Burn, Rewrite, Reread

I discovered this fun tag on Debby’s blog Snuggly Oranges. I’m too shy to tag anyone else, but play along if you want!

The Rules: Randomly choose three books that you’ve read and decide which of the three you would burn, rewrite, or reread. You have to use all three categories per round of three books. Goodreads has a “random” sort option for read books, so that’s what I’m doing to choose mine.

Round 1

Reread: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
I have a horrible memory when it comes to story lines, so I’d be happy to re-read this fun mystery in a year or two.

Rewrite: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I really loved this book despite my disagreeing with its philosophy and morals. But the final chapters are SO PREACHY and gag-inducing that I would re-write them to be more subtle.

Burn: Sisters by Raina Telgemeier
Luck of the draw! It’s not that I hated this book, but I wasn’t head-over-heels in love with it either.


Round 2

Reread: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
This classic sci-fi is always worth a reread, but I really should read some other H.G. Wells stuff first.

Burn: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris
Out of all the Sedaris books I’ve read, this is my least favorite. Yeah, some of the stories are funny, because when animals act like humans with problems it is pretty funny. It’s also really awkward a lot the time.

Rewrite: Anne of the Island (Anne of Green Gables #3) by L.M. Montgomery
REWRITE TO HAVE ANNE AND GILBERT BLYTHE TOGETHER!!!!! Seriously, we wait for that the whole freaking series and then LOOK AT THIS POS RESOLUTION.


Round 3

Reread: Emma by Jane Austen
My all-time favorite author is Jane Austen, and I’ve only read Emma once. I’ve read P&P 6+ times, S&S a handful of times too, but how is it that I’ve read Mansfield Park and Emma the SAME AMOUNT OF TIMES? For shame.

Rewrite: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
There are several things that I didn’t like about this story and mostly because it’s not 1Q84 or Kafka on the Shore. It needs a rewrite with more emphasis on the super weird coma girl.

Burn: The Cardturner by Louis Sachar
You know this author because he wrote Holes. The Cardturner is not Holes.

Do you agree? Speak now or forever hold your peace!

If I Were the Editor of ‘Cleo’

Sometimes I am punished by karma for judging books by their covers. Though I was truly looking forward to reliving my childhood fixation on Ancient Egypt, I mostly requested an ARC of Cleo because the cover was so puurrrty. Note to self: Stop doing this.

Cleo is about a young Cleopatra whose mother has just died and whose father is playing politics in Greece. Her two half sisters take over the dual-throne of Egypt and so doing threaten the blessing of future of the country because they worship Am-Heh, the god of evil. Cleo, as the goddess Isis’s chosen one, must complete a quest and help Isis regain her full power.

There were so many things I disliked about this book, but I think most of the problems could be solved by going through a heavy round of editing. If I were the editor, here’s what I would tell Lucy Coats to do:

Cut out redundant information. For example, whenever something not all sparkles and sunshine is happening (in a landscape description, with an action scene, with vegetables) there is a sentence explaining that Isis is loosing power and that’s why life isn’t unicorn farts. After the second mention, I will be able to make the connection without the author holding my hand.

Cut down on the constant inner monologue. The book is written in the first-person perspective, and Cleo has lots of secret information that she can’t tell anyone, but she chatters so incessantly in her own mind that I my introverted self was getting annoyed with the author. And it wasn’t just chatter, it was repetitive questions that Cleo never asks aloud and the audience is not supposed to answer. Let me give you an example from the text:

“How long did we have? I didn’t know. It must be late in the evening — but had we passed over into the day when the Dark Feast of Serapis dawned?”

Since this 320 page book is about 20% questions, a rewrite without the questions makes this much more palatable. Here’s my suggestion:

It was late in the evening now, and I wasn’t sure how much time we had before the dawn of the Dark Feast of Serapis arrived.

Do not make this story into two parts. The book ends with “To be continued…” when there is absolutely no need. Additionally, it’s broken at a really awkward place: right after the group has successfully escaped the city with the important things they need and are on their way to deliver the important things to Isis. Fifty more pages and this story is over! Sure, more plot points can be introduced, but that’s just prolonging the inevitable. If you must, make book two about Cleo on the throne and finish book one’s adventure where it started. Yeah, there’s the issue of this book becoming a 500 page tome, but if Cleo’s questions got cut out and the repetitive information was condensed into more dignified sentences, this book would still be under 300 pages.

Cleo hits shelves May 7, so unfortunately my edits won’t be taken into account ;) I’m willing to be hired on future projects though!

Note: Orchard Books gave me an e-ARC for review purposes but that obviously didn't change my honest opinion.

Poet’s Corner || Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara

I don’t read poetry very much, mostly because I’m intimidated by it. I want to understand it so badly, but I get this feeling that I’m doing it wrong. And I know I’m not alone in doubting myself.

