Thanks so very much to the Dundee Library of the Fox River Valley Library System for hosting me last Wednesday... I thoroughly enjoyed my visit and hope all who attended did so as well!
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Looking forward to my appearance at the Dundee Public Library, part of the Fox River Valley Public Library District, on Wednesday, September 17th at 7 pm. At least, I think this is what it looks like. For an experienced Google searcher, it was definitely tough to find an image of this library.
It's here... First Sunday... in football terms. Okay, so the Seahawks already slaughtered the Packers last Thursday... which brought much pleasure to those of us in Chicago... but today is the real beginning of the season of scientifically planned mayhem and strategically plotted violence. So, of course, we must celebrate that with a list of books that celebrate its charms and expose its rancid underbelly. A highly subjective top 5 list of pigskin prose#5. The Opening Kick-off: the Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation by Dave Revsine How else to open a sports season but by looking at its history? Revsine focuses primarily on college football, providing a thorough and exhaustively researched look at the origins of the sport and its development, particularly the years from 1890 to 1915. Not surprisingly, the issues over which people are wringing their hands today -- the "professionalizing" and "merchandizing" of student athletes -- were the subject of serious discussion and histrionics back in the day as well. Football has always been seen as public relations tool and a moneymaker for colleges. This book lays bare the birth pains of a monolith. Fun fact: Before the rise of college football, strenuous physical activity was regarded as boorish, but football quickly became popular on campuses in the mid-19th century, especially among Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale. Go, eggheads! Reminds me of the cheer we had at the University of Chicago: Themistocles, Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, X squared, Y squared, H2SO4 Who for? What for? Who we gonna yell for? Maroons! Maroons! Maroons! (or Morons, Morons, Morons, if the team was having a losing season, which was often the case...) #4. Paper Lion by George Plimpton Totally old-school memoir of how a famous journalist, editor of the Paris Review, legendary interviewer of Hemingway, talked the Detroit Lions into letting him join the team as a back-up quarterback... and the hilarious consequences that result for both Plimpton and his teammates. In 1963, Plimpton joins the team for training. The rest of the players think it's kind of strange that this tall and skinny dude is always jotting down things in a notebook between plays and while walking the sidelines. When his secret literary identity becomes known, he's teased mercilessly, but he stays with the team and plays on, failing miserably on the field, but writing excellent prose about the foibles, faults and ferocity of this American football life. #3. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Homeless kid in Memphis, one of 13 children of a crack-addicted mother, gets placed in a Christian high school and then adopted by a wealthy white family. Stuff of fiction? Stuff of popular movies for which actresses win Oscars? Well, no and yes. It's a true story and yes, Sandra Bullock did win the Academy Award for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family. However, the book goes beyond the sad, compelling story of Michael Oher to plumb the depths of structure of football and shows how the rise of the modern passing offense led, in turn, to the increasing emphasis on the defensive pass rusher and the quarterback sack, which, in turn again, led to the rise of the left tackle, the offensive lineman whose it is to protect the quarterback on the so-called "blind side." #2. Friday Night Lights by H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger If you live in Texas, where football is nothing less than a religion, Friday night is as sacred as Sunday morning. Or maybe the whole weekend is sacred: Friday night for high school football, Saturday afternoon for college football, and Sunday for the NFL. Bissinger puts high school football under the microscope and reveals the appalling mania that seizes students, teachers, parents, town officials and the general population of one specific Texas town: Odessa. Odessa's fortunes rise and fall with the energy industry, but the Permian Panthers are its pride and joy. #1. Scoreboard, Baby: a story of college football, crime and complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry Rape, armed robbery, attempted murder, drug deals... with all their off-the-field activities, one wonders how the players on the University of Washington's 2000 Rose Bowl-winning team found time to practice. They were a Cinderella team with a golden-boy coach who had been lured by trunkfuls of money to jump-start a once-storied program that had fallen into mediocrity. An excellent expose of a sordid story that, only 14 years later, seems commonplace at many educational institutions across the United States, which might be more truthfully called large football stadiums with colleges attached, to paraphrase a line from the 1925 film, "The Freshman." If this is what it takes to win, give us honest and lovable losers. For fictional look at the brutality and camaraderie of the football field, you can alsoqwq1 read Chapter 2 of my novel, The Things We Save, in which Claire and her beloved brother Joey suffer the consequences of engaging in a forbidden game of football in the family living room...
