I just got home a few hours ago from Los Angeles, where I dragged E and L to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It was my first time, and I figured I had to make an effort to go at some point for a few reasons. One is that it is simply the largest book festival of its kind, and I have heard nothing but amazing things about it. The other was that I wanted to scope it out to decide if it was something Shen’s Books would want to get a booth at in the future.
While I was there, I stopped by to say hello to Rebecca Grose, a children’s book publicist I worked with last year. She was helping out her friend Salina Yoon’s booth, so and when I arrived, Rebecca introduced me to her. Salina’s booth was filled with colorful board books and picture books that she had written and illustrated herself. Even though they were published by Simon & Schuster and Penguin, Salina decided to buy a booth at the festival herself to do further promotion. Wow, are some authors dedicated!
I asked how sales were going, and Salina pointed to a stack of books on the end of a table, ten or fifteen copies of A Pirate’s Life. “I thought I had run out of those!” she exclaimed. “We were down to two yesterday afternoon, and I didn’t think I had brought any more. When I overheard a customer ask if there were any more of them, I said, ‘I’ll take one!’ and the customer grabbed the other one!”
“Well,” I said, “pirate books are big this year. I just saw a huge line for David Shannon signing How I Became a Pirate.” Everyone nodded sagely.
And then it was time to move on. I promised to keep in touch with Rebecca, and Salina urged me to email her if I had any questions about the festival. Again, again, I marvel at the truly kind and friendly people who populate our children’s book industry.
"If you take a book with you on a journey... an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper-- memories cling to the printed page better than anything else."
Armed with my photocopied instructions from The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, a spiral notebook, and my copy of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, I set off to edify myself. Or at least appreciate what I was reading more than I could when I zipped through books as fast as I could.
I started out strong. As I read each chapter of Cold Mountain, I thought about the images, what they represented, and what the characters represented. I copied entire quotes into my spiral notebook. I noted particular details if I thought they might become important. And at the end of each chapter, I wrote a brief summary of the events that occurred.
It turned out that Cold Mountain was very conducive to this type of note-taking because each chapter alternates its point of view between the two main characters, Inman and Ada. In that way, the writing was episodic. I was able to work on one chapter at a time and then leave the book to do or read something else. I also noticed that when this happened and I returned to the book after a few days, I had no trouble recalling what had happened so far, or who the characters were. This was already a great improvement on my reading in the past, when I couldn’t read more than one book at a time, or take too long of a break between reading spurts without completely losing track of what happened.
However, as Inman’s journey wore on, I too began to lose steam. I would set down the book for longer and longer periods. The prospect of having to take notes and synthesize thoughts became something I dreaded, and I would find excuses to read something else, or not read at all. Before I knew it, I had stalled about three quarters of the way through the book and it had been months since I last picked it up.
Still, I hate to leave a book unfinished if I’ve gotten that far, so I finally decided that if it was the note-taking that was preventing me from reading Cold Mountain at all, it just wasn’t worth it. Maybe Cold Mountain wasn’t the best choice for note-taking anyway. Maybe the reason I lost interest was that there just wasn’t that much in it to note. So I allowed myself to abandon the plan and just finished the book without worrying about it.
In the end, I’m not sure whether I enjoyed the book more or less because of the extra baggage I imposed upon it. I certainly remember the beginning better than I otherwise would have, but I also don’t feel like I got particularly much out of it.
I am not ready to abandon Susan Wise Bauer altogether, however. My next attempt will be at something that is obviously more difficult both in terms of plot, character, and literary depth. How about Thomas Pynchon’s V?
Every once in a while (every two or three days or so) I’ll read a blog post that changes my life. Maybe it shifts my perception of a book I’ve read, makes me think about my views of the world, or just introduces me to an addictive online game.
About six months ago, I came across a post at Classical Bookworm, where blogger Sylvia wrote about her neurotic note-taking on the books she read. Check out her post, because she included a picture of a page out of her notebook—it’s amazing. This picture of her meticulous notes was the first thing that caught my eye, and then, as I read on, I realized how seriously she kept her records for both fiction and non-fiction books.
This is the part that changed my life: “It certainly does require time and effort but with my swiss-cheese brain I would have a hard time remembering and grasping the overall import of what I read if I didn't write it down in one place.”
That hit home. Is that why I can never remember anything about the books I read? I go through them so quickly that I don’t properly think about them or fully digest them. I would love to be able to appreciate the depth of the writing and the breadth of the thematic material in every book I read—or at least the good ones.
