Braddy Reads The Butterfly Mosque

Two blog posts within a week... I must be regressing.

Honestly, I haven't been doing much reading lately.  I've actually missed book club for the last couple months, because I haven't had time to read the material.  However, when I saw what our discussion would be about in August, I knew I had to give it a try.

I wish I could say that I knew the name G. Willow Wilson from the articles she'd written about being an American Muslim convert, or from her life in Cairo, Egypt.  I wish that I'd maybe read her other novel, Alif the Unseen.  But, of course, I know the name G. Willow Wilson because she recently started writing a superhero comic for Marvel.  It's not shameful knowledge in and of itself, but I'm starting to sense it's representative of a larger imbalance taking place in my life.

Maybe that's why The Butterfly Mosque was such an important read for me at this point in my life - it's ALL ABOUT finding balance.  At least, it's about seeking for balance.  Sometimes, balance is something you don't find.  Rather, you find surrender - maybe even assimilation.

I'm getting ahead of myself - The Butterfly Mosque is Wilson's memoir about her conversion to Islam and her subsequent relocation to Cairo, how she there met the man who would become her husband, and how she sought to reconcile her Western upbringing with the values of the religion she has so wholeheartedly embraced as well as the culture of her new, adopted home.  She struggles with the idea that there can be no such reconciliation - that the American system within which she was raised is incompatible with Cairene sensibilities.  Yet she, with her husband, manage to create something of a "third culture" within which the two of them can be happy, if not always secure.

I have, like, about a half-million ideas that have been swimming around in my head ever since I started reading this book.  I've spent a lot of time thinking of myself and my relationship to God, especially after Wilson mentions a friend who says "God is the love between you and religion."  I've also thought a lot about how selfish I've been, an idea that's been shaken up ever since reading a discussion Wilson took part in with some classmates ranking the culpability of various individuals involved in a tragic murder by their failure to live up to their social responsibilities.  I've questioned my own biases as I've read of brief, transcendental encounters between Muslims of different schools uniting in prayer.  And I've been thinking... and thinking... and thinking...

I doubt I could really explain everything I've been thinking since I started The Butterfly Mosque.  Now that I've finished it, I can tell you that it's made my shortlist of books that have changed my life upon reading, right up there with East of Eden and My Name is Asher Lev.  And, guys, that's really high praise.

Braddy Reads Crossing to Safety

I've found that, for most of the books I read as part of my book club, I walk away with the same impression of the book:  "The writing was good, BUT..."  Now, whatever follows that big "but" can vary.  "BUT I thought the characters were unlikeable."  "BUT I found the plot derivative."  "BUT I got too caught up watching TaleSpin on DVD to actually finish the book."  If I'm being honest with myself, though, I find that all my big "buts" are actually deflections, ways of coping with the fact that I just don't fully understand what I've read.

My opinion of the books I read for book club usually goes up after discussion.

Speaking of things I don't understand, Wallace Stegner wrote this book called Crossing to Safety, the story of a pair of married couples and their friendships and hardships during the years of the Great Depression.  One couple - made up of the story's narrator and his wife - come from a poor background, and they struggle finding financial security.  The other couple, Sid and Charity Lang, are wealthy beyond most people's imaginations.  Together, they form a friendship that lasts longer than I've even been alive.

I've got nothing in common with these people, except for perhaps an irrelevant love of literature.  I can't relate to any of the experiences described in the book:  there's no recounting of their courtship, except for a speculative bit on the Langs' past which sounds like something out of Pride and Prejudice.  The couples' experience during the Depression doesn't resemble any of the financial hardships I've ever endured - thanks to the Langs' affluence, neither couple really feels the pinch of their circumstances.  Even the marital strife that permeates their relationships doesn't really feel that much like the spats I've had in my few romantic encounters.

There's more I could talk about - brushes with illness, the fear of suffering, the struggle to age gracefully - but, again, these aren't really areas I've had much experience with, and very few of these issues are dealt with personally.  In fact, even though the whole story is supposedly told from the perspective of Larry Morgan, we get very little idea of how all of these experiences affect him.  Rather than dwelling on his response to trial, he chooses instead to speculate on how their trials impact the Langs.

Actually, now that I think about it, that sort of voyeurism is something I really can relate to.

I've been somewhat fascinated with the idea of telling more "slice of life" stories - stories without obvious antagonists or terribly dramatic conflicts.  Very few people actually have experiences that fit into that sort of three-act structure; rather, our lives lead us from one crisis to the next, usually without the satisfaction of denouemont.  In that regard, I'd say Crossing to Safety is massively successful, and satisfying.

Oh, and the writing's good.  I look forward to the book club's discussion.

