A Vision for an Excellent School Library

Who will win the Printz this year?

My vision of an excellent school library starts with great books. My current job focuses on selecting materials for children and teens, and while ebooks, audiobooks, DVDs, tablets and apps play an increasingly crucial role, the books still take the lead. I’m anxiously waiting to hear the winners of the ALA Youth Media Awards announced on January 23. I would immediately purchase the winners of the Newbery and Sibert awards for middle school libraries and the winners of the Printz, Morris and YALSA Nonfiction awards for high school libraries.

Mock award discussions allow students to vote for their choices each year. This Publishers Weekly article highlights a few excellent examples of Mock Newbery discussions taking place at school libraries around the country. Discussions like these can foster a love of literature in students in a fast-paced world where people increasingly communicate through texts and tweets.

An ideal school librarian will help students wade through the technology and online sources available to them while supporting the curriculum. Information literacy skills will remain of the utmost importance as it becomes increasingly difficult even for adults to distinguish legitimate news sources from fake ones. This School Library Journal article provides up-to-date resources for teaching information literacy.

While a school librarian’s most important role is helping students conduct research, the library should also serve as a fun place to hang out. It should function as a flexible space where teens can comfortably socialize and search for books, but it should also offer opportunities to tinker with hands-on maker materials and digital learning resources. Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia spaces provide perfect examples of this innovative approach. Brookfield Public Library also presents teens with exceptional maker programs.

Ideally, school libraries will engage teens with award-winning literature and the latest technology while providing them with 21st century research skills. For more inspirational school library ideas, take a look at my Pinterest page.

 

 

Book vs. Movie: The Godfather

I started writing a lengthy essay about how The Godfather Part I has to be in the top 3 movie adaptations of all time. My only complaint is that I would have liked a bit more of the female characters’ perspectives. In the book Mama Corleone comes alive as a really sassy woman who doesn’t take her husband too seriously. Kay is fleshed out a lot more too. And who doesn’t love speculating on whether Johnny Fontane was really based on Frank Sinatra?

Instead, I’ll leave you with a few favorite clips that illustrate the brilliance of Coppola’s film.

Here we see Michael’s first step into the “family business.” Outside the hospital, he’s calm and cool and ready to become the next Don.

This scene possibly makes the movie better than the book, because the greatest line wasn’t in the book. “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

The final scene where the door closes on Kay is such a perfect haunting image. In the book there is one more chapter, but for the movie this leaves such an impact.

Here’s a fun article from Vanity Fair with more geeky details: The Godfather Wars

And if you haven’t read the book, go get it! It’s a fun page-turner with a lot of subplots involving the minor characters that aren’t in the movie.

The Swerve

Every once in a while a book delights me so much that I want to clap my hands and say “Yay!” the way my one-year-old does whenever the Blackhawks score a goal. I want everyone on the planet to read this book just so they can share my excitement. Of course, tastes are so subjective that surely 90% of the population would think it’s totally boring.

Regardless, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt inspired this “Yay!” feeling in me. Somehow it incorporates everything that my husband and have been debating about since we were teenagers. To sum it up very simply, an Italian collector of ancient texts named Poggio found a copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in a German monastery in 1417. The ancient Roman poem had been MIA for about a century, and once Poggio had some friends copy it, the text ended up influencing some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance and far beyond. Included in this exalted group: Shakespeare, da Vinci, Galileo, Botticelli, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson.

The poem was controversial in its own time and in the Renaissance because it states that everything is made of atoms. The scientific aspects of it were considered heretical because it discredited the idea that God created everything. Also, Lucretius stated that there is no afterlife, and therefore there is no reason to fear death. No afterlife means no Hell, but also no need to worry about what’s left unfinished in life. You won’t be aware of these things, so you won’t care! He believed that religion was cruel because it caused fear and kept people from pursuing life’s highest goal, pleasure. He wasn’t exactly an atheist, because he believed that gods existed, but he thought that the gods didn’t give a crap one way or the other about what humans did. Oh, and humans aren’t the most important creatures in the universe. In fact, we’re not any more important than any other species. There’s no reason to believe that we’re special and that other life forms won’t exist before and after us and in other parts of the universe.

