Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 31

Diane Wynne Jones, Kate Milford, Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace & MORE

1. The celebration of Diane Wynne Jones continues - be sure to check the tumblr for updated links to all posts as they go live. If you missed it, the post at Finding Wonderland on Friday was amazing. Here's a bit:

At a time when books were not only a source of joy but an escape from feeling uncertain and new at school, from feeling angry and frustrated by the ongoing aftereffects of my parents' divorce a few years prior, I was more than happy to believe, to plunge headfirst into the adventures of Christopher Chant and Sophie and Howl and everyone else.

2. Kate Milford, author of the wonderful The Boneshaker, has a Kickstarter project for a novella sequel. (She has a companion novel, The Broken Lands, due out this fall from Clarion and the novella will serve as a bridge of sorts.) I'm a big fan of Kate's and think The Kairos Mechanism sounds pretty darn fantastic. Do go fund it if you interested in more rural fantasy with shades of steapunk, mystery and adventure tossed in. (Kate will be here for an interview in the SBBT in June where we will talk about the novella and The Broken Lands.)

3. And speaking of Kickstarter, have you heard about the Wollstonecraft comic? Mary Shelly and Ada Lovelace as girl detectives. If that doesn't bring a smile to your face then, well, then you are not my friend! ha! It's already crazy funded but go read about it and help Airship Ambassador do even more.

4. And it's Day #2 of the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou High School. Please help spread the word and if you can, buy a book for this school. Their funds are low, demand is high and the book fair is pretty darn vital. Making it a sellout would be a wonderful thing.

5. Now I'll finish writing my review of Nova Ren Suma's Imaginary Girls. WOW - what a book!!! (For the May column!)

The Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School is on!

Readers of Guys Lit Wire, the group review blog I moderate, will likely remember our efforts last year to build up the library at Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC. Melissa Jackson, the school librarian, posted a video of the library that showed the extreme dearth of titles in her stacks. In early 2011 they had less than one book for each student, which is particularly alarming when you consider the American Library Association is 11:1. Through our efforts and those of many others the situation at Ballou has improved and there are now two books for each student. While that is certainly a good thing, it is far far (FAR) from where the Ballou Library should be. So, Guys Lit Wire is back this spring with a new wish list at Powells Books and a new call to help Ballou.

Head on over to GLW to read the full post, and find out exactly how you can buy a book (or more) to help this DC school. There are a few extra hoops to jump through going through Powells, but as you guys know, I'm a big fan of independent bookstores and all of us support what Powells does for the city of Portland. It only takes an extra minute to order from them and is well worth the effort.

On the list this year you will find a lot of manga and urban fiction, some great nonfiction and several adult crossover titles. There is historical fiction and paranormal romance and all the big books of the past few months plus a lot of graphic novels and some wonderful poetry. Every book on this list has been vetted by Melissa and is a title that the school wants and/or needs. This is a big part of what makes the GLW Book Fair so unique - we aren't sending Ballou books we want to get rid of but purchasing for them books they want to have.

The point, after all is not to clean out our closets.

The fair will run two weeks or less if we sell out early. There are over 500 books on the list, with a few titles (the less expensive manga) requesting more than one copy. (They will get a lot of use!) There are plenty of sale titles, lots for less than $10 and most for less than $20. If you can't buy a book we ask that you do please help us spread the word as far as wide as you are able. This is a senior high school in our nation's capitol and we are a critical source of their books. This is not a vanity project folks, not something to make us feel good. This is about stocking the shelves in a way that would not happen otherwise and it's also, as Melissa has told me more than once, a way to show these kids that they matter. You want to change the world today? Buy a book for Ballou and do something that will make a lot of kids and one happy librarian believe in miracles.

I love this project, and I love everything about all of you who make it so successful. Thanks so much for helping us do a very good thing. :)

Yearning to be a bold girl - an appreciation of Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

This is the cover illustration of my [very tattered] copy of Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. I have had my copy for fifteen years, since I purchased it used at Gulliver's Books, my then place of employment, in Fairbanks. (Gulliver's is still open and still the farthest north independent bookstore in the US.)

Fire and Hemlock is one of my favorite books of all time and I was thrilled when I learned that it would be reissued this month along with two other DWJ classics. (In celebration of their return, I reviewed F&H in my current column at Bookslut.) As much as I am happy that a whole new generation of readers will be discovering these shiny new editions however (with intros including one by Garth Nix for F&H), my excitement about Fire and Hemlock is much more personal. Once upon a time I decided to take a chance and be brave about the rest of my life. Fire and Hemlock is the book I read just at that moment and DWJ is the author who made me believe - when I really needed to - that being brave was the right thing to do.

