Please Ignore Vera Dietz/A.S. King: Reflections

Here I am, reading Please Ignore Vera Dietz while sitting on a bench at the University of Pennsylvania campus waiting to meet with a friend.  This was just after I could be seen on the incoming train, clutching the iPad2-enabled book to my chest.  Which is just after I tore myself from the couch, where I could found getting even more fat while touching my eager fingertip to the gadget's glass in breathless admiration of A.S. King's poignantly odd, big-hearted, exceedingly jazzily written prose.  Which is the morning after the late evening when I downloaded the book in the first place, having been incapable of finishing the last five books I'd started (despair had set in; it had deepened).  I fell asleep with my iPad2 beside me.  I woke up in the dark, tiptoed it downstairs, and, well, you know the rest.

You're getting this, right?  Please Ignore Vera Dietz, a YA novel with decidedly adult content and thoroughly inimitable flare reawakened the reader in one Beth Kephart.  You can go to A.S. King's own website to find out about the book's many honors (Printz nominee, anyone?). You can read a description anywhere (though no two descriptions will sound alike, because there's a heck of a lot going on in this book about a pizza delivery technician and her parsimonious dad and her best friend, Charlie, who is dead on the first page of the book, but dead best friends do tend to linger, oh, and animals are involved, and Piggy of Lord of the Flies, and also a bunch of moral questions in a not entirely moral world, and did I mention that a Pagoda speaks?).

All I want to say is that it is darned fine thing to find a writer writing.  Not a writer telling a story, mind you, but a writer writing one.  Dealing so brilliantly with the whole flashback thing, while drawing a story forward.  Building real characters—messy, swearing, striving, searching, self-disappointed, self healing. Unafraid of big words, crafty with the small ones. 

I'm going to give you a taste of the action:

Charlie and I still shared a seat on the bus. We'd press our earbuds into our ears and read or daydream or, in Charlie's case, occasionally scribble things on tissues and napkins and then eat them.  On weekends, we'd see each other sometimes, but Charlie was busy between hunting trips with his father and dates. Girls swarmed him that year, impressed by his windswept attitude, his over-the-eyes haircut, and his Goodwill dress sense.  By the time summer came, I think he'd had about four different girlfriends, but he kept them totally secret, and if I asked, he would deny it, as if having girlfriends wasn't cool.

All right, and I just have to share this line, from near the end of the book, when Vera, our un-ignorable heroine says this:  "I love Vocab. It's like spelunking in a cave you've been in your whole life and discovering a thousand new tunnels."

Come on.  You love that, right? 

There's hard stuff in this book.  These kids don't have it easy.  Some seamy bad people press in.  But Vera Dietz, so perfectly imperfect, learns what it means to stand up to it all.  And I cried a few tears at the end.

Read more...

Girls in Wash of Blue (and what I'm reading)

Glasses up. Glasses on. No glasses.

Don't ask me why (my own brain processes often elude even me, the owner of this most porous brain), but this photograph symbolizes my changing relationship to books as I try to decide what to read in hardback, paperback, and iPad2-ery.

Just now, I've ordered the following from the Kindle Store:

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (Margaret Drabble)
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox)
The Coffins of Little Hope (Timothy Schaffert)
Faith (Jennifer Haigh)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

These join the following to-be-read Kindle titles (I read both before, as real books):

Selected Stories (Andre Dubus)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

Now, from the iBook store:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

They all join Tara Altebrando's Dreamland Social Club—a real book, a hardcover, as my next reads.

I'll be reporting back, of course.

In the meantime, might I note how glad I have been to be hearing from my students during these summer days. Might I say, too, that I am grateful that there is a new generation of smart young souls who know how to use language—know where sentences begin and end, know, unprompted, how to eliminate their own redundancies, lean into the music. How you are needed. How valued you are. How you might save the world.

Read more...

An iPad2 blogging experiment

In preparation for our upcoming time away, I am teaching myself how to use the BlogPress app on iPad2. This, ladies and gentleman, is a Beth first. An iPad2 photo taken of the chair where the book I am supposed to be reading sits unread (or partially read). An iPad2 posting. And a Beth, one hour later, a tad less frustrated than she was, say, an hour ago.

Quote from my husband, standing near: "You just need a tiny little bit of patience." You need to see the hand gesture to get the full effect.

