Pip Still Pops

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 

Austin : Holt, Rinehart and Winston [2000]

554 p. : 22 cm.

Sometimes, in reading, you just want to return to an old favorite or old classic.  Though not really a "favorite,"  I remembered enjoying Great Expectations decades ago when I first read it, and so took it home with me for reading over the winter holidays.

Though hailed as a masterpiece by contemporary critics, Great Expectations is probably not as celebrated as it once was.  Dickens, extremely popular in his own lifetime and publishing his work to eager fans through serial installments does at times feel a bit more like popular fiction instead of literary fiction.  That being said, I have to say that this novel has aged pretty well.   

The novel revolves around the fortunes of Pip, an orphaned boy being lovelessly raised by his sister and his sudden inheritance of a fortune from a secret benefactor. I really enjoyed Dickens' mastery of keeping the reader interested throughout.  He's an exceptional plotter and his characters are a delight to discover. Yes, there's a bit of moralizing in Dickens, and occasionally ridiculous coincidences used to further the action, but one can't help but enjoying the ride.  There are lots of enjoyable twists and surprises and at it's core, a deeply humane and progressive sympathy for humans with all their good qualities and disturbing flaws.

I would definitely recommend Great Expectations to a student wanting to read some of the classic novels of the English literature canon.   

Public Transportation

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater
New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017
305 p. ; 22 cm.

A friend read this book and told me I should read it.  I'm glad she did.  It's a timely and interesting non-fiction YA book.

The basic "story" of the book involves two teens from different worlds in Oakland, California whose lives intersect on a city bus when one - a genderqueer student who looks like a boy but wears skirts - is set on fire by another student - a lively, friendly African American young man from another school.  The act was a rash "prank" intended more to harass and perhaps humiliate the targeted student, but it ended up seriously injuring the victim, and was treated as a felonious, adult hate crime.

The book delves into the different world of these two young people and manages to convey the terrible nature of the crime and its effects, while also richly fleshing out the perpetrator.

There is a lot to mull over in this book.  The roles that race, gender identity, family, poverty, policing and criminal justice play in our society.

I really like that the book jumps right in with the crime, and then proceeds to introduce us to the main protagonists in this drama.  It also helps us see the ways that criminal justice serves and does not serve both victims and perpetrators.

This would be a great book to use in a class room to open up discussions of racial justice, criminal justice, gender identity, privilege and income inequality.

In addition to being a relevant read, it's also compelling and well written. I would recommend it.

An Escape to Treasure

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
New York : Signet Classics, [2008]
xviii, 204 p. : map ; 18 cm.

I probably wouldn't have read Treasure Island if I hadn't heard it referred to in a New Yorker poetry podcast featuring the poetry editor, Paul Muldoon, and poet, Tom Sleigh, discussing a poem by Seamus Heaney that references Treasure Island.  How's that for a convoluted beginning?  It wasn't just the discussion, but it was Muldoon's mentioning that he absolutely loves Treasure Island, and reads it frequently.  That caught my attention, and so I brought it home with me to read over the summer.

So was it worth reading?  Definitely.  The novel moves along at a quick pace with skilled plotting and has wonderful characters, too.  The admirable young protagonist, Jim Hawkins, the devilish Israel Hands, and the wily and dangerous Long John Silver are unforgettable. 

The novel creates the template for pirate fiction, and does it with dash.  This is a fun novel that I would definitely recommend to students.

Fled is that Music

Wake by Lisa McMann
New York : Simon Pulse, 2009, c2008.
210 p. ; 21 cm.

I finally read Wake because it is popular with students and has been reissued  (along with its companion books) by Simon & Schuster.  It was an easy read, but a bit uneven.

McMann creates a very clever plot - a girl, Janie, who finds that she is uncontrollably drawn into other people's dreams.  As she comes of age, she gradually learns to control this condition and even learns that she can shape content and direction of the dream she enters.

A lot of the novel revolves around her growing attraction to a male friend Cabel - a relationship that moves from friendship to a sweet romance.

I found the writing to be uneven at times, occasionally feeling very choppy and disjointed.  I found myself wondering why the editor didn't take a more active role in shaping the final production of the novel.  I also felt that the introduction of spirituality (a dead person visits Janie in her dreams and it is clear that the spirit is real) undercuts the understated realism of Janie's dreamworld powers.  Finally, I found some of the plot twists toward the end to be more like TV show plotting instead of good fiction.

Overall, a strong start, but a vision that fades (and so the title of this post).  Problems aside, Wake is a fun read and one that clearly appeals to young readers, so I'll give it a thumbs up with some qualifications.

Predators and Prey

Knockout Games by G. Neri
Minneapolis, MN : Carolrhoda Lab, [2014]
293 p. ; 20 cm.

