You Got the Music in You

On Thursday the library was filled with the sounds of music. It was really nice. It definitely put a little smile on my face. Music has a way of doing that. I always wish I had learned to play an instrument. I took violin for two years in elementary school and that is the extent of my formal music education. I had wanted to learn to play the drums but my parents put a stop to that idea immediately! The screechy violin was enough for their nerves. The drums probably would have pushed them over the edge. I took violin because my sister had taken violin. She took violin because her hands were too small to play both the flute and clarinet.

I love music. The library is a great place to get all kinds of music. I can expose my son to rock classics he hears on commercials to Klezmer his bubbe probably listened to as a little girl to the bluegrass his grandfather listened to as a kid.

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah and I am hoping my son chooses to open his Guitar Hero band kit. I really want to unleash my inner rock star.

Eye vs Ear

Writer Neil Gaiman was on NPR’s Morning Edition the other day extolling the virtues of the recorded book. For some reason, I have never been a listener of this format. I have always had a CD player in my car and at home, but I prefer using them for music CDs. I guess I was always afraid that getting involved in something more complicated like a novel would distract me from driving. And Fort Worth traffic certainly doesn’t need me to be any more distracted than I already am.

He did pose an interesting question at the end of his report: Does listening to a recorded book equal reading the same book in print? For those of you who do listen, if someone asks if you’ve read something and you’ve only listened to it, do you answer yes or no?

Some say no. Critic Harold Bloom, for one, was quoted in the story: “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear. You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” I’m not sure I really understand all of that, but I guess that’s why he teaches at Yale and I don’t.

Mr. Gaiman disagrees. He thinks one can have a “close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Audio producer Rick Harris takes the middle ground. When asked if an audiobook is a book, he says no. “An audiobook is a separate entity that is absolutely true. A novel can be seen as many things and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance.”

How about the rest of you who do listen and read? Equal or not? What’s the difference between listening and reading in how you understand the text?

Fear of Reading

I am currently reading the new A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book. I read her best seller, Possession and like everyone else was captivated by it. After that I tried one or two of her other novels but found them disappointing, too wrapped up in the 20th century academic world for my taste. So I was intrigued by the marketing that declared "If you liked Possession, you will love The Children's Book."

I didn't just take the hype on the book as gospel. As is my wont, I went to Amazon.com and read the readers' reviews of it first. I do that before spending my money on a book. I find that professional reviewers with their pretensions of being literary connoisseurs can lose sight of what constitutes a good read for us mere mortals. Anyway the readers' reviews forewarned me that The Children's Book really wasn't all that similar to Possession, however, their descriptions of the novel did convince me that I would probably like it.

I got it. I read it. It was very good and I recommend it unreservedly.

But, that, per se, is not what this post is about. It is about an interesting theme that emerged from all those reader reviews of The Children's Book. In many of them, the reader reviewer would praise the novel and then after listing all the things he or she liked would start to whinge and whine. It was too long, over 600 some odd pages. It had "huge" passages of description. The detail was "excessive." There were too many characters and they were hard to keep track of. There was too much historical background given with one reviewer decrying the frequent "lectures" given by Byatt. In short, there was just too much there to read besides the "story."

Well, personally, I like a lot of historical background. I admit that I read historical novels partly to learn history and pick up intriguing facts. So I was prepared to slog through it as I had slogged through War and Peace. Imagine my surprise when most of those "huge" passages turned out to be a couple of pages or less. The longest was about seven pages but in them she was bringing her characters from the Victorian into the Edwardian age. I breezed through this enjoying the author's obvious interest in her material and realizing that by giving context to the characters, my understanding of them and the story was greatly enhanced.

It became obvious to me that if the Amazon.com complainants thought Byatt's digressions were extreme they had never tackled Tolstoy. That man could gas on forever about Napoleon and the Battle of Borodino and his (Tolstoy's) opinions of Russian culture and philosophy before he allowed the narrative to struggle forward even a little bit. And if you really want to be confused by the characters just try to keep track of Tolstoy's because every one of that vast Russian crew has at least three different names. Then I wondered how they would react to Melville's Moby Dick with that honking great treatise on whaling plunked down in the middle of it. And as for "excessive" detail you can't beat Charles Dickens or any of the Victorian writers.

I began to recognize in their responses to Byatt's "lectures" something I have come to call "fear of reading." As a librarian I have encountered this syndrome frequently. I have seen the pupils of patrons' eyes shrink to pinpricks of panic when realizing that book they were assigned to read is over 200 pages long. Now you say that such patrons aren't really "readers." And I acknowledge the truth of that. But now I have discovered that a form of this disorder has spread to self-identified avid readers such as those who post their reviews on Amazon.com.

There is a type of "reader" now who has no patience with any element in a novel that is not strictly narrative. I really don't know how to feel about that, but on some level I think I am a bit alarmed. I enjoy the works of Robert Parker but I don't think I would be satisfied with his brand of stripped down, dialog and action only driven writing as an exclusive diet. Can I hope that there will always be readers who enjoy an author's digressions and their attempts to create atmosphere by descriptive passages or to help us see a character? Or am I just swimming agains the tide? What do you guys think?

