Tigerbuttah: A Hand-Painted All Ages Story Inspired by Golden Books

Becky Dreistadt is the creator of Tiny Kitten Teeth, a beautiful (and adorable) hand-painted web-comic. Her Golden Books-inspired project features Tigerbuttah, "a little tiger who doesn’t know much about life yet." He is featured weekly in single-paneled comics on her site. You can see more of Becky's work at her deviantArt page.

There are only 15 days left to make a pledge for this project. It sort of slipped from my mind for a few weeks, but I suddenly remembered it and made my $15 pledge today. The project has already reached its goal of $5,000 but additional funds will be used to print more copies of the book and increase their distribution.

Click below for more info about the project--a $15 donation gets you a PDF of her mini-comic "Little Beaky" as well as a copy of the book when it's printed.



P.S.
Happy New Year!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

I browsed some of the reviews for this book on Goodreads while I was still in the process of reading it. Many found it inspiring, some daunting, and others seemed to be just plain put off by Kingsolver's "pushy" attitude. I did feel that Kingsolver occassionally seemed to be scolding me. As much as I'm sure she'd like this book to appeal to everyone, for the most part I think she's probably preaching to the choir (or at least, people who agree with her views even if they aren't quite living according to them yet). Nonetheless, Kingsolver and her family provide a wealth of information--anectodal, factual, and delicious (recipes!)

I would group myself among the people who found this book absolutely inspiring. Each semester I drudge through in college draws me ever closer to the idyllic vision of living in the mountains, growing my own food, and being surrounded by beauty and life. Perhaps not exactly where a college degree "should" take me, but I feel increasingly attracted to such a direct way of living. Kingsolver emphasizes how this directness--planting, nurturing, and harvesting foods right in your backyard, or purchasing them from your neighbors--creates an invaluable link between people and their food. Quite a few times she mentions that Americans are increasingly disconnected from their food sources, and this may be why we are hard-pressed to define an actual American food culture.

Additionally, and despite Kingsolver's tut-tutting, she repeatedly states that eating local and organic is something that everyone can do (perhaps in varying degrees, but she also proposes that every little bit helps). She backs these claims up with hard facts by analyzing the funds her family spent on growing their own food and buying food from farmer's markets, compared to the "hidden" fees that consumers pay when they purchase food that has traveled a great distance to get to the grocery store.

And I must say...the recipes at the end of each chapter sound divine--I'll definitely be trying many of them. Homemade mozerella? YES PLEASE!

Overall, I think Kingsolver presents an insightful, humble, and well-researched solution to many of America's food problems. The solution isn't to make farms bigger and ship foods cross-country. The solution, instead, involves stepping out into our own yards and cultivating even the smallest garden; seeking out local farmers and farmers markets in our communities; and learning (and appreciating) what the earth beneath our own two feet has to offer.

The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony

I literally just finished reading this book today during my morning commute on the train. Still not quite sure how I feel about the ending, but I loved the rest of the book. I suppose the ending is kind of amazing because it's so bizarre (although that certainly isn't the only part of the book I would describe that way).

Anyway, The Convalescent is about a small ugly man named Rovar Pfliegman who sells [stolen] meat out of a broken down bus in the middle of a field in Virginia. The narrative jumps back and forth between the history of the Pfliefman's and Rovar's day to day existence and occasionally also his childhood. All of these aspects are seamlessly woven together to create a portrait of a simultaneously humorous and somber existence.

I could probably ramble forever about all the little things in this book that were interesting and funny and contribute to making it totally-worth-reading. However, one thing in particular has been nibbling on my brain as I've been thinking about this book. Rovar is a strange narrator. About 3/4 of the way through the book, he gets a look at his folder in Dr. Monica's office, and sees her notes about him: "Pseudomaniacal tendencies...Invents various illnesses for personal attention...PHYSICALLY, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM" (187). This blunt note comes as a surprise, as Rovar laments his unfortunate physical state repeatedly throughout the narrative. Is it all a lie? Or do others simply not perceive his pain? Are his claims of disfigurement not physical but rather a metaphorical reflection of himself, or society?

Rovar's reliability as a narrator comes into question, but it's not quite as simple as just that. Since throughout the book he also is relating the history of his people, Rovar's narration also represents a construction of history--an untold history, no less. And with Rovar as the supposed last remaining Pfliegman, he is the only source for this history aside from a book given to him by his grandfather: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Hungarians by Anonymus (sic) (as for the title...I think that's about right). Throughout the book, it is implied that the weakest members of a society, those whose history is forgotten and left untold, are often the ones who hold society together, the ones who create an invisible skeleton upon which the epic "mainstream" version of history can be constructed. Perhaps not a novel concept necessarily, but Anthony presents it with enough humor and fantasy to make one really wonder what could be missing from our history books, and how that history was decided on.

Aside from the epic question of HISTORY, The Convalescent also simply calls attention to the small things in life--whether the small things are actually things, or even people.

