Dear Mary Roach,

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife – Mary Roach – 320 pages

What, scientifically speaking, happens to our souls when we die?  Mary Roach, who has tackled physical death and the decay of the body, now turns to the afterlife with a scientific eye.  From ectoplasm to infrasound, she examines a multitude of scientific and pseudo-scientific interpretations of the soul and its post-life journey.

I’ve been eyeing Bonk for a while, and tried to read Stiff but couldn’t handle the talk of decay without feeling ill, so when Spook came up as an option for a ghost-themed book club, I was all for it.  I have to say, as someone who tries to be open minded and allow for any possibility, including ghosts, I found your examination of the afterlife to be pleasantly skeptical but not offensive to the believer side of the coin.  I can’t speak for the science-minded, but I’m betting that you didn’t offend them either.

Which makes it sound like I want all books to be inoffensive…that’s not what I mean.  I’m trying to say that I think you walked a fine line with this book, and remained both hilariously curious and surprisingly objective throughout.  I love your fearless voice–you’re the kind of author I want to have coffee with and talk about bizarre things like how much fake ectoplasm a woman could possibly hide in her…private sector.  Because these are things I thoroughly enjoy speculating about.

I was a little disappointed that you spent so much time on scientists trying to prove the existence of the soul, and relatively little time talking about ghost sightings and ghost hunting.  Still, everything you wrote about was informative, fascinating, and delightfully explained.  I particularly enjoyed the brief discussion of infrasound, and the link you provided to sound bytes of tigers roaring–it scared the ectoplasm out of me, just as you said it might, and I gleefully played it at high volume for my fellow book clubbers (as well as a collection of supposed ghost occurrences I culled from YouTube that I think you would enjoy).  Infected with your curiosity, and some of us with your skepticism, we even got out my old Ouiji board and spoke at length with a Bostonian man whose name was possibly Z, who died from a melanoma on his eye a few years ago.  He did in fact spell out melanoma–that took a while, lemme tell you.

I”m rambling, as usual.  To sum up, you wrote an awesome book, and I wish I could have gotten through Stiff as well, and I plan to read Bonk very soon.  Four ghostly stars for you on this one!

Love,

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Books this year: 87

Pages this year: 16,635

Dear Kim Dong Hwa,

The Color of Water – Kim Dong Hwa

In this second volume of a coming-of-age manwha trilogy, Ehwa hopes that her third romance will be the charm.  When she catches the eye of a young wrestler named Duksam, she begins to think he may be the right one for her–but she still has some growing up to do, and learns that love is always complicated.

It seems like not very long ago at all that I was reading The Color of Earth, and wishing fervently for the next book, and now here it is!  The Color of Water has that sort of slow flowing quality that many middle books in a trilogy have; the story is neither beginning nor ending, but must support the weight of those two opposites.  You’ve done that quite steadily in this book; Ehwa is growing up, and we see her mother in a new light now–less the wise older woman and more an older sister, someone who knows what love is, but pines for her picture-man just as Ehwa pines for Duksam.  You also hint at the future, making me think that perhaps Duksam will be the one that she marries, though there is clearly adversity to be overcome before that can happen.

As with the first book, I loved your fluid artwork and the peaceful, simple setting of the story.  I found, though, that as Ehwa gets older, I became a little more aware of my own displeasure with the role of women in her time and place.  There’s nothing to be done about it–it’s a cultural difference, in an older time, and since it’s based on a real person, there’s not much you can do but tell the story true.  You do make it beautiful, and you certainly appeal to my femme side with the flower fragrances and delicate prose, but my feminist side was still more bothered by this book than the previous one.  Still, there’s nothing to be done about it, and I’m still extremely fond of both books and can’t wait for the third.  Five stars again, for beautiful art and a lovely story, and for making me think.

Love,

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Dear Teruyuki Komiya, Toyofumi Fukuda, Makiko Oku and Kristin Earhart,

Life-Size Zoo – Ed. Teruyuki Komiya, photographs by Toyofumi Fukuda, Japanese text by Makiko Oku, English translation by Kristin Earhart

This oversized picturebook takes you up close and personal with zoo animals through photography, cartoons and fact-filled sidebars.  Learn about each creature and see it at life size!

