Grow Up

I think I might have to buy it.

The only things the teenagers in this book know how to do are drink, do drugs, do each other and then wake up to do it all over again. My liver hurts just from reading how much alcohol they consume at a party (or on a Tuesday afternoon after school for that matter…if they went to school at all.)  These are the kind of teens that surprise you when you hear they made it to 30.

I found a generation of charming slackers in Ben Brook’s novel set in present day England. I didn’t even know slackers could be charming. Here’s what you need to know:   

1)      17-year-old Jasper and his friends get high. Daily. Sometimes hourly.

2)      Jasper wants to finish his novel. 

3)      Jasper wants to make sure his best friend doesn’t commit suicide. 

4)      Jasper wants to find out he’s not a father because of a drunken (and very blurry) encounter with a school friend. 

5)      Jasper wants to have sex with a girl he knows is perfect for him.

Then there’s Jonah, Tenaya and Ping, his best friends, who come with their own set of woes and whom Jasper guides through the big and small hurdles of being 17, even if it’s a drug-addled 17.

Most of all, Jasper wants t the world to know his stepfather is a wife-killer:

I am certain Keith is a murderer. If you look at his history close enough, you can see that his ex-wife seems to just disappear, benefiting him in the process.

I’m from the Generation X era (although what a letter of the alphabet has to do with being a miserable teenager is beyond me) while Jasper’s generation is known as Generation Facebook. They all may seem to be nothing but a bunch of aimless idiots, but they wonder what they’re going to do with their lives once they graduate high school. 

I’m 35 and am still asking myself what I want to do with my life. No seriously, I have no clue. At the end of this hilarious novel not one of the characters knows what they’ll be doing in 5 years and I liked that fact. I didn’t want a nice tidy ending because, let’s face it, life is neither nice or tidy.

So if you find yourself meandering through life (at the age of 35 or 80) not knowing who you are or where you’ll l be in the next five years, you’ll love Grow Up. But I’d avoid the whole drugs and alcohol scene unless you don’t mind having only two brain cells to rub together.

Jennifer

Books lead to other books, as any avid reader knows. Some more so than others. In  EPL’s first “Everett Reads” program, back in 2004, we read Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Given that the title alludes to another writer, it might not surprise you to learn that a suitcase filled with Western classics plays a key part in this novel set in Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. I didn’t care for the book all that much, but I took note of one referenced author in particular who I was unfamiliar with at the time: Romain Rolland. I remember checking the library catalog and being pleased to see we had a few of his books, including the Jean-Christophe series, and I had always meant to take a look inside them, but eventually I kind of forgot about Romain Rolland.

So, recently, eight years later, I was reading another book by an author who’d been brought to my attention via a different novel (this referential path is described here). I have to say, I’m glad to have followed through this time because Roger Martin du Gard’s Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is one of the most deeply satisfying novels I’ve read in the past few years. This book too is filled with literary references and the publisher’s blurb is not exaggerating when it draws a comparison between three of those mentioned: Tolstoy, Proust and Montaigne. I could rave on, but for the purpose of this blog post I want to limit my focus to a section of letters that appear near the back of the book.

These letters that Maumort is writing are inspired by his rereading of – you guessed it – Romain Rolland, whose words propel Maumort into an impassioned, eloquent description of France at the end of the Nazi occupation (and it strikes me as an accurate description of modern-day America as well). Maumort asks his friend:

…is it possible today to accept without protest the world that these last ten years have made for us? The general disarray, the disorder of minds are blatant; all judgments are skewed: those of men in the street and men of state alike… In every domain, spiritual virtues are in decline, weakened, unappreciated: and yet never have they been more indispensable for holding in check those evil forces – violence, money – which triumph openly and divert mankind not only from a considered effort to recover its balance, but also from a valid concept of the future.

Maumort – an unbeliever, it should be noted – goes on:

Just look at what is happening here. In our France, still smarting from its wounds, impoverished to the point of destitution, starving, looted, reeling with humiliations that are not washed away in a day, do you make out, anywhere, signs of that moral greatness, that strength of soul, that patient and courageous wish for salvation which we must have if we want to rise out of our present chaos? And how many countries in the world, how many ruined, terrorized, enslaved populations lie even lower than us?

In a time of madness and fanaticism, he sees a desperate need for guides, “prophets,” “great mediators;” figures such as Emerson, Erasmus – or Rolland. But Rolland has just recently died, and Maumort asks:

Who will arise in his place to defend and save the fundamental – and seriously endangered – values of that spiritual civilization for which, during half a century, he so steadfastly fought?