Oy...here it is almost the 25 of Kislev

and I have only just started to think about Hanukkah!

This is always a hard time of year for me. I wasn't born Jewish but in my mid 20s found that my personal theology fit most closely with Judaism. As I raise my son he enjoys Hanukkah with me and Christmas with my parents and sister. He loves the story of the Maccabees and often likes to fashion himself as the powerful Judah striking down the attacking Greeks.

Because the Jewish calendar is lunar based Hanukkah moves around a bit. It is always the 25th of Kislev but can be as early as Thanksgiving or as late as New Year's Eve. This year the first night is December 11. Then for eight nights we will light one more candle on our menorah and celebrate the miracle that happened so long ago. Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas. In fact Hanukkah is a minor holiday that is not even mentioned in the Tanakh (the Jewish bible). It is a celebration of a military victory, a spiritual victory, and a miracle. Only in countries where it has to compete with Christmas has it taken on the gift giving extraganza that it is here in the US. Hanukkah is really more about staying true to your beliefs even in the face of death, fighting for what you know is right, and having the faith that it will all work out in the end if you do your part.

In order to help my son embrace this holiday, I want to have stories to read to my son:

In the Month of Kislev by Nina Jaffe

This is the Dreidel by Abby Levine

Hanukkah! by Roni Schotter (I really like her Jewish holiday titles)

Hooray for Hanukkah! by Fran Manushkin

Just Enough is Plenty by Barbara Diamond Goldin

Chanukah Lights Everywhere by Michael Rosen

Hanukkah Haiku by Harriet Ziefert

And some books that will explain the holiday to him a little better:

Hanukkah Around the World by Tami Lehman-Wilzig

Celebrating Hanukkah by Deborah Heiligman

All About Hanukkah by Judyth Saypol Groner

Some things for watching or listening:

Lights and Laughter Joel ben Izzy spins Hanukkah Tales

Kayla's Chanukah Concert (DVD)

Maccabees: The Story of Hanukkah (DVD)

Chanuka and Passover at Bubbe's (DVD)

Hanukkah Tales and Tunes: Miracles and Wonders (DVD)

And a few titles for myself

Celebrating the Jewish Year Volume 2

Jacques Pepin's Chanukah Celebration (DVD)

A Different Light: The Big Book of Hanukkah

The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking

Jewish Holidays Cooking: Festive Meals for Celebrating the Year

Plus I love having music playing in the background energizing all the festivities

Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah by the Klezmatics

A Taste of Paradise by the Klezmer Conservatory Band

Judische Lebenswelten Patterns of Jewish Life by various

and maybe after all of this you decide you want to attend a celebration....

The Galleria in Dallas Dec 13 at 5pm

Chabad of Dallas' Rabbi Dubrawsky will lead the event. Entertainment and refreshments will follow. (The announcement says the first lighting but according to my calendar Dec 11 is the first night and so long as you light the Hanukkah candle before the Shabbos candle I think you are okay.)

The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano Dec 14th at 6:15pm

Chabad of Plano will provide music, gift bags, and (yummy) gelt for the kids! A talent show will follow the lighting ceremony.

If anyone knows of something a little closer to our neck of the woods...let me know!

Who is hiding a terrible secret?

Jocasta, Martha & Clio meet in 1985 on their way to travel the world during their gap year. Together, they explore Thailand before going their separate ways. They all promise to meet up at the end of the year to discuss their travels, but it never happens. Years later, they are involved in their own lives and have never really even thought about what happened to the other two.

But one of these three women has a secret. She got pregnant during that year and never told anyone. The woman abandoned the baby at London's Heathrow Airport. The baby's name is Kate. She is now a teen and wants to know who her birth mother is and why she would abandon her child.

Fate suddenly throws the three women together and the mystery starts. Which one of these women-Jocasta-a semi-single, beautiful reporter, Clio-the doctor with a rocky marriage, or Martha-the single successful lawyer about to start a run for a political career-is Kate's mother and can she keep her secret safe or will her whole life blow up in her face?

Sheer Abandon by Penny Vincenzi is full of twists and turns. Figuring out the mystery keeps readers enthralled and coming back for more. Vincenzi's supporting characters are as interesting as the three women. I had a hard time putting the book down even though I wasn't completely happy with the ending. All in all, a great read!

Funny, Isn't It Romantic?

A co-worker of mine lately expressed a penchant for romantic comedy movies and that sparked a desire to write about my all time favorite romantic comedy movie couples. So here goes.

I did kind of a mental review and I realized that I don't have any favorites from the silent movie era which brings up the question, were there any romantic comedy silent films? I can't think of any. I mean Charlie Chaplin romanced a girl or two in them but his movies were always just comedies. And lovers sometimes made goo goo eyes at one another in mildly amusing scenes sprinkled through Mary Pickford melodramas but maybe there had to be the sound of lovers billing and cooing and quarreling before Hollywood could make romance funny enough to sustain an actual movie genre.

