The Elephant's Child

The Hunger Games.

What one intelligent mother discovered in The Hunger Games: 

Katniss is a refreshing departure from the hypersexualized images and caricatures of young women in modern literature and entertainment. The lovely notion a girl can be smart, self-sufficient, a hunter, chaste and worthy of admiration and respect is a lesson worth teaching. Knowing. And living. Every day.

 

I'm really getting tired of people dismissing these books as "just a bunch of teenagers killing each other."

The Present Tense.

I started a memoir last night. 

It's written entirely in the present tense.  

I'm thiry-four pages in, and I'm already sick of it. It feels over-dramatized, a bit like the docu-dramas on the cable TV channels. 

It's an interesting story: young woman makes escape from cloistered, restrictive, pietistic religious community.  It's a type of memoir that I've read a fair amount of.  

ALL of it in present tense may be too much, though. 

Reasons My Kindle Is Better Than a Dead Tree Trade Paperback.

I can hold it open with one hand, even if the book is over 600 pages and I'm halfway through it.  

It lays flat so I can read while eating.  I don't have to hold it open. 

I can read all the words, not just the 9/10ths of each sentence that isn't glued into the binding. 

I can't see the printing on the next page through the page I'm currently reading. 

I never lose my place or a bookmark, because my Kindle remembers where I was. 

I can change the font size. 

Nobody can see the cover. So I can read brainless, stupid books without you knowing. 

It doesn't smell like a smoker's house, like books from the library sometimes do. 

The pages won't crack and fall out of the binding. 

The paper won't yellow. 

I can take twenty books with me on the airplane.

If my house burns down, Amazon knows what books I have digital rights to.  I haven't lost my library. 

and the number one reason I like my Kindle....

It irritates the Luddites. 

TBR Update.

My To Be Read list.

I located several of the books at the Collegetown library some 30 miles away.  Went to the checkout and discovered that I'm now only allowed two books at a time because the Collegetown library has removed itself from the larger multi-county library association.  I asked if I could pay the out-of-town fee for full access, as out-of-town people can at my own small-town library.  No, I cannot. 

Why can't I?  I pay a little over $6 per month for Amazon Prime. I used to pay $8 a month for Netflix. I'd be more than happy to pay even up to $15 a month for full access to huge library such as the one in Collegetown. But I can't. 

Anyway.  I triaged my pile and settled on two. The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa, by Douglas Rogers and The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.  The Sci-Fi paperbacks were hidden on a back-wall shelf.  I had to ask for help locating them. 

Oddly enough, Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colors, by James Delingpole, was nowhere to be found.  Oddly enough, neither was The New Vichy Syndrome, by Theodore Dalrymple.  Huh. 

I'm nearly done with The Last Resort. It's a terrifying book and a hilarious one.  Strange combination, but then, that's the way Africa is.  

TBR

My friend Jane asks for her readers' to-be-read lists.  I don't have one written up, so I guess I need to make one. This is by no means whatsoever exhaustive, because I follow tangents upon tangents in my reading, and any one of these books is likely spawn a whole subset of TBR books. 

First, some car-related books off of my Amazon wish list:

Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, by Bob Lutz

If I can find one, a book on the history of BMW. 

A book of fiction:

The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.  I'm not limiting myself to one single book of fiction, but I would like to make a concerted effort such that the fiction I do read this year is beautiful and stunning. 

Some political & sociological books,

Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colors, by James Delingpole. 

The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley

The New Vichy Syndrome, by Theodore Dalrymple. 

Some memoir and biography, at the very least which should include:

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Strip, by Nevin Martell

Some books about Africa:

The Flame Tress of Thika, by Elspeth Huxley (I read this about 20 years ago and remember little of it, so I'm couting it as a new-to-me-book.)

Out of Africa, Isek Dinesen.  No, I've never read it. I read part of it many years ago, but did not finish the book.

Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller. Again, one I read quite a while ago but really need to re-read.

