Book Awards Reading Challenge

Holley’s Review #12 of 12
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

In the interest of A) finishing the Book Awards Reading Challenge, B) celebrating National Poetry Month and C) finding some poetry I like, I decided to give Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work a try. She was recommended to me by a valued patron at the library so I knew I’d found my final selection when I noticed this work had also won an award.

In this work I found everything I love in poetry. Things to ponder on, things to sigh over, things to cry about…a great collection all together! I found a particularly good passage in Three Songs from “The Lamp and the Bell”:

Holley’s Review #11 of 12
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich
2004 National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Poetry

I’m always disappointed by modern poetry. I am the last person to be considered a poetry expert, but I know what I like and I’ve never found it in the newer material. Rich’s collection has a beautiful cover (I know, I know…don’t judge a book…) and some interesting poem titles but I just did not enjoy all the interpretive spacing and stream of consciousness. I was by turns fascinated and bemused, but mostly confused. My apologies go out to all those more proficient than I in the reading of poetry.

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley's Review #10 of 12

Holley's Review #9 of 12

Holley’s Review #8 of 12
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
2006 Alex Award

Wow! What a story! I started this book at 10am on a Saturday morning and by 5pm that evening I had turned the last page. I flew through this woman’s life like a speeding jet. This is narrative nonfiction at its very best, though I will admit to a bit of skepticism on how exactly she remembers so much. The book begins with a 3-year-old Walls setting herself on fire while cooking hotdogs. Meticulous details take us from the ballerina tutu she was wearing catching on fire through skin grafts and the gentle investigations of the nurses and administrators as to why exactly a 3-year-old little girl would be cooking her own food.

You would think the story would expand from there to include foster homes and accusations of negligence but you’d be wrong. Instead, her father decides it is time to “check out Rex-Walls style” so he grabs her up and flees the hospital for the car, which is still running and packed with a few belongings and Walls’ mother and siblings. They drive away into the night and so begins Jeannette Walls’ incomparable life with parents more nomadic than loving.

The extreme poverty this family goes through is unimaginable, especially in light of the fact that this story took place not too long ago. Jeannette Walls’ photo shows a beautiful woman’s face to the world but her life’s story reveals that she felt gangly, awkward and unlovely. She had buckteeth and her home’s lack of indoor plumbing made hygiene a problem as well. I could go on and on about the struggles these poor kids had to go through for the most basic of conveniences but it would begin to sound repetitious coming from me so go out and read Walls’ version instead. She chronicles better than anyone else could the heartbreaking lows and manic highs of her dysfunctional family.

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley’s Review #7 of 12
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1961 Pulitzer Prize
1999 YALSA Outstanding Books for the College Bound

I set out to love this book. After all, the author is a native Alabamian like myself and the story is set in Alabama as well. I heard the untold accolades of hundreds of people ringing in my ears as I began. I did like this book, but I didn’t love it. I’ll forever be glad I read it but it will not figure in to the core collection of rereads that buy and hoard in a china cabinet in my living room.

The (fictional) southern town of Maycomb, Alabama could have come standard with an overlying whistled tune and a red haired boy going fishing. Ms. Lee did an outstanding job in conveying what the rural town life of 1930’s Alabama must have been like. I found some people I loved in Scout, Jem, Atticus, Calpurnia, and Dill while the bad guys, the Ewell family, were indeed very bad.

The first part of the book detailing the children’s early life, summer activities and educational difficulties dragged on for me. I just was not able to get into their lives and enjoy the storyline. The book only picked up for me once Tom Robinson physically entered the Finchs’ lives when the mob from Meridian came to make terrible mischief. From that point on, especially the trial scene, I was hooked in and devoured the rest of the book. The other, more slow-moving parts were just such a big part of the book that I cannot, in good conscience, say that I loved it. I also could not get used to treatment of and language concerning the African Americans in the book. I knew what it was about, knew the words were there, and tried to prepare myself for them before I ever picked it up but it was still a shock every time one of the characters (especially the children) spoke so hatefully, unintentionally or not. How could Ms. Lee have ever portrayed the circumstances and people without those mannerisms? I don’t think it could have been done any other way but that doesn’t stop me from being uncomfortable with it.

Isn’t it odd how you perceive of yourself as a mature, sophisticated reader and still something will come along that shocks you? I had the same problem with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye except I didn’t finish that book. I never found anything to connect with in the story. I guess it is a testimony to these stories that they still have the capacity to shock so long past their original publications.

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley’s Review #6 of 12
1776 by David McCullough
Quill Award, 2005

I do not often read nonfiction; it is just not my favorite genre. It is often dry and uninteresting with little punch to make it a page-turner (for me, anyway). David McCullough has taken this slice of history, when our nation was just beginning its struggle for freedom, and crafted a book that is hard to put down.