Alas, Maumort does not sees any forceful figure rising to defend human conscience and independent thought, and he is afraid that, for many people, these fragile values are “considered outdated and harmful.”

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort explores in great detail, and with terrific dexterity, the multidimensional life of the protagonist, his surroundings and society. The passages quoted above are not meant to represent the novel as a whole, in which politics is treated as only one of the many factors in the narrator’s life. I focus on them here because Rolland’s words so profoundly trigger Maumort’s considerations of the political situation, of civilization in crisis.

These passages also caused me, in the midst of writing this post, to go to the stacks and pull Dai Sijie’s book in order to refresh my hazy memory of its references to Romain Rolland. Here is the narrator, having just discovered Jean-Christophe:

I had intended only a brief flirtation, a skim read, but once I had opened the book I couldn’t put it down… Jean-Christophe, with his fierce individualism utterly untainted by malice, was a salutary revelation. Without him I would never have understood the splendour of taking free and independent action as an individual. Up until this stolen encounter with Romain Rolland’s hero, my poor educated and re-educated brain had been incapable of grasping the notion of one man standing up against the whole world. The flirtation turned into a grand passion. Even the excessively emphatic style occasionally indulged in by the author did not detract from the beauty of this astonishing work of art. I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Extremely high praise – I see again why, after reading Balzac, I’d always meant to read Jean-Christophe. So these 1,500 pages are back on my radar.

But for now, being so recently wowed by Martin du Gard’s complex character, I am reading the book Maumort refers to in his letters: Rolland’s 1915 nonfiction collection, Above the Battle, written in the midst of the first World War. These are brave and discerning pieces that take on imperialism and despotism while calling for reason, moral truth, justice and fraternity. I will end this post with words from its Introduction which Maumort quotes in a letter:

A great nation beset by war has not only its frontiers to defend, but also its reason. It must be saved from the hallucinations, the injustices, the stupidities unleashed by the scourge. To each his duty: to the armies that of  guarding the soil of the homeland; to the intellectuals, that of defending thought… Someday, history will make a reckoning of each of the countries at war; it will weigh up the sum of their errors, lies, and hate-filled madness. Let us strive to make sure that in its eyes, ours will be slight.

________

It is perhaps unsurprising to find Martin du Gard emphasizing the writer Romain Rolland. Both were French authors who wrote epic, multi-volume, Nobel prize-winning roman fleuves. Rolland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915, and Martin du Gard in 1937.

Heartwood 2:4 – on Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is here. 

Heartwood | About Heartwood

It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

Sage words indeed. And how appropriate that they are taken from the The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne which is the final book in our series Books You Have Always Meant to Read. This classic work will be the topic of a lively discussion lead by Bethany Reid from Everett Community College on Wednesday, May 23^rd starting at 7 p.m. in the Main Library auditorium.

Set in a time and place seemingly quite different from our own, seventeenth century Puritan New England, the characters of The Scarlet Letter might at first seem like strangers. But read a little further and you just might find a connection with one of these characters “unlike yourself”.

There is the long suffering, but iron willed, Hester Prynne who is forced to wear the scarlet letter.  Or maybe the conflicted, to put it mildly, Arthur Dimmesdale with all his self-inflicted wounds will strike a chord. And for those of you more inclined to darkness, there is “the leech”, a.k.a. Roger Chillingworth, who might just have a point or two.

Whatever your preference, come to the library on Wednesday evening to see what all the fuss is about.

Despite this gap in my education, I do like to read fiction originally written in other languages. It is always interesting to see how authors that are products of different cultures handle characters, society and ideas in ways that I’m not always used to. Here are three that I’ve read recently that may be of interest—in translation, of course.

The tantalizingly titled Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky is technically a coming of age story. Seventeen year old Sascha Neumann was born in Moscow, but her fractured family moved to Berlin and took up residence in “the Emerald” a depressing series of apartment blocks populated mostly by recent immigrants to Germany. After the murder of her mother by her step-father, Sascha vows to tell the world about her mother’s life and seek revenge. With its direct style and gripping storyline, the strength of this novel is how it introduces the reader to a gritty world that feels very real but may not be familiar.

Me and You by Niccolo Ammaniti also has an adolescent main character, Lorenzo, but is set in a much more affluent neighborhood in Rome. In an effort to placate his parents who desperately want him to fit in at school, Lorenzo makes up a skiing holiday with fictitious popular friends. Instead of hitting the slopes, he hides out in the forgotten cellar of his family’s apartment building which he has stocked with books, food and video games. 

