I didn't like science in high school . Chemistry was unbalanced equations and disappoint lab results; physics seemed like an unneeded headache; biology was smelly dissections and a lot of Latinate memorization. But away from the classroom, I can't get enough of science books written for lay audiences. Here are three recent books that messed with my brain in a good way.
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
Brian Greene explores ideas, all based on established theories of physics, that there may, in fact, be more than one universe, or that our universe is part of a larger collection of universes called the "multiverse." If that weren't mind-blowing enough, Greene explores seven different varieties of multiverses, each depending on a different theory or set of starting conditions for the development of the multiverse. From the "patchwork" multiverse, in which a universe that's sufficiently large (infinite or nearly so) will eventually repeat itself or come close to repeating itself, creating exact duplicates of all of us, to the holographic multiverse, which uses theories relating to black holes to describe your reality as merely a holographic projection of another reality taking place at the edges of the universe. In between the patchwork multiverse and the holographic multiverse are several other possible multiverses born out of quantum theory, general relativity, and string theory.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Due to problems with blogger last week we are extending the fair through Friday, May 20th!
It is with an enormous amount of excitement that I can announce this year’s Guys Lit Wire Book Fair! We will be working with Powells Books again, this time to send books to the east coast to Ballou Senior High School in Washington D.C. Ballou is very special to me as school librarian Melissa Jackson made such an eloquent case for her students’ need for more books. Her video, which shows so many empty shelves, really gave me reason to pause. There are probably more books in my house then Ballou has in this video and that is wrong in so many ways that I don’t even know where to begin.
At the time the video was made early this year there were just over 1,150 books on the shelves at Ballou; there are over 1,200 students in the school. So there was barely one book for each student (the ALA standard is 11:1). The WaPo ran an article about Ballou in January and I have seen a few follow-ups here and there (National Geographic sent over a bunch of books) but what struck me in all the efforts to help is what always hits me - people send books they have (publishers do the same) which is lovely, but not necessarily the books that the school needs or, most importantly of all, the students want. That’s where we come in and why we keep doing this, and loving it, every single year.
Melissa and I have exchanged many emails and spoken on the phone and the message is clear - they need many different types of books, many specific titles and many different versions of any given story. For example, HAMLET, a high school staple, is on the wish list, but you will find it in its original form, in the “No Fear Shakespeare” edition which includes a modern translation and in manga form for reluctant readers. Both versions of OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA are here as well as FAST FOOD NATION and THE WEATHERMAKERS. Very nearly every book in the Scientists in the Field series is listed as well as SAT study guides. Ballou has students who read on a fifth grade level and those who are in college prep courses. The range is wide, the interests varied and the need is tremendous. They want street lit and manga as well as nonfiction on nutrition, geography, history and more. They want a ton of poetry and drama with very specific authors in mind. They want graphic novels. They want Arthur C. Clark, Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury. They want Neil Gaiman, Sherman Alexie, Nikki Grimes and John Green; vampires and romance and humor. Hundreds of books to fill empty shelves; they want hundreds and hundreds of books.
We’re going to make that happen.
For those of you who have been with us before, the drill has been streamlined a bit (thanks to Greg Pincus!) Here is the direct link to the wish list at Powells. (And if you want to share it: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair)
The Ballou Sr High School list will open with 900 books to choose from. You can view them by title or author (don’t be afraid if it looks like a series book is missing - sometimes they have co-authors listed by the publisher - this happens with Neil Gaiman a lot - but I promise they are all there or will show up as the series is purchased). We have a mix of paper and hardcover for a reason - obviously hardcovers will last the longest in a library but we wanted to be sure that folks with any size budget can contribute. There are books ranging in price from $2.98 to $60 - and many many titles with excellent sale prices. Many of the paperbacks will be used in classrooms or could even end up as awards for worthy students. Regardless, all will be read, all will be appreciated and all will be valued and we really can’t ask for more than that.
It is perfectly fine to purchase used copies of a book (more bang for your buck) but please check and make sure the book is in “standard” used condition and not “student owned” (you will have to click on the title and leave the wish list to check this). The “student owned” copies are very cheap for a reason - they are written in and thus not a good choice for this effort.
Once you have made your selections head to “checkout” and you will be prompted to inform Powells if the books were indeed bought from the wishlist. This lets the store know to mark them as “purchased” on the list. After that you need to provide your credit card info and also fill in the shipping address. Here is where the books are going to:
Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN Ballou Senior High School 3401 Fourth Street SE Washington DC 20032 (202) 645-3400
It’s very important that you get Melissa’s name and title in there - she is not the only Jackson (or Melissa) at the school and we want to make sure the books get to the library.
