It's Monday! What are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Share what you (are, have been, are about to, hope to be) reading or reviewing this week. Sign Mr Linky at Book Journey and visit other Monday reading roundups.

The sections of this template:

Intro (here)
My Week in Review (list of books finished and links to bookish posts in the previous week)
Reading Now (my current reading list broken up into NF and Fiction)
Upcoming (scheduled reviews and blog tours and list of finished books awaiting reviews)
Recently (links to bookish posts in the last few weeks)
New Arrivals: (lists of recently acquired ARC broken up into snail mail, email and Net Gallery)
ARC in waiting (a list that is getting shamefully long)

My Week in Review:

Various events conspired to shift my focus from reading to writing in the last month,  from emails to copywriting course work, to poems, to LOLs, to NaNoWriMo prep.

Now that is about to shift back to reading.  Or at least widen to include it.  I don't want to drop the other balls I'm juggling but I must add reading and reviews back into the mix as I'm committed to 13 blog tours between this Friday and Thanksgiving.  One of them is for beta testing a new writer's community web site.

So stay tuned.  I should be posting IMWAYR? every week through the end of November at least.

The next blog tour book review is this Friday for Her Dear and Loving Husbund by Meredith Allard

Banned Books Week: 

tell them thay can't and they gonna

moar littery kittehs

Other Bookish posts this past week include several nods to Banned Book Week:

Danger!  Books Can Change You.
Banned Books Week: Ask Dr. Suess
Sunday Serenity #356  Banned Book Week






Thursday September 26th I posted the tour review for Arctic Fire by Paul Byers.

Move over Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, and Arthur C. Clarke.  Make room for the new kid on the block.  In Arctic Fire, Paul Byers has created a futuristic, technology thriller that can stand proudly in the company of Cussler, Clancy. and Clarke.






Thursday September 19th I posted the blog tour review for Mr. Monk Helps Himself by Hy Conrad. This is a delightful fix for all of us Monk addicts

Finished reading recently:

Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by by Bailey White I thought this was a novel and getting set to put it in the fiction list below when I thought to check out its page on Goodreads and discovered it is a memoir.  It's short little vignette chapters and easy to read font made it ideal for taking with me to doctor appointments.  Which is how I managed to finally finish it.
Mr. Monk Helps Himself by Hy Conrad.

At Home in Holly Springs by Jan Karon  --  was reading aloud to Mom.  Features Father Tim from the Mitford series as he returns to the town he grew up in.  First of two.  We started nearly a month ago and I forgot to put it on this list.  We will probably finish Tuesday evening.
 Arctic Fire by Paul Byers

Began reading recently:

The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin  My sister bought this book for herself and we are both reading it.  We both have a passion for how brains work.
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon -- one of the new library books and also a NetGalley ARC that timed out on me months ago.
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner about the influence of the Arabian Nights stories on western literature, art and culture.  One of the new library books.
A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon  --  a novel and a NetGalley ARC
Complexity and the Arrow of Time by (multiple authors) --  a collaboration of scientists, philosophers and theologians exploring the concepts of Complexity Theory.  a NetGalley ARC
My AWAI Copywriting course Installment 1 (of 13)

Reading Now:

__Non-Fiction:

Most of these I plug away in these at a snail's pace--a couple pages or chapters per week or even every other week as that is my preferred way to read non-fic.  It sticks with me longer. I'm closing in on the finish line for several but as I get close on one I tend to add two or three more. There are some not listed here because I read in them so infrequently.

Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Go by Les Edgerton  ROW80 reading list
What to Do When There's Too Much to Do by Laura Stack (Part of my attempt to organize my life around my priorities. So part of my ROW80 reading list)
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler   ROW80 reading list
And So It Goes by Charles J. Sheilds a bio of Kurt Vonnegut.  (I've posted about this biography of Kurt Vonnegut several time in a kind of reading journal. It is past time for another.  Part of the fun I'm having reading this is in stopping to read the stories he wrote as the narrative reaches the point where he writes them. Since this is an author bio this will also be on my ROW80 reading list )

This Mobius Strip of Ifs by Mathias Freese (I've posted a reading journal post for this collection of personal essays also.  It is past time for another.)