Reality interrupts his best laid plans for solitude in the form of his half sister who discovers his hideout and forces him to face some unpleasant truths. This slim book is written in a lyrical style that captures not only the character’s inner life but also the setting in a convincing way. If you enjoy this work, definitely check out his earlier novel I’m Not Scared for a similar, but darker, experience.

Speaking of darkness, there is a lot to be had in The Land at the End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Almost more of a fever dream than a novel, this is the story of a drafted Portuguese medic who is pouring out his life story to an unnamed stranger over the course of one day. The narrative skips in time but is primarily concerned with the narrator’s tour of duty in Angola during Portugal’s futile attempt to maintain political control of that land in the 1970s. The beautiful but devastating language is a perfect accompaniment to a tale that has little concern for power and everything to do with survival.

So don’t let your lack of language skills scare you away from fiction from other cultures. Thankfully there are many great works in translation available at the library.

Richard

The Doctor and the Kid picks up one year later with the infamous Doc Holliday losing his life savings in a drunken poker game, money he’d earmarked for a comfortable room in a sanatorium to ease his inevitable demise from tuberculosis. In an effort to recoup his gambling losses Holliday decides to hunt down the outlaw with the largest bounty on his head, newcomer Billy the Kid. But in order to have a chance to defeat the Kid (who has magical protection provided by Hook Nose), Holliday has to make a reluctant deal with Geronimo and to enlist the inventorly genius of Edison and Buntline.

Most of Resnick’s characters are real historical figures, although he plays around with timelines and circumstances. Still, I yearn to learn more about the history of the story’s setting. Here are some questions that come to mind and some titles that might help provide answers.

 1) In Resnick’s book Doc Holliday is 32 and nearly dead from tuberculosis. Is this an accurate portrayal of his medical condition?

• Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend
• The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and How It Changed the American West

     
2) What is tuberculosis and how prevalent was it in the late 19^th century?

• The Tuberculosis Survival Handbook
• Plagues, Pox and Pestilence
• The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won – And Lost

3) What events led Billy the Kid to a life of crime and murder? How much of what we “know” about the Kid is factual rather than apocryphal?          

• To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West
• Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride
• The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid
• Billy the Kid
  
  

4) Were medicine men thought to have magical powers?

• Geronimo his Own Story: The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior
• Geronimo: Apache Freedom Fighter
• The Medicine Way: A Shamanic Path to Self Mastery

5) What are some of the important inventions that have forever changed Americans’ lifestyles?

• Hooray for inventors!
• American Firsts: Innovations, Discoveries, and Gadgets Born in the U.S.A.      
• So You Want to Be an Inventor?

 6) Were violence and corruption part of everyday life in the Wild West?

• Which Way to the Wild West? : Everything your Schoolbooks Didn’t Tell You About America’s Westward Expansion
• What Made the Wild West Wild?
• You Wouldn’t Want to Live in a Wild West Town! : Dust You’d Rather Not Settle
• The Wild West on 5 Bits a Day

            
And if you’re interested in historical fiction revolving around these characters, take a look at the following titles:

• Doc: a novel
• Territory
• Trouble in Tombstone
• Lucky Billy

Can’t talk, lots more to learn.

I found this information on page 22 in the book Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Body & Mind. This is a children’s book full of facts, stats, lists, records and more. It is so fun to look at and wonder why people do these kinds of things.

Of course, being afraid of peanut butter is rather an odd phobia… most people are just afraid of things like speaking in public, thunder, spiders or heights. The children’s book What to Do When You’re Scared & Worried by James J. Crist, Ph.D. is a good guide to helping children (and adults) understand their fears. The book also provides some very good tools and exercises to help calm some of the worries you might have. Are You Afraid Yet? by Stephen James O’Meara explains the science of being afraid.

How can you tell if you are just afraid of something or if it is a full blown phobia? The book Phobias And How To Overcome Them by James Gardner, M.D. and Arthur H. Bell, Ph.D. delves deep into the problems of phobias. The book is an immensely helpful guide to understanding and coping with these deeply rooted and widespread afflictions. It also has a whole list of other types of unusual phobias.

On another note, I think that even people with arachibutyrophobia would probably still enjoy making a fun bird feeder with peanut butter. This very simple book, Watch Me Make A Bird Feeder  by Jack Otten, gives easy directions to create a bird feeder with your kids or grandkids.

And if you’re not afraid of peanut butter, you may be interested to see how it is made. From Peanut To Peanut Butter by Robin Nelson explains the process in easy to understand steps with pictures.

And lastly, there is a cute song about peanut butter “Sticking” by Raffi on his Singable Songs Collection.

