Weekly Geeks and a Blogging Meme

Meme first!  Kim L has asked for us to give our top blogging tips, and if you leave a link to your post in a Mr. Linky on her blog, she’ll enter you in a giveaway for a $15 Amazon gift certificate!  So I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you want a shot at the prize, go ahead and share your tips. :)  I’m impressed with all of the tips so far, and the one recommending the use of photos made me realise that while I used to have lots of visual stuff, lately I’ve been slacking. I’ll be working on that from now on! I have a couple tips myself…for newbie bloggers, it’s sad to write a post and not get any comments (I know that from experience).  I found that the best way to get comments was to really get out into the community and leave lots of comments on other peoples’ blogs: I know that when a blogger I don’t know leaves a comment on one of my posts, I always follow the link back and check out his/her blog, and many bloggers are the same way.  The other is for anyone who wants to increase their blog’s traffic.  Other than more frequent posting, in my experience the best thing you can do is start a meme.  It helps if you bribe bloggers to link back to your site (I said I’d link to their answers if they linked to my site, and I did a book giveaway), but that continues to be the single post with the most views, and it helped really spike my viewing numbers.  Plus, it’s a bunch of fun!  I happen to have to have made up a new meme a few days ago, but I’m waiting for a lull, since memes are everywhere right now.

Now on to Weekly Geeks!  This week, we’re invited to talk about our favourite childhood books.  I was a huge reader from a very early age, and I’ve talked a bit about my favourites before.  But it’s always fun to revisit them! All of the cover images below are the ones whose books I actually had, though sometimes it took a bit of searching.

My favourite picture book was Koala Lou by Mem Fox. It’s a wonderful story about a baby koala whose mom becomes busier as more koalas are born. Koala Lou is determined to get her mother to love her again, so she enters in the Bush Olympics and trains really hard, thinking that if she wins the Gumtree Climbing event, everything will go back to the way it was. I still have my copy (although it’s on loan to my neice right now), and in my head I hear my mom and I saying “Koala Lou, I DO love you!” (that’s what the mom says several times) whenever I think about it. My mom tells me that my other favourite read-a-loud was Rapunzel. She read it to me so much that when I was two-and-a-half, I almost tricked my parents into thinking I could already read, because I’d have the book in front of me, “read” all of the sentences, and turn the pages at the right time. In actuality, of course, I’d just memorised it.

I learned to read when I was 4, and I progressed quickly. I don’t remember the title of the first chapter book I ever read, but I do remember the plot: a little girl who lives in the country finds a duck egg and brings it home. When the duckling hatches, she raises it; as a four-year-old, I loved that, and I still remember looking very carefully at stones when we went on walks, in case one of them was a duck egg. My other favourite book at this age was Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. You can read about how I got my copy here.

In elementary school, I had a wide range of tastes. My mom and I read classics together, including Little Women-I always wanted to be Amy, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, Phantom of the Opera, Jane Eyre, a little bit of Robinson Crusoe, which we both thought was horribly boring, A Tale of Two Cities, and more.

Meanwhile, on my own I got really into The Babysitter’s Club and Animorphs (for those who haven’t heard of it, these fivekids get the ability to morph into any animal that they touch for two hours from an alien who crashlands on earth. They must use this ability to fight a different race of aliens, who are like slugs that creep into people’s brains and take control, who are trying to conquer earth). I liked animals, what can I say? I also loved three books from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Green Knowe series (you can read about both of those in the post I already mentioned), and the Anne of Green Gables series (I read them all, up through Rilla of Ingleside, so often that I can tell you all of the plots to this day).

Oh-and I absolutely adored ghost and horror books! (written for children) I never read Goosebumps (I did read two Fear Street books, by the same author though), because I thought they were stupid instead of scary. I still remember the plots of some of the books I read: one girl had gotten amnesia in a car accident, and her somewhat odd older sister was taking care of her. But it turns out the “older sister” was actually a stalker who had caused the accident and kidnapped her, and there was a great scene involving a huge butcher’s knife and the girl running for her life. In another one, a girl at boarding school discovers this doll that ends up being evil and possessed. I’ll never forget the scene where the girl has buried the doll out in the forest, and she’s in bed when she hears something clunking up the stairs. Slowly, it gets all the way to her door. Then it pounds on the door, which flies open, and the doll is standing there, smeared with dirt and with leaves in its hair. Oh! And here’s another one that I found on Amazon called The Dollhouse Murders: it’s a ghost story. I loved being frightened.

And of course I can’t forget the horse books: The Black Stallion (my favourite: the race scene at the end is so incredibly thrilling; somehow, I didn’t know that there was a whole series), the Misty of Chincoteague series, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka (although that one was really sad)-I ate them all up. Did anyone else read Where the Red Fern Grows? It was about this boy and his two hunting dogs, which he raises from puppies, and it was the first book I distinctly remember exactly where I was when I read the ending, because I just bawled uncontrollably.

By sixth grade, and during middle school, I read a bunch of Nancy Drews (my mom had collected them as a child and gave them to me in sixth grade: after that, I always got a few more for Christmas), and I was really into Lurlene McDaniel books. There were a bunch of mini-series and stand alones, but each book involved teens with big medical problems: cancer, weak hearts, comas, etc. They all found love, and sometimes they died and sometimes they didn’t. I remember my dad picked up a few for me on a business trip back to the States (we were living in England), and when he came back he was concerned that I was growing a bit too morbid, lol. This is also when I discovered Jane Austen, with Pride and Prejudice first (I still have my copy-it only cost me a pound in a British book store). For my thirteenth birthday, one of my best friends gave me her other five completed novels, which was awesome!

