The W's of Reading: Are You a WEIRD Reader?

A friend of mine recently told me I read a "weird" selection of books.  Being the over thinker that I am, I've completely over analyzed that comment and been thinking about it ever since.  What makes my reading choices so weird?  Is it because I'm a "grown up" and because I teach English?  Is there some reading list that I'm expected to draw from?  Having said that, I realize that I too stereotype books in considering who I think would read them.  Honestly, I think we all do.  Does that make some of us weird if we just like a bit of everything?  Should you be able to peg someone by their career, interests, or even field of study in school?

One of my literature professors in college was this ex-football player who happened to be teaching Young Adult literature.  He one time shared with us how during his travels around the country, that when people saw him reading YA (especially what was considered "girly" YA), he would get funny looks.  I also had this experience recently when a colleague caught me reading a book and asked the title.  When I said the Fever series, he gave me an odd look. I'm sure he just hadn't heard of it before and was trying to place it, but I thought it was funny.  As a teacher, here are the books that most folks think I must like to read:

    * Shakespeare
    * Classics
    * Prize winners
    * Poetry

While I love each of these types of writing, I'm also quirky and will read just about anything.  I also know that most of my friends in graduate school were reading casually all the time, and things that people wouldn't think we'd spend our free time reading.  I remember a couple of girls chatting about the Gossip Girls series one day before class, and many of us picked up the latest Dan Brown novel when it came out.  I'm not sure that makes us weird, but more that we have a wide taste and appreciation in literature!

I've called it book "snobbery" in previous posts, but I think I might take the honored badge of a weird reader any day.  Here are some of the ways that even I would label myself as "weird" when it comes to reading:

• I'll pick a book up at the library, just because it has a girly, pretty cover.  (Yes, I'm owning it.)
• If I like an author, I'll read every book they've ever written, even if there's a bad one in the bunch (which there usually is).
• I might be an adult, but I still like a good teen or children's read, and not because I might recommend it to a student!
• I like chick lit, nonfiction, and Nobel Prize winners, all in the same rotation of books I'm currently reading.
• I hardly ever read a crime or mystery novel, and usually only if someone has begged me to read it.  That's just me.  (I think I just must not have enough patience for the story to unfold!)
• Sometimes a good romance just fits the bill.  I might be skeptical and snarky about love in real life, but a good love story can be the perfect get away from the real world!
• Although I love ethnic literature, I'm a complete Anglophile and find myself reading all types of Regency and Victorian novels.

This is just a small list of things that I have noticed might get me labeled in that weird reader category.  The heart wants what the heart wants, and if it's a wide, strange variety, then maybe that really is weird.

What say you?  Are you a weird reader as well?  Has anyone ever said you have weird or eclectic tastes in reading material?

Review: Me by Ricky Martin

I meant to get a couple of reviews written up earlier on Monday, but my sudden lack of schedule played with my ability to get anything written today!  It's not that I didn't get things done, since I was running around to appointments and various errands, but I just didn't settle down today to do anything online.  At least, not anything that was fun!

Before I get sidetracked, I wanted to post a quick review of Me, by Ricky Martin.

Review:  I don't think that anyone needs to explain what Me is about.  Both the title and cover clearly spell out that this is a look into the life of Ricky Martin, the man behind the artist.  Honestly, I've always had a bit of a crush on Ricky Martin, from his days in Menudo when I watched him dance and sing between Saturday morning cartoons, to crooning sultry serenades on Vuelve, or gyrating to "Livin' La Vida Loca."  Whatever he's done, I've been a fan.

In a stripped down sense, this autobiography is the essentials.  There isn't a single picture, very little outside information about anyone else, and mainly takes us through Martin's feelings and thoughts about different periods in his life.  The core of his exploration seems to center on his own self-identity, which returns over and over again to his acceptance of himself as a gay man.  I wouldn't say that he solely looks for areas of his life that should have guided him in his personal truth, but it was a definite theme, and rightfully so.  It is easy to see how Martin's upbringing in a Catholic, Latino culture that both demand strong ideals of masculinity and heterosexuality, shaped his own search to understand who he was at the core.  In the book he looks at what he thought at different times in his life and considers his response in each case.  For instance, Martin had a string of successful relationships with women, who he felt passionately in love with, only to be offset by equally satisfying relationships behind the scenes with several men that came into his life.  He doesn't express any confusion about these relationships, but explains what drew him to each of these loves and what he learned.

