The Mortal Instruments to Film
I finally watched City of Bones, the movie. I’ve been debating writing a review for it since I first watched it and have since watched it two more times.
I’m trying to figure it out – why it seems to just fall flat.
(For the record, despite my use of the marketing, I am still opposed to book and movie covers/posters featuring shirtless men. It seems so unnecessary and ridiculous. I see it and all I can think is ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’ in the most absurd voice that makes the song even more ironic than intended.)
Lily Collins did a great job. I have a crush on Jamie Campbell Bower, have since I heard him sing – then watching him in Camelot just set it in stone. He’s amazing, not just pretty. I’ve been giggling at Robert Sheehan since Misfits. Lena Heady is my hero. When have I not loved Jonathan Rhys Meyers? – I’m 30, so pretty much never. (The movie August Rush makes me swoon to no end.) So it’s not the cast.
The action sequences are brilliant. Even my Kung Fu self loves them. My I- Read-The-Book self loves them. They are grand and epic enough. The weapons are fantastic.
The graphics are great, the demons exciting and true to descriptions.
But something just didn’t quite work.
Then, I realized what it was:
The ending was all a muck. We gloss over Simon becoming a rat, we skip through Valentine’s castle. Jace is awake the whole time. The writers just gave up halfway through and quit trying to stay true to the book. They tried to wrap up 485 pages into a short teen flick of generic proportions when it should have been the introduction to something as grand as Harry Potter.
It fell flat. It brings forth the reminder: “Don’t judge a book by its movie.”
The movie isn’t bad per se, it just makes me sad. It could have been epic and instead it was a ‘pretty good date movie.’
Of course, Jamie Campbell Bower is still ever so pretty and makes it all worth it anyway. He also manages to radiate that he read the book and knows who Jace is supposed to be. Of course, I have no way of knowing if he read the books or not, but it makes me feel better thinking someone on set did. And if he didn’t, his performance is even more impressive.
The movie is a B+
I wanted it to be so much more.
The Crows of Pearblossom
A Weekly Low Down on Kids Books
Title: The Crows of Pearblossom
Author: Aldous Huxley
Illustrator: Sophie Blackall
I first bought this picture book simply because I wanted to raise my child to be literary and it was written by ALdous Huxley. Naturally, a literary child should be raised on the works of Huxley, naturally.
The first time I read it to kiddo, I remember being a little creeped out. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I had mommy hormones and it took the mother crow at least 297 missing eggs before she got upset about her lost babies. Maybe because father crow didn’t swoop down and kill the rattlesnake right away. To be honest, I have no idea, but I do know my kid must have picked up on whatever I was feeling and furrowed her little brow.
Nevertheless, we read it all the time now. It makes its emergence in the spring and summer and gets tucked back into the shelf during the fall and winter unless we’re on a bird or snake kick. It’s not that the book itself is set in any particular season, the illustrations are just sort of sunny and Owl doesn’t wear shirts, so of course it must be somewhat warm out.
I adore Sophie Blackall. I know I say this about a lot of authors and artists and people and things in general – but there just is no limit to how much a person can love and adore things. That’s the marvelous thing about love and adoration, it is limitless and unending.
Obviously, her artwork is fantastic. In addition to that, I think her ‘about the illustrator’ blurb in the dust jacket of the picture book is too adorable:
Sophie Blackall is the illustrator of Ruby’s Wish, the Ivy & Bean series, and many other picture books. Her father once arrived at a party as Aldous Huxley was leaving. They may or may not have crossed paths in the vestibule. She lives with her delightful children, an ambivalent cat, and several presumptuous squirrels in Brookly, New York.
Can someone please write something equally adorable for my author blurbs? I never seem to know what to say for them. Me – who writes endlessly and speaks just as often – has nothing to say. Not in any concise and witty manner, anyway.
Back to Huxley, he apparently wrote The Crows of Pearblossom for his niece in 1944. It wasn’t published until 1967 with Barbara Cooney as illustrator.
That edition looked like this and is now out of print:
Which means, if you see it laying around somewhere in a clearance rack or heap bin – snatch it up! It should not be cast aside. It isn’t necessarily worth a whole lot, you can find copies on abebooks.com for $2 – $10, but out of print is out of print and you never know when you might be holding the last clean copy. I like Sophie Blackall’s illustrations better, but the original work should be salvaged.
Have Child, Plant a Tree, Write a Book
“Then it came to me: Zola had said: ‘To have a child, to plant a tree, to write a book.’ That, he said, was a full life!” – Betty Smith
What I love about being a book reviewer is the constant discovery of new things. Picking up books I may have never had the opportunity to read, and learning from those books – not how to write better necessarily, but – what kind of writer I want to be.
