June Casagrande Minds Your Language

A grammar columnist tries to compete with authors of better books such as Woe Is I

Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite. Penguin, 199 pp., $14, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

June Casagrande is a snob about how unsnobbish she is. She says early in Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies that “the problem with language today is that the people writing the rules are such blowhards that not even they themselves can deny it.” Then she spends much of the book listing her own rules, which often make no more sense than those she dislikes. She insists, for example, that the short form of “until” is “till” not “’til.” Why? Just “check your dictionary,” she says. Why follow dictionaries on this one and not on issues on which she disagrees with some of them? And aren’t some dictionaries more trustworthy than others? “’Til,” she says, “just happens to be wrong.”

A larger problem with this book that good writing is about much more than grammar. And from her title onward, Casagrande trades on humor that is often snide, clichéd, or sophomoric. “Meanies come in many forms, not just human,” she writes of grammar snobs. “They can be not only animal, but also mineral. In rare cases, they can even be vegetable, but we’ll talk about William Safire later.” What’s the point of such a personal attack on the New York Times columnist? The tone of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies resembles that of a high school student who feels superior to but wants desperately to join the popular kids – a group that in this case includes Lynne Truss, author of the popular Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

One of the few well-known grammar authorities Casagrande does not attack is Patricia T. O’Conner, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of Woe Is I (reviewed on this blog on Dec. 30, 2006, and archived in the “How to” category), the best grammar book for students or people who have forgotten what they learned in the eighth grande. Casagrade may have spared Woe Is I because it comes from one of her publisher’s imprints. Or maybe she just realizes that it’s a much better book.

Best line: Casagrande makes some good points about frequently confused words such as “disburse” and “disperse.” She quotes a line from The Da Vinci Code: “His Holiness can disperse monies however he sees fit.” This sentence, she says, suggests that the fictional pope was “hurling fistfuls of euros from a hole in his Plexiglas popemobile.”

Worst line: Many of the worst lines are pointless jabs at other grammarians, such as the attack Safire. Others are sophomoric : “I had one college professor who was a bona fide jerkwad. It took me a while to realize that he was a bona fide jerkwad on account of the fact that I was a bona fide kiss-up.”

Editor: David Cashion

Furthermore: Casagrande writes the weekly column “A Word, Please” for several community news supplements to the Los Angeles Times. Unlike Woe Is I and other books on language, Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies lacks an index. So it’s often harder to find information there than in other volumes, especially if you want an answer to a specific question instead of broad guidance. If you’re looking for a good grammar book, visit Patricia O’Conner’s site www.grammarphobia.com.

Published: March 2006

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Chris Van Allsburg’s Birthday Book

The creator of The Polar Express returns with a tale with his first black main characters

Probuditi! By Chris Van Allsburg. Houghton Mifflin, 32 pp., $18.95. Ages 3 and up.

By Janice Harayda

Chris Van Allsburg is widely regarded, along with Maurice Sendak, as one of America’s two greatest living creators of picture-book fiction for children. Probuditi! shows again why he deserves his reputation.

A great picture book is as economical on every level as a poem. Nothing can be added or subtracted without diminishing it. And while many author/illustrators achieve either visual or verbal economy, Van Allsburg always gives you both.

Probuditi!(pro-boo-dih-TEE) takes place in an American factory town in the early 1940s. How do we know it’s a factory town? On one page, a pair of smokestacks appears in the background. They never reappear. But in Van Allsburg’s hands, those two are enough to suggest a place and a way of life. To evoke the 1940s, Van Allsburg doesn’t pile on period details, Norman Rockwell-style, or rely on the traditional sepia tones that can have a deadening effect on a book. He uses a warmer shade, burnt sienna, as the main color for pencil-over-pastel drawings rendered with a pointillist’s hand. This unusual tone sets the book in the past but makes it look fresh, not freeze-dried.

Van Allsburg applies his distinctive technique to a brisk and witty story that has his first black main characters. As a birthday treat, Calvin gets to see a theatrical performance by the hypnotist Lomax the Magnificent, who shouts “Probuditi!” (Serbo-Croatian for “Awake!”) to bring his female assistant out of a trance. Later Calvin tries to hypnotize his younger sister, Trudy, and to turn her into a dog. Trudy obligingly begins barking and attempting to scratch her ear with her foot. Calvin is afraid he’s headed for “big trouble” with his mother if he can’t return his sister to normal. But is Trudy hypnotized or just pretending? Some children may feel unsure. But one measure of a great book is that the more often you return to it, the more you see. And on subsequent readings children may see more than during their first encounter with Probuditi!. If they need help solving the mystery, the dust jacket of this book says, tellingly, that this is a tale “about getting even.”

