"Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien + A failed attempt at Cortázar

Time spent reading:
6/29: 12:50pm-1:00pm; 1:40pm-2:00pm
6/30: 8:15am-8:40am; 10:00am-11:45am

Total time: 2hrs 40min

233 pages

Aladdin Books

Published in 1971

Lindi, my wife, picked up this book from a used book store a while back, which made me think, "Oh no. It's that book!" See, when I was younger, I had a terrible fear of the Rats from The Secret of NIMH; the movie was dark, scary, and had giant, yellow-eyed rats in it! Do you wonder why I was put off by the film as a six year old? What I remembered from the movie was the evil cat, the magical amulet, a back-stabbing rat, and the scary elder rat named Nicodemus; sadly, most of those things were not in the book. Yes there is a back-stabbing rat, an evil cat, and a rat named Nicodemus, but there's no magic involved! The rats are simply intelligent! I find that alone to be far more exciting than the movie itself.

Occasionally, when I haphazardly choose a book I am going to read, I stray away from the "winners". Typically, I could care less whether it was on Oprah's Book List. (Hello? Anna Karenina? I bet Tolstoy hated that...) Nor will I pick up books that everyone is reading. (I am sorry James Patterson.) So when a Newberry Award Winner from NIMH fell into my hands, I thought about it for a bit, then opted to dive in. How pleasantly surprised I was. It is not often that I find myself almost literally racing to finish the book so I can find out what happens! Yes yes yes, I saw the movie as a child, and I know Mrs. Frisby and her family find shelter, but the book led up to the culminating moment with a bit more intensity than the movie. There were no sing-song playing children; they were all subdued characters as opposed to frolicking, singing mice voiced by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: TNG fame.

The enduring tale slowly builds mystery over the course of the entire book, not just 50 pages like many modern writers try to do. It also demonstrates the differing hierarchy of the animal world, and how they interact. Mice are on a different intelli-social stratus as rats, while crows bring completely different, but exceptionally useful, traits to the table, and owls are on an entirely different level. And what happens? They ALL work together for the benefit of their own society. Why don't we do this now? Ugh!

Some side notes of distinguishing interest about the film and the book:
-Mrs. Frisby's name had to be changed to Brisby due to the makes of Frisbee, Wham-O, getting all upset. Lame.
-NIMH is an actual place. It's the National Institute of Mental Health.
-In the book, the Rats were attempting to attain a self-autonomous farming society. They wanted to change the perspective towards rats.
-Hints of Charles Darwin appear in the book, stating that at one point rats were higher on the evolutionary scale.

For a book that I loved so much, I really don't have much more to say about it. Awkward. Regardless, while the movie The Secret of NIMH is a longtime classic, which I still love, put away the movie and go read the book. Like always, the book just tends to be better.


Blow Up & other stories by Julio Cortázar

Time spent reading:
7/1: 9:15am-9:55am
7/4 9:30am-10:10am

Total time: 1hr 20min

277 pages

Pantheon Modern Writers Books

Published in 1963; translated in 1985

I'm not one to put a book down partway through and give up. But I did on this one. I tell you this now so that by the end you don't get all upset at me. It's like people who went and saw Titanic and cried at the end because it was sad. Duh! The ship sank; obviously this wasn't going to be a happy ending. Regardless, I tried real hard to focus on these stories; I thought I could get through them all since they were simply stories, but Cortázar is a unique guy with a unique writing style.

I love Cortázar. The first time I read anything by him was in college, and it was in Spanish. Even better! He is quirky and exceptionally unique; he was an incredible writer, prolific and mind-twisting. He was one of the instigators of Magical Realism. I'm not going to go through some diatribe about it, so just look it up in Wikipedia; you will find names like Cortázar and Márquez. Cortázar uses Magical Realism almost like a crutch; almost every story has some bizarre everyday twist to it that most people hardly even notice.

How about I just list why I love Cortázar? I made a list earlier with the NIMH entry; might as well follow suit:

1) Magical Realism. The man writes a story about vomiting rabbits, and how there is a loose tiger in the house! Marvelous.
2) Cortázar takes the mundanity of everyday life and changes it oh so well.
3) Multiple narrators are a constant. Cortázar flows between 3rd person to 1st and constantly makes himself part of the story as an outside writer or as Cortázar himself.
4) The deliberate details placed in the stories are amazing. In this collection of short stories, Cortázar takes small hints of a gigantic past and phrases them in a sentence or two.
5) He is never constant; who cares about the past tense vs. present tense? Most writers would look at this with disdain, but not Cortázar! He galavants through it with high speed.

So why could I not finish the book? There were three things: 1) I think I expected too much. 2) This was a moderately poor collection of works. 3) I cannot stand translated literature. There were several short stories that I believed were excellent examples of Cortázar's work, and others not so much. And obviously I'm a snob. Not just a music or everything else snob, but also a translation snob. Some of the phrases are now outdated, while others seem to be direct translations from the text. As you should know, a direct translation hardly ever works. Don't believe me? Go copy some random Spanish text and go to freetranslation.com and see if it works. Hardly. Numerous times you need to translate the feel of the text rather than the wordage. I had read a couple of these before in Spanish, so when I reached a story like The Night Face Up, I automatically think La Noche Boca Arriba, and then hear the story in Spanish instead of English. While the English translation is good, it will never fully capture the amazingness of the Spanish. I will step down from my soapbox.

