Vacation Reading

I'm officially on vacation -- my kids are with their dad, my sister's kids are with them, and I'm an honorary aunt, playing with cute kids and hiding after I get them overexcited.

I'm still on top of my summer goal to read a book a day from my TBR bookcase, pulling from right to left on the kidlit shelves. I did allow myself to skip hardbacks while I'm zooming about having fun; I'll save those for rainy days when I plan to huddle inside.

So as I go to Book Journey's weekly round-up of what everyone has read, is reading, and will read, most of my selections are children's books, and some of those are books I've been waiting to read for decades. I don't think I'm exaggerating. After I've read my TBR choice, I go back to read other stuff, such as the books I order from my goodreads TBR list, or books for challenges, or books for my Reading My Library goal.

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• Infamous Scribblers, Eric Burns. History of early American journalism.
• The Capture (Guardians of Ga'hoole 1), Kathryn Lasky. From my shelves.
• Doubleblind, Ann Aguirre. NOOK. Next in the series.
• Jane, April Lindner. A Best of the Best leftover.
• The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha, Lloyd Alexander. From my shelves.
• The Scarecrow and His Servant, Philip Pullman. From my shelves.
• The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, Uma Krishnaswami. Reading My Library quest book.
• Bagthorpes Abroad, Helen Cresswell. From my shelves.
• Bagthorpes Haunted, Helen Cresswell. From my shelves.
• Bagthorpes Liberated, Helen Cresswell. From my shelves.
• Mockingbird, Kathryn Erskine.

What am I currently reading? I left some in-progress books at home during my gallavanting, and I cherry picked from my options to things I thought I'd enjoy.

• Woods Runner, Gary Paulsen. Today's book.
• The Journey That Saved Curious George, Louise Borden. Borrowed from a friend.
• Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine. Fun stuff.
• Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey. Online book club book.
• Buffy and the Heroine's Journey, Valerie Frankel. Present from librarything early readers.
• Airman, Eoin Colfer. This is actually Thursday's book, but I wanted to start it early.
• Down These Mean Streets, collection. NOOK.
• Willie Mays, The Life, The Legend, James S. Hirsch. TBR. Too heavy to carry about.
• The Clockwork Three, Matthew Kirby. RML. Still unfinished.
• The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller. Still missing.
• Phoenix In Flight, Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge. NOOK. Interplanetary rich people plot things.
• (Many other things ignored during my vacation.)

I'll go sign in on the update posts that, where everyone notes what they read, are reading, and intent to read. Teach Mentor Texts echos this with a concentration on children's books which clearly is appropriate for me.

What will I read next? I'm still pulling from my reservoir of purchased-but-unread books, and I still have about forty library books waiting for me. And I have to scan my friends' shelves...

Challenges:

1. Cybils: 61/73. Unchanged.
2. Global Reading Challenge: 13/21. I read a book set in Wales.
3. Where Am I Reading?:  30/50.  Reviews are overrated.
4. Science Book Challenge: 1.141/3.14159. All my nonfiction lately is history. 
5. Reading My Library:  Finished one, left one in the middle.
6. Eclectic Challenge: 10/12. I am counting Jane as literary; it's heavily based on a classic.
7. Best of the Best: 27/25. I think I'll just keep going, only in a less rushed way. I'm a bit surprised that I made the finish line!
8. Summer Reading Goal: On target. The reviews are rather thin, but they keep me honest.

Sad, Sadder, Saddest: Mockingbird

I picked up Kathryn Erskine's Mockingbird from a Scholastic catalog because I liked the description: girl with Asperger's, with a caring older brother who has tragically died leaving her bereft but without the only person who could help her deal with her emotions. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much as I anticipated. There was just too much stacked against Caitlin for me to really find her believable.


Her mother had already died of cancer; there's a tear jerker flashback scene where she and her brother watch Bambi and the brother tries to deny that Bambi's mother won't come back. Her brother was killed in a small town school shooting, and she still goes to school with the son of another victim and the cousin of the shooter. Her counselor at school is infinitely patient, although prior to this year seems to have made no progress whatsoever with Caitlin and her social skills; it is only now, in the final months before junior high that she wants Caitlin to learn to make friends and develop empathy. So Caitlin alternates between drowning in misery (every now and again Erskine pours some more on her, from blisters to losing what small friendships she has) and suddenly making her first progress ever in learning to understand others' emotions and  feelings.

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Although I admit the book make me tear up sometimes, it was the same tears evoked by cotton commercials and bad Christmas songs -- sentimental, not sentiment. But the simple story line and easy lines to cross might make it easier for kids to read; it's a good problem novel for kids who like that sort of thing -- family death, community tragedy, and even personal disability.

Clearly most of the world disagrees with me; it's won awards and acclaim. But I won't bother mentioning it to my kids.

Scary Laughter: Bagthorpes Liberated

The third of my Bagthorpe books, which are #5 - 7 of the ten book series, kept me happy during the tiring extended hours of my vacation flight, a flight that kept stretching longer and including more airports and planes and eventually airport hotels. Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpes Liberated picks up a few hours after the end of Bagthorpes Haunted, which made for a nice grouping; all three books take place in within a week or so.