Best line/picture:All. Children may especially enjoy spotting the china tea pot shaped like a bull terrier, a dog that returns in each of Van Allsburg’s books.

Worst line/picture: None. Some parents have objected to the pictures of a black girl acting like a dog. See the “Reader Reviews” section of the www.amazon.com listing for Probuditi! for a discussion of this issue.

Recommended … without reservations.

Furthermore:Van Allsburg won Caldecott Medals for The Polar Express and Jumanji and a Caldecott Honor citation for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. He has also written written 12 other picture books, including an alphabet book, The Z Was Zapped: A Play in 26 Acts.

Published: October 2007

Links: Van Allsburg’s Web site, www.chrisvanallsburg.com, is elegant but harder to use than many that attract young children. The text on some pages scrolls too fast to read easily, and I couldn’t slow it down. Van Allsburg’s page on the Houghton Mifflin site, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com, is easier to use and, in some ways, just as helpful.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. She reviews one or more books for children or teenagers every Saturday on the Children’s Corner on this site. The review of Probuditi! was originally scheduled to appear Saturday. To avoid missing reviews of children’s books, please bookmark www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com.

Who Writes Better Sex Scenes, Danielle Steel or Jim McGreevey? (Re-posted)

Why is this recent blog entry being reposted?

On Friday I was a winner in a contest on the literary blog GalleyCat www.galleycat.com that asked you to write a musical parody inspired by a book. I satirized The Confession by the former governor of my state James McGreevey in lyrics inspired by Cole Porter. This parody has been getting a lot of attention because of write-ups or links on Gawker.com and elsewhere, and many are visitors coming to this site for the first time because of it. (You can read some of the comments on my parody on the “Praise” page at left.) I am reposting this recent entry (archived under “Memoirs”) on the theory that some visitors would like to read more humor about McGreevey. Also I was a little surprised that this post didn’t get more attention when it first appeared. Am I the only one who thinks the Luv Guv sounds remarkably like America’s best-selling romance novelist? How come the Republican National Committee hasn’t linked to this post? Bet you can’t guess which lines below are by McGreevey and which are by Steel!

The Children’s Corner that normally appers on Saturday will appear on Sunday this week and will discuss Chris Van Allsburg’s Probuditi!. Thanks for your patience if you were expecting a children’s review.

Jan Harayda

Can you spot the red, white, and purple prose of the ex- governor New Jersey?

The Confession. By James E. McGreevey with David France. Regan/HarperCollins, 369 pp., $26.95.

Political analysts have not been kind to this memoir by the New Jersey governor who resigned and told all to Oprah after outing himself as a “gay American.” I believe that too many of them have ignored good parts of the book – the sex scenes.

When it comes to red, white, and purple prose, parts of The Confession rival anything in the work of America’s best-selling romance novelist. Here are a dozen lines, half by James McGreevey and half by Danielle Steel. Can you tell who wrote each? Answers appear at the end of the review.

1) “In spite of myself, I knew I would miss him. Who else would wear red spandex and lime green satin, not to mention the leopard G-string?”

2) “I tried to sit up, but he was lying on top of me, and I couldn’t. ‘Oh, shit, what happened?’ I could hardly get the words out, and wondered if all my ribs were broken.”

3) “But I had to admit as he massaged my shoulders and rubbed my back, it was incredibly relaxing. And after a while, in spite of myself, I sighed, and rolled over on my stomach.”

4) “I stretched out on the couch and placed my legs out over his knees … I then leaned forward and hugged him, and kissed his neck. His response was immediate and loving, just what I’d fantasized about since we first locked eyes.”

5) “I pulled him to the bed and we made love like I’d always dreamed … boastful, passionate, whispering … ”

6) “It was an endless, breath-consuming, life-giving kiss.”

7) “We undressed and he kissed me. It was the first time in my life that a kiss meant what it was supposed to mean – it sent me through the roof.”

8) “Our first few times burned so fiercely in my mind I could hardly recall them even as we were still lying together. ”

9) “‘I love you … You make me so happy…. I’ve never, you know …’”

10) “’I love you. I don’t want to take advantage of you. I don’t want anything from you. Just you.’”