Braddy Reads The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki

Yeah, I read this book on accident.

Sort of. See, I was in the mood to look at some good art books, and the drawings of Hayao Miyazaki, filmmaker best known for Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, are among my favorites. So I saw this book in the library catalog and thought I'd put it on hold, just so I'd have some pretty pictures to look at. Then the book arrived, and there's not a single illustration in the whole thing.

How can you have a book called The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki without a single picture in it?

Well, I decided to read through the book anyway, as it appeared to be a rather scholarly approach to the films directed by Hayao Miyazaki. And scholarly it was! I'd never even heard the word "concomitantly" before, and the author uses it at least a dozen times throughout the text.

I've often wondered what a scholarly approach to pop culture would really look like. It's not something I've ever really thought to research, though. I must say that the scholarly approach to Miyazaki's films actually makes me appreciate them a whole lot more - even Howl's Moving Castle, which I've recently started to look down on despite the fact that it's the film that introduced me to Miyazaki.

I think the title is something of a misnomer. While the book certainly dedicates most of its time to discussing Miyazaki's work, there's a lot of space devoted to the works of other prominent directors from Studio Ghibli. I guess "Studio Ghibli" wouldn't move as many books as "Hayao Miyazaki."

The only section here I could see appealing to people not absurdly obsessed with fine foreign animation is a brief chapter detailing the sort of "bromance" between Hayao Miyazaki and John Lasseter of Pixar. It's a pretty cool little story. Otherwise, this one's for hardcore fans only.

I don't think I can sully my fingers by typing the word "otaku."

Braddy Reads Boxers & Saints

Gene Luen Yang wrote an amazing book a couple of years back called American Born Chinese, a story about the son of first-generation immigrants from China interwoven with the Chinese legend of the Monkey King and a hilariously racist sitcom charicature of a Chinese boy named Chin-Kee.  The three different stories draw tighter and tighter together as they progress, until they are completely pulled together in one of the best executed endings I've ever seen in a comic.

Now Yang's done it again with Boxers & Saints, a two-part comic that tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion in China.  The first volume tells the story of Little Bao, a young man who is able to invoke the spirit of the first Chinese Emperor and fight against the poisonous presence of "foreign devils" who have invaded China.  The second volume follows an unwanted child known only as "Four-Girl," who embraces the religion of the foreigners as an act of rebellion against her family.

The two stories proceed roughly independently of each other, only brushing together in small places, scenes which seem unimportant in the narrative as a whole.  Both stories offer fascinating perspectives on what it was like to live in China during such a turbulent, difficult time.  Most impressively, neither story completely villifies either the invading foreigners or the Boxer rebels.

In this regard, Bao's story is probably the most engaging, as his struggle to accept the sometimes horrifying violence he feels he must perpetrate in service to his cause is the chief conflict of the first volume.  Boxers, by itself, is a compelling read - it's violent and grim, but it's never so oppressively dire in its portrayal of war that the reader wants to take a breath.  My only real complaint about Boxers as a stand-alone graphic novel is that the ending feels too abrupt.

Of course, the true ending isn't found until the reader gets through Saints. Personally, I feel the story here is a bit weaker - but that just might be me bringing my preconceptions to the novel.  I expected the main protagonist, Four-Girl, to be a devout Christian convert in order to better contrast with the devotion Little Bao brings to his cause.  Most of Saints seems to revolve around how little Four-Girl actually believes in the Christian faith of the foreigners.  Her interactions with the visions of Joan of Arc are certainly compelling, and they mirror similar mythic experiences from the first volume, but the story as a whole just doesn't feel quite as emotionally charged as the first.

...well, until the ending.  Boy, that ending.

Boxers & Saints does historical fiction right, inspiring curiosity about the real-world events which inspired the story while advocating a message which still feels applicable over a hundred years later.  The books also do comics right - I used to dismiss Yang's art as "simple," but now I find it refreshingly unpretentious.  It takes real skill to make something so compelling look so easy.  Finally, the two-book story does storytelling right - deftly weaving bits of thread around the others in a manner that looks random and insignificant until the time is right to pull it all together and BAM!  Tapestry.

That is how weaving works, right?

Braddy Reads A History of the World in 6 Glasses

So I've made a goal this year - an unwritten goal (well, previously unwritted) to read more non-fiction.  I've decided that I'll focus on some of my favorite subjects and hobbies, mainly food, art, and history.  Admittedly, "history" is a pretty broad subject that could do with some narrowing.  However, sometimes a broad overview is sufficient.  And, heck, if it's an overview that happens to include some food info as well, then that's pretty great.

