The Diamond in the Window

Weird Intersections

Once upon a time, in a bedroom far, far away, I was a different person. This person that I once was thought about being in the wilderness a lot, and about hiking, and about how it would be to live there.

And then everything changed.

And then everything changed again.

And then I had children (note: "change" is not a strong enough word for that, er, transformation).

And then one of the children, Chestnut, became 15 and had her own, different obsession with the wilderness. As a result of which she ended up reading this book, and then it all came back to me in a rush.

That is the cover this book had when I read it, and I remember the feel of it—matte and papery—and all the specific scenes. Such a strange and immediate work it is, so very compelling. My niece saw it and read it too, with the same immediate powerful draw.

What is it about this book? I do not know. I only know that it's there, and that I am now intersecting with my kids in whole new and strange ways, which I find excellent. Also, if there is a person in your life yearning for the wilderness, this is what you should hand them.

Sci-Fi 'n' Me, Or: What Is WRONG With Me?

Chestnut has become quite the adventurous reader. We are talking wide. She's zipping from The Taliban Shuffle to Bossypants to The Three Body Problem, which is where my troubles began.

See, I till like to, when possible, read books that my kids are reading. When is this possible? When they let me know what they're reading, for instance, and don't squirrel the book away so I can't find it.

Dipping into their reading is especially alluring when it's a book I've never heard of. So when Chestnut started reading—and re-reading—The Three Body Problem, I was intrigued. Award-winning sci-fi by a Chinese author I'd never heard of? It sounded world-expanding in all the right ways.

I was never a big sci-fi buff growing up, but I like to think that I've gotten smarter than I was, and that I'm not as—genre-defensive? Is that a term?—as I once was. So with great anticipation, I began.

Here's where real life creeps in (sort of). Through strange flukes of the NYC public school system, both my kids are taking physics this year. I have never taken physics, and when they have run into problems, I have pathetically tried to google my way towards helping them, with middling success. It has not been...pleasant. And then here comes the Three Body Problem, which is chock-full of physics, nanotechnology (at least conceptually), and many, many scientific and mathematical digressions.

I mean, I get it: Science Fiction. Right? Except, oh! How it made me long for Trollope!

What I want to read about, pretty much always, is people. I feel this is a limitation on my part, but it is a truly felt one. And there were people in this book, of course. But they were not, it seemed to me, the author's main concern. Not by a long chalk (ah! What an excellent expression that is).

So: what gives? What makes someone able to engage fully in science fiction? And why don't I have it? And where or how can I get it? It should be noted that Chestnut LOVED this book, and found it fascinating. I feel like I am missing something, both in the sense that I don't have a quality I should, and because that means there are many wonderful books that I could love that I do not.

Is it just a taste thing? Larger? Smaller? All suggestions welcome.

Fever

I'm sick. Sick like grownups don't, and shouldn't, get, complete with fever, pathetic whining, texting Chestnut to bring me Tylenol, etc.

Here's the weird thing: the moment my temperature broke 101, I wanted to read one thing and one thing only:

Why? What power do Ms. Beck and Massman wield over me? Have they even written anything else? The Internet informs me that they've also written Fling, which is no doubt just as good at getting a person through a fever.

But what is the situation? Why am I like this? What is it about fevers that makes me want to read 80s trash? (My friend's favorite description from the book: "He had the latest haircut, cropped short on top, yet sensuously long in back.")

I like to think of Beck and Massman as best friends, having an awesome time writing their book (more sex! More Versace! More rhinestones!). But I am grateful to them for getting me through this stupid illness, which I hope will vanish soon, taking all 80s novels with it till next time.

Am I alone in this? What trash do you guys read when you're at your lowest?

The Non-Official Amtrak Writer's Residency™

Diana and I are on the Amtrak train, coursing along the Hudson River, which is very beautiful and also filled with weird birds in large, thin numbers. I am here, in my unofficial Amtrak Writer's Residency capacity (for official, see here), to keep you updated on affairs literary over the holiday weekend.

1) This book?

Is, according to my niece, really really awesome. I purchased it for Chestnut, who in the proud tradition of her kind, has refused to read it because I bought it "it doesn't look interesting." But fear not! The niece read it with total, thrilled absorption, and is now going to go and find all the other books by Sara Zarr. What does this teach us? Um, probably nothing, as we prove so totally unwilling to learn.

2) This book?

This is what you can put in the room with Diana and say, "Hey, maybe you want to try reading this!" if you are her father and want to ensure that she never, ever reads it.

3) This book?

Is just not that interesting. I wish it were so much more interesting. But alas, it is not. To me anyway.

So there you go. This has been your holiday weekend update. Stay tuned for when I read The Lucy Variations, spurring Chestnut to snatch it from me and read it out of gleeful spite. Oh, and wait! I forgot the super-weirdest reading of all, in case all of this was making too much sense.

Chestnut has been reading aloud from this:

"The old man, covered with mushrooms...."

Happy summer!

Inexplicable, and Yet Not So Inexplicable

What has Chestnut been reading all week? What did she bring to school to read during the last week of classes, and regale other kids with during lunch? Why this, of course.

