100 Rooms, 100 Square Feet, 100 People

As only my friend Kevin can do, he showed me a site today which gives me pause to think.

100 x 100

photographs of residents in their flats in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estate

100 rooms,
each 100 square feet in size.

Click on the link and think…how different is my life than this? How is it the same?

We all need a place to call home.

We each make it unique to us.

I’m amazed as I ponder each one, and think that tomorrow millions of Americans will be going out to buy more stuff.

Aliteracy: An Alarming Anecdote

As December approaches, I prepare my heart for Christmas. But, I also prepare a post for the year’s reading that I’ve accomplished. How many pages have I read? How many books, in what genre, by which author? How many challenges have I completed? What were my favorite ten books of 2009?  It’s exciting for me to review the year and define it, in part, by the books that I have read.

I remember Madeleine L’Engle writing once that she was embarrassed by the amount of books she’d read in a year until she found out that the average college student read three. Three?! I wish I could remember her quote exactly, but the point remains that so many people have lost their love for reading. If they ever had one in the first place. Consider this guest post by author, and teacher, Alison Hart:

I am an author. My days are spent reading, researching, writing, and reading some more. It is an addictive pleasure—and, lucky me, my job. But I am also a teacher at a community college. I teach those students who did not pass college placement tests, so they need remedial work in reading and writing before taking college-level classes.  The population is interesting and varied: students with learning disabilities, GEDs, and nonacademic backgrounds as well as English language learners, older workers who want/need new careers and teens who slept through high school. 

I have taught at the college for ten years–thirty semesters, approximately ninety classes of students. Each semester I introduce myself as an author. I am not J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer, but I have published over thirty children’s books, and yet in all my years of teaching, I can count on one hand the number of students who have been curious about my life as an author or my books.

I tell this story to illustrate that I live and work in two totally different worlds: the world of teachers, librarians, authors, agents, publishers (all book lovers) and then the rest of the world. Aliteracy—when someone has the ability to read but has total disinterest in reading and books—is not only rampant in my classroom but across America. Consider the facts:    

            1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

            80% of US families did not buy a book last year.

            27% of adults in America did not read a single book in 2007 (USA Today)

These statistics face me in the classroom every day.  

When my historical suspense novel Gabriel’s Horses was nominated for the Texas Bluebonnet Award, it was suggested that I quit teaching and spend my time promoting my books through school visits, conferences, blogging, and ‘getting out there.’ I am glad I listened to my gut because I need teaching. I need to be smacked in the face every day with the issues of literacy and aliteracy.  I know my books hook young readers with their action, suspense and history because I hear from fans. But I do not kid myself. My novels will never replace the importance of what I do in my classroom each semester: trying to convince disinterested students of the importance, the power, of reading and writing.

Some days I see a glimmer of hope.

For more information on aliteracy, read Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. Warning: don’t read it before bed—you won’t be able to sleep.

Alison has sent me two of her books for give-aways. They are wonderful presents for horse lovers in particular. Please share your thoughts on teachers, on reading, or on overcoming a lack of interest in the published word. Is there something special we could do to rein in a desire to read? And, let me know if you’re interested in winning one of the two titles below:

The year is 1864, and thirteen-year-old Gabriel is too young to join his father in the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry of The Union army. Instead, he finds a job as personal groom to Champion, the unruly horse that belongs to a white commander, Captain Waite. But when the cavalry receives orders to join white regiments in an attack on the Virginia saltworks, Gabriel is given a horse and a uniform and he eagerly accompanies the troops.

A soldier’s life, however, is a lot harder than he imagined. Bad weather, rough riding, dwindling supplies, and blatant racism wear on his spirit. When his father and Captain Waite are not among the weary and wounded who return from a fierce fight, Gabriel mounts Champion and rides to the battlefield in search of them.

