Results of Ruminations

Growing up a bookworm, most of the family's vacations saw me in one of two places when it came to buying a souvenir: The stuffed animals section, or the book section. The former comes from a still-present appreciation of cute things (though I don't want to pet anyone's animals because that means I have to go wash my hands). But it's the latter that, as I reflect on my hazy self-memories, I begin to see the stirrings of the bibliophile that I would one day grow into. No one is born able to read, and I have memories of my own illiteracy. My mother was paying bills one day. I know this was before I went to school, so it was likely the late morning, early afternoon. Sunlight spilled over the kitchen table on which the sundry bills were spread. My father, a free-lancing guitarist since before I was born, would get the money from work (gigs, as they call them in the industry, doncha know) and my mom would crack open the checkbook, fill out the amounts, seal the envelopes, a...

Writing advice is like underwear--certain styles work for certain people, but it's really there for support. Man. I feel like that should be a meme, like with flowers or something. Y'know, an inspirational Instagram photo. Hold on a sec. Yeah, that's more like it. Source . Just like you probably shouldn't try on every type of underwear simultaneously, not all writing advice is useful at the same time. And some doesn't work at all for the individual. One piece of writing advice that always requires a little bit of tailoring would be the "Write what you know" advice. Taken too literally, it makes it seem as though the only thing people should write is a journal--after all, what one knows is what one has done. I think there's some value to that. Some people lead interesting lives. I'm not one of those people, so I prefer my fictional stories to be a little bit more than recitation of my minutia. One thing that I believe about writing fict...

When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps , like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat.  I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland  was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall  books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games ( Castlevania ftw) and movies ( Hook ). By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech  to go alon...

Virginia Woolf: The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays. (" The Decay of Essay Writing ") For the most part, I like Virginia Woolf. I studied her works a couple of different times in college, and though she's hardly a "beach read" type of author, she's thoughtful and significant. Nevertheless, the aforementioned essay smacks of "old man shouts at clouds"--you know, this old thing.* Perennial. ( Source )  Despite her crotchety take on "kids these days" and their "writings about themselves", Woolf has so...

A new meme has been circulating through Twitter in which a guy with his girlfriend is caught "appreciating" another girl's look. The mutability of the meme is that the labels of each part can vary. The one I saw that I liked the most, and what inspired this essay, is this one: Yeah, basically. I got it from this tweep .  There's an allure to a book. Bookstores are quasi-sanctified ground for me, with the library-esque reverential feeling of speaking in Sacrament Meeting whispers, the particular smell of books and (often) coffee invoking a specific attitude both putting me in a specific mindset. Bookstores are less places to buy and something and more experiences to be enjoyed. Because of where I live, I don't get to go to bookstores as often as I'd like (read: Daily), but I'm not so far away that I can't go whenever I really need to. My favorite was Borders, but that died the death a decade or so ago, so while I still pine for their weekly coup...

I'm clawing through my memories, trying to remember the books that I loved as a kid. See, my two older boys love listening to audiobooks (whilst reading along) when we're in the car. It's a great pacifier, too--they don't argue or fight or wiggle too much, because the books keep them occupied and focused. Plus they help them improve their reading, and it gives me something to do whilst driving. Since the daily commute equates to about an hour a day, that's pretty good. Though there are more Pern books, I kind of don't want to revisit McCaffery's special planet again for a while. The emotional ending of All the Weyrs of Pern is so perfect I'd rather let it rest for a while, as I mentioned before . Being "done" with the series for the nonce, we scoured the library for the better part of an hour, trying to find the next set of books to read/listen to. I managed to score a digital audio copy of Redwall , by Brian Jacques. Frustratingly, there wer...

My boys and I have spent the summer listening to (and they, reading) All the Weyrs of Pern.  It is, to me, a culmination of eight books (three of which we read) that build toward the dragonriders of Pern finally eradicating their age-old enemy, Thread.* The ending (spoilers) has the deaths of some beloved characters, and it's written with such loving tenderness that, despite the fact that I hadn't read the book since I was in elementary school--maybe middle school--I still remembered some of the moments. After the book was finished, I asked my kids if they thought it was a good ending. "No," said my seven year old. I could hear a hitch in his throat. Glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw that his eyes were plastic wrapped with tears that hadn't yet freed themselves. Now, my middle son is a sensitive soul; he cries anytime he feels a little too much emotion. But I could tell the ending was getting to him. My older son, who is 10, confessed that he had cried a l...

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

Strands: One of the books that I read this summer was about incorporating the classics into education. It was essentially a home-schooling manual, with afterthought inclusions for those who teach in the private or public schools, and it made all sorts of wild assertions about certain books. I think, were I on the same wavelength as the author, I would have understood what he was saying a little better, but for me and my brain, he was blowing a lot of hot air. An area that stood out to me? When he started classifying books as "bent, broken, whole, and healing." "Broken" is a book where "evil wins" but it motivates a person to improve the world; "whole" is where, as the author puts it "good is good and good wins", while "healing" is one that is "whole" and makes an important, personal impact on the reader's life. But it was the definition of "bent" that really made me sit up: "Bent stories portray...

