And I thought my dog was high maintenance

On a recent car trip I had Stacey O’Brien’s book Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl  and His Girl to keep me company.

I am a sucker for animal stories and fell in love with Stacy and Wesley’s story. While working at CalTech, Stacey adopted an injured owlet, and the two of them go on to forge a life together.  It’s an entertaining and fascinating tale.

Of course, after listening to this book I have new appreciation for my more conventional pets. Sure, my dog does insist on two morning walks and he has some weird rituals when it comes to treats, but I can buy his food in a bag at the grocery store. In fact none of my pets actually insist that I personally kill their dinner for them. Owls, on the other hand, eat mice, a lot of them. Though, the scene Stacey describes of killing mice in the backyard much to the awe of all the cats in the neighborhood was pretty funny.

The book had lots of funny moments, but like every animal story I’ve ever read I did find myself moved to tears at the end. Don’t worry, Wesley lived a full and happy owl life, and I recommend this fascinating book to all animal lovers.

Some books you should read, some music you should listen to

It’s been a busy week. Here are a few of the things I’ve been doing:

Read What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell, and you should too. This YA book won the National Book Award. Even though,historical fiction is not my favorite genre, I decided to give this one a try, and am glad I did. It’s set in post-World War II America, and does an excellent job of capturing the mood of that time in a coming of age tale. Judy Blundell has been writing some different series books under other names for years, but this is the first book she published under her own name using her own original idea. Something tells me that this will be the first of many Judy Blundell books.

Laughed out loud while reading The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk. I had the opportunity to meet Josh when he was in town signing books. His debut YA novel is set in a region of Pennsylvania I am well familiar with and tells the story of Will Halpin a deaf teenager suddenly trying to adjust to life in a mainstream high school while also helping to solve the murder of  one of his classmates in a former coal mine, but don’t let all that heavy stuff bring you down. This is a fun book! Reading The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, I was reminded of another author I had the chance to meet many years ago when he visited my school, Gordon Korman. Just like Don’t Care High and A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin was laugh out loud funny, while still telling a serious story. It’s a delicious dark comedy, that you should definitely read.

Saw Elvis Costello and The Imposters in Atlantic City. This was in honor of my mom’s upcoming birthday. It was a great show. Here’s a fan video (not mine) from the concert:

What have you been up to this week?

Soundtrack Song Mini-Challenge

Alita over at  Alita Reads is having a quick mini-challenge. Choose a book that you are currently reading or have recently finished and then select a song that goes with, then answer a few questions, but hurry this mini-challenge is only up for a short time!

I just finished reading What I Saw, and How I Lied by Judy Blundell, and here is the song I have chosen for the soundtrack:

The song is “In the Mood” and in this clip is performed by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra.

As for why I chose the song, What I Saw, and How I Lied is a YA historical fiction set just after World War II. The main character’s stepfather has just returned home to New York after fighting in the war. “In the Mood” fits the time period of the story, and I believe was even mentioned once in the book.

Fun fact: according to my grandmother she and a friend of hers listened to this record so many times that they actually wore it out!

Why?

The internet is a scary place. I only went online to look up who the woman was who covered Crimson and Clover (Joan Jett, if you were wondering) and on the same site where I found this info learned that Pat Boone did a cover version of Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train, and it is as horrible as it sounds. Obviously, this was all very important research.

Where I find out about new music

Some people discover new music by hearing it on the radio or reading about it in a magazine, but for me my father has always been my source for new music. Whether it was Nirvana and Pearl Jam when I was in high school or Liz Phair when I was in college, my dad always seemed to be the first person I knew to discover new performers.

He is not in any way involved in the music industry, though he does have this dream of starting an internet radio station when he retires. This is a hobby, a sometimes expensive hobby, since he has been known to buy several CDs a week. (Yes, there are still people out there who buy CDs.)

Anyway, a CD he bought a little bit before Christmas and which he and I have decided is awesome is Fortress ’round My Heart by Ida Maria. So, this is what I am listening to right now:

How my iPod (sort of) saved me (twice) during last night’s power outage

Madonna soothes this savage beast.

I was planning on making it an early night last night, since I am still getting over the remnants of my flu, though I was hoping to do some reading or writing in bed before I finally turned in. That didn’t happen. I was getting ready for bed and had just spit the toothpaste out of my mouth when our power went out. It had actually gone out for a minute or so earlier yesterday morning. So, I wasn’t that alarmed. I patiently waited in the pitch black bathroom for the lights to come back on. They didn’t. Finally, I decided I was going to have to find a light source.

I knew there was a flashlight in the kitchen drawer, but I didn’t like the idea of going down the stairs in complete darkness. So, I felt my way down the hall to my bedroom, grabbed my iPod and managed to switch on the backlight, which makes an amazingly good flashlight in a pinch. I got myself down the stairs and found the real flashlight.