In this final book of the highly engrossing Racing to Freedom trilogy, author Alison Hart continues to explore the complex  relationships between black and white, slave and master, and North and South during the turbulent Civil War era. (for ages 8-12)

~Vermont, 1850~

Bell’s Star is a brown Morgan colt with a white star and two white stockings. He was bred for hard work, yet he longs to run free with his human friend Katie on his back. But when Star helps rescue a runaway slave girl, his ideas about freedom may change forever. Here is Star’s story…in his own words.

Alison’s bio:

Alison Hart is a Virginia author of over thirty books for young readers. Upcoming books include the re-release of Shadow Horse an Edgar-nominated mystery from Random House along with a new title Whirlwind, its much anticipated sequel (May 2010.) Emma’s River (Peachtree), a historical fiction chapter book about a plucky girl and her pony and their adventures on the Missouri River, is coming out in April 2010. Her latest early chapter book Bell’s Star (Random House) is the second in the Horse Diaries series. Gabriel’s Horses (Peachtree), middle grade historical suspense, has been nominated for nine state awards. Find out more about Ms. Hart and her exciting books at www.alisonhartbooks.com

Sunday Salon: A Bit of Paris, a Bit of Italy

Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
Author: John Baxter
Published: September, 2008
Number of pages: 270
Rating: 5 out of 5

From the moment she got off the plane, we both sensed a fundamental change in our relationship. Like a bottle of wine that only comes into its best after it’s had time to breathe, our love was ready to drink.

For the next ten days, we barely spent a minute apart. And in the quiet times, almost without discussing it, we became aware that this part of our lives was coming to a close. We would return to Paris, set up a home, marry, have children.

Within three weeks, to the astonishment of my friends, I’d emptied my apartment, disposed of my possessions, and booked a flight to Paris, a city where I’d never lived, in a country where I knew nobody, and whose language I couldn’t speak. I was fifty, Marie-Dominique ten years younger, and nobody believed it would last a fortnight, if indeed it survived as far as the airport. (p. 111)

I found this book while scouring the shelves at Barnes and Noble for the perfect present to give in the Book Blogger’s Holiday Swap. It is a marvelous book which either introduces you to the pleasures of France, or reminds you of how much you’ve missed them.

John Baxter, an Australian by birth, writes of his marriage to Marie-Dominique and their subsequent move to Paris. This book chronicles the Christmas dinner he plans and prepares for Marie-Do’s family, along with insights into the French lifestyle and “ideologie”. I loved it.

How does an Australian cook for the very particular French? Can you imagine two cuisines more diverse?

In hell, it’s been said, the drivers are Italian and the police French, while the lovers, and worse the cooks are English. The Australia of my childhood still thought of itself as an outpost of the British Empire, and ate accordingly. Scandalously for a country abounding in succulent fish and seafood, fresh greens and salads, in mangos, papayas,, and pineapples, Australian cuisine comprised hot dogs and meat pies, fried fish and chips, overcooked roasts, soggy vegetables, and canned fruit with canned cream.” (p. 7)

Not so the French. The chapters in this book discuss the careful selection of just the right wine, the perfect cheese, the proper meat for the main course, the freshest oysters for the beginning, and of course, the bread:

It’s customary to praise French bread. Even more than cheese and wine, bread represents something central to the French personality. One of the greatest compliments is to say of someone, “He is like good bread.” To deny the people bread or undermine its worth is to strike at the very heart of the nation. (. 162)

Of course, Christmas is not composed only of the food which one consumes. Christmas is filled with the location of where we spend it, and with whom. I’m unable to celebrate Christmas in some of my favorite places: the childhood home in which I grew up has been sold, the apartment in Germany where I prepared my first turkey was leased to someone else twenty years ago. Home is what we make of where we are now, and one is all the more fortunate if it is familiar:

Proust was right. Any house or garden or town existed only as the sum of the feelings experienced there. It was remembering history and maintaining tradition that kept the material world alive. (p. 219)

The meal comes together beautifully at the conclusion of the book: the roast pig with its cracklings and Cajun spices, which horrified one of the cousins until she learned that Cajun people have their roots in French ancestors, were consumed with the perfect wine and the accompaniment of roasted potatoes, carrot pudding, stuffing, apple compote, and fruits brulee. It is enough to make me anticipate the upcoming holiday feasts with greater longing than I already feel.

