An Advent Calendar of Books, Dec. 3 and 4
Still more recommendations for your bookish Christmas lists:
This book's place in my life is my husband's fault. I believe it was our first year of marriage that he found his childhood copy while we were staying with his family, and handed it to me and informed me that if we were to stay married, I needed to read it. Weighty orders.
Happily, my husband was giving me a treasure - a book that stands alongside Dodie Smith's beloved I Capture the Castle - a book that succeeds as humorous memoir, biological treatise, and bildungsroman - a real winner. It's the first of three books in the Corfu Trilogy, the others being Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods.
The name Durrell is rightly familiar to some - the author, Gerald Durrell, is the younger sibling of the noted author Lawrence Durrell. It's quite difficult, however, to take the elder literary Durrell seriously after having read his naturalist younger brother's memoir of their childhood on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. In this milieu, he becomes 'Larry', the overbearing, sometimes pretentious and bombastic, long-suffering eldest brother of the fatherless Durrell brood. The author is his youngest sibling, and in his adult life, was well-known as a proto-Steve-Irwin -- a famous British naturalist who publicized his adventures in conservation, wildlife preservation, and work with famous zoos. As 'Gerry', the younger brother of the memoir, however, we see him through the lens of a truly fauna-obsessed young boy, not merely content to observe the animals but to bring them home with him, with occasionally disastrous results. ('That bloody boy has filled the bathtub with SNAKES!') He studies his eccentric family's antics with no less interest than his collection of animals.
Durrell's mother is a unique sort; a widow, she's the sort of woman who packs up her three boys and daughter and moves to Greece because it seems a good idea at the time. She's the tolerant center around which her four children revolve. Rounding out the family between Larry and Gerry are middle brother Leslie, who is as obsessed with guns and weapons as Gerry is with animals and Larry is with a life of letters and smart society; and Margo, the sole sister, who gets involved in various social misadventures and embraces any number of passing fads and fancies. (The section of one of the Corfu trilogy sequels in which Margo embraces spiritualism and mediums is one of the funniest.) While Larry soaks up the Greek atmosphere to build his literary genius, Gerry learns absolutely everything he can about the natural world of the island. The family is joined by their personal taxi-driver Spiro, Gerry's private tutors, local peasants and characters, and Larry's itinerant friends.
This is a memoir, so it seeks to paint you a picture of a time and a place and a family more than follow a tight plot; at the same time, the book does have a certain structure. The family is forever being forced to pack up and move between villas on Corfu - most comically, in order to escape unwanted houseguests - and the main divisions of the book are bracketed by these moves between their series of garishly-colored homes while on the island.
Yet again, I'm recommending you funny books. And this book is hysterically, laugh-until-your-sides-ache funny -- but it only gives those rewards to patient readers. This isn't to say the book is a struggle, but Durrell's use of language does betray that he was educated before the second World War. You'll get past this, however. Not only does Durrell write about nature in a very interesting way -- he was famous for writing naturalist memoirs before he turned to the fodder of his childhood -- but he's got that wonderful dry British humor and a sharp way with a phrase that turns most episodes amusing and enchanting.
If you are the kind of person who thinks Steve Irwin is good fun, you will probably love this memoir, bottom line. This book is also for: People who love British-childhood-tales in the vein of Roald Dahl or Dodie Smith. Literature fans who want a window on the youth of a famous writer. Kids who've burned through tales like 'The Penderwicks' and who are open to more complicated fare.
I'm lucky enough to get to read a lot of good books for my job. Sometimes, I can be certain that a book will reach a wide audience and hit a lot of people where they live. Other times, however, I run across books that aren't so easy - that even I have trouble thinking up how to get it into the right hands, even if it's good. This is the case with Days of Little Texas -- a young adult novel quite unlike any other I've read this year. Unlike any other I've read period, in fact.