So you can see why the Pope and the Catholics during the Renaissance would have some problems with these ideas. But for me, who kept nodding my head while I was reading, it confirmed that other smart folks since ancient times have concluded a lot of the same things I have. There is something very comforting in that. I love the idea that we’re all part of this huge universe and we are just tiny particles within it. And that is not a sad thing. It’s a wondrous thing. And without religious superstitions hanging over our heads, we can be free to just enjoy the pleasures of life. Yay!

But I find myself writing this just after we’ve had a death in the family and I am faced with attending a Catholic wake and funeral. My family beliefs are very different from mine, and I will not be discussing On the Nature of Things with them this weekend! So even in 2013, most people don’t want to hear what Lucretius was preaching! And far be it from me to argue with loved ones about the beliefs that comfort them during times of grief. Everyone deals in their own ways.

But personally, I found this quote from Lucretius fan Montaigne very comforting today:

“Go out of this world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.

Our lives borrow from each other. And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life.”

Big Brother: Not Just a Reality Show!

Whelp, folks, I just finished the most depressing book I’ve ever read. It’s called 1984. I kind of want to trap myself in a cage of rats. Thanks, George Orwell.

Most normal people read this thing in high school, but my AP class read Animal Farm instead. I’m sure plenty of teachers are currently slamming their foreheads on blackboards and desks, trying to get their students to understand that Big Brother isn’t just a reality show where people vote each other out of a house.

I wonder what Orwell would think of his lasting effect on pop culture? Political analysts, including my husband, love to bring up Big Brother and DoubleSpeak when debating current events. Usually my eyes glaze over during these conversations. And my ears glazed over as I listened to certain chapters of the audiobook of 1984. When the action stops and Winston starts reading a book about the history of the world and Oceania and political parties and so on, I got really bored. But the rest of the story is completely frightening and dark and bleak. I found myself hoping that Winston and Julia would fight the forces of evil like some dystopian version of Batman and Robin. But, alas, nope. There is no shred of hope at the end of this book.

Considering I spend a lot of time whining in this blog that the so-called classics don’t live up to their reputation, it’s always refreshing to read one that does. This book is masterfully written. It scared the bejesus out of me, imagining a world where people wouldn’t be allowed any creativity or sexuality or freedom of thought. So Orwell succeeded in putting the fear of Big Brother in me.

And now that the weekend is upon us and I need something a bit lighter to read, I can’t wait to read Coreyography: A Memoir. When I spotted this book at the library earlier this week, it reminded me that when I was in the hospital in 2002, the only thing that cheered me up was watching the E! True Hollywood Story of The Coreys. Pop Culture Saves!

Not Dead!

As I was reading a friend’s blog just now, I realized that my own blog has been woefully neglected for months. What happened? I’ve become a bit more ambitious at work. I’m now writing blogs for the new Chicago Public Library website. When the site goes live to the public, hopefully by the end of the year, I will add links here. I’m still very active on goodreads, but I need to post more reviews there too. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. But I will get back to breaking down the classics, I promise!

I just finished Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady & I’m in the middle of 1984. I read a 700-page biography of J.D. Salinger too. I have plenty of material, just not enough time to reflect on it. Sigh.

The Painted Veil

Photo from moviefloss.com

I love it when a book surprises me, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil almost shocked me. Reading it was a complete 180 from my traumatic high school Maugham experience. In Brit Lit, I was assigned to write a term paper about Of Human Bondage and Existentialism. The book is 600 pages long and depressing as hell. From what I recall, a pathetic artist falls in love with a waitress who cheats on him a lot. I never finished the book, I am ashamed to say, and I used the word “existentialism” as much as possible in the paper to rack up the required number of pages.