Amy of Amy @ My Friend. I almost had to call you. Almost.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Read more...

Month 2 of iPad2: A review of books and apps; a chronicle of experiences

I'm well into my second month of cohabiting with the iPad2, and I'm frankly still getting used to the creature. Still learning how to navigate and sync. Still trying to discover how to make it work for me.

Some reporting, then, from the field.

I have found the iBooks (I bought Bossypants and a guidebook to Croatia) to offer a more alluring read than the Kindle books, thanks to the preview capability, the extras, the ease of navigation, and the more generous simulation of actual-book reading. And yet, I have leaned more heavily toward Kindle books because the titles I have wanted—In Zanesville, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Please Look After Mom, When We Danced on Water—have been either more readily or more cost-effectively Kindle available. During these past six weeks I have continued to go into bookstores and to buy books proper, continued to hold proper paper-and-spine books such as Cleopatra, Caleb's Crossing, Sweet Dreams, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius on my lap. I don't think I will ever willingly give up on my old book-buying habit.

I have also made use of the PDF Reader to read both my own adult novel-in-progress (I wanted to approximate the feel of the read before the book was sent out to editors for review) and Dana Spiotta's magnificent Stone Arabia. I'm clearly not a skilled PDF Reader user. I am not thrilled with, and could never look past, the floating nature of those pages, the inability to truly mark the text, the sense that I was reading a mere facsimile. I'm buying Spiotta's book when it comes out in July because I want to own it, have it on my shelves, pick it up with ease, flip to a favorite page. And certainly I am hoping that my own adult novel will move past the PDF Reader stage.

On the other hand, I have loved—loved—reading The New York Times on the iPad2. I still retrieve the weekend edition from the end of my driveway, still settle in with the paper version of the magazine. But I find the overall newspaper to be easier to handle on the iPad2—more alluring, more easily reviewed, more packed with the bright lights of videos and links.  I don't annoy my husband with the crinkle and snap of the paper while he sits on the other end of the couch watching his monster river fish and World War II shows, and I am more connected to the news than I was, and that, alone, is worth the price of this machine. The New Yorker still arrives via the old mangled mailbox each Tuesday. I'm not quite sure that I want to go digital with that particular publication just yet.

Since I am soon bound for London and Berlin, I've also bought some travel apps and played with these.  I'll be honest: I'm still going out to buy a travel guide or two. Call me old-fashioned. I like to dog ear my instructions to foreign places. The Berlin app, for the record, was far superior to the London app.

Last night I spent about four hours searching for new apps—reviewed several but remained unconvinced and finally went on over to Salon.com to get the kind of reading I was hungry for. In the midst of it all, I studied those increasingly famous Kindle Singles, feeling just a little amazed that Susan Orleans earned an entire NYT article for a piece called "Animalish" that appears to be the length of a single New Yorker magazine story. What, I wondered, would happen if all magazine stories got NYT reviewed?  And while I absolutely adore Tim Gunn, I was surprised to discover that his Kindle Single "memoir" is but 15 pages long. Maybe I'll buy it anyway, to help mitigate the long flight to those foreign places.

I'm headed to the BEA on Wednesday and I think I'll likely be carrying a regular old book in my bag—perhaps a classic like Mary Karr's Liars' Club. I hope to come home with a regular old galley or two as well. I'm on the hunt for Michael Ondaatje's forthcoming The Cat's Table and I'll be stopping by the Grove Atlantic/Black Cat and Graywolf booths to see what these two fantastic imprints are up to. 

All in all, I guess I'm saying, I am making my way. I'd love to hear from others on this journey.

Read more...

How do you like reading on the iPad2? they asked

The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance.  "I don't need that," I kept saying.  "It feels indulgent."  But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that.  Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.

And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use.  I am a New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name.  I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once).  I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know.  I'm rather fond of my stacks of New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.  Vanity Fair?  Maybe.

I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium.  As much as I loved Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions.  I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong.  I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be.  There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper.  I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology.  I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings.  I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June.  I think of these books as traveling companions.

Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress.  I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir.  I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might.  That, at least, is what I'm going for.

My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or reading student papers.  She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things).  I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope.  But for now, to answer your questions:

I really like my iPad2.

Read more...