R. A. Nelson, the author, does seem to have a gift for unique premises that not everyone will embrace. His debut, Teach Me, is an unflinching story of obsession and disaster borne of an affair between a high school student and her English teacher. His second book, Breathe My Name, concerns the ripped-from-tabloids premise of the relationship between a teenaged girl and her mother who murdered the girl's siblings in cold blood, and the madness that the family participated in before that awful crime. There are a few things in both those books that don't work for me, even though I find them worthwhile reads. The same can't be said for Little Texas, even though the reasons people will find it uncomfortable are just as plain. In one book, it concerns itself with the lingering sins of slavery and poverty; evangelical Christianity and faith healing; theology both Christian and not; and wraps it in a tale that might be about possession, that might be about ghosts, that might be just a symbol for the challenges to the faith of the main character, known in preaching circles as 'Little Texas'.
Ronald Earl, nicknamed 'Little Texas', was called to be a preacher when struck by lightning; he's said to have laid on hands and raised from the dead. His parents died in an incident related to drugs, and so he travels with his battle-axe aunt Wanda Joy, who has appointed herself keeper of the family's holy-rolling legend, and a pair of elderly religious men - skeptical, teasing Certain Certain, and Sugar Tom, who acts as his bedrock and adviser as a man who walked the same boy-wonder-preacher road that Little Texas finds himself on. As the boy faith healer grows older, he's forced to playact that he's still the little fellow to play to the crowd, but he can't help but start to feel doubt in his path as he sees beyond the world and finds himself asking questions about his life. This threatens Wanda Joy's outlook on his mission. Doubly so, as Little Texas begins to see a beautiful girl in blue whom he laid hands on, appearing at all his engagements. His aunt strikes a plan to solidify his faith, bringing him to a dark place indeed with several kinds of tragic history, just as Little Texas begins to consider that his worldview on the dead - and the world - might not be true, once given signs that the girl in blue is not merely following him, but haunting him.
First and foremost, this is one of the best YA love stories I've read in a long time. It's also one of the best YA ghost stories I have read...well, possibly EVER. The supernatural events in this book are deadly serious, deeply frightening, and all the better because there is nothing frivolous about them. They are not there as set dressing; Nelson treats these incidents, and the beliefs of his characters, as meaningful and real. In lesser hands, Little Texas and his makeshift family's religious beliefs would be treated as foolish or unworthy, but Nelson is wonderful at making us see these characters in all their good and bad detail. The romance contained within, between the unwilling, innocent Ronald Earl and the ghostly Lucy, who is much more than she seems, is far deeper than most YA tales, and is brought forward in efficient strokes. I think it highlights a flaw in some other young adult romance: so often, the greater world falls away under the weight of that consuming emotion. Not that this isn't a realistic feeling for teenagers, for whom first love can sometimes seem to drown everything, but this particular story highlights just how much more marvelous it is when the romance connects with a greater story. Lucy and Ronald Earl don't just come together and discuss their peculiar connection, but find that that connection is just one piece of a greater story begun with others beyond themselves, and their relationship has an impact on the greater picture they are a part of. It enriches the entire experience.
Not everyone on your list may want to read about the crisis of faith of a teenage would-be Billy Graham and the girl he's attracted to who's definitely following him and may or may not be dead. And perhaps others still might find the battleground the two lovers fight on less compelling than undead vampires or Dan Brown's nekkid Masonic hijinks. But they might just be missing out. Days of Little Texas is beautifully and simply written, drawing the reader into a world both totally familiar and totally specific and unique to those characters. Its ambition as a book is quietly massive, and almost entirely, the book achieves what it sets out to do. I don't know as many readers I can share it with as, say, The Hunger Games -- but those who can embrace it are lucky indeed.
Also a good book for: historical fiction interest. Given its niche-y feel, however, it's hard to say who else to choose, save 'people who find it easy to throw themselves into mindsets that may not be like their own, and see nuance'. Not a book for the black-and-white thinkers among us -- it's too willing to debate its own premises.
