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Middle Grade Fiction Favorites

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by marie in dear apples, education, fiction, Uncategorized, writing

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Dear Apples,

Remember when we used to read out loud to each other?  Wasn’t that just the best?  Now I still miss it so much that I’m always trying to replicate it, and I read out loud to Isla all the time, whether it’s Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? or a re-read of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.  I read to C too, regardless of whether he’s paying attention or not.

I’ve started so many posts about all of the books that I loved growing up–and that I still remember and sometimes reread–and I’ve left them half-done because the volume is just too overwhelming.  There are children’s books that I loved when I was a kid and now there are a whole army of new ones that have grabbed my attention.  The same goes for every category and subcategory of literature.  But since I could talk about books forever and never get bored of it, I’ll try to start slow and see how far I get with listing at least some of the books that have shaped me and been my most constant solace through every stage of life.

Today I’ll start with some of my favorite Middle Grade fiction.  Some were written for that age group, and some I just happened to read when I was in 6th, 7th and 8th grade.  This is by far one of the best categories in literature, and I think it’s because it’s just such an awesome age.  I know a lot of people would disagree with me, but adolescents have all that incredible curiosity and enthusiasm and awkwardness and budding maturity that hasn’t yet turned cynical.  Although I love a lot of Young Adult fiction as well, I usually don’t find the same depth and variety and scope there that I can usually count on in Middle Grade fiction.   This is certainly not a comprehensive list, and some of them feel younger than middle grade while others feel slightly older, but I’m trying to pull out the heavy hitters of the adolescence-ish age that I can recall at the moment.

Harry Potter Series- J. K. Rowling 

I started reading these in high school, and they finished coming out when I was in college, but I would have loved starting them a little younger too.  It was great to have the experience of waiting desperately for her to complete the next one and the next one, and checking for your turn to come to borrow it at the library or waiting for a friend’s copy.  I’m so glad I had the chance to love those books as she was writing them.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh-Robert C. O’Brien

My 6th grade teacher read this book out loud to my class, and we weren’t supposed to skip ahead, but I couldn’t wait and definitely checked this one out at the library and read the whole thing while the class was in the first few chapters.  It didn’t stop me from loving it while the teacher read it.

The Wednesday Wars-Gary D. Schmidt

This one is a Newberry honor, and totally deserves it.  Holling Hoodhood is a hilarious boy who is forced to spend Wednesdays with a teacher he hates while everyone else is in religion class.  The story takes place during the Vietnam war, and the backstory of his family is woven in so well.  I really need to go back and re-read this one.

Up a Road Slowly-Irene Hunt

I’ve read this book many times.  The characters are fascinating and funny and compelling, and it’s a coming of age story in a reality very different from mine, but so relatable at the same time.  I learned a lot from this book.  I just looked at the Amazon page, and it has a pretty unappealing cover that shows a dreamy girl peering wistfully out into space, and that image does not do a great job at conveying the content of this book.

To Kill A Mockingbird-Harper Lee

I started this after I was riding home from school on the bus one day and saw a girl in high school finish it and say “What a book!”  I’ve re-read it many times since then, and it always makes me cry.

The Great Brain series

Ohmygosh these are the best.  Told through the voice of a young boy recounting the adventures of growing up with his older brother, they are perfectly hilarious and honest.

Dear Mr. Henshaw-Beverly Cleary

This is another Newberry Medal winner, but surprisingly, I doubt it’s Cleary’s best known book.  I absolutely loved all the Ramona books and the Henry Huggins books, and this one was quite different from her younger books but such a pleasant surprise.  It’s a poignant conversation in letters between a growing boy and his favorite author as the boy navigates everything happening around him through adolescence and his teenage years.

The Narnia Series- C.S. Lewis 

I didn’t read all of these, (probably because we owned those really weird but good movies that BBC did, and so I knew most of the stories very well) but I loved The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle.

His Dark Materials series-Philip Pullman

I read these in grad school and finished all three in a few days.  Pullman is such an incredible storyteller, and I think I would have loved reading them when I was younger.

I don’t have time to give descriptions of all the books that are on this very incomplete list, but I absolutely loved all the following books as well and I promise that they deserve emphatic recommendations:

Homer Price books-Robert McCloskey

Lily’s Crossing- Patricia Reilly Giff

A Wrinkle in Time-Madeleine L’Engle

Emily of New Moon series

Peter Pan- J.M. Barrie

The Giver-Lois Lowry (Just found out now that this is a series!! I only ever knew about the first one)

What are some of your favorites?