The book is pretty much an exploration of experiences and how they shaped Martin into who he is today, a man of an open heart and life of complete honesty.  My one disappointment was that there wasn't a single picture outside of the cover!  I don't care if I'm reading about a famous author or a superstar, I look forward to seeing the personal pictures that are included.  There's something about autobiographies that beg for a picture or two to help us think about the person at each age.  I was just sad that Martin chose not to include any pictures.  The stories and personal journey were interesting, but I'll admit that I was sad that he left out the pictures.

In short, I would say that this is less of an autobiography in the classical sense (linear and straight-forward), and more about Martin's thoughts about different times in his life.  This was an interesting life story, with lots of self-reflection that helps us to relate to Martin's life and to see ourselves in him. 

Yep, I still found I had a bit of a crush and am glad to see how happy he is today.

*FTC Disclosure:  This review was based on a library copy of the book.

Sunday Blatherings: Summer Vacation?

This week I  had a bit of a mini meltdown--twice.  I realize I sound a bit dramatic since I had a nice vacation out of the country, but I swear I haven't had a moment to let the brain reboot and run its own updates.  Since school let out I've been in classes, meetings, and appointments, and to top it all off, my online courses that I teach started up summer term on Monday.  Needless to say, I had my meltdown moments.  It seems to me that we all need a second to breathe, to take in whatever we're doing, but I'm not sure that life affords such luxuries?  Having some downtime this weekend to read and watch a movie or two has definitely helped me to chill out a bit.  Time for me to put the drama queen away!

On the reading front, here's what I'm reading:

Shadowfever by Karen Marie Moning.  Enough said.  I'll probably be sucked into this one all day!

My Jane Austen Summer by Cindy Jones.  I like this one well enough, and even started it when I was in England.  It's a teeny bit slow right now, which might not be the best combo with my previous read.  I'm sure once I finish the Fever series, this will take over.

Finally, I'm finishing up Bill Bryson's book, Notes from a Small Island.  Most of this was read on the plane before I hit England, so I'm really just finishing up.

I also had a bunch of books come in at the library.  Here's what I'm excited to read next:

Besides finally diving into my summer break this coming week, I have some goals for my blog this summer.  I'd like to set up a rating system.  I realized that my audience here is pretty diverse. Some of my friends really want to know if a book has material that might be offensive, not to mention the fact that I sometimes have students that find out I have a blog and search me out.  I definitely want to be sensitive to a wide range of readers.  Because of that, I've thought about adding a rating system that breaks down content as well as my own thoughts on the story overall.   I don't want to be too technical though, so I'll be thinking about a quick system where I can share some "want to know" information, but in a fun and easy way.

Finally, I want to reach out more.  I have a hard time commenting on other blogs when work gets busy, especially when I come home and teach online classes.  Being online for work often leaves me wanting nothing more than to get offline and pronto!  The blogs I follow though are really incredible, and I respect so many of the people that I follow that I want to take some time to interact again.  Honestly, I'm excited to take a little time to reconnect with the blogging community!

Well, this week I'll be taking care of a few more items on my list for work, so I'm not off YET.  The nice thing is that I get to sleep in this week, which is huge, so I already feel like I'm on vacation. Now I'm looking forward to great summer weather, a little R&R before fall sneaks up on us, and getting through a stack of great books this summer!  What about you?

Review: Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning

Here's the one book that I did finish on my trip that created a lot of panic for me.  Talk about a cliffhanger!  Thankfully I'm off in the last book in the series, so as soon as my meetings are over this week I can get back to reading!