This book's place in my life is my husband's fault. I believe it was our first year of marriage that he found his childhood copy while we were staying with his family, and handed it to me and informed me that if we were to stay married, I needed to read it. Weighty orders.
Happily, my husband was giving me a treasure - a book that stands alongside Dodie Smith's beloved I Capture the Castle - a book that succeeds as humorous memoir, biological treatise, and bildungsroman - a real winner. It's the first of three books in the Corfu Trilogy, the others being Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods.
The name Durrell is rightly familiar to some - the author, Gerald Durrell, is the younger sibling of the noted author Lawrence Durrell. It's quite difficult, however, to take the elder literary Durrell seriously after having read his naturalist younger brother's memoir of their childhood on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. In this milieu, he becomes 'Larry', the overbearing, sometimes pretentious and bombastic, long-suffering eldest brother of the fatherless Durrell brood. The author is his youngest sibling, and in his adult life, was well-known as a proto-Steve-Irwin -- a famous British naturalist who publicized his adventures in conservation, wildlife preservation, and work with famous zoos. As 'Gerry', the younger brother of the memoir, however, we see him through the lens of a truly fauna-obsessed young boy, not merely content to observe the animals but to bring them home with him, with occasionally disastrous results. ('That bloody boy has filled the bathtub with SNAKES!') He studies his eccentric family's antics with no less interest than his collection of animals.
Durrell's mother is a unique sort; a widow, she's the sort of woman who packs up her three boys and daughter and moves to Greece because it seems a good idea at the time. She's the tolerant center around which her four children revolve. Rounding out the family between Larry and Gerry are middle brother Leslie, who is as obsessed with guns and weapons as Gerry is with animals and Larry is with a life of letters and smart society; and Margo, the sole sister, who gets involved in various social misadventures and embraces any number of passing fads and fancies. (The section of one of the Corfu trilogy sequels in which Margo embraces spiritualism and mediums is one of the funniest.) While Larry soaks up the Greek atmosphere to build his literary genius, Gerry learns absolutely everything he can about the natural world of the island. The family is joined by their personal taxi-driver Spiro, Gerry's private tutors, local peasants and characters, and Larry's itinerant friends.
This is a memoir, so it seeks to paint you a picture of a time and a place and a family more than follow a tight plot; at the same time, the book does have a certain structure. The family is forever being forced to pack up and move between villas on Corfu - most comically, in order to escape unwanted houseguests - and the main divisions of the book are bracketed by these moves between their series of garishly-colored homes while on the island.
Yet again, I'm recommending you funny books. And this book is hysterically, laugh-until-your-sides-ache funny -- but it only gives those rewards to patient readers. This isn't to say the book is a struggle, but Durrell's use of language does betray that he was educated before the second World War. You'll get past this, however. Not only does Durrell write about nature in a very interesting way -- he was famous for writing naturalist memoirs before he turned to the fodder of his childhood -- but he's got that wonderful dry British humor and a sharp way with a phrase that turns most episodes amusing and enchanting.
If you are the kind of person who thinks Steve Irwin is good fun, you will probably love this memoir, bottom line. This book is also for: People who love British-childhood-tales in the vein of Roald Dahl or Dodie Smith. Literature fans who want a window on the youth of a famous writer. Kids who've burned through tales like 'The Penderwicks' and who are open to more complicated fare.
I'm lucky enough to get to read a lot of good books for my job. Sometimes, I can be certain that a book will reach a wide audience and hit a lot of people where they live. Other times, however, I run across books that aren't so easy - that even I have trouble thinking up how to get it into the right hands, even if it's good. This is the case with Days of Little Texas -- a young adult novel quite unlike any other I've read this year. Unlike any other I've read period, in fact.
