Post-Depressive Past

My recent reading has been determined by those around me in the most figurative of senses - the public library hold list.  I have a number (okay, way too many) books out of the library and, as other patrons put holds on the books, needed to return them.  Consequently, I read these three books in chronological order, and by the third book was so depressed I found it difficult to continue reading.  All 3 books are worth reading, but this should serve as a warning not to read them consecutively as I did.

As someone born toward the end of the baby-boomers, and who grew up on the East Coast, I remember much, but not all, of the way Bill Bryson describes growing up.  (My daughter has a warped view of how old I am, seeming to believe that all cars had manual transmissions when I learned how to drive - so not true.)  It was a different time.  Better?  Perhaps.  But definitely different.  Rascism was okay, as were chemicals in your food and pretty much everywhere and smoking, again, pretty much everywhere.  But people didn't live behind locked doors and kids played outside without adult supervision without fear of kidnapping.  It was a simpler time when we didn't need (or maybe just want) as many material things as we seem to now.  There's a reason why closets in older houses are small.  People didn't have as many clothes.  Do you ever watch The Honeymooners?  Ralph and Alice were thought of as ordinary people, funny, but ordinary.  Kids watching that show today think Ralph and Alice live at, or below, the poverty level.  They had a two-room apartment and, while Alice didn't have a fur coat and they didn't go on vacations, they never thought of themselves as poor.
This is a funny book, not quite as funny as A Walk in the Woods, but funny.  And yes, Bill Bryson, many other people remember George and Gracie.  But, just as in A Walk in the Woods, Bryson notes all the things that have gone wrong with our "progress".  In A Walk in the Woods, the concern seemed environmental.  In Thunderbolt Kid, it is the demise of small family-held farms and real downtowns with individual stores.  Things we cannot get back and don't really comprehend the impact of their loss until reading this book.

I don't usually read Stephen King. He is too scary for me. But this was a good book and I'm glad I invested the time to read it.  We all know from the reviews that this is about a high school English teacher who goes through a time portal to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Spoiler alert - the time portal puts him into the late 1950s so he spends years in the past waiting for Nov. 22, 1963.  So once again I was reading about how much better the past was.  I didn't see Bill Bryson in the bibliography but perhaps Steven King was using his own memories.  Food tasted better, the air was cleaner (hard to believe with all those factories) and life was simpler.  You could even get used to being without the internet!  I don't particularly like the ending, but then, this is Stephen King so I should not have expected a happy ending, should I? Although the ending is happy in its own way. Since I was too young at the time of JFK's death to really remember the impact on the country, I was surprised to read that it tore the country apart. (Here again my daughter seems to think that I should have a clear memory of this time and that might be why these books affected me this way.  Not true, dear, I was little.)  Sadly, I was not surprised at the ineptitude of the government in its dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald.  It is clear that King did a great deal of research for this book and the timing of its release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of JFK's presidency could not have been better.
Would the world be a different place if Jack Kennedy had lived? For sure. Would it be a better place? We'll never know. But Stephen King certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Next up were Jackie Kennedy's conversations with Arthur Schlesinger recorded in the spring following her husband's death.  That is how she refers to it:  Not when Jack was murdered, not when Jack was assassinated, but when Jack died.  I had just finished reading 900 pages of Stephen King, hoping against hope that Jack Kennedy could be saved (yes, I know in the real world he wasn't).  Perhaps because of that, I felt like JFK had just died.  It felt wrong to even rate the book on Goodreads because it is just so personal.  There were parts of the book, for example when she talks about JFK's relationships with his children and with his brother Bobby, and JFK's back problems and his plans for his life after the presidency, when I just wanted to weep.  And the pictures, oh, the pictures.
On a purely analytical note, this book shows just how much the role of women in their marriages and the role of the president's spouse have evolved in 50 years.  If you are looking for an insight into JFK's presidency, there are better books.  But nothing could make you understand better the impact of his death on his family.  Jackie Kennedy went from being First Lady to being a single mother of two small children needing to find a new home for them in minutes.  I also got a better appreciation of their marriage.  Marilyn Monroe and all the dalliances notwithstanding, for a few short years we all had Camelot.