I was lucky enough to meet with some guys from Seven Footer Press at Book Expo, and they kindly gave me samples of a couple of their new books brought over from Japan.  My favorite of them,  Life-Size Zoo, is both beautiful and hilarious at once.  The photography is absolutely stunning, and so huge that you can’t help but feel you’re standing right next to the animals.  Each page has its own color-coded sidebar with adorable and bizarre informational cartoons, and I particularly enjoyed the little section at the top of each sidebar with a silhouette of the whole animal to show you what bit of it is pictured in the photo.  Every sidebar has a little bio of the animal, too, because they’re all inhabitants of the Tokyo Ueno Zoo.  There are awesome fold-out pages, and a zoo map in the front of the book, and great endpapers…and overall it’s just a fab book.  Well done, to everyone who made it happen!  Five stars!

Love,

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Dear Linda Perlstein,

Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers – Linda Perlstein

After spending a year observing, interviewing, and recording in a Maryland middle school, Perlstein presents a close-up picture of the middle school experience, including the perspectives of teachers, parents, and the kids themselves.

I had a lot of issues with Not Much Just Chillin‘.  At first I was really enjoying the kids, their attitudes and their speech and all the things that make kids that age entertaining to me, but then I started to notice your voice coming into it much more than I would have liked.  You often took a knowing and patronizing tone when describing the kids and their lives, making subtle judgements about their fashions, or belittling their emotions.  I took the book out of the library and have since had to return it, so I can’t quote specific examples here, but I felt throughout the text that you were coming at this whole experience from an entirely adult point of view–the stance of an adult who isn’t really trying to understand the social and emotional workings of twelve-year-olds, instead just reporting without the proper empathy or context as though spying for the grown-ups in some sort of battle.  The sensationalist sort of feel about the book, the “hidden lives” and the all-secrets-revealed attitude didn’t sit well with me, especially with all the reviews quoted on the cover about how it’s “an important book” and “information every parent and educator should have.”

I think it’s problematic, too, that you made a great deal of blanket statements about middle schoolers, and present your book as a guide to all middle schoolers, when you only observed one middle school.  No one school can represent an average, and no one school can be assumed to be like all the others.  Sure, you had lots of back matter and references, but I wish the book had been presented more as a look at one particular school, and less as a look at all adolescents.

I also was concerned by the lack of any information on homosexuality in middle schoolers.  Certainly some people don’t know yet, at that age, but also certainly some do; you frequently mentioned the kids’ reactions to being called gay or supposed gay, and how that was one of the worst names they could be called, but included no statistics of how many kids that age actually identify as gay or lesbian, nor made any comments addressing whether the middle school you observed had any homosexual students, or how the casual and cruel use of “gay” in bullying and name-calling might affect students in the closet.  It seems irresponsible to report anti-gay bullying and then pass it off as something they do whether or not the target child is actually gay without any further explanation or investigation, especially when you spend so much time investigating and supposing and explaining heterosexual dating, crushes and sex.

Overall, I wish that you’d sided with the kids, trying to make their world comprehendable to the clueless adults, rather than the adults-always-know-better-and-now-we-know-your-secrets tone you took.  Three stars, and only that high by virtue of the kids themselves and the insights I got from what little of their real perspectives you presented.

Respectfully,

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Dear Matt Alt, Hiroko Yoda and Tatsuya Morino,

Thanks to Yokai Attack!  The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, I now know what to do if a trip into the great dating pool lands me a Rokuro Kubi or a Futakuchi Onna.  That’s still a more intriguing prospect than meeting a Wanyudo in a dark alley, though.  In all honesty, this guide was not only entertaining, but also clarified a lot of small but perplexing moments in my forays into anime and manga–I’ve seen some of the yokai you describe before, but had no idea what they were, or what the cultural significance of their appearance might be.  The writing was just tongue-in-cheek enough while remaining quite informative, and the art was quite appealing.  I loved the design of the book, too, though perhaps none of you had any influence on that.  Overall, this definitely gets four enthusiastic stars!

