Currently Reading: House Rules

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is when people make inaccurate allusions to music. In my sophomore year of high school I derailed my English teacher's argument because he said that something "builds to a crescendo." Impossible, and if you know what a crescendo is in music, you would know why.

This book is written partially from the perspective of a teenager with Asperger's, a disorder on the autism spectrum. At one point he describes his condition as being like a piano with only black keys, the notes that nobody wants to hear (or something along those lines). First of all, the black keys are absolutely necessary to all music- if there were no black keys everything would sound the same. Second, even if there were ONLY black keys, the notes would sound quite familiar as the five pitches represented by the black keys, when played in succession, created a pentatonic scale. You may not know that most music is based around the pentatonic scale. SCHOOLED.

Then, later, Picoult writes as the ASD boy, "it makes me think of my meltdown--of the room with no windows, no doors, the country where nobody speaks to each other, the piano with only black keys. Maybe this is why funeral dirges are always in a minor key..." supposedly implying that black keys only come together to make music in a minor key? In fact, the pentatonic scale that the black keys would play most closely resembles a major scale. SCHOOLED AGAIN.

No, I'm not a music teacher, why do you ask?
Schoolingly,
A.

Thoughts on Jodi Picoult

"...'parenting' isn't a noun but a verb..." (House Rules, p.118)

Actually, Ms. Picoult, it is a gerund which is a verb functioning as a noun after having had "-ing" added. So please....give me a break. "Parenting" is the noun form of the verb "to parent."
This was a terrible analogy.

Apologies if you enjoy Jodi Picoult's writing. I just don't.

Cynically,
A.

Currently Reading: House Rules

My second Jodi Picoult, and I have already noticed some Disney-ish similarities between the two, most notably that one of the protagonists is a single mother of a troubled child (or children), and another is a young-ish bachelor, who has been burned beyond repair by the love of his life.

Huh. I don't know that I will read many more of her books- I am only reading this one because it makes reference to the traumatic event that happened in my high school mentioned in my last post.

Jodi, get creative! Don't reuse the same archetypal characters over and over.
Tritely,
A.

Finished: Nineteen Minutes

Title: Nineteen Minutes

Author: Jodi Picoult

Genre: Fiction

What did I like about it? It hit very close to home. A viscerally appealing novel, it details the years and moments leading up to and following a high school shooting. The date of the fictional shooting is March 6th, 2007, less than two months after a fatal incident at my own high school. On January 19th, 2007, a student was stabbed and killed in a bathroom in my high school (ironically the one day of my high school career that I turned off my alarm instead of snoozing it, waking up to a whole bunch of text messages at 8:15am saying, "What is going on?" because the whole school went into lockdown). So the sentiments shown in the community were very real to me -- even though in this book there are ten casualties and in my town there was just one, and in this book the attack was a retaliation whereas in my town the poor freshman who died was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter the circumstance, something like that absolutely tears a community into pieces. We came back to school the following Monday wondering how we would go on, just like the students from the high school in the book.

What didn't I like about it? The writing. God, the writing was boring and trite. It wasn't bad, per se, but it was just like every other okay writer. The writing made me want to put the book down, but the story was motivating and my connection to the story even more so.

Would I recommend it? Sure. If you like something that is gripping and you aren't interested in thinking too much about literature, pick up a book by Jodi Picoult. In fact, any of her books would suffice. This is the only one I have read start to finish but the deal seems the same with each of her books: great story-line, "trying too hard" type writing.

Rating: what have I been doing this out of, four stars? Okay, I will give it two-and-a-half. Enough that I would never swear off a book by this woman, but not enough that I will go out of my way to read something of hers or even spend money on it. Meh.

-A.