I was able to finish getting read for bed, and then tucked myself in content that I would get plenty of rest and hopefully feel all better in the morning. Then something let out a high pitched beep and my dog, Jack, went berzerk. He crawled under my bed and commenced loud, bed-shaking, growling barking.

I had a suspicion that it was the carbon monoxide detector (I mistakenly thought there was only one) that has a battery back-up component. I knew from past experience that when the battery starts to get low the device emits a warning beep at a decibel guaranteed to drive dogs insane. I went downstairs and stood in front of the carbon monoxide detector waiting for it to beep, but when I did hear another beep that sent the dog into another frenzy, it was from elsewhere in the house. Perhaps it was one of the smoke detectors?

There’s a lot of smoke detectors in the house, and I wasn’t about to go stand under every one of them waiting to see which one was beeping. I figured it made sense to go back to bed and try to sleep. I lay there in the dark losing my voice as I begged my dog to relax and ignore the beeping. His barking only got louder, and I realized I wasn’t going to get any sleep.

My iPod speaker system has a built-in battery, I didn’t know how long it would run for, but I was hoping if I turned it up loud enough, it just might be enough to drown out the beeping, and buy me a few hours of sleep. Who knows? The power might come back on by the time the battery was running out of juice.

The first song that came up on shuffle was “Goodbye Girl” by Squeeze which was ineffective at easing our suffering. Next up was a different girl entirely, “Material Girl” by Madonna. Perhaps it was those high pitched beeping sounds in the song or the heavy base line or simply Madonna’s melodic voice, but Jack did not bark once through the entire song. The song ended and a Weezer track began (I can’t remember what it was) and a few seconds into it my bed was shaking with vicious growling barks. I realized there was only one solution.

That’s right, I put on “Material Girl” on endless repeat. I never really understood the repeat song feature on iPods and certain CD Players, but now I realize it’s all about quieting dogs when the power goes out and the carbon monoxide detectors start beeping. I’m not sure how many times I made it through “Material Girl” before I finally drifted off to sleep.

My sleep was short lived. Louder beeping had pierced our Madonna sphere of protection. As it turns out the first floor carbon monoxide detector that I had initially thought to be the culprit had finally begun to run out of battery power. Of course, it was late and I was not thinking too clearly with a shaking and barking dog beside me as I staggered out of bed, and I was still thinking the smoke detectors were to blame. I found a step ladder and began staggering around in the dark with it, hoping to track down the offending smoke detectors and silence them by any means necessary, which is when I wound up in the basement and found that there was a carbon monoxide detector down there.

I yanked it from the wall and, after much fighting, was able to pull off the back and remove the battery. I performed the same battery-ectomy on the one upstairs and was rewarded with wonderful silence. I staggered back upstairs, crawled into bed and slept soundly until the power came back on at about five this morning.

Oh and for those of you who haven’t spent a decent chunk of your night listening to “Material Girl” here’s the YouTube clip of the video:

Thank you, audio book inventors

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time behind the wheel of my car, both for work (My job involves driving around visiting libraries, how cool is that?) and for family obligations (there was a round trip to Maine which included a traffic-filled ride up to Vacationland). I actually kind of enjoy driving with the exception of that trip up to Maine. The problem with spending so much time on the road is that it cuts into my reading time. Audio books are my salvation.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve “read” Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington and I am in the midst of Looking for Alaska by John Green. Of course, I’ve “read” all of these books without cracking open a single book. While listening to books will never take the place of actually reading a book (and there are some books that I must read the old fashioned way) having a book to keep me company on my driving is a blessing. I can’t imagine what traveling salesmen did before audio books.

I started wondering, just who this wonderful genius was who came up with the audio book. As it turns out, I cannot track down the name of a lone genius behind the audio book. It’s a collaborative effort that has built over time. There were early poetry recordings that predated radio and television entertainment. In the 1930s the Books for the Blind program came into being, and while this is similar to the commercial audio books of today, the program was limited to those unable to read physical books and recording quality lacked a lot of the production values that make commercial audio books such a pleasure to listen to. Caedmon, who continues to publish audio books, began the first true audio book line in 1952. Not until the cassette tape and later the CD came along would audio books become the friends of  road warriors of every stripe.

Of course, these days entire books can be easily downloaded to an MP3 player. I still can’t completely grasp the fascination with digital versions of print books, but digital audio books make perfect sense to me. Technology can be pretty cool sometimes.

By the way, behind the wheel isn’t the only thing audio books are good for. There are whole household projects that I might never have made it through were it not for audio books. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig helped me to redo a kitchen floor. Frost on My Moustache by Tim Moore was my companion through a bathroom makeover, and thanks to listening to Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown while painting a bedroom I will always associate Phil Spector with a certain shade of blue paint.

And as for that whole debate about whether listening to an audio book counts as reading, Stephen King weighs in here. He also lists his top 10 favorite audios, which probably wouldn’t be a bad place to start if you were thinking about trying out an audio book yourself.