11) “He greeted me in his briefs. ‘Did anybody see you?’ he asked, closing the door quickly.”

12) “ ‘I’ve been waiting for you forever,’ he whispered back. ‘I didn’t know where you were … but I always knew you were out there somewhere.’”

Don’t lose heart if you couldn’t easily tell the prose of the ex-governor from that of the author of novels such as Passion’s Promise and No Greater Love. Could McGreevey himself tell the difference?

Best line: “One of the cardinal rules of New Jersey politics is, there’s no such thing as a private conversation. Governor [Brendan] Byrne once told me this, as though imparting a philosophical truth from the ages. ‘Somewhere along the line,’ he said, ‘you are going to be taped by someone wearing a wire.’ This is who so many political meetings start with a big bear hug – a New Jersey pat down among friends.” And you thought that only happned on The Sopranos.

Worst line: Apart from the sex scenes? Winner #1: McGreevey tells us that when he was visiting peep shows in Times Square and picking up gay men at Parkway rest stops, “taking Holy Communion every week helped me remain Christ-centered.” What was he like when he wasn’t so “Christ-centered”? Winner #2: The cover of the book says that McGreevey “lives in Plainfield, New Jersey, with his partner, Mark O’Donnell, and daughter Jacqueline. “McGreevey’s ex-wife Dina says in the December 2006 issue of New Jersey Monthly that Jacqueline lives with her in their Springfield home and stays with her father every other weekend. “The inaccuracy has since been removed from the website of the publisher … as well as from Amazon.com and the Barnes & Noble website,” Denise Di Stephan writes.

Editors: Judith Regan and Calvert Morgan

Publication: September 2006

FYI: Perhaps the best short review of The Confession by a close observer of New Jersey politics is columnist Paul Mulshine’s “McGreevey Confesses, But We Do Penance” in the Sept. 21, 2006, Star-Ledger. Mulshine analyzes the claims the ex-governor makes in the memoir about his record and concludes that “the book is proof that McGreevey remains as much in denial about his political life as he once was about his personal life.”

Answers to quiz: Lines from the novels of Danielle Steel: 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, and 12. Lines from The Confession: 4, 5, 7, 8. 9, and 11.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #2

Jane Yolen on the the importance of landscape in fiction …

“Too many writers ignore landscape, to their peril. Perhaps the problem is their lack of visual acuity. We are unpracticed in the art of looking …

“Many authors know this about landscape: that it is the setting or background for their characters. But the better authors realize much more. Place can be shorthand (or longhand) to explain a hero or villain: Think of the difference between the living green forest of Ents and the Orc-made desert of Modor in The Lord of the Rings.

“Better writers also know that landscape can be metaphor, can be a parallel to their characters’ lives, can become central to the action, can even be a character in itself.

“Think of R.L. Stevenson’s Davie Balfour, striding across the harsh, Highland countryside, becoming a man. The territory he treads helps to shape him.

“Think of the uncompromising sea through which Captain Ahab plows and how it defines him, creates him just as the whale Moby Dick ‘tasks’ and ‘heaps’ him.

“Or how the rough island on which Robinson Crusoe is marooned is the making of his soul.”

From “An Eruption of Poppies ” a chapter on the importance of landscape in fiction in Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft (Cincinnnati: Writer’s Digest, 2006), by Jane Yolen. You’ll find a review of Take Joy in the post below this one on One-Minute Book Reviews www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com and more information about Yolen’s books at www.janeyolen.com, her excellent Web site.

Comment from Janice Harayda …

What Yolen says is true even when the “landscape” is a town- or cityscape. Jane Austen’s characters are shaped by their country towns as much as David Balfour is shaped by the Scottish Highlands in Kidnapped. What role does landscape play in your favorite novels and short stories? You may want to leave a comment about this on this site.

Jane Yolen: Advice to Writers From a Nebula- and Caldecott-Winner

One of America’s most versatile authors says that it’s not writing but a focus on publication that makes writers miserable

Take Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft. By Jane Yolen. Writer’s Digest, 202 pp., $14.95, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Like Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Yolen is one of those writers who seems to be continually outpacing her reviewers. She has written or edited nearly 300 books of fantasy, science fiction, and folklore, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and she has won literary honors that include Nebula and World Fantasy awards. But she may be best known for Owl Moon, which received the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished picture book for children.