Synopsis:  From Goodreads, "When the walls between Man and Fae come crashing down, freeing the insatiable, immortal Unseelie from their icy prison, MacKayla Lane is caught in a deadly trap. Captured by the Fae Lord Master, she is left with no memory of who or what she is: the only sidhe-seer alive who can track the Sinsar Dubh, a book of arcane black magic that holds the key to controlling both worlds.

Clawing her way back from oblivion is only the first step Mac must take down a perilous path, from the battle-filled streets of Dublin to the treacherous politics of an ancient, secret sect, through the tangled lies of men who claim to be her allies into the illusory world of the Fae themselves, where nothing is as it seems—and Mac is forced to face a soul-shattering truth."

Review:  While I was on vacation, I finished Dreamfever.  For anyone who has read this series, you know that book four ends with a HUGE cliffhanger!  Here I was in London, frantically trying to get wireless in my hotel so that I could see if I could download the next book from Amazon.  By the time I get on, what do I find but that it's over $20!  Yes, I was crushed.  See, I was enough of a cheapskate that I just couldn't download it when I knew the book was sitting at home on my table.  I had enough foresight to pick it up from the library before I left, but not enough to actually bring it with me!  What I didn't anticipate was the giant, gasp-worthy moment that ended Dreamfever that had me in a panic for the next book!  Ironically, the price went down after I got home.

In the fourth installment Mikayla is left picking up the pieces from a showdown with some serious bad guys who are aiming to find the powerful Sinsar Dubh to gain its power.  Just when we think that Mikayla couldn't possibly recover from the trauma and pain she has gone through, Barrons steps in to help her.  The problem is that we don't quite know who he really is, why he's helping her, or what he is to begin with.  Because of that, Mikayla remains cold and aloof from the other characters in the book, and rightfully so.  At this point, all Mikayla wants is resolution and her family kept safe from the evil that is pouring forth on the world.

Without saying anything more that could ruin this installment, I have to say that you really should have the next book handy when you finish.  Each of the books in the series has had a twist that forces you to keep reading, but this one really is painful not to know!  Mikayla has grown darker, shrewder, and tougher through her experiences.  On one hand the softer person we were introduced to feels sadly lost, but this new Mikayla seems like just the person to get the job done that she knows she has to do. 

By this point, I can't put this series down.  I thought there might have been some hype built up around these books, but have to say that I get it now!  They're neither romance nor suspense, but have both elements in them.  There's magic and seemingly paranormal creatures involved, all in a fantasy-like backdrop that takes place in Ireland.  They are both funny and tragic, scary and sweet.  It's in these dichotomies that Moning created such a consuming read.  Thankfully I have my hands on the last book so I can find out what happened after the major cliffhanger that ended this book!  All right, I'm off to keep reading.


*FTC Disclosure:  Review is based on a personal copy of the book.

Review: Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee

June has turned out to be a pretty crap month as far as reading and even relaxing is concerned.  I know, I know, I know.  When you've traveled for fun, no one pities you in the slightest, but I'm just saying that this has been the craziest, on the go month for being a break!  One of my big goals, every summer, is to read books that will help me prep more for my AP classes.  I haven't done very well in that regard, but I did recently read most of Hermione Lee's large biography, Edith Wharton.  Amazing and dense is the easiest review to write, but I'll try to explain a bit better than that!

Review:  In short, Lee's biography is more than just a book about the famous author Edith Wharton.  In this densely written book, we learn about the culture of turn of the century, upper-class society in New York City.  We learn about gardens and landscaping in the United States in comparison to Italy and other European countries.  We learn about little lap dogs, and their popularity way before the likes of Paris Hilton started toting them around.  We learn of the ever sophisticated, cultural center that was Paris, as the escape for artists in all walks of life.  We learn that writing reflects the pain of one's life so directly, that the mental anguish or non-disclosure of such pain can eek out into the words on the page whether the writer want them to or not.  For Edith Wharton, the complexities of her life were shown in all of these lessons and a million more. 

