Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Books Everywhere/Research? Fun????

Just finished a great book I heard about at WFC, The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen. It's several years old, but time has not taken away the book's power. It's a time-travel/Holocaust book, but that description hardly does it justice. Hannah, a Jewish teenager from 1988 New Rochelle, NY, goes back in time and finds herself in Nazi-occupied Poland. She thinks her presence there is just a dream, but she finds it harder and harder to remember the "real" world and who she was in it.

In this scene, Hannah is a prisoner in a concentration camp. She and another girl, Shifre, are forced to scrub burned bits of potato from a cauldron. To escape the drudgery, the girls imagine what they wish they were eating.

"An orange, I think," she (Shifre) said slowly....

"An orange," Hannah echoed, pleased with the novelty. "I'd forgotten oranges." ...

"How about...pizza!" Hannah said suddenly.

"What is pizza?" Shifre asked.

"It's...it's...I don't know," Hannah said miserably, fingers in her mouth, blurring the words. "I can't remember. I can only remember potato soup."...

"Well, do not cry over this pizza. Tell me about it."

"I can't," Hannah said. "And I'm not crying over the thing, whatever it is. I'm crying because I can't remember what it is. I can't remember anything."

Yolen does a great job of portraying what it must have been like for the Jews in concentration camps trying to grasp the thinnest vapors of their former lives. It's a tremendous book.

I also finished Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground a few days ago, a book that just knocked me out with its combination of raw power and beautiful language.

I'm working on a new story and doing some research for it...and (Let me look around the room...nobody in the closet...) I'm actually enjoying it. Maybe I'm just excited about the story.

Next time I'll have my report on the most obnoxious holiday tunes of the week.

Now Playing = Secret Story - Pat Metheny
Now Reading = Vellum – Hal Duncan
Four and Twenty Blackbirds – Cherie Priest

1 comment:

John said...

I LOVE RESEARCH. And I'm okay with that.

It seems that almost every Christmas album by a big name recording artist includes at least one original Christmas tune. 99.9% of these originals belong in some sort of holiday music purgatory. Oh wait, there is such a place: it's the all-holiday radio station that infests American cities every year.