I learned last year that food makes a pretty great medium through which to teach history, and Tom Standage seems to agree, if his book A History of the World in 6 Glasses is anything to go by.  Standage links some of the most popular and influential beverages with broad sections of human history.  Beer is associated with early human history and a move from wandering hunter-gatherer tribes to fixed farming settlements.  Wine is associated with the rise of Greek and Roman thought.  Distilled spirits reflect the spirit of exploration and ocean travel.  The rise of coffee mirrors the rise of scientific thought.  Tea covered the world in a period of global imperialism.  Finally, Coca-Cola's worldwide popularity is indicative of the triumph of marketing and the spread of American influence, for good or for ill.

Frankly, that's the gist of the book, so I may have saved you a few hours of reading.  However, the details of this expansion are well-worth reading, and Standage's writing is accessible enough to invite even novice students of history to crack open the pages.  I've found a lot of events in here that I want to explore in a bit more detail, but, as an introduction to world history, this text serves its role well.  And it makes its lessons all the more effective by tying historical events in with everyday beverages everyone consumes.

Well, everyone except me, that is.  I'm Mormon.

Braddy Reads One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Man, some books... I don't think I've felt this conflicted about a story I've read since Lolita.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is without a doubt worthy of the influence it's had on people over the years. It's a compelling tale with memorable characters, a primal, universal conflict, and a resolution that couldn't have come about any other way. It's a story that had to come together the way it did, and it would not have worked any other way.

It's too bad the main character is such an unlikable cuss.

Most of the issues I have with Cuckoo's Nest center around Randall McMurphy. He's brash, boisterous, and rowdy. He's sneaky, conniving, and contemptible. He's got some charm to him, certainly,  and the story felt like it screeched to a halt every time he wasn't the center of attention. Yet I could never bring myself to genuinely like him, because he asked for most of the poor treatment he received.

Sure, I get that McMurphy is meant to illustrate the value of freedom in the face of oppression. I get that he's making a stand against an unjust and corrupt system. I get that he restores autonomy and confidence to a whole group of disenfranchised inmates. HOWEVER, he remains, start to finish, an angry gambler, a misogynist, and a violent criminal.

I've got other grievances - mainly centering around the depictions of the mental health profession - but most of them I can brush off as elements necessary in constructing the delicate tyrrany against which our protagonist fights. Cuckoo's Nest testifies of the importance of personal freedom, and it makes the point that freedom is something worth dying for. It's a good message, and a good story - but did it have to be told this way?

Maybe, for some, it did. For me, though? R. P. McMurphy just isn't my hero.

Braddy Reads I Want My Hat Back

Is there a market for picture books for adults that I'm not aware of? Or is this just a thing my friends do?

Of course, I'm not talking about "adult" picture books. Don't be gross.

I'm not even talking about parody picture books, like Go the F*^% to Sleep. I'm talking about honest-to-goodness, 12"-square books that are, like, 75% illustration. Yeah, I've got a lot of friends who love those things.

And there's no reason why someone shouldn't love a good picture book. Some of my fondest, earliest memories are from reading the likes of "Little Critter" or "Curious George." Heck, as an adult, I've come to appreciate the work of artists like Shaun Tan, whose written one of my all-time favorite books.

Well, if you haven't ever seen Jon Klassen's I Want My Hat Back, you might want to try a picture book for yourself. The simplistic illustrations set up this sort of dry, deadpan tone that leads up to one of the best punchlines I've ever seen.

Plus, the book is full of the usual monosyllables, so most people could enjoy this book with their kids. Provided you like just a hint of dark humor in your child-rearing.

Braddy Reads East of Eden

Man, is Steinbeck depressing or what?

I've been doing less reading than usual. Between singing rehearsals all throughout the last quarter of 2013 and house... stuff... I've not really had the time. But now it's a new year, and a new month, and a new selection from my book club. So it's time, I guess, to take that reading rainbow for a ride.

This is actual the second time my book club has chosen to read a Steinbeck novel. It's not terrible hard to see why: Steinbeck is a stupendous writer, even if all he seems to write about is misery and discomfort. I've never walked away from a Steinbeck novel feeling anything other than enlightened, although perhaps a bit dirty, as well.

East of Eden is almost definitely my new favorite Steinbeck novel. It contains one of the most interesting meditations on morality I've ever read. Admittedly it took a long time for me to really get into the novel - it felt like the first several hundred pages were all set up , and it takes a LOT of patience to get the payoff.

I really hate long novels.

Ultimately, though, East of Eden has given me a lot to think about. Like the stories from the Bible on which the novel is loosely based, East of Eden affirms that men and women all,have the capacity for good and evil, and their reasons for cleaving to one or the other can vary. Sometimes, vice can lend one strength, while virtue can lead them down treacherous, sinful roads. Yeah, I'll be thinking on that one for a while.