I also read quite a bit of fantasy at this stage: my mom really liked it, as did one of my other best friends. My favourite authors were David Eddings, Piers Anthony (but only his Incarnations of Immortality series), and Tad Williams. I also really loved this book that the same friend leant me, which of course I can’t remember the title of, that involved a high school girl who realised that she was a reincarnated Egyptian Bast priestess, and that she and a popular clique in her school could all turn into panthers at will. Now that I think of it, it kind of had a Twilight vibe, and I read it over and over again! I just spent ten minutes doing an internet search, and it turns out it’s a trilogy called The Year of the Cat by Zoe Daniels; my friend had an omnibus edition. I’m so tempted to see if my library has it and do a walk down memory lane…

Well, that’s probably more than enough. High school’s still close enough for me that I don’t really consider it childhood, and I’m sure half of y’all are bored to tears. But it is fun to reminisce!

The Supreme Court (thoughts)

(Finally catching up with my March reviews!)I picked up Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court expecting it to give me insight into how the Supreme Court works, and maybe some of its most important cases. I seriously considered going to law school, so I obviously have a bit of interest in the law, but I’m not super-familliar with the Supreme Court. This book didn’t really change that. What Rosen did instead was compare and contrast the leadership styles of (for the most part) Supreme Court Chief Justices (John Marshall v. Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall Harlan v. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Hugo Black v. William O. Douglas, William H. Rehnquist v. Antonin Scalia) to decide what an strategy is most effective for a Chief Justice. His conclusions are almost laughable:

In each of the pairings, there have been consistent tropes. The brilliant academic is less appealing, over time, than the collegial pragmatist. The self-centered loner is less effective than the convivial team player. The resentful braggarts wear less well than the secure justices who know who they are. The narcissist wields judicial power less surehandedly than the judge who shows personal as well as judicial humility. The loose canons shoot themselve sin the foot, while those who know hen to hold their tongues appear more judicious….The ideological purists are marginalized, while those who understand when not to take each principle to its logical extreme are vindicated by history. Those who view cases in purely philosophical terms are less sure-fotted than those who are aware of the cases’ practical effects. Those with the common touch win broader support than those who live entirely in abstractions.

None of that really breaks new ground in leadership advice!

(However, each chapter really looks at a phase in Supreme Court history, and that was very interesting indeed. My favourite was the Harlan v. Holmes, Jr. chapter: it focused on the irony that Harlan, a former slave owner who fought for the Confederacy, ended up championing African American civil liberties in the Reconstruction Era while Holmes, Jr., a Union veteran, was civil liberties’ greatest enemy. He explains that

Holme’s suspicion of abolitionist ideals proved to be especially unfortuante during his tenure on the Supreme Court, since some of the most important cases of his tenure required him to construe the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendements, in which the abolitionists had attempted to inscribe their ideals of equality into the Constitution.

And I had to laugh at Jefferson’s reading schedule for a young lawyer:

from dawn until eight A.M., physical sciences, ethics, and religion; from eight to noon, law; from noon to one, politics; one until dinner, history; dinner until ten P.M., literature, Shakespeare, criticism, and oratory; and then to bed.

All in all, a useful look at key points in Supreme Court history, but definitely not a primer on the Court itself.

Other Favourite Passages
In one of his most passionate opinions, Marshall agreed, striking down Georgia’s entier system of laws regarding the Cerokees as “repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.” President Jackson is famous for having supposedly reacted to the decision by saying, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” The comment was probably apocryphal, but the state of Georgia simply ignored the decision, and Jackson made no effort to enforce it.

But perhaps the main reason that Scalia was never as influential as Rehnquist involved not intellectual inconsistency but judicial temperament. Although his jurisprudential premises were unobjectionable, Scalie seemed, like Thomas Jefferson, to view every disagreement as a form of apostasy. As a result he had no volume knob. Every dissenting opinion predicted the apocalypse and every colleague who disagreed with him was denounced as a politican or a fool.

Lost in the Nineteenth Century

This past weekend, when I had reading time, I was living a nineteenth dream. It all started when I got to the Sense and Sensibility chapter of Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. I’ve been meaning to reread S&S for awhile now, but as its my least favourite Austen I kept putting it off. But after reading Austen’s letters, I suddenly bounced up and grabbed it off the shelf. I needn’t have worried! I finished it this morning, and even Austen at her worst (imo) is wonderfully, wonderfully delightful. So I’ve been lost in Marianne and Elinor’s lives, as well as Austen’s.

Then, around Thursday, I started reading the second (publishing order) in the Hornblower series: Ship of the Line. I finished it Friday night, but it had a big cliffhanger ending! Luckily, I had the third book (Flying Colours) in the series on my shelves, and of course I had to break it out right away to find out what happens to Hornblower. I finished that one this morning too. It’s rather neat reading about a British naval officer when two of Jane Austen’s brothers were in the Navy!

However, soon I’ll have to emerge from my nineteenth century cocoon soon. Stacked in a pile near my bed are: The Poisonwood Bible (for the 1% Well Read Challenge), “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” (for the Novella Challenge), Les Mis (it’s ongoing, and still wonderful!), Summer Crossings (my Capote book for the My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge), and Rosy Thornton’s Hearts and Minds just came in today, and its siren call will likely win out. I’m sure they’ll all be wonderful, but I can’t help a nostalgic twinge at leaving the 1800s behind.

Happy Mother’s Day!!

Since I usually try to talk about short stories on Sunday, I went through all of my short story collections looking for a story or two about mothers. I came up pretty empty: I found a couple, but the mothers weren’t exactly the heroines, so it didn’t seem Mother’s Day appropriate (ironically, my mom and I are watching Now, Voyager, which TCM decided to show today…for those who don’t know, it’s all about Bette Davis escaping from under the thumb of her insanely domineering mother…whoops!).

