Pleasure in small things

February is a short month, and yet I read a baker’s dozen books.  Many of them were quick reads; brief books or books that focus an author’s talents on a small flash of human experience, a moment in history, a idea, a window into one place, time, or family. I’ll admit, the Computer Scientist was away a few times, and without him tossing and turning to remind me I needed to get to sleep, it was easy to stay up too late reading.

I started the month by reading a new release whose advance copy was in my to-read pile for months: Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron. I’ve groused before that a few “it” titles suck all the oxygen out of the book publicity world, leaving many worthy titles to debut with little fanfare. This was one of those books deserving of much more attention. It got plenty of pre-pub reviews, but I have seen very little since it came out in January.

Benaron’s story is about a Tutsi boy in Rwanda who dreams of running in the Olympics. That’s probably all I have to say for you to know that it’s going to be a tough story about the 1994 genocide.  The book actually starts a few years earlier and through her hero’s life, Benaron portrays the events that led to it.  I won’t say it helps the reader understand — I think it’s impossible for most people to actually understand how genocide happens.

This book is a very compelling look at how the undercurrents of civil strife eventually grew into violent conflict . It’s also a love story in a few different ways, and a book about coming of age, dealing with loss, finding friends. The boy’s coach is a particularly strange character, who loves him and protects him but also hurts him unimaginably, all in the name of a cause that is ultimately a house of cards even for its most fervent believers.

There are a pair of idealistic ex-pats, the only characters I thought were not very interesting, and Hutus who stand up against the atrocities. The scene on the night when the genocide hits home for the book’s characters is incredibly chilling.  Benaron’s details — the way mobs form in the street, the night raids by people familiar to the victims, the government controlled radio announcing the names of people they want killed — will keep you glued to the page. The redemptive power of her character’s rebuilt lives will satisfy you as well.

Bitter violence and redemption also feature in three books I read in one weekend while the Computer Scientist was away: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. If you’ve not heard, these young adult titles have been wildly popular and are being made into a film series. The first one is out soon. Teen the Younger has been recommending I read these for awhile, as had several other friends of all ages.

While I haven’t read a great deal of YA fiction, I’ve read some that has been fairly dumbed down.  Collins, to her credit, writes pretty well; the books are not simple. I was definitely hooked and enjoyed reading them straight through a weekend, even though I lost sleep doing so. I have a weakness for a good dystopian story and this definitely fits the bill.

The trilogy is set in a future America that has been divided into thirteen districts subjugated by a powerful and hedonistic Capitol. Every year each district has to send one girl and one boy — culled at a “reaping” ceremony televised live throughout the land — to the Capitol for the Hunger Games. Their mission? Become the champion by remaining the last person alive in the arena.

Yes, Collins makes several overt allusions to Rome – in one book there is even a feast at which characters excuse themselves to vomit so they can eat more. And she taps into the cultural obsession with reality shows; I am sure if I’d read more slowly I would have picked up other references.

Perhaps these allusions could have been more subtle, but I liked the intent. Collins clearly hoped to get young people thinking about power, culture, and the importance of independent critical thinking. I appreciated that she has something to say besides just telling a thrilling story. I like the fact that kids reading these books could ponder some of life’s big questions.

Collins also writes the requisite love story into her books (are there any YA books without a romantic angle?) but makes that a more complicated story than simply boy-meets-girl-meets-boy. There’s a fair bit of psychological drama.

Teen the Younger complained at first that she thought the love story was superfluous to the second book. She hates token romance thrown into stories (as do I, as did her great-grandmother). But on reflection even she agrees it’s an important part of the heroine’s understanding of what she must do.

The characters are edgy and interesting, even if they occasionally veer close to stock roles. Collins respects her readers enough that just when you think you have one of the main characters figured out, he or she does something you aren’t expecting. I do think that some of the minor characters came across as a little flat or undeveloped.

But overall, The Hunger Games series were excellent reads. I just don’t know if I am brave enough to see the movies. Teen the Younger says she will go first and make sure I can handle it.

One night as I was arriving at the reference desk my colleague who worked the previous shift handed me a book and said she’d read it in an hour and highly recommended it. The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, by Caroline Preston, took me more than an hour, because I was poring over every page.  This book defies genre, much as Brian Selznik’s books do.

