droolie's corner o' the planet

BOB

It's time to tackle the BOB books again, which can be great fun.  BOB is what I call the Battle of the Books competition we have at school.  BOB is a great concept for middle school, and really sucks kids into reading for pleasure.  The way it works is pretty easy.  Right away in the fall, the year's sixteen selected books are listed, and any kid that wants to do BOB dives in and starts reading.  Then, come closer to spring, the kids will form their own competition teams of four.  We have a bit of training around March for the kids, followed by a school-wide quiz competition.  Then the top two teams get to go on to the city-wide competition.  Prizes and everything, including a travelling trophy (currently at our school, so we'll host this year's city battle).  The kids have fun, the grownups have fun, and it's just a great thing to be a part of when you love reading as much as I do.  So, I mentor teams for the competitions, help judge and scorekeep the school battle, and I have a blast. 

This year's books so far have been great.  I've read nearly half the list of sixteen already.  I don't think there will be a clunker in the bunch that I can't bring myself to finish, either (unlike last year, where I ditched Christopher Paolini's Eldest after about a dozen pages).  There is a certain richness in young adult fiction, and when it gets a person to care and seek out more info or perspective, I think it's very valuable indeed.  The latest book to do this to me was one of this year's BOB books ~ an historical fiction novel by Mary Jane Auch called Ashes of Roses.  The book follows the journey of a sixteen year-old girl named Rose through Ellis Island to New York.  Her father and brother were not allowed into the country, due to the brother's eye disease, so Rose, her mother, and sisters end up staying with an uncle, until hospitality wears thin and tempers flare.  Eventually, Rose's mother heads back to Ireland, and Rose and her sister choose to stay in America to make their own way.  This would be a rich enough, engaging story in itself, but it's only the beginning.  Ashes of Roses is indeed a dual title with much deeper meaning.  For Rose, with her one good dress made from a fabric called ashes of roses, ends up working at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.  Fire is a strong theme in this book, from Rose's spitfire nature to the tragic historical fire that claimed 146 lives in March of 1911.  This is a book that delivers, with strong, believable characters, superb attention to detail, and will leave the reader changed.  Of the various historical fiction books I've read on the young adult level, this is the one that sticks with me most.  It is a very satisfying read. 

Of course, Ashes of Roses led me off on side tangents to the internet and Google, from looking up Ellis Island info and pictures to info on the diseases that kept immigrants out, splitting up families.  It also led me to spend a little time looking up the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire itself.  Before my only background was the usual sketchy paragraph from US History texts, which kept it basic (tragic sweatshop fire, locked in, led to labor reform), but left out the human element. 

It also led me to pick up another book on my stuff to seek out list, a recent book that I'd heard of about a month before I read Ashes of Roses.  This second book is an adult novel called Triangle, by Katherine Weber.  This one's also historical fiction, and concerns itself with the story of Esther, the last living survivor of the Triangle Fire, her subsequent death, the secrets that she held, and her recollections of working at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory and of the fire itself.  The passages recounting the fire are particularly engaging, and parts of it left me breathless.  It's more detailed than Ashes of Roses, and paints a stronger picture of the fire.  But it's not just one character's story.  The bulk of Triangle settles around Esther's granddaughter and her search for the truth about her grandmother and the fire.  Because of this, it's told in a flashback kind of sequencing, which also involves the granddaughter's musical genius boyfriend (the focus on him in the first chapter gives it a slow start) and an annoying feminist researcher (that I couldn't bring myself to care about).  The attempt to work the triangle in as a motif throughout, from the music to the factory and so on is a bit much at times.  I'm glad I read Triangle, especially coming right off the other book.  It really is a neat book, with a neat concept.  I think it makes for a richer understanding of the fire and its human element.  But I think doughnut for doughnut Ashes of Roses was a much more satisfying read overall. 

more movies and a book

And you fine people probably are thinking that all I do is read and watch movies.  Really I don't.  Honest.  It's just that this week I've had off, and I don't sit around well, so I got movies to help pass the time.  So here we go...

Sophie's Choice  Now, mind that I didn't care for the book much, and found it overrated.  The reason centers around that fact that it really wasn't focused on Sophie and her choice so much as Stingo's lustfulness and bemoaning his lack of a sex life.  The movie I liked better, mostly because I really like Meryl Streep, and her perfomance in this movie was fabulous.  It kind of eclipsed the Stingo's fantasy world emphasis some.  In a way I'm glad I finally got around to renting it, but it's really not a movie I'd watch again, either. 

Game Over This one's a documentary on Garry Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue in 1997 that I accidently stumbled upon.  Considering it's from 2003, I'm kind of surprised it was a VHS rental and not DVD.  It looked a little dated, all things considered, and I never did figure out what was up with the creepy twinkly music throughout.  But I really liked this one.  Perhaps it's only because I'm a chess junkie.  Perhaps it's only because I think Kasparov is the coolest chess player ever.  But it was well worth my buck ninety-nine. 