I happened upon Verso Books '* summer sale and picked up five books for a buck each. I bought five ( General Intellects, Beneath the Streets, and The Spectacle of Disintegration, all   by Mckenzie Wark, Beyond the Pale  by Vron Ware, and In Defense of Lost Causes  by Slavoj Zizek), but I wanted to go a little meta, a little rhizomatic, and talk about one piece, taken out of context, from the beginning of Zizek's book. I've mentioned Zizek before , and he's a fascinating thinker, albeit hard to understand (as much his speech patterns, his lisp, his accent, his thoughts, his writing as anything else about him). Nevertheless, there's a lot about him that I can't help but be attracted to, and when I started off, he hit me with this particular phrase: "the rhizomatic texture of reality" (loc. 93). The broader context is that he's going off on the idea that, because there are no more "big ideas", some think that "we need 'weak though...

Why do we tell stories? Yeah, yeah, I know: To make sense of the world, to preserve our culture and heritage, to explain what we could be. There are lots of reasons, and a lot of them also make sense (which is nice), but I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. Maybe it's because it's late but I'm worried the insomnia that's been plaguing me the last three nights is lurking behind me; maybe it's because my own sense of self-worth and legacy resides in twenty-six fragile letters, pushed back and forth on my keyboard millions of times and my stories remain almost entirely unread; maybe it's because the late July night outside of my now-open window is cooler than July usually is, and that feels like a detail that ought to be remembered somehow, if even in a nebulous, digital way. Maybe there are more reasons for telling stories than there are stories to be told, or maybe because there are really only a handful of each, but the veneer is different enou...

It's Sunday. Here's something slightly more religious: Paradise Lost. I started another reread of Paradise Lost  this last week. My school is having an informal book club about the poem and, though I won't be able to attend as often as I wish, it's exciting to read Milton again. One of the interesting things that was brought up during the discussion was the mistrust most of the participants had of Satan. I mentioned before some of my experiences discussing the Prince of Darkness, but that was in the formal school setting. In this conversation, we could be even more forthright, and since most of us were LDS, we were able to dive into more specific theological implications than I do with my students. (The added benefit was that we didn't have to waste any time explaining what happened in the book, as summarizing and explaining the text is a huge piece of my pedagogy.) As we wandered through Book I, it quickly became apparent that there was a reluctance to embrace...

I try to keep a light touch on the publishing world, and I like to follow success stories about authors, even if I don't read their stuff. As a frequenter of bookstores (my closest is a Barnes and Noble, which hurts my help-independent-booksellers inclination, but spares my bank account, as I can get a teacher discount at B&N, plus not have to commute for an hour to get there), I see a lot of names on the shelves. My diet is dichotomously spread between classics and science fiction/fantasy , with some dabbling in the historical section, too. The large, mainstream fiction is relatively unexplored by me, though I occasionally venture outwards. And, since I always perk up when I hear about authors--and few current authors court as much controversy as Jonathan Franzen--I finally decided to buy a copy of Freedom . (In the interest of full disclosure, I bought it used for a dollar, plus tax, at a now-out-of-business used bookstore.) It's still sitting on my shelf. But an audiob...

I looked up the most lucrative authors of 2016 on Forbes , curious to see what kind of emphasis mainstream fiction has over the commercial fiction (which covers the speculative market). Here's the list (the gallery is obnoxious, so I'm putting the information here). Also, I've put the genre in which they write into parentheses so that it's easier for me to analyse. James Patterson (A) Jeff Kinney (MG) J.K. Rowling (YA/F/A/M) John Grisham (A) Stephen King (F/H) Danielle Steel (A/R) Nora Roberts (A) E.L James (A) Veronica Roth (YA/SF) John Green (YA/NA) Paula Hawkins (A) George R.R. Martin (F) Rick Riordan (YA/F) Dan Brown (A) If you've walked through a bookstore for any amount of time, you'll see these names. What's interesting here is the sprinkling of Young Adult books (though it's debatable if Rowling's presence on this list comes from her Adult/Mystery books or continual sales of Harry Potter ), but only one Middle Grade. The fa...

Since October 2016, I've disabled comments on my posts. This decision was made rather hastily and comes primarily from the fact that I didn't want to engage with what others had written in  what I had written. That is, I didn't want to spend my writing time writing about what I already wrote when I had more to to write that wasn't being written. Glad we cleared that up. Anyway, I keep the comments off and, though I post my essays on both Twitter and Facebook, I don't usually engage much beyond a like or favorite of comments these essays generate. This stems from a reluctance I have to engage in public conversation. My teaching style is heavily focused on dialogue, discussion, and exploration of ideas; it is called, after all, Socratic Seminar. So why don't I want the same online? For the same reason I don't leave my door open during class and encourage people to walk in and start talking. I get the sense that people don't read through a conversation,...

I finished listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day  by David Sedaris. He came recommended--a former student told me some years ago I should make it a point to read his stuff. I knew it was a compilation of essays, and there's a funny story about an interview with Sedaris in the fantastic film Bad Writing  (which I won't share here so that you can watch the movie and find out for yourself), so I kind of knew he was a good writer. The man's great. But I'm kind of unsure what to think about his work in general. I still have Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls  on my reading queue, so I think I'll put him back on, but...I don't know. There's something about his topics that kind of got to me. Here's the weird thing: His writing  is top notch. The "David Sedaris" character is charming, a little naive, and a lot of fun to hear his wry observations and excellent points. And, since I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, it gave an even more...