It’s not really a graphic novel, it’s a scrapbook novel, told from Frankie’s point of view from her high school graduation in Cornish, NH in 1920 through college and adventures in New York and Paris before she returns to Cornish. It’s fascinating, and Frankie is an appealing aspiring-writer heroine somewhat reminiscent of Skeeter in The Help, although her story is much different.

Preston has written a lovely essay about how her highly original and very beautiful book came to be. I am very impressed that she created the scrapbook from vintage ephemera along with writing the novel. And I’m excited she’s already at work on another scrapbook novel. I think Preston has created a really interesting way to write historical novels and the fact that her background as an archivist inspired her work is a wonderful example of the spontaneous way life can inform art.

A nonfiction book I read this month was inspired by art in another way. DaVinci’s Ghost, Toby Lester‘s latest book, is the story of Leonardo DaVinci’s famous sketch “Vitruvian Man.” Lester writes in an engaging way about every aspect of science, art, and culture that led to the drawing over centuries. In lesser hands, the story might be dry, but Lester can make everything from Renaissance politics to frog anatomy seem relevant and interesting. He’s simply a terrific story-teller. And he makes Leonardo seem like a real person, not a remote historical genius.

It is interesting that Leonardo’s drawing isn’t just an example of his own curiosity about movement, art, and the human form. Lester unpacks the philosophical idea that the ideal human form inside the circle inside the square of Vitruvian Man represents the harmonious proportions of all creation — the universe as everyone from the Greeks to the Renaissance thinkers of Leonardo’s time understood it. As I say, the best part is that Lester makes this all come alive in a very entertaining way.

Another book that is very close in spirit and style to DaVinci’s Ghost is The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year. This is the story of one cultural icon as well: a poem packed with scientific theories and philosophical ideas by an obscure Roman named Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things.” The Swerve is an interesting, if sometimes discouraging, read.

Greenblatt can’t really tell us much about the poet, because no one knows much about him. He focuses instead on an Italian book hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, who rediscovered “On the Nature of Things” in a remote German monastery in 1417. Bracciolini worked as secretary for a succession of popes.  The discouraging parts of this story have to do with the corruption of the Vatican and the horrors it inflicted on people during the Inquisition.

Greenblatt also touches on the poem itself, its Epicurean inspiration, and the people in later centuries who were influenced by “On the Nature of Things.” Overall, it’s a well written, entertaining story, if slightly drier than DaVinci’s Ghost.

Similarly fascinating and discouraging is Novels In Three Lines by Felix Feneon. These are actual three line pieces Feneon wrote for a French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. Many reviewers describe the pieces as Twitter-like.  Here are some examples (I didn’t preserve the three line format, but the book does):

“At census time the mayor of Montirat, Tarn, nudged the figures upward. His eagerness to govern a multitude cost him his job.”

“Once again people have been stealing telephone cables: in Paray, Athis-Mons, and Morangis, 36,000 feet; in Longjumeau, 10 miles.”

“Colics are tormenting 18 inhabitants of Matha, Charente-Inferieure; they ate some mushrooms that were much too lovely.”

“M. Usuello and M. Crespi were very cold (30 below) at 18,000 feet aboard the Milano, taking off from Milan and landing at Aix-en Savoie.”

and the whimsical:

“V. Kaiser, 14, was headed to Mont-Saint-Martin, Meurthe-et-Moselle, to see her father. Then the satyr of the woods rose up before her . . . .”

But these are only a few of the hundreds that are about suicide, despair, murder, or other crimes, horrors or hardships. I found the book to be a bit too much read all in one go. It might have been less unsettling in smaller bites.

The introduction is excellent and explains a great deal about Feneon and his work. Besides writing these brief pieces for Le Matin, he was Rimbaud‘s editor, he helped discover Seurat, hired Debussy to be a music critic for a journal he edited, and was a frequent attendee at Mellarme‘s weekly salon. And he was an anarchist and “Trial of Thirty” defendant. So the book is interesting albeit depressing and I learned a fair bit from digging into the author’s background.

Perhaps I was drawn to the idea of novels in three lines because I’m a fan of poetry in a similar form. Bookconscious readers know I read and write haiku and other Japanese forms. Haiku really isn’t about the form so much as the aesthetic, despite what you may have learned in fourth grade.