Baxter reminds us of feasts mentioned throughout the course of literature and history: Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast is one. But, there is the other, more sacred in my mind:

A ritual? That most of all. There was enough religion in me to see all meals as sacramental, and this one especially. Religion was full of food: bread and wine, fish and fowl, flesh and blood. When Christ felt his time on earth was coming to an end, he summoned his disciples not to a sermon but to a supper. (p. 258)

This book offers a fresh look at food, at love, at Christmas and family, but most of all at Paris. C’est merveilleux.

Or couse, I couldn’t write a post about another country without including “my” Italy. If there’s one new Christmas album you buy this year, buy this. I can’t even describe how fantastic it is. In every way.

Thanksgiving

The First Thanksgiving by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The origami turkeys are made, and gaze down upon us in my classroom from where they’ve perched. (On a paper chain, tied by their feathers, poor things.)

The meal is arranged at my mother’s who wants to host it before we get to the place where she can’t. It will be without my brother and his family this time, because he won’t commit until the last minute whereupon he arrives pissed off. About something, who knows what?

My husband and I will greet before the Thanksgiving service at our church Thursday morning, while all the turkeys are roasting in ovens across Illinois and the whole United States.

So, everything’s in place. There’s a lot to do, certainly, for the feast, but it’s all planned. And I’m wondering what I can say about Thanksgiving that’s fresh and new. One of the quotes I read said, “It’s “We stole your land and killed all your people day~Let’s celebrate!” but that seems to fall far short of any sentiment I want to hang on to. Even though it is rather apt.

Neither do I want to fall into the obligatory sentiments of: I’m thankful for my home, my family, my job” stated off of rote memorization from when we began in Kindergarten.

I think the sentiment I want to express the most is that thankfulness should be expressed on every day, not just the fourth Thursday of every November. Some days are harder than others to be thankful for: the day that my student, Jacob, lost his mother to cancer is not a thankful one for him. The day my son lost is own father is not a thankful one for him. But, overall, I think we have to look for joy and thankfulness in every small (or big) thing, and add them up until they are overflowing like a feast in our hearts.

In blog world? There are lots of things that frustrate me: I would like to visit, and comment, much more than I do. I would like to take pressure off myself and just post when I had a brilliant insight. Which wouldn’t be all that often.

But, I love the connection I’ve established with you. I love being requested to review marvelous books I’d never have found on my own. I love hosting the Japanese Literature Challenge and there again, learning so much more than I ever knew from every one’s reviews. I love the anticipation for Christmas which is already building with the establishment of the Advent Blog Tour, The Book Bloggers Holiday Swap, the Persephone Secret Santa. I love receiving an unexpected card in the mail like a comment in real life. I love the way that the book blogging world has expanded and enriched my world.

So, I give thanks this week for you, my friends, among all the other great blessings in my life.

Christmas Anticipation: A Third Grader’s Perspective

I was reading my children’s Writing Journals earlier this week, and I came upon a series of entries from Aditi. She is one of the most charming girls you could ever hope to meet. After the pages on how she wanted to be a squid for Halloween, were these pages of her thoughts about Christmas.

I wish I could have taken photographs of her drawings, because they are priceless as well, but I dropped my camera and broke it. (“Good,” said my husband, “now I know what to get you for Christmas.”) So, here are the entries sans photographs:

October 5, 2009

Christmas is coming soon! So get this! I’m going to write my wish list on…

toilet paper!

Because my list is so scaring long! But since toilet paper is longer, I’ll only write one word on each piece of paper. Mostly my list has WebKinz, Beanie Babies/Ty, and Gogo’s Crazy Bones. That’s all, can’t wait for

Christmas!

October 7, 2009

Just my X-Mas list. Thought I could write some of it down.

1. Beanie Babies

2. Webkinz

3. Gogo’s Crazy Bones

4. Other stuff

Okay, fine. I didn’t WRITE it down. But who cares? My list is secret. Bye!

