Book Review: Miss Brooks Loves Books! (And I Don’t)

Allow me to introduce my new friend, Missy.

She hates books too.

She can’t understand why Miss Brooks, the school librarian, is so enthusiastic about them. They’re either too pink, too fluffy or just plain sappy. What’s a discerning non-reader to do when everyone around her can’t get enough of wild things, runaway bears and very hungry caterpillars? None of these things seem to hold any interest for Missy.

The problem’s compounded when Miss Brooks announces that Book Week is imminent. Everyone is expected to make their own costume and tell the rest of the class what they love most about their favorite book. Poor Missy insists that she’ll never find a book she loves, but the undaunted Miss Brooks sends her home with a big pile of books to choose from.

With a little help from her mom, Missy makes one last effort to find a book she can love, but things aren’t looking good.

“You’re as stubborn as a wart,” her mother exclaims.

Aha! Warts!

Suddenly inspired, Missy finally discovers a book she can love. No boring princesses or ballet dancers to be found—an ugly, wart-ridden ogre is what she’s looking for! Can you guess which book Missy chose?

Miss Brooks Loves Books! (And I Don’t) is a delightful picture book, artfully blending Barbara Bottner’s pitch perfect prose with Michael Emberley’s quirky, detailed illustrations (just see how many literary references you can spot with each costume Miss Brooks wears).

It can take a while for some young readers to find that one book that ignites their passion for reading. As a parent or teacher it can be a little frustrating when tried and trusted classics fail to have the desired effect, but it’s important to maintain a sense of optimism about the process and continue to offer encouragement to the reluctant reader. An open-minded approach to the process of matching the right book to the right child can often work wonders. Missy had no interest in princesses and ponies—it took a gross and yucky character like Shrek (did you guess?) to reveal her true passion for reading.

Here’s to more school librarians of Miss Brooks’s caliber!

Miss Brooks Loves Books! (And I Don’t) is written by Barbara Bottner and illustrated by Michael Emberley. Hardcover edition published in March 2010 by Knopf Books for Young Readers.

I Have Piles

Yes, I have piles.

No, not those kinds of piles!

The piles I’m talking about are those strategically positioned towers of reading material, some leaning a little more precariously than others. Here a monolithic tower of novels, there a haphazard skyscraper dedicated to history, science and graphic design. There are also sprawling clusters of books, having long since succumbed to the force of gravity, where fiction and non-fiction peacefully co-exist with one another. A lone tome will occasionally generate enough escape velocity to leave its local group, usually turning up under the sofa or the bed when I least expect to find it.

Let’s see what we’ve got.

If I turn to my left, copies of Stephen L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games and Brian Loguidice & Matt Barton’s Vintage Games can be found supporting a mug. Yeah, I’m a computer & video game addict. I’ve been playing games long enough that I can still recall a time when the video game industry consisted of little more than disparate individuals who programmed games in their bedrooms, duplicated their own cassette tapes and sold them via mail order catalogs. We’ve certainly come a long way since then. Needless to say, I’m just as passionate about games now as I was back then; when I’m not playing them, I’m either reading about them or blogging about them over on another blog of mine.

If I turn to my right, we find an interesting cluster of reference books. The Chicago Manual of Style, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus and Merriam-Websters Dictionary of Synonyms all stand spine out on top of a desktop storage unit. The five greatest weapons in my writer’s arsenal. Sure, online dictionaries are great for a quick spell check (definr being my favorite), but nothing beats a weightier tome for accuracy and detail. If I had to pick out a particular favorite, it would have to be Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. I remain forever fascinated by the evolution and etymology of words and phrases, particularly (as an Anglo-American) the differences between American English and British English. As well as being useful for solving various wordy conundrums, it’s just plain fun to thumb through and read articles at random.

Next to those heavyweights is a stack that’s only really there in lieu of a bookend. It currently consists of Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite, Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook, Kristopher B. Jones’s Search Engine Optimization, Eric Meyer’s Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Mayer on CSS. Plus a couple of computer programming books too boring to mention. Spunk & Bite is a great read—it’s basically the antithesis of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, encouraging modern writers to trash the stuffy conventions of yestercentury and inject some contemporary zest into their work. Highly recommended, particularly if you’re a fellow blogger.

Okay, time to leave the confines of the office and move out into the living room, which is where we’ll find the more interesting piles.

