Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
Many months ago on February 14th, Oregon had its 150th birthday. But when you're 150 years old, your birthday party lasts longer than a single day – all year, all around the state, folks have enjoyed celebrating our state's history, reflecting on its future, and bringing the word "sesquicentennial" more fully into our vocabulary. Poetry Northwest magazine and the Oregon State Library are doing their part; they've compiled a list of 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books for our enjoyment and edification. So I'll take this as an opportunity to do a little poetry celebrating too!
A few years ago I realized that not only did I rarely read poetry, I had no idea how formal English verse structure worked, and had never really tried my hand at writing poems myself. To resolve these problems, I turned to The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by actor, novelist, comedian, director and also poet Stephen Fry. The book is an instruction manual for poetry-writing, and it is a sincere and careful text, introducing readers to meter, rhyme, and verse forms with a series of explanatory chapters and instructive exercises, illustrated along the way with numerous examples of both excellent and execrable verse. Fry's descriptive and instructional style is logical, helpful, and clear – but at the same time, his famous wry wit is decidedly present. The book should be enjoyable to all who wish to understand poetic structures better, as well as to those who want to write and those who enjoy a bit of humor while they learn.
If you're more fascinated with the process of poetry than you are with writing it yourself, you might be interested in Abigail Friedman's story. Her book The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan chronicles her personal journey exploring the form of haiku and discovering the world of people devoted to the haiku life, while continuing to attend to her family and her day job as an American diplomat in Tokyo. Why is the book worth reading? Friedman's account of her exploration of a specific piece of Japanese culture is interesting, for sure; but beyond that, The Haiku Apprentice introduces readers to the beauty and precision of the Japanese language, and to the intriguing spiritual aspects of the practice of reading, writing, and enjoying haiku.
I said up above that although I don't, as a rule, enjoy reading poetry, I do like to hear it read or performed. I am not alone here – spoken word poetry has experienced a revival in the United States in the last twenty years in the form of the poetry slam. It's a very democratic sport, and the rules are simple: poets sign up to compete, they must perform original work, they can't use costumes or props, and they get three minutes. Judges are picked from the audience more or less at random, and they score each performance. That's it. If you want to see and hear how this works but don't know where the best local venue is, take a look at the film Slamnation: The Art of Spoken Word, directed by Paul Devlin. It's a profile of the 1996 New York City slam team as it makes its way to the national contest right here in the Rose City.
Posted by Emily-Jane
The zombie is the monster of our times, according to Adam Cohen in a piece about the new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. Cohen contrasts the sleek, investment banker-like vampire of the recent past with the more brutish and blunt zombies we now see shambling all over our movie screens and bookstore shelves. Jane Austen sequels, knockoffs, takeoffs, and remakes have flooded the market in the last few years as well. With the over-the-top conjunction of these two trends, I'm afraid they may have reached their apotheosis and that both zombies and Elizabeth Bennet will slowly fade from the front of our collective mind. Enjoy the mayhem and Regency manners while you can!
Memories of devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid flooded back to me on seeing Lost In Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure by Emma Campbell Webster. A book that may polarize hardcore Austen fans into purists vs. non-traditionalists, it incorporates favorite characters from Jane Austen's novels and lets you decide on the steps you, as Elizabeth Bennet, will take on the path to matrimonial bliss--or disaster. The world of Pride and Prejudice opens up to Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Part of the fun of this book will be figuring out who belongs to which book and enjoying how they're put together in novel ways.
If your hobbies tend towards handicrafts, like the Bennet sisters and the ladies of their day, but you need a little edge to your projects, try this: Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More!. As a crocheter myself, I've experienced what I feel is a lack of crochet books with funky, fun projects compared to some of the knitting books I've looked at. Creepy Cute Crochet helps fill that gap. Using the popular Japanese Amigurumi style of crochet, Christen Haden provides patterns and instructions for a Corporate Zombie and a Cyber Zombie, as well as a panoply of monsters and their ilk. You can even make a crocheted Cleric to confront the Grim Reaper or to exorcise a crocheted Devil.
When you need to ready yourself for the inevitable rise of the undead, your indespensible companion will be The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead. This comprehensive guide to arming yourself, preparing your home for a long-term seige, and doing battle with the undead will keep you laughing through the apocalypse. Max Brooks' exhaustive guide includes a complete history of zombie uprisings dating from the dawn of human history and the details of the virus Solanum, which causes the infection that kills and then reanimates human beings. Don't read The Zombie Survival Guide if you're sensitive like I am. Its mock-serious tone could make you believe there really are zombies in your garden, hungry for your flesh.
Posted by Kate
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Presidents, like other famous people, have an incredible ability to influence popular culture. Their habits are imitated, their favorite foods see renewed popularity, their taste in music is noted and critiqued. And president-elect Barack Obama is no exception – the media has noted possible trends springing from, for example, his devotion to his smartphone and his patronage of D.C.-area restaurants. What's the newest presidential trend? NPR's Morning Edition ran a story this morning about the influence of the president-elect on America's reading habits. It seems that Obama likes to read – lots of different kinds of books*, pretty much all the time. And Americans are jumping right on the reading bandwagon with him!
Of course librarians are always glad to hear that someone influential is promoting reading (we're not territorial; we love it when anyone gives reading props!), so I was glad to hear that Obama's reading habits are making news. And this got me wondering about other presidents. Surely a fair number of them have been avid readers also, right?
It turns out the answer is yes. Our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, is perhaps best known for his skill as an orator, but throughout his life he was a devoted reader as well. Elizabeth Van Steenwyk and Bill Farnsworth's When Abraham Talked to the Trees tells the story of young Lincoln's passion for literature, learning, and the art of oration in a beautiful picture book format. Farnsworth's oil paintings are evocative and warm – this would be a great choice to read aloud to children or adults.
When we think of our most intellectual presidents, Thomas Jefferson nearly always makes the list. Kevin J. Hayes's The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson lays out the story of what the third president read and how it affected him, and describes in detail the libraries Jefferson built over the years, including the one he eventually sold to the nation to form the foundation for the Library of Congress. Hayes draws from a wide array of source material, including the marginalia that Jefferson inscribed in his books as he read, and the result is an unusual portrait of a serious thinker and lover of literature.
* The article mentioned several books that Barack Obama has been seen reading in recent months, all of which are available at your library!
- The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, by Jonathan Alter
- FDR, by Jean Edward Smith
- Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, by Fred Kaplan
- Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, by Thomas L. Friedman
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
And what about the rest of the first family? It seems they're readers too! The article shows a photograph of the president-elect with his daughter Malia, and the book she was reading at the time: Outside Beauty, by Cynthia Kadohata.
Posted by Emily-Jane
