The Hero and the Crown

The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley, won the Newbery Medal in 1985.  This award is given to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.  I remember the book was better the first time I read it.  Maybe this is one of those books that works for children but not as much for adults.  I can see how McKinley's style of writing would be novel (no pun intended!), but the story is bland and it's hard to tell when the story is reaching a climax or when it's just moving the plot forward.  I've read a bunch of Newbery Medal winners and The Hero and the Crown is one of the more difficult reads.  It's not really straightforward (lots of what I call "dream-writing" where the character is hallucinating or having a vision and you're not really sure what's going on) and because it's fantasy, the names, settings, and animals are all a bit unfamiliar.  I'm glad it wasn't the first fantasy book I'd ever read...I think I would have been turned off the genre.

Ender's Game

 Ender's Game is the winner of the Nebula Award (1985) and the Hugo Award (1986) for best science fiction novel.  It's one of the few Nebula and Hugo Award winners I've actually read, which is a little surprising given the number of sci-fi books I've read in my life.  :)  (The others were Dune, Speaker of the Dead, and HP and the Goblet of Fire.)  Ender's Game truly stands the test of time and my personal test of re-readability.

Given my recent obsession with Hunger Games, I was drawing all sorts of parallels between the use of children in war in both these novels.  Orson Scott Card is superb at writing insights into the psychological struggle of protagonists.  This becomes even more important in the various sequels and concurrent novels connected to Ender's story.  Some of the books are entirely about ethics and emotion while others focus on politics or science in a future world.  I admit both the politics and science were sometimes way over my head.  I still don't really understand what an ansible does (something about bridging the space/time continuum and faster than light speed communication) or what a hegemony is (something about a political alliance?).

But there's all sorts of great moments throughout the entire series where you stop and think about what life would be like if what is described were really possible or actually happened (laws on number of children that a family can have, designer babies, maturity vs. age, consequences of destroying an entire alien species, colonization or other planets, etc).  The interesting discussions that can stem from this book and its relatability to young adults is probably why it's one of the books on the English curriculum reading list.

April Book Club

You're a winner!  Now that we've all survived March, it's time to celebrate!  This month's theme:

Award Winning Books

I checked out bookspot.com and they had a list of major book awards.  There are lots more, especially in specific book genres, but I figure this will get us started, especially since I'm not real familiar with any of these yet.

Booker Prize

Caldecott Medal

National Book Award

National Book Critics Circle Award

Newbery Medal

Nobel Prize for Literature

PEN/Faulkner Award

Pulitzer Prize

Commonwealth Writers' Prize

Bronte Books

So I got sucked into TCM last night and watched Wuthering Heights (1939) and Jane Eyre (1943) because I recognized almost all the actors from Errol Flynn movies.  :)  But this is the sort of situation where I would be motivated to read a book based on having watched the movie.  I had absolutely no interest in reading either of these books (they seemed all Charles Dickens-y depressing), but now I think I could get into Jane Eyre.  Wuthering Heights is too tragic for me to want to read it and I wasn't real sympathetic to Cathy - she's the one who messed everything up anyway.   

I wiki'd both books, of course, and found out that the Jane Eyre movie skipped a section of the book, but it still ended the same, so I won't be too surprised reading it.  As I was googling stuff, I found an interesting article entitled, "Jane Eyre movie adaptations: Why are there so many and which one is the best?"

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/03/up_in_the_eyre.html

On a literary note, I'm glad I finally know who Heathcliff and Rochester are.  They're alluded to a lot in random places and I never really understood the reference until now!

Delta Girls

This book actually has nothing to do with our theme for the month, but I just finished reading it and discovered something really cool!  It's called "abecedarian poetry."  Basically, you write a poem where the first letter of every word uses the letters of the alphabet in order. 

This is one from the book:

Apple brownbetty cures depression.
Eat fruit generously; hunger is just
kindling, lurking minutes north
of pleasure.  Quit rationing;
start tasting unlimited varieties,
wanting x-tasy, yumminess, zest.

As you can see, you sort of cheat with "X."  I wrote one for this book - it doesn't quite make sense until you read the book, I think, but it was fun!  I'm going to try to use "abcde poetry" in a lesson for my students.  :)

A book concerning Delta events for girls harvesting in June.
Karen likes macho Nathan.
Organic pears quite ready!
Skate Tristan.
Underwater Vieira whales X-cite young zealots.

Longshot

This is a book by Dick Francis, one of my favorite mystery authors.  I first started reading him because I was a horse-crazy girl, and his stories take place around the British horse racing world, but I continue to read them because he writes dialogue in the coolest way.  Sometimes his characters hardly speak, but they imply a lot with sardonic looks and dry wit.