Book reviewing has also required me to read things more closely, not just the way I would for school, but in a more personal way as well. It’s not just about finding the literary value, it’s not just about liking or not liking, it becomes more and more important to be able to people and my readers why I loved a book. What moved me to passion? What is so relevant about this story to my own life? In doing that, it makes me dig deeper into myself, deeper into my library, and deeper into the art of research.
I’ve slacked off the last few weeks about publishing a literary journal post, but I haven’t stopped reading the literary journals. I meant to write this yesterday, it’s been dancing around in my head the last few weeks as I’ve alternated between picking my way through McSweeney’s issue 18 and researching to see if anything was written about Betty Smith. I’ve been scouring the internet for evidence of things written about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or perhaps a long buried article or story she may have had published before infamy. I didn’t know a lot about her, so it’s been an educational endeavor.
I started with what was available in the back of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition that I read the book from. The little extras this edition provides are wonderful, including the first piece Smith ever published: a bit of prose called “Winter” when she was 8 years old and still in grade school, under the name Elizabeth Wehner.
I enjoyed reading the article from This Week that she wrote called “Fall in Love With Life.” It’s a beautiful glimpse into her mind and life and what led her to know that she had had a full and marvelous life. It was refreshing to read, after feeling like a failure on most days, knowing I’ve had a child, planted a tree, and written book, changed my outlook on my life at 30.
Of course, the research continued and in my searching I found this: http://web.njit.edu/~cjohnson/tree/context/context.htm
I also found this and am pretty disappointed that I can’t find a copy of “On Discovering Thomas Hardy” anywhere: http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/s/Smith,Betty.html
If anyone knows of any publications or articles written on or by Betty Smith, please share. I’d like to discover them too.
To Live And Die By Books
“She never wanted me to save her, only to love her as she was.”
– from The Archivist
The awful truth of it all is that madness isn’t beautiful. But it can be made to sound like it is by literary giants who suffer from it or have had someone close suffer from it. Anyone who has read the works of Sylvia Plath or T.S. Eliot could tell you this. Martha Cooley makes this so utterly clear in The Archivist. Reading Cooley’s work is like coming home.
“Her anger lay just under the surface, and it governed. I was foolish to think I could urge or lead her anywhere.”
If you’ve known or been close to a manic depressive, you know how maddening this can be. You know how frustrating the inability to react properly to anything that goes on in their head. You know how quickly you, too, can be sucked into their reactions and find yourself angry as well. You also know how wonderful is the defense mechanism of diving into a good book or hiding away with your journal and pen.
“People with special powers are frightening to love. That’s why Eliot and Vivienne were doomed by the way – why their marriage was bound to fail. They terrified each other.”
The literary mind finds safe places where it can… inside the pages of books.
“[…]While denial is useful, it has its price. There’s no such thing as identity without history.”
So many quotes from Cooley moved me with their simplicity and truth. They are words that I feel in my bones. “Authentic moral resonance,” Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe called it. Resonance is always felt in my bones, for all their conditioning I am oddly hyper aware of them. They are undeniably tied to my passions – my loves – my needs – my life.
In 1998, Steven Moore of the Washington Post Book World, wrote: “It is rare and gratifying to read a novel about people who take literature seriously, who practically live and die by books…”
It’s not so rare anymore with the likes of Diane Setterfield, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Kate Morton lurking about. These days there is a whole sub-genre of fiction dedicated to it featuring titles like The Secret of Lost Things and The Little Book. My own book is a feeble attempt to honor these authors with a dose of what suited the publishing company at the time. The Bookshop Hotel is a bit of a romance – but one where the main character is quite in love with books and her small town more than in love with another human.
Poets, a marriage, diaries… Possession won awards and became insanely famous. Somehow, however, Cooley’s book got buried once it ceased being a New York Times Bestseller – but it should never be forgotten.
I think I’m drawn to these kinds of books because I always find peoples’ relationships to books telling of what their relationships to people are. Sampling someone’s library is like peering into their soul and seeing where their loyalties lie. Or, if they have loyalties at all.
There’s a quote on page 47 that I find so familiar –
“She had become familiar to me physically as well as intellectually; I knew her dark brows and good coloring, […] the slope of her neck, the slight overbite of her upper teeth. I was familiar with the details, yet she eluded me. Something to do with her motives remained completely beyond my grasp.”
