The Literary Cat

Here’s another poem I’ve memorized. Some of you political types might appreciate it as well.

“Everybody Tells Me Everything” by Ogden Nash

I find it very difficult to enthuse

Over the current news.

Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,

And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

Today, in class, a speaker asked if we, the students could recall one poem we had memorized. This was what came to my mind: “September 1, 1939″ by W.H. Auden. I memorized these stanzas years and years ago, but I still remember them. I love this poem, even though it’s sad and hopeless and a little bitter.

“Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good…

For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.”

I recently came across Michael Stelzner’s new list of the 10 top blogs for writers in 2008. Here is a link to his picks for best writing blogs. In case you’ve never heard of him, Stelzner is the author of Writing White Papers; he writes for companies like Microsoft, FedEx, the Dow Jones, etc.

After he picked his top 10, Stelzner invited the authors of the winning blogs to post comments and links to their blogs on his site. A lot of them responded (very positively, of course).

I particularly liked The Renegade Writer blog by Linda Formichelli and Dianna Burell, Stelzner’s third choice. Guess what — they’ve been blogging about Twitter! (Which we’ve recently been discussing in class.)

I got Tales on Thursday and read it by Friday. (It’s only 100 pages long.)

The fairytales were all clever, but what made the book hilarious were the notes by Albus Dumbledore after each story. Anyone who has read the Harry Potter books knows what a great sense of sarcastic humor this character (Dumbledore) has. Rowling also included her own notes, defining magical terms for us “muggles.”

The book obviously isn’t intend to be a spectacular bestseller like the regular HP books — after all, it was written to raise money for charity — but it is definitely worth reading.

J.K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard will be released this Thursday, Dec. 4. The bookstore where I work will be having a midnight release party starting around 10 p.m. Wednesday. I, of course, will be working (possibly wearing a witch’s hat and possibly doing face-painting). We’re expecting several hundred people. After the tragic Wal-Mart accident last week, I can only hope none of us will be trampled to death by hordes of eager Harry Potter fans.

I received some odd looks while I was carrying this book around. Despite its title, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart is not a romance novel. On the contrary, it is a national book award finalist by one of the most complex contemporary authors of teen fiction.

In many of her award-winning novels, Deb Caletti deals with the highly sensitive topic of psychological and emotional disorders, particularly in teens. For instance: In her most recent novel, The Nature of Jade, the protagonist suffers from panic disorder. In Wild Roses, the protagonist has to cope with the insanity of her stepfather.

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart is about a young girl named Ruby who suffers from extreme shyness and loneliness, due in part to the divorce of her parents. One summer, she meets and gets involved with a rich, reckless, motorcycle-riding neighbor boy named Travis. Their relationship opens up a new world of adventure and risk-taking for Ruby.

First the friendship becomes a romance — then a dangerous infatuation, as Travis crosses the boundary between games and crime. Ruby is forced to choose between what is right and what is wrong, and, in the process, learns to create ambitions and adventures of her own.

I am not going to rate this book, because, though it has its flaws, I have a soft spot for its message. Caletti does an excellent job of convincing teens (and adults) that shyness doesn’t have to last forever (thank God!) — that life is what you make it — and that love is much more than being somebody’s “honey, baby, sweetheart.”

A few posts ago I mentioned the Giant Book Sale Store here in Greenville. I contacted them and found out that the store is currently open, and will remain open until January 1. After its closing, the store will move to a different city and, sadly, may not return to Greenville for several years.

I discovered The Whispering Road by an amazing coincidence. I had never heard of author Livi Michael before (though she is apparently well-known in the U.K.). In fact, I didn’t choose the book up for either the author or the plot.

What attracted me to it was the most amazing cover art I have ever seen. Here is a snapshot from the U.K. edition (mine is a little different, but this was all I could find):

I love this cover art because it somehow captures the beautiful wistfulness of the story.

The Whispering Road is historical fiction (with a few elements of magical realism thrown in). Livi Michael based it on the stories of children who were adopted out of the poorhouse during the 1800s to families who treated them worse than slaves. Many of these children were beaten or starved to death by their masters — but many more managed to run away and survive as vagrants on the highways of England.

The Whispering Road follows two runaway children through their struggle for survival in a world full of danger and mystery. Along the way they meet fantastical fellow-travelers– a tramp who sews clothes from furs, a wild-woman living with wild dogs, a circus troupe full of bizarre performers, gangs of children who hide in the sewers of Manchester. They are characters that could belong to Dickens himself — bizarre, magical, tragic.

I love this book for its vivacity, but more than anything for its underlying wistfulness and sadness. If you have ever had a desire to leave everything behind you and set out on “the whispering road,” you will enjoy this novel.

4 1/2 stars.

The following book review is excerpted from one I wrote for class:

A landscape of shifting sunlight and shadows, of hot summer days and cool English rooms, of passion and hate, bitterness and regret—in Atonement, Ian McEwan creates a historical tour-de-force that rivals even the great wartime novels of the 1940s. Though a great departure from the violence of McEwan’s previous work, Atonement is a risk that pays off in every possible way.

The story begins slowly, as dreamy and lethargic as an upper-class English house on a hot summer afternoon. Four years before beginning of World War II, thirteen-year old Briony Tallis—obsessed with authorhood and the tragic heroine—writes her play The Trials of Arabella. Frustrated in her artistic attempts to stage the play, she looks out the window and witnesses a strange scene between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son.

That same night, a violent crime is committed against a young girl, and Briony’s repressed antagonism toward her sister coalesces in a single lie—a lie that will destroy both Robbie and Cecilia. In a moment of jealousy and bitterness, Briony commits the act for which she must seek “atonement” the rest of her life.

In the second and third divisions of the novel, the cold and grisly realities of World War II blot out the memories of sunny England like a dream. When McEwan picks up the story five years later, Robbie has been released from prison to fight in France, and Cecilia, now estranged from her family, is a nurse in London.

At eighteen, Briony is also a war-time nurse, struggling to mend the wounds of English soldiers in the same way she longs to heal her broken family. But her efforts at personal atonement—and, eventually, at reconciliation—are like strokes against the tide, pushed back by an endless wave of entropy.

But it is the fourth and final division of the book that clenches Atonement as a masterpiece—Briony’s lyrical yet haunting words, the atonement never made, the dream never attained. Now an elderly and celebrated author, Briony returns to her home for a production of her childhood play, The Trials of Arabella. The circle of the story is complete, but, we find, Briony’s quest for atonement is unattainable.

”How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?” Briony asks. Neither she nor McEwan can answer the question. Nor can we, the readers, do more than wonder at our own paths through those shifting patterns of darkness and light.