November 5, 2009

On December 25, 2008 I wished to have everything on my wish list that Christmas Eve.

And what did I get? ONLY TWO OF THE THINGS ON MY LIST! and a note from Santa (aka, my parents) saying:

Dear Aditi,

I couldn’t get you everything on your list because

I was stuck in a blizzard.

Merry Christmas!

Santa

But this year, I hope I get everything on my list!

November 8, 2009

OMG! I can’t believe it! Christmas is in 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 DAYS! Because it’s

NOVEMBER! So I can’t wait! Wanna see an example of how long my list is?

(drawing of a stack of paper with list which is longer than the Sears Tower…..Eiffel Tower……cat……..me)

Our classroom is almost too small to hold this much excitement from twenty-nine third graders. Worse yet, this joy is almost contagious. I find myself ecstatic that I won a Mosaic Bible newly released from Tyndale thanks to Bookfool, and the presents are coming in the mailbox which I’ve purchased for my Persephone Secret Santa and Book Blogger’s Holiday Swap (see the sidebar). There are going to be really fun posts come up all over the blog-o-sphere the next few weeks…things that just make Aditi’s joy pale in comparison.

Sunday Salon: One Book Abandoned for Another

I have abandoned this:

for this:

While I didn’t mind Dan Brown’s games in The Da Vinci Code, I find myself very annoyed with them in The Lost Symbol. It’s tiresome the way he continues to scorn Christianity, in my opinion, by making it seem a pagan ritual; quotes like these go a long way with me:

Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.”

The class looked horrified.

Langdon shrugged. “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”

The classroom remained silent.

Langdon winked. “Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.” (p. 32)

All the winking, all the innuendo, all the cultish rituals regarding what we take for granted are a bit much the second time around.  I’ll probably finish it, sometime, but I’m not in any hurry to do so this week.

However, Jhumpa Lahiri does what she does, and that is write beautifully, the third time around with grace. Unaccustomed Earth is a breathtaking work which examines our lives, our families, our thoughts in such a way that surely it must be universal. I have come to love the Indian culture, particularly through the children I teach, but I don’t feel any division between that culture and my own when I read her work. I just feel as though we are one, with similar heartaches and similar hopes.

I’m loving Unaccustomed Earth.

A Much Needed Day Off, With A Pay Off

It was an indulgent day. A well deserved day off, not only for the Veterans, but for the tired-ass teachers. Like me. Who were in conferences yesterday from 8:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. That’s right: twelve hours of fact-to-face interaction with parents. I love parents. I love their children. But, I do not like talking all day and all night. However, lest I further this tangent into the woes of my job, let me get back to the indulgence part.

My husband and I went to Oak Brook to return a J. Jill sweater I’d bought for nine hundred dollars in August only to find it unravel the second day I wore it. Normally, J. Jill sweaters don’t do that, so I sadly brought it back. And while my husband was waiting for me to carry out the return he found a corduroy jacket which I love, and which he coerced me to buy (by saying, “Honey, do you want this?”), and which cost only 30 bucks more than the aforesaid sweater. Sold!

Then, we went off to Brighton because who doesn’t need a brand new red leather lipstick case with a mirror inside the lid? Especially after one’s parents’ dog chewed up her old one last Christmas Eve? Sold, again!

Of course, no trip to Oak Brook is complete without a stop at P.F. Chang’s, my very favorite Chinese restaurant in all the world. We stuffed ourselves with lettuce wraps, and double-pan fried noodles, and tea. Tea! Now, I have found that a smile is all it takes to open untold doors in this world, and so I smile as much as I can whenever I can, and the waitress took an immediate liking to me, bless her heart. So, when I asked her what kind of tea it was, she said, “Revolution Tea, like the war. (Isn’t that Revolutionary? But, never mind.) You can Google it.” Which I did. After she gave me five bags to take home so I have something to drink while I read. Which I’ll do in a few minutes.

