You Are What You Hear

Candor, by Pam Bachorz, is a supremely creepy book. It's about a boy who lives in a special town that his father founded, where music containing subliminal messages is used to control the people who live there. Catchy phrases turn them into loose-clothing-wearing, healthy-food-eating, nonartistic, avidly academic individuals. No one wears eye makeup or nailpolish or holds hands in public, and teenagers never drink alcohol or make out in movie theatres. And if they ever leave and forget to take some of the special music with them, they will go insane and die a violent suicidal death. Oscar, the protagonist, has found a way to outsmart his father, but he's still stuck in this strange microcosm, with questions of love, control and honesty to confront. The entire book was full of suspense - will he escape? Will anyone escape? Will they all be brainwashed by the evil Mr. Banks, with no hope of free thought?

Clearly Bachorz believes that a) the media can affect us without our realization and b) our music, and the messages it contains, can define who we are. I agree that the words in songs, as well as the pictures and articles in magazines and the things we see on TV, can change both our perception and our goals more than we expect, but I think villainizing music is a pretty strong exageration of this concept. Then again, maybe the exageration is necessary to catch our attention.

Crooked, Zipped, and Crushed

These are three seperate books, by one married couple of authors. They aren't a series, but they are all "young adult" books, and they're all about pretty normal American teenagers. If I were a guy, I would probably be most interested in Zipped and least interested in Crushed, but if you like one of these, you'll probably like all of them.




Crooked was the first book I read by Laura and Tom McNeal, and it's about a girl with a crooked nose and no mother. There's a bad guy and a good guy who sometimes seem to change roles, and a really bad guy. Reading it felt like moving to a new town and getting to know new people, only probably a bit more exciting. The characters were all "round" characters, as my English teacher calls them, and I liked it a lot. This one gets 4.5 outta 5 stars.

Zipped was mainly told from a guy's point of view. It was full of questions and matters of perspective and identity, covering everything from adultery to racism to Mormon culture. It had one of the best quotes-within-a-story I've ever come across when two characters discuss the lyrics of a showtune, and no one was completely bad or completely good. 4 stars.

I honestly didn't want to read Crushed, but I liked the other two books enough to try it, and it wasn't terrible. Everyone it it was dealing with loss, whether that involved money, friends, family, or some combination thereof, and it was honestly pretty interesting. The characters, though, all seemed either naive or distrustworthy, except a few nice ones, who's importance levels fell somewhere between benchwarmers and supporting actors. So everyone likable was basically a "flat character". I think I should have stopped after Zipped, but this book isn't a total waste of time. 3 stars.

Has anyone else read any of these? Would you want to? Does the label "Young Adult Literature" affect whether or not you want to?

Say You're One of Them

I think there are authors who think that happy endings are boring, predictable, and less meaningful to the reader. They may be right. I also think that Uwem Akpan, author of Say You're One of Them, is one of these authors.

This collection of fictional stories by a smiley Jesuit priest from Nigeria doesn't have a single happy ending. There are bittersweet endings, endings that are twisted with relief and regret, and endings that leave you cold. But, as I recently learned how to say in Spanish, Todas las cuentas acaban mal. They have sad endings.

If you feel like you now don't have to read these stories, don't get me wrong; the endings are often unpredictable, some ending with what we hoped for all along, but not quite as happy, and some ending with what the characters dreaded, but we were too naive to believe possible.

These stories of Africa, exploring ordeals that happen to people there, and not rarely, are all unnerving. I had to ask myself, over and over, what seperates me from them? There are answers - physical distance, money, language - but they pale in comparison to the similarities, the unnerving proximities. Like Jubril, am I not at the mercy of the crowd whenever I take a bus or a train, or a plane? Could the others not kill me, if all incensed and united against me? Could I not lose my parents in an instant, like Kotchikpa, and find myself at the mercy of the world? These stories take place in an alternate universe, one that exists, only a plane ride away.

