Finished Book 2!

Late last night around 1am, I finished the second book in the "Game of Thrones" series, which is called A Clash of Kings. Overall I'd say it was pretty good - makes me want to read the next one. It's quite different (in my opinion) from the second season of the TV show. The show basically follows the same plot-lines, but it leaves out a lot of things that were in the book.

Book Two in the Series

Now on to two different books before I return to the series. I'm reading a young adult novel called The Book Thief. I'm just starting it today. I'm hoping that it will be appropriate as a read-aloud book for my fifth graders. To improve both the vocabulary and reading comprehension of students it's always helpful to read books out loud to them that are just above their own reading level. This book states that its age range starts at 12 years old. My students coming in are anywhere from 9-11 at this point. The book itself is about a young girl living through WWII who steals books. Books from Nazi book burning's or any book she can find, she steals it. The story itself is narrated by death. Yes death is personified. I know it sounds grim, but reviewers say that the book has potential to be life changing. Here is the Barnes and Noble overview found on their website: Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

This book is about power that books have to feed the soul. It was also named a Common Core State Standards Text Exemplar for grades 9-10. The Common Core State Standards dictate that we challenge our students with rigorous texts, push writing skills on them for every subject, and push them to higher level thinking skills as well. In fifth grade I'm all about pushing my students to be prepared for upcoming years and give them an edge up on their peers. Last year my students and I read through Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This year I want them to have access to books that challenge their thinking and understanding of the world they live in.



In a potential novel study, my partner teacher and I were hoping to have kids read Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. This book is about the war and the Holocaust from a Jewish girl's perspective. So me reading out loud The Book Thief could potentially be a good introduction to a novel that the kids will read on their own or in reading groups. Number the Stars has an age range of 10-14 years.

I'll let you know how The Book Thief is as well as rather or not I think it appropriate to be read aloud to fifth graders or kids around the age of 12. Likewise, I'll give you some potential ideas of how to discuss these issues with your kids.

After I finish reading this novel (I'm hoping it goes quickly so I can see if I can introduce it to my kids), I'm planning on reading another novel that I recently purchased. It's more of a brain candy novel that will give me time to relax and read rather than be thinking critically throughout the book like I've had to do with some recent others.

Keep reading!
~Britt

Game of Thrones/Me and the Devil

Warning: This review talks about sex, my irritation at the book, and at sometimes uses profanity. If any of these things makes you uncomfortable then don't read it.

Update!

So last week at this time I was relaxing at a sparkling pool located underneath thousand + year old boulders in warm Carefree, Arizona. I was pampered, I was happy, and guess what ... I was reading. I had just finished the first book, A Game of Thrones, of the "A Song of Fire and Ice" series by George R.R. Martin, when I dove into a totally different book called Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches.

Let me explain my reading pattern to you. Whenever I read books in a series I tend to get bored after one or two of them (sometimes three), so I break up the series by reading a random book in between. So after finishing A Game of Thrones I dove into a book that gave me a quick respite from the heavy series. Now here's the thing. I absolutely love the HBO show "A Game of Thrones" and I was really excited to read the books, because not only does the show do a very good job of following the book plots (so far anyway), but the books give you the details and the explanations that, I for one, desperately wanted during the show. They're action packed and marvelous, and I finished the first one and reluctantly stuck to my pattern and picked up NOT the second book in the series (which I'm reading now), but a book recommended to me by Scott.

I bought Me and the Devil quite a while ago and before I had a chance to read it Scott found it interesting and asked if he could read it first. Of course I let him. His opinion of the book is that he enjoyed the majority of it, but hated the ending. My reaction was I kind of hated the whole thing, but I was intrigued enough to get through it. Both of us agreed that the author sometimes comes off as incredibly pretentious because his main character "Nick" is basically a somewhat twisted fictional personal version of himself. Is it an autobiography, a memoir? No, it's fiction ... but it definitely takes a lot of real life pages from the real life author of the book, Nick Tosches. In fact, his book is praised heavily by Keith Richards and even Johnny Depp. Do you know why they praise it so much? Well, my guess is because in real life they're friends with Nick Tosches, and both of them are mentioned in the book and are friends with the character "Nick." Are you following me? It's perplexing isn't it? This weird twisted semi-reality dark life of a semi-real fictional person. Uh-huh.