February is NaHaiWriMo – National Haiku Writing Month – which is fun. I usually write haiku daily anyway, and I try to read haiku daily as well. This month I also decided to pick up a book I’d had on my nightstand for a long time: one of Stephen Addis‘s beautiful books, Haiku Landscapes.

Like the other haiku books he has shepherded, this one is a collection of poems by Japanese masters with English translations by Fumiko Y. Yamamoto and Akira Y. Yamamoto. The poems are matched with woodblock prints and paintings by great Japanese artists. The combination is just gorgeous. I’d love to get some of the other books in the series.

In fiction, short stories are fairly well known but hardly anyone talks about novellas. That may be in part because no one is really certain what a novella is. Sure, it’s a small novel. But when is a novella a novel and when is it a long short story? That’s a subject open to debate.

I’ll wade in: I read two short books in February that I feel venture into novella territory. Bookconscious readers know I loved Stewart O’Nan‘s last book, Emily Alone. I’d heard good things about his new book, The Odds.

Let me say that I think Stewart O’Nan is masterful. This is a really heart-breakingly sharp look at a long-married couple, Art and Marion, on a last pre-divorce weekend fling in Niagara Falls. They are facing bankruptcy, a loss on the sale of their house, and past indiscretions, known and unknown. Readers are privy to the entire mess through long interior passages.

But it’s one of those books I admired but didn’t enjoy as I read. In retrospect, it’s really complicated, impressively so. Between the financial and the personal entanglements, O’Nan packs a tremendous amount of psychological drama and tension into a small package. But it is so sad, which isn’t what I look for in pleasure reading.

He does reward the reader with a very hopeful, possibly even redemptive ending. It’s grown on me since I finished it. Plus, there are fascinating little facts about the odds of various things happening at the beginning of each chapter — a pleasing touch that appealed to my inner fact junkie.

I had a similar problem with my Europa Challenge read this month. It’s a novella by Alfred Hayes, The Girl on the Via Flaminia. I read that the author adapted this book into a play, and I could immediately understand why — I actually envisioned characters entering and exiting the scenes as I read it. I have no quibble with the writing, but this book wasn’t my cup of tea.

Again I think the subject matter is the issue: this is a distressing story, and even worse, I got no sense that the characters would be released from their troubles as I did with the end of The Odds.

The book is about an Italian girl who stays in a pseudo-brothel with an American serviceman at the end of WWII because she’s hungry. But she really doesn’t want to, and he really wants more than a prostitute. They’re both miserable; just about everyone in the book is miserable.

This was one of those books I read to the end because it felt like it should develop into something I’d eventually love, but it didn’t. But I may have just reached my limit for sadness this month.

A book which opened with sorrow but developed into joy much later is The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen.  First in the prologue, a bear makes it to the shore of a Scottish island after a harrowing swim. We only know it’s a bear because a little picture of a bear signals his story. Then in the opening chapter, a recently bereaved mother and three children are driving to the same island, and they are clearly and understandably each a mess, in different ways.

Through the eyes of these five characters (including the bear), the novel unfolds. Slowly we learn that until recently the family lived in Cold War Bonn, and the father worked for the British embassy.  The government thinks he killed himself because he was a spy; his wife doesn’t want to believe it but finds what she thinks is incriminating evidence, and each of the children is unsure what to think.

And the bear? The boy is sure it’s his father, come back to help him. Pollen spins a page-turning tale with such fabulous characters, such sensory detail, such emotional depth, and such unexpected turns, I couldn’t put it down. A handful of moments, a handful of personal interactions, made the whole story fit, and I really enjoyed how seamlessly it all happened.

Finally a book of very brief essays, Delight: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things in Life by J. B. Priestly, which I read only because it was also on my nightstand with a bookmark perhaps ten pages in, under Haiku Landscapes. When it rose to the top I decided to pick it up again and finish it. It was, well, delightful.

Some of Priestly’s small things are not mine and never will be — he lived in a different era in a different culture. But his delight is infectious. This isn’t a feel-good book. Some of his musings take a serious tone, even as he describes his delight. But it’s an erudite little tour of the way an attitude of delight can make even hard things more pleasant.

So, a book about taking pleasure in small things, a number of books devoted to small forms, a big novel that turned on small moments, another novel that shines a light on one terrible time, and two nonfiction books focused, respectively, on one drawing and one poem. That did it or me this month. As for the rest of the bookconscious household . . .