For love of words IV

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by marie in fiction, for love of words, journal, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

(Posts one, two and three)

“I opened the tattered book.  Its onion-skin pages were stained with grease from his fingers.  On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures-0ld, repeated stories.” -Wally Lamb, I know this much is true

“Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.” -Patti Smith, Just Kids

“He was whittled down now, either to banalities or to simple truths.  Either way, they would have to do.” -Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Later I will look at video made close to that day of the children watching the rapacious hawk, and hear the light tinkling bells in Simon’s voice and think, he was so young that April.” -Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.” –Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club

“So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood.  We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.” -Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

For love of words III

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by marie in fiction, for love of words, quotes, Uncategorized, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

(posts one and two)

“Experience taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive.  Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps.” -Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“He looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.” -Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling

“He could see a new set of muscles hardening in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more.” -Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“If a man can’t build a violin, he may as well make pizzas in a former violin shop.” -Molly Wizenburg, Delancey

“Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.” -Marilynn Robinson, Home

“But unlike his brothers, Henry had a redeeming attribute.  Two of them, to be exact: he was intelligent, and he was interested in trees.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation and endurance–then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?”   -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“To see a thing in its proportion, whatever it was, to draw its outlines true and sure and simple–that was bottomless content, which lightened all the world.” -Pearl S. Buck, The Proud Heart

For Love of Words: II

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by marie in fiction, for love of words, Uncategorized, writing

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I enjoyed posting small selections from books I’d read lately here, and now I’ve curated a new selection.

“Thus the neglected idea did what many self-respecting living entities would do in the same circumstance: It hit the road.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

“She didn’t understand the struggles some of us went through.  If you had to write 1500 words you wrote 1500 words.  You put one word then another then another…You didn’t think too much and you didn’t expect too much.” -David Almond, A Song for Ella Grey

-“I feel about our children sometimes the way I used to feel about our tabby cat, Tiny.  I used to look at him blinking slowly in the sun, or lifting his hind foot to chew at his toes with his minuscule front teeth, and I’d think, Why is he even living here with us?  We have so little in common.  The thought was always accompanied by a cresting wave of love.  ‘Our cat! Our dear, strange animal!'” -Catherine Newman, Catastrophic Happiness

-“Every once in awhile in the block, there’s a day that doesn’t start right.  A day when all the repeating patterns that Melanie uses as measuring sticks for her life fail to occur, one after another, and she feels like she’d bobbing around helplessly in the air–a Melanie-shaped ballon.” -M.R.Carey The Girl With All the Talents

-But this new place was other things too… It was ghoulish and ghastly.  It was all things unimagineable.  But Ernest D. was the bravest of explorers.  He battled and brawled until the moon ducked low.” -Joseph Kuefler, Beyond the Pond (Isla’s recommendation)

For Love of Words

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, fiction, for love of words, journal, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

“I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down” -Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world” -Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See

“Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell…” -Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.” -Lemony Snicket

“That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing…That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.” -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful, her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty — a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.” -Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Short Fictions: Alissa

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in fiction, writing

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fiction, writing

Annie couldn’t quite shake the sense that there was something unnerving about Alissa. It wasn’t anything she could really put her finger on; Alissa was certainly all the right things, and everyone seemed much happier since the day she arrived from the airport for the exchange program. She was quite likeable and sweet, she always agreed to push Annie’s little brothers on the tire swing even if they asked a million times in a day, and she was far more helpful to Annie’s mom than Annie herself was (although Annie always behaved similarly in other people’s homes as well, so that her friends’ mothers would often remark that they wished their own daughters could be more like her, and Annie would feel quite embarrassed about it). Alissa’s goodness was creative in a way that sometimes gave Annie a twinge of jealousy. She had a knack for motivating people to get on board with her ideas without them noticing.