But Maugham wrote dozens of other books and plays, many of them set in the Far East. As I read about him online, he lived quite the life. He served in the British military, spied on Russians, had homosexual affairs and illegitimate children. He was one of the highest paid and most popular authors in the 1930s, and he often landed in hot water for basing his characters on real people. Now that is some US Weekly-worthy stuff that can keep a gal like me interested, Mr. Maugham! 

The Painted Veil, which was made into a movie most recently in 2006, is way shorter and more palatable than OHB. The reason it surprised me, other than being enjoyable to read, is that it’s about a woman who has an affair but doesn’t meet a tragic end the way Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina do. I’ve read too many classic novels where any woman who has sex outside of marriage is totally doomed. It gets old after awhile, right, Tess of the D’ubervilles? 

At first Kitty, the main character in The Painted Veil, seems all too similar to Bovary and Karenina. She’s a spoiled, shallow socialite who is only concerned with landing a rich husband. When her little sister gets engaged before she does, she freaks out and grabs the first marriage proposal that floats her way. That’s how she ends up hitched to Walter, an introverted doctor who ships her off to Hong Kong where he’s going to aid victims of the cholera epidemic. There she meets Townsend, a handsome, charming politician. They have an affair and Townsend swears he’ll stand by Kitty if Walter finds out about the affair.

Does a married guy ever leave his wife for his mistress? You can probably guess the outcome. Kitty ends up staying married to Walter, who takes her to a Chinese province where everyone is dying of cholera. Kitty is terrified of catching it, but instead she ends up seeing what a swell guy Walter is when he cares for sick kids in an orphanage. She realizes that Townsend is a total a-hole who never cared about her. Walter’s good deeds inspire her to help some French nuns take care of the orphans. I won’t tell you the end of the story, but I was impressed that Kitty actually grows a soul and redeems herself instead of dramatically throwing herself in front of a rickshaw. Instead of whining that her life has been ruined by heartbreak, she makes a bad-ass speech at the end about how she doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did:

“I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life a free man and make a better job of it than I have.”

This isn’t the typical Victorian morality tale at all. Could Maugham actually be a feminist?! Hurrah!

And while the aforementioned French nuns talk a lot about sacrifice and God, I don’t think Maugham was preaching a religious message with this book. My favorite character, Waddington, is a drunk British officer with a wicked sense of humor who befriends Kitty while everyone else is busy dying of cholera. I think he is Maugham’s mouthpiece when he goes on a rant about the meaning of life:

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.”

And then he goes on about Taoism and almost sounds like Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars:

“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring….Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

Kitty: “Does it mean anything?”

Wadddington: “Sometimes, when I’ve had half a dozen whiskies and look at the stars, I think perhaps it does.”

Sounds about right to me, buddy. Also, the book’s title comes from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Photo from PoetryFoundation.org

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

 

Shelley is one of my favorite poets, and I think of him as an optimistic Romantic. This poem seems to say that if  you lift the veil on Life you’ll find some pretty ugly shit. That’s harsh, Percy Shelley! And it’s true that Kitty discovers some bitter truths along the way, but she rises above them to find a moral center and inner peace. That makes this a very progressive novel for a book written in 1925.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Once again, I feel like a slacker. I can assure you that I’ve been reading steadily all spring and summer, but not many of my selections seem to apply to this poor forsaken blog. Oh, and I have a teething baby. You can blame a teething baby for just about anything: sleep deprivation, foul moods, scatterbrained behavior. So thank you, Baby Fitz, for providing the perfect alibi for where I’ve been for the last few months. The whole five folks who ever read this blog will appreciate it, I’m sure. Anyway, I’ve decided that being a new mommy is sort of like being in love for the first time. It’s all-consuming and it’s all you can think or talk about. Soon you find yourself gushing to your friends about how your kid ate sweet potatoes for the first time or stood up by himself for the first time. And then you see your childless friends’ eyes glaze over. Silence. Crickets. And then you remember that anyone who’s not a parent does not give a crap about any of these things. Just like my high school friends got bored to tears hearing about my first love (What was his name again? Oh yeah, it was that Nick guy!), my friends are so over hearing about baby stuff. And I’m sure my readers aren’t interested in baby milestones, either.

