April Family Pick: Feynman

Feynman still reigns as the coolest physicist, and the Cybils Graphic Novel finalist and graphic biography Feynman by Jim Ottaviani (art by Leland Myrick, coloring by Hilary Sycamore) helps him maintain that reputation. Starting with his childhood bedtime stories, which emphasize process and understanding over vocabulary (and accuracy), the comics follow present his progress from a stance of smug reminiscing, writing as if Feynman were telling these stories about his education, his wives, and his work.


The pictures kept the characters identifiable for me, with Feynman's beaky nose and wavy hair identifying him from high school through the Challenge investigation. Since my weak visual skills often has me scrabbling to identify who is talking in a graphic book, this consistency helped a lot.

P received a copy as his birthday present from his dad, so we made it the April Family Book Club choice, although it took us until almost the end of May to have the meeting.  P actually stalled out in the middle of the book, and I agreed that at age eleven I also would have found the story of Feynman choosing which university department best suited his career dull, and the bits about his girl-chasing and second marriage incomprehensible. So we talked about what age to read things, and then more about his adventures in youth (tricking the guards at the Manhattan Project, finding the bad valve by pretending to read design documents, safe cracking).  We spent a lot of time figuring out the safe cracking parts, in fact.

Overall, we decided it was a good book for YA and up, but only recommend the first half to the elementary crowd. I'm not sure why it's a Graphic "Novel" since it seems to be a nonfiction biography, but then the nursery rhyme book also ended up in this category so clearly I'm missing something.

October Book Club: The Snow Goose

Family book club faced a crisis last night -- several members had not finished the September book.  Through adroit negotiations I negotiated a solution -- P picked the October book (short) by virtue of us having read it together over the past few weeks, X quickly read it, and we headed out for sushi to much rejoicing.  Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, illustrated by Beth Peck, provided a full meals worth of discussion and tangents, so I declare the intervention a complete success.

X officially disliked the book, shocked at the unhappy ending.  The protagonist dies at Dunkirk, leaving the young girl bereft, and the goose disappears forever.  P also expressed his dislike for the ending.  I pushed the issue, asking what would happen next if the guy didn't die, and we got into a discussion of the creepiness factor of old people (really old -- some over 30!) who fall in love with children and then the children grow up to marry them.  All three of us find that very disturbing.  I mentioned Emily of New Moon's Dean and Bella's daughter Renesme as examples of creepiness in literature, and the boys declared that they currently had no teachers they intended to grow up to marry, which I applauded.  So I said that maybe violent death was the best place for this book to go, since a reunion between girl and old guy could only be creepy, but at that point their love was still innocent.  X seemed interested by the idea that death could be the happiest ending for a book.

We also talked about Dunkirk and World War II a bit, and the boys even put up with me reciting a few lines of Robert Nathan's Dunkirk and we talked about the battle and about the difference between the snow goose imagery and the idea of the ghosts of English admirals helping the kids bring their boat home safely.  We talked a bit about Peck's paintings, which P and I had scrutinized as we read the book; X had assumed that the book was a collaboration, with the story and the illustrations informing each other (the story came first by many decades).  And I ate a Hella Hot roll (yum) and we all declared ourselves happy.

Warm Fuzzy Feeling: The Kneebone Boy

When I pick a book for my book club, I'm always a little nervous that everyone will hate it.  This is true even for my tiny family book club where it's just me and the kids.  This month was especially risky since I was the last to read the book -- I chose one of the Cybils Middle Grade Novel finalists, Ellen Potter's The Kneebone Boy.  First X read it and gave it a seal of approval, but he likes almost everything, then I chased P around for a week or  to get him to start reading the book.  Finally X put his foot down -- he wanted the dinner out we have as part of the family club and so P would by golly read the book.  And after a chapter or two he was hooked -- he finished it at his dad's house and met me demanding I read it as well.  He even told me it was an especially good book for the club because there was so much he wanted to talk about.