I found my copy of the book when I was shelving a ton of recently arrived paperbacks in the used book section. The cover is, well, it's pretty striking, right? It was the description on the back though that made me plunk down the $1 to take it home. How do you resist this:

Polly struggled with her own childhood memories. Memories that reached beyond the familiar walls of her home, beyond logic or imagination. Visions of fire, of hemlock, of an old mansion and an eerie funeral procession clouded her thoughts and lured her into the dark heart of an elusive other world. A world where childhood fantasies had become all too real. Where an evil woman regal as a queen had trapped a man in her spell. And where Polly alone held the key to his freedom from the seductive web of....Fire and Hemlock.

Well I had to find out what the heck was going on with Polly!

From the very first pages it is clear that our nineteen year-old heroine, packing up for another year of college, has forgotten some critical parts of her childhood. Everything in her past seems normal, bland, predictable - nothing to suggest she has something to forget. She lives with her grandmother because her divorced parents are each a bit of a disaster. Her boyfriend, Seb, is entirely acceptable if a little smug and her future is bright if a bit pedestrian. There is nothing remarkable about Polly, except what she is starting to remember that she has forgotten and very quickly those memories prove to be startling, strange and everything anyone who ever yearned for adventure could want from a life. (Whew!)

I loved Polly. No, wait - I LOVE Polly.

She is Nancy Drew and Harriet the Spy and stubborn in the best way that Mary Lennox could be. She had moments of Buffy-like toughness and Rory Gilmore-like steadfastness and she is Meg Murray when she faces down IT. Polly strays where she should not, peeks in at what she shouldn't see and listens at doorways and notices things. She crashes a funeral in her Harriet the Spy moment and that sets her on a path with a musician named Thomas Lynn. Her conversation with him brings his complicated and dangerous associations into her life and little by little, over the years, she and Mr. Lynn become great friends (even though they meet when she is a child). It is clear that something bad is coming after Mr. Lynn and Polly finds herself in the midst of it all. What happens to him, and how she ends up forgetting their friendship, are the issues that drive the plot forward. It's complex and thoughtful and full of enormously appealing characters and then - and then - Diana Wynne Jones gives readers such a splendid and just right ending, that it makes me smile every time I read it. It's not sappy but real, in fact Fire and Hemlock, for all that it is mythic fiction and a retelling of both the ballads "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Tam Lin", is one of the realest books I've ever read.

All of this is why in 1997, when I left an aviation career behind and took a job as a clerk in a bookstore while also enrolling in graduate school, it was the book I needed most. I didn't feel very brave in 1997, only tired and a bit desperate. The one truth I had was that everything was not right in the life I was living. Reading Polly's story, seeing her ask all the hard questions and fight for honest answers, gave me a little bit of something to believe in.

The good stories can do that you know. They make you believe in so much; they can even make you believe in yourself.

[See also Dogsbody and A Tale of Time City both out with their equally gorgeous covers and introductions by Ursula K. Le Guin and Neil Gaiman. And be sure to check out the many other DWJ celebration posts around the web, gathered at the DWJ 2012 tumblr. (Tomorrow if Finding Wonderland!)]

Lost birds, lost passages, lost childhoods and lost explorers

With all the traveling there has been a lot of reading in fits and starts but very little finishing. This is where I'm at right now:

Books Recently Read

The Conjurer's Bird by Martin Davies. This was a reread and remains one of my favorite books of all time. I like the mystery but more importantly I adore the characters and the history (it doesn't hurt that I've long been a Joseph Banks fan). Really really wonderful literary title.



Visiting Sunny Chernobyl by Andrew Blackwell. For Booklist so I can't say much but boy - did I ever learn a lot about the world's most polluted places! (And those oil sands that the Keystone pipeline is all about? I'm now officially not a fan.)

What I'm Reading



Burton & Swinburne in Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon by Mark Hodder. I read and reviewed the first two books in this series and find them to be very enjoyable alternate history/adventure/steampunk titles. (I also have long adored the explorer Richard Burton so again, this is a no-brainer.) One of my upcoming columns will be adventure titles, or maybe "tales that takes us to distant shores" or something like that. Not sure. But somewhere, Burton & Swinburne will fit.



An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer. I'm only about 60 pages in but enjoying it and finding it, in an odd but endearing sort of way, similar to Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai. (I hesitate to make that comparison as the narrative structure is very different and Samurai has such a strong cult following, but I couldn't help think of it while reading. Perhaps it is the notion of a quirky parent educating a precocious child.) I hope to have a column on schools or learning in the coming months. Again, not sure but I'm aiming for that with this title.