Instead, I thought I’d share a little bit about my mother. And since Ashleigh tagged me for another six random things meme, I figured I could combine them!
1. My mom made my Halloween costume every year from when I was born until I was in seventh grade. Various outfits include unicorn, Athena (the Greek goddess), and a leprecon. She also made my First Communion dress (for the non-Catholics, this basically looks like a wedding dress for a second grader) and my Easter dresses.
2. My mom was a stay-at-home-mom until I was a sophomore in high school (then she began working part-time), and we always had so much fun during our summer breaks! When I was in elementary school, we lived in central Texas, and we spent at least two hours a day at the pool; we also biked everywhere around our small town, and we’d often play cops and robbers!
3. My mom was always in the PTA (parent-teacher association) and my classroom mom: she’d throw Halloween parties where she dressed up like a witch and bought dry ice for a smoky cauldron, and she always chaperoned our field trips. I was mortally terrified of the bus (since I walked to school with my mom, it seemed a strange and foreign object), but in elementary on Thursdays I spent part of the school day at a different school for a program I was in. Every Thursday, my mom came and picked me up and drove me back to my regular school. Several of my classmates through the years mentioned that they wished she was their mom!
4. I got really sick in high school. Before the doctors figured out it was fibromyalgia, many of them said that I was just a hypochondriac trying to skip school. This went on for months, to the point that I believed I was somehow making it up, but my mom never, ever lost faith in me. Each time a doctor said it was nothing, she just brought me to a new one.
5. My mom is my best friend. I went to a college several states away, so I could only see her during winter and spring breaks; we talked on the phone every single day, even if it was just for a few minutes. The only time we didn’t was when I was studying abroad in Russia; then, I called home once a week and e-mailed every day, but it wasn’t the same! Once I got home from Russia, I realised how much it took for my mom to never show how nervous she was that I was behind the iron curtain: instead, she was completely supportive! Whenever I have a dream, no matter how unrealistic it seems, she always says that she knows I can do it, and helps me however she can. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of a best friend?
6. Every single day of my life, my mom has made me feel as if I made her life complete. That is an incredibly precious feeling, and one that I wouldn’t trade for anything else in the world.



(This is a pic of mom and me during our San Antonio vacation in March! Sorry about her eyes being closed…for some reason, that almost always happens, lol. We’re in front of the theater where my sister took us to see Phantom of the Opera, but my sis didn’t want to be in the pic, so I had to crop it a bunch.)
To all of you mothers out there, keep doing your excellent jobs! Even if you don’t always feel like a great mom, I’m sure that you are: my mom never thought she was more than an average one, but my sister and I both know that she’s a super mom. I hope you enjoy your special day!

Weekly Geeks and a Planet Earth 2-for-1 (Snowball Earth & Basin and Range)

For the Weekly Geeks challenge, I’m supposed to write about my experiences linking to other book bloggers’ reviews! Well, I really enjoyed the sense of community it fostered, and while it was a bit of a hassle to retroactively add links, it was definitely worth it. My only negative experience was that I had been keeping a notepad file of links to my reviews to leave in comments of other blogs, and my computer ate the file. I was so disenheartened, I never got around to visiting a bunch of the blogs that joined later in the week and leaving my links there. I hope I linked to everyone who left comments! I also tried to link to everyone who had a ping-back link to my post, but I didn’t go out searching for links (because I would have wasted hours that way!). All in all, I think I’ll keep the policy going-I just hope that people will leave their links. Oh, and speaking of science books (that’s what I’m reviewing again today), I just wanted point out this great resource for finding future science reads. It’s a wiki developed by the sponsor of the Science Book challenge, with book notes that include a short summary and a really neat ratings chart. And if you’ve read a science book, you can submit a note for inclusion. Now, on to the reviews!

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a review for my Planet Earth challenge! This is because John McPhee almost killed me. Ok, maybe not literally, but for the past couple of months, Annals of the Former World, a 900-ish page book that combines five formerly published books of his all about American geography has been my downfall. Finally, after having it stare at me malevolently with a bookmark about fifty pages into the second book, I realised it just wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I just decided to acknowledge my completion of the first book, Basin and Range, and call it a day.

As you might have gathered, I didn’t enjoy Basin and Range too much. I really expected too. My mom’s taking her second geology class right now, and she’s a very enthusiastic student, so I’ve been hearing about geology for months. And when I was researching books for my geology section of the challenge, it seemed like McPhee was the golden author. So I was so excited to find Annals of the Former World in the library! I brought it home, curled up with it, and really enjoyed the ‘narrative table of contents.’ Then the actual book started…and McPhee was throwing around technical geology terms left and right, and I thought “Ok, there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve. I can handle this.” But then I realised I had to force myself to pick it up, and my attempts to convince myself it was interesting (hey! I’ll be driving this highway later this year! it’s good to know these things!) were failing. Honestly, I don’t remember much of what I’ve read, because when I’m reading involuntarily, I think my eyes and brain glaze over. So it wasn’t the book for me, but you should try it too, since so many people really like McPhee. But perhaps don’t go for the omnibus right off the bat…

Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth on the other hand, is geology done right! She looks at one specific geological theory (and a somewhat controversial one that has detractors as well as supporters) and the main scientists behind it. It’s a combination mini-biography, travelogue (she goes to Australia, Nigeria, the Artic, etc.), and interesting science! The Snowball Earth theory suggests that at some point in the earth’s history, its surface was completely frozen. I’m not going to go into all of the details (because I had to return the book to the library), but the eventual thawing could have caused an important ‘outbreak’ of life! Walker is very talented at explaining things in a way that makes sense, without glossing over the important details and issues, and her descriptions are incredible (for a taste of her writing, check out my favourite passages below). I found Snowball Earth compulsively readable: I read it all in a single sitting (it’s not a super-long book), wanting to find out what all of these interesting people were doing. I’d highly, highly recommend this one to everyone.

Favourite Passages (all from Snowball Earth)
Though sea ice is gray when it first forms, it whitens year by year as its brine drains back into the sea. Even gray young ice is often dusted with white snow. But a frozen ocean is far from monochrome. Gashes of open seawater, created as the pack ice is ripped apart by wind and weather, expose the deep turquoise roots of the floating sea ice. And the dark ocean reflects in the clouds, streaking them the color or a bruise. “Water sky,” this is called, and polar sailors have long used it as a clue for where to point their ship next as they navigate perilously through the pack.