At this point in my exhaustion, the familiarity of the characters was an asset; I could relax into the sparkling dialogue, crazy situations, and extravagant actions taken by all the Bagthorpes. I especially liked the focus on the mom, who decides to push back against the advantages taken by the rest of the family, starting with her husband Henry.  Grandma's delight in stirring up trouble takes new heights, as when she successfully passes of a local tramp as an eccentric millionaire. As an added advantages, the way I constantly burst into laughter very quickly cleared me a wide space to stretch out in as I waited for the plane to take off again.

No Mercy: Bagthorpes Haunted

I polished off the second of my Bagthorpe books at the start of what looks like a prolonged airport stay. The sixth in the series,  Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpes Haunted follows the rest of their stay in an unfortunate Welsh house for a holiday.

Like book five, this book features unpleasant behavior, foolish eccentricities, and wacky high jinks. Although not quite as funny as the early book, perhaps because familiarity makes it easy to guess what each character will do, it still provided a few hours of fun while standing around in lines trying to find out where my planes plan to go.

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I have one more Bagthorpe in my pile, and it looks like Cresswell went back again a few years later and wrote a few more, so I suppose I'll eventually have to dig those up as well.

Skipped a Week at the Library

I didn't manage to post a library list last week, but I had a really good reason. I didn't check out anything new! I did visit, and I turned stuff in, and I looked at stuff, and then I put my hands in my pocket and walked out. After all, I have dozens of books out already, so it was clearly the mature thing to do.

I bought myself an Ann Aguirre book to celebrate, because the library does not have the third book in her series. What's up with that? They have the fourth!

This week I somehow had three books waiting for me, but I turned in a bunch so I felt OK with that.

What did I get? Well, the hold shelf offered me three books, and then I grabbed a fourth:

• Carnelians, by Catherine Asara. I have a fondness for her space opera books.
• The Cheshire Cheese Cat, Carmen Deedy. A Cybils finalist.
• Some Assembly Required, Anne Lamott. A surprise -- I thought I was still weeks out on the waiting list.
• Mr Putter and Tabby Ring the Bell, Cynthia Rylant. Clearly an attempt to get the novice reader reading something, but I like them even on my own.

This brings me to a total of, wait for it, 42 items out on my card, plus a few ebooks that I'm in denial about. Yes, I have achieved my goal of getting the list under my age! Of course, almost all of them are actual books that I need to read, not CDs or anything easy, but still, there is hope.

I'll go share my Library Loot at the event co-hosted by Claire from the Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader, where all the library addicts compare their treasures.

Bagthorpes Abroad: Fun Revisited

I remember laughing at the Bagthorpe family stories decades ago, but somehow the latest batch of books got left on my TBR piles. They've moved with me a few times, and just turned up in the stack I'm working through on this summer drive. I'm glad I found them again; I just finished Helen Cresswell's The Bagthorpes Abroad and I laughed my way through it.

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The Bagthorpes are a kind of English version of The Wimpy Kid family, where almost everyone is unpleasant or downright mean. Cresswell makes no bones about this, pointing out when the entire family is unsympathetic because they only worry about their own problems. She does give us Jack, the ordinary son, as a touchstone, and then flatters the reader a bit by pointing out that Jack, like most everyone, has common decency and kindness. Or the reader can choose to identify with the self-described brilliant members of the family and become complicit in their egotism.

I'm not sure how well the books works as an introduction to the series; although it's been years since I read the earlier books, I remember the family dynamics and had the correct expectations for the back-stabbing nature of the group.  The first chapter shows us the children huddling together to doctor their school reports, showing both the unethical attitudes but also that they can function as a family in their own special way. I'm glad I have two more to go; it will be a treat to spend an extended time with this unneighborly family.

Nordic Magic: Icefall

I have many reading lists going on -- I'm still plugging away at the Best of the Best books, I'm searching out state settings for my Where Are You Reading books, I'm dragging books off consecutive shelves of the library for my Reading My Library Quest, and I'm working my way through all the Cybils finalists in all of the book categories.  Oh, and this summer I'm trying to work my way through the kidlit shelf of my TBR bookcase. Some of these I do for fun (I like the beauty of my Quest, and the strange places picking a book because it's set in a state I've never visited takes me), but the Cybils list I enjoy because I'm guaranteed to find some real treasures.

Matthew J Kirby's Icefall was one such pleasure. It's a finalist in the Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction section, although it reads more as a history than a fantasy to me. There's no magic, no divine intervention, no runic power. There is a belief in gods and ghosts, a respect paid to dreams and portends, as well as a berserker power in battle that robs men of their sentience, but these seem as real to Kirby's characters as they did in a Sutcliffe novel.

The biggest evidence of my respect for this book is that I never peeked in the back to figure out who survived or who was the traitor. Despite my usual distaste for suspense, I wanted to stay in the dark with Solveig so that I could appreciate her worries and her loyalties. I had my suspicions based on story conventions, but that actually didn't put me much ahead of the protagonist, who spends much of the book training as a skald and learning to cast her own world in terms of narrative and pacing. The vivid and real hardships and dangers were enhanced by the interior stresses and shifts as Solveig spends the winter learning how to value herself despite the expectations of others, and how to appreciate and see the truth about the people around her as well.
Sometimes I ferociously argued against her decisions and actions, but they always felt real and centered around a true personality. The setting and characterizations were strong, and the first person narration both let me see things that Solveig might miss but also taught about her connections with the other characters through what she reported or ignored.

I'm coincidentally reading Kirby's first book at the same time, and though I'm liking it I don't have the same passion as I did for Icefall. This book I highly recommend, and intend to press upon my younger son (the older one doesn't understand why I took so long to read it).