Some people don't read "depressing" stories, because they say that there isn't anything they can do about it. But maybe, if we read about the struggles of others, we won't be tempted to prey upon the one Muslim in a group of Christians, even in times of desperation and fear. Maybe we won't turn against our neighbors and families when there is a crisis, because we see how horrific it was when it happened in Rwanda. Maybe we won't ignore those charities that help child slaves just because they seem so far away, and we'll be careful where and how we get our oil and diamonds. So read Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan. Maybe you'll learn something about life, or yourself.

Titian; The Last Days

Over Spring Break, I finished an excessive number of books, but this was not one of them.

Titian, by Mark Hudson, is about everything and everyone (and everyone's cousin) in Italy within a century or two of Titian's life. I read detailed accounts of the possible interpretations of paintings (which Titian probably never even saw) by artists who Titian never knew. I read the word "beatific" four times in one page, and eventually looked it up. ( If you're curious, it means saintly, calm, enlightened, etc; it is not simply another way to say beautiful. It is also used to address the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. If you find this excessive and unwarranted explanantion tedious, I recommend you do NOT read this book). Reading this, I felt as though someone had written a three page dissertation on Titian, realized that it had to be a 100 page paper, panicked, and proceeded to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. And then, realizing he only had 99.5 pages, threw in the kitchen sink and made the page margins a bit smaller.

So if you'd like to educate yourself about Titian's home and how it looks now, rumors about the personal lives of those who inspired and trained him, and the nuances of tempera paint as opposed to oil paint, I would recommend this book. If you want to learn something about Titian, I'd recommend Wikipedia.

Seven Days in the Art World

So I thought I'd mix it up with some current nonfiction, and the book I chose is a fascinating look into the complex world of art - buying, selling, auctioning, collecting, studying, etc - that I never really thought about before.

Like most nonfiction, Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton, is not a book for everyone. If you think Sports Illustrated when you think nonfiction, I'd sit this one out. But if you're interested in art, history, art history, high society, money, and/or psychology (especially group psychology), then I'd definitely give it a spin. There are a lot confusing aspects to the art world, like why does some strange-looking art sell for millions, and who decides? How are artists trained, and what kind of qualifications help an artist to be successful? How does the art market work economically, and what does that have to do with the art itself? And what does one do with a degree in art history?

Thornton uses her BA in art history, her PhD in sociology, and her extensive experience in all facets of the visual arts industry to help us understand this chaotic, lucrative whirlwind that is the art world. She divides the book into 5 clear parts, with a few helpful visuals. The first is The Auction, all about the people, personalities and pocketbooks in New York City that determine the value of artwork. Next is The Crit, about a class at the prestigious CalArts grad school. The Fair takes place in Switzerland, at a prestigious international art fair, and in The Magazine, we return to Manhattan to experience ArtForum, and important artistic publication that was mentioned several times in previous chapters. The Studio takes us to Tokyo, into the intimate world of an excentric Japanese artist named Takashi Murakami, who is making an eighteen-foot sculpture that will soon be platinmum-plated.

By the time you've finished 7 Days in the Art World, you will not only have visited 5 countries, including Italy and the UK, but you will also have the kind of knowledge about art and the people who deal with it that you'll be able to refer to countless times in the near future. Thornton's expeditious name-dropping and process-explaining imparts quite a bit of knowlegde and insight that most people could never aquire, due to the small and exclusive nature of the art circle.

If my positive review isn't enough to convince you, it was a New York Times Best Art Book of the Year, was a best-seller in Canada, got positive reviews from Vogue and Financial Times, and has been translated into 10 languages. You can also visit Sarah Thornton's website to learn more about her and her work.

Happy Reading!

Things Fall Apart

Little Bee is all about what the world and its people do to people. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, explains a lot about why the world (specifically Africa) is the way it is.


Doesn't seem like the country borders match up with tribal/kindom borders very well, do they? Might explain a lot about current political issues...