On that note, I will get back to using my brian and talking about books for a few precious minutes. By now it’s probably obvious that I gravitate towards anything to do with the 1920’s. Since the Gatsby movie came out, a bunch of historical fiction about Scott and Zelda has followed. The only one I’ve read so far is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. So much has been written about the Fitzgeralds, and I’ve read a great deal of it, that it’s almost hard to imagine an author having a new perspective. But this novel held my attention from start to finish. It’s been long enough since I’ve read biographies that I’m not sure how close to the truth it stays. In her acknowledgements, Fowler says she “often felt I’d been dropped into a raging argument between what I came to call Team Zelda and Team Scott” as she read through their biographies. The Team Zelda people believe Scott ruined Zelda’s life and use her as an example of how women suffered before feminism. It’s true that she never got to pursue writing, ballet or painting in earnest because Scott didn’t really want her to, but she also had mental issues. Scott’s drinking messed up their lives considerably. It’s hard to tell what Zelda would have been able to do if she’d been more stable and able to get a divorce and establish her own career. There’s no doubt that Scott “borrowed” from her letters and journals in her own writing. Some stories published under his name were written by Zelda. But would we ever have heard of Zelda if she hadn’t been married to Scott? I don’t think she was exceptional enough as a writer or a dancer that she would’ve been famous if not attached to her husband. She would have married a rich guy in Montgomery, Alabama, and would’ve been an eccentric Southern socialite if she had not married Scott.

Z is very sympathetic to Zelda and portrays her as an ever-suffering wife of an alcoholic who spends money extravagantly. Scott cheats on her and tells her not to write novels because he doesn’t want her stuff to compete with his similar material. His friendship with Hemingway causes all sorts of problems in their marriage. I don’t have a difficult time believing Hem was a d-bag who has his own agenda to topple Scott off the top of the literary ladder in the late 20’s. The author thinks he outright made up stories about the Fitzgeralds in A Moveable Feast that persist today as facts about Scott and Zelda. I’ve never thought about that, but she’s probably right. So many famous stories about them are accepted as myths, but no one really knows if they ever danced in the fountain in front of the Plaza. These things make fun stories, but the day-to-day marriage of these two people was a hot mess. And reading their tale always starts off as fun and games, when Scott was making an astonishing amount of money from short stories and they made friends with every famous writer of the day in New York and Paris. But then it all descends into alcoholism and madness and it’s so sad. When I finished this novel I felt angry on Zelda’s behalf. Scott was broke and bitter and very ill at the end of his life and his wife died in a fire in a crappy mental hospital. Where were all of her fancy friends when she really needed them? No one cared about Scott and Zelda at the end of their lives, and it took a couple decades before Scott’s writing gained some respect as his novels were reprinted.

I find it hard to accept the author’s portrayal of Zelda as the suffering wife, though. I know it’s too simple to dismiss her as crazy the way some people did, but she was far from innocent. It takes two to tango, as they say, and she and Scott always knew how to push each other’s buttons. They both cheated on each other. They both spent too much money. They both drank too much. They could have accomplished so much more if they could have gotten themselves together. It’s a shame. But overall Z is a fun piece of historical fiction. Maybe just skip the last few chapters of depressing material?

No less depressing is the life of my beloved Dorothy Parker, but any fan of hers knows that she could always find the humor in her dilemmas. Ellen Meister decided to write a work of fiction with DP as a character. In her acknowledgements of Farewell, Dorothy Parker, she said she realized that a ton of fiction has been written about Jane Austen and other famous authors, but not one novel existed about DP. So she wrote one. Good for her. I share her taste in authors, and by her liberal references to DP’s poems, stories, and reviews, you can tell she knows her stuff. The premise of the novel is a little cheesy, and DP herself might even write a snarky review about it. A movie critic with serious social anxiety finds the ghost of DP in the guest book of the Algonquin Hotel. DP’s ghost helps the protagonist find the courage to fix all the problems in her life. She finally stands up for herself with the ghost of DP standing by drinking gin and offering witty remarks. It’s a heartwarming story in the end, and a quick read.