I can't really, adequately review  a book of this nature without directing more of my thoughts around how the book was written.  In a pretty weighty, yet engaging academic voice, Hermione Lee takes a linear approach to Edith Wharton's life, in a very non-linear way.  Although she starts with her early childhood and marriage, she also bounces around to show how things that occurred in her life are reflected and influence events later on.  This moving backward and forward through Wharton's life leaves the chapters in the biography feeling more like individual academic essays that could be lifted from the book for research.  I would think that unless you are really, really interested in Wharton's life, that I would only pick up this hefty book for individual research or curiosity.   This is not easy reading, by any means, but it is richly satisfying and made me appreciate the artist's life much more.  For college students or academics, Lee's book would be a brilliant resource that I can heartily recommend.  Give yourself plenty of time to peruse, because you'll need it!

*FTC Disclosure:  Review is based on a library copy of the book.

Sunday Blatherings: Back from Holiday

Hampton Court, the famous home of Henry VIII.

Bonjour and Happy Father's Day for all here in the U.S.!  I arrived back late, late Friday night from my trip to London and Paris and am now trying to quickly readjust before work meetings all this next week.  The trip was great, although so tiring at the same time.   I suppose that's what happens when you do everything in a whirlwind eight days.  It was a great eight days though and I have come home with a lot of great memories!

First off, can I say that in eight days I lost 7 pounds.  Does that say anything about the amount of walking we did?  On average, we walked, climbed stairs, stood in lines, rode metros, and meandered through sites for 8-9 hours a day.  Every night, I rubbed my poor sore feet in the hopes that they would still be attached to my body by the end of the trip!  Even the teens that traveled with us complained that their feet hurt, so I know it wasn't just me.  Who knew that I could go on vacation, and still eat croissants, pastries, and nutella and not gain an ounce!  (Oh, and did you know France has these cool Chicken & Thyme flavored Lays potato chips?  Some in our group didn't like them, but I thought they were delish!)  I suppose I should schedule more vacations if this is the case?  The travel diet sounds pretty darn good to me!

I'll admit that our trip got off to a rocky start and I'm not much of an American Airlines fan at this point.  Our flight was late getting into Chicago when we left, and although the plane was still in the gate, they wouldn't let us on.  It didn't make sense to me though, since there were eleven people on the incoming flight that needed to catch that plane and it sat at the gate for almost 30 minutes after we ran to get there.  In hindsight, we're all pretty sure they sold our seats and just bumped us.  We ended up sleeping a pretty miserable night in the airport and catching a flight that next night at around 6:30pm that put us into London early Saturday morning.  Lucky us though, they also lost our luggage in the switch, which we then didn't get until Sunday evening.  That means that we not only had literally slept in our clothes in the airport one night and again on the overnight flight into London, but then had to wear them for two more days!  Yes, talk about a lovely sight that we all just had to laugh at and keep moving.

Regardless of the rocky start to our trip, we made up for it all by really hitting the pavement and seeing as much as possible.  We did all the normal in London, which I have to say that I absolutely loved.  I'm even now looking into courses that I could take that would put me back into London for a couple of months.  I loved it all.  The city is great, full of history, and teeming with activity.  We got rained on a good bit last Sunday, but we had a great time while we were there. 

Canterbury Cathedral

On our way out of London to France, we spent a day in Canterbury.  Talk about an amazing cathedral!  I teach some of the tales in The Canterbury Tales, so I took a lot of pictures to hopefully create some nice teaching materials.  We'll see if I'm smart enough to create something with iVideo, or at least on PowerPoint.  I'm also going to have to go back and reread Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot and Jean Anouih's Becket, which I've never actually read.  This should all really add to my Middle Ages unit and some of the materials (a book and an audio CD) will make for nice background information.

Paris was our next stop after crossing the English Channel and driving down from the coast.  What can I say about Paris that a million other people and artists haven't said, sung, drawn, or performed?  It's an amazing city full of life and energy from the get go.  Before we left on the trip I  had purchased To Dance With Kings by Rosalind Laker, which is a book that centers on Versailles and the history of the time that the kings lived there.  I started it on the plane, but was so distracted, prone to motion sickness, and busy once we got there, that I only really read about 40 pages into it.  Now, I'm kind of glad I didn't get far, as the history behind it now makes more sense to me.  Knowing that they moved from the Louvre, out to what was originally a "hunting lodge" that turned into what is now this enormous palace, has helped the story come together even more.  Now I'm really looking forward to finishing the novel!