However moving on a decade or two, we come to my first (chronologically) favorite screen couple, Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. Oh my YES! The cocky Frenchman and the imperious diva square off in two of my favorite movies, The Love Parade (1929) directed by that master of frothy delights, Ernst Lubitsch, and Love Me Tonight (1932) directed by Rouben Mamoulian with songs by Rodgers and Hart. Oh, did I mention that both films are also musicals? Don't let that put you off. Neither one of these performers were ever sexier than when they were striking sparks off one another onscreen.

The odd thing is that they hated one another off screen. But, whatever the reason, that hostility translated into something pretty hot in front of the cameras. Separately, both performers could be over the top and kind of ridiculous but together they generated a delicious silliness that is so much fun to watch and listen to that by the end of the movie you are completely satisfied and happy, which is how a romantic comedy should leave you.

Then there is The Lady Eve (1941) directed by Preston Sturges the screwball comedy king. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as the bad girl con artist and Henry Fonda as the earnest sweet rich guy she falls for while trying to make him fall for her. It is like watching a snake and a mouse hypnotize each other. It is completely fascinating and funny. Stanwyck and Fonda worked together in two other films that were mostly forgettable but this one lands them in my all time favorite romantic comedy couple category regardless.

I'm going to skip over a lot of years now and I won't be mentioning such couples as Tracy and Hepburn or Rock Hudson and Doris Day because as good as some of the movies that they graced were, they just aren't among my favorites. Can't explain why, just aren't. All right, I'll back down on that a bit. I really did enjoy Tracy and Hepburn in Pat and Mike (1952) wherein Tracy as a big palooka sports trainer helps all round athlete Hepburn perform up to her full potential while of course falling in love with her. However, in their other endeavors together Hepburn was "put in her place" by Tracy just a little too enthusiastically for my taste.

Now closer to the present day my next favorite couple is comprised of Drew Barrymore and just about anybody. There is something about Drew's giddy sweetness that acts as an anodyne in which the petulance of such child men as Adam Sandler, The Wedding Singer (1998), Fifty First Dates, (2004) and Hugh Grant, Music and Lyrics (2007), melts into true soul mate material.

Finally, my last entry in the romantic comedy couples sweepstakes is Ricky Gervais and Téa Leoni in Ghost Town. This did not do too well at the box office and that is a crying shame because it hosts gut busting laughter and the delight of watching two slightly off center human beings click into complete harmony. At the end of it, you are wearing a silly grin which is exactly what you should be wearing at the end of a romantic comedy.

Anyway, those are my picks. What are yours?

Playing favorites

One of my least favorite questions as a librarian is “What’s your favorite book?” How can you ask a reader to narrow it down to just one? But now that I think about it, it is not that hard. There is one book that I have read several times over the last twenty years and frequently recommend to other people. At one time we had three copies of the book in my house – one for me, one for my husband and a third to lend to friends. The book I am referring to is Orson Scott Card’s science fiction book, ENDER’S GAME, originally published as a novel in 1985 although it started out as a short story in 1977.


This book seems to engender strong feelings – either you love it or your hate it. This is not the type of book I would have typically chosen to read because it is about children being trained to fight in an intergalactic war. War and violence are just not my thing. The truth is I read it because I wanted to impress my boyfriend (now husband). In the book humankind faces the very real threat of being annihilated by the Formics an insect-like alien race. The book centers around six-year-old Ender Wiggin as he attends battle school at a space station with other young military geniuses. Through a series of calculated psychological and physical war games the students are manipulated by their elders in order to produce the most effective soldiers in the universe. What fascinated me about this book is the psychological development of Ender and his ability to counter-manipulate his teachers and battle school opponents. He manages to rise above seemingly hopeless situations. Despite the violence I found myself to be deeply empathetic to Ender’s plight.

If you like this book you may also enjoy the companion book ENDER’S SHADOW. There are several other books in the series, but they have not captured my attention as much as these two.


The psychological aspects of this book reminds of another favorite science fiction book. It is William Sleator’s HOUSE OF STAIRS. I was fifteen-years-old when I read it for my mother. She was a school librarian in Houston and during the summers she was asked to review books for possible purchase. She wasn’t into science fiction so she asked me to read and review it for her. The book is about five sixteen-year-olds orphans who are put in a strange building with stairs that go every which way and lead to nowhere. The teens are provided with a toilet, water, a machine that produces food pellets and they are given no privacy whatsoever. The food machine starts out giving pellets upon demand, but it gradually begins to restrict the pellets until only certain behaviors are displayed – talk about Pavlovian responses. What is expected of the teens to get food is constantly changing and they are forced to become increasingly aggressive to one another to get food at all. Read the book to find out how far they are willing to go for food.