Light, quick reads seem to be all I can manage these days. Every attempt I make to read a Serious Classic lately has been a total fail. I started listening to the audiobook of War & Peace and got completely frustrated with the endless chapters of play-by-play on the battlefield. The chapters where characters actually have some emotional drama in their lives kept my attention for the first section. Yes, it’s just one of those books on my bucket list, but that one might actually kill me. I’ll make another attempt when I have more brain power. Ditto for the poems of Rilke, which are fascinating and bizarre. I kept reading the same page over and over and barely comprehending a word. But they are pretty. I will keep looking for a classic that my mommy brain can understand right now.

The Not So Great Baz-tsby

Oh, Baz Luhrmann. Why do you do it? Why do insist on making all of your films over-the-top acid trips that overwhelm the senses? People were laughing in the theater at moments that weren’t meant to be funny! I got a headache, and I didn’t even see the 3D version of the movie! And why didn’t anyone tell you that making a 3D version of Gastby, with a soundtrack full of Jay Z no less, is the most ridiculous idea ever???

So yes, I finally bit the bullet last night and saw The Great Gatsby with my husband in the theater. We don’t often make it to the theater anymore. Why bother when you can watch things on Apple TV or Netflix a few months down the road for less money and less hassle? But Gatsby is the one book we agree on as the Great American Novel. We named our son Fitzgerald for chrissakes. So we forked over $22 for this one. Unfortunately.

My expectations were pretty low. Previous efforts to put Gatsby on film have failed miserably. The 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow is very pretty, but SO BORING. Redford was trying so hard to be a man of mystery that he comes off as having no personality, which is the opposite of Gatsby’s character. Farrow just comes off as ditsy. But Daisy is a tough role to play. She’s just a unlikeable woman. I’ll get to that later. But anyway, when I heard that Baz was making this movie, I was terrified. OMG, he’s going to turn my favorite book into a musical with a laser light show. NOOOOO. And the result isn’t that far off.

Okay, I don’t hate all of his movies. I adored his Romeo+Juliet when I was in high school. Leo and Claire were perfectly cast, and in that case the modern setting and music totally worked. Moulin Rouge was great fun, but again, how much of that was the charm of Ewan MacGregor and the pretty costumes? Gatsby definitely has pretty costumes. If Baz’s wife, Catherine Martin, doesn’t win the Oscar for best costumes it’ll be a sin. The fashion mags and blogs have been going nuts with flapper madness for at least six months or longer. Vogue did a gorgeous spread with Carey Mulligan last month.

Good thing she looked pretty as Daisy, because that’s the best thing I can say about her performance. So I felt some hope when I saw how beautiful the movie LOOKED. And Leo! Leo is the perfect choice for Gatsby. He’s got the looks, the charisma, the depth, and the Old Hollywood air about him. He looks great in the Brooks Brothers suits. I thought his performance would be brilliant. Not so much. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. But I blame the terrible script and Mulligan, who is just not his equal acting-wise. I will defend Leo to the end, although my husband said he only did this movie because he must have bought a new yacht or mansion that he had to pay for.

So here’s the moment I almost walked out of the theater: At the beginning of the movie, to solve the problem of just doing boring voice-overs as previous versions of the book have done, Baz decides to put Nick Carraway in an asylum and make him an alcoholic. He’s talking to his therapist about Gatsby, and then the therapist recommends that he write about Gatsby as part of his recovery. Oh. My. God. This is so cheesy, and so wrong on so many levels. In the book, Nick is the voice of reason, the moral compass, the normal Midwestern guy. He observes these crazy rich people and realizes how f-ed up their priorities are. He sees the good in Gatsby but also realizes that he makes huge mistakes. So, at the end of the book, Nick rejects their shallow New York lifestyle and moves back to the Midwest, older and wiser. He DOES NOT become an alcoholic in a looney bin. This is not a soap opera, Baz Luhrmann! This infuriated me. Also, you don’t need to type important quotes onto the screen just to drive home an important point. So lame.

