Kate McDowell on Storytelling

(David, your post is the next one down.) I decided to treat myself to re-reading an old favorite over the holidays by one of the best sci-fi-fantasy writers for children in the world. And it was as delightful as before. Jones creates a world replete with groups of creatures, politically motivated wizards, and a multi-species family of children and griffins. The premise is that someone from a non-magical world has found a portal to this magical world and is exploiting it for tourism. But it's not enough to tour a magical world. Mr. Chesney, head of these tours, demands that his customers be given a scripted set of typical fantasy story experiences, in which good triumphs over evil. The best part is the way the women of the world band together to educate the tourists (called "pilgrims") in the exploitation of their world. So much is topsy turvy. The eventual person who shuts it all down in the head of the thieves guild, who is angry because Mr. Chesney is stealing ma...

Hi David! I hope you've had a great year. Here are a couple of books I read from the last year that you might enjoy, as someone who likes fantasy/sci fi: Gregor the Overlander (and sequels) by Suzanne Collins Singer of All Songs (and others in the Chanters of Tremaris series) by Kate Constable The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale (Grimms fairy tale retelling) The Vacation by Polly Horvath (not quite fantasy, but very surreal) Those are just a few, and of course you can see other things I've been reading in this blog. I hope you enjoy your amazon gift certificate and have a wonderful new year! best wishes, your cousin Katie

Krull's new Giants of Science series has debuted to rave reviews, and this bio of Newton makes it easy to see why. This is an outstanding biography of a strange, antisocial scientific genius from back when scientists were still called "natural philosophers." It's interesting in light of so much contemporary self-help advice celebrating well-rounded lives to think of Newton, who probably contributed more to the creation of modern science than any other single person in the history of history. He was so far from being an enlightened being, tearing into his rivals ruthlessly and destroying their careers if they so much as criticized him. He hardly ate or slept while he was in his most productive phases. He certainly did not lead a balanced life. Krull's narration is broken into highly digestible chapters, and she develops suspense and weaves topics together with the ease of a novelist. I think I would have hated this guy in real life, but his story is quirky and...

After Saffy's Angel, Indigo's Star, and Permanent Rose comes the book that I so hope will not be the last in the Casson series. This one switches points of view regularly, so that the "crowd of kids" effect in the earlier books is now compounded by a crowd-of-points-of-view effect. The only voice I found it a bit hard to follow was that of Indigo, who is so quiet that it is almost as if the narration is temporarily in the 3rd person. It could be an ending point for McKay, since Caddy leaves home in search of Michael.... Rose is, as usual, unforgettable. She is absolutely and unabashedly herself, in a way that those of us with any manners at all can only dream of being. Here are a few of the quotes I liked best from the book: -- "'Valentine's cards are supposed to be speical,' said Saffron. 'You can hardly call them special if you send them off in dozens.' 'This is how I do special,' explained Rose." -- 'Last year...

I skimmed this after the first 40 pages. The book itself is such a visceral immersion in the disorientation of grief that I had to read it lightly. To have a woman's perspective on such an immediate and devastating loss as she experienced (her husband died while her recently-married daughter was in the hospital, in a coma) is a good thing. I admire the way Didion grapples with her own experience of aging, as the loss of her husband suddenly makes her realize that she has been seeing herself as the age she was when they met all these years, because that is how he saw her. She documents her own reading about the medical science of grief as she is grieving, which makes this interesting reading for those of us in LIS. Any of us who are used to doing research when we need a lifeline can understand what Didion is doing as she seeks to sort the true reflections of her experience from the absurd, and reads to know when she will recover. At one point, she reads that loss is most devast...

McBride's memoir is both autobiographical and biographical--about his mother. The subtitle "A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother" gives some sense of the issues covered, although the identity territory he covers is even wider ranging. His parents were a mixed-race couple in the 40s, and his mother had been raised Jewish in Virginia. McBride is deeply respectful of his mother, and yet clear about how her experiences have left her somewhat fragmented. On the up side, she sent all 12 of her children to college, and all are professionals. She was also widowed by 2 husbands, both of them African-American men, and when James left for college, she had only about $14 to give him. The story is remarkable, and McBride tells it like the composer he is. He switches from his mother's voice to his own, seeming to skip around at times. This echoes the fragmentation of the information that his mother is willing to give him about her own past and her total break with h...