We all know that Africa is a chaotic place, full of sudden wars and horrifying poverty. I recently talked to some people who now live in France, who had to flee Zimbabwe because they were related to a human rights lawyer, and if you read Little Bee, you get the idea that wars spring up and wipe out innocent bystanders, and then governments hunt down the witnesses and kill them, too. Africa has problems. But it wasn't always that way; for a long time, there were just mostly-peaceful tribes with sophisticated cultural, religious and social traditions. When they fought, it was often to humiliate their enemy, rather than kill, and they knew how to survive in the most inhospitable climates. But then a variety of European powers came along, and infiltratred their society, destroying them using a variety of weapons, from military force to money to religious persuasion.


Things Fall Apart is the story of this infiltration. We can look at it with purely Western eyes, and maybe sustain the notion that Europeans were better and stronger and it was good that we conquered the Africans. If we have any level of sensitivity, however, we begin to understand that this beautiful civilization was no better or worse than Western society, then or now. The outsiders came to Africa, and started doing unforgivable things, like massacring an entire village on market day, or converting peoples' children to Christianity. We see how a group of people reacts, when there are suddenly outsiders with new ideas and lacking morals, and how they survive - or dont.



This story is written by an African, and gives the account of a very specific tribe and it's slow descent. Parallels can be drawn between every culture that was colonized by Europeans, though the British never wiped out an entire tribe by poisoning their water supply (like the Germans) or left a large disabled population by cutting off the right hand of anyone who didn't work up to speed (like the Dutch in the Congo). What we see in Things Fall Apart is really the moral and social destruction of a culture, rather than a aqueiescence to force. In order to understand Africa now, I think it's important to understand what it underwent to get where it is.


I'm curious - has anyone else read Things Fall Apart? I know it's a well-known book, and taught in a lot of history classes, (although probably not as commonly as Heart of Darkness, which I never finished). It's not as riveting as Little Bee, but I still wouldn't pass it up!


Happy Reading!

ps - Thanks to my AP Euro teacher for a lot of the ideas/information relating to African colonialization!

Little Bee

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave, is the story of a girl whose real name I will not tell you, who flees to the UK for typical yet tragic reasons (as she often says, "The stories always begin with 'The men, they came and they...'"). So she finds herself in England, upon the day of her release from a detention facility. This is where the book begins, although the story of Little Bee starts much earlier.

This is not what one would call a "brief" read, because it is not transient or easily forgotten. It's left me with the same sensation I feel after a shocking new article about a true event, or when a fabulous movie is suddenly over; it is as if the floor has fallen and nothing will ever be the same. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but reading Little Bee has made me think more about my life, my priorities, and the world than anything has in years. The characters, Little Bee and Sarah, are fighting opposite wars until they meet: Little Bee is trying to survive men with guns, while Sarah is trying to survive the miseries of a suburban life that is spiraling out of control. Little Bee is hanging on to her life for all she's worth, while Sarah is questioning her life and its true worth. When they meet, all of the death, fear, hope, and determination that rule their lives meet in a maelstrom of questions.

People are always talking about what they got out of something. Like, "Oh, I went to this wonderful seminar on the benefits of getting sleep - I just got so much out of it!" or something along those lines. Well, personally, I got so much out of this book I don't think I have the words to share it all, but I'll try to give you an idea. Little Bee, the character, is a heroine. She fights bad guys and survives tragedies and keeps her wits about her. Sarah is a lost soul, struggling with a failed marriage and a career that just isn't changing the world the way she once hoped it would. Between the two of them, they exemplify everything I want to be and everything I'm terrified of becoming. The story speaks to so many of my unspoken hopes and fears, and feels like something I've just been waiting to read. This is the sort of book that makes all those let-down, why-did-I-waste-my-time? books shrink in comparison, and I dearly hope you read it.

While Little Bee is "soon to be a major motion picture," I suggest the book, and soon. Click here to go to Borders to buy Little Bee (they have new and used) or else go to Amazon... I apologize for seeming like some pushy advertisment, but I can't suppress the desire to share this fabulous book with everyone!