Cady's ready for Christmas ~ and winter's chill

Hummingbirds ~ by Joshua Gaylord, 2009

Helen said about the characters in Joshua Gaylord's Hummingbirds:

"I had a difficult time getting into this book, but I think I just wasn't in the right space because once I started reading it during the Dewey Read-a-Thon I plowed right through it. As a teacher this was an interesting book to read and, I must confess, at times it made me really uncomfortable to read the parts  about the sexual tension between the students and the teachers. I know that exists in real life for some teachers and some students, but it just seems so wrong."

She also said, about the students, "It's all about posturing..." I'd add that it isn't just the students who are posturing.  I got really annoyed with the writing style, long about page 104, and these snips are ALL from that page:

"Instead, he just sits for a few minutes inside the rattling sound of his wife's fingers on the keyboard and thinks about dry, weightless things -- dead leaves, insect legs, empty aluminum cans rolling down street gutters in hot desert winds. ... It's the face of an angel, the face of an infant, the face of a cartoon dog, the face of a total stranger, the face of a carnivorous cat, the face of laughing Buddha.  He knows that face. ... Sarah's face -- a face like clarity, like decency, like home fronts."

It's his wife's face, for Pete's sake!  Enough, already!  Maybe the author intends for me to hate the protagonist.  If so, he is succeeding.  Maybe the problem is that this semester I'm technically an English teacher myself.  I could SO relate to this long passage from pages 119-120:

Of all his responsibilities as a teacher of English -- the report cards and the faculty meetings, the roll-taking and the conferences with irate parents -- there is no duty more objectionable to Binhammer than the grading of papers.  The thing about papers is that they accumulate in the most tyrannical of ways.  They stack up in unruly piles with torn corners and awkwardly stapled edges hanging out everywhere.  They are always too many to carry around as a single quantity, and so it is necessary to break them into smaller piles -- knowing as you finish grading each pile that this is only one small part of the whole.  And most of them, in Binhammer's experience, offer little more than plagiaristic sentiments by the paragraphful.  All in neat little trains of black letters on endless leaves of white.

He always thinks about the plural quantity of papers as a "brick of papers," and uses it in the same way that you might talk about a brace of fowl or a herd of buffalo.

"What have you got there?" Walter asks this morning, leaning over the table in the teachers' lounge where Binhammer is holding a ballpoint pen -- in frozen potentiality -- over one such brick of papers.  He has read the same line five times.  He has memorized the words, but he can't seem to make them stick together or make sense in any way -- and down they plummet through the gutter of his consciousness.

"Papers," he replies.

"Papers, sure."  Then, after a pause:  "That's a lot of papers you've got there."

Walter takes a unique pleasure in Binhammer's suffering.  If he were an old soldier, he would be the kind to want new recruits hammered and humiliated into shape just as he once was.

Binhammer reads the line again.  He underlines it to help him focus.  But now he has to write something beside it to justify the underline.

"Are they good?" Walter asks as he sits down in a chair across the table and leans back.

Binhammer looks up.  "Not particularly."

"That's a shame."   Walter is glowing.

The other thing about this odious task is that it feels like work being dropped down a well.  The comments are made, the grade is given -- and the student's next paper might as well be a photocopy of the previous assignment with the title of one book whited out and another scrawled in.  It seems to make no difference what he writes -- whether it is thoughtful, articulated criticism or half-conscious nonsense.  Everything, he sometimes thinks, sounds like nonsense to teenage girls.  The whole world is nonsense.

He kicks himself awake and, even though his eyes have been concentrating on it for a long time now, looks at the paper before him with renewed vigor.  He has managed to get that line lodged securely in his head, now that he has underlined and starred it.  The next few lines he reads at a breakneck speed to the end of the paragraph, where he lets out a sign of relief.  Nothing.  The girl is saying nothing.  Nonsense piled on top of nonsense.  He circles a misplaced comma and moves on.

Pardon me while I get back to grading my latest brick of papers. Here's a link to my teaser, written the day the book arrived.  And here's an interview with the author that Helen posted. I rate this book 6 of 10, above average.

Chains ~ by Laurie Halse Anderson, 2008

Rap review of Chains



Synopsis:  As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom.

Book trailer for Chains



I rate this YA book 9 of 10, an excellent book. Didn't the young man make a fantastic rap video? That's not the way I did homework.

Caturday ~ nap time

Sorry, folks, but I'm too busy

today to write a Caturday post.

I'm, uh. getting my beauty rest.

Kiki Cat, signing off

Another Friday, another book

Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman is a 2003 memoir by Nuala O'Faolain.  Her earlier books are her 1996 memoir, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, and My Dream of You, a 2001 novel.  Because it's Friday and time for another Book Beginnings post, I looked over the books on my TBR shelves and chose this one based on the first lines I needed for this post.  (I put back two other books with boring beginnings.  Yes, I'm weird.)

"If I had been asked to report on middle age when I was halfway through my fifties, I would have said that it was too bleak to talk about.  Much too bleak if you believed, as I passionately did, that your life has been a failure."

For some, that bleak beginning -- in a chapter titled "The Low Point" in the second of two memoirs when I haven't read the first one -- would be enough to send them scurrying for another book.  But no, I'm interested and want to continue.
If this is the low point, then things must get better.  I became even more interested in reading about her life when I discovered she and I were both born in 1940.

If you want to play along, this meme is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.  Click this link to see the beginnings of other people's books.

Feminist classics

I had about decided to do at least part of A Year of Feminist Classics when I started writing this post.  Participants will read and write about a feminist classic each month or any months they choose.  Here's the list of books I found a few days ago.

January: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft - Amy
February: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill - Ana
March: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen - Emily Jane
April: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Iris
May: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf - Ana
June: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan OR The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer – Amy
July: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir - Iris
August: The Women’s Room by  Marilyn French - Emily
September: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf - Amy (1991)
October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks - Iris
November: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler - Ana (1990)
December: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde - Emily (1984)

On the other hand, I may change my mind if they keep changing the list. Here are the additions and deletions since I started considering this challenge less than a week ago:

January: So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba (1981, has been added to) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
February:
March:
April:
May:
June: (Two classics) The Feminine Mystique OR The Female Eunuch (have been tossed aside to read) God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi (1985)
July:
August: (The classic) The Women’s Room (has been discarded for) The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (1975)
September:
October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks (AND) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (an anthology has been added, even though it is not a classic)
November:
December:

The changes the hosts are making seem to be an attempt at diversity, which isn't bad, but click here to see the book list they first promised.  How do you define a classic?  I think I'll pass on this challenge.

"Missing the Boat" ~ by Naomi Shihab Nye

It is not so much that the boat passed

and you failed to notice it.

It is more like the boat stopping

directly outside your bedroom window,

the captain blowing the signal-horn,

the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,

its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,

digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,

so tired it pulled up the anchor

and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance,

shrinking like a toy --
at which point you probably realized

you had always loved the sea.

"Missing the Boat," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, is from Different Ways to Pray (Breitenbush Publications, 1980)

(Discovered on pages 107-108 in Putting Away Childish Things: A Tale of Modern Faith, a novel by Marcus Borg.)