R. A. Nelson, the author, does seem to have a gift for unique premises that not everyone will embrace. His debut, Teach Me, is an unflinching story of obsession and disaster borne of an affair between a high school student and her English teacher. His second book, Breathe My Name, concerns the ripped-from-tabloids premise of the relationship between a teenaged girl and her mother who murdered the girl's siblings in cold blood, and the madness that the family participated in before that awful crime. There are a few things in both those books that don't work for me, even though I find them worthwhile reads. The same can't be said for Little Texas, even though the reasons people will find it uncomfortable are just as plain. In one book, it concerns itself with the lingering sins of slavery and poverty; evangelical Christianity and faith healing; theology both Christian and not; and wraps it in a tale that might be about possession, that might be about ghosts, that might be just a symbol for the challenges to the faith of the main character, known in preaching circles as 'Little Texas'.
Ronald Earl, nicknamed 'Little Texas', was called to be a preacher when struck by lightning; he's said to have laid on hands and raised from the dead. His parents died in an incident related to drugs, and so he travels with his battle-axe aunt Wanda Joy, who has appointed herself keeper of the family's holy-rolling legend, and a pair of elderly religious men - skeptical, teasing Certain Certain, and Sugar Tom, who acts as his bedrock and adviser as a man who walked the same boy-wonder-preacher road that Little Texas finds himself on. As the boy faith healer grows older, he's forced to playact that he's still the little fellow to play to the crowd, but he can't help but start to feel doubt in his path as he sees beyond the world and finds himself asking questions about his life. This threatens Wanda Joy's outlook on his mission. Doubly so, as Little Texas begins to see a beautiful girl in blue whom he laid hands on, appearing at all his engagements. His aunt strikes a plan to solidify his faith, bringing him to a dark place indeed with several kinds of tragic history, just as Little Texas begins to consider that his worldview on the dead - and the world - might not be true, once given signs that the girl in blue is not merely following him, but haunting him.
First and foremost, this is one of the best YA love stories I've read in a long time. It's also one of the best YA ghost stories I have read...well, possibly EVER. The supernatural events in this book are deadly serious, deeply frightening, and all the better because there is nothing frivolous about them. They are not there as set dressing; Nelson treats these incidents, and the beliefs of his characters, as meaningful and real. In lesser hands, Little Texas and his makeshift family's religious beliefs would be treated as foolish or unworthy, but Nelson is wonderful at making us see these characters in all their good and bad detail. The romance contained within, between the unwilling, innocent Ronald Earl and the ghostly Lucy, who is much more than she seems, is far deeper than most YA tales, and is brought forward in efficient strokes. I think it highlights a flaw in some other young adult romance: so often, the greater world falls away under the weight of that consuming emotion. Not that this isn't a realistic feeling for teenagers, for whom first love can sometimes seem to drown everything, but this particular story highlights just how much more marvelous it is when the romance connects with a greater story. Lucy and Ronald Earl don't just come together and discuss their peculiar connection, but find that that connection is just one piece of a greater story begun with others beyond themselves, and their relationship has an impact on the greater picture they are a part of. It enriches the entire experience.
Not everyone on your list may want to read about the crisis of faith of a teenage would-be Billy Graham and the girl he's attracted to who's definitely following him and may or may not be dead. And perhaps others still might find the battleground the two lovers fight on less compelling than undead vampires or Dan Brown's nekkid Masonic hijinks. But they might just be missing out. Days of Little Texas is beautifully and simply written, drawing the reader into a world both totally familiar and totally specific and unique to those characters. Its ambition as a book is quietly massive, and almost entirely, the book achieves what it sets out to do. I don't know as many readers I can share it with as, say, The Hunger Games -- but those who can embrace it are lucky indeed.
Also a good book for: historical fiction interest. Given its niche-y feel, however, it's hard to say who else to choose, save 'people who find it easy to throw themselves into mindsets that may not be like their own, and see nuance'. Not a book for the black-and-white thinkers among us -- it's too willing to debate its own premises.