(I'm also planning on a column about carnivals in the future and something about adventures out of this world and really....I am rarely so scattered about future columns but I keep picking up books that don't fit into a single theme and thus I seem to be all over the place at the moment. At some point it shall - must - come together.)



The Other Side of the Ice by Sprague Theobald. For Booklist, about a filmmaker taking a pleasure boat through the Northwest Passage.

Stand Up That Mountain by Jay Leutze. For Booklist, about the struggle to save a mountain in N. Carolina from mining.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. I'm a big fan of her writing and I have this one noted and underlined all over the place. For the next book I'm thinking a lot about escape and getting lost and thus Solnit is right up my alley. In a passage about Conquistador Cabeza de Vaca who was lost for years in what became the southern US, she writes: "...he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else." That applies so much to what I'm working on that it's not even funny. It makes me think I'm on the right track and so, with some relief, I'll keep moving forward.

Report from Fairbanks

The event in Fairbanks went fine and was followed by a surprise review in the Sunday paper. (I am accepting the few factual errors although referring to the Company as a "bottom feeder" is certainly sigh-worthy.)



Sunday I flew out from Fairbanks to Anchorage with an old friend in the captain seat of the 737 on Alaska Airlines which was very cool. Because of fog in Anchorage we took our time going south and got crazy close to Denali (aka Mt McKinley, largest peak in North America). It's actually eight miles off the wing but so big it looked a lot closer. This was the kind of view most folks dream of so I'm pretty happy to have seen it. (My husband actually had the FAI-ANC flight for years with the commuter he worked for and used to fly past the mountain all the time. He saw climbers on a few occasions with was very cool.)



Over the past week I met with a bunch of folks, received assurances that books will be ordered to replace those sold (sold out more than once), and got the word out pretty much as best as I could in the state's metropolitan areas. Now we regroup and think about contacting some smaller town bookstores and getting back into the Pacific NW and other areas. (I'm especially thinking about more aviation-centric locales.) All of this has been quite interesting and made me think about writing and publishing from a whole different perspective. I met many frustrated authors this past week, all of whom have written amazing (award winning) books but can't seem to get noticed by the public. It's so hard to cut through the noise, but I made a good stab at over the past six days. Now back to writing, reviewing and, coming soon, the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School!

Report from Anchorage Part 2

Wednesday night I spent in Anchorage at a lovely Hilton where around midnight the couple next door began engaging in some very loud and graphic "relations". I called the front desk to complain and they quieted down....for about 20 minutes. I called the front desk again and they quieted down....for about a half hour. The third time they got going not only was she yipping and barking (I'm not kidding) but he started spanking her and she replied with cries of joy and begging for more. At that point I asked for a new room. (The desk clerk said they promised both times they were going to sleep. Liars.) So at 1AM I was downstairs in my pajamas getting a room key for a room one story further up and all the way down the hall from my original one. Finally, blissfully, no more noises!!!!



Thursday went much better. The event at the Aviation Museum went great, folks had questions, books were sold and the museum plans to continue carrying my book in the future and would like to have me back. Success! From there it was on to Fairbanks arriving that night at 8PM and back into winter. It's all melting but there is so much snow. I was shoveling today. (I can't believe I just typed that.) Summer can't come fast enough.

Tomorrow is my last event, this time at a place where I used to work in front of a hometown crowd. These are the folks who know me and my story better than just about anyone; I'm really looking forward to it.

[Post pics: The Aviation Museum is on an active taxiway for Lake Hood - aircraft have the right-of-way; The mountains behind Lake Hood; Pulling into the house in Two Rivers, Alaska - which looks a lot more welcoming in the summer.]

Report from Anchorage

The tally so far is four radio interviews and two events (one in Juneau and one in Anchorage). Both events went really well - about twenty people at each, (fewer in ANC) tons of questions (more of those in ANC) and books were sold aplenty (seriously). Both bookstores are happily planning to continue stocking the book and both managers were delighted with how things turned out. So thus far all with the tour is going quite well and it is proving to be a most worthwhile endeavor.

Plus I'm having a ton of fun which is what matters most! ha!



Anchorage is in heavy break-up season right now so I'm afraid it does not look nearly as spectacular as Juneau. I did want to post these two pics of Lake Hood though, so you could get an idea of what it looks like. This is the busiest seaplane airport in the world (!) and these planes are just parked up on the banks of the lake. You land, taxi over to the side and park your plane and get out and hop into your car. It's all pretty cool and certainly unique. Of course you can't really appreciate it all with so much snow, but the lake is there, promise! (The dark part in the second picture is the road I was driving on.)

