Along with frolicking and touristing and hiking and sweating and picture-taking and everything else I did over break, I read. And I read and I read and I read. You'd think grad school had starved me for the written word!
Here are my thoughts on some of the books I finished over Spring break, as well as some that I read over Thanksgiving break and didn't write about here. (Numbering continues from the end of the list in this post. I set a goal of reading 50 books outside of school work over the course of the academic year. So far, I've only really read during the breaks, but I'm still chugging along, and am keeping track of my progress.)
®13. All My Friends Are Dead · · · · · · · · · · by Avery Monsen and Jory Jory (11/24/2011).
This book doesn’t even need any thoughts from me, and it may not even count as a book. It’s about two pages long, and has pictures. Go look up the title, and you’ll laugh until you cry as you flip through this wee devil of a book. Luckily, all my friends are not dead, and we all read this out loud to each other on Thanksgiving Day. It seemed to fit the holiday spirit. ? out of 10.
®14. Blankets · · · · · · · · · · by Craig Thompson (11/25/2011).
Blankets is a beautiful autobiographical graphic novel that poignantly tells the story of growing up. It includes breathtaking depictions of the author’s childhood and his wide-open imagination, which seems to burst out of the confinements of the small world of rural Wisconsin, hemmed in by the harsh winters and strict small-town life. 8 out of 10.
®15. Habibi · · · · · · · · · · by Craig Thompson (11/26/2011).
After being blown away by the gorgeous drawings in Blankets, I picked up Habibi, Thompson’s newest graphic novel. While Blankets is much more personal (it’s a memoir), Habibi is an epic that spans centuries and explores themes of Islam and Christianity, the natural world, industrialism, love, and storytelling. The drawings are, again, exquisite, and the panel of the story fit together like puzzle pieces. I am not a graphic novel connoisseur, but I thoroughly enjoyed the style of Habibi, and the conventions of a graphic novel. For example, where a traditional novel needs a lot of excess words to create a frame story, Thompson can simply draw an intricate, geometrical frame around his Scheherazade-like stories-within-stories. Both his dialogue and wordless images are moving, and tell a masterpiece. 8 out of 10.
®16. The Book Thief · · · · · · · · · · by Markus Zusak (1/14/2012).
Brilliant, sad, and wallopingly funny. Go read it! (Or maybe you did way back in ’06, when this was a bestseller. If you missed that boat, hop on now). The basic premise is that we (the readers) follow Liesel Meminger through Death’s eyes as she grows up in Nazi Germany. Death is an oddly cool, detached narrator, and can’t help but observe Liesel as she boisterously goes about her life. Death travels the world, collecting souls, and stops back every once in a while to check on Liesel. He also slowly, stealthily, wraps his cold fingers around your (the reader’s) heart and just holds it, waiting, while you traipse through all the warm chapters of Liesel’s young adolescence. And then he squeezes. Eee-gadz, I think my heart leaked out of my eyes and is now in a puddle on the floor—I cried that much. Am I spoiling anything? It is a book narrated by Death, after all, so I don’t think I’ve given any spoilers by admitting that I cried. (I cried at the end of When Harry Met Sally, too, so I don’t think that says much.) There are hilarious bits as well – one of the characters makes a sketchbook by painting over pages of Mein Kampf and then drawing his own pictures (which are included for our enjoyment and are *cute*!) and there’s a sketch of a young Hitler in a Führer Shop, eyeing such items as mini-moustaches and hatred-in-a-bottle. (!) If you don’t ever want read another book about Nazi Germany again, this is one to make an exception for. It isn’t really about Nazis at all, or death—it’s about living. 8 out of 10.
®17. The Shell Collector · · · · · · · · · · by Anthony Doerr (3/18/2012).
These short stories unwound in magical, breathless sequence, and held me in an in-between state so powerful that I didn’t notice or care that my plane was still sitting on the tarmac in Portland, and that I’d probably miss my connecting flight in Tokyo—I was being transported to Kenya, Montana, Chicago, and thousand other emotional places in Doerr’s stories. I typically avoid short stories because of their tendency to attempt too many symbolic punches, but Doerr laid on the symbolism, plot, character development, and lyricism in exactly the right amount. 8 out of 10.