Love,

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Dear Jonah Winter and André Carrilho,

I picked up You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! as a gift for a friend, not for any of the logical reasons, but because Sandy Koufax is one of the baseball players mentioned in a song in our favorite musical, Falsettos.  Imagine my delight when I read it before wrapping it up, and discovered that not only did it serve as an obscure reference between my friend and I, but it’s also a spectacular picturebook!  The writing was funny and endearing, and I loved the chummy teammate voice you use to address the reader.  Of course, for me picturebooks are always really about the art–and this art is spectacular.  The only images of the cover I could find don’t show it, but the book has this fantastic lenticular cover image that, when you tilt the book side to side, shows Sandy winding up for a fierce high-speed pitch.  The interior art is incredibly striking, too; the cool grays and blues and understated golds of the spreads give the whole thing an art deco kind of feel, which I totally love, and it’s all full of long fluid limbs and dynamic lines and soulful, Hirschfeld-esque close-ups.  The art really brought home the sheer athletic beauty of a baseball player I knew next-to-nothing about before.  You’ve managed to make a sports biography that reads like any great picturebook, which is no easy feat!  Five stars, for sure!

Love,

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Dear Kim Dong Hwa,

I heard about The Color of Earth some time ago, and decided after I saw the beautiful cover that it would go on my list of highly anticipated things to read.  So, when it appeared at the bookstore, I picked it up, and was quite happy I did!  I loved the languid pace of the story, and the sort of…dreamlike quality of the whole setting.  I loved the moments of intimacy between mother and daughter, and I laughed out loud at all the misinformation passed around by the village children as they’re pre-pubescing.  Then, of course, there’s the art–it’s incredibly beautiful.  Simple, delicate, flowing, and there was always a lot of restful white space for my eyes.  That the story is biographical was icing on the whole wonderful cake, bringing a very pleasant sense of nostalgia to the story.  Five stars, and I can’t wait to read the next one.

Love,

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Dear Linda Furiya,

I picked up Bento Box in the Heartland as part of my recent self-education in Japanese cooking, and I was pleasantly surprised!  I was suspicious of the idea of a “food memoir” before, but you did a lovely job telling vivid stories and painting the background of those stories with the smells and tastes and colors of food.  I’m excited to try out the recipes at the end of each of the chapters, and was so physically hungry after mentally devouring your book in one day that I made onigiri for dinner.  YUM!  Of course, the memoir part of the food memoir was fantastic, too–the way you express the difficulties and triumphant moments of your childhood made the experience accessible even to those of us who grew up surrounded by our own ethnic group.  Dealing with parents, with teasing, with self image…all those things are difficulties everyone can relate to.  Five stars.

Love,

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Dear Dan Yaccarino,

I knew at first glance that I would love The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau.  I mean, really, what an appealing cover!  Appealing to me, at least.  The text is very simple, great for even young picturebook readers, and the art is so full of eye-catching colors and shapes that I couldn’t look away.  Sometimes the art seemed a little too busy, actually–now and then I had trouble finding Jacques among all the fish and crazy wavy lines.  Even so, the color palette is great, the subject matter is quite worthy, and the whole thing is a treat to read.  Four stars, only held back by the dizzying busy-ness of some of the pages.

Love,

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Dear Truddi Chase and the Troop Formation,

It’s been seven years or so since I last read your account of your therapy experience; When Rabbit Howls was just as intense, angering and fascinating as it was back then.  The strength of your ability to cope with trauma boosted me through my own rough early twenties, and encourages me still that the human mind and spirit (in your case, minds and spirits) can survive almost anything.  I hope that, in the twenty-some years since its publication, your book has encouraged abuse victims to speak up, get help, and get what justice and peace they can.  I also hope that the psychiatric and medical communities have a better understanding of MPD these days–though I’m not entirely sure that has happened.  At any rate, your book is an intense but more than worthwhile read.  Five stars for each of you–and that adds up to…what…460?  With some extra pretty sparkly colored stars for the little ones.

Love,

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