Luckily, Sylvia gave a quick overview on her note-taking method and also referred readers to the book that it is based on: The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. Here’s a brief description of the book according to School Library Journal:
Written in a straightforward style accessible to most students, this readable book provides solid, step-by-step advice on how to read some of the world's great books with discipline and comprehension. The first four chapters explain the author's well-thought-out three-step program, how and why it works, and how to prepare to use it. The remainder of the volume devotes a chapter each to analysis of novels, autobiography/memoirs, history, drama, and poetry. The system involves reading each book three times: once for the facts, once for analysis, and once for an informed evaluation of the author's ideas. Readers are encouraged during this process to mark up their books with comments and questions in the margins (or use Post-Its), and to keep a journal of quotes, summaries, questions, and ruminations.
Within a week I had borrowed The Well-Educated Mind from the library and read the section on fiction (it’s best to start small, right?). In fact, I photocopied the section so that I could follow Bauer’s note-taking strategies. I figured it would take at least one book to get the hang of the system and figure out my own note-taking preferences, so I chose a cheap spiral notebook (didn’t want to invest in a Moleskine quite yet) and a fairly moderate book to read on the literature scale: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.
I own the whole series of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. In hardcover. I really like the way they look on my bookshelf—their sherbet colors, jaunty font, smooth, rounded spines. I really like the idea of the series too, since it reminds me of me and my two best friends from high school. We were like that back then.
Given my terrible memory, I can never recall the details of any one book, but overall they give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, and I have a particularly vivid image in my mind of the night I finished reading the first book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
I was living in a studio apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt. The one room held, on one end, my bed, nightstand, and dresser. On the other end was a futon, a coffee table, and a television set. While lying in bed, I could reach over and touch the arm of the futon. The kitchen was in fact a separate room that utilized the narrow space along the front of the building that bordered the stairwell. It was no more than five feet wide, but it felt luxurious.
The image is simple: me, sniffling into a wad of tissues in a small pool of light cast by my IKEA bedside lamp at three in the morning.
I try not stay up reading. I often force myself to put down a really good book because if I finish a great book at night, I can’t sleep. I’m so hyped up, or still weepy, that it just compounds the problem. Funny how I don’t remember what happened in the book, but I can picture myself reading in bed as if I was a bystander in my own life.
I literally just walked in the door from meeting Lisa Yee at the local Barnes and Noble. I don't often go to author events in stores, but last week my friend EJ told me she would speaking only a few miles from my house. I have been reading Lisa Yee's blog and have been charmed by her wit and enthusiasm and, most importantly, her Peep Wars, so I did want to meet her and introduce myself.
Lisa Yee stopped at our Barnes and Noble as part of the book tour for her new novel, So Totally Emily Ebers. If you're familiar with Millicent Min and Stanford Wong, you will know that Emily Ebers is the third book in this series, and that you will find out what happened during that single summer from Emily's point of view.
Tonight, Lisa tried a little something new: reading passages from each of the three books that portrayed the same events from different characters point of view. That was fun. The audience consisted of about twenty people, filling the nook that Barnes and Noble made available. Besides me and EJ, there was a group of Asian students from a literature class, a few families, and one girl who had her hand up between excerpts, asking questions or making astute comments about the characters.
After the reading, the small group asked a surprisingly large number of questions. Actually, I'm not sure why I was surprised. I don't know how many questions people usually ask. And then, of course, people had Lisa sign their books. At the end, I introduced myself and was pleasantly surprised that Lisa seemed familiar with Shen's Books. When famous people know of you, does that make you famous too?
But I had a plan for these. As a writing assignment, I read one of the short mysteries called "The Case of the Stolen Fan." At the cliffhanger ending, I had the students come up with their own solutions to the mystery and write a well-formed paragraph using their own explanations and supporting evidence from the the story.
While none of them got the solution exactly, they did write great paragraphs using clues from the story to back up their opinions. And what's more, they had fun doing it.
Recently, work has been a bit stressful. When I get down on my job, I like to fantasize about other peoples’ jobs. Last week, I wished I was a scientist. No—a neuroscientist or a cognitive scientist. Everything about how the mind works fascinates me. I love reading Oliver Sacks, I have V.S. Ramachandran on my TBR pile, and I’ve always been drawn to anything about child brain development. E said, “why don’t you go back to school for neuroscience then?” He always says crazy stuff like that.