Trapped This one's the movie version of Greg Ile's 24 Hours, which  I read over Memorial Day weekend.  It's basically a kidnap for ransom scenario.  I wasn't expecting Charlize Theron or Kevin Bacon.  It was very interesting, as Iles tweaked some major details (including the ending) between the book and the screenplay he wrote, but it didn't hurt the story any.  It was descent.  I just love how they change character names between book and movie though.  Same character, different name. 

Return to Paradise This happens to be one of my favorite movies from the last decade.  Vince Vaughn, Joaquin Phoenix, and some other dude wrapped up in a foreign prison snafu over hashish.  Phoenix's character is in prison, and is to be executed in eight days for drug trafficking unless the other two go back to Malaysia from New York and serve their time for the drugs.  Strong characters, great casting, and a compelling tale. 

And the book happens to be Miracle in the Andes, by Nando Parrado.  Yes, I've read Alive.  More than once, as a matter of fact.  Probably closer to 4 or 5 times.  And I've seen the movie version twice.  I've always thought that Alive is probably the ultimate survival story.  It's definitely among the best I've ever read, and for inspiration you can't beat it. Until now.  I can unequivocably say that I much prefer the new retelling.  It's not that Alive wasn't thorough.  It was researched to the max, and written after hours of interviews with the survivors.  But with Miracle in the Andes, you get the perspective of Parrado himself, who was instrumental in getting them rescued.  And this makes it a much richer reading experience.  It's wellworth the read, and I'm sure I'll revisit it again at some point.

droolie's reading...

Anybuddy that knows me best knows that I'm a voracious, obsessive reader.  I don't know how to go anywhere without at least a couple of books.  At any given time, I'm working on an average of around 20 books.  I bounce back and forth according to whim.  When I finish one, and I'm "in between books", I get a little fidgety until I settle with another.  And it's a running joke in my family that if you cut my veins open, I'll not bleed red, but the deep, ebony of printer's ink.  :)

Long story short, you're going to hear about a lot of books in droolie's corner o' the planet.  Here goes, with three I finished this past week...

I adore chess.  I've always been fascinated with it, since I was a kid.  The pieces are cool.  The possibilities are endless.  It keeps the brain sharp.  I didn't actually learn to play it until a couple of years ago, though, since no one else in my family ever wanted to learn with me.  I actually learned just so I'd be able to play with one one of the kids at school, as a reward.  I readily admit that in learning so late I will never get anywhere near grandmaster status, and that I'm a decent, marginal hobby player.  I can beat some of the kids at school, and it's great fun.  It's also neat to be able to follow a game and get the chess references in the world of popular culture.  It came in very handy recently when I read a novel called The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. 

In no means is this a light, fluff book.  It does take a bit of mental work, but it's really not hard to follow.  Even if you have no prior knowledge of chess, I think it would be easy enough to understand.  The book is primarily a mystery, centered both upon the Flanders Panel itself (a painting depicting a medieval chess game between a knight and a king and an observing queen), and the lives of the art restorer and her counterparts in modern time.  The premise is to discover "who killed the knight", after the phrase is found in the layers of the painting.  To do so, the characters must analyze the chess game pictured on the panel, which ironically is being played out amongst them by an all too real murderer.  The game featured in the panel, while unconventional, is well-explained, step by step, as the book goes on.  I thought the whole thing was quite clever, and very well written.  I think anyone who has an appreciation of chess would enjoy it. 

Okay.  Book number two.  I teach middle schoolers, and one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a colleague was to read what they do from time to time.  There are many, varied and well-written young adult books out there.  And it's really neat when the kids see you reading the books they do and get excited.  Yesterday's pick was Among the Hidden, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, which had come recommended to me by a whole handful of kids.  This one is interesting, even to a grownup.  It centers around a boy named Luke, who is the third-born son of a farming family.  Since the government has laws limiting the number of children to two, Luke must live a life of hiding, away from all windows and the outdoors,the price of being found out being death.  Eventually, other houses are build near Luke's family, and he sneaks out to meet another third child, who happens to be staging an underground revolution of sorts.  The story offers a fast pace, well-drawn, sympathetic characters, and is deep enough to provide compelling social commentary, despite it's relatively short length.  I'll point out that it's actually the first book in a series of six.  But the ending is well tied together, and it can read just fine as a standalone.  I enjoyed it. 

Once in a while, a person's got to set aside the genre stuff and read a classic, right?  And eventually in my lifetime, I do plan on finishing Moby-Dick.  But in the meantime, I picked up another fish tale this last week ~ Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.  The only other Hemingway I've read prior to this is the short story "Hills Like White Elephants", which I don't recall being fond of.  But last summer I read Rodman Philbrick's The Young Man and the Sea, and recognizing the parallels, added The Old Man and the Sea to my reading list.  I pretty much loved it.  Hemingway is famous for writing in short sentences, but man oh man, can he pack a lot of picture in those phrases!  Simple is sometimes very deceiving, and this book is no exception.  It's perhaps one of the most richly written books I've ever read.  The premise ~ an old fisherman battling a big fish ~ may be simple, but the deeper meanings, of parallelism to life and perseverance, of mixed rewards, really expand the story into something quite remarkable.  I can see why this book won the Pulitzer.  It's pretty much flawless.