The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa, by Douglas Rogers. 

The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, by Peter Godwin.

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, by Robert Kaplan.

I think, even more than a stack of specific books I'd like to read is having a list of things I'd like to learn more about.  For example, this fall I read The Road To Fatima Gate, by Micheal Trotten and found it fascinating.  I'd like to learn more about Lebanon's history.  I'd like to read some more about China, perhaps beginning with this:

Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century, by Guy Sorman.

Of course, the trouble I always run into when making lists of books to be read is finding the books.  Our library system (which encompases several county's worth of libraries) hasn't been the best at having the various strange and obscure sorts of things I want to read.*  So poor, in fact, that over the last six months I've gotten out of the habit of weekly or monthly visits to the big college-town libraries that are within driving distance of me.  Isn't that terrible? 

 

 

*Do not tell me about inter-library loans. Those cost money, and you have to wait for the books. I'm not really a wait-ey sort of person. 

Kipling's Kim.

In the last few years I've gotten in the habit of reading mostly non-fiction books and a few sci-fi novels here and there.  To blame is the fact that I'm a stay-at-home Mom and am constantly interrupted during the day.  I'm stretched thinner than I used to be.  Richer reading requires more concentration and fewer interruptions than I have at my disposal.

But I'm determined to read more of some of my favourite authors, and so this week I plunged into Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

The lama, very straight and erect, the deep folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light of the parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadows of the low sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered ruth which burned like a many-coloured jewel in the same uncertain light. The patterns on the gold-worked curtains ran up and down, melting and reforming as the folds shook and quivered to the night wind; and when the talk grew more earnest the jewelled forefinger snapped out little sparks of light between the embroideries.

Pure music. Listen:

folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light

And listen again:

parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadows of the low sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered

See all those /s/ and /l/ sounds with "knotted tree-trunk" dropped right in the middle?  The sound of the words paints the knobby, knotty trunk right into your mind. Say "knotted tree trunk" and count how many time your tongue hits the roof of your mouth.  The phrase is all edges. 

Pure joy in the English language is why I love Kipling's writing.

The hardest thing for me to remember to s l o w  d o w n when reading Kipling and F. Scott Fitzgerald (another one of my favourite authors).  I tend to read too quickly, partly because I'm a fast reader anyway, but also because the last nine years of being a mother have trained me to cram as much reading in as short a time as possible, since I'm about to be interrupted.  Again.  So I sometimes skim, which is fine for some sorts of reading, but is a grand disservice to Kipling.  It's a hard habit to break.

I hope and pray I can get back my ability to read long books and dense books.  I hope that being  a mother and aquiring a "mommy brain" hasn't ruined that forever.

Student Loans.

I'm reading Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents.

The author, Zac Bissonnette, blows open the financial aid application process, revealing plenty about how it works, and how it's pratically rigged to make college grads dependent on debt. He then describes many ideas and work-arounds to help you and your kid figure out how to get a college education without going into massive unsecured, non-dischargeable debt.  (Did you know Social Security payments can be garnished for studen-loan repayment? Did you know student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy?)

Did you know that Sallie Mae makes about one-third of its income from fees and penalties associated with defaulted loans? 

Lots of thought-provoking stuff in the book, and plenty of ideas for outside-the-box college-funding.  Plenty of plain old common-sense ideas, too, like "work hard, save, take as many credits as possible at community colleges first."  He also blows up the the "good college" myth and explains how it's perfectly possible to get a fantastic college education - at a much cheaper price - without attending first tier schools. A few shocking things, too: why parents should always choose saving for their own retirement over taking out loans for education or borrowing against their nest egg and why you should consider not bothering to apply for scholarships.

This book is definitely going on my "recommended reading for all parents" list.

Sparkle Spots a Problem.

I'm reading Blind Descent: The Quest To Discover the Deepest Place on Earth.   The other day, I sat on the couch with Sparkle Kitty and we looked at the pictures in the center of the book for a few minutes.