But then, yesterday, I got This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin (they keep coming into the house at about four times the rate that I can read them). This is a book that combines two of my greatest interests, and since it got some great reviews, I knew it was one I had to read. Then I turned to the back flap and took a look at the author. This is what his bio blurb says:
DANIEL J. LEVITIN runs the Levitin Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, where he holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communications. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he was a record producer with gold records to his credit and professional musician. He has published extensively in scientific journals and music trade magazines such as Grammy and Billboard.
Levitin’s bio is inspiring beyond belief! It’s not that crazy to go back to school and getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience! I majored in music! I’m good at science! I could do that!
If you’re a home owner, I highly recommend having a place to store home-related information like the phone number of your plumber, or when you last serviced the microwave, or what color you painted the living room. The Homeowner’s Record Keeper by Christina Henry de Tessan is just one of the many books available that have sections for every conceivable home topic.
We’ve had this book since we first moved into this, our first house, and I faithfully pasted the business cards of the people we had do work here and wrote in the information for our utility companies. We haven’t quite utilized the maintenance sections or the planning sections, where there are grids for drawing out your interior design fantasies. A few years ago, however, I did a smart thing that makes me very happy this week. When we painted half the house in 2004, we had some custom colors mixed at Kelly Moore. Each color had a code assigned to it so that the store could mix more from the same formula. I took a few moments then to fill out the paint information section of the room-by-room interior records.
This week, in preparation for setting up my home office (long story), we had a painting company come in to scrape the acoustic-popcorn-cottage-cheese-texture off the ceilings of three rooms. Then we had them prep and paint just the ceilings. So on Monday, I went to Kelly Moore to buy two gallons of the off-white we had used before. Having the paint codes so easily at hand was invaluable. Then today, I went back for a gallon of cheery yellow-orange called Clean Canvas, which is in our kitchen and dining room. I will paint the office that color. It’s a good thing I had written the name in the book, because I was able to walk right in and ask for a gallon of interior flat Clean Canvas. Five minutes, in and out.
I love having been organized two years ago. It makes life today so much easier.
I feel like it’s been so long since I read real literature. (Translations are automatically considered real literature, right?) I think I’ve forgotten how. I read Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint with a pencil in hand, trying to figure out how to decide what was worth underlining. I also tried pretending I was back in college and had to write a paper about the book in the next six hours—what would I focus on?
It really wasn’t that bad. Television was a very enjoyable read with a lot of very obvious themes to work with. The main character, at the beginning of the novel, announces that he has stopped watching television. He is simply too busy doing “nothing,” as he calls his work, hobbies, and outings, to watch TV. However, this plan, as well as his work, hobbies, and outings, turns out to be a study in self-delusion. Not only does he sneak in quite a bit of television viewing (if you’re at someone else’s house, it doesn’t count), but by the end of the book he has purchased a second television for his household. And still has not written more than fifteen sentences of his monograph.
This fatally flawed main character pained me throughout the book. Everything he did was so awkward and misguided, yet perfectly justified in his own mind. I cringed constantly at his mishaps. But every once in a while, he would spout out some gem of insight that I had to dig my pencil out for. Toussaint brilliantly created a character that encompassed all of human nature’s greatest failings and triumphs simultaneously.
Luckily for me, the book included an afterword that briefly examined the themes and connections in Toussaint’s works. I’m always amazed by professional literary analysis, and how professors and critics can see things that seem so obvious after they have been pointed out, but I didn’t catch when I read them. I suppose this skill can be acquired from practice. Maybe if I didn’t spend so much time blogging, I could work on it. Hmm. More on that later. Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Final day. We arrived at the Osaka airport with plenty of time to spare for our afternoon flight. However, the United counter wasn’t open yet, so we shopped and visited the observation tower before trying again. When we arrived, the counter was open all right, and there was a huge line of people already snaking through the area.
I tried to see if we could use the automated check-in computers, but someone in line was trying to explain that I couldn’t. I must have looked confused, because the American then said, “you can’t check in. There’s no flight.” Incomprehension. “There’s no flight—it was cancelled,” he said. Then an airline employee handed me a hastily printed flyer. In both Japanese and English, it explained that our flight had been cancelled and that there were, “unfortunately no accommodations in the Osaka area.”
While E got in line to rebook, I bought a calling card and called my mom in the States and had her call United from there. During the next hour, we waited and waited, while I called my mom every fifteen minutes to check in. There must have been a lot of trouble finding flights for people to San Francisco, because the line hardly moved at all. As far as we could make out, there didn’t seem to be any flights to San Francisco for another two days. Some people were able to get a flight to Seoul, then to the U.S. from there. With a hundred people still in line in front of us, it didn’t seem likely that we would be able to leave that day.