See, I bought this book for a...project I'm working on. And she immediately found it and cannot stop reading it.

At first I thought this was funny and random, and then she came to the dinner table asking this:

• Did you know that singing off-key is illegal in Kentucky?

• Did you know that whaling is illegal in Oklahoma?

And I thought—wait, this isn't inexplicable at all! This is actually just awesome. 

Why This One?

Chestnut has mostly been reading in what I think of as a comforting way. You know: old American Girl books, Rotten Rhymes—books that have been happily read before. Lots if littler kid books.

Except this:

It was on our coffee table? Or bookshelf? Something. She came upon it and has been reading it ever since. And rereading it. And rereading it again.

Why? I have no idea. It's a pretty strange book, honestly. I mean, I guess there's a cover quote by Daniel Handler? Which makes it...children's literature adjacent?

It's not that I'm complaining. I'm just some cross between befuddled and interested. I remember various books that really compelled me from my parents' bookshelves, and not for any reason I can identify now. But I would read them over and over. And it wasn't all Diseases of the Skin, either (sheesh—everyone can understand why you'd want to read that over and over). It was...weird books. How to Be a Jewish Mother (for real, this is a book). Having a Baby Can Be a Scream, by Joan Rivers. While The Screwtape Letters, which I had very high hopes for (C.S. Lewis!), was a total dud.

Anyway, that's what we're reading around here. Happy inexplicable reading to you all!

Weather Literature

Well, as another snowstorm bears down upon us, it's probably time to come clean. For a while there, a subway Poetry in Motion type poster was up. It said: "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." —Eleanor Roosevelt.* And I thought: "Oh, I guess I have a small mind." Which felt, actually, like a relief to have settled so definitively.

It's true (for me) of books too: I like books about people more than those about events or ideas, and I suppose that's just my small mind talking. But I think there must be yet another quote that piggybacks on the faux–Eleanor Roosevelt one and says, "But really, totally, entirely boring people talk about the weather."

Friends: I am one of those people, and it's time to just come out and acknowledge it. I like to talk about the weather. I like to think about the weather. I even (God help me) like to read about the weather.

Trust me, great books have been written about the weather. Of course, for the snow-focused among us, there's no better book than this:

Blizzards! More blizzards! Extreme cold! The chinook!

But that's not all. Perhaps you would like a hurricane novel? Check this out:

It has the most excellent description of a giant wave with a CAR inside the wave, its lights still on and shining through the wall of water. (Trust me: weather people have a thing for very big waves as well.) Bonus: building on unsteady foundations laid bare and excoriated!

And my most favorite weather novel, Ice! Sadly, I don't know the author (and no, it's not the Christian Science novel about discovering ice on the moon) and the internet has failed me: I cannot find it anywhere. It has an (ice) blue cover, and it's about a nerdy boy who has discovered that the next ice age is coming. (His mother is an...anthropologist? Who studies native cultures in icebound Greenland? Maybe?) There is also a weather scientist (exciting!) whose climate model shows that this is TRUE! And then, the snow begins! Madness! Chaos! Mayhem! Lots of snow! Polar bears wandering over the frozen tundra that once was New York City! Oh, to find that book again!

Anyway, it's supposed to snow tonight, so I thought I'd let you all in about this part of my reading. I'm hoping Chestnut will follow in my inglorious weather-reading footsteps. (I've got her checking the hourly forecasts on weather.com, it's a start.)

*Apparently she never said this. Apparently no one ever said this the first time. Still, it was on a subway poster once, which counts for...nothing, I guess.

Outposts from Reading-Land

My children's English teachers both use the prospect of "silent reading" to badger their classes into behaving. As in, "If you don't settle down, we'll just have silent reading," and then everyone shuts up and behaves. Which means, I guess, that this prospect is so horrific to most kids that they will do anything in order to avoid it. I find this dispiriting.

Chestnut's in-school "book group" is reading The Catcher in the Rye, which she told me: "It's bad. I mean, he talks about prostitutes and killing himself." Huh.

The two books spread open on the bathroom floor?

Yeah, Howard Zinn and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. I don't understand it either. Maybe file it under "it's hard to grow up."

We Recommend: Rereading, Frustrated, 5th Grade Edition

It's We Recommend, where you write to us with a person's age, tastes, likes, loves, hatreds, and anything else that might help, and we put it in a magic pot and come up with a perfect book for them! Or something like that. Got a person in your life who needs a book? Write to us at thediamondinthewindow (at) gmail (dot) com with all relevant and irrelevant information, and we will do our best. And the secret? Look in the comments, it's where you'll find all the best recommendations.

Well, this one really hit home for me, and so I am posting about it though I an meaning to write about something else. It's—well, you'll see.