*Preen.*

So I read it this afternoon, and I agree that it is delightful.  The tone is note-perfect, from the Nesbit-echo of a child narrator who doesn't identify herself (you see who I think it is, but it could be one of the brothers).  The family dynamics between the three siblings also charmed me, including the alienation of the youngest because of the tight bond between Otto and Lucia.  The adventures that continuously danced on the edge of impossible but managed to stay just on the right side of improbably, the rich gifts of all three children -- Max's brains, Lucia's imagination, Otto's sensitivity, the American great-aunt with her mysterious motives, everything added to the atmosphere and prepared me for the bittersweet ending.

I'll probably come back and update this entry after out dinner out tomorrow, but for now I'm just glad I forced us all to read this book.  I wonder if I could get P to try Potter's other books...

May Family Book Club: Ender's Shadow

X picked our May family book club book, but P is a bit behind so we didn't have our meeting until mid-June.  We all read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow (Ender, Book 5); a re-read for X and me but a new book for P and probably one of the first books he's read from the adult side of the library.  Everyone enjoyed it, so it satisfied our first rule of family book club, and it was interesting talking about it.

P has never read Ender's Game (he's started it now) so he had a different perspective that X and I enjoyed hearing.  We talked about whether kids really could be that smart (yes, especially with the genetic tinkering) and what happened to kids who had to do such bad things.  We discussed whether the final act of the war was necessary, and how Ender and Bean thought of different things because their home lives had been so different.  We looked at the differences between Bean and his sorta-twin brother, and how both were so smart in their own ways.

And we ate at Luther's Table, the new place in town -- P enjoyed his steak flatbread with caramelized onions (he ate the whole thing -- none for me!) while I stuck with a salad and X picked at his mac and cheese since he deeply distrusted the bread crumb topping.  X paid for it all with his winning gift card from the Poker Run we did last May.

Our next book is Lloyd Alexander's Book of Three, and then P will pick something for July; maybe something we can share with the Utah folks.

Plot Before Character: Scumble

I enjoyed Ingrid Law's first book, Savvy, quite a lot.  I'm not the only one; it garnered an Newbery Honor. So I was very chuffed when I received an ARC of her second book, Scumble.   This was many months ago.  I started it quickly, but when my fourth grader saw the cover illustration he asked to read it.

I had forgotten what a glacially slow reader he is.  He brought it to school and read it in their 30 minute reading periods, of which 20 minutes are usually spent chatting with his friends, probably about where he could have put his book -- oh wait, there it is in his desk, just like yesterday, and yes, this is an ARC that he got so he's reading this book before anyone else except yes, there it is in the book catalog because if you read a book for MONTHS it eventually gets published.  I eventually checked another copy out of the library so he could read it at home as well.  Also, he loved it and I suspect kept going back to reread favorite passages.

By the time I got it back I had to start from the beginning, which is one of the weakest parts of the book.  The voice of the first person narrator is fresh and believable, but his habit of wallowing in guilt for things that are clearly not his fault bugged me.  And his mother's savvy horrified me and left me gasping in disbelief that her family still tolerated her.  But once Ledger got left by himself in Wyoming I settled down and enjoyed myself.  I still felt that the author had some Ideas she wanted to say about children following their own dreams instead of their parent's plans, and how facing your fears is better than ignoring them, and sometimes she really forced events and people to illustrate these Ideas.  I don't remember bothering about that with her first book.  B

My family is group reading a book each month (well, that's the plan) and for this month P picked Scumble.  Since I just finished it, we'll probably be going out for a discussion soon.  I'll report back then. Oh, and my real book club just met for our January Movie Meeting, which was a fun Katherine Hepburn farce.  I missed the beginning because I was cheering A along at a gymnastic meet.  Kids today are amazing, and especially the ones in my family.  She was all over the bars and on top of the beam and doing something on the vault and flipping herself around on the floor.  Go A!