I find this true of many people I’ve encountered. And many books too. You hold them, weigh them in your hands. You lovingly caress their spines. You know their smell, you know what they are saying. You know their stories, their backgrounds, their recurring themes. But you couldn’t begin to comprehend why they are telling you and what motivated them to do so. You’re not always certain what they want you to do with the information. That part belongs tucked away in someone’s secret heart and one can only guess.
“I sat at my desk, staring at the note and struggling to make sense of it. I remember feeling a peculiar detachment – as if I were someone else, trying to unravel a mystery that was captivating but in which I wasn’t personally implicated.”
The Archivist is a must have for any book lovers library, especially for those who live and die by the printed word.
Lessons in Fleabane
My favorite thing about homeschooling is hitting the books and walking in the woods. All of our lessons involve those two things in some combination or another and it’s so invigorating. Fresh air, sunshine, open spaces, trees, and good books – I don’t understand how I learned anything in any other fashion. With spring upon us, we’ve been going headlong into Wildflowers of Texas
So on our trail walk today, we collected fleabane flowers. (Kiddo likes to pick them anyway, so if we’re collecting flower baskets, I’d like to get good use out of them.) There are a whole host of lessons that come into foraging. Identify the plant, spell the name of the plant – with a three year old we get to talk about phonics and how the ‘ph’ in Philadelphia makes the same sound as the ‘f’ in Fleabane. I wonder if in the long run the F sounds will always bring to mind images of white sunflower-like-daisy flowers and the smell of fresh, nearly summer tea. We learned that “fleabane” is a common name for Erigeron and is part of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family. 
Once home, another science lesson ensues. Boiling water on the stove. After all, boiling is the rapid vaporization of a liquid with occurs when heat is applied. We get to discuss the words ‘rapid’ and ‘vaporization.’ Rapid ties into our synonyms lesson (from the Bryan P. Collins’ Words are Categorical series that we’ve been reading since birth.) Kiddo’s eyes light up when she sees the water get hot enough to cause steam and bubbles. 
We’ve used the strainers before, and the measuring cups, but becoming a pro in the kitchen is something to strive for daily. Making tea this way is the perfect opportunity to practice reading our measurements and understanding what those mean… two cups, one cup, half cup, etc. Understanding these concepts visually before setting fractions in front of them when they’re older is essential, I think. Plus, there are some practical life skills gained from knowing how to make fresh food from fresh sources. 
I also like her growing up knowing that food has purpose beyond pleasure and satisfaction. This tea, for instance, has very little flavor. It is a bit floral, obviously, having been made from flowers, but without honey tastes a bit like fancy water. It is a natural insecticide but is edible. You can treat headaches with it as well as inflammations of the nose and throat. It cleanses the kidneys and can aid against gout. Be warned, like chamomile and licorice root, fleabane tea made from the roots can induce miscarriages and was commonly used for menstrual issues and birth control by Native American tribes. Now, we’re diving into history… 
The picture came out a little blurry. But now, we’re enjoying our tea and a game of Name That Continent. Happy Earth Day.
Earth Day Reading With Little People
The Weekly Low Down on Kids Books – selected by The Kiddo
Holiday reading with preschoolers can actually be quite fun. Although most people are doing a lot of Easter books, we’ve spent our focus on nature, enjoying spring, and covering the catechism this week. Easter bunnies and egg hunting a thing on hold for now.
Our daily go to during any season tends to be Cat in the Hat Learning Library
Life Cycles
Because it’s Earth Day season (the actual day is April 22nd, which falls on a Tuesday this year), we’ve been reading up on conservation and organic gardening. Of course, that also means that I’m letting my three year old water my tomatoes and walk in my garden. It’s a learning experience for her and a letting go experience for me.
That’s why the woods being by the house is best for us. It’s where I can really let her go and frolic and be herself.
When we get to the open fields she gets to pick as many flowers as she wants.
Whether you want to make it part of your normal routine or you’re just celebrating Earth Day, check out kiddo’s favorite books and find a good outdoor park this weekend. The fresh air and sunshine is amazing.
GreenGreenerGreenest – Earth Day Every Day Part Five
Title: Green Greener Greenest
Author: Lori Bongiorno
Publisher: Perigee (Penguin)
Genre: Nature/Organic Living
Length: 310 pages
Written by a journalist and freelance writer, GreenGreenerGreenest is a concise but thorough way to get up to date information and advice on how to handle the green movement in your life.
This is a handy reference book that should be on the shelf of every self-proclaimed hippie, home owner, or human being. Yes, it’s that useful and that important.