By the way, I read the Penguin edition of the novel, and the back of the book kinda made me laugh:

Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families-the Trasks and the Hamiltons-whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

That, by the way, is literally the entire plot of the book. Spoilers, indeed.

Braddy Reads Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong

Surprisingly, I haven't been reading too many comics recently. I spend most of the time I've set aside for picture entertainment watching cartoons, I guess. Recently, though, I came across the name Faith Erin Hicks as a cartoonist to watch out for. She's got this book called Friends With Boys that's supposed to be excellent... but I didn't start with that one (I'll read it later). Instead, I went to the book she created with Prudence Shen called Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong.

I should spend more time with this kind of book - you know, a comic book that's about something other than superheroes. NCPGW is a pretty straightforward story about a group of teenagers trying to come up with money for different goals. Amitious and arrogant Nate is trying to raise the funds to help his robotics club enter the National Robotics Fair, while the cheerleading squad is trying to capture those same funds in order to supply the team with new uniforms before their big competition. Poor Charlie, the captain of the basketball team, is caught in the middle, and he's not sure he can handle all the stress while still trying to deal with his parents' divorce (and his mother's new boyfriend).

Those are the stakes in NCPGW, and they're great stakes to have in a story with these characters. Faith Erin Hicks imbues each character with a great deal of charm - they all look good. Even their "acting" is a thing of beauty.

I don't know that you could call this a world-changing book - it's the sort of thing teenagers will read to convince themselves that the world doesn't end just because you're in high school. It's got a lot of the usual cliche's - the jocks vs. the nerds, the prissy squad of cheerleaders, dirty student election politics - but with enough clever twists to keep any of them from wearing on the reader. Plus - and I don't know if I've mentioned this yet - it's really, really funny.

You can knock out NCPGW in about an hour or two, and it's the type of book most public libraries will probably keep a copy of, so I'd strongly recommend it. You could probably even borrow my copy, if you wanted - after I finish reading it the second time, of course.

Braddy Reads A Girl Named Zippy

Considering how little I care for memoir, I sure do read a lot of it. Guess that's what being in a book club is all about. So, yeah, someone ELSE decided that I'd be reading Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy. Wasn't my choice.

Memoir often strikes me as self-indulgent. "Look at my life!" shouts the author. "Isn't it just literary?" And I definitely think that there's a healthy dose of that here. But, really, does that make the book bad? I think you'd be hard pressed to find one novel whose author wasn't something of an exhibitionist while writing.

An additional problem I have with memoir is that I often find it difficult to react to. Admittedly, since my initial impulse is to pretty much hate everything, I'm choosing my own fate here. I mean, it's certainly upsetting to an author to find out that someone hates their characters, but as long as those characters are fictional, it's hard to take that personal. But with memoir, if I hate a character, I'm basically just telling the author, "Hey. I hate your dad."

Kimmel deals with a lot of themes here - faith, family, social mores - yet she never seems to draw a firm conclusion on any of them. She doesn't believe in Chrisitianity, yet she admires and emulates her Christian friends. She seems to both love and hate her sister. She recognizes that she causes her own problems by refusing to follow societal rules, yet she never changes her behavior to avoid suffering. Is it fair for the author to bring all these points up without leading the reader to a firm conclusion? Maybe not, but it's probably not fair for the reader to demand didactic morality from the author's life, either.

Maybe that's what I hate about memoir - it's too often as messy and un-satisfyingly open-ended as real life. Seriously, I have enough messes outside the pages of the book. I don't need my reading material to jack up my mindspaces.

All that aside, A Girl Named Zippy is a good read. Taken separately, the vignettes from the author's life are charming and amusing, and she's got just the right sardonic voice to pull them off in writing. As a whole, the book leaves you with a lot to think about. It's definitely successful as what it is, and if you like memoir you'll like this too.

Braddy Reads The Old Man and the Sea

I don't read nearly as much as I used to. While reading was once a favorite pastime, now I find I would rather spend my idle hours writing or drawing. Creating rather than consuming.

Okay, I still watch hours and hours of cartoons, but those are pretty much a commitment from me by this point.

Anyway, yesterday I found myself taken with the urge to read a good story. I wanted to read something short and easy but not childish. It's a difficult set of criteria to meet, honestly, and I idly and aimlessly browsed the fiction section at the local library. Salvation came in the guise of a thin little volume by the incomparable Ernest Hemingway, that creation most loathed by high school students everywhere, The Old Man and the Sea.

I'd never read it before. My first Hemingway was about two years ago, and I loved it. The Old Man and the Sea was exactly the sort of thing I wanted.

