Worderella Writes

Book: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

This is technically two separate stories about two cocky young men who use their wits to get what they want. The thing is, one is a Hungarian folktale about Csucskari, a young gypsy who puts the sun, the moon, and the stars back where they belong. The other story is a contemporary first-person narrative about Greg, a student painter who dropped out of his junior year of college three years ago to work in a studio with four of his artist friends. There aren’t really chapters, just a series of vignettes, and the vignettes switch between the contemporary narrative and the folktale.

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Book: Green Rider

Karigan G’ladheon has been unfairly kicked from school because she, the daughter of a mere (if rich) merchan, insulted a spoiled heir in a sword fight. Instead of facing the suspension board, Karigan decides to run away from school and make her way home. Seems like a good plan, until a rider dressed in green with two black arrows in his back blocks her path and asks that she finish his mission by sending an important message to the king. Being the spontaneous girl she is, Karigan accepts, and thus begins the typical fantasy story about the journey from being an innocent, ignorant, yet fiesty, schoolgirl to an experienced warrior who may not know what her future holds, but at least knows she has the strength to withstand just about anything.

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Book: The Slightest Provocation

In the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, Mary Penley and Kit Stansell of the Regency feuding Penley and Stansell families elope, after nourishing a secret friendship from their early teens. Their first year of marriage is one long honeymoon night, if you get my drift, but when Kit is teased by his club friends for only lusting after his wife (how provincial!!), he dallies with an actress and catches a disease such that he can’t go to bed with Mary for a year. This doesn’t stop him from going to other actresses, however, and to get back at him, Mary allows Kit’s best friend to seduce her. Of course, Kit walks in on them, and that’s just the backstory.

When the book actually starts, Kit and Mary have been separated for nine years, during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon is finally defeated, and Kit and Mary are returning to England, worried by rumors that there is an insurgency threatening their homeland.

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Quote: Daydreaming

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
- Neil Gaiman

And for the record, I’ve given up on reading Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. Believe me, I absolutely hate to drop a book, especially when the idea is so clever. She uses this Victorian fiction to theorize that Jack the Ripper was actually the boyfriend of the young woman who had to be staked in the original Dracula; that the Ripper didn’t just kill prostitutes, but vamipiric prostitutes. Did I just make vampiric up? Possibly, but I think you get the idea, right?

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Book: St. Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb

So. This book is interesting. St Ursula’s Girls Against the Atomic Bomb by Valerie Hurley is about Raine Rassaby, a free-spirited high school girl who is determined to be a heroine and save the world from nuclear missiles and other dangerous horrible things like the military. Her mother is a concert violinist and her father is a famous astrologist; her late grandmother converted to Judaism so she thinks she’s Jewish even though both of her parents are Catholic. She’s in love with the Slovakian Jewish gardener, and her Catholic school guidance teacher, who has his own problems, lives next door. The book starts crazy, and it doesn’t seem to come to any sort of real resolution, in the way that a typical romance would, which is why I’ve labeled this book as simply fiction, it almost asks to be literary fiction.

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Book: A Hole in the Earth

A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch is a first-person narrative about “the summer” as described by Henry Porter, the narrator and main character. A middle school history teacher with a penchant for gambling, Porter is a divorce who has not seen his daughter Nicole in five years, which makes her about seventeen. The school year has just ended, and Porter is on his way out the door to the race track to make a couple bucks when Nicole shows up at his door with her friend, Sam. That same day, Porter’s girlfriend of three years Elizabeth begins to act strangely, and she soon reveals that she is pregnant. What starts out as a series of unexpected events leads to the inner-workings of a quiet man; Porter’s narrative tells us everything he cannot or does not say, and how that can make or break his relationships with the people around him.

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Suggested Reading

As a writer, I have an interesting position with my friends who consider me a writer: they ask for reading suggestions, as though I’ve read everything and therefore know what’s worth reading. Now, admittedly, I do read a lot. Usually more during my breaks than when school is in session. I’ve been known to knock out ten books in a couple weeks, if I have the time. But the fact of the matter is, sometimes I’m absolutely thrown for a loop when someone asks me what they should read next.

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Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Well. I finally completed reading this book. This isn’t to say that reading Dorian Gray was tedious, it’s just that with school and life getting in the way, I only had time to read during the twenty minutes I had between leaving my apartment and waiting for my folklore class to begin. Anyway, there is a reason that The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a classic. Wilde’s turn of phrase about society and many of society’s hypocritical rules/behaviors often caught me laughing in surprise and recognition. He tends to be a little verbose in terms of description, but he is a contemporary of Victorian literature, so I forgive him that. And then, Wilde is the only playwright yet who made me laugh out loud when reading his play (excusing bonny Shakespeare, of course), so he deserves snaps and props.

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Book: Book by Book

It’s not often that I pick up a book about books, unless it has to do with writing them. As I consider myself a moderately well-read person, and at the very least a professional when it comes to leisure reading in general, I have generally ignored the books telling you what sort of books you should read. Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life by Michael Dirda, on the outset, seems like that sort of book. The one saying “If you want to be considered ____ and ____, then you must read this book!” Dirda’s book, however, is insightful.

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Book: Bright Arrows by Grace Livingston Hill

Bright Arrows by Grace Livingston Hill is one of her many “feel good” inspirational romances. I first read Hill in seventh grade, after being told that Out of the Storm (originally written under her pseudonym Marcia Macdonald) was a “Worderella book.” Hill’s plots are simple yet elegant, if slightly dated because she was writing at the turn of the century until her death in 1947. All of her books have a definite message: all paths lead to God. Whether you agree with that or not, and whether you can get past the often-quaint plots, Hill is a pretty good read.

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