What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Muller   ROW80 reading list  Net Galley ARC a NF that purports to answer many puzzles in the Austen novels.
Trust the Process: An Artist's Guide to Letting Go by Shaun McNiff So part of my ROW80 reading list.
Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols   ROW80 reading list  Since I'm reading this for an understanding of character type and the language of symbol understood by our unconscious this will be on my
13 Ways of Looking at a Novel by Jane Smiley   ROW80 reading list  This was one of the 24 items I checked out of the Longview library on my sister's card last Thursday.
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.   ROW80 reading list  Who knew.  Dick was a mystic.  I've only read one of his novels and a few short stories but now I've got to try to find and read everything!
Before You Say I Do Again by Benjamin Berkley  for Blog Tour Review Feb 8.  The review is up but I'm not finished.
The Fiction Writer's Handbook by Shelly Lowenkopf  ROW80 reading list  posted review for blog tour in March but still not finished
Choice Theory: A Psychology of Personal Freedom by William Glasser M.D. a library book
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson  I own this book.
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor    ROW80 reading list  This is a reread for me and has had significant impact on the development of my storyworld in the early months of its inception.  This Friday post was about my current encounter with it after checking it out of the Longview library again for the first time in over a decade.
The Right to Write by Julia Cameron   ROW80 reading list
It's Not About You by Max Lucado.  I found this on my own shelves while packing up my personal library.  It was one of the last gifts I received from my Dad in 2005 the year he died of cancer.  It has a lovely inscription in his handwriting on the inside front page.  And I was reminded how I'd promised him to read it.  My bookmark was less than half way through and I could not remember if I'd finished it and just left the bookmark in or not but I doubt it.  So I've pulled it out to put on front burner.
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch  I pulled this off my sister's bookshelf awhile back.  It is over a thousand pages in smallish font.  So it will be on this list for a long time.  I find it exhilarating that my mind seems ready to tackle text that is so dense in info and complex ideas again.  There is only one other book on this list that fits that criteria, The Act of Creation, and I've not pulled it out very often in these last months but am now finding myself yearning toward it again.   Good signs.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Erotic Romance by Alison Kent.  Also found on my shelves.  I won this in a drawing during the Sweating for Sven writing challenge in 2007.  It made me blush and I kept it hidden in the recesses of my bookshelves but I think I've gotten over that.  Tho I admit it is hard to pull it out and read in it now that I'm back at Mom's.  But since Valentine's Week all my new story ideas have been for romances.  Not my usual thing.  But hey, you gotta take what the muse sends or she'll stop sending.  Setting aside the erotica aspects, this book is full of good story structure advice as well as romance genre specific advice.  I'm exploring the idea of writing a love story.  Hmmm.  Not sure who that is that just said that.
The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy
by Emily Bazelon -- one of the new library books and also a NetGalley ARC that timed out on me a couple months ago.
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
by Marina Warner
Complexity and the Arrow of Time by (multiple authors) --  a collaboration of scientists, philosophers and theologians exploring the concepts of Complexity Theory.  a NetGalley ARC
My AWAI Copywriting course Installment 1 (of 13)

__Fiction:

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness  (audio from library)  Was listening to this while working on this Xmas crochet project and have not gotten back to it since Christmas.  I'm going to have to restart it yet again.
The Civilized World by Susi Wyss (another a Tree book ARC that got lost in the mix before I'd finished it.  Have not posted a review for this one either and can't remember when I received it but it had to be at least a year ago before I started packing for our move and likely before 2011 NaNo when I typically stop reading fiction while I'm so intensely writing it.  This is a collection of interlocking short stories set in South Africa and I remember I was quite enjoying it.  I've had to start it over.)
A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon  --  a NetGalley ARC
In the Company of Others by Jan Karon  --  am reading aloud to Mom.  Features Father Tim from the Mitford series as he and his wife Cynthia travel to Ireland to spend two weeks in the area where his father and grandfather immigrated from.

Upcoming:


___Blog Tours:

I will be participating in 13 blog tours in the next 8 weeks.  The first this Thursday:


Her Dear and Loving Husbund by Meredith Allard  --  October 4
Tinseltown Riff by Shelly Frome -- October 10th
Review as Beta Tester for Indicated, a new writer's community web site about to launch. Mid October
The Return by Melissa Douthit -- October 21
The Thunderbird Conspiracy by R. K. Price  --  October 30
Ghosts of Lost Eagle  -- November 4th
Sinnerman by Jonathan M. Cook -- November 7
The Three Sisters by Bryan Taylore  --  November 12
Blood Drama by Christopher Meeks  --  November 15
Head Games by Erika Rummel  --  November 19
With Friends Like These by L. Hunter Cassells  --  November 25

Woman On Top by Deborah Schwartz  --  November 25

___Books I've Finished Awaiting Reviews:

Whenever I'm not pinned to a date like with the blog tours I do very poorly at getting reviews written in a timely way after finishing books and the longer I wait the harder it gets.  This is an issue I'm working on and hope to get a system in place to smooth the track from beginning book to posting review.

At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window by Jan Karon  (the ebook I was reading aloud to my Mom while staying there in March and April. These short little lighthearted chapters are almost like stand-alone short stories with beloved characters and make great bedtime reading for adults wanting pleasant dreams)

The Land of Decoration by Grace McClean
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Leher.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg   Part of my attempt to organize my life around my priorities. So part of my ROW80 reading list.   I discussed this in such detail in my mid-week ROW80 check-in post it was practically a review and I'll probably copy/paste much of what I said there into the review.
Never Give in to Fear by Marti MacGibbon  This was a NetGalley ARC but later I picked it up for Kindle when it was free on Amazon.  I began it in Adobe Digital Editions and when that timed out on me switched to the Kindle for PC.  This was a memoir of an addict's decent into the abyss and rise back out again and was quite engrossing.
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff  a library book
Get Your Loved One Sober by Robert Meyers (Research for a fiction WIP)
Losses by Robert Wexelblatt an ARC
After: The Shock by Scott Nicholson  This is post apocalyptic horror with zombies.    I anticipated enjoying this even tho zombies are not my favorite horror theme because I really enjoyed his The Red Church and I did but probably not to the same degree.  And its continued.
These High, Green Hills by Jan Karon  The third book in the Mitford series.
Pie Town by Lynne Hinton
Out to Caanan by Jan Karon  Book Four of the Mitford series.
Witch by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie
Curse by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie
A New Song by Jan Karon.  The fifth Mitford book.
Legacy by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie
Spellbound by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie

A Common Life: The Wedding Story by Jan Karon
In This Mountain by Jan Karon
Good in Bed by Jennifer Wiener
Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon  reading aloud to Mom
Certain Girls by Jennifer Wiener (sequel to Good in Bed)
Joyland by Stephen King
Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills onetime fiction editor at Esquire.
Rose Fire by Mercedes Lackey
A Light From Heaven by Jan Karon  --  have been reading this to Mom in the evenings.  It's the final book in the series.
Boys Will Be Joys by Dave Meurer.  my sister bought this one for me after finding me standing by the book rack reading it while waiting on her to exit the restroom at the truck stop in Rice Hill OR on our trip home last May.  It's a Father's musing (Erma Bombeck style) on the vicissitudes of parenting.
Write Good or Die! edited by Scott Nicholson   ROW80 reading list (a collection of essays by inde authors.  many of them self-published)
Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living by by Bailey White
At Home in Holly Springs by Jan Karon  --  am reading aloud to Mom.  Features Father Tim from the Mitford series as he returns to the town he grew up in.  First of two.  We started nearly a month ago and I forgot to put it on this list.  We will probably finish Tuesday evening.