Also, why was Jordan even included in this version? She was just a brunette with one facial expression whose only purpose seemed to be to tell Nick to invite Daisy to tea. She had no other subplot. They never talked about how she cheated at golf or went on dates with Nick or anything. She just sat next to Daisy on couches and in cars. That’s it. But whatever.

The music annoyed the piss out of me. If you’re going to leave the setting in the 1920s, use 1920s songs. Hearing Jay Z or Florence Welch or whoever else was on this awful soundtrack completely distracted me and took me out of the story. It’s a feeble attempt at keeping the story hip and current and it didn’t make any sense. If Baz had consulted me about the music, WHICH HE TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE, I would have reminded him of Bon Jovi’s theme song to Young Guns. So silly. So 80s. So wrong. Even having current pop stars sing 1920s songs would have been really charming and fun. I know this is one of Baz’s pet things, the modern soundtrack, but it just doesn’t work with this story. Blech.

Okay, so maybe I’m a bit angrier than I thought I was before I started writing this. So let me tell you the positives. Visually the movie is beautiful and fun. The costumes are fab. The party scenes are totally over-the-top but entertaining. Gatsby’s house I thought was too gigantic to even be realistic. It’s a friggin castle on Long Island, somehow. But the scene where he’s showing Daisy around the house and he’s throwing his fancy shirts around is exactly the way I always pictured it. These scenes between them are charming. I wouldn’t say that Leo and Carey have the greatest chemistry. I think Michelle Williams could have done a great job with this part. As I said, it’s hard to make Daisy sympathetic in any way. But Carey’s version doesn’t stand out at all. She’s supposed to be the It Girl, the most popular socialite around. She just doesn’t pull it off. It’s hard to understand why Gatsby is so obsessed with this girl, which is the core of the story.

Now I’m complaining again. But they look perfect for the parts. And in the scenes where Baz played it straight and cut it out with the hip hop and the glitz, he actually came closer to bringing the novel to life than anyone ever has. The confrontation at the Plaza is actually pretty good and tense, and so is the accident scene. Ilsa Fisher did a great job as Tom’s mistress. Casting Leo and Tobey Maguire together was brilliant, since they are real-life BFFs of so many years. Their rapport seems genuine and caring, which is another core element of the story. When Nick tells Gatsby, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together,” I believe him.

And Leo is dreamy. He’s maturing very well. He’s not a teen heart-throb anymore, but he’s a handsome grown-up and he’s a fine actor. Usually. This script did him no favors, and he came off sort of wooden. My husband said it seemed like he was reading off cue cards. I think he was a lot better than that. Again, it’s hard to play such an iconic character who doesn’t even seem like a real human. In this version they went for Gatsby as Eternal Optimist and really idealized him, despite his lying and bootlegging. This oversimplifies Gatsby and that is annoying too. This guy created a whole personae for himself that wasn’t real, and it’s tragic to watch his world fall apart. The whole thing is supposed to be a Greek Tragedy, the American Dream gone horribly wrong, where you see the negative consequences of thinking money will bring happiness. Gatsby uses money to win over his true love, but she’s so caught up in her socialite world that she can’t give it all up to be with him. He’s “new money” and that will never fly in her circle of friends. So she stays with Tom, who is the biggest d-bag on earth. Gatsby puts all of his faith in a girl who doesn’t deserve him and he is even willing to get blamed for murder on her behalf. The poor guy is a total sucker.  He just can’t deal with the harsh reality that Daisy and Tom are totally selfish a-holes.

So…yeah. If you love the novel, you will hate this movie. Sorry. But you probably already knew that. If you just want to see a fun movie that’s visually cool and has pretty people in it and has fun music (and you don’t care that the music makes no sense for the plot) then go ahead and see it. I did not, as my husband did, think it was one of the worst movies of all time. It was just extremely disappointing.