This is just a short blip on the radar of all that happened on my trip, but I couldn't move smoothly on to reviews and other reading-related posts without giving my trip a nod.  On a personal level, travel is what I live for.  If I could afford to travel out of the country every year I would do it, but it's not really a possibility at this point, so I enjoy every moment of the time I do get to spend abroad, about every four years.  It definitely takes some planning, and skimping and saving on my part to make it happen, but it's so worth it.  Besides, on a professional level, I think that connecting the literature that I've read and loved with the locations and history behind them is invaluable.  Although I try not to share history and places like big travelogues with my students, I always hope that some of what I bring back helps them to get excited to also connect to the writings of great authors.  My hope is always that they see the value and importance of reading and studying literature, because as a great teacher and mentor of mine said to me, "Business and other lucrative fields might control the world, but the humanities CHANGE the world."  I've hung onto that thought and can see more than ever the impact of art, history, music, and literature on the standard of one's life.  Without these beauties, where would our lives be?

Enough waxing poetic for one day.  Today I'm going to go for a nice, long walk to keep up with what we did on our trip, and then will settle down with a stack of good books.  Since I really haven't read in over a week, I'm behind on books I need to read and review by the end of the month, so that's what I'll be doing.  I hope you're having a great weekend!  To close, I'll include a short video clip of the Eiffel Tower doing its hourly sparkle at night.  We had such fun sitting back on the grass, avoiding the salespeople with their champagne and lit-up Eiffel Tower statues for sale.  It was all an experience to remember.  It's slightly cheesy to get so excited about it, but the Eiffel Tower really was a real highlight.  Au revoir!

Review: Breadfruit by Celestine Vaite

Synopsis:  From Publishers Weekly, "This second installment begins when Pito Tehana, the father of Materena's children, drunkenly proposes marriage. Though he's forgotten about it by morning, Materena can't get it out of her head. In between jobs, caring for her kids and visits with her many cousins, Materena fantasizes about her wedding, even though Pito does nothing but dash Materena's hopes; in one of the book's most moving chapters, Materena scrimps to buy Pito a silk shirt for his birthday, but when he opens it, he grumpily tells her to return it and buy him a case of beer. Although the novel is driven by Materena's intense longing, it's peppered with witty encounters between Materena and her nosy family members. Among the wide cast of friends and family, there's Cousin Giselle, who gave birth in the back of a Mercedes Benz; Mama Roti, Pito's doting mother; Mama Teta, who drives a wedding car; and Rita, Materena's favorite cousin. None are particularly nuanced, but when combined with Vaite's light touch and the exotic setting, the result is redolent of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series—a delightful diversion."

Review:  After reading Vaite's first novel Frangipani, I had high hopes and expectations for her second in this group on novels.  Where the first seemed to follow a linear storyline and mode of telling the story between mother and daughter, this felt more like a series of short stories.  Each is leading to Materena's real desire for Pito to be serious in his proposal to her, not to mention her hope that this means that he really loves her in a truly romantic sense.  This romantic hope threads through each story nicely and lends to the whimsical look at Matarena's Tahitian culture all the more.

The book is very light-hearted and warm, which makes it easy for readers to love Matarena and hope for her best.  Having felt a connection with her first book because of the time I'd spent in Hawaii and how similar some of the cultural references and relationships seemed, I enjoyed watching each character develop.  The story unfolded in these shorter chapters, but I'll admit that sometimes this lost my attention, as I wanted each story to tie directly to Matarena's desire for Pito to marry her.  The stories didn't necessarily all have to do with the relationship, per se, but built around them to show us the community and family they lived among.  Although it didn't grab me in the same way as the first book, I still really enjoyed the novel and feel that Vaite has an important voice in telling stories that show us Tahitians and their vibrant and amazing culture.


*FTC Disclosure:  Review was based on a library copy of the novel.