This is the real Nick Tosches

So what's the book about? It's about a fictionalized author named Nick, based loosely on the real life Nick Tosches who writes the book. In the description of Nick Tosches at the end of the book, it states simply that "Nick Tosches lives in New York City and is uniquely acquainted with the half-lit world in which his tale is set." So there you have it. SO SO SO ....

We continue. There's a lot of sex and violence in this book, and it is all from a male's perspective. It's kinky, uncomfortable sex. There's whipping and nylons and stiletto shoes. There's porn and clear plastic raincoats. For those of you who liked the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, this book may not be for you. Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, the sex in this book is not meant to turn you on, but rather it's meant to make you queasy, uncomfortable, and put off. The sex in this book makes you flinch. It's not that the sex is overtly strange, it's just the way in which the main character describes it. He's an unhappy man, and sex does not bring him happiness but it does bring him peace. Those are two very different things. The sex in this book is dark and entirely without eroticism. It's blunt and it chafes. He doesn't want to feel good having sex, he wants to dominate to get a release deeper than just ejaculation. He wants sex to change him into something better, newer, and younger.

Let's veer away from the sex for a second. The main character, Nick, is indeed an author who doesn't write much anymore. He's a horrible alcoholic and we hear his views on how Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a waste of his time, as most of the people there (in his opinion) just like to hear themselves talk and in turn they drive him to drink more ... not stop. This Nick is old - I can't remember if we ever find out his exact age - but he's in his 50s or 60s which to him is old. He feels old. He has a vast contempt for all mankind, particularly the new generation of New Yorkers whom he sees as killing his old New York with their modern architecture and snarky ways. He hates Whole Foods (yeah, that's a grocery store). He's a food snob. We hear many descriptions of the food he likes to cook and eat, and he has a disdain for people who actually have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to food, but just pretend to be knowledgeable and picky to be cool. As I've mentioned frequently, this Nick wants to feel young, he wants to regain his youth, and so to do this he has sex with many young women and he bites them and drinks blood from their thighs. This blood lust he has basically turns him crazy, but it also turns him sober, and we are stuck in his inner monologue and we see the world through his disdainful personality.



He drinks blood and doesn't drink booze. He reflects on how alcoholics are good liars, deceivers, and how if he were drinking it would be easier for him to say the things he so desperately wants to say at points throughout his mid-life crisis journey. He at one point feels the need to ask one of his young lovers about a pamphlet he found in her book bag. He reflects that "If I were drinking ... I would have no trouble asking her outright. Drinking did that. It washed away all the halting doubts, all the reservations, all the cowardices that beset and prevented communication. Liquor let the words flow freely." He then continues to state that liquor lets the words flow freely in the time it takes to raise or set down a glass, but all those words are mixes of lies and truth.

You see "Alkies are the most ingenious and expertly devious people in the world. The simple truth is that they never apply these qualities to anything worth a damn, and, worse, can't even tell when these ingrained traits are working independently of them, and against them." I think anyone who's ever known an alcoholic in their lives, or who has ever been one, will find the words of Nick to be painfully honest and truthful and in a way, relieving. It's a relief to hear the words of an alcoholic (even a fictional/semi-fictional one) that explain what makes up an alcoholic. Think about it. How often have you looked at a loved one who drank too much and tried to figure out why they are the way they are? Alcoholics are ingeniously devious and ingenious. And the problem is they can't control it. Bingo. The words in this book do sometimes hit you strongly, and it was this hook that kept me reading through the whole thing.

Here's the problem with the character of Nick. The whole book HAS NO PLOT! There's nothing! There's really no climax, no rising or falling action, NOTHING about good writing that I teach my kids. Nothing. It's just him bumbling through life, and even when disaster strikes ... NOTHING HAPPENS. EVER. The biggest consequence he faces is ending up in the hospital at one point, nothing new to an alcoholic, where he hears the same stupid reprimand that if he keeps drinking he'll probably die. It takes a lot to kill an alcoholic, folks ... they're like cockroaches. To try and stop drinking, to regain a sense of youthfulness that he sought out, he possessed women like one would possess alcohol. He found troubled young girls and he drank their blood, and nothing really happens because the blood is just another form of addiction. Booze traded out for blood. Whoop-dee-do. In the end he realizes this and pushes it all away. Blood wasn't giving him serenity and rebirth, it wasn't giving him anything. "You can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to all of yourself."