However, now I am passing the information on to you. Free of charge, of course. You know you shouldn’t be drinking sodas, because of all the sugar, and artificial flavoring, and coloring, and calories, and I’d been denying all those things drinking merrily away until I found my jeans no longer zip. So, now I’m drinking tea. Lots of it. And my favorite is the Dragon Eye Oolong which I just ordered from amazon.com. But, here’s another link to Revolution Tea in case you want to research the topic further yourself.

Which, I’m sure you do.

Green Books Campaign: The Players

Title: The Players
Author: Margaret Sweatman
Published: September, 2009, on 100% post consumer-fibre
Number of pages: 320
Rating: 4 out of 5

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a  a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

I turned the creamy pages of this historical saga slowly. I dwelt within them as surely as the characters did, who struggled to survive the winter snows which blew through Hudson Bay in the early 17th century.  It reads like a poem. The images resemble an impressionist painting, impeccably recreated according to the artist’s eye.

Lily, who’s lost her mother in her late adolescence, befriends Bartholomew in the tavern where she’s found retreat. He teaches her the skills of an actress, which she perfects to such a degree that she becomes the favorite mistress of King Charles. When two French explorers arrive in his court to request ships from the King, and succeed in their persuasion, Lily smuggles herself on board; she is one woman among a crew of men. They set sail for China, but end in the Hudson Bay, where they make the acquaintance of Cree Indians with whom they barter for beaver pelts, food and the grace to help deliver Lily’s baby. I felt as if I was on the voyage enduring their struggle for survival, and relationship, with them.

We see Lilly content to be King Charles’ lover:

“Lilly had never before experienced such generous admiration-taking into account that she hadn’t quite reached her seventeenth birthday. In the sweet surfeit of the hours, she drifted down into nearly trusting desire, to the place Charles invented or knowingly sought out, where she, with the last shreds of separate mindfulness, thought, I will be what you like, let you do what you like: I’ll even like what you do.” (p. 119)

compared to Lilly’s desire for another:

“In the gallows garden below, there was a huge cry over her absence-Charles sent attendants back to fetch her and to bring the new overseas Governor of the Voyage to Hudson Bay. Lilly Cole waited for them. It had been a dream, these past months. This prison cell, the beatific bulk of Magnus Brown, here was the hinge to the future. The voices below grew louder. They were coming, all the more insistent because they’d forgotten about her. She watched Brown. He obviously heard but didn’t respond. These were the last few minutes of what now seemed to Lilly to have been a pretty play, borrowed for a time, then stripped away.” (p. 156)

With whom does Lilly find herself at the end of the novel? It is, perhaps, the least important question in her search for survival.

Find other works, reviewed by other bloggers, in this iniative to buy books which have been made ‘green’ by using recycled paper. You’d never guess a tree didn’t die for this.

Back to Basics

When I first began blogging, I wasn’t even aware that there was such a world as book bloggers. It wasn’t until I met Booklogged, and then Lesley, and then Bookfool, Nan, Tanabata, Carl, Chris and Nymeth that I knew it existed.

I was filled with awe that there could be so many people like me, who loved reading, who loved talking about the books they’d read, who actually read books which were taken from places other than the grocery shelves’ wire racks of top ten bestsellers. I’d been living in a lonely world, let me tell you, with not many people who shared my passion.

But, then something ugly came into the picture: Page Rank. Technorati Authority. Rankings. Feeds. Stumble, Digg, and Twitter. People posting give-aways with more chances to win if you became a follower, or if you posted about their giveaway on your blog. Somehow, the whole purpose of being a book blogger, to share the love of literature, was tainted with the issues of popularity and power.

I don’t like it.

I don’t want to become a book pimp…posting on books because I’m paid to, advertising a bunch of widgets for other blog ’services’, consumed with worry about my status instead of my love.

Which is for books. Which is also for one another. Which is the whole reason I want to blog in the first place.

You can find additional, and much more eloquently written, thoughts on Linda’s blog here and Mark David’s blog here.

One of My Favorites From “Story People”

“When I first met him, I knew in a moment I would have to spend the next few days re-arranging my mind so there’d be room for him to stay.”

~Story People