It's a little disconcerting to hear a character that you've created called "unlikeable," even if you have used those very same words to describe that character (hastening, of course, to soften the harshness of it by adding the qualifier "at times"). Like a prodigal child, it would be a sad character indeed whose author did not love him or her unconditionally. I admit I love all my characters, even the particularly nasty ones. I suspect that is because each contains at least a sliver of my own personality. That being said, I would not expect a reader to love them all and there are at least one or two who should provoke feelings of, if not hate, then at least intense dislike, however momentary and however much the reader reminds him or herself that "this is only make believe." (Although characters in novel often bring to mind people that we know and love/hate in our very real lives -- at least if the author has done her job.) It's also a bit disconcerting because these judgments seem to come much more heavily on female characters than males. Roxane Gay wrote an excellent essay for BuzzFeed on this very topic: Not Here to Make Friends. The debate rages between the pro-likeables and the pro-unlikeables, with well-thought arguments on both sides, but one fact seems to be established: we love our difficult men (Don Draper, Hamet, MacBeth, Charles Foster Kane to name a few); women, not so much. But I myself am in a light-hearted mood today, after having spent an absolutely exhilarating evening with a book club made up of lovely ladies from Des Plaines, IL. Listening to their insights and takes on the characters in my book reinforced my belief that what the reader brings to and thus takes away from a story is just as important, if not more, than what a writer puts in. Reading a book is a conversation; it always goes two ways. And that's thrilling. So I decided to approach the "likeability" factor with a touch of humor (I hope). After all, I want you to like me! So, based on my opinion that: 1) my not-so-darling character Claire Sokol has her flaws, but that those flaws make her very human; and 2) there's at least a little bit of Claire in almost every human being on the planet; I have created a quiz on Playbuzz.com so that you may take to find out just how "Claire" you are! For most of my life (the better portion) I've shared a home with at least two cats. (Yeah, sometimes more -- what's it to ya?!) Cathy, a wayward calico that wandered her way into my childhood was my first cat. A month later she delivered a litter of kittens and the house on Clyde Avenue became cat haven/heaven. I persuaded Mom (the arbiter of these decisions) to keep two: Irish and Red. Later, there was Lucky (who survived an attempted drowning) and Augie (rescued in the month of August, hence his name, from similar abuse at the hands of a band of sub-human creatures that resembled tween-age boys). When I established my own household, Tess and Mac became apartment dwellers with me. Two cats just seems right, despite the stereotype that cats are loners who prefer the solitary hunter's life. Hey, Crosby Stills and Nash immortalized the notion in song: "Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard..." Of course, mine are always confined to the inside of the very fine house... when you lose your first cat under the wheels of a speeding car, you never forget... On the other hand, maybe it's easier to lose a cat that way, suddenly, at the hands of someone else... rather than have to hold its life in your own hands. Lily and her sister, Jade, arrived in 1997. June 13th. A Friday. But these little kittens, a calico and a tabby, littermates adopted from the DuPage Animal Care and Control, were anything but bad luck. They were signs of jittery, skitter, playful, thriving life in a summer of death: my mother in July, Princess Diana in late August, Mother Teresa days later in early September. One thing I've noticed in this practice of keeping dual (and sometimes dueling) felines, is that one will inevitably have personality traits similar to my own...and the other will be the opposite. Lily was definitely the alpha cat in this pairing, and it was she who was my alter ego: lean, slightly neurotic, snappish on occasion, but loyal and loving in her own way. She liked it quiet and didn't cotton to strangers, being the first to flee at the ring of the doorbell and the last to emerge... and then only to peer cautiously around corners and from under chairs, scoping out the intruders from a safe distance. Lily always went her own way. Lily passed most of her time lately sleeping. When she was up, she was usually wandering around the house, caterwauling, ever more crotchety, nipping at legs and toes, apparently suffering from something called feline cognitive dysfunction as well as a general decline in health. And yet still loving and loyal, in her way. The way she'd squinch and blink her green-yellow eyes, saying "I trust you... I love you" in the way cats do. She was seventeen years old, which is about 84 in human years. I spent the better part of the past year hoping that I would wake one morning to find that she had passed on, joining her sister, keeping her body's own timetable, saving me from having to make the decision. I spent a lot of time being angry at her for getting old and angry at myself for not being able to deal with everything that meant. I didn't think I would cry as much as I did. I lost a soulmate yesterday. Crazy hair and an interview... Thank you to Susan Dibble for a great article! And to photographer Paul Michna for making me look good, even though I had just walked in from the pouring rain!
What's it like for an author to sit in on a book club discussion... of her book?
Since I have a particular affection for alphabet books, I will describe it thusly: Amazing...Bizarre...Constructive... Delightful... Enlightening... Female-centric... Gracious... Heartwarming... Insightful... Joyous... Kitschy... Literate... Memento (Mori and otherwise)... Nice ... Observant ... Piquant... Quixotic ... Reader(ly) okay I made this word up ... Strange ... Touching ... Undeniably fun ... Vivacious ... eXhilarating ... Youthful ... Z(definitely did not put me to sleep!) Thank you so very much to the Liberty Belles Book Club of Wheaton, Illinois for inviting me to your meeting. It was simply out-of-this-world to listen to you discuss my characters and their motivations. I learned a lot about how to connect to a reader just by listening to your comments. I will forever treasure the experience! No, Orion wasn't physically in the studio with me as I chatted with Steve Bertrand on Books, but maybe he was there in spirit. Thanks, Steve, for an amazing experience! Listen to the full interview here.
My daughter, the former speech team member, will chide me severely for all the "up-speak" in the initial few minutes of this interview. I will claim nerves at the onset. Many thanks to Brian O'Keefe of WDCB Radio of the College of DuPage for making me sound like a reasonably intelligent and coherent human being. Which, on certain days, can be quite a feat!
WDCB Interview |
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