I don’t know if I just wasn’t paying attention in school (likely) or if my teachers never bothered to mention it (unfortunately, also likely), but I never knew George Washington was such a novice at warcraft. In my mind’s eye, I see a tall, distinguished and crafty old fox, busily outmaneuvering the stolid, overly-dressed British. Instead, I learned that Washington was hesitant, indecisive, and utterly unprepared for what the fledgling Congress was asking him to do. I felt a definite pang for all these boys and men, fighting through the depths of melting summer and harsh winter against a well-trained and supplied regiment of Red Coats. I have suggested this book to many of our junior high and high school students who recently had an assignment requiring them to read a history book. They came in down-cast at the prospect and I sent them out excited…a pretty good day for any librarian!

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley’s Review #5 of 12
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Alex Award 2007

OMG! I was by turns fascinated, repelled, grossed out, teary-eyed, and nauseated.

David is only 12 when his mother dies and he doesn’t quite understand things like his father’s loneliness, stepmothers and half-brothers. As he grows more resentful of his “new” family, strange dreams invade his nights and those dreams feature a man…a crooked man with a crooked hat who begins to appear outside his dreams as well. Soon he begins to hear his dead mother calling for him from the hole in the garden wall and of course he must investigate. So begins David’s quest to rescue his mother and it will take him on a deadly, horrifying journey through the heart of nightmares.

I loved this book. I would NOT let my teenage niece read it because she’d never sleep again. I’ll tell you this….the Crooked Man no doubt haunts Freddy Krueger’s dreams.

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley's Review #4 of 12

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Library Journal Best Books of the Year 2001
New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age



Sijie takes the reader back to China during the Cultural Revolution. The narrator (unnamed) and his friend Luo are sent to a community high on a mountain called Phoenix of the Sky. In addition to the insult of being taken from their parents and friends, these two boys now spend endless days hauling baskets of sewage on their backs up the mountain to fertilize the fields. A far cry no doubt from the lives the two boys must have previously led as the children of medical professionals. The boys' lives take a turn for the better when they discover a friend in a nearby village who has smuggled banned books of western literature into the village with him. These books open up new worlds of ideas and aspirations for the two friends and they discover the price of hope.





I really liked this book as I do not remember studying much about the Cultural Revolution in school and I have not read many books in that setting. It is such an alien concept to me that I've always been quick to read the fiction I come across that surrounds it. One of my absolute favorites in this area is Xinran's Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet, if you are interested in some related reading.

Holley’s Review #3 of 12
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
PEN/Faulkner Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
Southeastern Booksellers Association Award – Fiction

I have flirted with this book for years. I’ve watched its popularity wax and wane and said to myself at every turn, “I need to read that.” Well, now I have and I really don’t know what to say. I did not enjoy it and to finish it I had to absolutely gut it out like a Navy SEAL recruit. The way people raved about the beauty of the language I was just sure I would love it so imagine my disappointment with the tedious book I found it to be. There were beautiful passages, images, turns of phrase, descriptions of characters…it was all there, but this book just did not resonate with me.

One friend pointed out that it was a tedious situation for the hostages and I was just picking up on that but somehow I don’t think that was it. I’ve never had an ear for opera so perhaps that is some of it as well. The thoughts of people losing focus, forgetting allegiances and disregarding their own safety (not to mention a months-long hostage standoff complete with food, music and soccer) to hear someone sing surpassed my abilities at suspension of disbelief. I won’t spoil the ending for you here but to me it seemed slapdash and thrown together. Like the tediousness of the hostage situation, perhaps it was a literary device to parallel the same sudden brutality in the hostages’ rescue but, again, I doubt it.

I understand the theme of music being used to bring together people of different backgrounds and ethnicities. I understand falling in love with the wrong person at the wrong time. I’ve read and liked other hostage/terrorist novels. I did not like this particular book. All this being said, I think Patchett’s writing is beautiful even if I did not like the book and I look forward to finally picking up my ARC of her newest, Run.

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley’s Review #2 of 12
The Panic Hand: Stories by Jonathan Carroll
1996 Bram Stoker Award for Collections

What would you do if your best friend were having an affair with your imaginary friend? What lengths would they go to in order to be together if the imaginary friend’s existence depended on your unhappiness and misery? Would you go into hiding if a little girl told you all of the world’s animals were going to revolt and kill everyone? What if God developed Alzheimer’s disease? How would you know if those threatening phone calls were actually being made by the very person you’re dating, who at this very minute is watching your windows with binoculars? What if unpleasant dreams failed to disappear when you woke up? Can writing about the death of your child keep it from actually happening?

All of these dark concoctions and more can be found in Jonathan Carroll’s disturbing collection of short stories, The Panic Hand. You will explore the darker side of human nature along with the other, seedier sides no one could have imagined existed. Not all of the stories found here are scary, but they will make you take a second and third look at the world around you. Great Halloween reading from a master storyteller!

Happy Reading!
htw

Holley's Review, #1 of 12