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The other is Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. The only part of this book that I remembered from childhood was Harriet hiding in someone’s dumbwaiter and spying on them – that’s because Harriet wants to be both a spy and a writer when she grows up. She carries around a notebook everywhere she goes, and writes about everyone she sees. One day, her notebook goes missing, and turns up in the wrong hands, and all the mean things Harriet has written about people come to light.
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I just finished a book for adolescents called Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. My niece Emily, who loves reading just as much as I do, recommended it to me, and it was fabulous. In this story, an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer to the earth, and out of its proper orbit. The book is about how one family deals with all the catastrophes that result from this – tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, famine, and disease. It’s written in the form of a journal by a sixteen-year-old girl named Miranda, who struggles to keep her family alive during the year after this disaster happens.
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Another book that I recently finished was When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale. It was one of the most engrossing and charming books I have read in a long time. It’s told from the point of view of a nine-year-old British boy named Lawrence, complete with the spelling mistakes and run-on sentences that a boy of his age would actually use. He tells the story of himself, his mother, and his younger sister Jemima, and how they leave Britain to escape his father, who is stalking them and trying to hurt them. They travel to Rome, where Lawrence’s mother used to live, and spend the time there moving between the homes of various friends, trying to survive on an ever-dwindling cash supply. It’s a sad and lovely story, with heartbreaking undertones of mental illness.
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My aunt Lynn recently lent me a book called My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. It’s about a young Hasidic Jew named Asher Lev living in New York City, who from childhood has shown the potential to be an artistic genius. His ability to capture feelings and stories in his art belies his age. Unfortunately, his father disapproves of his son spending all his time painting, when he could be out in the world saving Jews from persecution and death. The story is about Asher’s struggle to use his gift despite the disapproval of his father and most of the other people in his life.
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And finally, the book that I’m currently reading is The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson. That’s right, the Bill Bryson that I couldn’t stop raving about here and here. I can’t believe I had overlooked this book until recently. In this piece of non-fiction, Bryson travels around America visiting small towns, searching for the ideal town that he always saw portrayed in 1950’s movies, and sharing it all with his readers with his usual irreverence and sarcasm. I think the brilliance of Bryson stems from the fact that he can take the most mundane thing, talk about it for a whole book, and his readers come away from the experience feeling like they learned a lot and got a good laugh. Seriously, half of this book is about him driving on rural highways and staying in rundown motels, and yet it’s utterly captivating, because he makes fun of everyone and everything, including himself, and does it while managing to impart fascinating facts to you.
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