My 5th grader (girl) has always been a bookworm. Loves to read, and has always scored 98-99 percentile for all of those reading assessments we hate. (She was the subject of this post, several years ago.) Last year she even had a goal to read all of the Newbery winners by the time she's 14. But in the past 6 months, she's mostly stopped trying new books, and instead just reads the same things (Calvin & Hobbes, the Popularity Papers series, the Penderwicks series, and Wonder) over and over. The list of books that have been picked up & put down after reading the flap or the first page is endless (and full of wonderful books!). Watership Down? Eh. Harry Potter #7? Got 1/2 way through and doesn't want to finish because too many people die. And so on. And even the realistic fiction that she used to love isn't doing it for her anymore. The thing is, now she's saying that a) she's tired of her favorite books, and b) there are no more good books left. And she's spending her time playing DragonVale and exploring the New Moon Girls site, and explodes when it's suggested that maybe she should do something non-electronic, because "there's nothing to do and nothing to read."

 

So I think I'm not really looking for a recommendation to bring her back to reading (unless someone has something that would be just perfect for the kind of kid who loves The Penderwicks and can't wait for the next one to come out). But for you parents of older girls--is this normal, in your experience? Is this a phase that some kids go through before, as part of pre-adolescence? 

 

Any thoughts are welcome!

 

It's lucky that any thoughts are welcome, because I have a few. First of all, as I said to the writer in an email, normal is just a setting on a washing machine, which is what a well-meaning camp counselor told us when we were freaking out about something or other. But I know that's a dodge, really, because the real question is (more or less) Should I Be Scared? And the real answer to that is what it always is, No, because being scared doesn't help anything. Though, I must admit, I am scared all the time.

 

Also, the other real question is: Is this happening to other kids, and the answer to that is an emphatic: YES. It's certainly happened this way to both my girls, from what I can see on the outside. And it happened to this kid. And I went ahead and flat-out asked Chestnut about it, and she said, "Oh that's happened to me!" She fully recognized it as a thing she goes through sometimes, especially when things are a little tough. But then, she tells me, she finds a book that no one expected her to read or like in a million years, and she'll read that and like it, and she'll be fine again.

 

She also said that it's of no use recommending books to her when she is in one of those moods, because recommending a book to her will only make her want to read it less.

 

And I would note, too, that it's plain old hard to be in 5th grade. Everything is changing, and maybe that's just fine for some people, but for me and for many of the people I most admire, change, especially lasting, profound change, is tricky.

 

So, even though all these things are true, I still insist on recommending something, because that is my nature, I suppose. And also, because the real concern here is that reading is such a friend and relief in a difficult world, and we want her to have that if she can.

 

First of all, I would offer something foolish and terrible.

 

I know that I violate every trusting and good heart in recommending these, but.... Well, Chestnut was reading one of these on her bed the other day, feeling overwhelmed by guests and visitors and life itself. And a guest, a wonderful but also distressed teenager, came into her room and said, "Oh! I remember those! I loved reading those!"

"Yes! They're so terrible!" Chestnut said.

"Yes!" the teenager cried happily. "They're really awful." And they were both so happy. Sometimes, I feel silly stupid things are just the ticket.

 

But! I am not just an emtpy-headed Mephistopholes. (I think.) Because I would also recommend this.

Just getting a subscription (you can find them here) means that it will show up, and she can read it...or not. It's not as much of a commitment as a book, and it's truly strange and silly and wonderful.

 

I do know this happens, and that it's hard and scary, just like every other part of being a parent (as far as I can tell), where you watch someone ahead of you walk down a rocky, wonderful, terrifying path, and you just have to hope they're OK, but you don't get any real assurance that they will be.

 

But perhaps I have gone on enough? OK, Penderwicks fans and readers everywhere, do you have a lifeline to throw this family? I am sure they will be OK anyway, but extra lifelines never hurt anyone.

The Browser, Encyclopedias, and the World

The internet. It's wonderful and terrible, thrilling and terrifying. It is certainly addictive. But one thing it's supposed to be good for, is browsing.

I mean, that's the whole problem, isn't it? That you end up browsing rather than reading, ready to jump off in the middle of anything to something else.

Except: Chestnut was thinking about her Hanukkah (forget the spelling on that one is what I think) list, and she said that what she really wanted was an Encyclopedia.

Well, we sort of said, You can use your dad's access to the Encyclopedia Britannica's web site (he gets it as part of being a professor), or you can look on Wikip—.

No, she said. Not online. I want one that's paper. I want to, you know, just look through it.

I completely understand what she means. It's the whole Book of Lists, Guinness Book of World Records vibe she's going for: she wants to come across things unexpectedly. Of her own volition. It's fun to page through an encyclopedia (no really, it is!). And it's not the same having random things flash up on a web site. You're not browsing then, their design is. How can you wander when you're not the one doing the wandering?

If you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica kids site, it says "Browse Arts, Religion, Geography...." But if they're giving you options of what to browse, it's not exactly browsing. It's looking, which is different.

I had to tell her that I think they don't make paper encyclopedias anymore. I am not so sure that's even true—there is a 2003 edition on Amazon for $650. There is ye olde one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia from 2000. But..nothing newer.

Which I understand, I really do. I mean, the encyclopedia makers have to be realistic, don't they?

Well don't they?

But it sort of kills me. It's this very specfic weird, kid activity that will vanish, and it makes me blue.