Spend long enough in the Artic, and you will develop your own definition of a bad fly day. According to Paul, a bad fly day is when you can hit your arm once and find a hundred corpses in your hand. On bad fly days, mosquitos whir and whine around your head in a dense claustrophobic cloud. Blackflies crawl everywhere on your clothes and skin, and into every crevice. To avoid inhaling them, you have to breathe through your teeth. If you run your hand through your hair, it comes back greasy and bloody. At the end of a bad fly day, you empty your pockets of globs of dead and half-dead flies. They have crept up your wrist, down your neck, under your belt, down the tops of your boots. On bad fly days, you soak yourself with industrial strength Repex, the repellent of choice. Repex doesn’t keep the flies way, but it stops them from biting. it lasts two or three hours. On bad fly days you don’t have to be reminded to reapply. In the Canadian Artic, between the fine few weeks of June and the return of winter in late August, every day that is not freezing cold or blasted with wind is a bad fly day.

Relationships among geologists are intense. By its nature, geology involves traveling with your colleafues to remote places, working long, hard hours in sparse conditions, living on top of one another and away from other people for weeks on end, having little contact with the outside world. Think of submarine crews, or Antartic explorers. Think of throwing obsessive, opinonated people together in places that they can’t easily leave. Their personalities become magnified. They bond or they break.

One partygoer, peering over his shoulders, asked if [the bacteria] liked beer. Joe promptly applied a drop of Foster’s lager to one side of the breaker, and then flipped the manget to make that side “south.” The bacteria galloped toward the spreading yellow liquid, but as soon as they tasted it, they turned tail. Australian bacteria apparently do not like beer. Later, Joe tested the northern bacteria in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. The American bacteria showed no inclination to turn tail at the Foster’s-water interface. They swam directly into the beer, and promptly perished. “They died happy,” says Joe. American bacteria, unlike Australian, had no idea when to call it a day.

Paul wound his way hurriedly down the canyon on the sandy river floor, dodging the rocks and branches swept there by an old flash flood. Up ahead his lights picked out a thick black log, maybe nine feet long, lying in the sand. The Toyota could handle that, no problem. But at the last minute Paul swerved around it, striking what might have been a glancing blow. The log had seemed to twitch as he passed.
He was intrigued. He slowly backed up, craning his neck to see the scene illuminated by his white taillights. The log had vanished. No, it was standing up, and heading toward the vehicle, fast. It was chest high, four a half feet above the ground, just about the height of the Toyota’s open window. Now Paul could see that it had curious yellow rings the length of its body. It was a zebra snake, a western barred spitting cobra. It had spread its black hood angrily around its face and ot looked unnervingly in the wing mirror. Paul remembers wanting to laugh. This was like the T. rex scene that appeared in Jurassic Park, reflected above a warning that “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
But he also knew that zebra snakes were deadly. The toxin would quickly paralyze his muscles, and shut down his breathing. He had no serum as an antidote, since serum has to be kept cool and Paul had no refrigerator. Without immediate artificial respiration, he would suffocate. If someone pumped his lungs with their own air constantly while he was rushed back along these twisting canyons, in the dark, out along the bush tracks to the nearest village and then on and on to a town that perhaps had a hospital, he might survive without too much brain damage. Zebra snakes don’t even need to bite you. They are called spitting cobras for a reason. Normally they’re excessively shy, but when aroused they can spit their cytotoxic venom six feet or more. This one was clearly aroused, and Paul hastily rolled up his window.
The snake book in the passenger door of Paul’s Toyota contains many lurid pictures. Alongside the featured snakes from southern Africa, you can see the human effects of their venom: rotten arms, legs and hands, attached to bodies with pained, hopeless faces; limbs and torsos with puncture points surrounded by skin taht is black, blue, yellow, sowllen, pitted and blotched. “Don’t read the snake book,” Paul says to every newcomer, to first-time field workers and naive young graduate students. “It will only give you nightmares.” Everybody immediately opens the book and stares.
You are told, when you first come to Namibia, never to unroll your sleeping bag until the very last minute, just before you climb in. Each morning, when you wriggle out of the baf, you immediately bind it into a tight bundle. Everybody knows about the sleeping bag unrolled at Khorixas rest camp by an unwary student, about the zebra snake that slid inside during the day and was there waiting for him when he retired to his tent. He survived, just, since he was relatively close to town. Then you’re camping out in the remoter parts of the Namibian desert, you don’t need to hear this story twice.

The Goose Girl (thoughts)

Ask and ye shall receive! Since so many of you seem curious about my ‘dissenting’ review, here we go. This is my third Once Upon a Time read, and it’s one I have distinctly mixed feelings about. In fact, since I know how popular it’s been in the OUaT challenge, I went and read everyone else’s reviews before writing my own. But now I’m back, and I’m a little nervous about explaining my thoughts since I think they go against the general tendency (and I know that the author is aware of book blogs, which makes it worse, and she seems like such a nice/cool person and she had to be taught at home for part of high school because of chronic fatigue, which is just like me except I was diagnosed w/ fibromyalgia, and I love discovering people who sucessfully manage their CFS/fibro, but I can’t lie, can I?).

Here goes. I love fairy tales-I love reading the originals, I love retellings, I love stories about ‘faeries’ that aren’t anything like the Grimm Brothers. I also appreciate the YA genre: I don’t automatically assume that the writing is somehow Less Serious. I wanted to say that first, so you can keep it in mind as you read the rest.

At the pure story level, I enjoyed this book; it took about a hundred pages to get going, but that doesn’t really bother me, and I thought it was interesting to see how Ani, the dethroned princess, grew as a person and went about trying to reclaim her place. I like the world Hale has created for the fairy tales, with all of its little rituals and traditions and clothing (have I mentioned I love fantasy? the kind of fantasy that creates whole new worlds, and cultures, and sometimes reads like an anthropology book?). I liked the idea of Ani talking with birds and her horse (and since I knew the original fairy tale, I knew what was coming with the horse…but as a kid, I would have stopped reading the book right there. I had a strict ‘no animals harmed’ policy towards movies and books.), and I appreciated that Hale made the geese mean (because they are. Geese attacked me when I was four and my sister was two, and my mom had to put us up on top of the car to save us. But I digress.). And I thought that Ani’s love interest was pretty adorable.