Linda

The backdrop of Gods Without Men is the eerie desert landscape around Pinnacles National Monument in California. Baked by sunlight and shadowed by spires of rock, it’s an otherworldly place that draws people who are trying to fill the hollow places in their souls. When the book begins, we see the legendary Native American trickster Coyote mixing up some methamphetamine…and we sense that this story will be a mind-altering experience.

Then the story veers to gritty-edged reality with a cast of unusual characters, focusing mostly on a young interracial couple, Jaz and Lisa and their struggles with their severely autistic son Raj. They are worn down by the child’s tantrums and ferocious energy, and the desert landscape mirrors the slow crumbling of their marriage. 

On a walk, the little boy manages to undo a stroller strap and suddenly disappears into a maze of rock. The terrified couple is browbeaten by the news media’s craving for scandal. Soon the television and the internet seethes with rumors of child neglect and even willful murder, and Jaz and Lisa are trapped in their own personal hell. 

We then explore others’ tales, and glimpse the past traumas that haunt this place: a chaotic hippie commune, a gathering of UFO abduction devotees, a Native American man who steals a bi-racial child, a Mormon silver-miner driven mad by mercury poisoning, and a Franciscan priest who has delusions of remaking the local Indians.

But the keenest irony in the book emerges with the story of the Iraqi refugees who work nearby on a U.S. military base. They are paid to dress up and role-play in the desert as “primitive” fanatical villagers, when they are actually urban sophisticates who savor American culture.

Some timeless questions appear here about identity, culture, and faith, yet this novel never becomes dull or philosophical. There’s no shortage of wonder and humor in the bizarre things that happen to these characters. The novel leads us to marvel at how people feel a universal need for a higher power to overwhelm them, possess them, and bring them escape from the pains of human life.

This is Kunzru’s fourth novel, and he continues to build characters whose lives can seem absurd and illogical, but whose inner thoughts shine with wonder and irony. 

Kunzru’s Anglo-Indian biracial background charges his writing with a vibrant awareness of cultural and social issues. His emotionally complex characters struggle with their own identity and vulnerability. They fall apart…and after watching their own lives crumble, they must re-create themselves in terrifying and thrilling ways.

Esta

Holy cow is it.

Jenna Lord is in a lot of pain, both physically and mentally:

They think they’re doing you this big favor keeping you going because you’ve got your whole life ahead.  Because you think there’s only one kind of pain?  That pain is pain is pain?

Uh, that would be a no.

When the novel opens, Jenna has just finished a stint in a mental facility for help with self-harm and spends her days being home-schooled. Months later she knows she’s not healed from the compulsion to harm. She knows that it might always be there, lurking and prodding her to act. She has only herself to count on since her brother enlisted in the service and was sent to Afghanistan. He was her protector from a raging father and an alcoholic mother, a woman who has dark tendencies no one would suspect. 

Jenna’s brother Matthew saved her from a house fire that burned much of her back and required skin grafts from her thighs. This bonded them more than a regular sibling relationship. She’s determined to stay close to him and has to email him on the sly, creating an email account her parents can’t find out about. They disowned Matthew when he enlisted and if they find out Jenna is still talking to him, well, there goes the computer and any further “us against them” bonding between siblings.

Jenna gets a chance to start all over again at a new school where there are the usual stuck up girls applying three coats of lip-gloss in the bathroom while trashing every dweeb, geek, and yes, the troubled new kid. The worst is Danielle, the über stuck up pretty girl who especially seems to have it out for Jenna.   

Jenna tends to avoid contact with anyone and seeks solace in the library. But before she can go any further into herself she meets Mr. Anderson, her chemistry teacher and track coach. He takes an interest in her. Now, wait. I know what that sounds like: “takes an interest in her”. Creepy and very Mary K. Letourneau. 

But he encourages her to join the cross-country team, makes her his assistant in his lab and eventually (to Jenna’s horror) sees how her home life is unfolding like a Hefty bag with an amputated arm inside. He invites her into his life and home where Jenna sees picture after picture of a woman in various stages of pregnancy. She’s Mr. Anderson’s never seen wife. When questioned, he says that they are estranged and she’s in Wisconsin taking care of her sick father.

Mr. Anderson makes her forget about hurting herself. He helps her to see she’s more than damaged goods.

But he has his own secrets. Where is his wife? Where is his child? Why did Danielle say to Jenna that Mr. Anderson liked “the broken ones”? Did something happen between him and Danielle? Does he see Jenna simply as someone beyond repair that he pities?

Just when you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, Ilsa J. Bick’s Drowning Instinct throws in a whopping slap of events that are both unnerving and enthralling.

I’m still unnerved.

Jennifer

Me: Did you like the TV show Dead Like Me?

Friend: Yes.