Recently:

___Reviews and Bookish Posts:

moar kittehs  see   share  caption
my Merlin & my new Library Loot

Recently my sister cut me loose at the library with her card and in the days following my posts fixated on the new library loot:  that night's post was a picture and a list of the haul, then for the ROW80 check in I created this LOLcat featuring the stack and my Merlin,  then for Sunday Serenity another picture of the books.  This time with the mug of bookmarks as I prepared to select just the right ones for each of the six non-fic.  And try to decide which novel to start first.  Still working on that one.

I participated in the blog tour for Tilda Pinkerton's Magical Hats by Angela Shelton.

I participated in Ms Shelton's tour for The Adventures of Tilda Pinkerton last November and opened my review thus:  "This is a truly lovely story.  If Dr. Seuss had written a novel it would be just like this--whimsical, charming, colorful as an artist's palette, with moral values wrapped in parables like peaches in whipped cream, with epic struggles of good against evil and full of the wonder and wisdom only ever comprehended by the heart of a child.  This story will speak to every child heart aged 8 to 88."  Need I add that I was ecstatic when asked to join this one?

 Anyone who has read many of my reviews knows that I'm not generally a gusher but there is something about these Tilda stories that taps into the deep reservoir of glee that was a natural aspect of my early childhood but has been buried deep by the traumas and worries, the failures and furies of fifty years.  Reading these stories, I feel as though I'm trying on happiness like a hat and hope like a pair of sunglasses.  I can't help wishing I had a Tilda hat as I'm sure it would make the anxiety, depression and blood pressure meds I'm now taking moot.

 I participated in the blog tour for The Story of Sassy Sweetwater by Vera Jane Cook.  This story was as sweet and sassy as its narrator and title character. But not the sweet of syrup, no, more like the pucker-power sweet of a persimmon. The sweetness is in the delicious prose, the pucker in the dark plot and the sassy in its protagonist's stance towards her life.






I captioned a pic at cheezeburger.com with a quote from William Styron for a quickie quote post: How to Acquire More Lives Than a Cat.  That LOLcat and similar ones I'd created brought me to the attention of a group on cheezeburger.com called JeffCatsBookClub which has its own profile created for the purpose of collecting bookish and other story themed LOLs.  It's a story lover's treasure trove.

I posted about JeffCatsBookClub with the image of the 'library card' they issued me on Sunday.  Anyone into the IMWAYR? meme would likely also get a kick out these.  And if you have a cheezeburger profile and like what you see, just make a friend request.

BTW my profile at cheezeburger is Joystory

There were two other quickie quote posts in the last couple of weeks: Just LOLlygagging.  and  Lonliness is Feeling Embraced by the Empty.  I used to feel embarrassed by these, thinkng of them as lazy cheats and not real posts but now that I know they are giving pleasure to those who encounter them I guess I'll own them and even flaunt them a bit.

New Arrivals:

By snail mail:

By email:

from NetGalley



ARC in waiting:

Tree Books:


The Variations by John Donatich
The Inquisitor by Mark Allen Smith   My husband read this and loved it and is after me to read it so he can talk about it.
The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller  Nobel winner!!
Skios by Michael Frayn
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
The Sadness of the Samurai by Victor del Arbo
Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman
Winter Journal by Paul Auster a memoir from an American literary figure that really excites me.
We Sinners by Hanna Pylvaine.   It's another story exploring the impact on family life of a fundamentalist religion.  One of the themes I'm drawn to like Pooh to honey.
Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010 compiled by The Organization Breaking the Silence
A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks
Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an american Metropolis by Mark Binelli
The Autobiography of Us
The Abundance by Amit Majmudar
Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman by Minka Pradelski

Ebooks:

____By email:


Troubled by Scott Nicholson

____From Net Galley:


A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee
What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Muller
The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
Unloched by Candace Lemon-Scott
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon  [the  55 day NetGalley digital edition timed out before I finished but I have just nabbed a library copy]
APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch
With or Without You A Memoir by Domenica Ruta   [the  55 day NetGalley digital edition timed out before I finished but I am watching for a library copy]

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano  [the  55 day NetGalley digital edition timed out before I finished but I am watching for a library copy]

Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself by Lissa Rankin, M.D.
Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence by David Samuel Levinson
Kinslow System Your Path to Proven Success in Health, Love, and Life by Frank J Kinslow
Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Joe Dispenza
Women, Sex, Power, And Pleasure Getting the Life (and Sex) You Want by Evelyn Resh
All Is Well: Heal Your Body with Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition by Louise Hay & Mona Lisa Schulz
The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth by Bruce H. Lipton,

The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth by Bruce H. Lipton,
A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
Directing Your Destiny by Jennifer Grace
Hiding in Sunshine by John Stuart and Caitlin Stuart
I Am: Renewal from Within the Garden by Lucie K Lewis
The Book Publisher's Toolkit by Independent Book Publishers Association
The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino
Why Priests? by Garry Wills
Why we Write by by Meredith Maran (Editor)
A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon
Complexity and the Arrow of Time by (multiple authors) --  a collaboration of scientists, philosophers and theologians exploring the concepts of Complexity Theory.

