you’ll finally see yourself when you don’t recognise the scenery
Sometimes before bed or when I’m out walking, I make lists in my head. Songs with a month of the year in the title, songs with the word “rain” in the lyrics, books with a character called Rose, books with a specific trope… etc.
That sort of thing is what started me wondering if I had read a book set in each American state. (The US has a good number of states for this -- enough to be challenging without being impossible.)
I ended up going through my reading record on LibraryThing and looking at the “Important Places” data (which is user-generated and therefore doesn’t exist for all books). An interesting exercise, because I haven’t always realised where books were set -- especially for books I read when I was growing up, when my grasp of geography was so much vaguer. The spelling of “mom” has meant that I usually noticed when books were set in Northern America, even if I either didn’t notice the cues as to exactly where it was set or else didn’t properly understand those cues in context.
(When reading, I have a tendency to imagine the places featured and mentioned on a rough sort of map. Sometimes I notice that I’m reverting to the map of north-east US that I made up -- in my head -- probably beginning back when I read What Katy Did at School as a kid.)
But I digress. It was very easy to find books set in New York, California and Florida. That didn’t really surprise me. For Arizona and West Virginia, the only books I found are mostly set elsewhere, and I couldn’t find anything for Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota and Ohio.
I read some YA set in the USA.
Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son: In this sequel to Carry On, Simon, Baz and Penelope set off on a roadtrip across America to see Agatha, who Penelope is convinced is in trouble. I opened the book out of curiosity, a sense of I read the first one so I might as well read this too, but was quickly hooked. Rowell is so good making me care about her characters and their relationships. I liked how this is a journey of discovery -- they’re exploring a new country, finding out things about the world they live in and learning more about themselves.
I really enjoyed reading this but wasn’t so enthusiastic about its final act and conclusion.
The roadtrip turns into a story about vampires, plural. There are a few vampires book that I’ve really liked but with those I knew what I was signing up for, whereas here all the vampires were interrupting a story which was way more appealing (to me).
As for the ending, that’s setting up for a sequel. (Like a clue, the final chapter is called “prologue”.) There’s resolution to their immediate goals, but the emotional arcs feel very unresolved and the book literally ends with a character saying something unexpectedly cliffhangery. I expect that I will feel less grumpy once I can read the sequel.
So, it comes down to expectations and personal preferences and the fact that this book doesn’t standalone.
For the record: They drive from Chicago through Iowa, Nebraska,Colorado, Utah, stuff happens in Nevada and then they end up in California.BAZ
Things I hate, a list:
1. The sun.
2. The wind.
3. Penelope Bunce, when she hasn’t got a plan.
4. American sandwiches.
5. America.
6. The band, America. Which I didn’t know about an hour ago.
[...]
13. Myself, most of all.
14. My soft heart.
15. My foolish optimism.
16. The words “road” and “trip”, when said together with any enthusiasm
SIMON
Iowa is beautiful. It’s all gentle green hills and fields of maize. It reminds me of England. But with fewer people in it.
BAZ
Iowa looks exactly like Illinois. I’m not sure why they bothered to separate them. Just an endless stretch of motorway and pig farms.
Snow has switched in full-on battle mod; I haven’t seen him like this since the Mage died.
I envy what he has with Bunce. They act like this is their tenth tour of duty together. It makes me realise that Simon had a whole life I didn’t know about back in school. The Mage used him to fight whatever needed fighting -- even when Simon was just a kid. (Simon was always just a kid.)
I had this idea about America…
That I’d find myself here.
That’s why people get in a convertible and hit the road without a map. That’s the promise. That you’ll finally see yourself when you don’t recognise the scenery.
Ellen Emerson White, Life Without Friends: I was so excited when I discovered that this had been recently released as an ebook, because it’s been out of print and I’ve been looking for it ever since I read White’s Long May She Reign in 2010. (Which doesn’t seem like that long ago, until I remind myself that I was a student who didn’t have a car, a job or even a smartphone. However, unlike daily life, my tastes, interests and opinions haven’t changed drastically.)
A decade of wanting to read something may be an unfair amount of pressure to put on any book, especially on a teen novel from 1987, but I was not disappointed.