Me: You must read Croak!

While Croak by Gina Damico has a similar feel to the TV show, there are enough differences to make this story stand out on its own. Sixteen year old good girl Lex Bartleby is going through a bad girl phase, and she doesn’t even know why. She’s angry all the time, sparring verbally and even physically with classmates and teachers, until finally her family has had enough. They announce over dinner that Lex will be separated for the first time from her twin sister Cordie. Lex will be spending the summer at her Uncle Mort’s farm. Her parents hope a couple of months of honest, hard work will set her back on the good girl path. Cordie just wants Lex to survive the summer without punching anyone new.

Things no one knows about Uncle Mort:

• He doesn’t live alone.

• He doesn’t even live on a farm.

• In fact, he’s never farmed a day in his life.

• He’s the mayor of Croak, a small town in the Adirondacks.

• He knows why Lex has been acting like such a bad girl lately.

• Oh, and he’s a Grim Reaper.

Lex is immediately confronted with the reality of her Uncle Mort’s true profession when they ride into the town of Croak on the back of his motorcycle and he explains how everyone in the town is working the same job in one capacity or another. Every Croak resident helps transport souls from one life to the next: they’re Grim Reapers. Some are Killers, who touch a person just before the moment of death and release their souls from the doomed body. Some are Cullers, who finesse the freed soul into a special container used to transport the soul to the next world.

Uncle Mort tells Lex she has been acting out lately because it’s a sign of becoming a Reaper. While still trying to come to terms with everything, she is thrown into her new job as a Killer with her new Culler partner, Driggs, who’s also living with Uncle Mort. She’s immediately successful at Killing, which surprises all of her new friends and even intimidates a few. Reaping starts to take an emotional toll, though, as day after day our young heroine witnesses death to the old, the very young, alone in their homes or as part of a massive plane crash. Witnessing an endless string of deaths can really take the wind out of a girl’s sails.

Then people start dying who weren’t supposed to die. Worse still, some of their souls are being eternally trapped in their bodies instead of moving on to the next world. While it’s true these people had committed various unthinkable crimes against innocent people, Reapers are taught that no one deserves to have their soul trapped forever in their bodies. At first Lex thinks these people got what they deserved. But then Reapers become targeted, too. Lex and her newfound community realize that it’s up to them to put a stop to the rogue Reaper.

Voya reviewed this book as being, “Creepy and hilarious.” I have to say I agree. While the thought of dying makes many people squirm, the folks of Croak will win you over to the dark side.

Carol

Then filmmakers and authors began to play with these rules, and this too was interesting. Charlaine Harris’s vampires, for example, have a blood substitute available so that they do not have to use humans for their nutritional needs.

Zombies also exist within a fairly tight set of rules. They typically crave brains and thus try feed off humans, they can survive loss of limbs and other severe bodily damage, they don’t sleep or breathe or feel pain, they do not remember their previous lives, typically they moan but do not talk, and they are strong but slow moving. The standard method of dispatching a zombie is to destroy its brain.

Zombie infestations are generally caused by objects from space, chemicals, or disease. If a living person is bitten by a zombie, he or she joins the ranks of the brain eaters. Most zombie stories feature groups of the living trying to survive zombie attacks and to wipe out the zombies.

So what fresh zombie twists have been unleashed on our zombie-hungry nation?

In Handling the Undead by John Ajvide-Linqvist, strange weather causes the dead to come back to life. In addition to your typical zombie mayhem, the author examines the psychological side of the undead.

In Dead Mann Walking: a Hessius Mann Novel by Stefan Petrucha, a criminal is executed, exonerated, and then brought back to “life” as a zombie. This story looks at the details of zombie life, culture and slang.

In My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland, Angel Crawford dies in a car crash and then comes back as a zombie. In life Angel was a drug addict, but in death her only addiction is to brains. Fortunately for her, a local serial killer seems to prey upon a victim whenever Angel craves brains.

In The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Steven C. Schlozman, a medical team studies zombies in an attempt to find a cure for the zombie epidemic. This book details the unique biology of zombies and includes anatomical drawings.

Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament by S. G. Browne is a romantic zombie comedy that details the day-to-day life of zombies.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks tells about the zombie wars as if they were an historical event. Included in the text are interviews with survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

In I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked it by Adam Selzer, a high school student starts dating a zombie without realizing that he is undead. When she does find out and tries to break up with him, things do not go as easily as planned.

 
In My So-Called Death by Stacey Jay, a freak cheerleading accident leaves Karen undead. She is sent to a boarding school for the “death-challenged” and discovers a mysterious plot that might bring about the end of all the students.

Ron