The particular edition I picked up contains a brief introduction which spoils the entire plot in a paragraph written by Hemingway himself, so I started with a feeling of distrust lodged firmly in my psyche. How is Hemingway going to tell the story of a single fishing trip in which exactly one thing of note occurs, make it last 90 pages, and make it interesting? There's no way he can do that.

And, in a sense, that's probably true. I read most of the book while on my way home from work, on the bus, and I fell asleep while reading. A couple of times. Whether that was due to the quality of writing in the book or my own fatigue, though, I couldn't definitively say.  If I'd been a teenager at time of reading, though, I would certainly come away from the book hating the experience.
Thankfully, I'm no capricious teenager. This book amazed me, despite the beddie-byes. It's profoundly introspective and contemplative, all while maintaining that mythic fortitude of manliness Hemingway's known for.
I don't really buy into that myth, but it does make for good reading.
Short story shorter: I loved it. A bit slow at the start, but the ending's gorgeous.

Braddy Reads The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Man, it's been nearly six weeks since I last finished a book. I just don't read as much as I used to since I stopped taking the bus to work all the time. I've also still been working my way very, very slowly through Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which is a book that a person could probably spend years reading. So I'm thankful to my book club for providing me with this selection, which gave me something of a break.

Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was not quite the book I expected it to be. Harold Fry is an elderly man who learns that a good friend of his is dying of cancer. He writes a note to wish his friend goodbye; however, when he steps out to mail the note, he walks right past the mailbox and decides, on a whim, to walk all the way from his southern England home to Berwick-upon-Tweed to say goodbye in person. Along the way, he reminisces on his failures in life - everything from his job to his marriage to his parenting. He's a sorry, aging figure driven on by the hope that, somehow by making this walk to thank an old friend for a favor she had done for him long ago, he can set everything right again.

The book frustrates me. At times, it's so predictable as to be banal. At times, there are these bits of shoehorned editorial that completely take one out of the experience of reading. But then, at the best of times, there's this sublime moment when a side character who makes little more than a cameo in Harold's story leaves such an impression that you remember them the entire way through the story.

Throughout his walk, Harold starts to accumulate stories from individuals who have fully-realized lives, yet they leave only a bit of who they are with him. These encounters are funny, touching, sometimes disturbing, and universally fleeting, yet there's a great profound poetry to them. These little moments are what make the book worth reading.

And, I'll admit it, the ending, when Harold finally reaches his destination, plays out exactly the way it needs to and in a way I did NOT see coming.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry isn't a perfect story, nor is it completely unique (of all things, it often reminded me of the movie Forrest Gump). The pilgrimage, though, is one worth taking. If you're in need of a good summer book, I'd recommend this one.

Braddy Reads The Westing Game

So I've been working my way through a DIFFERENT book for nearly six weeks now. And... it's been a really good read. A really, REALLY good read. Which is why I'm so disheartened that, six weeks later, I'm only about 150 pages in. The protagonist just barely got BORN. And I've got about 400 pages to go.

Thus, this intermission read: Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, a book most of us probably read by the time we finished grade school.

I read this book once before, and I remembered NOTHING about it except the twist at the end - which, since the novel is a MYSTERY, I won't spoil just in case. So while I knew the SOLUTION to the puzzle, I remembered nothing about the clues, the characters, or even what the mystery itself was about. Made reading the book an interesting experience, to say the least.

Oddly enough, I had a bit of a false-start with The Westing Game - I started reading it, got maybe five pages in, and decided I didn't want to finish. The Westing Game is very much a book for children, so the opening doesn't really have the sophistication of a lot of other novels. Or, you know, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for a mystery at the time.

Actually, in hindsight, it was probably the latter, because the opening section strikes me as being pretty good. The problem with it, if there is one, is that it takes it's sweet time giving us the RELATABLE characters. Heck, my other book managed to do that on the very first page, and (like I said), the POV character wasn't even a glimmer in his grandfather's eyes at that point.

That said, the characters in this story are really good, and probably the primary draw. Now, The Westing Game is obviously a product of its time, especially when it comes to portrayals of race. There's both a black judge and a Chinese restauranteur, and while both characters are portrayed with their race a very prominent part of their personality, both are shown to be fairly well-rounded.

The character that really impressed me, though, is Chris Theodorakis, a mentally-handicapped young man in a wheelchair. He has great difficulty communicating with the other characters, but his mind is shown to be keen and sharp. It's probably one of the most positive portrayals of a person with a disability I've ever read, and I was almost disappointed when, at the end of the book (*SPOILER*) he gets better.

