Beast at the Beach

Spent a week at our vacation getaway and discovered what I like to get away from, besides the incessant connectivity of daily life, is my stuff. In a world full of more and more choices, I reveled in having fewer. I chose a handful novels to take along, mostly those on the Books for the Beast list, plus a counted cross-stitch of the Chincoteague Island Library that I've been working at every summer for countless years. My to-do lists were left behind and I spent the days walking or reading. Top on my reading list was Richard Russo's "That Old Cape Magic." Simply perfect.

Just before leaving I had read this graphic-book version of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden." Like my too briefly simplified life, this book contains little clutter, either text or visual. At first glance it seems simplistic, but the gentle and plain drawings set the mood for a saunter through the woods with Thoreau's words. Those, too, are spare, inviting the reader to spend time with each thought. Would the teen Beasts be engaged by the simplicity or find it silly? I look forward to hearing their thoughts at the conference or perhaps on the library's teen blog.

Other Beastie beach books: "Hattie Big Sky" (lukewarm on this based-on-a-true-story account of a young female homesteader by Kirby Larson), "Elijah of Buxton" by Christopher Paul Curtis (Elijah is a very engaging young narrator, and the novel is reminiscent of Laurie Halse Anderson's "Chains" but for a younger audience and far more humorous), and the first part of M.T. Anderson's "Octavian Nothing." Listened to the audio version of this: Narrator Peter Francis James is terrific, but his melodious voice lulled me to sleep during even the least soothing passages. Despite raves from reviewers, I found the book too perverse. It seems almost to revel in the distasteful "scientific" experiments.

Others at the beach house enjoyed Jessica Abel's "Drawing Words & Writing Pictures," a how-to on cartooning and storytelling written with her husband, Matt Madden. Abel is a featured Beast speaker. Her "Life Sucks" is also on my to-read stack, which now that I'm back home covers the entire couch and not just one pillow on it.

Quote 2.0

That guy was a ... ticking [bad word] time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.

--Lev Grossman, "The Magicians"

[Dan]Chaon zeroes in on the strange irony that an age so obsessed with individuality should also give rise to such fluid and ephemeral identities. We're all a matrix of screen names, avatars, credit card numbers, passwords, browser histories and cookies -- an ever-evolving collection of data. But the same technology that allows us to express ourselves to anyone on the planet has also made it impossible to tell who anyone really is.

-- review by Ron Charles of "Await Your Reply"


So consumed of late with keeping up with tweets and retweets, bookmarks and tags, RSS feeds, blogs, social Web sites etc. that have had scarcely time for an original thought. Though in doing the above I find many of the same things bobbing back up again and again out of the Internet surf. (Meant to actually read the story that surfaced the other day on 10 or so phrases, including Web surfing, that you must never again let cross your hopelessly fogey lips...)

Nearly through "The Magicians," which is about the melancholy of magic, and most certainly not for tweens wanting their Harry Potter fix. Must put "Await Your Reply" on my reading list. I think I am nearing 99 checkouts, though.