. . . Teen the Younger finished The Help, continued to read Sherlock Holmes stories here and there, and wasn’t particularly interested in my grilling her about what she thought about her reading.  She ventured that she likes the character of Mae Mobley in The Help. I’d rather she read without feeling badgered, so I did not press for more details.

The Computer Scientist sent me such a nice thorough description of his reading that I quote it nearly in its entirety:

“I read The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak. I found this to be an enjoyable historically based story told with great prose. I loved following the characters along their troublesome and humanistic path. I honestly couldn’t put this down, in part because I was stuck in a window seat on a long flight. To be honest, though, I really didn’t want to put it down, either. I highly recommend this book. (bookconscious note: I wrote about  how much I loved The Sojourn here.)

On a separate long flight, I made serious progress on The Social Animal by David Brooks. Despite his political proclivities, Brooks is thoughtful writer from whom I’ve learned much about the wiring of people within the social structures in which they exist. I left the copy with Teen the Elder because it was so fantastic and topical for him, and I look forward to finishing it in the near future.

Finally, I’m nearly finished with the first installation of The Hunger Games trilogy. An interesting story concept that is well paced, but I find it lacking in depth when compared to other authors considered peers of Suzanne Collins. It’s to the point and enjoyable, but I find myself reading it to just finish it more than being compelled by the story.”

Well, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. So that’s the story here at the bookconscious house. Stay tuned for more books and musings.

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Re-reading Harry Potter

January flew past in the bookconscious house.  We saw Teen the Elder off to England for the second half of his gap year. Began some new things in Teen the Younger’s life learning, and investigated more options for her coming (soon!) high school years.  Prepared for speaking gigs (I gave a talk on working with libraries and bookstores at NH Writers’ Project Author School, The Computer Scientist is speaking at a development conference in San Francisco). Generally succumbed to that new year, new plans, new goals kind of mindset that can be both invigorating and disruptive.

We’re all moving in interesting and exciting directions, with plans for better eating/exercising/time management/writing/studying. All of the thinking and planning that went with the collective turning over of new leaves ate into my reading time this month. And my reading was focused on one large goal related to Teen the Younger’s educational plans this season: I re-read all the Harry Potter books.

Several students at the college library where I work mentioned a course that looks into the literary origins of Harry Potter; I’ve heard several students gripe about (or plan shortcuts around) the required reading or re-reading of all seven volumes. When I mentioned this to Teen the Younger, she was quick to point out that she’s been asking me for years to re-read them, mainly so I would quit asking her what happened in which book, or what’s different in the movies. And she liked the idea of our discussing the books in the context of the influences J.K. Rowling mentions on her website or in interviews, or what we see ourselves.

Re-reading the books took me a few weeks.  I was struck by a) how much I enjoyed re-reading them b) how little I’d retained in terms of the small details and plot twists and c) how long it took me to read what I’d expected to breeze right through. Granted I haven’t read them in many years.  But I was surprised by how fresh the stories were even though I knew the basics of what was going to happen. And I was impressed anew with how really good and quite meaty these books are.

When Teen the Elder was seven, we’d spent a few months reading the first four Harry Potter books (all that were out at that point) aloud. We moved to New Hampshire and he was begging me to start reading them over again. He was a good reader but lacked confidence; he wanted me to sit beside him as he read even simple chapter books, so he could verify he was getting it right. I told him I had to unpack the kitchen, but he could start reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone himself.

He disappeared with the book, and came back downstairs later, absolutely delighted with himself. He was reading it!  I wasn’t surprised but was pleased he felt so good about it. What did surprise me was that in about a month and a half, he read all four books himself, big thick books full of complicated twists and new words, and he never once asked for help. I knew he understoof what he read, because he told me all about his favorite bits and how badly he wished it was all real.

I decided then and there that J.K. Rowling was a genius and felt forever grateful to her for helping him see he could read anything. The boy who’d been hesitant went on to read whatever he wanted, selecting books he thought were interesting without any regard for “reading level.” Harry Potter had given him the belief that thick books were a delight, not a chore.

We learned fairly quickly that there were families who were anti-Harry. I’ve never understood that point of view. Many of the best stories from mythology to the present explore the same themes, and many people who fear Harry approve of other stories with magical elements, like the Narnia series.  People who claimed that the Harry Potter would confuse kids or dupe them into believing in magic especially baffled me, since I knew that my own two were highly disappointed that it was all a story, and often wished there really was a Hogwarts and they could really go. I’ve never met a child who didn’t realize Harry Potter’s world is fictional.

