I actually have been reading a bit, even though school has started and I literally feel breathless All Day Long, but I haven't blogged yet because Vox's book attachment is on the fritz, until some time in October. And you know, when it's not ONE-CLICK EASY, I just can't be bothered. So I'm going to write about the books and put in some unrelated visuals to break up the monotony. Not unlike my 6th grade history lessons.

So I just read two very enjoyable, if not AWESOME, young-adult novels, one by an author that I liked as a Grown Up too.

One is Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins, the necessary sequel to last year's favorite: Hunger Games. She's a great storyteller, who writes fantastic action scenes, but I feel manipulated by the cliffhanger endings. I hate waiting for sequels.

And where the book photo would go, here's my super-beautiful former nanny, responsible for any good child-rearing that Ainsley has experienced, and her two beautiful flower girls:

Johanna, Ainsley and Aspen

(Mad props to Corndog Queen for providing the dress and the shoes to Ainsley, and the peace of mind to me.)

The other book is called The Other Side of the Island, by Allegra Goodman, who won reasonable accolades for her grownup book Intuition (which was not a dirty book, despite the title) but rather another one of those Environmental Dystopia tales where weather is the great enemy ... Or So We Think. I wonder if she started this as a book for adults and was told that only Young Adult and Non-Literary Authors write about environmental dystopias.

And where the book would go, here's why Johanna was the best nanny ever: 

Johanna and Ainsley on the beach

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My washing machine died on Labor Day. I really didn't like my washing machine until it died, and the I liked it so much that now I miss it and I mourn it deeply. We bought a new, old, low-end set from a family on Craigslist, who won a fantastic space-age set from Oprah when she (the seller) typed in the Word of the Day. Her Oprah machine spins up to 1400 RPM and the clothes come out of the washing machine nearly dry. My old washing machine used to spin at 1200 RPM. But you could only fit in two t-shirts and a washcloth. It was a front-loader. You couldn't put anything into it after you started the cycle, so too bad for you if you dropped a sock on the way to the garage.

These new ones are Maytag Atlantis and are very white. They seem like they should be heavier than they are. You can continually add socks until the drum fills and the agitation starts.

Someone came from Craigslist to pick up the broken washing machine for free. We left it outside for them to retrieve and during a very silent hour it vanished. Ainsley thought perhaps they came in a Prius to take it away. Alicia thought maybe Bubbles took it for scrap.

We got the new washer and dryer on Friday, the 18th. In the meanwhile I washed clothes in the sink and hung them on the line like I was living in the 1820s. Now we have the new machines but I still hang the clothes on the line. So I'm up to like the 1940s or so.

If I were reading anything, I'd be reading the manuals. But things from Craigslist don't usually come with manuals.
 

IMG_0541

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Okay, so those last two posts have had NOTHING to do with books in any way, so it's time to rein myself in and return to the Ostensible Purpose of this blog -- writing about YA and kids books. Discipline, young grasshopper!

John Green, of Paper Towns etc. fame, has the High School Boy voice all wrapped up, but for my money it's been a looong time since I've read anything as funny as Carter Finally Gets It. I would call this the Middle School Boy voice, perhaps, even though Carter is a freshman, but he is so totally hapless with the ladies and so completely earnest in his attempts to improve his game that he reminds me of  every eighth grade boy I've heard over the past five years trying to Slyly Put The Moves On and failing miserably (or succeeding in spite of The Moves). Just LAUGH OUT LOUD funny. In one scene, he spends $30 to get a bootleg VHS copy of a porno that is stuck on fast-forward, and then accidentally leaves it running in the basement VCR, prompting his dad to patiently remind him that it might bother his mom to find it and ask, "Why did you forget to hide it?" to which Carter replies in deep truthfulness, "I don't know, Dad. I think I might be retarded."
 

Carter Finally Gets It

Brent Crawford

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Wigs for Kids got my ponytail! I am several pounds lighter!

Long Hair

Short Hair

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My trip to Israel was amazing and exhausting. If I may, here's a brief photographic recap:

1. I flew for many many hours. If you were on the 7/12 6 am flight to JFK and you played the online trivia, I took you to school AND church. From JFK to Tel Aviv, I played Tetris. That's right, a 12-hour Tetris marathon. Just like college.

Airplane trivia CHAMPION

2. Jerusalem is amazing. It has Roman ruins (excellent):

Part of the Roman Cardo

a crazy Third World-style market (although I didn't take pictures, there were also tons of tiny booths selling plungers, paint and panties, not just tourist crap):

Giant spice booth

Festive Middle Eastern colors!

Ecumenical souvenirs!

and the Dead Sea Scrolls! Which are two thousand years old and yet Completely Readable Today! You know, if you knew Hebrew.