One day mom came in all frazzled after a meeting with Lukey’s teacher. Apparently he had been missing some of his classes and homework assignments, and mom hadn’t even been checking his work because she’d had to stay extra late at her nursing shifts in the hospital so many nights that year. Alissa made a quick assessment of the situation and organized after school study sessions complete with flashcards, prizes and charts. Lukey loved the attention, and soon both his grades and his confidence levels soared. Alissa even managed to turn the whole production into a major ego boost for mom, who after all, was responsible for raising such a gifted son. She made sure Annie was involved too, and somehow imbued menial tasks with a sense of pride and ownership. Annie would read out quiz questions that Alissa composed for Lukey, and every time Lukey answered correctly, Alissa would shoot Annie this look of admiration as though Annie was personally responsible for Lukey’s progress, and it made Annie beam inside.

Alissa was always busy with projects like this. She enlisted her friends to help her build and paint a small ramp to cover the step of old Mr Henry’s back door stoop so that he could wheel his chair in and out of the house on his own. They all felt wonderfully altruistic and pleased when they finally set it in place and called him out to try it for the first time. He was a rather lonely soul, so the sight of a whole neighborhood group of kids gathered together just to surprise him with their gift caused him to tear up and beam the most adorable gappy wrinkly old smile.

Annie herself could never manage to pull such efforts together. Even if she had ideas like that (which she never did), she doubted she’d have any success persuading others to help her. She could just imagine how Lukey would react if she asked him to help her clean out mom’s broom closet for example, or fix the wobbly table leg in the kitchen that always drove dad crazy. He would just laugh at her and run out to play in the empty backyard lot with his friends. They’d probably ruin the whole operation if they attempted it in the first place. With Annie’s luck, the table leg would pop right off for good. It wasn’t that she was envious of Alissa necessarily, although she did admire all her talents. No, it just made Annie realize that she shouldn’t waste her efforts trying to keep up.

And still, there was something mildly disturbing about Alissa. Whenever Annie tried to pinpoint it, she came to the conclusion that she must be crazy; it was just silly to harbor any suspicions towards such a kind generous girl. She wondered why the feeling came to her in the first place, and realized that it was because Alissa almost seemed too good. Her emotions were always perfectly suited to the situation at hand: she was sad when there was bad news, she empathized with Annie when Annie was having a bad day and assured her that everyone felt grumpy at times; she was angry over injustices, like when she heard that dad’s co-worker had received the Physics Society Fellowship that he had been working towards for so long.

But it was as if all these reactions were too well matched to everything that happened. Annie realized she needed to see someone’s flaws to know who they really were, not in a bad way, but just in a human way. For example, she’d never regarded Miss Flynne as anything other than her teacher until one day Annie had walked into the classroom to find Miss Flynne all alone at her desk, crying and tearing one of the student’s essays into tiny little shreds. Annie walked right back out before she was noticed, and the next day when all the graded assignments were passed out, Miss Flynne apologized to one student for “misplacing his excellent essay.” It was a small incident, but after that, Annie paid more attention to her teacher and wondered about her life and what her interests were and whether she was happy and what excited or scared her.

Alissa never let her guard down like that, and it almost seemed strange to imagine that she had any guard to let down in the first place. Despite all the do-gooding and the sweetness and the concern and the socially appropriate flares of temper, there was something a bit spurious about Alissa that almost reminded Annie of the Flat Stanley cut-out that had been mailed around the world when she was in second grade. Not quite though. No doubt Alissa was far more complex than the two-dimensional paper man, but in what ways exactly? And when would the complexity show itself?

Annie schemed about ways to force Alissa to mess up, to rumble her right out of the textbook Boxcar Children perfection that couldn’t really be who she was all the time. Or could it? Were some people just that good? Actually, Annie’s Polish friend Sophie did seem to be just that good, and there was nothing alarming about it. What was wrong with Alissa then? Maybe Annie was just mildly jealous. Maybe it was the fact that Annie had finished reading East of Eden last summer, and the thought of Kathy still sent shivers down her back. Maybe it was the empty look that Annie thought she could detect in Alissa’s eyes just after certain more convincing shows of understanding. Whatever it was, Annie vowed that she wouldn’t let it affect her friendship with Alissa, but then again, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised to come home one day and find the house burned down.

Short fictions: Therapy

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in fiction, writing

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fiction, therapy, writing

Most days he loved his job, and enjoyed the feeling that he was putting together a human jig-saw puzzle. His patients entered his office in various stages of assembly, and he would guide them to find the missing parts and match them to their proper places. Some had probably lost certain pieces for good and would always have odd holes that could only be patched up at best, but for the most part, he enjoyed the challenge of coaching them gently towards empowering self-discoveries. The brain was a marvelous masterpiece.