The biggest failing of The Westing Game is the speed of the story. The plot moves at a breakneck pace, so it's easy to skip over some of the clues or details. I read a page that said that the characters Turtle and Sandy (who didn't know each other before the story began) were good friends, and I had to stop for a minute. I don't remember how they even MET, much less at what point they became best bosoms.

But, you know, I've only got a few nitpicks when it comes to the plot. The Westing Game is a classic, and, like most classics, it has that honor for a reason. The mystery is compelling, the characters enjoyable, and the clues are mostly there from the beginning, so the reader gets to play along. Great use of an intermission read.

Braddy Reads The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio

Pretty much every time I read a book for book club, I come away thinking about how glad I am that I'm in a book club because it gives me the opportunity to read something I normally wouldn't. Cuz, yeah, this month's selection is a biography. I don't read biographies very often, because I don't like biographies. Reality is boring. Fiction's MUCH more fun.

I'm not sure why I dislike biographies, especially since most biographies I read, I wind up liking. Case in point: Terry Ryan's biography of her mother, recorded in The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio. Terry writes about her mother, Evelyn Ryan, and the hardships she went through raising ten children while avoiding the wrath of her alcoholic husband. With so many mouths to feed and not enough money, Evelyn supplements her income by entering as many corporate sponsored contests as she can.

It'd be easy to dismiss this book as just another tale of tough times in the Leave It To Beaver era, and, if that were all there was to Prizewinner, it'd be a pretty bland book. After all, the story isn't really that dark (at least as it's presented here) to qualify as a criticism of Picket Fence, U.S.A. There's too much optimism and lighthearted humor.

However, I get that criticizing the often-idealized 1960s isn't really the point of Prizewinner. Rather, Ryan's book should be seen as more of a family history. It's not meant to be compelling reading in the same way as a lot of novels. It's a celebration of the life of one remarkable woman who battled difficult situations with relentless positivity. Excessively focusing on the negative would undermine that message.

Now, for me, the real joy of Prizewinner is to be found in the examples of Evelyn Ryan's poetry and contest entries. She possesses a wit and knack for clever rhymes that rivals Ogden Nash. I chuckled more than a few times reading Evelyn's verses. She was a talented woman, one of the most remarkable of her ilk (the contesting housewives) and well-worthy of rememberance.

Braddy Reads The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories

Eh. Technically, it's The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 2. But I'm not going to be picky.

No doubt the main reason I picked this book up was the name on the cover. I'd never heard of "wirrow," but the co-author is actor and groovy fellow Jonathan Taylor Thomas Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who has apparently set up a kind of collaborative creative workforce online called HITRECORD.

It's a pretty impressive endeavor - hundreds (thousands?) of contributors share little bits and pieces of ideas that get compiled together into larger and more polished products. It reminds me a lot of what Creative Commons was supposed to be all about, and it's equally inspirational. In my mind, HITRECORD seems like it functions the way intellectual property SHOULD function - credit given where credit is due, but ideas aren't really OWNED (or, rather, monopolized) by anyone.

But none of that really answers the most important question: Is their stuff any GOOD?

Well, yeah. I think so. You can see some of the videos they've come up with on their website, and they hold up pretty well, although having contributing talent from JGL and Gary Oldman (and a singer who I'm pretty sure is Zooey Deschanel) certainly helps.

And The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories (Volume 2) holds up pretty well on its own, too. The illustrations are often a little on the childish side - almost like what you'd see in the margins of a high-schooler's notebook - and the little stories sometimes verge on "emo." But that's not to the work's detriment. It's the synthesis of well-intentioned amateurish talent into something greater that makes these tiny stories fun to read. They are at times funny, poignant, and thought provoking. It's exactly what it says it is: a collection of tiny stories, some less than a sentence long, each packed with implied narrative and emotion.

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories seems like it'd make a great gift for the hipster in your life, but I'm pretty sure, if you give it a chance, you'd like it, too.

Braddy Reads Ender's Shadow

I actually feel a little bad about this one...

My book club met in December to do a book exchange. Now, I joined the book club because I wanted to expand my horizons a little - read books I wouldn't choose to read on my own. So when we all decided to share our favorite book with someone else in the club, I was excited to get something new and different.

And... well, I don't really like Orson Scott Card.

I hope I was able to mask my disappointment when I opened up Ender's Shadow... but I doubt I was. I mean, it feels a little childish to get all huffy when your gifts don't live up to their expectations. And I don't know many twenty-whatevers as childish as I am. Still, a gift's a gift, so I gave the book a read.