Jerusalem also has comparative religion! There are Jewish holy places (duh):

SW Corner of the Temple Complex

(the Western Wall, aka Wailing Wall, aka Kotel, is further along the wall),

and Christian holy places

Church of Gethsemane, garden in back

and Muslim holy places! They made me put a shawl on here:

Dome of the Rock

The Old City of Jerusalem has a neat wall around it with seven gates in and out! Apparently you have to be Muslim to use this gate and they quiz you by asking you to recite the first chapter of the Koran. Luckily, the Christian quiz is the Lord's Prayer (easy!) and the Jewish quiz is the Sh'ma (even shorter!). This is about 6:45 am, so nothing is happening, but later in the day this is the bustling-est gate!

Damascus Gate

If you make the hajj, you get your door decorated!

You may now call me Haji Abdul

3. Israel also has an excellent desert. It's called the Negev and it is home to Masada, the Dead Sea, several neat oases, camels and Bedouin, and the grave of David Ben Gurion.

Sunrise over Jordan and the Dead Sea

We got up at 3:30 am in order to hike to the top of Masada in time to see the sunrise. Which was pretty glorious. Masada has a rather tragic history in Jewish lore, but a great view! And tons more Roman ruins at the top!

Masada in the daytime

Snake path to the top of Masada

Hiking up before sunrise was one thing, but then we hiked back down again. In retrospect, a stupid idea. So relaxing in the Dead Sea was definitely in order:

I can't actually read that Hebrew paper

The Bedouin are very hospitable

Excellent tea and bread

although they don't let you near their women (but I am a crass tourist with a zoom on my camera, so there).

Bedouin women. Very far away.

I wasn't fast enough to catch any of the camels on camera (because our bus was moving fast, not the camels) but these ibex? ibexes? ibices? were everywhere and very docile. I guess no one hunts the ibex in Israel.

Ibex 1 and Ibex 2

Tel Aviv was kind of a dump, but it did have THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA washing up against its border.

THE GLORIOUS MEDITERRANEAN!

This was before dinner and the worst avant-garde dance performance I have ever seen. It makes me laugh out loud lo these many weeks later just recalling its crapitude. Happily, we came back around midnight and swam for close to an hour. Definite highlight!

And then, a lovely view on the way home:

That's the last I'll see of you, EL AL.

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At 6 am tomorrow! Close to two weeks away from my beloved family, and only half way through this monster:

The Source: A Novel

James A. Michener

which we were requested to read, along with The Jerusalem Report (weekly) and Ha'aretz (daily). Yeah, right. I'll see if I can pick one up at the airport. The Source is the first Michener book I've ever read, and it's really quite good, although it was written in the mid-60s and definitely has that era's tinge in its approach to the female characters. I don't mean the countercultural approach, I mean the OTHER approach. That the Republicans are nostalgic about. You know.

Anyway, as long as I can get on the plane (I understand it's easier to get past St. Peter than El Al security -- but perhaps that's the wrong analogy) I'll be off tomorrow! I wonder if saying, "I'm not Jewish but my sister is!" will speed me through or get me sent to the strip-search room.

And I'll report on The Source when I finish it.  24 hours of travel time should be plenty.  

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And we just finished it. We are bereft! Luckily, I cleverly noticed that author Richard Price wrote a whole bunch of episodes, and his latest book "Lush Life" was conveniently available in the Cupertino library's excellent bestseller browsing section, so I snapped it up!

Lush Life: A Novel

Richard Price

It absolutely filled the void for the time I was reading it. All kind of criminal-cop dialogue and urban decay and the general awesomeness that The Wire delivered so consistently. He's written seven or eight other books, of which I have only heard of "Freedomland" and "Clockers", so I hope those live up to my sky-high expectations. No pressure or anything.

And, although Richard Price didn't write it, I really liked the last episode of the series. <SEMI SPOILER>I thought it was so tragically satisfying the way someone is always waiting to fill any vacancy (retirement, death)  ... like Sydnor becomes McNulty, Michael becomes Omar, Dukie becomes Bubbles ... everything changes but nothing changes at all. Too big and cracked-out to change.</SPOILER>

I could have watched that forever. I bet the City of Baltimore's PR department is pretty happy it's done, though.

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My usually-reliable NYT magazine had a LAME article about Jodi Picoult, who (they say) is "the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril." Uh, no.

Now, I would like to think I KNOW from kids-in-peril authors. And JP is NOT among them. The whole point of kids-in-peril lit is that it's about the KIDS, and their own problems, their own consequences, their own resourcefulness. JP's books are all about the PARENTS (even the NYT admits it) and the myriad ways they can suck at their parenting. I would like to propose that we give JP the category "There's So Many Ways To Screw Up A Child" and let her be the figurehead for that. But keep off my favorite genre.

12 Raining Twilight Coast

Robyn Hitchcock

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I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.

the dead and the gone

Susan Beth Pfeffer

Exodus

Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?

Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.

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No pithy observances. No narrative cohesion. Just a bunch of pictures for the Zeh/Thompson/Bateman diaspora.

Here's Ainsley showing off her Quadrilla creations, which she makes entirely her own self and then shouts MARBLE FUN! as loudly as possible when the marbles run down. I love this set but I'd kinda like a whole other room for it to go in -- its epic scope dominates our living room/kitchen. Either that or a piece of plywood to make it transportable when I need to get out my TV-Watchin' Chair and watch The Wire.

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