It's a beautiful book and I highly recommend it. The book design and bookjacket are also wonderful so even if you hate reading it, I'm sure you'll at least enjoy holding it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

Before reading this book, I had only read Marquez's more recent novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. I read it for a World Lit class. We were asked to read any novel by Marquez, and due to the pressures of other classwork, I chose the shortest, smallest book I could find--Memories of My Melancholy Whores fit that bill nicely. It was a quick read and I read it twice, the second time so that I could better write an essay about it for class. I found Marquez's writing magical and illuminating--simultaneously gritty and ethereal. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which must be at least 4 or 5 times the length of Memories is also a beautiful tale, apparently heavily influenced by his grandmother's storytelling. This novel seems much less obviously personal than Memories (in which the narrator/main character seems to be Marquez himself in many ways). Nonetheless, there is a sense of childlike wonder, as though Marquez has placed himself simultaneously in the position of storyteller (with his grandmother's straight face--even at the most absurd moments--and fantastic stories) and avid listener, eyes wide with excitement.

One of the things I found most interesting about this novel is the sense of time that is created as the story progresses. Ursula, a strong woman and the character who most clearly ties together the various generations (aside from her son Aureliano perhaps), represents a "wise" and grounded sort of figure--a woman who has seen everything and is ready to meet life head on. She repeatedly sees in her own children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren the repetition of time, old habits, and dark family secrets. Despite the passage of time (100 years or so sounds about right!), one gets the sense that time is standing still, with new characters inhabiting a simultaneously different and similar realm as their ancestors. Almost like a parallel universe, but with the lingering shadows of the past very much present rather than completely unseen.

Unfortunately I'm writing this quite a few weeks after I finished the novel. The start of school has interrupted my thought process on this book. There are many characters with similar names, which gets confusing (thank goodness for the family tree at the beginning of the book). In a way I think this is appropriate, however, especially in light of Ursula's viewpoint, from which history appears to repeat itself. A somewhat disheartening notion lined with optimism...the idea that no matter how far we feel from our roots, we are all connected in an inescapable way.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

I decided to mooch this book on a whim because I read Annie John a few semesters ago for a World Lit class. While Annie John wasn't exactly my favorite book from the class, I remember feeling like certain major themes in the novel stood out to me and stayed with me, and I was curious to see how it compared to some of her other work. It seemed like Lucy was a continuation of Annie John, which, if I remember correctly, ends with the main character leaving her family in the West Indies for North America to begin nursing school. Lucy is about a 19 year old girl who has begun a new life in North America as an au pair for a seemingly perfect family (which quickly unravels as the novel progresses) while pursuing an education to become a nurse. There's also a similar love-hate relationship between the main character and her mother and father. Again, this relationship and even the parents are almost identical to those in Annie John. I'm guessing Kincaid's novels are autobiographical in nature and that's why there are recurring characters and this almost obsessive examination of mother-daughter relationships. I've yet to read her book Autobiography of My Mother but I'm sure that would answer some of my questions.

Anyway, I was not terribly impressed by this book. It seemed bland and Lucy, the narrator, is so cold and pessimistic that it's difficult to feel any sort of connection to her. Perhaps a feeling of alienation was what Kincaid was going for, but I found it off-putting. Throughout the novel Lucy begins to realize herself sexually and also remembers some of her early sexual experiences back home. These too seem cold, like recollections of someone else's memories. Overall, I got the feeling that Lucy did not feel like a part of anything, nor did she desire to be a part of anything or create a deep connection with anyone. However, she has a "best friend" named Peggy and she claims to be friends with Mariah, the woman for whom she works during the first 3/4 of the book. Maybe Lucy is supposed to be a more dynamic character with a wider range of emotions, but the writing style (which is very straight-forward and dry) doesn't communicate that very well.

I did think Lucy was interesting because of her rebellious spirit. She is determined to carve out a life of her own, away from her family, and she does this without hesitation or excessive emotion. Perhaps she realizes that by moving to a new country and burning her mother's letters, she is violently cutting an essential part of herself off: her homeland and her family. Lucy certainly makes no attempts to cover up her bitterness and while she moves forward and gets an apartment with Peggy, begins a new job, and pursues photography as a hobby, perhaps the most crucial element that seems to be missing from Lucy's attitude is hope. Maybe that's the component that I felt was lacking here, but maybe I'm also being a little naive in that expectation.

Aside from Lucy as a character, I thought that Kincaid made some interesting commentary about colonialism and how the world as seen through the rose colored glasses of the coloniser is quite different from the shattered view of the colonized.

Overall, I think this book is worth reading but not fantastic...I definitely enjoyed Annie John more. However, if you're a fan of Kincaid's work then you'll easily make connections to her other books and admittedly, I did feel like having previously read Annie John added considerable depth to my reading of this novel (perhaps it would have been even better if Annie John was fresh in my mind!).

