thursday june 26
After a classmate's recent suicide, Clay Jensen comes home to find a package on his porch, with no return address. It contains cassette tapes with Hannah Baker's voice on them, explaining why she killed herself. Each of the thirteen stories on the cassettes belongs to a person who played a crucial role in Hannah's suicide.
The kicker is that everyone who receives the tapes is one of the reasons she killed herself. So what did Clay Jenkins, who loved Hannah, do to be on the receiving end of all that guilt?
Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher, brings together this tale of grief, love, and surviving high school, in a story of both compassion and blameful vengeance.
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wednesday june 25
The siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Stalingrad) by the Germans in 1941 has inspired many books. From literary novels like Helen Dunmore’s achingly beautiful The Siege or Debra Dean’s poignant The Madonnas of Leningrad, to military thrillers like David L. Robbins’ War of the Rats or the movie Enemy at the Gates, and of course many histories, the books try to bring to life the terrible struggle for survival during that winter of starvation.
David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, falls at the suspense end of the spectrum. The narrator, a writer, decides to interview his grandfather, Lev Beniov, about Lev’s experiences during World War II. Family legend has always said that Lev killed two Germans before he turned eighteen, but Lev’s grandson has never known the details. Now Lev tells him how life changed when he stole a knife from a dead German paratrooper.
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tuesday june 24
I'll be the first to admit that Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States sounds like a REALLY boring book. But as the Fourth of July approaches, humorist Bill Bryson aims to find out--with little known facts and stories--why American English is the way it is. For instance, he reveals why Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.
Bryson also explores American words and phrases such as firecracker, fit as a fiddle, and fly off the handle and ponders place names like Rabbit Hash, Kentucky and Two Egg, Florida.
It’s quite clear that Bryson is fascinated by the English language, just as I am. You might also want to read the prequel to Made in America called The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way or consult Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words as well as his latest book, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors.
friday june 20
'Homeschooling' takes on a whole new perspective. Canadian novelist and film critic David Gilmour recently published a book about his son's high school years and the creative way in which they dealt with the issues at hand. Gilmour's book, The Film Club, has received a good amount of press, and rightly so. Gilmour's son Jesse hated high school and his grades were heading for an all-time low. After much deliberation he and his father made a deal: Jesse could quit school as long as he agreed to watch three movies a week and discuss them with his Dad. Good idea/bad idea? A courageous idea, without a doubt.
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wednesday june 18
I got a nap yesterday. This might not sound like a big deal to most of you, but for me it was a momentous occasion. I don't get much sleep these days. My three-year-old daughter and six-month-old twin boys don't think it's a good idea, apparently. So when I managed to get all three of them down at the same time I ran to my bedroom and burrowed under the covers.
Of course, I was "rewarded" an hour and a half later when I went to get the boys out of their cribs and discovered that one of them had spit up and, well, let's just say had a "diaper leakage" problem all over his sheets. My daughter came in, took one look at her brother, and pronounced that he smelled disgusting and "needed to start going in the potty" like she does. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Apparently, unlike yours truly, author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor uses her daughter's naptimes for more adult pursuits. In Naptime Is the New Happy Hour: And Other Ways Toddlers Turn Your Life Upside Down, Wilder-Taylor discusses not only imbibing alcohol while your child(-ren) are sleeping, but also how to survive playdates, temper tantrums, and moms who swear their children never watch tv.
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Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why.
This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams.
It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.
Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe.
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I picked up Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.
Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more.
He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.
Pretty cool, huh?
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