Now Yolen has written a guide for writers in the spirit of Anne Lamott’s popular Bird by Bird. Take Joy blends lively reminiscences with down-to-earth advice on topics such as coping with rejection, creating memorable beginnings and endings, and writing in your own voice. An especially strong chapter deals with how to structure a plot. There could hardly be a more basic or important topic for writers of fiction. Yet the question of how to develop a plot is, remarkably, ignored or slighted by most writing guides. And Yolen’s advice is as simple as it is sound. Make sure there’s “always something going on,” she says, then gives 15 pages of specifics on how to do that.

The last pages of Take Joy take on a valedictory tone as Yolen writes about entering her final decades: “Aging is oppositional,” she says. “The soul reaches for higher things as the rest of the body succumbs to gravity.” But she ends hopefully: “If I had another life to live, I’d run for high office. Or learn to paint. Or take acting lessons … But I chose writing early, as well as poetry and music. Enough for this lifetime, enough to take me into the winter with plenty to do.” Her admirers can only be grateful that she decided to let others have the Senate seats and Helen Mirren take home the Golden Globe awards.

Best line: “I contend that it is not the writing that makes writers miserable. It is the emphasis on publication.”

Worst line: Yolen urges writers to avoid taking rejection letters personally and instead to learn to live with them. So far, so good. She adds: “Even hang them up in your room as I did with one from John Ciardi, who was poetry editor at The Saturday Review. Thankfully, he sent it after a few of my poems had already been taken for publication elsewhere, or I might have considered taking up horse training as an occupation.” Ciardi wasn’t “thankful” when he sent that rejection letter.

Published: 2006 Jane Yolen has an outstanding Web site www.janeyolen.com that is beautifully designed, informative, and comprehensive, with pages for writers, teachers, and children. Her site includes more than 200 links to others and a journal in which she explores the connections between her life and work.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Delete Key Awards for Bad Writing in Books

Yes, the National Book Critics Circle will announce the names of the finalists for its annual awards on Saturday. And the American Library Association will reveal this year’s Newbery and Caldecott Medal winners on Monday.

But only the Delete Key Awards tell you which books to avoid, not which ones to read. Don’t get burned by another bad bestseller! Watch for the names of finalists for the Delete Key Awards, which recognize the worst writing published in books in 2006 … coming soon to One-Minute Book Reviews. To nominiate a candidate, leave a comment on this site.

Charles Frazier’s ‘Thirteen Moons,’ Misbegotten

The author of Cold Mountain serves up a dish of lard-fried cornmeal mush

Thirteen Moons: A Novel. By Charles Frazier. Random House 422 pp., $26.95.

By Janice Harayda

Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washingon Post that Thirteen Moons is “even longer and even duller than Cold Mountain.” That about sums up this dish of lard-fried cornmeal mush, served up against the backdrop of the lush Appalachian wilderness in the 19th century.

Charles Frazier found much of the inspiration for this novel in the life of Willam Holland Thomas (1803–1893), a remarkable lawyer and Indian rights advocate who organized two companies of Cherokee to fight for the Confederacy. So he had rich material to tap for what is essentially a fictionalized biography, though he rejects that label.

But Frazier squanders his research on a bloated story full of digressions and sentimental pieties. Reading Thirteen Moons is like riding a slow mule through the mountains with a guide who keeps stopping to describe every river, cove, and bush along the way. Throughout the novel, Frazier shows a better feel for the landscape of the Appalachians than for his characters. Much of his slender plot hinges on a girl whom his narrator, Will Cooper, allowed to get away in his youth and who preoccupies him into his ninth decade. But Frazier reveals so little about Claire that it’s unclear why she plays Moby-Dick to Will’s Ahab and he can’t give his heart to another of the attractive women he meets after becoming a well-known lawyer, senator, and Confederate colonel.

Thirteen Moons also shows little sense of pacing or conflict. Scenes have the same emotional weight whether they involve a fighting duel or frying cornmeal mush in lard. Frazier is clearly not a man who shares Lillian Hellman’s view that any sentence beginning with “I remember” is too long. In one gassy paragraph he gives us, “I’ll set the record straight,” “my recollection is,” and “to the best of my remembrance.” The more words he piles on, the less clear he becomes. He tells us that a character dug in the dirt with “the tines of his stubby and spatulate fingers.” Did he mean that the man’s fingers had tines, perhaps sharp fingernails? Or that he used his fingers as tines? Don’t the connotations of “tines” (sharp) clash with those of “spatulate” (flattened)? The novel is full of such lines, overwritten to the point of opacity.