Beverly’s ex-boyfriend has been charged with murder and everyone -- her classmates, her father, even Beverly herself -- blames Beverly for not telling anyone sooner what she knew about Tim. She’s trying to keep her head down and get through her final weeks of high school without talking to anyone, not even the psychologist her father insists she sees. Then she meets a boy in the Public Gardens who doesn’t know anything about her past.
But for some reason, even after she got home, she couldn’t get the incident out of her head. Big wow. Some stupid, probably illiterate guy was halfway friendly. What was this, the highlight of her month? Her year? Like the saying went, how low could she go? From murderers to park psychopaths. Terrific. But she still kept thinking about it.
White is so good at writing smart, acerbic teenage girls with intense emotions.
Beverly isn’t just dealing with the guilt and grief surrounding the death of a classmate, she also was in what, from my 21st century perspective, was clearly an abusive relationship and she lost her mother in distressing circumstances a few years earlier.
Her backstory is a bit too info-dumpy, but otherwise I liked White’s writing. She’s got a distinctive, unusual style. Beverly’s relationship with Derek is delightful to read about, so believably awkward and tentative and hopeful. Two people with their own flaws and fears who enjoy each other’s company and make the effort -- and sometimes it really is an effort -- to get to know each other. It’s, like, everything I want from teen romance.
I don’t agree with a review that said “the neat resolution of Beverly's problems strains credulity”. In the end, Beverly in a better place, physically, emotionally and in her relationships, but it hasn’t been an easy journey to get there -- and the book left me with the sense that that journey isn’t over.
It’s optimistic, but not implausibly so.
(Also YA in the 80s had stricter length limitations, so I’m not at all surprised that this isn’t as detailed and complicated as Long May She Reign, which is an outlier even by modern YA standards.)
Setting: Boston. “What about now?” [Dr. Samuels] asked. “Where do you go from here?”
She sighed. This was really a drag. “I don’t know. Home for dinner, probably.”
His eyes flickered. Amusement, she thought. “And after that?”
“I’ll probably study, and then I’ll go to bed.”
“What about tomorrow?”
She gritted her teeth. “What do you want me to do, plot the rest of my life, hour by hour?”
“Do you think about it?”
This guy was starting to get on her nerves. “No, I’m a carpe diem kind of person,” she said, and was even more irritated when he grinned. “I wasn’t being funny.”
“You’re just extremely intelligent.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” She tilted her head to try and see his watch. Was she ever going to get out of here?
“I’m not mad.”
“Still can’t figure what you want.” He put his hands in his pocket, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Like, if you weren’t so totally weird, I’d ask you out.” He frowned. “You’d prob’ly call the cops ‘r something.”
Beverly looked at him slouching against the fence, hair tousled, cigarette hanging.
“Is this your James Dean imitation?”
“Give it more pain,” he said, and slouched lower, demonstrating. He straightened. “So, do I ask you out, or what?”
“Couldn’t we just be -- friends or something?”
“Friends,” he said.
“Well, yeah, I, uh,” she coughed, “don’t have so many right now.”
Another train of thought, another list. I was wondering how much I would spend on books if I bought everything I read. I made a list of all the books I’ve read since May, and for each title, looked up the cost of the kindle edition and the cost of the paperback (or if that wasn’t possible, hardcover) from a local bookshop.
Then I calculated averages: 12.3 books each month, with a total of $125 for kindle or $315 for paper.
It wouldn’t actually be possible to buy everything in the same format -- out of these books, three were unavailable for kindle and nine were only available as ebooks. And if I really was buying everything, there are a couple of other factors affecting the cost: I listen to two or three audiobooks every month, and I wouldn’t limit myself myself to shopping at the one local bookshop for paperbacks because a couple of other places are sometimes slightly cheaper.
Anyway, that’s not the point I wanted to make. The point is that I was expecting the amount to be exorbitant, but after I looked at those figures I looked at my financial data spreadsheet and I realised: I could actually afford to do that.
I don’t think it would be a very smart idea to suddenly buy all the books, not when I can get so much of what I want to read from the library. If I’d started buying everything as soon as I could afford it, then I would have spent an awful lot more money over the years.
(It’s reassuring having an emergency fund. I have an active imagination, I can think of a lot of possible emergencies. Especially since my job is more casual than I’d like.)
Also if I bought a dozen paperbacks a month, I’d have to make difficult decisions about which to keep and where to store them and what to do with the others because I just do not have enough room (and if I was spending that much on books, then there’s no way I could afford to live somewhere with more space).