All of that being said, this book disappointed me. I think I was expecting more layers and depths, more like The Book of Lost Things or The Stolen Child or The Wee Free Men (which somehow I never got around to reviewing, so I found a review to link to). The Goose Girl never challenged me: Ani did all of the things she was supposed to, and all of the other characters behaved perfectly consistently with their good or bad labels (there are two exceptions: Conrad, the goose boy and a relatively minor one, and Ani’s aunt in the beginning, whom I loved and kept wishing would pop up again with her ambiguity, but she never did). It somehow didn’t capture the je ne sais quo (yes, I realise how pretentious that sounds, but I couldn’t think of an English alternative) about fairy tales that gives you goosebumps and makes you look at forests a bit more suspiciously. Instead, this was entertaining fluff, and while I appreciate fluff, I wouldn’t rush out and tell anyone that they had to read it right away.

So, perhaps I can chalk it up high expectations. I certainly wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading this book, but I wouldn’t encourage them either. It was a rather average read…even the early Harry Potter books had a bit more complexity that this.

Favourite Passages
When Ani shadowed Gilsa into the coop anyway, Gilsa slapped her hands away from the task and then asked her what the chickens were saying.
“‘People are here to take the eggs’ and so on. Chickens aren’t the best conversationalists.”
“I’m glad,” said Gilsa. “Makes me feel better about eating them.”

Ani stood. “We came back here to beg for your help, and before I even ask you’re waiting for me at the door.”

Enchantment (thoughts)

I read this over a month ago, as my first Once Upon a Time Challenge read. And look: the challenge is over halfway over and this is my first review. Whoops! (In my defense, I have another OUaT review waiting in the drafts folder until I get up the courage to disagree with most of the blogosphere.) And now I’m writing with the Bookworms Carnival in mind. So this review is probably different from what I would have written right after I finished, but sometimes it might be good for things to percolate for awhile!

I bookmooched Enchantment awhile ago, because Orson Scott Card is one of Chris’favourite authors, and Chris has wonderful taste. So I bothered Chris into giving me a list of good Card books that aren’t sci-fi, and when I read that Enchantment is retelling of Sleeping Beauty (one of my favourite fairy tales) and it’s got a big Eastern Europe influence (one of my favourite places), I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist.

What Chris didn’t know, is that if he had told me it also involved time travel and the Middle Ages (two of my other favourite things), I would have read the book the very next day. But that’s ok, because when I finally did get to it, I got to be surprised! While young Ivan (in case you’re curious, the ‘authentic’ way to pronounce that is Ee-VAHN, with the emphasis on the second syllable, and I think it’s much nicer sounding!) is staying with some cousins in Ukraine (his parents try to get exit visas to leave the Soviet Union for the US), he stumbles across a mysterious meadow that haunts him for years afterward. Meanwhile, his father’s enjoyment of old Slavic languages transfers to Ivan, who ends up going to grad school and studying, among others, Old Church Slavonic. By the time he’s ready to his PhD, the Soviet Union has disintegrated, so he goes back to Ukraine for his dissertation research.

And that’s when the story really starts! He goes back to the meadow and ends up waking a sleeping princess, Katerina, who then takes him back to her land, which turns out to be a journey through time instead of space. There’s the old witch Baba Yaga (BAH-bah yi-GAH, if you want to be authentic), who I was glad to see from all of my Russian fairy tale readings (children’s lit is great for learning a foreign language!), and Card makes her a deliciously evil villain. There’s also a bear god, and some other gods, and it’s all a ton of fun. The reason I’d consider this urban fantasy is because it’s the ‘normal’ world, just with magic grafted on top. What I found interesting about this book, compared to other urban fantasy, is that much if it actually historical urban fantasy! In Katerina’s time, not only is Baba Yaga a very powerful witch, but there’s magic in the blood of royalty. And normal people accept all of this as a matter of course: one of the book’s subthemes is Christianity vs. paganism, and in the pagan mindset most of the villagers still have, there isn’t anything unbelievable about Katerina being saved by her aunts’ magic from Baba Yaga’s death spell by having to sleep until a man comes and kisses her. The book also goes back to Ivan’s time, though, and it turns out there’s still magic in the present, that’s been passed down since pagan times from mother to daughter or aunt to niece. And it still works, although power on the scale of Baba Yaga’s is unheard of. In the present day, it’s more like charms than anything! The other aspect that makes this urban fantasy is the presence of gods in everyday life, just going about their business. I can’t talk about it too much, because it’d give away one of the story’s surprises, but it’s rather like how Gaiman treats gods in American Gods or Anansi Boys, which I thought was neat! (They’re not the centerpiece of the story, though, like in those two Gaiman books; here they’re just a sideline) All of these aspects made the book one I really enjoyed.

In the interests of honesty, however, a few things bothered me. First, Ivan speaks Katerina’s language because he studied Old Church Slavonic (and Scott is careful to add that Ivan and his father only spoke Old Church Slavonic for an entire year for fun). While I’ll accept that, in interests of the story, as the book progresses the way Ivan talks (supposedly in Old Church Slavonic) becomes pretty modern, which sometimes snapped me out of the story. Then, there’s Katerina’s name. Now, Scott obviously did research on Russian names for the book, since he gets the nicknames right. But in Russian, the name is Ekaterina, and the nickname is Katya. I knew a bunch of Katyas when I studied abroad, an Ekterina (professor) but never one Katerina. I think it especially bothered me, because Scott did everything else right, lol. But if you’re not a student of Eastern European languages, it shouldn’t bother you. I also found myself rolling my eyes at parts when Card’s obvious personal beliefs intruded upon the characters’ thoughts and dialogue…they felt a bit fake and tended to simplify complex issues (”No, Father. You don’t have faith in a rational universe. This is a unverse where nothing can move faster than the utterly arbitrary speed of 186,000 miles per second, where feathers and rocks fall at the same speed in a vacuum, where a measurable but unexplainable force called gravity binds people to planets and planets to stars, and where a butterfly’s wing in China might cause a hurrican in the Caribbean. But you have faith in all this incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo which you don’t beginto understand, solely because the priest of the establish church of intellectuals have declared these to be immutable laws and you, being a faithful supplicant at their altar, don’t even think to question them.” Now, I don’t blindly accept everything science says, but I wouldn’t call the scientific method mumbo-jumbo.). And the last thing: the final chapter. It wraps things up in a cutesy-cutesy way, and while part of me enjoyed it, another part was having sugar overload.