If anyone reading this states a preference I may let it weigh my decision as to what I begin next from the above list.

Read more...

Sunday Serenity #356 Banned Book Week

Banned Books Week: tell them thay can't and they gonna
moar littery kittehs

I had to make this five times before cheezburger would save it.  It kept getting stuck in the uploading stage and I gave it five or ten minutes each time.  Now I'm an over an hour past my bedtime.  So I'm going to have to forgo more commentary.  But I think the LOL speaks more eloquently than I can now that my eyes are full of sand and my brain full of haze.

Read more...

Banned Books Week: Ask Dr. Suess

more literary captions  see share caption fav

I put hours into yesterday's Banned Books Week post so I think I'll just let this captioned pic do the heavy lifting today.

Read more...

Danger! Books Can Change You.

Danger!
Books can change your operating system.
Are you sure you wish to proceed?
moar littrary kittehs

In honor of Banned Book Week a serious LOLcat, a presentation of an invaluable set of books about banned books accompanied by a rant likening book pricing structure to a form of suppression.


Banned Books Four Volume Set Published by Facts on File
Ken Wachsberger (general editor)

Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds by Nicholas J. Karolides
Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds by Margaret Bald
Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova
Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds by Dawn B. Sova

These are an invaluable resource for anyone needing to research the history of book banning over the centuries.  Each book begins with an overview of its category followed by brief histories of a hundred or more books that have been suppressed somewhere at sometime--many repeatedly.

Every public and school library from middle school to college should have two sets--one for the Reference Shelves and one for checkout.  Every news organization needs at least one set for those times when attempts are being made to exclude books from curriculum or libraries. So those covering the story can have their awareness grounded in the historical context of the current hullabaloo and the facts at hand.

But unfortunately that is unlikely to happen as at $60 per book that's $240 per set.  Even the one volume version is priced at $240.  They are all hardback and use library quality binding and paper so that is almost understandable but it prices them out of range for many public school and public library districts.

There are no paperback or ebook editions that one could expect to be priced affordably for the average home reference library at any of the online booksellers and tho Infobase Publishing parent of the Facts on File imprint does show ebooks in their catalog the price is hidden until you sign in and based on their statement that they cater to educational institutions and libraries I doubt I'm even eligible to have an account with them even if I could imagine being able to pay their prices.  

In my humble opinion this amounts to a form of suppression essentially excluding those below the upper middle class and the school and library districts in their neighborhoods since they are funded by local property taxes.

I know.  That rant doesn't jive with my first statement.  Well, I made that before I found the publisher's page with the price quotes.  I stand by it.  For the essence of their value is in the impact they can have on the local and national consciousness on the issue of book banning and thus on the debates surrounding every local attempt to take a book off a public shelf or out of a curriculum.  But if over 60% of the people never encounter them that value is diminished, even nullified.

Yes.  I understand that a lot of care went into creating these books--gathering the facts and compiling them and writing the overviews for each category and the histories for each book and designing the books.  But dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, and quotation books have all managed to provide affordable editions.  It mystifies me why so many publishers can't see that more sales at lower prices would likely increase profit.

This post spun off its original axis after the first paragraph.  I fully intended this to be a several paragraph rave about these information packed reference books. I still feel as enthused as ever by the books themselves but the news about the price structure shook me up.  I believe I was harboring a bit of hope for having a set for my own reference library and that has been dashed by what I learned today.  Which soured my mood and morphed the rave into a rant.

I came close to deleting everything after the first paragraph and returning to the original intent.  But when rereading it and encountering the line comparing this price-jacking to suppression itself I realized the relevance of the rant to the Banned Book Week theme and decided to make it part of the discussion.

Read more...

Banned Book Week Wrapup

Banned Book Week
Censorship Causes Blindness

For BBW this past week I will have posted ten times on the theme counting this one.  The other nine are listed and liked below.

There were seven book reviews, the last two brand new and the first five excerpts of previously posted reviews with commentary and quotes related to BBW.

I mused and occasionally ranted and rooted my aversion to censorship and the misguided overprotection of young adults in my personal experience as one who was kept so naive I was unable to function with competency once I became a legal adult.  And that in spite of my being able to make the President's List at college when I went back to school at age 27 the first semester and the Dean's List the second.

I'm not revealing that last in order to brag about my brightness as I discovered it to be fairly meaningless in the long run since what I had still not learned to do by age 27 was think for myself and was still so naive I continued to be continually traumatized by things I encountered in the real world which I had been so sheltered from all the way to age 21 when I got married and left home.

I was 35 before it dawned on me why this was and began my quest to learn to think for myself.  That was 20 years ago already and I'm still struggling.

When I wasn't preparing posts this week, I was reading.  In the first post and again in Monday's post I listed the titles of banned or challenged books that I currently had in my possession either owned or borrowed from friend, family or library or had access to online.  Of those books I listed I read in:

Aristophanes Lysistrata --the first several pages
East of Eden -- the first chapter
Twilight series -- the whole first books and some 40 odd pages into the second.
Milton's Areopagitica -- about 3 pages
Boccaccio's Decameron -- several pages
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -- several pages
Whitman's Leaves of Grass -- several shorter poems and some browsing
I also reread many pages in both Speak and Nickel and Dimed while preparing the reviews.