"Okay for Now" is A-OK

This is going to be a longer post than usual, so if all you are interested in is the new Gary Schmidt book, just go to the second half.  I feel compelled to tell you how I started reading Gary Schmidt.  One summer while I was shelving books at the Westport Public Library a friend came to the Children's Room.  She was looking for a copy of "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy".  She told me that her family had listened to "Lizzie Bright" in the car and the language was so beautiful she had to actually read it.  Of course I took it out next.  It took me few tries to get into it - I thought it was 'yet another' sports book.  I know, how wrong could I be?  I would say I was blown away by it, but given that Schmidt's writing is so good he even makes the air a character, that would be hackneyed.

That parent was right.  And if I were an English teacher, I would give every student a copy of "Lizzie Bright" as an example of how to have your reader experience the book, rather than merely reading it.

So then a colleague started talking about "The Wednesday Wars".  And I'm thinking - Vietnam, Long Island - can Schmidt pull it off?  So I delayed and delayed until I had to read it for a course last year.  And that's when Gary Schmidt became my new favorite author.  Yes, it was just like the cliche - I laughed, I cried.  But I didn't just laugh, I was shrieking with laughter.  And I didn't just cry, I was sobbing.  A truly phenomenal book (and it doesn't hurt that I'm a Yankees fan).

So when I heard that the sequel was coming out, I felt a great deal of trepidation.  Could Schmidt succeed again?  I got the book last week and waited to read it.  I kept telling myself not to expect a book as good as "The Wednesday Wars".  I started it Saturday night and put it down after a few pages.  I was so upset that the book was not about Holling Hoodhood, but about Doug Swieteck.  I really didn't care about Doug Swieteck; I wanted to find out how Holling's family was doing.

But on Sunday, faced with my taxes and assigning Library of Congress call numbers to my imaginary library for class, "Okay for Now" was much more appealing.  So I read it.  And yes, I laughed (not out loud) and I cried (maybe not sobbing but more than just a few tears).  And it's a really good book.  Almost as good as "The Wednesday Wars".  Let's put it this way -- if on a scale of 1 to 10, "The Wednesday Wars" is a 12, "Okay for Now" is a solid 10, maybe even a 10 and a 1/2.

A few personal notes:
When my son was in elementary school, he did a huge project on John James Audubon.
My daughter and I still laugh about a joke about the arctic tern from Whose Line Is It Anyway?
If you want to know what these have to do with Okay for Now, you'll have to read the book.

And those smart-ass things Doug Swieteck says to his teachers -- that would be me.

Creating versus Consuming

The Director of the Westport Public Library, Maxine Bleiweis, often speaks of how libraries have changed and how they must continue to change if libraries are going to continue to serve their patrons.  One point she has made is how people now no longer simply consume information; with various web 2.0 tools at their disposal, they also create information.  Anyone who blogs understands this.  After all, we are blogging so others can read our thoughts.

But this point was truly brought home to me over the Christmas break from school.  I created a Goodreads account about a year ago.  For those of you unfamiliar with Goodreads, it is a Web 2.0 cite for books, just as Ravelry is a web 2.0 tool for yarn.  I had been using LibraryThing to catalog the books I read, but when I got over a certain number (one or two hundred), it was going to cost me money!  So I abandoned LibraryThing and moved to Goodreads.

I like these cites.  They help me to recommend books for friends, keep track of books I plan on reading (no more little slips of paper!) and avoid those horrible times when I get 200 pages into a book to realize I read it a few years ago.  Goodreads gives you the option of adding your own review.  Sometimes I do that - particularly if I want to remember what I liked or disliked about a book.  I never never thought of that as "creating content", it was a memory aid only.  Yet over the winter break I got 3 emails from Goodreads about 3 different books I had reviewed, notifying me that other Goodreads members had marked that review as one that they liked.

So yes, Maxine, we are creators of content.  Whether we know it or not!