Every now and again, however, the process drained him. This occurred on days when his systematic capacity to separate work from personal life was not as sharp. Thank goodness it didn’t happen too frequently, or he might be tempted to leave his practice altogether. It was on one of these rare days that he had a post-lunch session with a girl who’d been coming in for months now without many signs of progress. He knew she was there because she needed to be, but she had yet to reveal anything substantial enough for him to work with. She was of the type that masked her thoughts in vague general terms. He usually reveled in the particular endurance required to assist this barmy sort of introversion that surely shrouded her deeper insecurities, but he was weary today, and paranoid that his usual patience was wearing thin. Even worse was the fact that her words seemed to be echoing his sentiments. He decided to opt for a Socratic approach in hopes that she would reach useful conclusions on her own.

“Sometimes I am so tired and my body feels like a trap”
“A trap?”
“Yea, like I am prohibited from floating away somewhere safe. I have to stay here, in this chair, and then meet my sister in the city and walk around—and sometimes my sense of self is too wobbly for it.”
“To be with your sister?”
“It’s actually worse with her. With most acquaintances, and friends I don’t know too well, I’m ok with keeping quiet. I don’t feel the obligation—as I used to—to entertain them or engage with them. Maybe its selfish, but it’s true. With my sister, I think I love her most in the world—or at least she’s in the category of People I Love Most, but sometimes we need to reach across chasms to find each other. Sometimes not.”
“So you’re not close?”
“Well I don’t know. We can keep quiet together. We trust each other. We know the same things about our family together. But family is weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yea. This collection of random males and females that live together and share everything. And then move out.”
“Does that make you sad?”
“Sometimes. It used to really get to me. But now I’m more accepting. And I see how much we all return home and that says a lot I guess.”
“Why are you more accepting now?”
“Umm I’m not sure. Because it’s a way to keep content. And probably because it’s part of my genetic coding or something. But…” Her eyes drifted lazily to the edge of the carpet where the sun was falling through the window in slanted rays. He followed her gaze and considered the amount of floating dust particles revealed by the afternoon light.
“But what? Are you concerned you don’t get along anymore?”
“Not that we don’t get along. Just that we have no meeting ground. As if we’re just floating spheres, but no Venn diagram. I hate that.”
“What do you hate?”
“I don’t know. Dissonance. Indifference. Can we stop talking now? I know I paid for this, but I’m tired and I prefer to just sit for a minute.”
“Sure, sure.”
He wanted to say that he himself was tired as well, and also preferred to just sit for a minute, but reasoned that such a comment was not very professional of him. He mustn’t let his patients perceive him as anything other than their shrink. And why, he wondered now, did he have a sudden sense of confusion on the boundaries his profession required him to maintain? What was their purpose if not to further the dissonance, really? Why couldn’t he just tell her he was tired? He shook off the thought and only entertained the question for a moment. He checked his watch and decided to ask his wife out to dinner that night.

Short Fictions: The Peacemaker

10 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by marie in fiction, writing

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fiction, writing

The floor seemed a good enough place to sink, as it was the bottommost spot that gravity would allow. The buzz of the room sounded familiar: Bob Dylan Thomas and the Leopard Skin Pillsbury Doughboy Hat now, later Rufus Wainwright and how he could never eat just one jellybean, but wanted everything all at once. She remembered also feeling that way before—insatiable—but now it was the tiredness that dominated and sat like a thick-roped net over everything. At some point it all became too much, the din of anger and a dancing coffin, the swelling black crowds shoving her against the wall, the ricocheting opinions of opposing sides, the homelessness of refugees, the obstinate counting of costs. There were no more efforts, just the inevitable point of surrender. Even that word, “surrender” poeticized the fact that she believed she was just quitting. So it was the term she had used in that utterly empty stone space, because even in there, where her soul and body could be bared, she still had some shards of pride.

Now the drone of a record-voice woman wailing over the perfidia of her lover permeated the room. She internalized the sounds without energy to drink them in analytically. Just enough breath to let them be. Many things need to be done, much progress to be made, impossible decisions requiring enthusiastic determination, miles to go in order to wake. All she could do was wish up a small prayer, push it out by desire, lift it against the knotted gravity off the floor and out to the atmosphere, where, perhaps, it would be caught in the fingers of two hands older than time.

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