I read a caption on one of the pictures out loud, "October 18th, 2004. Bottom of the world. 6,825 feet deep."

Right away Sparkle asked, "But is that deeper than that deepest trench at the bottom of the ocean?"

I told her I didn't know.  I checked just now.  It's not even close.

The Mariana Trench is estimated to be 35,994 feet deep. 

The book uses the term "the bottom of the earth" in a lot of places. It's certainly a lovely turn of phrase.  Too bad it's not technically accurate.

Don't get me wrong, though. It's a really interesting book, covering both the exploration of the world's supercaves and the pioneers that have taken incredible risks to get to the bottom of them.  I'm just wincing, though, at the "bottom of the earth" line when I come across it.  Because the earth is, you know, round.  It doesn't have a bottom.  And even if it did, the bottom of the Maiana Trench would be the bottom, not the bottom of a supercave in Mecico or the Ukraine.

 

 

What I Know.

Richard Dowden knows this about Africa, and I know it, too:

. . .[W]hen outsiders do go they are often surprised by Africa's welcome, entranced rather than frightened. Visitors are welcome and cared for in Africa. If you go you will find most Africans friendly, gentle and infintely polite.  You will frequently be humbled by African generosity.  Africans have in abundance what we call social skills. [. . .] Africans meet, greet and talk, look you in the eye and empathize, hold hands and embrace, share and accept from others without twitchy self-conciousness.  All these things are as natural as music in Africa.

Westerners arriving in African for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size -- even the sky seems higher.  And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open.  They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived.  In Africa, the essentials of existence -- light, earth, water, food, birth, family, love, sickness, death -- are more immediate, more intense.  Visitors sudently realise what life is for.  [...] It is the prize that African offers the rest of the world: humanity.

-Richard Dowden. Africa: Altered State, Ordinary Miracles.  (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 1-2.

February Reading.

I made it to a nearby large library on Saturday and now I've got a reassuring pile of books on my coffee table once again.  I always feel a bit uneasy when there's nothing in the house to read.  I'd finished off the The Hunger Games trilogy several weeks ago, wildly (but briefly; it's not that long of a book) enjoyed Fever Crumb by Phillip Reeve, then read a meh book on storm chasing, paged through a book on weaving, and have been sort of floundering since.

But all better now! Many books = happy me. 

Here's what I've started so far:

The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong With Humanitarian Aid.  Some of what I'm reading in this book I suspected or knew, although I did not know the extent.  For example, it's estimated that some eighty percent of children in Liberian orphanages are not at all orphans and actually know who their parents are.  And yet they can be taken out of the country and "adopted" by American families.  Also outlined are some scenarios where the author suspects that the payments, fees, and bribes given to combantants by NGOs amount to enough cash inflow that hostilities have been essentially extended by the presence of NGOs working in the area.  Scary and interesting stuff.

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tradgedy of the Whaleship Essex. The terrifying and gruesome account of the Essex, rammed a high speed twice by an enraged, eighty-five foot sperm whale, and the ship's eight survivors' ninety-three day ordeal.  Way more interesting than Moby Dick, if you ask me.   Last year I read a few books (here's one of them) on the search for the Northwest Passage; also remarkable and terrifying, not not nearly as much so as the account of the Essex.

After this book, I need to hunt down Sir Ranulph Fiennes' book on Scott. I've read several books on Shackleton, but none on Scott or Amundsen.

Crashproof Your Kids: Make Your Teen a Smarter, Safer Driver. A wonderfully laid out, step-by-step plan to teach your teen what is never taught in basic driver training: true car handling and control, visual scanning skills, and emergency car manuevering.  It's information everyone can use, not just teens.  And I have to say, I was gratified to see a few things listed that I've been soapboxing on the last few months.   Maybe sometimes I do know what I'm talking about. Heh.

 

I picked up several other books, too... but those are the ones I dug into right away.