There’s so much information out there about how to live an eco-friendly life, and so many opinions on which way is correct. GreenGreenerGreenest takes all the advice, all the information, and categorizes it for you so you can select which option works for your life and budget. It helps people see clear cut options for how to go as green as you can in every area of your existence without shaming you for not being able to do it perfectly in all of them. Sometimes going green is what you can afford, sometimes being greenest is easiest, either way Bongiorno helps clear the red tape of confusion and spells out what is what.
There are a lot of things discussed that I already knew about, things I thought everyone probably knows. But there are twice as many things that I read that I had never given a second thought to. For instance, I had no idea you could get reusable menstrual pads, not sure why it didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. It’s the greener option. (Green being using chlorine free and chemical free ones made by companies like Seventh Generation.) My response to that was similar to my response to Merriweather of Foraging Texas cooking June bugs for breakfast – I’m not that hippie yet. Bongiorno makes me feel like that’s ok. I can choose a greenest option in another category to make up for it.
Which I do in my house, little did I know. We have ripped out all our carpets and have concrete flooring. Mostly because we’re poor and concrete floors are cheap – your foundation is already there whether you like it or not. I already knew carpets weren’t the best for your health (dust, dust mites, allergens, dirt, overall ick), but I hadn’t thought of it as “green” living. We live with area rugs we can remove from the house to clean. Area rugs last longer and keep you healthier… and apparently is better for the environment as most carpeting is made with petroleum products.
Food and Beverages, Personal Care, Babies and Children, Transportation, and more, Bongiorno covers it all, and provides links and websites when helpful. Love it.
Photograph by Joel Robison
Literary Journal Monday – Earth Day, Every Day Part Two
It’s April, it’s spring time, it’s RAINING! To bring May flowers, of course. So, I jumped head first into an April 1968 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine, more specifically, Roy Neal Williams’ Mushroom Weather.
I’ve never heard of Roy Neal Williams before today, but I definitely can say I’ll remember him. His memoir about his grandmother and their adventures foraging in the woods for mushrooms with his german shepherd mix, Shep, is right up my alley. His prose is nice and playful, easy to get right in step with the spring time atmosphere he is describing from his childhood.
The time spent in the woods and the property with his grandmother is looked back upon so fondly. I hope that my daughter remembers her time with me in the woods as well. And I like his grandmother,
“She stopped and looked at the flowers. All was quiet. There was only the sound of the water as it rushed along its way, cutting round stones and making miniature waterfalls from a flat rock or a fallen limb. An occasional bird would chime in and, in the distance, we could hear Shep yelp now and then.”
He explains how they collected mushrooms, morel mushrooms, and then took them home and soaked them in preparation to eat the next day. As he slept that night he would dream of the delicious dish that awaited him the following day.
The forager in me couldn’t help but come home and search the web for images of these tasty treats. Below is a picture of morel mushrooms that serves as a link to the Morel Mushroom Hunting Club. How exciting – and odd – is that?
Earth Day Every Day 2014 – Part One
Spring time… the sun is out, the animals are about, it’s time for spring cleaning and for our family to start hitting the trails every day again. It also means April is here, and so my environmental awareness is in high gear. Earth Day and Arbor Day means Earth Day events at the bookstores and local libraries. It also means I start seeing my favorite color (green) plastered all over displays, and books with pretty leafy covers come out of the woodwork. Thus begins the Earth Day reading highlight reel.
Title: The Green Book
Authors: Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Genre: Nature – Environmental Conservation & Protection
Length: 201 pages
This is a handy little book that is easy to read and full of celebrity pep talks for going green. The writers have pointed out a lot of easy to remember ways to readjust your existing lifestyle to recycle more and waste less. I liked it.
It was published in 2007, so some of the information feels a little outdated. It also gets a little repetitive for those who have the ability to apply one concept to multiple aspects of their life, but it’s a good little book nonetheless.
My favorite tidbit from this book – being a cyclist – is this:
“Try to recycle your old bicycle tires and inner tubes instead of throwing them away. You’ll prevent about two pounds of rubber from being landfilled and may help provide materials for a new handbag, a pair of hiking boots, or even a bike path itself. If one in fourteen American cyclists were to recycle his or her bicycle tires each year, the rubber saved could pave the current route of the Tour de France.”
Worth checking out from the library or downloading to an e-reader. The only time I could see wanting a physical copy would be for your child’s library – and even the authors think you should buy these books used.
This photograph is a Joel Robison piece. I love all his work, it has been awhile since I’ve shared it, though. However, some of his earthy pieces seem extremely appropriate this time of year as we’re reminded to enjoy our world and treat it kindly. Click the image to visit his blog.