®18. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn · · · · · · · · · · by Betty Smith (3/18/2012).
Well… it’s a classic, which is about all I can say for it. In my quest to finally get through a stack of books someone should have made me read earlier in life, it finally fell time to tackle this one. Anna Quindlen wrote a rather apt foreword for the book, making remarks like, “It is not a showy book from a literary point of view,” which I wholeheartedly agree with. I also happen to think there’s not much showy about it at all. If I hadn’t been in a metal/plastic tube hurtling through the air at 35,000 feet, trapped between the window and a talkative seatmate, I’d have chucked this book out and gone to watch Mad Men. OK, sorry—I feel like I should at least say a few positive things about this book, since I made it through to the end, and it is a classic for a reason. This book was revolutionary for its time. Smith’s depiction of her childhood Brooklyn, full of poverty, misogyny, and corruption, is a powerful reminder that America’s favorite immigrant narrative (rags-to-riches, land of opportunity, yadda yadda) glosses over the fact that many 1st- and 2nd- generation immigrants were faced with brutal, short lives. Institutional racism hasn’t gone anywhere, and if we keep telling ourselves that today’s immigrants should just buck up and work harder, then we are simply perpetuating the cycle of condemning generations of people to being second-class citizens. 5 out of 10.
®19. The Hunger Games · · · · · · · · · · by Suzanne Collins (3/20/2012).
I succumbed! After thoroughly exhausting myself on my first day in Singapore, I came back to my cousin’s apartment and perused her bookshelf (hooray for expat packages! they even shipped her books from the US!). She had a boxed set of The Hunger Games, and since, hey, who doesn’t like a bandwagon? I hopped on. I kicked back, turned on the air-con, cracked open the first book, and WHA-BAM! I was trapped. I don’t even know if the writing was good or bad, but OH MY GOODNESS it was engrossing. Go read this book if you need two hours of your life sucked away because you can’t un-pry your fingers from the book covers. 7 out of 10.
®20. Catching Fire · · · · · · · · · · by Suzanne Collins (3/20/2012).
After finishing the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy, my cousin and I went out for dinner, and since she had the Singapore Flu (a deathly cold brought on by repeatedly going from Siberian air-conditioned buildings to the street that has a heat index of 108oF with 90% humidity), she went to bed early. I devoured the second Hunger Games book as a bedtime snack. 7 out of 10.
®21. Mockingjay · · · · · · · · · · by Suzanne Collins (3/21/2012).
I promise I did a whole lot more in Singapore than just sit back and read young adult fiction, but really, I could only push myself so far each day before I melted in the heat. After spending all day traipsing around the Singapore Botanic Gardens (a fantastic spot), I dragged myself, dripping, back to my cousin’s apartment, and finished the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy. Sorry—I guess I haven’t said anything about the books themselves. They are addictive, action-packed, full of (sometimes sappy) romance in full YA-angsty-style, and have powerful political sub-themes. They are set in a post-apocalyptic North America, where The Capitol holds absolute power over the people of the 12 Districts, who live in isolated labor camps. The 13th District was obliterated because it tried to lead the other Districts in an insurrection against The Capitol. Each year as a reminder that insurrection does not go unpunished, The Capitol holds The Hunger Games, where one boy and one girl are taken from each District and are forced to fight to the death for the “entertainment” of the nation. A friend of mine, who has close ties to Libya, made the comment that the first book gave her nightmares because she could picture Qaddafi setting up this sort of thing with his dissenters. It’s not that far-fetched—think of what’s happening in Syria, with the regime’s indiscriminate bombing of Homs. Or let’s look at Israel and Palestine. Israel is fencing in the Palestinians, cutting off access between villages, and has engaged in acts such as telling over 100 civilians to take shelter in a house and then shelling it and shooting 26 children who crossed the border from Gaza into Israel to collect gravel. The world sits by and watches on TV—essentially, it’s all bread and circuses. Book: 7 out of 10. World peace: so far, 0 out of 10.
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