Remember a few posts back when I said the most promising book on my wishlist was See You Later by Christopher Pike?

Yes, my most promising book was a teenage novel that I read when I was twelve, but anyway, I put it on hold at the library. Yesterday, the librarian tells me that they have to cancel my hold as they don’t know whether this Christopher Pike novel has go to.

Insert sad face.

In any case, I can buy a copy for a penny plus seven dollars shipping on amazon if I really wanted to (I don’t, partly because amazon and partly because I don’t know whether this book is really worth seven and a penny plus the anxiety I get having things shipped from across the border [how long it takes, possibility of unexpected duty and handling fees, etc.]). But instead, I will just say to whoever misplaced (I’m going to think positive and assume this book was misplaced rather than stolen, which it very well might have been given the number of times I’ve gotten books out of the library only to come home and realize they weren’t scanned out properly) Christopher Pike’s See You Later, please find it and bring it back! Thirty-somethingers longing for their tween years are counting on you!

In the car, we were listening to Five Children and It. There’s a line about flying when you’re dreaming.

I’ve never dreamed of flying I said to Geoff. Have you?

Geoff nods.

That hardly seems fair. But if I were to fly in my dreams, I think it would be like a painting by Chagall. I would fly like a woman in a Chagall painting surrounded by colour.

Perhaps I’ll try to think of Chagall and flying before going to sleep tonight. Just to see what will happen.

Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa in the eighties and nineties, we didn’t have tweens. Well, we did, but when I was what would now be called a tween was called pre-teen or young adult. I was in my final year of high school, the now defunct year of OAC, when tween had made it’s way to Barrhaven, too late to wrap me up in it’s silly sounding label.

But, when I was a tween, the list to take out scary books from the school library was a mile and a half long. R.L. Stine‘s were for our younger siblings. We went for Christopher Pike, with his mixture of teens having sex before gruesomely dying. But before those, we all read the same collection of scary stories, whose pictures were worse than the words themselves: Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.

Tesfa and I were at a book sale on Saturday and there I found and purchased for the sum of twenty five cents:

Excellent. Now Tesfa can be as traumatized as all of us were back in 1991. I didn’t let her look at it yet though. Possibly the pictures are a teensy bit too much for a five year old with as overactive an imagination as Tesfa has.

Syria: In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa

Synopsis: (from amazon) In 1980s Syria, a young Muslim girl lives a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents. Her three aunts—the pious Maryam, the liberal Safaa, and the free-spirited Marwa—raise her with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant.

Soon the high walls of the family home are no longer able to protect the girl from the social and political　chaos outside. Witnessing the ruling dictatorship’s bloody campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, she is filled with hatred for the regime and becomes increasingly radical. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle, Bakr, she launches herself into a battle for her religion, her country, and ultimately, for her own future.

Thoughts: This is a book that seems more interesting in the abstract. It seems more interesting now that I’ve finished reading it than I did while reading it. I really felt tugged apart while reading it: I could describe this book as both fascinating and tedious. I don’t know whether it just doesn’t translate well or whether the style and content are simply at odds with the structure and layout of standard Western novels. It struck me at times as similar to an old-fashioned novel with an omniscient narrator, even though this is a story in the first-person singular.

There is a lot of talk about dreams (my most hated thing in books ever, but I know that in certain sects of Islam, dreams are given tremendous importance). There is a lot of waiting around. The internal voice of the narrator never gives much of a reason or justification for her radicalization; it seems to just happen one day almost beyond her control. The narrator’s character isn’t given much depth or agency. Of course, the lack of agency makes sense, being raising in a fundamental, religious household. But there is something lacking (in the novel or in the translation) to make this lack of agency compelling.

But I think I’ll still think about this book for a long time. So I guess in that sense, it succeeded.

Rating: 2.5/5

Previous Readings Around the World.

If you have any recommendations for boxes I haven’t crossed off yet, or any sort of “diverse” lit in general, tell me tell me TELL ME. Maybe by the end of the year, I’ll get all the boxes checked off.

Léonicka’s twitter feed linked to this outside one’s comfort zone bingo card:

Let’s see how I’m doing for 2014.

For comparison, here is my chart for all of 2013:

But back to 2014 so far, we can see I am pretty able-bodied, hetero-normative in my choices for books. I guess I’ll be working on that to try and get a bingo. And perhaps I’m cheating as some of the books are only partly their category, i.e. set in Asia and Africa, the books are split between places. But, here’s the list of books for 2014 thus far broken into categories:

Set in Asia:

Illustrated:

Writer of Colour:

POC MC:

Death/Sickness:

Mental Health:

Religion:

Diverse Non Fiction:

Bisexual MC:

Horror:

Set in Africa:

POC on cover:

Classic:

I promised a picture post, and it isn’t that much of one, and it isn’t even my picture (google image search from this flickr account), but it’s worth a thousand words nonetheless.

