Tomorrow is Dewey’s 24-Hour Read-a-Thon, and I’ve been excited about this for weeks. I decided to read only my own books tomorrow even though I have a loooong list of review books for April that I am making almost no progress on. I want to just be able to relax and not have to think to much about taking notes or what I might say reviewing the books. Plus, I have a lot of books on my shelf that I’m anxious to get to, and this seems like a good excuse.

Since I’m at home in Madison for this Read-a-Thon, I had the luxury of putting together two truly absurd piles of books for consideration. This first pile is all of the fiction and nonfiction I’m thinking about, and the second is the pile of graphic novels I checked out from the library this week.

Fiction, Nonfiction

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In the introduction of Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry author David Orr notes,

The potential audience for a book about poetry nowadays consists of two mutually uncomprehending factions: poets, for whom poetry is a matter of casual, day-to-day conversation; and the rest of the world, for whom it’s a subject of at best mild and confused interest.

While I suspect there is at least one more group — people who actually have no interest in poetry — I consider myself to be a person in Orr’s second category. I’ve read poetry, and I have some poems that I enjoy, but I don’t feel like a poetry conversationalist nor someone who could intelligently recommend poetry to another reader. In that sense, I think I was an ideal read for Beautiful & Pointless, which I nerdily read in one sitting on a Friday night (I know, I lead an exciting life).

Orr, a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, wrote the book to look at the relationship between contemporary poetry and readers, and explore what experiences a reader can expect when reading modern poetry. He goes on to explain,

This book will try to give you a sense of what modern poets think about, how those poets talk about what they’re thinking about, and most important, how an individual poetry reader relates to the art he usually likes, always loves, and is frequently annoyed by.

I’ve quoted a lot from the introduction, but I think that’s important to really get a sense of what this book is about. It’s not a how-to guide for poetry, or even a book arguing for the importance of reading poetry. Beautiful & Pointless might better be described as a series of essays on poetry, in which Orr tries to address what he sees as the most common confusions or objections the average reader has when it comes to reading or talking about modern poetry. The book tries to de-mystify these qualities, addressing:

• “The Personal” or why we often think of poetry as such a highly-emotional form of writing.
• “The Political” or why we think about poetry as political action.
• “Form” or why we often get bogged down in discussions of what “kind” of poem a piece should be classified as.
• “Ambition” or what poets are trying to do with their writing.
• “The Fishbowl” or a look at the context that contemporary poets are writing in.
• “Why Bother?” or a discussion of why experts say to read poetry.

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Last week, my in read life book club met to discuss Paper Towns by John Green. This is, I think, the first young adult book we’ve read as a book club, and I think the change of pace was fun for everyone. There’s something about reading a book about high school that makes you want to trade stories about the person you were back in those dark days, isn’t there?

I love the description of Paper Towns from John Green’s website, so I’m just going to use that instead of trying to sum things up on my own:

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life–dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge–he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues–and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.

The only other John Green book I’d read before this one was Looking for Alaska, and I think there are some definite similarities. Both feature quite, nerdy guys and the “manic pixie dream girl” they think they are in love with. In both cases, the dream girl turns out to be different than the nerdy guy expected and the story is about the growing up teenagers face when life changes dramatically.

Unlike some of the other books we’ve read, everyone in the book club really loved this book. I thought it was an excellent read — smart, quirky, actually laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally gripping without being melodramatic. I loved this book, and would definitely recommend it.

The most interesting part of our discussion was in response to the question of whether Margo and Quentin were fully-realized characters, or if the sidekicks — Quentin’s nerdy friends — were the best parts of the story. One person suggested that, as narrator, Quentin has to be sort of vanilla because that way he becomes a person more readers can relate to. Others said that part of the point of Margo is that she’s mysterious, that the Margo everyone thinks they know is just an idea, and part of the book is trying to figure out who she is.

In any case, Paper Towns was a great read for all of us that I think everyone would recommend. And it was a definite departure from our other recent reads, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Our next pick, scheduled for the end of April or beginning of May, is The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I’ve been meaning to read this one for months now, so I’m glad I finally have the outside motivation I get to it!

Rating:

The Long Goodbye is poet and journalist Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about losing her mother to metastatic colorectal cancer on Christmas Day, 2008, when O’Rourke was in her 30s and her mother was only 55-years-old. The book follows O’Rourke and her family through the initial cancer diagnosis, her mother’s short recovery and subsequent decline, and the aftermath of losing the center of their family. Throughout the book, O’Rourke constantly battles with an overwhelming question: How do we live with the knowledge that, eventually, we will die?

I don’t know how to write a review of a memoir about a young woman loosing her mother. I still have my mom, but I think the idea of losing a mother has paralyzed me in some way, made me unable to write analytically about the book in the way I would like. I hope, instead, some feelings I was left with after reading The Long Goodbye will be sufficient.

I loved O’Rourke’s writing style. I thought she had a beautiful way with words, and I have a number of paragraphs that I marked because I thought both the writing and sentiment were lovely. I think that’s probably the combination of O’Rourke being a poet and a journalist — a talent for choosing the right and most economical words for a situation. Take, for example, this section traveling after her mother’s death:

On my way to Joshua Tree National Park, a vast wind farm loomed on the left. The turning windmills were eerie, like machines from another world, and their strangeness made me stomach hurt with something like homesickness. The desert was dry and majestic and it calmed me; I was empty and it was, too. The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and majestic — it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.

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