A mystery puzzle book! I loved the Westing Game by Raskin, and I had heard great things already about this book from some of my students in LIS403, Children's Lit. So I read it in one night, which was a both a blessing and a curse. It was a quick and breezy read. I felt no need to translate the coded messages, because the content was given by the context of the surrounding text. What struck me as odd was the interweaving of a mystery-genre story with supernatural, almost ESP elements. Generally, mysteries are about discovery, finding out that what appeared mysterious is in fact explainable. In this book, the appealling-misfit characters Petra and Calder each have amazing "communications" from either a painting (in Petra's case) or from the letters formed by a set of pentominoes (Calder). And these communications are never explained, although the rest of the pieces eventually fall into place. All the empowering things about a mystery novel, such as being able t...

This is a stunning memoir of growing up with parents who couldn't or wouldn't keep a household together. Walls' family was typically on the run from the law, whether a result of her father's money schemes or the potential intervention of state authorities in how the children were being raised. It was normal to her, and she conveys that normalcy by offering a reporter's objectivity on the subject of her life. Even when she records outrageously hurtful or selfish acts committed by her mother or father, she does so without comment, indulging neither anger nor self-pity. She was, really, an abused child, with abuses too numerous to count, from simple neglect to near-starvation (while her mother indulged her own sweet tooth, hiding candy bars) to sexual molestation (under the eye of her father, who took her along to bars to distract his marks while he bested them at poker). The first line was enough to show me that I had to read this book: "I was sitting in a ta...

What could we need to know about interpreting and understanding the meaning of a work of literature that could be facilitated by digital text mining? I went to part of a dissertation proposal defense today (Bei's). Someone on her committee pointed out that literary scholars use digital tools for pre-critical work, finding the books they wish to criticize. Humanities scholars would only benefit if these text mining strategies used for classification had some way of giving them access to surprising or new meanings. But what if these tools were used for post-critical work, to see if a book's or a group of books' critical reception had some basis in the frequency of word occurrences in the text? So say, for instance, librarians in the late 19th century deemed some books "realistic" and "true to life" and other books "improbable" or "false." Would there be anything in a text analysis to back up this kind of distinction? Particularly ...

Just finished reading Countess Kate by Charlotte Yonge, which is a complex portrayal of an orphaned girl who has been kicked around from place to place. She builds her entire sense of self on finding out that she is a countess, because she has so little else to go on in the home of overbearing Aunt Barbara who constantly tells her she's not good enough. Then I start reading Elise Dinsmore by Martha Finley... we're still post-Civil War here, hence Elise is also an orphan deposited with a family who does not love her. But while Charlotte is confused, uncertain, and awkward thanks to having been kicked from family to family, Elsie is beautiful, self-righteous, constantly in an attractive state of near-weeping, and refers incessantly to the Bible. Why is she like this? How does her character come to be? We don't know, and it's hard to care when Elsie does nothing but demonstrate over and over how much better a person she is than anyone else. She's a child who need...

--Boys of '76 by Charles Coffin (earliest UIUC catalog date is 1876, although it was clearly reprinted multiple times) Rip-roaring start, right in the middle of action, getting ready to send a son off to war. And then an intervening letter gives details, and the whole things bogs way down by p. 5. I wonder if inclusion of the letter was meant to make it seem real, the way contemporary nonfiction writers for children include photographs? I need to read What Darwin Saw, if I'm able to find it. Finding older nonfiction may prove difficult, but it's what I need to do. Just found Chemical History of a Candle on Project Gutenberg... goodie.

--Outward Bound, or Young America Afloat Just finished reading this in electronic form--thanks to Project Gutenberg for making the text available for free. The UIUC catalog says it was first published in 1867. This old book is the first one I've read entirely on screen, 300+ pages. I found that by narrowing the browser window my eyes could begin to actually move as fast as they do over print pages, and I was, after many chapters, able to get "lost in the book" on this Thanksgiving day. It was a pleasure to tap the space bar rather that turn pages. I picked it out because of the title, thinking that it may lead me to greater understanding of the youth nature program by the same name. I'm sure this was the inspiration for those programs, since the gist of the story is that a principal decides to have a school on a ship, relying on the necessities of maritime life to provide needed discipline for unruly but rich boys. I do see why 19th century librarians found it ob...

Went to the library to find memoirs of women with unusual families or academic careers. I browsed, rather than asking for help. I found two important books: --Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman This memoir of growing up in a Jewish hippie family in NYC is strikingly honest about a kid's eye view of everything from concrete playgrounds to racial inequities and adolescent rock star adoration. The first half is brilliant, and she should write children's books. She write the way children are, seeing one another as people. Just like Iona Opie describe in The People on the Playground, kids refer to one another as people... not little people, not kids.... they do not see themselves as incomplete but as whole, with their own whole dramas. Gilman gets this. I'd read anything she writes. I laughed out loud enough times while reading the first few chapters that I decided not to take the book with me on the bus or to cafes. http://www.susanjanegilman.com/ --...