I've kept my bookmarks in the classics and intend to keep plugging away a few pages at a time.  Except for East of Eden which is the only one I don't own and has a library due date and besides is modern enough in language I can read it at the same speed as Twilight without loosing comprehension.  Some of those others--Milton, Boccaccio, Chaucer--give me the sensation I'm reading algebra.  I had less trouble reading Russian by my second year of study.

My Banned Book Week Posts

Banned Books Week Begins

Book Banned Week: Review Repost of Lovely Bones
Sunday Serenity #247 The Soul of Books

Banned Book Week: Review Repost of Leaves of Grass

Banned Books Week: Review Repost of The Kite Runner

It's Monday! What are You Reading? #36 [Banned Book Week]

Banned Book Week Review Repost of The Bluest Eye

Banned Book Week: Review Repost of Impulse

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed [Banned Book Week]

Friday Forays in Fiction: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson: A Review for Banned Books Week

Every one of my posts during BBW had several quotes opposing censorship following are some of what is left of the dozens I collected as the week began:

• Every burned book enlightens the world.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" ~Joseph Henry Jackson
• To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.  ~John Aikin
• The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged.  The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship.  And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted.  ~Jonathon Green, "Did You Say 'Offensive?'," as posted on wordwizard.com
• We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.  ~Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764
• Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.  ~Potter Stewart
• The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. — Carl Sagan
• What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.  ~Sigmund Freud, 1933
• Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935
• A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.  ~Albert Camus
• To reject the word is to reject the human search.  ~Max Lerner, 1953, on book purging
• I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.  ~Nancie J. Carmody
• It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle. —Sutton Elbert Griggs

Here are a few bookish events going on for BBW:

Hosted by Bookjourney

Get on the BANNED WAGON!

Giveaways, a scavenger hunt and links to participating blog's BBW reviews are some of what's happening at Sheila's BookJourney this week.  Along with her own reviews of banned or challenged books and of course her daily Morning Meanerings post.

Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop

Banned Books Week Hop

Giveaways galore and lots of participating blog's to visit and comment on.

Banned Book Week Virtual Read Out

Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out

The annual BBW readout traditionally conducted in public at bookstores and libraries where individuals read aloud form a banned book has now gone digital. Now you can video record yourself reading a banned book and upload to a YouTube channel

Read more...

Friday Forays in Fiction: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson: A Review for Banned Books Week

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Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson

“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.” -- William Blake 

What more ironic book to be censored than one whose central theme is the self-censoring of one's own voice and the delirious consequences engendered.

Melinda Sordino calls the cops from a student end-of-summer party just weeks before she enters high school and thus becomes a pariah, hated by all from those who had been her best friends to those she doesn't even know.  Only a lonely new student unaware of her outcast status is the only one to befriend her.

Melinda, meanwhile has repressed her memories of the incident that motivated her to phone the police that day.  It had something to do with an encounter with a senior boy though and every encounter with this same boy in the halls, in class, at pep rallies or in the lunch room sends her mind into a tizzy. She can't even speak his name in her mind:

I see IT in the hallway. IT goes to Merryweather.  IT is walking with Aubrey Cheerleader.  IT is my nightmare and I can't wake up.  IT sees me. IT smiles and winks.  Good thing my lips are stitched together or I'd throw up.

She finds it more and more difficult to speak aloud for any reason to anyone even to teachers and parents when asked a direct question.  Her grades drop.  She sleeps a lot.  She skips class sometimes holing up in an abandoned janitor's closet she had stumbled into.

One class only is the exception to her near failing marks and that is art and the art teacher is the only one able to even almost connect with her.  His assignment for the year involves taking a theme drawn at random from a bowl he passed out the first day and using it in as many different art pieces utilizing as many different art techniques as possible.  Melinda's theme was 'tree' and she spends hours upon hours drawing, painting, sculpting, etching trees. This exercise has given her a way to express herself that makes an end run around the difficulties she has speaking aloud and at times even thinking certain things.  This may have a certain amount to do with how easily nonverbal communication like drawing, sculpting etc can access more directly the unconscious than can verbal but the fact that the incident at the party that late summer night took place in the trees at the edge of the property plays no small role.

The novel  is narrated in first person by Melinda in short paragraph whose style mimics personal journal entries which makes it intense and immediate.

One of the incredible ironies surrounding the history of this book's challenges is that one of the school districts where it was challenged by one set of parents has a lawsuit filed against them by another parent for having mishandled a case of rape and sexual harassment against their special needs daughter that had gone on for more than a year.  You can find the links to this story in my Friday Forays post in August in which I discuss it in the context of Laurie Halse Anderson's suggestion that we fiction writers should befriend and thus harness our anger.

In that post I also discuss why censoring stories like Speak is so counterproductive and why censorship is so anathema to me:

There are many more subtle ways of taking the voice from those whose words disturb the societal norm than a hand over the mouth or the cutting out of the tongue or burning of books. One is the deliberate and systematic sabotage of an education that gives one the vocabulary, the concepts, the historical frame of reference to be able to think about and thus talk about injustice and other wrong perpetrated by the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, the insider against the outsider, the majority against the minorities.
Which is exactly why books like Speak get banned. And sex education, evolution, ethnic studies among other subjects are removed from curriculum and students are tested only on memorizable facts not the ability to think about them and talk radio hosts talk about open season on liberals defined as anyone who disagrees with them out loud and governments act in secret to keep us uninformed and corporations spend billions on a politician's campaign prevent regular people from competing for their loyalty and votes are suppressed and unions are broken and activists are assassinated and 'free speech zones' are created for protesters in locations they are least likely to be noticed by their intended audience and terrorists bomb civilians and the people are told a war is about bringing civil rights to oppressed people when its really about profit and in the name of that war civil rights are taken from the very people sending their sons and daughters to fight and corporations sue those who dare to question the quality of their product and oil companies discourage pictures of distressed dolphins and duck in the midst of an oil spill and children are punished for crying or speaking uncomfortable truths to adults and mothers shame daughters for being unladylike when they raise their voice and preachers excoriate parishioners for asking uncomfortable questions and religions and other social constructs prize obedience over all other virtues including integrity.