So I am not going to do that.
But maybe it is okay if I buy books more often. Like when the library doesn’t have things.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.
That sort of thing is what started me wondering if I had read a book set in each American state. (The US has a good number of states for this -- enough to be challenging without being impossible.)
I ended up going through my reading record on LibraryThing and looking at the “Important Places” data (which is user-generated and therefore doesn’t exist for all books). An interesting exercise, because I haven’t always realised where books were set -- especially for books I read when I was growing up, when my grasp of geography was so much vaguer. The spelling of “mom” has meant that I usually noticed when books were set in Northern America, even if I either didn’t notice the cues as to exactly where it was set or else didn’t properly understand those cues in context.
(When reading, I have a tendency to imagine the places featured and mentioned on a rough sort of map. Sometimes I notice that I’m reverting to the map of north-east US that I made up -- in my head -- probably beginning back when I read What Katy Did at School as a kid.)
But I digress. It was very easy to find books set in New York, California and Florida. That didn’t really surprise me. For Arizona and West Virginia, the only books I found are mostly set elsewhere, and I couldn’t find anything for Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota and Ohio.
I read some YA set in the USA.
Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son: In this sequel to Carry On, Simon, Baz and Penelope set off on a roadtrip across America to see Agatha, who Penelope is convinced is in trouble. I opened the book out of curiosity, a sense of I read the first one so I might as well read this too, but was quickly hooked. Rowell is so good making me care about her characters and their relationships. I liked how this is a journey of discovery -- they’re exploring a new country, finding out things about the world they live in and learning more about themselves.
I really enjoyed reading this but wasn’t so enthusiastic about its final act and conclusion.
The roadtrip turns into a story about vampires, plural. There are a few vampires book that I’ve really liked but with those I knew what I was signing up for, whereas here all the vampires were interrupting a story which was way more appealing (to me).
As for the ending, that’s setting up for a sequel. (Like a clue, the final chapter is called “prologue”.) There’s resolution to their immediate goals, but the emotional arcs feel very unresolved and the book literally ends with a character saying something unexpectedly cliffhangery. I expect that I will feel less grumpy once I can read the sequel.
So, it comes down to expectations and personal preferences and the fact that this book doesn’t standalone.
For the record: They drive from Chicago through Iowa, Nebraska,Colorado, Utah, stuff happens in Nevada and then they end up in California.BAZ
Things I hate, a list:
1. The sun.
2. The wind.
3. Penelope Bunce, when she hasn’t got a plan.
4. American sandwiches.
5. America.
6. The band, America. Which I didn’t know about an hour ago.
[...]
13. Myself, most of all.
14. My soft heart.
15. My foolish optimism.
16. The words “road” and “trip”, when said together with any enthusiasm
SIMON
Iowa is beautiful. It’s all gentle green hills and fields of maize. It reminds me of England. But with fewer people in it.
BAZ
Iowa looks exactly like Illinois. I’m not sure why they bothered to separate them. Just an endless stretch of motorway and pig farms.
Snow has switched in full-on battle mod; I haven’t seen him like this since the Mage died.
I envy what he has with Bunce. They act like this is their tenth tour of duty together. It makes me realise that Simon had a whole life I didn’t know about back in school. The Mage used him to fight whatever needed fighting -- even when Simon was just a kid. (Simon was always just a kid.)
I had this idea about America…
That I’d find myself here.
That’s why people get in a convertible and hit the road without a map. That’s the promise. That you’ll finally see yourself when you don’t recognise the scenery.
Ellen Emerson White, Life Without Friends: I was so excited when I discovered that this had been recently released as an ebook, because it’s been out of print and I’ve been looking for it ever since I read White’s Long May She Reign in 2010. (Which doesn’t seem like that long ago, until I remind myself that I was a student who didn’t have a car, a job or even a smartphone. However, unlike daily life, my tastes, interests and opinions haven’t changed drastically.)
A decade of wanting to read something may be an unfair amount of pressure to put on any book, especially on a teen novel from 1987, but I was not disappointed.
Beverly’s ex-boyfriend has been charged with murder and everyone -- her classmates, her father, even Beverly herself -- blames Beverly for not telling anyone sooner what she knew about Tim. She’s trying to keep her head down and get through her final weeks of high school without talking to anyone, not even the psychologist her father insists she sees. Then she meets a boy in the Public Gardens who doesn’t know anything about her past.