Nick says it perfectly. "I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them." He's a despicable man, who doesn't beg sympathy from his readers. He pushes away those close to him before they hurt him, and he's searching for a cure to his misery that doesn't exist. Since he was a young boy he had the seeds of fear of abandonment sown in him, and he has never truly been able to see its dominion over him. This being said, he used booze to soothe his wounds, and he drove away any woman who loved him - it "was" his way. He thought that by consuming youthful blood from beautiful women he was regenerating - becoming younger, getting better sight, having no hunger pains for alcohol. He thought he was rising from the ashes. In the end he realizes his folly. "In driving away love and intimacy - drunkenness and sex took their place - I had inflicted on myself and perpetuated and nourished my own fear. I lived in self-imposed abandonment." He hated people, he hated himself, he hated everything, and all he had to prove he was worth something was a case of books he had written long ago. This book, Me and the Devil, makes me passionate - passionately irritated. But I've always told my students and my classmates and my professors etc. etc. that if a book can make you feel anything at all, then it's worth reading.

I am not always the happiest person in the world, and I sometimes find myself repeating Nick's idea that I'm interested in people, but I don't necessarily like them. This is all my fault. Only I can pull myself out of the self-inflicted anthropophobia (fear of people) that I've inflicted on myself, but it'll be a long road to recovery. I'm stubborn. That being said my personal road to recovery won't involve alcoholism, random scary sex, nor drinking blood. How does this semi-fictional Nick end up in the end? Read the book to find out. It will intrigue you, it will pull you along, but be warned, this book is about 100 pages too long and at times you'll get sick of his weird self-annihilation and overly pretentious and difficult words. His vocabulary is condescending, his views on women are condescending, and whatever "peace" he finds still doesn't interest me, I'd rather have seen him really annihilated in the book for the crap he pulled and got away with - but that's the bitch in me. He shocks you, he's repulses you, he amuses you, but is he a good read ... let me know your opinions.

We'll end with a quote from close to the ending of the book. "People told me that I should be careful, that I should not burn my bridges behind me. I told them all the same thing, which was the truth: I've always loved the smell of gasoline."

Updates

I've been reading for about a week now the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire series - A Game of Thrones. I still have 200 or so pages left, and I've been really impressed with it so far. Scott and I had just recently bought the first two seasons of the TV show version of this series, and we loved it! Or at least I really loved it. The books are greatly detailed, and each chapter is from a specific character's point of view. The book manages to explain what the TV show sometimes did not, and by that I mean after reading the book what I saw in the show actually makes a lot more sense and I've gotten some clarification that I've needed on some things. Overall I'd really recommend this series. They're action packed and filled with tension. As soon as I finish this book I'm going to take a break and read something else a bit shorter than 800 pages and then go back to the second one.

Speaking of series ... I still have the last two books to go in the Southern Vampire Mysteries (aka the Sookie Stackhouse novels, aka True Blood). I don't feel a huge urge to go back to that series yet though, so it'll probably have to wait. George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones books are written much better than the vampire ones, and so I think I'm hooked on that series for now. The vicious details, the violence, the romance, the politics ... it's all too good to give up on now, whereas Sookie's crazy fairy, werewolf, vampire adventures can wait.

Another Update - tomorrow Scott and I leave for Arizona for a week long vacation. This is much needed and I really can't wait, particularly after a week of Great Expectations teacher training. Some relaxation by the pool in the midst of the desert sounds heavenly. If I finish some books by that pool I'll let you know. Keep reading! And if you have any ideas for good books to read aloud to my fifth graders (school starts VERY soon!) let me know.

Keep reading,

Britt

Beautiful Ruins

I had mixed feelings after reading the novel Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, but overall my verdict is that Beautiful Ruins is a beautiful book about life, love, loss, and the challenges we face and how to overcome them ... or ignore them until you can't anymore. This is a blithe, funny, satirical fiction novel featuring characters unhappy with their lives and searching for that next break.