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 All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values… and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States — and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"  Kurt Vonnegut

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”—Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)

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Here are a few bookish events going on for BBW:

Hosted by Bookjourney

Get on the BANNED WAGON!

Giveaways, a scavenger hunt and links to participating blog's BBW reviews are some of what's happening at Sheila's BookJourney this week.  Along with her own reviews of banned or challenged books and of course her daily Morning Meanerings post.

Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop

Banned Books Week Hop

Giveaways galore and lots of participating blog's to visit and comment on.

Banned Book Week Virtual Read Out

Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out

The annual BBW readout traditionally conducted in public at bookstores and libraries where individuals read aloud form a banned book has now gone digital. Now you can video record yourself reading a banned book and upload to a YouTube channel

Read more...

Book Review: Nickel and Dimed [Banned Book Week]

Nickel and Dimed:
On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.  ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty,

It was towards the end of the 1990s after the Welfare debates of that decade had resulted in the 'end of Welfare as we know it' and even the Democrats talked about 'the dignity of a job' being better than being on the dole that Barbara Ehrenreich and her editor at Harper's purposed to discover first hand if it was possible to live on minimum wage.  She did time honored investigative journalism by taking minimum wage jobs in three different cities for one month each and attempting to make ends meet at the end of the month in terms of rent, food, laundry and transportation.

 “In the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one.”

“When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift.”

In Key West she discovered part way through the month that one waitressing job was not going to cover it so took on a second but found that schedule impossible to maintain so dropped the first and added a motel maids job but lasted only one day on that. Walking away without even picking up her checks and tips she called it a failure on both the experimental and moral basis. Experimental because she had not lasted the month. Moral because she had escaped, leaving behind co-workers in dire straights. “I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proportion, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed.” Chapter 1

"My job is to move orders from tables to kitchen and then trays from kitchen to tables. Customers are, in fact, the major obstacle to the smooth transformation of information into food and food into money - they are, in short, the enemy. And the painful thing is that I'm beginning to see it this way myself. There are the traditional asshole types - frat boys who down multiple Buds and then make a fuss because the steaks are so emaciated and the fries so sparse - as well as the variously impaired - due to age, diabetes, or literacy issues - who require patient nutritional counseling. The worst, for some reason, are the Visible Christians - like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday-night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original profession."

In Maine she worked for a housecleaning service and a nursing home, again simultaneously as one job would not have covered it.  Taking the weekend job as dietician's assistant at the nursing home meant she worked 7 days a week. Though it was a struggle she managed to make it to the end of the month with the money saved to cover the next month's rent but she notes that it was possible only because it was not tourist season when rents would have more than doubled.

In Minnesota she worked at Walmart as an associate.  She was unable to find affordable housing and ended up in a pay by the day motel room with no kitchen.  The most astonishing (for her) thing she learned there was that she could not afford to buy the Walmart merchandise--not even the clothing on the discounted or damaged racks.

What she discovered is that it is possible to survive as a single, childless white woman with decent health and stamina.  But not with dignity.  And with little left over in terms of energy and emotion to invest in relationships outside of the workplace.  And she could not begin to imagine how a single mother of one or more children could have managed at all without some kind of external support what with the extra food, housing, laundry and childcare expenses added on.

She also discovered that the job searching process was rigged to be humiliating, subjecting applicants to personality tests, surveys to ascertain their moral character and peeing in a cup for drug tests.  This assumption by implication of unspecified guilt was shaming and degrading. This assumption was carried into the workplace with the attitude of managers being suspicious, accusing and punishing.

Throughout the book she shares the stories of her co-workers situations and struggles as well.  None of them were thriving, few were living independently in houses or apartments either sharing  expenses with family or friends, living in their vehicles, in pay by the week kitchenettes or pay by the day motel rooms.  One of the issues most often keeping them from suitable housing is the inability to garner the necessary first and last month's rent plus deposits.  Housing which government statistics assume should account for no more than 30% of one's income, for minimum wage workers it consumes 50 to 70%.  Food costs are inflated for them when they have no kitchen to cook or refrigerator to store perishables.

As for health care?  Forget it.  Childcare? Ditto.

Barbara Ehenreich advocates in Nickel and Dimed for a living wage and a minimum standard of dignity in the workplace and for acknowledgement by the middle and upper classes that their own standard of living would not be what it is without these so called 'unskilled laborers'  a term she argues with maintaining there is no such thing as 'unskilled labor' as every job entails the need to master skills in eye and muscle coordination, cooperation with others, following instructions, anticipating needs and so on.

“If you hump away at menial jobs 360 plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in? I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out. I can guess that one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills the landscape, co-workers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slights loom large and a reprimand can reverberate into the night…Work is supposed to save you from being an “outcast”,…but what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch diggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste free and democratic society. Or maybe it's low-wage work in general that makes you feel like a pariah.” Chapter 2

When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone. (p. 221)

Ehenreich's narrative style is engaging and her marshaling of the facts and statistics to frame the personal story and what she witnessed of other's was compelling and in the end damming of our American economic system as it operates today.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.  ~Henry Steele Commager

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More quotes from the book:


“There’s no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent, entitled to cut your own deal. The intercalation of the drug test between application and hiring tilts the playing field even further, establishing that you, and not the employer, are the one who has something to prove. Even in the tightest labor market…the person who has precious labor to sell can be made to feel one down, way down, like a supplicant with her hand stretched out.”  Chapter 3

  “Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person—a potential slacker [No talking directives], drug addict [employment drug testing], or thief [personality tests]—you may begin to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status…If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth.”