Here are the shining moments of the book (in list form!):
House Taken Over - A brother and sister couple discover there is more to their inherited house than themselves.
Continuity of Parks - This is so short, I dare not summarize. Google it.
Letter to a Young Lady in Paris - Doesn't everyone vomit rabbits occasionally?
Bestiary - Which room is the tiger in today?
The Night Face Up - Don't ride motorcycles; you might get sacrificed.

Happy reading!

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by JK Rowling + my weeklong recommendations

So, I will be out of town until next weekend, so this entry will have the latest book I have read and some suggestions of books I happened to read just before I started this blog. Being out of town does not mean I will not read; it will just be a bit sparser.

Hope you all have a great week.


Time spent reading:
6/16: 8:02am-8:11am; 10:00am-10:53am

Total time: 1hr 2min

107 pages

Children's High Level Group Books

Published in 2008

When Beedle the Bard came out last year, everyone was beyond excited, "Oh my goodness! Another Harry Potter book! One written by Rowling! Oh wow..." I can still remember the day when I trekked into Borders at 10am to fight off the large crowds to purchase the book. No one was there. The books displayed directly in front of the door upon entering, I grabbed one, turned, and paid; I didn't even look around the store. The poor cashier behind the counter, who had obviously been practicing this one line, said, "Tonight at 7 there will be a reading from The Tales of Beedle the Bard if you would like to attend." So funny. It was story time. And I, being a 26 year old "professional" teacher, was invited. I stifled a giggle, thanked him, and left.

With that being said, the book sat pleasantly on a shelf since last December, awaiting a reading. I opted numerous times to pick it up and give it a quick once through; I had flipped through it a few times and noticed the format was slightly different and decided not to read it as of yet. (I'll explain the differing format in a bit.) When I finally waited for any remnant of interior hype to leave me, I acted. Even better? I was highly surprised.

Rowling did a wonderful job in this short compilation of wizarding fairy tales. While some people might feel gipped due to the surprisingly short number of stories (only 5 in all), Rowling adds in her own twists and textures to truly enrich the reading. So here goes the format of Beedle the Bard's tales:

1) The introduction is written by Rowling, but not your high-class, exceptionally famous, richest person in England Rowling, but a Rowling who has spoken with Hermione Granger and Albus Dumbledore on, seemingly, more than one occasion. The introduction explains just who Beedle the Bard is, or was considering he was alive in the 15th century, and just why and how his tales differ from the Grimms' or Disney films of our time.

Before continuing, I would like to interject that if you have not read any of the Harry Potter books and are simply waiting for the next movie to come out, you might not want to read these until all of the movies have been released. This is meant as an addendum to the Harry Potter library, not a fun, quick read by some unknowing individual. There are numerous terms that a non-Potter reader will have trouble understanding, or even saying. So you might even want to continue cautiously through the rest of this post. Though, as you should know, I'm not going to tell any endings or important surprises!

2) The Bard's tales have been translated by the one and only, supergenius of the time Hermione Granger. And these have even been translated from the Ancient Runes, not just a crappy English version. It's like how people keep re-translating the bible based on older English versions of it. If you REALLY want to translate it, you need to learn Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Jump on it! When Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf (Oh what a marvelous work he did too!), the man did not take the poorly-done version by random person in the early 20th century to base his own translation. He learned Anglo-Saxon, studied it in depth, and then decided to translate! So this shows a unique perspective by Rowling that Hermione didn't just reword the old tales, but actually took them from their original sources.

3) Found at the end of each translated tale is a commentary from the most well-known headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore. Occasionally, like most modern scholars absolutely LOVE to do, the commentary is longer than the text itself. Dumbledore rewords parts of the fairy tales, adds meaning to certain words, analyzes why the Bard used specific wizards, gives historical background, and as always makes the reader laugh by his constant wit. I found myself quite often tearing through the tales to get to the commentary.

4) Maybe this is the literary nerd in me, but I highly applaud Rowling's use of multiple narrators, voices, and authors. First there is the author Rowling, then the introduction (I'm part of the magical world still) Rowling, the original untranslated text, the Granger text, and Dumbledore's commentary. Each one has its own distinct language, style, and diction. I hate using these terms freely, but Rowling truly is a master of the craft. The introduction writer Rowling even has to dissect some of Dumbledore's commentaries since Dumbledore,

"appears to have been writing for a Wizarding audience, so I have occasionally inserted an explanation of a term or fact that might need clarification for Muggle readers."

I love it! This is the translation nerd in me jumping for joy.

All in all, I found this small book to be such a quick, sweet escape from typical fantasy and even the Potter series. I would definitely suggest read the books first, otherwise you might be in for a pleasant, or rather unpleasant, surprise by the way of some principle characters.

Happy reading.

Recent books I have read that exceeded my expectations:
-The Pagan series (all 4 of them) by Catherine Junks. This is a series about Pagan Kidrouk, a poor lad who happened to live in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Very funny. Very Monty Python-esque. Those of you who know me know I don't give the Python blessing often.

-Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud. Eventually I will get around to reading his Bartimaeus Trilogy, but I settled for this standalone novel, which is a story of how tradition, fantastical tales, and determination can change even the darkest of children.