After all that you buy the books and you’re done! Please head back over here when you get a chance though and leave a comment letting us know who you are, where you’re from and what you bought. Starting tomorrow I will have a continuously updated post listing everyone’s purchases so we can see the books flying their way to our nation’s capitol. I’ll be in constant touch with Melissa too so I can let you all know how things go on her end. The book fair will run until Friday, May 20th and we'll keep you updated on things even after it shuts down. (Hopefully as a sellout.)
As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all your dollars spent on books and your time spent blogging, tweeting and emailing about the book fair. This is a labor of love for all of us - it’s a way to give back to the world some of what books and libraries have given to each of us. This is how we make our mark, one kid at a time, one book at a time, one tiny miracle when it all comes together.
You guys are awesome; now please help us show Ballou Senior High just how powerful the written word can be.
What do you do when you realize your parents are people - people who make mistakes, people who had lives before you were born? What happens in that moment - and what happens afterwards?
Ask Nick Brandt, the main character in Alyssa B. Sheinmel's new novel The Lucky Kind. Nick's a junior at a private school in New York and, up until now, his life has been pretty solid. He's not the best student, but he's not the worst. He's the only child of two attentive parents. He's got a crush on a girl named Eden who is as intriguing as her name suggests. Nick and his best friend Stevie are as thick as thieves. Almost like brothers.
Then Nick discovers that he has a brother. A flesh-and-blood brother, born to his father's college girlfriend twenty-nine years ago and given up for adoption. His father's always known about his first son, and though he told his wife about his firstborn years ago, he didn't tell Nick. But now that Nick knows the truth, there's no way for him to forget it - and he can't see his parents the same way anymore. In the light of his father's lifelong lie - or omission of truth - Nick's home, his childhood memories, and his family's routines all seem tainted somehow.
I don't want to reveal too much here; I actually didn't want to tell you gentle readers about Nick's brother, but if I hadn't, this would have been an extremely vague, short, and unsatisfying review. To discover the circumstances under which Nick discovers the existence of his older brother and what happens to his family - which includes Stevie and Eden just as much as his blood relatives - check out The Lucky Kind. Make sure you also pick up The Beautiful Between, Alyssa B. Sheinmel's memorable debut novel.
Today I am trying a new kind of book review, at least for me. I call it The Half & Half Book Review. Here is how it works:
1. I read about half of a book.
2. I write a review.
3. When I finish the book, I‘ll write a second review, and go back and put a link to it in the first review.
This could be the start of something cool and exciting, or it could be the first and the last time I do this. We’ll see. Here’s my review of the first half:
When I was a kid my mom went through a jigsaw puzzle phase. She would take over the dining room table for weeks at a time and do enormous jigsaw puzzles. They had 1000 pieces, and sometimes even more, and each piece was the size of an atom. The images were often nature, like a picturesque pond surrounded by endless trees. It was the kind of jigsaw puzzle image that created nightmares with 700 identical-looking pieces of a tree and 300 specks of water. My mother took great pleasure in figuring these out, studying her puzzle as if it were the plan for the moon shot.
As I read Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt – after already having read his miraculous The Wednesday Wars – I am reminded of my mom’s jigsaw puzzles, because that is what Schmidt’s books are: complex jigsaw puzzle stories with many pieces that fit perfectly together to create a whole that works as if every piece was gently crafted for the sole purpose of completing that picture and creating that wholeness.
We first met Doug Swieteck in The Wednesday Wars. He was a character in the background, and his bully of an older brother – known there as “Doug Swieteck’s brother” – was also in that book. The Wednesday Wars was Holling Hoodhood’s story; Okay for Now is Doug’s story, and what a beautiful story it is (so far).
Just wanted to give all of you a heads-up that the annual Book Fair will go live next week, starting Monday. I am putting the finishing touches on the Powells wish list for our school of choice and I'm delighted by how this is coming together. We have found a school in Washington D.C. that is desperately in need of the sort of bookish attention that the GLW Book Fair is known to bring. Get ready to change the world guys - this one is going to be epic!
You probably know that King Tut is dead. But do you know how he died? Or how he was prepared for mummification, or what Howard Carter did to poor Tut's mummy?
Tutankhamun is the first of nineteen “awfully famous” people whose death is discussed in Georgia Bragg's How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous, with illustrations by Kevin O'Malley. As you might guess, this is a book about death. And not just any old deaths, but gross, disgusting, and miserable deaths. On the few occasions in which the death itself wasn't actually too gruesome, relatively speaking, what happened to a person's remains after death, well... As the introduction to the book warns, “If you don't have the guts for gore, do not read this book.”
Earlier this week we had a post about liking stories written by unlikeable people. Today we ask a similar question. Can you enjoy a novel with a unlikeable protagonist?
Ham on Rye takes the coming-of-age genre out for a night of drinking and leaves it shaking in the gutter. Its “hero” is Henry Chinaski, the thinly-veiled (if you can call him that) alter-ego of the author, Charles Bukowski. Growing up poor in Los Angeles around the Great Depression and World War II, Henry recounts his experiences as a child and young man.