But for some reason, even after she got home, she couldn’t get the incident out of her head. Big wow. Some stupid, probably illiterate guy was halfway friendly. What was this, the highlight of her month? Her year? Like the saying went, how low could she go? From murderers to park psychopaths. Terrific. But she still kept thinking about it.
White is so good at writing smart, acerbic teenage girls with intense emotions.
Beverly isn’t just dealing with the guilt and grief surrounding the death of a classmate, she also was in what, from my 21st century perspective, was clearly an abusive relationship and she lost her mother in distressing circumstances a few years earlier.
Her backstory is a bit too info-dumpy, but otherwise I liked White’s writing. She’s got a distinctive, unusual style. Beverly’s relationship with Derek is delightful to read about, so believably awkward and tentative and hopeful. Two people with their own flaws and fears who enjoy each other’s company and make the effort -- and sometimes it really is an effort -- to get to know each other. It’s, like, everything I want from teen romance.
I don’t agree with a review that said “the neat resolution of Beverly's problems strains credulity”. In the end, Beverly in a better place, physically, emotionally and in her relationships, but it hasn’t been an easy journey to get there -- and the book left me with the sense that that journey isn’t over.
It’s optimistic, but not implausibly so.
(Also YA in the 80s had stricter length limitations, so I’m not at all surprised that this isn’t as detailed and complicated as Long May She Reign, which is an outlier even by modern YA standards.)
Setting: Boston. “What about now?” [Dr. Samuels] asked. “Where do you go from here?”
She sighed. This was really a drag. “I don’t know. Home for dinner, probably.”
His eyes flickered. Amusement, she thought. “And after that?”
“I’ll probably study, and then I’ll go to bed.”
“What about tomorrow?”
She gritted her teeth. “What do you want me to do, plot the rest of my life, hour by hour?”
“Do you think about it?”
This guy was starting to get on her nerves. “No, I’m a carpe diem kind of person,” she said, and was even more irritated when he grinned. “I wasn’t being funny.”
“You’re just extremely intelligent.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” She tilted her head to try and see his watch. Was she ever going to get out of here?
“I’m not mad.”
“Still can’t figure what you want.” He put his hands in his pocket, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Like, if you weren’t so totally weird, I’d ask you out.” He frowned. “You’d prob’ly call the cops ‘r something.”
Beverly looked at him slouching against the fence, hair tousled, cigarette hanging.
“Is this your James Dean imitation?”
“Give it more pain,” he said, and slouched lower, demonstrating. He straightened. “So, do I ask you out, or what?”
“Couldn’t we just be -- friends or something?”
“Friends,” he said.
“Well, yeah, I, uh,” she coughed, “don’t have so many right now.”
Another train of thought, another list. I was wondering how much I would spend on books if I bought everything I read. I made a list of all the books I’ve read since May, and for each title, looked up the cost of the kindle edition and the cost of the paperback (or if that wasn’t possible, hardcover) from a local bookshop.
Then I calculated averages: 12.3 books each month, with a total of $125 for kindle or $315 for paper.
It wouldn’t actually be possible to buy everything in the same format -- out of these books, three were unavailable for kindle and nine were only available as ebooks. And if I really was buying everything, there are a couple of other factors affecting the cost: I listen to two or three audiobooks every month, and I wouldn’t limit myself myself to shopping at the one local bookshop for paperbacks because a couple of other places are sometimes slightly cheaper.
Anyway, that’s not the point I wanted to make. The point is that I was expecting the amount to be exorbitant, but after I looked at those figures I looked at my financial data spreadsheet and I realised: I could actually afford to do that.
I don’t think it would be a very smart idea to suddenly buy all the books, not when I can get so much of what I want to read from the library. If I’d started buying everything as soon as I could afford it, then I would have spent an awful lot more money over the years.
(It’s reassuring having an emergency fund. I have an active imagination, I can think of a lot of possible emergencies. Especially since my job is more casual than I’d like.)
Also if I bought a dozen paperbacks a month, I’d have to make difficult decisions about which to keep and where to store them and what to do with the others because I just do not have enough room (and if I was spending that much on books, then there’s no way I could afford to live somewhere with more space).
So I am not going to do that.
But maybe it is okay if I buy books more often. Like when the library doesn’t have things.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.