In spite of the generally positive reviews for this book, I've got to give this novel a mixed review. I appreciate what G. Neri is trying to do - get inside the minds and hearts of kids involved in "knockout games" - the brutal crime of attacking a random stranger with the idea of knocking them out with one vicious blow. He tries this through the main character, Erica, who has landed in a rough area St. Louis after her parents split up.  She has a talent for video editing and ends up involved with  the group of high school/middle school kids who are victimizing strangers in her neighborhood with their random assaults.  She especially gets in deep emotionally with Kalvin, the charismatic leader and "Knockout King" of the group.

The novel is set in St. Louis and closely parallels the real knockout game story that transpired there. Neri does a pretty good job of showing how peer pressure, boredom, and machismo create a lure for the "game" but I just never found myself drawn in to the main character's motivations.  Frankly, she's kind of a repulsive character, getting off on editing videos of the attacks and even assaulting one of the victims herself.

Neri seems to want to just tell the story, and not preach a lot, which is fine.  But I think what he really fails to convey is the absolute terror and life altering experience that being a victim of the knockout game would be.  He tries to in the one case that goes horrifically wrong, resulting in a murder - but that is it.

I will say that the pace of the novel picks up as it goes on, especially as all of Erica's really bad decisions and actions begin to have consequences for her and those around her.

I won't be recommending it to students, but I will be curious to see and hear what students think of it if they do read it.

Bleak and Beautiful

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz
New York : Anchor Books, 2008, c1984
158 p. ; 21 cm.

Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, and this little gem of a novel gives an example of why.

It is the tale of a man emerging from four years of harsh and humiliating imprisonment, only to find that his wife and her new lover are the ones who betrayed him to the police, and that his criminal mentor is a hypocrite and a man of means and power.   Bent on revenge, Said Mahran ends up destroying the only treasure he has left, his humanity.

In it's short, but intense meditation on the human spirit, this novel reminds me of another Nobel laureates fine little novel, Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.

I really appreciated this novel of set in 1950s Egypt.  It is straightforward, compelling, and easy to finish, but leaves you with a lot to sit back and think about.

Terrific Fair, Fairly Terrible

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
New York : Vintage Books, 2004, c2003.
1st Vintage Books ed.
xi, 447 p. : ill., maps, music ; 21 cm.

This is a fantastic and haunting book about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Larson's book manages to convey just how incredible the feat of Chicago's hosting the world's fair was (having just over 2 years to organize and build the entire fair venue) - while also telling the story of serial killer Henry H. Holmes and his immense frauds and scams that helped him elude capture for so long.

The book is a wonderful glimpse into the turn of the century world of the US and Chicago, which had been destroyed by fire only a little over twenty years before.

The reader gets to learn so much about the founding architects of Chicago, the landscaping prowess of John Olmsted - creator of NYC's Central Park - the amazing invention of the Ferris Wheel and the massive turnout of visitors to the fair (including a one day attendance total of over 750,000 people!).  Following the story of killer, H.H. Holmes, also gives the reader a feel for the fast and loose business dealings of the day, the ease with which people could assume false identities, and the plodding nature of police investigations at the turn of the century.

I will definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Chicago history, true crime stories, and just an amazing read.

Schooled in Prison

A Question of Freedom by R. Dwayne Betts
New York : Avery, 2010, c2009.
1st trade pbk. ed.
 240 p. ; 21 cm.   

There have been some really good books out lately about mass incarceration - such as The New Jim Crow and the comic book format, Race to Incarcerate.  A Question of Freedom is a great addition to the literature - and especially for high school age readers - in that it personalizes the story in a compelling and finely written memoir by a young man who was sentenced as an adult to 9 years in prison at the age of 16.

Yes, he committed a serious crime - using a gun to carjack a man in a mall parking lot.  And yet under the relatively new draconian laws now on the books in many states, he was sentenced a a sixteen year old to serve years in adult penitentiaries in the state of Virginia.

In prison Betts underwent a transformation from a basically good student who was morally adrift - to a thoughtful and powerful writer.  His writing conveys - without melodrama - the really twisted world of the US prison system where who you are as a human being is lost in a bizarre world of regulations, danger, and violence.  I was especially struck by how much time Betts spent in "the hole" - solitary confinement for minor rule infractions, and how he ended up in Virginia's infamous Red Onion "super max" prison, supposedly for the "worst of the worst" - even though he never did anything more violent than push a rookie guard's hands off of his genitals when that new guard was over zealous in doing a pat down search.

Again and again, Betts also reflects on the sad racial facts of the US prison system where the majority of prisoners are Black and Latino, and on the draconian "get tough" sentencing that locks people away for decades.  He himself could have been sentenced to life in prison!

I really like how Betts does not try to shock us with violent or terrifying episodes from prison, but instead conveys the soul killing world of prison - and the redemptive nature of the decent human beings who were kind or protective of him.

I would highly recommend this book for reading in classes.  It is ultimately a hopeful book.  The author has gone on to be a successful poet in addition to this fine non-fiction memoir.  I will be recommending it to any students looking for something about prisons, biographies, young writers, and mass incarceration.