Ok, so now that my nit-picking is out of the way, I truly urge everyone who enjoys fairy tales to go read this one! Scott reimagines the story in a complex and interesting way, and his plot never slows down. And it’s full of Old Country magic! Thanks to Chris for recommending this to me.

Favourite Passages
He came upon it in the midst of a forest so old that there was little underbrush-the canopy of leaves overhead was so dense that it was perpetually dusk at ground level, and nothing but a few hardy grasses and vines could thrive. So it felt as if you could see forever between the tree trunks, until finally enough trunks blocked the way or it grew dark and murky enough that you could no longer see. The ground was carpeted with leaves so thick that it made the forest floor almost like a trampoline.In vino veritas.”

Only when he was belted into his seat and the plane pulled back from the gate did it occur to him why he felt so free. Coming to America, all the burden of his parents’ hopes and dreams had been put onto his shoulders. Now he was heading back to Russia, where he had not had such burdens, or at least had not been aware of them. Russian might have been a place of repression for most people, but for him, as a child, it was a place of freedom, as America had never been.

In this moment, Ivan loved these people and this place. Not the way Katerina loved them, because she knew each one and all their stories from childhood on; Ivan loved them as a whole, as a group, as a community.

Katerina could hardly bring herself to eat supper that night. Not that she wasn’t hungry-she was. But they had come so close to dying. The food here was already strange. None of it looked like anything. Everything was flavored with something else, so nothing tasted like itself. She hadn’t really had much of an appetite since she left Sophia’s house.

“I cast a spell of Truth on the house,” said Esther. “It’s very simply, really. It makes people willing to act according to what they believe. To say what’s in their hearts, regardless of shame. It doesn’t change what they feel, what they want. It just helps…loosen them up.”
“You needed magic for that? Wine has been around for centuries.

Death by Black Hole (thoughts)

I figured I might as well keep up the theme of “non-fiction I like” for a day or two! Don’t worry if you’re not a non-fiction kind of person: tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Enchantment in order to have a submission for May’s Bookworm Carnival, whose theme is “Urban Fantasy.” You have until Friday to e-mail your submission to srf at soundchaser dot org. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist who writes a monthly column in Natural History about the universe. Death by Black Holecollects forty-two of these essays, which cover fascinating topics, from black holes to the first few seconds of the universe to light to stardust to more. This is the kind of book that will give you endless cocktail conversation starters…”Did you know that the sun doesn’t always rise in the east and set in the west?” “Did you know that Kodak has an entire research division devoted to developing film for astrophysicists?” “Have you ever heard of a stellar nursery? No, I mean the kind where stars are born.” “Do you know exactly why physicists say we’re all made from stardust?” “Do you agree with the Copernican principle?” “Did you know it’s possible that a comet named Apophis might hit the Pacific Ocean in 2036, obliterating America’s West Coast?” “Do you know why we call the timepiece strapped around your wrist a ‘watch’?”

Ok, I’m sure that if you used these all at once, you’d come off as insufferable. But if you just talk about one or two, I’ll bet you’ll be fascinating. And just so it doesn’t torment you, I’m going to answer a few of these questions (but to really understand it, you should read the book). Watches were invented when the British government called for a reliable timepiece so that their navy could navigate reliably. When John Harrison finally did invent them, they were considered as important to a ship as the sailor who stands watch in the ship’s bow. So, they called it a ‘watch.’ The Copernican principle is “in the absence of dogma and data, it is safer to be guided by the notion that we are not special.” For some reason, the way that it’s worded makes me laugh every time I read it! And the reason we’re all made of stardust is that all elements other than hydrogen were originally created in stars. Eventually, the stars exploded, scattering (among other things) carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen throughout the universe. People, and everything around us, can all be broken into elements, so at our deepest level, we’ve been created by stars. And stellar nurseries are big clouds of gas floating around in the universe; eventually, conditions trigger some of the gas to compress, forming baby stars.

In case you can’t tell, I really enjoyed this book. I knew next to nothing about space going into it, and Tyson explains both the more complicated science and the simpler stuff in a way I could easily understand. The best part, though, was that Tyson is obviously still in awe of space, and he brings that to the reader. Now, I have a sudden passion for astronomy, and I’ve been talking my family’s ear off about it (the above paragraphs give you a taste of what they’ve been hearing). The only drawback was Tyson’s occasional attempts at humour; I think that jokes that might work in a lecture, or a conversation, don’t always translate well to the written page (I’ve noticed a tendency among popular science writers to include more than their share of bad jokes). But that didn’t get in the way of the science involved, and towards the end Tyson broke out some truly amusing stories, including one about The Titanic. Apparently, the night sky after the Titanic has sunk is all wrong, and Tyson had been bothered by it for years, especially since the director took such pains with things like the correct dinnerware. Finally, Tyson finds himself at a dinner with the director, James Cameron:

What better occasion to tell him of his errant ways with the Titanicsky. So after I whined for ten minutes on the subject, he replied, “The film, worldwide, has grossed over a billion dollars. Imagine how much more money it would have made had I gotten the night sky correct!” I have never before been so politely, yet thoroughly, silenced. I meekly returned to my appetizer, mildly embarrassed for having raised the issue. Two months later, a phone call comes to my planetarium office. It was a computer visualization expert from a post-production unit for James Cameron. He said that for their reissue of the film Titanic, in a Special Collector’s Edition, they would be restoring some scenes and he was told I may have an accurate night sky they might want to use for this edition. Sure enough, I generated the right image of the night sky for every possible direction that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio could turn their heads while the ship sank.

