First Boy -Gary Schmidt

Cooper Jewett has been raised by his grandparents on a New Hamshire Dairy Farm. When his grandfather suddenly dies, he is left to keep up the farm. At the same time strange things are happening in New Hampshire with the political primary season. One of the candidates comes to Cooper's school and proposes that Cooper join him on the campaign trail. Cooper faces an identity crisis similar to most teens, but complictaed by his grandparents denial to be upfront with him about his own parents. He loves his New Hampsire life, but wonders about the rest of the world as well.

I enjoyed the writing quite a bit. When dealing with his sense of loss, Schmidt writes, "..whatever it was that had stopped in him when his grandfather had died still hung broken. He felt it deep, like a stone too big to heft out of the garden. He just had to hoe around it and make do." I like that nurture wins over nature-- themes that Mark Twain obsessed over as well. I thought the story line itself was a bit far fetched. Nonetheless, it was fun to read.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -Dave Eggers

I picked this book off of my daughter's summer reading list. She has chosen The Catcher in the Rye as her fictional work and then she had to pick from a list of 16 nonfictional books. It is worthy to point out that of those 16 choices, 10 were from male authors and 3 female. Of those 3 female author possibilities, one The Glass Castle was also on the list last year so she had read it for her freshman english class. So, for those of you counting that is 2 female authors, and 10 male! For those of you who may have never read The Catcher in the Rye, it is also about male adolescents.

With that prologue in place, I probably would have never come to this book on my own. It is good to get out of your comfort zone once in awhile. I can see why it is on the list because it too is the ramblings of a young man. Will my daughter enjoy it- no she will hate it. She is narrowing down the list trying to find something she can tolerate. I don't think this one will be it. This is a "heartbreaking" story of a 21 year old man who loses both of his parents to cancer within a few months and then becomes a co-guardian with his sister of their 8 year old brother. The setting is mostly San Francisco and some Chicago where Dave Eggers grew up and his parents died. The time frame is the mid 1990s as I often found myself wondering why he spends so much time going to pay phones! Cell Phones have absolutely exploded in use in the past ten years. He worries about his younger brother quite a bit, but also befriends him in the way only a brother could.

As with any memoir, I was curious what has happened since. The book was published in 2000 so it has been eight years. The brother seem to manage his growing up unfortunately the sister takes her own life. The author holds nothing back in his glimpse at the few years following the parent's death. We learn of the father's alcoholism and every sexual escapade the author has. Quite frankly to me, it got a bit boring after awhile. Granted I have never been a young male, but all of the brutal honesty about running naked on the beach and having your private parts hurt was a little much. Then of course there is the overuse of the word "fuck". A glimpse at the very last paragraph of the book will give you an idea, I counted 22 times in that paragraph alone.

Some of his ramblings I enjoyed and I realize that honesty makes for good writing. This book was a runner up for the Pulitzer Prize so some hot shots must have loved it. Towards the end of the book he goes back to Chicago for a visit and I could totally relate to visiting the house you once lived in etc. The scene of him scattering his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan is also very vivid. The author has talents as most of his descriptions are vivid and memorable. Some unfortunately fell under my current lingo of TMI(too much information).

Well looking up his current life on the internet, the most obvious things out there are that he won a TED Prize for "Once upon a School". If you have never been to the TED website:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html

I urge you to go there and listen to his speech. He obviously cares about the state of our schools and is working to involve local communities more. During that lecture, I found a "want to read" for my list it is called Waiting to be Heard it is written by high school students and what they think about today's world. It was written by students at Mr. Eggers tutoring center in San Francisco. I'll blog about it once I get my hands on a copy. In the meantime, it is back to the dreaded list with my daughter to find something she could get through for her school requirement. Maybe I'll even suggest a few for the teacher's list to balance the male female ratio a bit!

Drinking the Rain -Alix Kates Shulman

At 50, Alix Shulman decides to live remotely on a Maine Island while working on a book. I picked this book up on our recent trip east and enjoyed reading it. The book encompasses ten years of her life. I was amazed at how self sufficient she became in a short period of time. She learns to eat what is available near her small electricity/plumbing free cabin. I loved the way she began the book with this quote by Franz Kafka: " You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." The quote was part of the reason I bought the book while on vacation and the memoir was equally as good.

www.alixkshulman.com