To say that Bukowski’s writing is not for everyone is a monumental understatement. The young characters in this novel are aware of sex at a young age and mimic the language that they hear from their parents, and you hear just about every word imaginable. They experiment with alcohol, and Henry takes a liking to it right away.
For the past couple of years, I've offered a "short story anthology" post, where I link to some great short stories out there on the internet. This year, I thought I'd do the same thing with poetry for National Poetry Month. But you don't have to go to any links to read it, you only have to print it out, make a few simple folds and one little cut in the middle to have your very own anthology of poems for your pocket.
So, first, the anthology, then I'll explain the poems I chose and why. Click the image on the right for the file. This is a .jpg you print on a full sheet of 8.5x11 piece of paper, fold along the dotted gray lines, and make one cut along the solid gray line to construct the anthology. Here's a link (via pocketmod.com) for instructions on the folding and the cutting to turn it into a booklet. Join me after the jump for the breakdown of the poems...
In high school, I fell in love with H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories. I was fascinated with the creaky, gothic atmosphere and the immense scale of them--monstrosities that had been hidden away for millions of years or travelled between the stars. But more than that, I was fascinated by Lovecraft himself. His father died in an insane asylum when Lovecraft was eight, and Lovecraft and his mother moved in with two aristocratic-but-poor aunts. He was bright, reading 1,001 Arabian Nights, The Iliad, and The Odyssey as a child, but because of his own psychological problems and lack of finances, he wasn't able to go to college. Instead, he made a living writing stories for pulp magazines like Weird Tales. This money was barely enough to survive on, and Lovecraft died poor and largely unknown.
As a gloomy, bookish teenager who was called "weird" more times than I can count, I saw Lovecraft as a fellow traveler, an author who gave voice to my fears and anxieties, somebody who could have understood me even when the people of small town Alabama didn't. Then I found out that Lovecraft was racist. Not just a little racist, either. He was a proud white supremacist, filling letters to friends with tidbits like, "Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved."
So this around the time of year when I would tend to do a lit news dispatch, rather than a review, telling you how all the YA events at the recent LA Times Festival of Books went.
Except that given the filing schedule here at GLW, and where those “third Tuesdays” fall, it turns out that that posting would be nearly a month away.
So what we’re going to do instead is tell you what’s coming up at the LA Times Book Fest, weekend after next (Sat., April 30, and Sun., May 1). This way, if you’re a GLW reader in the SoCal area, you can come. Or can email your cousin Geoff in Bell Gardens or your Aunt Jen in Cerritos to get over there.
First though, note that two whole days of YA events -- on a “YA Stage” no less! -- is a recent development in Times Book Fest history. The overall gathering is the largest public literary fest in the country, and of course, being L.A., there are awards -- in the form of the LA Times Book Prizes. There’s a YA category, too, and for a long time, there’d usually be one YA panel comprised of that year’s nominees. So one panel, four or five people, and that’d be it.
For YA readings, you’d often find yourself on an outdoor stage, with jugglers and costumed characters designed to capture the attention of younger readers, those perhaps still in the “board book” phase of their reading lives. (Of course, by the time they grow into the “YA” demographic, the challenge for the Times may be fomenting a “Festival of Digital Reading Devices,” so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty in giving up the jongleurs after all).
One of those stages has been the Target Children’s Stage, which has included MG writers (this year, for example, R.L. Stine and Lisa Yee), but again, those slots were few, and both MG and YA were generally underserved.
Brian Greene explores ideas, all based on established theories of physics, that there may, in fact, be more than one universe, or that our universe is part of a larger collection of universes called the "multiverse." If that weren't mind-blowing enough, Greene explores seven different varieties of multiverses, each depending on a different theory or set of starting conditions for the development of the multiverse. From the "patchwork" multiverse, in which a universe that's sufficiently large (infinite or nearly so) will eventually repeat itself or come close to repeating itself, creating exact duplicates of all of us, to the holographic multiverse, which uses theories relating to black holes to describe your reality as merely a holographic projection of another reality taking place at the edges of the universe. In between the patchwork multiverse and the holographic multiverse are several other possible multiverses born out of quantum theory, general relativity, and string theory.
In high school, I fell in love with H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories. I was fascinated with the creaky, gothic atmosphere and the immense scale of them--monstrosities that had been hidden away for millions of years or travelled between the stars. But more than that, I was fascinated by Lovecraft himself. His father died in an insane asylum when Lovecraft was eight, and Lovecraft and his mother moved in with two aristocratic-but-poor aunts. He was bright, reading 1,001 Arabian Nights, The Iliad, and The Odyssey as a child, but because of his own psychological problems and lack of finances, he wasn't able to go to college. Instead, he made a living writing stories for pulp magazines like Weird Tales. This money was barely enough to survive on, and Lovecraft died poor and largely unknown. 