This was a book I used to read at my grandmother’s cottage. Debates have been had about what happened to it. My uncle says he gave it to me about fifteen years ago. I don’t think that happened. My mother thinks it did happen, but I put it in a box with some old textbooks and that box was thrown out during one of my parents’ renovations since they thought the box was my sister’s and my sister said to chuck it. I still don’t think any of this happened. My uncle did give me a puzzle he said I always used to do, which I’m pretty sure I’d never seen before in my life. That puzzle I have no clue where it ended up. I think that’s what everyone else is thinking about when they’re thinking about this book. Maybe one of my cousins has the book and is wondering whatever happened to the cat puzzle they liked.

Then I couldn’t remember what the book was called. I remembered the story (a Fin McCool one) and I remembered the publisher (Scholastic) but frustratingly didn’t remember the name. Then the nice people at librarything Name that Book forum helped me out, then a search of alibris, and blammo – I have my own copy again (and also twenty less dollars for a picture book that cost twenty cents or something to buy and I could have had for free if my family could come together and actually remember what happened to their copy in the first place).

And after all that – it only sort of holds up. Why doesn’t Fin’s wife have a name when she does all the thinking? Wikipedia tells me she actually has a name – Oona. Why doesn’t she have a name in the story? Why is she just referred to as Fin’s wife? It bothers me. But I read the story to Tesfa anyway because at least the wife is the smart one in the story and I liked the story when I was a kid.

So there’s a picture post for you. Sometimes books from the 1960s about Irish legends are not as awesome as we remember them to be.

Things are wet here. The lake that used to be my backyard is back. There is also snow that is sort-of-melting, with the melting part of that last hyphenated word being more wishful thinking than not. I think we’re still below freezing and cloudy, so the snow may not be melting for a while yet. And things. There are always things. Hopefully next week I can sit down and make about a change in my brain.

In the wetness, I have been re-reading. I re-read Plain Jane by Eve Horowitz. Last time we talked, I talked about over-reading through my tween years (not that they were called tween years then. I think in the early nineties, we still went by the moniker Young Adult). Then in high school, I slowed down. Ninth grade I read what was assigned for ninth grade English (all two books, pathetic), the two books for ninth grade French, and two other books (Fifth Business and a non-fiction book about the Holocaust, but I can’t remember which one.)

So I was not much of a reader in high school. Or much of a writer (see my About Me page for my failed foray into high school Writer’s Craft). I wanted to be a writer, yet didn’t write much. I suppose that’s like now. I want to be a writer, and although I write an exponential amount more than in high school, I likely still don’t write enough.

I didn’t stop reading entirely. Clearly I still went to the library because in either the spring of grade twelve or the spring of OAC, I took Plain Jane out of the library (I’d like to think it was OAC, because for some reason doing things in your last year of high school makes things more meaningful than doing things during a placeholder year). I don’t remember many books in high school, but this was a book that I left right by the front door so that the minute I came rushing home from the school bus, I could pick it up to read it (I rarely took the school bus in OAC, so likely this story happened in grade twelve. Boo.). It was the first time in a long time I remember enjoying a book.

So I read it again. I can see why seventeen/eighteen year old me liked it. I still do, but there’s a lot there that I can see my teenage self not really understanding why she liked it so much. I know I’m being vague and frustrating, but I guess around going off to university time, that’s a breaking-free time, like you don’t have to be this person anymore. You can be someone else. Not that I went to university and started writing more (pretty much the opposite being a math major). Not that I even went to university and changed that much (bigger changes happened more after I moved to Halifax in 2004).

Maybe I felt like I was in high school this week. As the pudgy, quiet, geeky kid with no self-esteem in high school, these have not been the most pleasant of feelings. But I still liked the book. It was comforting to re-experience something and not have it be a disappointment.

See earlier post here.

The last time I read and read and read and read, more for something to do than for enjoyment, was grades six, seven, and eight, when I was bored and without many friends, being an awkward and pudgy pre-teen. I guess I’m bored now too. I wasn’t so much last year, even when I had a longer day to fill with Tesfa away from eight-thiry to four, as opposed to now from eight to two. Writing isn’t as much of an intellectual exercise because I don’t know how to write intellectually taxing stories. Lately, I write straightforward ones, like my story about summer, if I could ever figure out an overarching conflict rather than the string of microconflicts that are keeping the story going forward right now.

I’m working on embracing the sameness. It doesn’t get green here until June. Maybe more sun will cheer me up. Maybe writing more stories of summer will trick my brain. I feel like I’m using all my brainpower deciding on children’s bicycles at the Wal-Mart and making small talk at the bus stop. I should pick some extreme books and work out my brain.

Or something.