Body Outlaws edited by Ophira Edut

This book is a compilation of essays about body image and identity. I think there is something here for everyone, and the women in this book have had a wide range of experiences. Nonetheless, a lot of them project similar messages, and because of this many of the essays seem to run together. That's not to say that those messages weren't delivered differently--they weren't just all about how you should learn to love your body and many admit that they are still working on learning to love themselves. Many end on an ambiguous note, such as Meredith Mcghan's essay "Dancing Toward Redemption," in which she recounts her brief experience as a stripper--an experience that had a profoundly uplifting effect on her self-esteem, but remained problematic for other reasons.

Many of the essays note the problems of adequately unifying mind and body in a society that demands you be instantly identifiable and ready for judgment based on appearance.

The symbiosis between body, emotions, identity and appearance is still deeply mysterious to me. There is a delicate feedback loop here, which in a society hooked on images of perfection and technologies of control is easily corrupted, its pathways turned back against us. The notion that our bodies make us who we are is twisted into an equation between our appearance and our self-worth. Feeling bad about our physical selves puts us on a fast track to self-hatred. When we're growing up and get caught at the body's surface, we never reach the place where intuition, feeling, and a sense of who we are live inside us, and our spirits never reach escape velocity. (Lee Damsky, "Beauty Secrets")

Overall, I enjoyed reading this compilation. However, I enjoyed Listen Up! more because I felt the diversity of topics helped create a stronger overall message. I realize that the entire point of this collection is that it focuses on body image but at times it was redundant.

Another quote that I marked:

In a women's studies class I took, we talked about the idea of women 'being' bodies rather than merely possessing bodies. A reading suggested that women were taught to separate their identities from their bodies, which distorted their self-image. (Allison Torres, "At Home in My Body")

I'm curious what the reading was that Torres refers to; I would be interested in reading it myself. Torres' essay focuses on her identity as an athlete, an identity that obviously would not be possible without feeling deeply connected to her body (and paradoxically, identifying the right times to separate her mind and body). Since I'm not an athlete myself, this was one of the essays that didn't particularly strike a nerve with me, however that one short quote caught my attention.

I do feel that women are taught to separate their identities from their bodies--more than that, I believe that women are encouraged to wage outright war with their bodies. The media provides no shortage of propaganda and the beauty industry provides an ample arsenal with which to alter our bodies into submission. This "war" wouldn't be possible unless women felt separated from their bodies, but I think that inevitably hatred toward one's body leads toward a more general self-hate that further prevents a unification of mind and body.

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

One of the subtleties that I immediately fell in love with in this book is the title. Not The History of Reading (although Manguel does postulate about the potential existence of such a book in his "Endpaper Pages") but rather A History of Reading. Because there are many histories of reading, completely dependent on the reader. Manguel realizes and celebrates this fact, jumping throughout history and drawing together writers and readers of seemingly disparate relations into close proximity, letting them share the page together based on an idea or a memory that connects them in his own mind. This is a thoroughly researched book, but it still reads like a memoir. Manguel writes in a way that is formal and educated enough to be "scholarly" but remains personal and oftentimes whimsical.

Manguel covers a lot of ground, from hard facts to fleeting impressions, and there's a lot of information here to be processed! I got this book from the library but will probably buy my own copy so I can read it again and make my own notes to go back to (something I rarely do, but I feel like this book invites such scribbling).

I found this quote hilarious, from the chapter "Stealing Books." It's an inscription in a book from the library of the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, attempting to deter people from stealing it:

For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.

Well then, if that curse doesn't cure your case of sticky-fingers, I'm not sure what will!

At the end of the chapter entitled "The Missing First Page," Manguel quotes Kafka:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

And in the last section of the book, "Endpaper Pages," in which Manguel describes an imaginary tome of The History of Reading, he writes a passage that seems to aptly pay respect to his own admiration of the individual reader:

And yet, in its apparent randomness, there is a method: this book I see before me is the history not only of reading but also of common readers, the individuals who, through the ages, chose certain books over others, accepted in a few cases the verdict of their elders, but at other times rescued forgotten titles from the past, or put upon their library shelves the elect among their contemporaries. This is the story of their small triumphs and their secret sufferings, and of the manner in which these things came to pass. How it all happened is minutely chronicled in this book, in the daily life of a few ordinary people discovered here and there in family memoirs, village histories, accounts of life in distant places long ago. But it is always individuals who are spoken of, never vast nationalities or generations whose choices belong not to the history of reading but to that of statistics. Rilke once asked, 'Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we've always spoken about its masses, as if we were telling about a gathering of people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around, because he was a stranger and was dying? Yes, it's possible.' This misunderstanding the author of The History of Reading has surely recognized.

This was overall just such a fun book. Reading is usually a solitary activity, pursued in silence. But after finishing A History of Reading I realize that the community of readers, both contemporary and historical, share their experiences through that silence and simply by taking part in the legacy of letters on the page, each of us weaving our own "history of reading," contributing to a larger history of common experience, teeming with unique subtly for each of us who can relate to it.