The Graveyard Book

I came to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book with high expectations. The only other Gaiman book I've read is Coraline, which I loved. That, plus Graveyard's Newbury win created a lot of hype. The beginning, though, was similar to how Tim Burton described Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in an interview for his movie: a brat wandering around in a strange world where odd things happen to her.

The young protagonist, who we come to know as Nobody "Bod" Owens, barely escapes when a stranger murders the rest of his family. (A lot of children's lit is dark, but the beginning of this book was particularly so!) He crawls across the street to the neighborhood graveyard where, unlike the rest of the living, he is able to see the ghosts who inhabit it. The Owenses adopt him and Silas, who hovers somewhere in between the dead and the living, agrees to take care of him--bringing him food, monitoring his education, etc. The ghosts all pitch in to teach him usual and unique lessons: reading, writing, arithmetic, fading, dream-walking . . . He also explores a fantastical underworld, befriends a witch, and discovers the mysterious Sleer.

The second half of the book is where it really picked up. Bod crosses paths with the man who killed his family and works to uncover why he targeted them. Bod also discovers the drawbacks of living among the dead:

"In the graveyard no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was . . . "

This, plus the many scenes emphasizing how important Bod's lessons are, is what won the Newbury.

The Graveyard Book was an interesting pairing with Her Fearful Symmetry--although, I do find it slightly odd that I read two books set in a creepy English graveyard in the span of a few months. The Gaiman book was by far the better--a fun adventure set between earth and the afterlife.

Reading the Classics

I came across this essay by novelist Cathleen Schine while flipping through a stack of recent New York Times Book Reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Schine-t.html?scp=1&sq=dostoyevsky%20%22the%20idiot%22&st=cse

In it, she talks about being "illiterate" after developing an aversion to reading when she bit off more than she could chew as a seventh grader picking up Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. She describes standing in The Strand after years of graduate work in medieval history, trying to find something to read. She describes all the great classics that are still new to her--Dickens and Austen.

I'm fairly well-read in the canonical classics. I was an English major and focused on eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels. And yet I still relate to her feeling of the endless possibilities awaiting--especially as I'm hunkered down in my own Dostoyevsky novel. (1/3 of the way through Karamazov!!) I've never read a Henry James novel . . . or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. I've been wanting to read Lolita and Gone With the Wind for some time now. There are so many books out there, I think there will always be new territory to explore, even for life-long voracious readers.

Okay, enough wistful thinking. It's back to the 9o0+-page Russian novel for me!

Franny and Zooey

Putting Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger on my list was really cheating--I've read it before. But, I've been wanting to reread it and now seemed like a good time to do so, in light of Salinger's death.

I wanted to revisit this book, because when I read it in high school, I remember being really moved by the discussions of religion and spirituality. I wanted to see if I'd still feel that way. Well, this time around, it struck me that Franny was being quite self-indulgent to have a major meltdown and refuse any help from her worried family during her crisis of faith. Sure, a crisis of faith is major, but it just seemed like she didn't have to ignore her family. Her brother Zooey, however, comes off as quite the saint by talking her through her conundrum.

Even though Franny did annoy me this time around, I still found it to be a brilliant book. Reading this and The Bell Jar and the short stories of Dorothy Parker, which I've been picking up now and again, I really want to audit some classes in twentieth-century American lit. I don't want to write papers or anything, but I'd love to be in a really smart book club led by an expert.

In the not-so-brilliant-book category, I tried to read Lauren Henderson's Jane Austen's Guide to Dating at the gym, but it took itself far too seriously. I thought it'd be a fun, tongue-in-cheek approach to looking at modern dating situations through the lens of Austen's characters, but it was an earnest dating guide based on principles from her books. It even had a quiz to see which Austen heroine you most resembled, which Austen hero your love interest matched, and then a chart to see if you would be compatible. I abandoned this one about 14 pages in.

Now it's on to The Brothers Karamazov, which I think I'll be reading for awhile . . .