This novel chronicles the lives of various characters and is highly fictional, even including fictional portrayals of the very real Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as chief players in the lives of others. Somehow all of these people - cinema stars, Italians, authors, actors, producers, porn-addicts - get connected to one another in this story of stories.  Additionally, the book spans several decades from the 1960s to the present day (2012). A consistent theme is film and how it influences us. Nowadays the film industry is failing - good film is dead, because the good stories are gone. Film changes the way that we see the world, and as the industry has turned to 3D action films, raunchy comedies and reality television ... our faith is turning into a bitter taste of cynicism. Shane, a young wannabe Hollywood writer is on his way to pitch a film idea featuring cannibalism, and he has what can only be an epiphany:

"Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway - its true religion?

Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but

emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, 

same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten

million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects

with a billion sermons - but the same movie showed in every mall 

in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you'll never 

forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative

images - the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and

Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced

our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, 

that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. 

What was that but a religion?"

The main characters of this story are the fictional Pasquale Tursi, who we first meet as a young Italian man trying to run his deceased father's hotel - THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW - and a young aspiring actress, Dee Moray, who we also meet in the first chapter as a young woman working on the movie Cleopatra with none other than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The first chapter is beautiful and filled with visions of old Hollywood, and while our present day Shane remarks upon how film is "his generation's" religion, we learn quickly that even in the 1960s Pasquale and Dee also view film as their religion, their inspiration, and the thing that keeps them from living their own lives. As Pasquale reflects when he first sees the young actress arriving at his hotel, "Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination." 

Dee and Pasquale slowly open up to each other despite some language barriers. Dee tosses her hair back and says "I've been thinking about how people sit around for years waiting for their lives to begin, right? Like a movie. You know what I mean? ... I know I felt that way. For years. It was if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of the lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start." 

And then we realize that she's right. "And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exciting part, the action? It's all so fast." And then you're on the outside looking in. These two people discover one another, and then before they know it the action in their lives start, and we zoom forward to the present day where an elderly Pasquale is searching for the young actress he met years ago in Italy, in a town amidst the Cinque Terre called Porto Vergogna. And it is here in the "present day" that we start to see everyone's stories collide. 

Stories are people. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while we're less alone. Because being alive isn't the same thing as living. The present day search for Dee Moray isn't just an adventure, or a quest, it's everything. We fight the future as much as we fight the past, but there comes a time where you can't find your story anymore and you have to face it. You have to stop being an outsider looking in and live your story out before you wake up one day and it's over. 

Beautiful ruins is a representation of ourselves. We are all eventually going to be beautiful ruins, a crumbling structure of the greatness we once were, and hopefully we're still enticing enough that people don't forget us. This novel is poetic, romantic, tragic, richly written, and oftentimes very funny. It's a touching novel. It didn't necessarily excite me as much as some of the other books I've read recently have. I finished this over a week ago, and it has taken me this long to write down my thoughts on it. While I would definitely recommend it to anyone as a good read worth diving into, it sometimes lacks the forward motion to keep you hungering for more, and sometimes because of the intermingling of so many stories and so many people searching for redemption it feels trite. Every person is searching for redemption or fighting for or against the future, and it gets to be a bit overused. And then yes, sometimes I had to applaud the author for tying everyone's stories together, to fight that loneliness that comes with life, but other times I had to look at the connections and go "really?" It's hard to believe some of the relationships, particularly the fictional relationship of real life stars to fake characters. 

One minor character, Alvis, who is an author himself tells his beautiful wife that "All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character - what we believe - none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!" Life is a glorious catastrophe. We want what we want and we love who we love. We have to learn to live in the action and not wait for it to start and then miss it when it's there. We must bridge our desire between what we want and what is the right thing to do. Read this novel and judge for yourself who is beyond redemption and who deserves a second chance. Take time to connect to each individual story and then see how you feel when the stories intertwine. Judge the authenticity of those relationships for yourself, and please let me know what you think. This is a book worth discussing. Overall, I enjoyed their stories of love, life, loss, redemption, and learning to do the right thing ... or not.