But my mom, who insisted that the airline was not going to leave her daughter in the Osaka airport for two days, talked to a manager was able to get us rerouted out that day. With confirmation in hand, we stepped out of line, leaving hundreds of frustrated people behind us.
Where did we go? We flew that evening from Osaka to Honolulu, arriving at 7:00am. Then we transferred to Aloha Airlines and “island hopped” to Maui, where we had an eleven-hour layover. Eleven hours in Maui!!
(I wished for a moment we had a guidebook, but I let it go. I really need to be more spontaneous, and wasn’t this the most spontaneous way to take a trip to Hawaii there could possibly be? )
First we rented a car and headed for La Haina, the only place I remember from my one trip to Maui ten years ago. I also remembered there being a row of swanky resorts just north of La Haina, so we headed that way, stopping at the first one we saw: the Hyatt Regency, right on the beach.
Even the lobby at the Hyatt was a tropical paradise. The weather was crystal clear, hovering in the low 80’s, bright and sunny. A warm breeze wafted from the surf. We checked into the spa and got lockers, where we changed into our swimsuits. Before getting wet, we had a bite to eat at the poolside café. There, we ate and basked in the sun. Across from our table, an older couple was relaxing in lounge chairs. Each of them was reading a different Maui guidebook, and the one the wife was holding was Maui for Dummies.
“Hey, E,” I whispered. “Look at her book.”
He looked over and shrugged. “Uh-huh?”
“Isn’t that funny?” Was it just me? While I sometimes joke that I don’t want to be reading a book that calls me a dummy, I can see the appeal for many subjects—especially computer-related ones. But when you sit in a lounge chair by the pool of the Hyatt Regency resort, do you really need a book called Maui for Dummies? I don’t know. I guess it’s just me.
And we took off for the beach. We splashed around, sat on our towels watching the kids, then tested out the swimming pool. Finally, we went back to the spa to shower and change. Completely refreshed and tired, we had an honest-to-goodness cheeseburger (so welcome after a week of rice and fish) in La Haina, and returned to the airport for the final leg home.
Remember when I joked about our vacations being so tiring that we need a vacation afterward? Well, we got it this time!
I went to a little happy hour get-together thing last night organized by the Children’s Book Council for people in children’s book publishing in the Bay Area. The event was called “Where the Wild Things Drink,” and we met at the Thirsty Bear Brewery in San Francisco after work.
I must admit I had a really good time. Only about a dozen people attended (all women), and I knew half of them, maybe. And even though I’m really shy and am totally afraid of meeting new people, I had a great time. I love the children’s book industry! Every single person is nice, friendly, and genuine. I loved being around people who are interested in hearing about what I do, and I always enjoy hearing about what other people are doing.
One of the women there that I already knew was Hazuki Kataoka, author and inventor of a product called Storycard Theater. Her idea is based on the traditional kamishibai storytelling cards from Japan. Each of her stories, like Momantaro: The Peach Boy, is printed on large cards with pictures on one side and text on the back. However, the text that goes along with a particular picture is printed on the back of the previous picture’s card, so that when you stack them in a pile, the right words will be on the last card in the pile, the one the narrator sees when holding the cards forward.
At one point in the evening, I had to tell Hazuki about visiting Japan. She was eager to hear what I thought, and I explained that the most striking thing about Japan was the way two seemingly irreconcilable yet entirely unique cultures are juxtaposed in daily life. On the one hand, there are bowing bellmen, ladies in kimonos coming out of the kabuki theater, and shopkeepers who pick up miniscule bits of litter on the sidewalk outside their shops. On the other, there are punk teenagers gathered in cafes, cell phone stores the size of department stores, and shopping arcades with more neon than ten Times Squares put together. It’s mind boggling.
I love Suki’s Kimono! Suki is so cute you want to take her home. Written by Chieri Uegaki and so very charmingly illustrated by Stephane Jorisch, the book is about Suki’s first day at school, when she decides that the special day warrants a special outfit: the kimono her grandmother gave her during her visit that summer. While her older sisters pretend not to know her and some of the other kids snicker, Suki is undeterred.
That reminds me of seeing a few little girls wearing kimonos when we were in Kyoto. How darling they looked! In fact, many women in Kyoto wear their kimono daily. Our tour guide explained that in an effort to encourage traditional Japanese culture in the face of modernization, the Kyoto government has passed a law that offers a discount on public transportation and taxis to any woman wearing a kimono. How great is that?