Ok, I just want to share one more story: it’s a short one, I promise:

A few years ago I got a phone call from a kareting executive who wanted to light up the Moon with the logo of her company. She wanted to know how she might proceed. After slamming down the phone, I called her back and politely explained why it was a bad idea.

Can you even imagine the thought process that went into that phone call?! lol

Go read this book: the essays are usually around six or seven pages, so it’s easy to find a stopping point. Afterwards, I guarantee you’ll find yourself glancing up at the night sky a bit more often, and impressing strangers at parties!

Favourite Passages
The history of human discovery is characterized by the boundless desire to extend the senses beyond our inborn limits.

Scientists cannot claim to be on the research frontier unless on thing or another baffles them. Bafflement drives discovery.

In the twentieth century, astrophysicsts in the United States discovered galaxies, the expanding of the universe, the nature of supernovas, quasars, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of the elements, the cosmic microwave background, and most of the known planets in orbit around solar systems other than our own. Although the Russians reached one or two places before us, we sent space probes to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. American probes have also landed on Mars and on the asteroid Eros. And American astronauts have walked on the Moon. Nowadays most Americans take all this for granted, which is practically a working definition of culture: something everyone does or knows about, but no longer actively notices. …Snobby people from other countries like to make fun of the U.S. for its abbreviated history and its uncouth culture, particularly compared with the millenial legacies from Europe, Africa, and Asia. But 500 years from now historians will surely see the twentieth century as the American century-the one in which American discoveries in science and technology rank high among the world’s list of treasured achievements.

If you’re not swayed by the academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery-the frontier that drives the economies of the future-would be incalculable. I don’t want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to be taught that anything they don’t understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capability. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don’t understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

Link Love…

just a brief interruption to bring your attention to the latest edition of Estella (and it is so very awesome) and this week’s pick for “blog that makes Eva’s Mondays better” (yep, I’m a day late. just pretend)! This week is Nikki of Keep This on the DL. She’s a military spouse living in Italy (and her dad was in the Air Force too! and we Air Force brats must stick together!), she’s been doing a serial feature on how she met her husband that is too adorable for words, then there are the ‘muffin juice’ stories about a less-than-stellar coworker that make it dangerous to drink things around my keyboard, and of course she talks about books too. AND, she’s exactly two years and two days older than me, which is pretty cool. And, she did the meme I tagged her for already even though her parents are visiting and she has a broken foot. So go visit her if you haven’t before!

And sorry about the multiple posts in one day thing…again. I forget to include these links earlier, and I thought this was better than editing my post. But definitely go read my attempt below to browbeat you into reading a couple books if you haven’t already!

Two Awesome Non-Fiction Books You Should Buy/Borrow Immediately (News of a Kidnapping and Will Storr vs. the Supernatural)

Did I get your attention with that title? I think it might be my longest ever! After yesterday’s somewhat downer of a review (and a few lukewarm reviews hanging out in my drafts section), I decided I wanted to be perky! And the following two books are ones that I read in San Antonio (when I had limited internet), and that I keep meaning to review, because they’re both so incredibly perfect, in their own very different ways. Get ready for a bunch of exclamation points and fawning adjectives!

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Did you know that Marquez wrote non-fiction? Because I didn’t; I even managed to mooch this book thinking it was a novel about the Colombian guerrilla fighters. But nope: it turns out that Marquez was a reporter a long time ago, and he’s ‘returned to his roots’ to tell the story of several Colombians kidnapped by Pablo Escabar’s forces (in case you’re thinking “Um, Pablo who?” I didn’t know who he was before this book either; he was the head of the Medellin cartel and the Colombian government’s most wanted man in 1990). I’ll let Marquez tell you how the book came about…

In October 1993, Maruja Pachon and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, suggested I write a book about her abduction and six-month captivity, and his persistent efforts to obtain her relase. I was already well into the first draft when we realized it was impossible to seperate her kidnapping from nine other abductions that occurred at the same time in Colombia. They were not, in fact, ten distinct abductions-as it had seemed at first-but a single collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose. This belated realization obliged us to begin again with a different structure and spirit so that all the protagonists would have their well-defined identities, their own realities. It was a technical solution to a labyrinthine narrative that in its original form would have been confused and interminable….I interviewed all the protagonists I could, and in each of them I found the same generous willingness to root through their memories and reopen wounds they perhaps preferred to forget.

This is part of the foreword to the book, and right after that Marquez lets the reader know which two hostages don’t survive their imprisonment (personally, I think this helped me read the book, since I could emotionally distance myself from those two and cheer for all of the others). While it sounds like it must be depressing and dreary, I think it’s actually a triumphant book: the victims’ attempts to find normalacy, their families’ unwavering fights for their freedom…Marquez has captured all of the best of human nature. You’ll learn a little bit about Colombian politics, but this is a book about people, not policy, so it never drags. And for those of you who don’t go near Marquez because you’re allergic to magical realism, let me assure you that his non-fiction style is splendidly straight forward. Not to mention, think of how cool you’ll be the next time someone mentions One Hundred Years of Solitude and you can say “Oh yes, that was an amazing work, but I feel he’s at his best when he’s capturing the emotions of actual people. Have you read News of a Kidnapping?” And did I mention Edith Grossman, the preeminent Spanish to English translator, did this one? Ok-I’ve busted out all of my big guns, and now I just hope you’ll go get a copy.