“The problem of rents is easy for a noneconomist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp: it’s the market, stupid. When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don’t stand a chance.”

 “The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and “poverty,” (the rate of which has remained static for years) as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof, at least compared with rent.”

. “It did not escape my attention, as a temporarily low-income person, that the housing subsidy I normally receive in my real life—over $20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction—would have allowed a truly low-income family to live in relative splendor.”

"The thinking behind welfare reform was that even the humblest jobs are morally uplifting and psychologically buoying. In reality they are likely to be fraught with insult and stress. But I did discover one redeeming feature of the most abject low-wage work - the camaraderie of people who are, in almost all cases, far too smart and funny and caring for the work they do and the wages they're paid. The hope, of course, is that someday these people will come to know what they're worth, and take appropriate action."



"So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list -- a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down."  from the new afterward to the 2011 edition


[I'm sorry regarding most of the quotes from the book I presented here that page numbers are not included.  I was a sloppy notetaker when I read this book several years back with a library due date looming.  I always meant to recheck out the book someday and get those page numbers and some of the facts and stats I didn't note so that I could do a quality review.  For me the need to present something on this book for BBW had an urgency that outweighed such niceties.]
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Links of note:

Barbara's Blog
Nickel and Dimed on Wikipedia
Nickel and Dimed Book Summary at Bookjive
Nickel and Dimed on Google Books

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.  ~John F. Kennedy

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Information is the currency of democracy.”—Thomas Jefferson

The challenges:



In 2010 the book was retained in the 11th-grade Advanced Placement English curriculum after a challenge by a man with no children enrolled in the district but claiming standing as a tax-payer and graduate of the school district accused the district of "political activism"  in using a book promoting socialist ideas, economic fallacies, use of illegal drugs and belittlement of Christians.


In 2010 Parents of a Bedford NH teenager attempted to have school officials ban the use of a book in their Personal Finance class that refers to Jesus Christ as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”

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My commentary re reading the book and the challenges:


Reading this book and writing this review was difficult for me on a personal level. I found it too hard to detach from the subject matter.  When I first read this in the 2002 I was fresh from the recent experience of homelessness in Santa Clara County California after the dot.com boom had crashed taking my husbands job.  We had recently moved into a single wide trailer with his parents near Phoenix Oregon where we remain to this day.

The decades previous to my husband acquiring his tech job had been one nail biting month after another of sometimes barely but often not making ends meet. Several times we were back with one or the other of our parents.  I confess we made bad choices at times but that does not negate the experience we had of being treated in and out of the workplace as pariahs of the community as we worked as janitor, motel maid, window washer, book store clerk, carpet cleaner, fruit packer, cold storage hyster driver, babysitter, shipping dock, library aide, mechanic, tutor, gas station attendant, freelance word processing and data base maintenance, high tech code writer.  I mixed both of our long string of jobs together and that last one came very close to becoming my husband's American Dream realized but even there, tho it was considered 'skilled' in comparison to most of the others it was drudge work and the bulk of the company's appreciation was given in stock options which were never realized when the company went kaput without going public.

We missed it by that much.

Reading Barbara's book validated that sense that I had picked up in encounters with bosses, landlords, creditors and aid agency bureaucrats of a barely restrained contempt.  Even from other dwellers in the various housing accommodations we found ourselves in.  Shortly after I was diagnosed with RP and began carrying the white cane which qualified us for food stamps, medicaid and social security during the months my husband was out of work or working for minimum wage the rumor spread among the single mothers on welfare and their children in our apartment complex that I was faking it.

All of that is just by way of a confession that I was unable to be objective while reading or thinking about this book.  On the other hand I don't think that completely disqualifies me from commenting on when my personal experience corroborates Ehrenreich's accounts and her facts and statistics explain to me some of what happened to us.

But I don't want to do a play by play of all that right now.  It is not the place for it even if I found myself emotionally able to keep digging at those memories.  I only brought it up as my way of refuting the claim of the challengers that the book promoted economic fallacies.  Not just my own experience but that of my husband's and many dozens of friends and acquaintances over the years match and exceed in nightmarish quality the stories Barbara shared in Nickel and Dimed.

I have lived the underbelly of American capitalism and it is not pretty and anyone who wishes to deny the truth of that or lay the blame entirely on those caught in the poverty trap is heartless and anyone who wishes to suppress the uncomfortable facts in order keep pretending it isn't so is willfully ignorant.

High school students just one to four years from being expected to fend for themselves in our 'free market' should be given a clear view of exactly what to expect and what the consequences of certain choices are sure to be.  They have the right to be prepared to walk into their future with dignity and denying them the right to encounter the stories of American nightmares does not guarantee they will avoid them nor does allowing them to believe the American Dream is their birthright to be handed to them on their 18th birthday going to ensure they realize it.

Parents who wish to keep their own children ignorant have the right to do so but they have no right to impose the ignorance on everyone's children.  I wish I'd been prepared for these realities before I left high school.  I had no clue having been raised in a stable lower middle class family with a Dad who worked the same job from before I was born until the day he retired and a Mom who stayed home to care for the house and three children.  Because I was so sure this scenario was a given for me as well, I did not plan for any other possibility.