There’s No Place Like Home

Okay, enough of the doom and gloom! I decided to give my mommy brain a vacation and picked up an audiobook of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I don’t see how anyone could feel unhappy while listening to this story, which is why I want to buy a copy for my son. I’ve watched the movie dozens of times, but I’ve never read the book until now. For the most part, the movie follows the book pretty closely, but the movie script actually improves a few plot points. 

The first thing that caught my attention was how Baum describes everything in Kansas as being gray and gloomy and then when Dorothy arrives in Munchkin Land it is full of all colors of the rainbow. This reminded me of how brilliantly the film goes from black and white to Technicolor. It’s an amazing movie moment. I couldn’t believe how similar the book and the movie were in that scene.

One memorable difference is that Book Dorothy is given silver shoes instead of ruby slippers. As the owner of both silver and ruby red ballet flats, I think either is a legitimate fashion statement. Silver is a great neutral and goes with everything, so Book Dorothy probably had more wardrobe options. But of course everyone remembers the sparkly red shoes from the movie, and probably every little girl (or gay boy) who watched Judy Garland trot down the Yellow Brick Road wanted to own heels just like them. If I’m not mistaken, the Smithsonian owns the real ruby slippers. So Dorothy had great and timeless style. In fact, in the  book the silver shoes are the first thing that Oz asks Dorothy about when she arrives in the Emerald City. He sounds more like a fashions stylist than a wizard, but whatever. Moving on…

Did you know that Tin Woodsman, as he’s called in Baum’s book, once was engaged to a nice village girl until the Wicked Witch cursed him and turned him to metal? It’s such a sad little anecdote. The Tinman tells Dorothy that he promised to marry this girl once he made enough money from chopping wood to buy a house. And he thinks the poor girl is still waiting for him in her cabin where she lives with her mean aunt! I thought for sure at the end of the book he would dramatically reunite with this girl and have a big wedding in the forest. But, um, nope. The Tinman gets his heart and decides to rule some gang of midgets or something. So much for romance.

Another big difference between book and movie is that Book Oz and Book Wicked Witch aren’t too bright. Movie Wicked Witch is crazy scary and whip smart. In the book she tries to outsmart Dorothy and her pals by sending wolves and flying monkeys killer bees after them. The book goes all kinds of Hunger Games for a couple of chapters! But the witch seems really afraid of Dorothy and her silver shoes. In the end it’s death by bucket o water for her! Oz is a really crappy wizard, as he even admits himself. He tries to appear as a giant bald head, a pretty blonde girl, and a ball of fire to Dorothy and her friends. But then Toto exposes him for the fraud he is. And he really has no idea how to help them get courage, a heart, a brain and a trip to Kansas. He kind of throws together some arts and crafts (a courage energy drink for Cowardly Lion, a silk heart for Tinman, a set of pins for Scarecrow’s head, and a hot air balloon for Dorothy) and everyone seems satisfied. But then he takes off in the balloon without Dorothy like a chump! He really is useless. So the lesson here is that they all possessed the traits they wished for all along. Scarecrow was smart, the Lion was courageous, and the Tinman had a loving heart. And Glenda the super pretty Ginger Witch tells D in the end that she just has to click her heels together to get home. It’s all about the shoes, ladies!!!

But Victor Fleming did a great job condensing some repetitive scenes. In the book there are two or three trips to the Emerald City and more than one Good Witch who helps the kids and at least three road trips on the Yellow Brick. And the end of the book finds Dorothy at home in Kansas with her aunt and uncle, but it wasn’t all a dream like it was in the movie. I always loved the end of the movie where you see that the helpers on the farm were really the Scarecrow, Lion and Tinman. “And you were there and you were there and you were there!” That is movie magic. As a kid it made me believe that anything was possible, and that’s what good fairy tales should do.