My reasons for disliking Card are kind of difficult to explain. For one thing, he's said some rather stupid things I don't quite agree with. That's not really it, though. I think it boils down to the feeling I got when I read Card's Seventh Son series back in junior high. Those books are a bizarre fantasy series loosely based around the life of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. I don't remember them being particularly BAD books, but I do remember getting an odd, unpleasant feeling when I read them. I continued to read the books because they were, in a way, about my own faith. As an adult, I feel like I'd been tricked, especially since whatever feeling I got while reading those books wasn't a pleasant one.

That's all I can say. Card's not a bad writer - he's actually really good. But I just... feel weird reading him. That silly enough for you?

That said, I do remember reading Ender's Game in junior high and LOVING it. In fact, I've often thought I should go back and read it again. So I tried to push my weird feelings towards Card and his writing aside and just enjoy Ender's Shadow for what it was.

Of course, when the first chapter features numerous references to twelve-year-old prostitutes, that task was made pretty difficult. But, really, that's just the sort of grittiness one should expect from the Ender series. The whole point of the series (at least, those books of the series I read) is to take a lot of the violence and psychological conflict of adult war stories and transplant them to a juvenile setting. It's a mite disturbing, yes, but in a way that's more reminiscent of The Hunger Games than, say, Lolita.

For me, the biggest distraction in Ender's Shadow was how hard it sought to rewrite the events of Ender's Game, casting Bean in a stronger protagonist role. Card goes to great length to portray Bean, not as Ender's peer, but his superior. In a way, by building up Bean's story so much, I kinda felt that Ender's story was diminished.

But, really, I'm nitpicking. There's a reason Ender's Game was so highly regarded, and Card's strengths show through equally strongly here. Bean's calculations are fascinating to read. The way he understands people so thoroughly, and yet somehow misses their humanity, makes him a truly compelling character. So, yeah, this book was definitely worth the read.

Braddy Reads The Night Circus

I don’t think I’m much of a romantic.

Or maybe this just wasn’t that much of a romance.

Or maybe the main characters in romance novels are ^%#in’ IDIOTS.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is one of the upcoming selections from my book club (and I’ve GOT to start taking these books at a slower pace). It’s billed as a romance novel, but there’s significantly more going on between these covers than a love story.

Was… was that a euphemism?

*ahem* So the story follows two young people who have been snared into some kind of magic competition by a couple of meddling old wizards. The terms of the duel are never really clearly stated, but the venue for the competition is pretty clearly established: each of the competitors makes subtle, but magnificent, adjustments to a traveling circus.

And, as so often happens, the competitors fall in love.

I don’t know why this particular couple bugged me so much. There are plenty of other romantic couples in fiction that are infinitely more annoying, but something about the way these two go about things just frustrates me. They wrap up a lot of innocent people in their duel and manage to ruin their lives pretty thoroughly. They even get a couple of people killed.

Oh, wait, they feel sorry for it in the end? Well, that makes it all better.

Well, now that I’m done kvetching, let me say that I actually LIKED this book quite a bit. Not a whole lot, but enough that I’m really glad I read it. It's kind of a terrible romance, but as a period fantasy, it's excellent. I mean, the setting is... Oh, the setting is really good.

See, Morgenstern’s got a knack for place description, and she sets up the circus BEAUTIFULLY. You can tell she was trying to craft a place of transcendental wonder, and she was trying really, really hard. And doggone it, she succeeded.

The Night Circus isn’t a book I plan on re-reading much, but I imagine I’ll crack open the pages a time or two to get a sense of what that wonderful circus is like. Les Cirque des Rêves really does wind up being a dreamlike place. Frankly, I want to re-read those sections a bit more, just to see how Morgenstern did it.

One last note (and maybe I’m the only person who thinks of this): There’s a scene where our two lovers consummate their relationship. At that moment, the narration states that, “though there are a great many fragile objects” in the room, “nothing breaks.” Now, there are completely legitimate reasons for pointing this out within the context of the novel. However, I can’t help but read that line as a sort of “take that” against the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn in particular.

Man, for someone who’s never read the series, I know WAY too much about Twilight.

Braddy Reads Unbroken

The book club I meet with isn’t reading anything for December, so I started on January’s book a bit early. And I fully expected to take the whole month and a half to finish it. After all, I simply don’t care much for biographies. I also don’t much like sports or war stories. So when January’s book (Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken) tells the true life story of Olympic runner and World War II veteran Louie Zamperini, I expected to be bored to tears.

The first hundred pages felt like they took forever to read. The story follows young Louie through his troubled childhood. It traces his journey to the 1936 Olympics and all the records that he broke along the way. Louie’s hopes of winning the gold in 1940 were shattered by the start of World War II. He joined the Army Air Force and trained to be a bomber. On a rescue mission, his plane failed, and Louie and two other men found themselves adrift in the Pacific Ocean. They remained on the raft for over a month, catching birds to use as bait for fishing. While out on the ocean, the three men were attacked by a Japanese plane. Louie dove over the side of the raft to avoid getting shot, and he found he had to defend himself against ravenous sharks. He gritted his teeth, balled up his fists, and swung, and then…

WHEN THE HECK DID I START LIKING THIS BOOK?