Even my high school guidance counselor suggested that stay at home mother was what I was best qualified for the one time I ventured to confess to him that I thought maybe being a child psychiatrist was something I might love to do as a means of supporting my first love which was writing stories.  He bluntly told me that academics did not seem to be my forte thus I should get married have kids and write stories for them.

Mr G I so wish I had a wet dishrag and your address.

I only bring up Mr G and his theory because it was based on my low math and science scores.  My difficulties in math were due to anxiety as I proved with As and Bs in college ten years later.  But my difficulty in science was the direct result of my self censoring on quizzes and exams whenever questions on evolution or origins of the universe were in play, marking the answer I knew the teacher would mark as wrong because it was what I believed.  I felt guilty even reading the sections in the text books, handouts, encyclopedia and library books.  I believed that giving the expected answer was the equivalent of denying God and Jesus.

That was the result of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing so I know the mindset of these parents who challenge books from that perspective. And I also know what a huge wake up call awaits many of these kids when they are thrown into the real world at age 18.

As for the charges of socialism made against the book I can only wonder if advocating for a living wage, the right to unionize and dignity for the workers is the definition of socialism?  And if so, and that is what the challengers wish to eliminate in America then what is the definition of America?

Those are questions high school students should be free to discuss no matter which color their parent's politics is.

As for the charges of being derogatory of Christianity I don't see it.  Sure she presents a few Christians who displayed very unchristian behavior.  She called them the Visible Christians meaning those who displayed their allegiance via jewelry or clothing but not via their behavior which makes them hypocrites and in no way implies the religion in its entirety must be held to account.

As for her depiction of Jesus as a  “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”  Who can deny it?  The Gospels themselves depict him as an itinerant preacher who when he wasn't sleeping at a friend's house was sleeping outdoors or on a boat.  He was frequently drinking wine and even turned water into wine to keep it flowing at a wedding and he provided free food and medical care via his miracles and gave his disciples to know that he expected them to care for the needy and befriend the outcasts and to treat every human being, even those in prison and thus presumed guilty, as if they were himself.  If that's socialism then it must not be the demonized thing the American right has tagged it.  And if that is Christianity then where in America is it being practiced today?

Those are the questions high school students should be discussing whether they are Christians or not.  To deny them that is to make them less qualified to be a contributing citizen and a responsible voter at age 18. It is just common sense that if you want 18 year olds to have access to the American Dream you have to start giving them the cold hard facts more than one year before that and if 16 is too young, as some parents claim, to be exposed to Barbara Erenreich's experiences in the low wage culture then heaven help them as America won't.
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Here are a few bookish events going on for BBW:

Hosted by Bookjourney

Get on the BANNED WAGON!

Giveaways, a scavenger hunt and links to participating blog's BBW reviews are some of what's happening at Sheila's BookJourney this week.  Along with her own reviews of banned or challenged books and of course her daily Morning Meanerings post.

Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop

Banned Books Week Hop

Giveaways galore and lots of participating blog's to visit and comment on.

Banned Book Week Virtual Read Out

Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out

The annual BBW readout traditionally conducted in public at bookstores and libraries where individuals read aloud form a banned book has now gone digital. Now you can video record yourself reading a banned book and upload to a YouTube channel

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.  ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Read more...

Banned Book Week: Review Repost of Impulse

Impulse
by Ellen Hopkins

“We must beware of all censorship in whatever form it comes, because to censor, to tamper with truth, to tamper with our memory, is to commit a historical sin.” —Vartan Gregorian 

Three teens' lives intersect in a psychiatric hospital after their failed suicide attempts. All three of them had been failed catastrophically by the adults in their lives. The story is told by alternating first person POV scenes from Tony, Vanessa and Conner. Tony, whose home life had been so abusive he found living on the streets preferable had resorted to intentional OD. Vanessa, raised by a bi-polar mother and an absent (military) father had long been a cutter to ease her pain had slit her wrists. Conner whose cold, unaffectionate parents obsessed about his performance in school and on the football field, had shot himself in the heart.

In the course of their treatment the three are able to forge connections of emotional intimacy that offer hope of healing and a foundation for a future.

Like Hopkin's other novels, Crack, Glass, Burned, Identical and the recently released Tricks, the story is told in verse.  Read more...


[For these BBW review reposts this week I'm posting only excerpts with a 'read more' link to the original post.  This partly to keep any possible discussion in one place but partly because my reviews tend to ramble long, go on tangents and focus more on my relationship to the book than the book itself.]
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There are some chilling realities dealt with in this story and I can understand how some parents might think their 13-17 year old might be unready to deal with it but that doesn't make it right to deny access to every teen especially as so many have already lived such traumas and their best hope for dealing is encountering a story in which their experience, their pain and their worth are acknowledged and the proof that they are not alone.

 "Libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy, and community. Librarians have stood up to the PATRIOT Act, sat down with noisy toddlers, and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed." Paula Poundstone

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Here are a few bookish events going on for BBW:

Hosted by Bookjourney

Get on the BANNED WAGON!

Giveaways, a scavenger hunt and links to participating blog's BBW reviews are some of what's happening at Sheila's BookJourney this week.  Along with her own reviews of banned or challenged books and of course her daily Morning Meanerings post.

Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop

Banned Books Week Hop

Giveaways galore and lots of participating blog's to visit and comment on.

Banned Book Week Virtual Read Out

Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out

The annual BBW readout traditionally conducted in public at bookstores and libraries where individuals read aloud form a banned book has now gone digital. Now you can video record yourself reading a banned book and upload to a YouTube channel

Read more...