This Week's Non-Related Reading: Elise Gravel's The Worm

Worms don’t have eyes, the eyed worm in Elise Gravel’s The Worm tells us.  Worms also don’t wear berets, drive garbage trucks, or are so gosh darned cute, but that is besides the point… This is a fabulous book that strikes a nice balance between entertainment and education—always good in a book for this age group.  Our narrator the worm wears everything from a beret to a pair of spectacles, and seen in all sorts of decidedly un-worm-like conditions (when was the last time you saw a worm driving a garbage truck?).  And the illustrations and lettering are absolutely gorgeous.  At the same time, it gives kids the chance to learn some new words like ‘invertebrate,’ or ‘hermaphrodite’**—all helpfully drawn in larger, bold, and otherwise eye-catching letters.  

It’s part of a larger series called Disgusting Creatures, though the narrator does try to tell the reader that worms are not disgusting!  Unless you plan on eating them, in which case, yes, they are disgusting and please do not eat me.  

‘Disgusting creatures’ are a good choice for edutainment—what child hasn’t let out a long, drawn out ewwwwwwwwwww when presented with something creepy, crawly, slimy, or sticky, only to be drawn in closer for a good poke?  This is the textual equivalent of a good poke, and just as satisfying. Also, I can imagine some kid, armed with both a love of grossing people out and a charming puerility digging out a worm and presenting it on some unwilling lap, armed with the knowledge that not only are worms slimy, but that some can be up to 115 feet long.  And isn’t that disgusting?  

Best out of context line: What? Delicious? No, no, no! I'm disgusting! I'm disgusting! 


Also, though I'm not exactly the target audience for the book, I'm glad I received it, because it led me to other work by the author/illustrator, Elise Gravel. And it's awesome!  Her blog is here.

I received this book as of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program. 

**Also, props to her for saying that some worms have both male and female reproductive organs. Not something sillily euphemistic, like they have both girl and boy parts.

This week's non-related reading: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

It's been too long since I read a books didn't have footnotes in it.  Ever since the semester ended, I've been trying something new-- instead of working on school-related stuff until I pretty much pass out from lack of sleep, this week, I've been spending my late evenings with Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays is Missing. 


It's a book that probably will not be terribly enjoyable for people who haven't read the other works in the series (which I urge everyone to do.  Go on, I'll wait. *surfs the Internet.  Makes a cake. Writes the next great American novel.  Does dishes.* OK, all done?  Good).  It's also a bit slower than the other books in the series, and the jokes seem a bit more forced this time around, but Fforde is a wonderful author, so even on a less-than-stellar book, the result is chuckle-worthy, even if it's not the same ohmygodicannotgotosleepuntilifinishthisbook that The Eyre Affair was.


The premise is, not terribly surprising, that Thursday Next, or, rather, a Thursday Next has gone missing, and another Thursday has to go and both find her, and find out why she's missing (though not in that order).  In the mean time, written Thursday meets up with a clockwork butler, an elephant with a long memory, a Designated Love Interest, and Unrequited Love Interest, and others.  Hijinks (formulaically) ensue.  Lessons are told, consequences are suffered, and everyone who was meant to lives happily ever after.


Not the best book in the world, and I doubt that I would have finished it if I hadn't had the great love of Fforde that I do.  But it did provide a nice counterbalance to reading about sodomy in early modern Italy, which was today's related reading.  I think I giggled more at the latter, but that's just because I am immature.

Review of Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie

Now that my papers are done, I can contain grad school related reading to the eminently manageable 9-5, and leave my evenings and weekends free for books without footnotes.  The last one I read was Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie, which I received as an early review copy from LibraryThing. I had received it a while back, but only managed to finish reading it tonight. And, I might add, I haven't had a cup of coffee all day.  But that's more because I forgot to bring my coffee from home to the library, so I wasn't able to brew my usual clandestine brew.  Although, a whole day without coffee, and I haven't bit off anyone's head yet.  This is good.


But, back to the topic at hand: here's is the review I wrote for the LT site:
Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie takes the reader on an adventure that takes the reader from the banks of the Thames, feet in the mud, and maggots wriggling between your toes; to whaling lanes of the Atlantic, covered in the blood and blubber of a whale killed to meet the then dwindling need for whale oil; to the islands in the South Pacific, peering over the edge of a cliff, and watching giant lizards, “a mess of the like eels slipping wormily over one another in a must tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag tailing festoons, the grinning head of which half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own” (134).  This horrific scene, a presage of things to come, is representative of Birch’s grand ability to weave words and create a rich tapestry of exquisite detai 

Our protagonist, the young Jaffy Brown, is only 8 when he is born for the second time, in the jaws of a tiger belonging to the London animal seller, Mr. Jamrach.  Jaffy becomes a yard boy in Jamrach’s menagerie, mucking out the stalls of every exotic animal that passes through nineteenth century London, and along the way, forming a complex friendship with another of Jamrach’s employees, Tim Linver. When Tim signs up on an expedition to capture a dragon in the South Pacific for Jamrach, Jaffy signs up as well, and the two boys join a whaling expedition, the last in a dying industry.  The whaling ship takes them  to ports of call all over the world, but finally to an island “neither big nor small, rocky green, high mountains of harsh brush jutting the sky above jungle and weeping bays” (123).  This is the island when they finally meet their dragon, even after catching their prey, the story is far from over.

Jamrach’s Menagerie is, at its core, a Bildungsroman, telling the tale of Jaffy’s harrowing voyage back to London.  Jaffy’s quest for survival leads him to understand the lengths to which people must go in order to survive, and leads him to understand why, despite its horrors, the sea holds such a sway over sailors who go, again and again, to sea. 

Random titbit of the day

One of this week's non-related* reading was Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.  It's a fine book, with a relatively straight-forward argument, that four-dimensionality was important spatially before it became important temporally.  Even before Einstein's relativity, artists were finding great inspiration in the idea of a fourth dimension, and Einstein's work represents the beginning of an end for these kinds of ways of thinking about the world, and not simply the beginning of some movement.  Or, at least that's what I think is going on.  At any rate, I think that the best part of my reading notes (and the most important thing I learned while reading) was this:  

"Dali came up with the visual idea for the watched in The Persistence of Memory while looking at a plate of camembert cheese, and in his The Conquest of the Irrational, he described the melted watches as “the extravagant and solitary Camembert of time and space.”  What the hell was this man smoking"

That, I'd say, sums up the level of critical analysis for my reading of the work.

*that it, non-related to anything I am remotely thinking about working on, but which I still read because I thought it was fun, or I thought it was useful, or I had to read it.