But it is a very rich fictional world, and I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in it for a few weeks. Re-reading allowed me to notice some things I don’t remember making as big an impression the first time. Like how very well Rowling writes of the pain of being an adolescent who feels like an outsider, and how searingly she captures Harry’s isolation when most of Hogwarts and the wizarding world turn against him. I really felt his pain this time.

I was also impressed anew with the complexity of the books. Rowling manages to weave several generations of tales into Harry’s story: his own, his parents’, Tom Riddle’s, and Dumbledore’s.  I found myself asking Teen the Younger questions, just to make sure I was clear (she and her brother have each re-read the books many times). It’s impressive how Rowling incorporated certain magical objects’ histories into the tales as well.

And the magic — wow. Everything from the nuts and bolts of magic at Hogwarts — charms, spells, potions, transfiguration, history of magic, divination, care of magical creatures,the dorms and dungeons and towers and owl post and ghosts and magical food — to the way the wizarding world works, the places and traditions, the gardening and housework, the transportation and career choices, even the jokes and sports, are so very, very richly detailed. How much fun it must have been to invent it all, and how complicated to keep it all straight during the writing.

Another thing I noticed this time, perhaps because I read the books with an eye towards discussing them in a greater depth, are the historical and political overtones. The anti-muggle agenda of the Death Eaters has obvious parallels in Nazism, but I also thought of more recent history: apartheid, racism in America and Europe, the rise and fall of various totalitarian governments.  Spying, propaganda, state control of the press, and underground resistance all factor into the stories.

These issues were already on my mind as I read, because my Harry Potter reading fell between other books that dealt with racism and power. First, the Hooksett Library Book Club discussed The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines in January, a novel I’d never read. It’s a painful book, so I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed it. I think it does a good job of replicating autobiography’s idiosyncracies — Miss Jane’s narrative rambles a bit, it isn’t perfectly chronological and it emphasizes seemingly small incidents that seem historically unimportant to the reader. I sometimes felt lost in the tangle of names and relationships.

But I found it very interesting to consider that the civil rights movement, which we all learn about as a historical progression towards equality, was itself somewhat tangled, had its fits and starts over many decades, and wasn’t always welcomed by those who were its intended beneficiaries. Some of Miss Jane Pittman’s friends just want to live their lives in peace and don’t welcome what they see as hot-headed young people agitating for things like integrated water fountains.

The book is a reminder that it’s easy to fall into the trap of categorizing people as part of broad groups that were one side or the other of historical events, but in reality, life is far more nuanced and messy. A good thing to keep in mind today as we read about political points of view of various demographic groups, or people whose countries at war. Humans aren’t easily pigeonholed.

After Harry Potter, I turned to a book I’d checked out weeks ago at work: Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay. Ms. Kay is a well-known and prolific poet and fiction writer in England. Unfortunately, until I saw this memoir on the shelf, I’d never read her work. I suspect it’s because she came to prominence after I left college, so I missed learning about her work there, and she’s not as well known here in the U.S. (neither the college library nor my public library have any of her poetry books). I always feel a broad sense of loss when I come across an author I’ve never heard of; how many more are out there, unknown to me but important and beautiful? How will I find them?

Kay’s personal history lends itself to great story-telling and I really enjoyed Red Dust Road. She is the adopted daughter of progressive parents (political activists, Polaris protesters, anti-apartheid marchers who write Christmas cards to political prisoners) in Glasgow, Scotland. Her family is strong and loving and her mother depicts her birth parents — a Highland mother and Nigerian father who met as students — as brave victims of the society of their times.

When she’s grown and becoming a mother herself, Kay begins to investigate her origins, and Red Dust Road is about that physical and emotional journey. I found it fascinating and enlightening. I’d never heard of the British Movement, a fascist group that gained a fair bit of popular sympathy while stirring up racist sentiments in the UK. I never knew how widespread racism was (and by some accounts, still is) in the UK, where officially at least, it was never as blatant as in the Jim Crow South. I didn’t know much about Nigeria’s geography, and Kay brings it alive, as she does a small Scottish village and the town of Milton Keynes in England.