Tomorrow is an event at the Aviation Museum and then I'm off to Fairbanks where the weather is turning dramatically and I'm looking at the 40s. Yea!

Report from Juneau

It seems like no one ever writes casual travel diaries anymore. We have an entire box of postcards that were sent to my great grandmother by family members (starting in the 1920s) and I love them. Granted they aren't true travel diaries (there is only so much you can convey in a postcard) but they are still fabulous. So here is my travel diary, which starts with Juneau where I arrived yesterday.

Juneau is our state capitol and a former gold mining town on the water and surrounded by mountains and glaciers. It's pretty spectacular scenery-wise (as you can tell from the pics) but still looks like a frontier town on the ground. (It's built right up against the hills so you have rows and rows of houses that are generally accessible only by steps - so it's like living on a boardwalk all the time!) (without sand or bikinis though).

Yesterday I had a radio interview (it will be broadcast in a week and a half). I have two more interviews today (one is about the event tonight, one is about the book) and this evening I have a slide show & signing for the local bookstore. I am most excited about that and hopeful that I will connect with the bookstore folks so that they will share MAP with their customers and the tourists who come through here every summer.

Hopeful hopeful hopeful!

Last night I had dinner with my old friend Katrina and her husband as well as Juneau author Lynn Schooler. Lynn's most recent book, WALKING HOME, won the 2010 Banff Mountain Festival Book competition for Mountain Literature and it's a great title that manages to blend some Alaska history and a Tracy Kidder "HOUSE" vibe about carving a place out for yourself plus a serious personal hiking adventure. (And he is prepared!!!) We talked about books and publishing and facebook (Lynn posts a photo a day for Juneau - you should friend him for some amazing pics). We talked about frustrations with the business and still doing the writing while trying to figure out the selling. It was a very good time.

Tomorrow I head for Anchorage which also has amazing mountains; we shall see what I can find with my camera there!

[Post pics of an actual glacier (!) and "Sandy Beach" which is where part of the old gold camp is still present and you can see some serious mountains. Juneau is just across the strait.]

A pile of periodicals (among other reading...)

What I'll be taking along on the AK tour:

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. Love her writing and find the idea of getting lost to be particularly prescient for a current project.



An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer. For a column - possibly - down the line. (It's an adult title so I don't know yet if it will work for teens.) I am planning to write a column this summer set around going away to school (high school and college) so we'll see if this one fits.



Stand Up That Mountain by Jay Leutze on a fight to save a mountain on the Appalachian Trail from mining and The Other Side of the Ice about a family sailing through the Northwest Passage. Both of these are for Booklist so I can't say more but based on the subjects, I'm looking forward to both.

And a stack of magazines because they are (in my opinion) perfect airline reading. I'm packing along Audubon (migration and Maple syrup!), Rolling Stone (Jennifer Lawrence on the cover), Oxygen (so every time I feel like eating crap food I'll be reminded this is not a good idea), two back issues of Publishers Weekly (keeping my eyes peeled on what I might have missed), National Geographic Traveler (Cuba!), and Elle UK (pretty) and probably People because when all else fails, it is the go-to magazine for the center seat in coach*. (SIGH).



* I may not succumb to this lure of People and instead veer in the direction of Oprah. I don't think I have ever flown without reading Oprah. We shall see what happens.



** I am not taking National Geographic or Smithsonian because my son is too afraid I will lose them. I am both delighted and bummed about this.

Juneau, rocket engines, big snakes and Ms. Gwenda Bond presents...

1. Jeff Bezos says he has found the Saturn V rocket engines from Apollo 11 - wicked cool doesn't even begin to describe this one.

2. Titanoboa!!!! (I've already preordered the Smithsonian DVD for my son.)

3. The Juneau Empire has a [short] excerpt of MAP up online. I'll be in Juneau on Monday so it's nice to see them spreading the word already. (Two radio interviews while I'm there - kinda nervous about those....)

4. The AK tour is the reason why I've been largely absent this week. I'm still messing around with the my slide show and a zillion other little things. I will be getting in a few posts while I'm traveling and tweeting photos. Be sure to follow me if you want to see some shots of mountains and moose and everything else I see.

5. My pal Gwenda Bond has revealed the cover for her upcoming YA title, Blackwood. I love it so much I had to include it here - can't wait to read this one (or Strange Chemistry's other fall titles).