Anakalian Whims 
People Aren’t Who They Say They Are
April 12, 2014 at 1:42 am (Reviews) (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith, books, Francie Nolan, Johnny Nolan, liars, literary criticism, people, reviews, social commentary)
The most offhand statement, the smallest turn of phrase, a random word, can completely start my mind reeling for hours, days even.
A friend said to me, about nothing and no one in particular, “People aren’t who they say they are,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As much as I try to let things roll off my back, I internalize and mull over everything and this statement today relates so well to a piece of fiction I started long ago. In addition to that, about a dozen short story ideas popped into my head from the one phrase.
The thought that won’t leave me, though, is not that people lie, it’s that people don’t think they’re lying. People aren’t who they say they are, but they are only capable of telling you who they think they are.
I can only tell the truth as I see it. I can only tell you what’s in my head, not what you perceive of my actions. Isn’t this why people read novels? In third person omniscient you get everyone’s version of the truth – and how very different it can look.
The Ugly Duckling kept telling everyone he was a duck, but in reality he was a swan. He wasn’t who he said he was, but he was saying who he thought he was.
Along this line of thought, many novels and their characters come to mind: The Great Gatsby, The Fountainhead, the Harry Potter series, The Poisonwood Bible, and many, many more. But currently, what is most fresh in my mind is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Francie’s father, Johnny is a talented, sweet, and incredibly handsome, alcoholic. He dreams and wastes away while his wife takes care of the family. He knows he’s a drunk, he thinks he’s useless and has nothing to offer, and his wife comes to a point where she believes this as well. Afterall, he has let her down over and over again with his failures. The only thing he seems to manage is to sing well and entertain his neighbors and friends.
Though he’s not conventionally a good man of the house, and is an awful care giver when it comes to providing food and rent money, but when it comes down to the children’s emotional needs he is there where his wife is not.
Francie’s mother admittedly doesn’t love Francie as much as she loves the son, Neeley. Francie’s mother sends the children to get their inoculations alone – the young kids were terrified and had no loving support from their mom. But she loves them best, right? She cares for them, keeps a roof over their head, and keeps them fed.
Clearly, both parents love their children the best they know how, that much is evident in the novel, but both parents are also not who they say they are – but they say exactly what they think they are.
Johnny meant what he said when he told Katie he would love her forever, that she was the one for him. He didn’t realize when he said it that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself once he became a father of two at age 20. He didn’t know what he was made of yet, or what he wasn’t made of.
A man like Johnny is a great babysitter, the best man to have on a family vacation, a little girl’s knight in shining armor. He will walk her to school, help her get into the school of her choice, because he’s a dreamer and by God he will teach his daughter that her dreams are relevant and important.
Johnny thinks he’s the worst father. He is dejected by his inability to hold down a job other than one as a singer/waiter, singing and bringing food and drinks for tips. He’s Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” had the man never managed to invent something and find Truly Scrumptious. [Completely random side note: Did you know “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” was based on an Ian Fleming story (the author of the James Bond novels)?] An airheaded dreamer, but ultimately a good person with a big heart.
In Francie’s eyes, Johnny isn’t who he says he is – or even who other people say he is – but everyone says who they think he is, including himself.
Maybe if Johnny hadn’t started to believe that he had to be so ashamed, he wouldn’t have had so much to be ashamed of. Maybe if he’d let go of some of those bad thoughts and acted on the dreamy happy ones, life would have been better for everyone. The character of Johnny Nolan is a complete disappointment to everyone. I haven’t finished the book, yet. I’m not sure how it all turns out, but I do know one thing: Johnny may be a disappointment, but he isn’t useless no matter how much he thinks and says it. He isn’t who he says is his, but he definitely says what he thinks he is.
Obviously, that’s probably a reverse scenario than what is typical of that statement. Most people present themselves as better than what they are, I think. But unless you’ve been utterly broken, it’s highly likely that you think you’re better at things – at life – then others will believe or know.
Maybe it’s because they don’t see every aspect of your life, maybe it’s because you’ve had to shield yourself from truths that hurt too much, maybe you’re a little delusional, but I believe less and less that the majority of humanity is blatantly lying with purpose. The people I have met who do, are manipulative and underhanded and typically have large groups of people fooled, but these people are few.
Then again, maybe I see the world through rose colored lenses. Maybe Johnny Nolan is a useless piece of crap of a human, and I just only see the good in fictional characters. Sort of a difficult idea to embrace from such a self-proclaimed skeptic. And maybe this is the worst piece of literary criticism and character analysis ever to come out of someone who pretends to understand literature so well. But as we know, people aren’t who they say they are.
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