The dominant pile is built upon a foot-high foundation of  magazines, largely comprising Wired, Edge (a British video game magazine), The Radio Times (the BBC’s television & radio listings magazine, which mum will occasionally send over from England) and a variety of film industry/screenwriting magazines. A rather odd assortment of books sits on top of them, including Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, which does a great job of illustrating how the world’s best writers have tackled various aspects of writing; Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, which I must confess to not having read, despite my love of all things Auster; Philip Matyszak’s Ancient Athens on 5 Drachmas a Day, a nifty bite-sized travel guide to Ancient Athens; Regina Brooks’s Writing Great Books for Young Adults, sage advice from one of the industry’s top literary agents; William J. Broad’s The Oracle, more Greek history; Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, instigator of the current trend for classic/geek mash-ups; Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw, highly literate fantasy from one of the greatest living writers of our time; and John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, a collection of blog posts from Whatever, Scalzi’s witty, acerbic blog.

Yes, and that’s just some of the books in that pile.

Tucked behind that we have a smaller, less demanding pile that contains an equally random mixture: Peter Coles’s Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction, one of a dozen books in the VSI series I picked up when I lasted visited the UK—they’re little pocket-sized primers to just about every academic subject you can think of; Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor and How to Read Novels Like a Professor, both of which covertly act as an introduction to literary theory and encourage the academic study of literature—good to see these appearing on school reading lists; Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, mind-bending hard science-fiction from one of Australia’s finest writers—such a pity most of his stuff has never been printed in the States; The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, my all time favorite anthology series, edited by the awesome Dave Eggers; The Best American Travel Writing 2008, edited by Anthony Bourdain; Richard N. Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute; and Audrey Niffenegger’s wonderful Her Fearful Symmetry.

Oh, there’s a copy of Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island stuffed down the side of the sofa. My wife and I will occasionally read passages to one another amidst gales of laughter.

Let’s move things into the bedroom, he said without any hint of innuendo. Naturally, the vast majority of books are not neatly arranged on the two bookcases contained therein. In fact, the bookcase on my side of the bed appears to contain more DVDs and Blu-rays than books. I tried putting books in it, I swear, but their combined weight caused them to collapse, so they’re now home to decidedly lighter fare. The books now live on the floor, in about four or five stacks. For now, we’ll just concern ourselves with a couple of the tallest:

King of the first mountain is Darryl Sloan’s Chion. Darryl’s been an online acquaintance of mine for some fifteen years. We met on a science fiction & fantasy discussion board on the Fidonet network (where lots of people used to hang out and chat online before the invention of the world wide web) and were mutually attracted to one another’s interest in writing. Darryl decided to pursue the self-publishing option and, to date, has published two young adult novels and a work of non-fiction that, if it were written by anyone else, I’d describe as “new age quackery”, but for Darryl’s sake I won’t describe at all. Anyway, I designed the original cover for Chion, which is well worth reading if you want a suspenseful slice of contemporary horror. Darryl now gives the digital edition of the book away for free.

Underneath that we have Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, a clever novel that blends fiction and memoir to unsettling effect ; Piers Paul Read’s The Templars, a solid historical account of the Templars that remains free of Dan Brown-esque bullshit; Christopher Priest’s The Separation, an awesome novel that explores the psychology of twins and doppelgängers, the unreliable narrator and how we go about recording history, all set against the backdrop of the Second World War II; Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a brooding family history in the vein of (although not quite as good as) The Crow Road; Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth; an ARC of Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle which I still haven’t read (an omission which will probably earn me a verbal slap from The Book Lady); Mark Z. Danielewski’s The House of Leaves, a wonderful piece of non-linear fiction that boldly experiments with the structure and presentation of the conventional novel; and Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, a pseudo historical based on the Rostov Ripper murders in the Soviet Union—looking forward to Ridley Scott’s film adaptation.

The adjacent stack comprises the following: The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, I never realized how deliciously dark and disturbing a lot of her work can be until I plowed my way through this; Surendra Verma’s The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball, detailing a geological phenomenon that’s puzzled scientists for almost a century; Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, a handful of harrowing eyewitness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster, which I felt compelled to read after playing the incredibly atmospheric STALKER: The Shadow of Chernobyl computer game; Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Other Stories; Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, which is even more of a literary mind-fuck than The House of Leaves; Maddox’s The Alphabet of Manliness, laugh-out-loud, over-the-top macho humor from one of the internet’s finest humor bloggers; Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which we all own just to look educated but have secretly never read; the two previous editions of The Best American Nonrequired Reading; The New Granta Book of the American Short Story edited by Richard Ford, yet another brick-sized anthology—I’m rather partial to the short story form; and Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers.

It goes without saying that these heaps of word-bundles represent just a fraction of the reading material lying around my house, but I thought I’d highlight some of the more interesting ones to give you an idea of my reading habits and the kinds of books I’ll be covering on this blog.

My name is Mark and those are my piles.