Our tour guide also insisted that kimonos look best on petite women. We visited a textile center one afternoon, where there was a short kimono “fashion show” for us tourists. She told us to pay particular attention to the vertical lines created by the drape of the kimono, and the aesthetic difference between the shorter women and the taller women. While they all looked pretty much equally beautiful to me, I will admit that the little girls we saw earlier that day were the cutest. Maybe it’s only obvious if the kimono wearer is less than three feet tall?
Suki's Kimono by Chieri Uegaki and illustrated by Stephane Jorisch
I almost quit halfway through Spook by Mary Roach. It’s not that it isn’t an interesting and well-written book. It’s just that it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be about. I thought it would be full of real-life ghost stories, of unexplained eerie happenings and how scientists approach studying them. Instead, most of the book was concerned with the history of the search for the afterlife. And while this should be interesting too, I’m just not really a history person.
Roach’s style is important to consider as well, because her tongue-in-cheek personality comes through very strongly. Either you like it or you don’t, and, well, maybe I didn’t.
That said, I kept going and the second half of the book was much better. I guess I got used to Roach’s tone, and her stories and experiences were more contemporary and relevant to my interests. So in the end, I enjoyed the book, though I didn’t love it.
The really funny thing was that in Arthur & George, which I read right afterward, Arthur joins the London Psychical Society, and gets very involved in the spiritualism so popular in the early 20th century. Several characters appeared in both books, and luckily, I was familiar with the movement, with the way mediums and séances were handled, and I knew exactly was ectoplasm was (or wasn’t). Talk about coincidences!
Arrived home yesterday morning, and the tally for the two week vacation: only one book read, Arthur & George by Julian Barnes. This is par for the course, though I did bring two books just in case.
I spent most of the 11-hour plane trip from San Francisco to Taiwan reading Arthur & George. I especially liked the beginning section of the book, when Barnes introduces us to each of the boys and their very different lives. And when I figured out that Arthur was Arthur Conan Doyle, I was delighted. How was it that I didn’t know what this book was going to be about before I started reading?
Here’s the gist:
In 1903, George, a solicitor, was accused of writing obscene, threatening letters to his own family and of mutilating cattle in his farm community. He was convicted of criminal behavior in a blatant miscarriage of justice based on racial prejudice. Eventually, Sir Arthur ("Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth") heard about George's case and began to advocate on his behalf. In this combination psychological novel, detective story and literary thriller, Barnes elegantly dissects early 20th-century English society as he spins this true-life story with subtle and restrained irony. (Amazon.com)
On the plane, I followed Arthur and George through to their young adulthood, attended George’s trial, and by the time we landed in Taipei in the evening of the following day, George and Arthur finally met for the first time. I felt like I had stayed up all night. I had, in fact, stayed up all night.
We spent the first two days at my Grandparents’ house in Tainan, where I got a lot of reading done. That seems to happen when visiting Grandparents. Then our proper vacation began when we took a jaunt to Green Island, off the east coast of Taiwan, with my parents. Between putting around the island on our scooters and eating sashimi fresh of the fishing boats, there was no longer time for less frivolous pursuits.
It wasn’t until the end of the week, on our flight to Tokyo, that I finished up the book. Maybe it was that I was distracted by the fun of vacationing, but I found the second half of Arthur & George less fascinating than the first. Until about three quarters of the way through, I had been all set to proclaim the book one of the best I’ve read this year, but somehow the magic of Barnes’ turn-of-the-century England lost some of its luster as the story dragged on. With no cathartic ending (due to it being a true story?), the momentum of the book seemed to have been lost somewhere soon after Arthur took on George’s case.
It was probably just the unusual circumstances of where I was when I read it, I’m sure. The descriptions of the two very different men in their very different social worlds is so elegant, while the plot is all the more fascinating because it reads like a Victorian detective novel. Julian Barnes was my favorite writer for a long while, and there is nothing in his latest work that indicates that he has lost his touch.
Want to see pictures from our trip? I’ll tack some on the end of each post this week. Enjoy!
I just got home a few hours ago from Los Angeles, where I dragged E and L to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It was my first time, and I figured I had to make an effort to go at some point for a few reasons. One is that it is simply the largest book festival of its kind, and I have heard nothing but amazing things about it. The other was that I wanted to scope it out to decide if it was something Shen’s Books would want to get a booth at in the future.
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