The Sound of Mommy’s Fury

Hi folks. Yes, I’m still alive. But when does mommy have time to blog when she’s working full-time and taking care of a four-month old at home? Try never. But I’m alive, feeling positive and trying to read and write a bit every day to keep my brain functioning.

So a week or two ago I finished Faulker’s The Sound and the Fury, the first classic I picked up since returning to work after maternity leave. My mom loves Southern Gothic Dysfunctional Family Novels and so I’ve always meant to check out good ole Faulkner. And she warned me that this one is the toughest, what with the four different narrators and the stream of consciousness and the whatnot. But I guess I am just a glutton for punishment sometimes.

According to Mom the Literature Teacher, you need to read The Sound and the Fury more than once to really get it. And I believe it. I mostly listened to the book on audio and that made it a bit tougher to comprehend. At least on the page, the author used italics to indicate flashbacks, but not always. Basically, the Compton family is f-ed up, and they have been since the Civil War ended. Benji, one of the brothers, is mentally handicapped. Quentin, another brother, drowns himself because he’s so depressed that his sister became a floozy. Jason, the third brother, is bitter that the bank job he was promised by his sister’s fiance was taken away from him when the sister’s baby turned out to be someone else’s kid. Caddy, the sister, leaves town after she has the baby girl, who is named after Quentin. Mom is totally self-absorbed and checked out emotionally. Dad dies of alcoholism. So, yeah, it’s a feel-good book. Sort of like Marley and Me, except in the South. Uh-huh.

Well, here’s what I’ll say in this bummer of a book’s defense. Reading it feels like a brain exercise, a puzzle to be solved. It fascinated me even though it made me feel sort of dumb. I don’t know how the guy wrote this thing and pasted it all together. I had to read background info in both SparkNotes and Novels for Students to even figure out the plot. And even then, there is a lot left up to interpretation. Reading the characters’ confusing thoughts and memories reminded me that everyone has a different take on family events. If you ask any member of your family what happened on any given day, you will get completely different answers. Whose narration should we trust, if any of them? It’s sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with a family that really needs a therapist.

These days the family probably would turn to a therapist, talk show host or self-help book. Currently I’m reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, which explains how to use mediation techniques to stay calm with your children. I am having mixed results with its suggestions, but that is another story! It reminded me of S&TF’s stream of consciousness narration when I read, “our thinking is complex, chaotic, unpredictable, and frequently inaccurate, inconsistent, and contradictory.” So, Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn would suggest that the Comptons take a mediation class together to let go of their negative thoughts and their inaccurate memories of family events. That would be a much happier outcome then all of the death, bitterness, yelling, and running away that goes on in Faulkner’s book. Faulkner himself would probably say, “Screw that hippie nonsense” and just go hunting.

In any case, these people had PROBLEMS. I don’t even have the brain power to unravel them right now. All I can tell you is that I found the women in the book, Caddy, her daughter Quentin, and the housekeeper, Dilcey, far more interesting than the men. I would have much rather read their perspectives on their messed up family, but I guess it’s symbolic of women’s lack of power in 1920’s society that we only hear from the men and the omnicient narrator. Okay, fine, I get it, but it still would have been way more fun to read Miss Quentin’s version of how she stole her a-hole Uncle Jason’s money (which was supposed to be hers anyway) and ran away with some guy from the circus. At the end of the book, Miss Q’s antics are supposed to mark the complete downfall of the family. She’s become a floozy just like her mother and feels no remorse about it. But I felt happy for her. She got out of town and hopefully created a new life for herself. At least she showed some backbone. Dilcey is supposed to be the redeeming member of the whole family, the one who keeps everything together with her quiet wisdom and religious faith and cooking skills. Well, screw that, I say. She should have told the whole family they were nuts and left the lunatics to run their own asylum. Being the martyr is overrated.

But finding a classic book where female characters have any sort of optimistic ending is a tough task. I guess my goal for next classic will be to read something that doesn’t make me want to follow in Quentin’s footsteps and drown myself. Maybe I should pick up something for children in honor of my munchkin at home?