Somewhere along the line, Hillenbrand hooked me in. The first 100 pages took me about two days. I finished the remaining 300 pages in another two days of non-stop reading.

It would be enough if the book was just a good adventure, but Hillenbrand extrapolates some fascinating morality from Zamperini’s story. She discusses at length how Zamperini’s “dignity” carried him through all his adversity. She makes a strong connection between a person’s dignity and their will to survive. It’s a fascinating subject to think on, and I found it well worth reading through Unbroken just for that.

Altough I think the book really should have been titled Sharkpuncher.

Braddy Reads The Thirteenth Tale

Part of me is bugged by self-referential art: movies about moviemaking, poems about poetry, rock songs about how great it is to rock. These particular expressions are good enough for those who are already fans of a genre, but how must they look to the potential convert? Doesn’t good art have the unspoken responsibility to proselytize to those unfamiliar with it?

I dunno.

Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale is a book about books (as one can easily determine when, contrary to conventional wisdom, one judges the book by its cover). The story follows Margaret Lea, a bookstore employee and sometime biographer, after she is employed to write the life story of the reclusive Vida Winter, England’s premier novelist. What follows is a twisted, convoluted, and fascinating tale of hauntings, tragedies, and twins.

This is actually my second time reading The Thirteenth Tale. I’d recommended the book to a friend without ever reading it, based solely on the strength of the cover image. I picked the book up nearly a year later, shortly after graduating from college. I’ve remembered the book fondly since then, even though many of the particulars of the story, including the details surrounding the twist ending, have escaped me.

After re-reading The Thirteenth Tale, I can re-confirm what I’ve long told people when describing the story – it’s a more or less contemporary take on classic “haunted house” stories (I can’t help but think of Wuthering Heights when I read Setterfield’s novel). Whether you like the book or not would depend largely on how much you like that kind of literature.

A knowledge of classical literature, especially stories like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Turn of the Screw seems almost prerequisite. This is NOT a book for the initiate. One who doesn’t much care for reading will likely not get much out of The Thirteenth Tale... at least, not in my estimation. Perhaps I’m wrong there.

Avid readers, though? Those who like words and how they can line up in a sort of harmonious dance? Those readers will find a lot to like in The Thirteenth Tale. They will be reminded how great it is to rock.

Braddy Reads The Scarlet Pimpernel

About... geez, it must have been about 12 years ago, my parents took me and my siblings to see a production of the musical The Scarlet Pimpernel. From the beginning, I loved it - the music was stirring, the costuming engaging, and OH how I laughed at all the prancing foppery.

It's an excellent show, one I've seen at least four times since then. However, as much as I enjoyed the musical, I've had no exposure to the source material (or, for that matter, any of the movie adaptations). So, when I found myself in need of a book to read, I picked up this one, which has been sitting on my shelf for probably about two years.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (seriously? Who names their kid "Baroness"?) tells the story of Marguerite St. Just, a French woman who marries incompetent oaf Sir Percy Blakeny and thus escapes the horrors of the French Revolution. She is compelled by a former acquaintance, a French spy named Chavelin, to seek out the identity of a man who has helped former aristocrats escape the judgment of the Revolution, a man who is only known by the name The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I'm not spoiling much when I give away the big surprise: The Pimpernel is actually Sir Percy, and his clueless foppishness is actually a clever ruse meant to divert suspicion. The Pimpernel's identity is pretty much common pop-culture knowledge by this point. In fact, the musical uses Percy's decision to take on the Pimpernel identity as its starting point. Thus the big reveal of the Pimpernel's identity, which comes about halfway through the novel, doesn't carry a lot of surprise anymore.

I enjoyed the book well-enough - it reads much like a simpler version of A Tale of Two Cities, only with more disguises - but I found myself questioning repeatedly the decisions made by Wildhorn and Knighton when they adapted the story to the stage. The novel tells the story completely from Marguerite's point of view, which I thought a much more interesting choice (though one that would be difficult to pull off in a stage setting.

Oh, and I'd be completely remiss if I did not mention that The Scarlet Pimpernel is essentially the ur-Batman.

As a novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel hasn't aged particularly well. It feels unnecessarily padded in certain parts, as if the writer were getting paid by the word. However, as a story, The Scarlet Pimpernel holds up fairly well. Marguerite's tension, her difficult decisions, feel significant. Hers is a story well-worth investing time in.