Besides being informative, I found Red Dust Road beautiful. Kay’s voice is honest and warm and friendly, funny and open-hearted and kind. Her tenderness towards the two very imperfect people who brought her into the world is amazing; both her birth parents have been unable to share her existence with her half-siblings, her mother faces Alzheimers and family problems, her father can’t reconcile his young self with the born-again figure he has become and sees her as a reminder of his past sins. She faces all of this with spirit and patience.

But her tenderness towards her actual parents, the bold, strong, loving people who raised her, is deeply moving.  This book deserves wide reading as social history, as memoir, as poetic tribute to the real meaning of family, as gorgeous witness to love’s power to heal and writing’s power to transform. I can’t wait to track down some of her poetry and catch up on this amazing writer’s work.

Bookconscious regulars know I am in my second year of the Europa Challenge. In 2012 I plan to read one book from Europa Editions every month. I started the year with Margherita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni, a novel first published in Italy.  This book includes many of my favorite things: social commentary, sharp wit, a strong-but-quirky heroine, and elements of magical realism.

Margherita of the title is a teenager, overweight, creative and acutely observant, especially when it comes to the foibles of her family. She has a younger brother who reminds me of Jason in Foxtrot (a math genius, mad about video games), an older brother who prides himself on being a soccer hooligan, a father who tinkers with old bikes, cars, and other junk in a shed in the yard; a grandfather who claims to enjoy telepathic communication with the younger brother and dances with a ghost several nights a week; a mother who lives for her soap opera and is an avid green stamp collector and frugal cook who can recycle anything into her meatloaf; and a smelly, funny looking mutt named Sleepy.

When the book opens Margherita observes a mystery: where the open skies once allowed her a view of constellations of her own design, all is dark. Something is blocking her view. It turns out to be a black cube — the high tech futuristic home of her new neighbors. As the family gets to know the neighbors strange things happen: her older brother cleans up his act, switches soccer allegiances, and fawns over the beautiful daughter; her dad’s junk disappears and he goes into what Margherita suspects is nefarious business with the new neighbor; Mamma gets beauty treatments and gives up her beloved green stamps; Grandpa is an accident and moves to a care home; and Margherita discovers the new family has an unstable son they’d rather keep hidden.

To add to her troubles, the Dust Girl, a war ghost who lives in the meadow behind Margherita’s home, seems agitated; Margherita falls for the mysterious son and finds the secret behind all the changes in her family’s life. With her younger brother’s help, she tries to investigate the “business” and find out why a farmer has died, an immigrant friend is in danger, and the gypsies have disappeared. The book’s climactic ending is anything but tidy.  In fact I sat in stunned silence for several minutes, contemplating what had just happened. Benni tells a wicked funny story, but in a chilling way.

I’m realizing as I look over this that I read about Patrollers in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (vigilante groups terrorizing newly freed slaves during Reconstruction), Snatchers in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (vigilantes rounding up “mudbloods” to turn in to Voldemort’s puppets at the Ministry of Magic), British Movement thugs in Red Dirt Road (thugs sympathetic to British Movement fascism who terrorized people of color in the UK), and Rage of God (an anti-immigrant anti-Roma vigilante group and DB International (a government contractor that sows fear of terrorism in order to drive demand for its work) in Margherita Dolce Vita. Perhaps it’s time for some more uplifting reading?

Around the bookconscious household, Teen the Elder is reading up on places to go in England and beyond during the spring term and after his gap year ends. Teen the Younger has spent a lot of time reading books with film connections and seeing the films — we saw Hugo together (we both read The Invention of Hugo Cabret in December) and she also saw Tintin, which caused her to pull out our entire collection of the books and re-read them. She’s also reading Kathryn Stockett‘s The Help after enjoying the movie.

The Computer Scientist just finished 11/22/63 by Stephen King. He says he enjoyed the excellent character development and fascinating story that made him stop and think: “While the JFK event is the central point, there is so much more to the story than that…classic SK.”

Up next? I am trying to decide which Europa book to read in February. My theory of the interconnectedness of reading — the way I seem to read books with something in common — is holding up as I started another book confronting racism and nationalism last night, Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron. So far it’s very good, tempting me to set aside my to-do list and curl up with the cat to read this afternoon.  I have my ever-present to-read piles beside the bed, and I’ve requested Stewart O’Nan‘s latest book, The Odds, at the library. Feel free to leave me reading suggestions in the comments. I’m always collecting ideas!

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