Will Storr vs. the Supernatural by Will Storr
This one is much more playful, due to its subject matter and the author’s general irreverence. Will Storr is a British journalist who did a feature on an American ‘demonologist’ for a journal. Rather skeptical, he ends up having some spooky experiences that lead him on a quest to find out if ghosts are real. In fact, he considers this a rather pressing question, because as a rational atheist raised Catholic, he worries that

if I accept that ghosts do exist, then the hard walls of my straightforward and rational world fall down likek colossal reality dominos. Because if we don’t die when we die, then nothing is as it seems and everything is up for questioning. All logic is gone. The priests, with all their smoke, spells and bad news, could turn out to be right after all. There could be an afterlife, and if there is, that means there could be angels and demons and heaven and hell and rules of right and wrong by which I should be living.

The book is about his contact with various people who claim to know/be in contact with/etc. ghosts or demons. It’s great, because he’s a total cynic, and when people are whacky he tells you, which makes his genuinely disturbing moments all the creepier. And he’s really funny:

Two weeks ago I was at my parents’ house, perusing my brother’s Web User. And as I clicked, I noticed that the online home of a real-life ghostbuster had been awarded ‘Website of the Month.’ His site looked fantastic. Encyclopaedic, grandiose, and full of gothic kitsch and portentous admonitions about divination and devil worship. This, I thought, would make a brilliant story. It’d be fantastic, because it concerns an American eccentric, and American eccentrics are great. They’re more sincere, unabashed and convinced in their madness than any other eccentrics in the world. And they hilarious things like, ‘Rule number one is don’t freak out.’

That kind of captures his tongue-in-cheek style: there are a ton of one-liners in the book that had my actually laughing out loud (and unfortunately quoting them here would be pointless, because they need context). At the same time, his descriptions of some of the things he witness, and his recountings of some ghost stories he hears, gave me goosebumps. What more can I ask of a book? It made me ponder spirituality, burst out laughing, and be afraid of the dark all at the same time. It reminded me of when I was little, and I’d go to a slumber party and we’d all start telling scary stories to the point that we were too afraid to turn out the lights or get out of our sleeping bags: it was a delicious kind of fear, though, because of course it wasn’t quite real. I think everyone who ever had that kind of sleepover should go read this book; in fact, just reviewing it has made me want to reread it all over again. One word of advice, though: don’t read it at night unless you’re equipped with an understanding sleeping partner or a nightlight!

Favourite Passages (Marquez)
It was a providential visit for Juan Vitta [one of the victims whose illness required the guerillas to bring in a doctor], not because of the diagnosis-severe stress-but for the good it did him as a passionate reader. The only treatment the doctor prescribed was a dose of decent reading-just the opposite of the political news Dr. Prisco Lopera was in the habit of bringing, which for captives was like a potion capable of killing the healthiest of men.

Another guard had taken the twenty thousand pesos Pacho [a victim] had in his pocket on the day of the kidnapping, but as compensation he promised to bring him anything he asked for, books in particular: several by Milan Kundera, Crime and Punishment, the biography of General Santander de Pilar Moreno de Angel. Pacho may be the only Colombian of his generation who had heard of Jose Maria Vargas Vila, the world’s most popular Colombian writer at the turn of the century, and he was moved to tears by his books. He read almost all of them, lifted for him by one of the guards from his grandfather’s library.

There was little the judicial system could do. Judges and magistrates, whose low salaries were barely enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the education of their children, faced an insoluble dilemma: Either they sold themselves to the drug traffickers, or they were killed. The admirable and heartbreaking fact is that many chose death.

Favourite Passages (Storr)
I’m in a roadside diner somewhere on the outskirts of Philadelphia, USA. Everything that just jumped into your head when you read the words ‘roadside diner’ and ‘USA’ is actually here. There’s a run-to-fat waitress with a heart of gold and a hairy chin, chewing gum and taking orders for cawfee. There are little, table-top jukeboxes with slots for quarters and multiple Elvis options. There’s a handsome stubbly man, who looks like he’s on the run from the law, sitting at the counter, chewing a toothpick and considering his next move. Any minute now, he’s probably going to start a fight with the serial killer in the next booth.

“You could call it multiple personality if you want,” says Dr. Mark. “We’ve all got the capacity to have the,”
There’s a silence. I put my tea down on the floor between my feet. “I don’t have multiple personalities,” I say.
“Try a little trick for me,” he sais. “How are you going to get home from here?”
“I’m going to cycle,” I say.
“Well, as you’re cycling home, imagine a version A and a version B of yourself and have a conversation in your head beween them. You know, like: What are you doing tonight? Well, I thought I might write up this interview. Well, you could, but there’s some great telly on. I know, but I have a lot to get through. Carry on like that for an hour and see where you end up. I promise you you’ll scare yourself.”
Dr Mark tells me that, before long, the first voice will become more extrovert, more outgoing and prefer art and German techno. The second voice will be quieter, more nervous and likes cience and South American heavy metal. In other words, they will develop distinct and consistent personalities of their own.

I watch Dave creep up the track and, as the dangerous dark folds in around him, it strikes me that everybody needs a Satanist. Because knowing whose fault it is can be a great comfort. It helps define you, knowing who you’re not. It’s reassuring. Especially if you’re an anti-Satanist vigilante or, indeed, a Christian. And then it occurs to me that having enemies can also be exciting. The thrill of having the spicy breath of the dark side prickling the skin on the back of your neck can be seductive and thrilling and vital. Isn’t that one of the reasons why we want to believe in the supernatural, in the devil and in evil and in ghosts? Because their very presence in our days makes our lives feel less ordinary? And the fact that they never quite get you has the perverse effect of making you feel safer.

I’m convinced that an eleven-year-old couldn’t fool a mother of four, her neighbours and all those journalists and miscellaneous strangers that a ghost was causing chaos, when it was actually her. Nobody could. If you, as a child, threw a Lego brick at a houseguest’s head and blamed it on a poltergeist, there wouldn’t be a mother on earth that would fall for it. Not even once.

And then I remember what I’ve done. I close my eyes and wish, wish I hadn’t. Earlier on, I insisted that David let me sleep upstairs, tonight, in the ‘haunted room.’ I sit and sulk at myself quietly for a time.