What about you? Are you an audio book listener? Why or why not?

You are Not Alone: Join a Writing Group

Writing can be a pretty lonely thing. Most of the time it’s just you and your computer (or if you are more like Harriet and yours truly you and your notebook.) Yes, we tend to be the quirky, iconoclastic ones always at the fringes of things, watching everything that goes on and recording, recording, recording.

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to take part in things too, and to have a little human interaction. Some social activities frighten me terribly, but there is something comforting in a writing group. It’s a place where I can go and meet other people like me. These people get it!

I found my new writing group thanks to Meetup when I was looking for things to do in my new for-now home. There are a host of online writing groups as well, but that’s not quite the same thing. If you can track down a group of writers in your area, I urge you to do so, and if you can’t track down a group, maybe you should start up a group of your own.

I just got done listening to the audio version of Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories by Chuck Palahniuk. This is a collection of essays and articles on various different individuals and groups of people told in that unmistakable Chuck Palahniuk style. (If you’ve ever heard the phrase “building an author brand” tossed about and wondered what it meant read a few of Palahniuk’s works and you will quickly see how he has mastered this concept.) What I found fascinating, though, were the passages in which he discussed writing, which occurred at the beginning and the end of the book. In fact, if you haven’t read this book, I urge you to hunt down a copy, and if you read nothing else, read that introductory essay on writing. Good stuff, and I think anyone who has ever written, ever considered writing will quickly see that this is someone who gets  it!

Oh, and in case you wondered if any good came of writing groups, Chuck Palahniuk used to belong to one.

What I’m Listening To: Something Rotten

One of the ideas that has been kicking around my head for a few years now is a modern retelling of MacBeth that would either be a young adult novel or a screenplay, but I don’t think it’s ever gotten any further than a few scribbled notes here and there. Alan Gratz apparently beat me to the punch as his sequel to Something Rotten is Something Wicked, a retelling of the Scottish Play.

Something Rotten was the audiobook that kept me company over the past week, and if you hadn’t already figured it out, it is a retelling of Hamlet. I majored in English in college. So, I read Hamlet. A lot. Roughly once a semester, I believe. Something Rotten is a pretty cool Shakespeare retelling.

Horatio is a wise-beyond-his-years narrator and amateur detective who is a basically a teenage Philip Marlowe. He exudes cool and individuality. The other characters with slight name changes from their Shakespearean predecessors tend to be a little more one-dimensional. Still, I can see the book being a hit with teen boys, and being a nice jumping off point for high school teachers hoping to introduce Shakespeare to their students.

The book is actually very good, but there is one problem. It is billed in more than one place on the cover of my audio as a mystery, and certainly the style is that of a mystery, with one key problem. There is no mystery. There is a sort of half-hearted attempt to introduce a few other suspects, but these possibilities amount to nothing. I read a fair amount of mysteries, and the general idea is that there should be twists, turns and surprises, but that never really happens in Something Rotten. So, it’s a good book, but if you are a mystery reader and looking for a good mystery, this isn’t it.

There was lots to like about this book, though. The dark humor is fun, and should go over well with the young adult audience. I personally appreciated the They Might Be Giants reference. (I had to stop typing the previous paragraph when “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas” came up on the Ipod.) There was also a fun reference to Shakespeare ripoffs.

Ok, have to go now because Mammal just came up on the Ipod.

What I’m Listening to: Little Brother & Behind the Curtain

I logged a lot of miles for the day job this week and I couldn’t have done it without some good audiobooks for company. Both Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Behind the Curtain by Peter Abrahams are books that have been on my to-read list for awhile. Both are technically young adult novels and both of them have a lot to offer for readers who are not-so-young adults.

I loved the fact that at the time I was listening to Little Brother news broke about a secret CIA program that may or may not have been illegally kept under wraps. Little Brother is a near future science fiction novel that describes an Orewellian (hence the title) situation that arises after a terrorist attack on San Francisco and the teenagers that use technology to fight back against a government intent on stealing their freedom.

This is a country that was founded by a bunch of rebels who didn’t like the idea of people taking away their freedom, and too often people forget that. We are way too complacent when it comes to the government meddling in our affairs. Young people should read this book, not just because it is a good book with some wonderfully real and non-cookie cutter characters, but because it also has an important message. Of course, maybe the kids are not the ones we need to worry about. Maybe it’s the grown-ups who need to be reminded of what it means to be free, and why we shouldn’t let anyone, but especially our government, start messing around with our freedom.

Behind the Curtain is the second book in Peter Abrahams’ Echo Falls series, which I am now completely hooked on. It joins The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and the Agatha Raisin series in my unofficial mysteries to listen to in the car list. Thirteen year-old Ingrid makes a wonderful amateur detective, but as she is also a thirteen year-old girl she makes plenty of mistakes along the way. Although Behind the Curtain does pick up on some clues dropped in Down the Rabbit Hole, the first book in the series, it works just fine as a standalone book.