It was liberating to read this essay by Elisa Gabbert, a poet and poetry critic, where she admits that she doesn’t always get poetry. She also declares that when poetry critics complain that a bad poem is just ‘prose chopped into lines,’ they are forgetting something: ‘Poetry is just prose chopped into lines.’ Reading that tripped a switch in my brain. I spend hours a week reading prose without so much as a quiver, so what’s my problem with poetry?

My very smart and talented poet friend Jeevan Narney once visibly gagged when I told him that I was enjoying the poems of Billy Collins. Billy Collins is the poet for the masses, evidenced by his two-time U.S. Poet Laureate title. Yeah, he’s kitschy, but is that really so bad? I can listen to Billy Collins poems while I’m driving, and understand them enough to chuckle, and that’s ME having a GOOD TIME with POETRY.

Japanese poet Machi Tawara had a collection of poetry that went viral in the late 1980’s. It’s sold over 2.5 million copies to-date, inspired TV shows, a film, other poetry collections, etc etc. It’s a huge success. Salad Anniversary, as the English translation is called, recently got a facelift by Pushkin Press, and I requested a review copy of it. Poetry that the masses enjoyed? Must be up my alley. It turns out that my guess was correct: this is a perfect read if you want to enjoy the structure of poetry, would like something that our references our contemporary condition, and is light yet thoughtful.

Tawara writes about the problems of modern love (from an introvert’s perspective, for sure), daily life, family relationships, and self-doubts. Even though she’s Japanese, and didn’t have to deal with eHarmony or Tindr when she was writing it, it’s super easy to nod along, smile ruefully because it’s true, and see yourself in her words.

Ponder this for example. In the midst of longing for her relationship with her lover to have been more matured than it really was, she writes:

thinking of the slender margin
between unreal and real

     “Today only!”

Red blouse in the window, on sale each time I go by

It’s clever, right? And understandable. Here’s to more Poet’s Corner posts in the future!

My Top Ten All-Time Favorite Authors

This week's edition of Top Ten Tuesdays (hosted by The Broke & The Bookish) features my all-time favorite authors! Even though most of the books I read and have read in my life are by YA authors, when I put this list together I realized that not many of them made the cut. For me, YA books are fun and entertaining, and they provide conversation material for important contemporary subjects.

But, I chose the following ten authors because they: significantly changed my way of seeing the world, consistently write books that appeal to me, and have books that I have read multiple times. I also listed my suggestions for a good ‘intro’ book if you’d like to read them but aren’t sure where to start.

p.s. Play a game! Try to guess the author from their picture!

David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) // Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz) // Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)

Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist) // Laura Ingalls Wilder (Farmer Boy) // Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre) // Shirley Jackson (The Lottery) // C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Do any of my favs make your list?

'The Walls Around Us' Brings Life to Ghosts of the Past

Perhaps you know Shirley Jackson for her short story ‘The Lottery’ that you read in an American literature class. She published tens of short stories and several novellas, centering on themes of isolation, ‘otherness’, and a perverted sense of justice. Everytime I read one of her stories, I talk about them as creepy, eerie, disturbing, mind-bending, unexpected, yet familiar. They are familiar because she has so influenced our current generation of authors (Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Suzanne Collins, etc) that we surely know her tales just by rubbing shoulders with more contemporary works.

As I read The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma, I kept thinking about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published a few years before Jackson’s death in 1965. The two stories are so similar that if I described key elements in Jackson’s story, it would reveal important plot points in The Walls Around Us. Both tackle Jackson’s favorite themes that I mentioned earlier, and even some finer details make a dual appearance.

That’s not to say that the stories are identical, however. The Walls Around Us has two narrators: Amber, an inmate in a maximum security juvenile detention center in upstate New York, and Violet, a rich ballet dancer on the cusp of a successful career at Juilliard. They narrate their lives and experiences, but they both have a curious obsession with Ori. Ori, who is a former ballet dancer and Violet’s best friend, is convicted of murder and becomes Amber’s cellmate.

As the story progresses, you realize that Amber’s words, “I knew that just because people on the outside were free and clean, it didn’t mean they were the good ones,” ring true. Both Amber and Violet are telling Ori’s story, but they are deliberately not telling all of it. As you piece together different angles, versions of events, and correct the timeline that is given, you see that something very dark and disturbing emerges.

The narrative style itself is very beautifully written. Though I usually dislike first-person narration, it made sense to use it in this book because it highlights the differences in the ways each character tells her version of the story. Besides that, the prose and rhythm of the sentences are gorgeous, and I appreciated that the paragraphs were built in a way that wasn’t always linear and straightforward.

I enjoyed reading The Walls Around Us because the story is intriguing, it’s well-edited, and the storytelling itself is of such a high caliber that I would point to this as an example of what to aim for in a YA novel.

On a side note, after reading The Walls Around Us, I was inspired to read all of Shirley Jackson’s stories this year. Anyone with me??


Thank you Algonquin Young Readers for providing an e-ARC for me to review! That didn’t affect my opinion of the book in any way.