Anyway, this particular book is about a man who writes books on survival - he calls them "travel guides," but they're to places that bring on the man vs. nature challenge.  He's hired to write a sort of biography on a racehorse trainer and stumbles upon a secret that could get him killed.  He's forced to call upon his survival skills to get through and solve the case, although to a rather surprising end.

Today's topic:  dehydration

The first rule of survival is to get water. According to survivaltopics.com, a person, under ideal conditions, could survive about 10 days without water.  Of course, if you don't have water, you're probably not in ideal conditions.  The average survival time without any water is about five days.  Getting water was paramount in both Hunger Games arenas and harvesting rain enabled Louie and Phil to survive on their raft, even before they figured out how to fish.

My personal dehydration story: On my first camping trip to Glacier National Park, we were hiking up to Granite Park Chalet, advertised as an easy 4 mile hike up the mountain.  It was a spur of the moment kind of thing and we didn't have our water bottles filled.  I figured it was no big deal cuz I had done 8 mile hikes without drinking much of the water we brought.  Plus there was a promise of apple pie once we got up to the chalet.  False advertising!  It was 4 miles from the bottom of the mountain to the top, but the trail was a series of switchbacks, with probably tripled the total walking distance.  I got thirsty about a third of the way up.  I drank the water condensing at the bottom of my plastic bag of carrots.  By the time we made it to the top, I was pretty desperate.  There was lots of whining.  Here's the fun part.  We left our wallets in the car so we couldn't pay for any food or water!  That's when I started crying.  :(  Anyway, a very nice girl filled our water bottles for free and we made it back down, but I was so exhausted from the dehydration, I couldn't even walk a mile the next day before my body made me stop.  It took me about a day and a half to recover.

Unbroken

I just flew through this book, no pun intended!  Read the whole thing in two days, most of it in one sitting.  I couldn't believe it was only 1943 and a third of the way into the book when he crashed and became a POW.  Two years until the end of the war!  An eternity of torture, especially since he didn't know when the end was coming.  Laura Hillenbrand is an amazing storyteller.  How she can take millions of disparate facts and wrap them into a coherent and gripping story is beyond me.  She had world history, small town lifestyle, personal anecdotes, and cultural anthropology looping around each other practically seamlessly.

As far as a survival story, you can't beat real life for emotional awe.  As much as I got wrapped up in the Hunger Games, it's still fiction and your brain can sort of step away from the story and file it in a place that says, at least these people suffering through this aren't real.  But with Unbroken, it was all real.  I fully admit that I am a wimp, for myself as well as for others.  I have practically no pain tolerance at all and suffering of others pulls at my heartstrings pretty hard.  Meanwhile, I do have a pretty vengeful streak flying through my soul, and I was all for "an eye for an eye" type justice for the Bird.

So today's survival topic: what gets you through an ordeal like this?

For Phil, it was probably thoughts of his fiancee.  For Louie, an inner sense of strength and rebellion?  In Hunger Games, Katniss made a promise to Prim and in Catching Fire, it was all about keeping Peeta alive.  Is it hope?  stubbornness?  anger?  faith?

Law and Order and HeLa Cells

There's a Law and Order episode based on HeLa cells!  I've included a link to another blog that describes the episode and its connection to the HeLa story. 

http://allthingslawandorder.blogspot.com/2010/05/law-order-immortal-recap-review.html

Quite fascinating, the way the show writers adapted the true story.  (It's Season 20, Episode 21, "Immortal," if anyone's interested in watching it.)  The connections are obvious if you've read the book.  My husband was really interested in the legal aspects of the Lacks' situation and others that Skloot describes.

Catching Fire

I reread Hunger Games and Catching Fire this weekend.  Hunger Games is still a fantastic book.  It was just as fascinating the second time around, and made me even more excited to see the movie!  I think they did a great job with casting and we'll see how it all plays out int he movie adaptation.  I read the book thinking about survival as a theme this time around, which I think I'll use as a springboard for some discussion about all the books we read this month.

Topic:  altruism vs. self-preservation

Which one is more necessary for survival?  In Hunger Games, the gladiator-style arena would imply a "survival of the fittest" kind of battle, but it turns out that alliances and working together turns out to be more beneficial in the end.  Hunger Games is good at following Katniss' thought processes as she goes through the transition from "everybody out for themselves" to a feeling of emotionally-motivated cooperation. 

In Catching Fire, the sequel to Hunger Games, the altruistic motivation is really a main focus of the games.  It's sort of twisted into a manipulation by political forces, but again, in the end, she survives.  Without giving too much away for those who haven't read it yet, the subject of her altruism is not so lucky.

Is this topic present in the books you have read about survival?