What is the theme of all this? Will reflects late in life that most of us “reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year,” one many Mitch Albom–like pseudoprofundities. The line might sound deep. Perhaps it’s true of some people. But how many 80-year-olds do you know who would say: “Yes! Shoot me next month! Just give me back that acne! That curfew! And that summer job at McDonald’s!”? Such romanticism drives the entire novel. And if you share Frazier’s world view, you may love Thirteen Moons. If don’t, you won’t find much comfort in it, except perhaps in a line near the end. In old age, Will says he has learned that “journeys all eventually reach a conclusion.” So, too, does this book.

Best line: A description of a house in the Indian village of Cowee: “That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dead floor, but Charley could not remember exactly whose bones had rested near as a lover beneath his old sleeping platform.”

Worst line: “There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We’re called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end.” These are the opening lines of Thirteen Moons and perhaps the worst beginning of a novel by a well-known author since Norman Mailer had a dangling modifier in the first sentence of Harlot’s Ghost.

Furthermore: You can find a biography of William Holland Thomas by searching for his name in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and other helpful background on the events in Thirteen Moons by searching Wikipedia for “Cherokee Trail of Tears,” which the novel refers to by its formal name of the Cherokee Removal.  www.wikipedia.org

Published: October 2006

© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day, #1

“Many of the great 19th-century novels have plots so outrageously implausible that a freshman in a creative writing class would be flunked out for suggesting anything like them. Dickens was one of the worst offenders. Genius though he was, he reveled in cases of mistaken identity, farfetched coincidences, look-alikes, hidden documents. In Bleak House, one of the plot points involves a character bursting into flames by spontaneous combustion. Even Dickens must have felt uneasy about that one, since he felt obliged to defend it, in his preface with supposedly scientific data.”

Lloyd Alexander in “The Grammar of the Story,” one of 22 essays in Celebrating Children’s Books: Essays on Children’s Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland (New York: Lothrop Lee & Shepard, 1981), edited by Betsy Hearne and Marilyn Kaye. Alexander won a Newbery Medal for The High King.

The Creators of Madeline, Curious George, Mike Mulligan and Other Beloved Children’s Book Characters Talk About Their Work: Books I Didn’t Finish, #2

Second in an occasional series of posts that explains why I didn’t finish certain books

Title: Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: Writings on Their Lives and Works. By Miriam Hoffman and Eva Samuels. Bowker, 471 pp., varied prices.

What It Is: A collection of essays and articles by or about 50 of the most admired children’s authors or illustrators of the 20th century. Among them: Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeline), Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon), Virginia Lee Burton (Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel), Beverly Cleary (Ramona the Pest), Virginia Hamilton (Zeely), Margaret and H. A. Rey (Curious George), Scott O’Dell (Island of the Blue Dolphins), and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are).

Where I Stopped Reading: After several chapters. I read the introduction, an article about Dr. Seuss, an essay by the Reys, and a couple of other entries.

Why I Stopped: What I read was good. But I’m trying to finish Thirteen Moons, and it’s like riding an extremely slow mule through the mountains with a guide who wants to stop to describe every river, creek, and bush he sees along the way.

Best Line In the Parts I Read: “This is the funniest book I ever read in nine years,” a 9-year-old wrote to Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Another child said: “All would like it from age 6 to 44 – that’s how old my mother is.”

Published: 1972. This book is out-of-print, so you’d have to track it down through libraries or online or used booksellers.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Starbucks Raises Its Opinion of Your Reading Level: From Mitch Albom to Ishmael Beah

Beah wrote better in high school than Albom does in middle age, an essay on the site for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation suggests

Good news for serious readers: After Feb. 15, the Starbucks coffee shops will be selling Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone instead of Mitch Albom’s For One More Day. Beah’s book hasn’t arrived in stores yet.

But the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has posted on its site www.wagingpeace.org “When Good Comes From Bad,” an essay that Beah wrote as a student at the United Nations high school in New York. In this poignant piece he tells how he lost his family and was forced to join the army in Sierra Leone after the civil war in his country came to his town he was 13. Beah packs more emotion and drama in this 1,124-word essay than Albom does into all For One More Day. And while Microsoft Words readability statistics show that Albom is writing at a third-grade level, Beah was writing seven years ago at the level of grade 7.5.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.