In addition to the numerous fine things that I learned at this year’s UELMA conference, I had the great luck of receiving copies of the shortlists of the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees. These lists were a key acquisition because all of the elementary librarians in my school district need to hurry and order these books with what’s left of their budgets before this year’s budgets are frozen, BUT WE HAVEN’T KNOWN WHICH BOOKS TO BUY.  It was therefore imperative that I obtain this information.  I succeeded, with one exception: I only went to the elementary session of CLAU’s presentation, so I did not get my hands on a copy of the young adult fiction list.

In the hopes of rectifying this oversight, I checked the CLAU web site, the UELMA web site, and the UELMA conference wiki, but none of these sites are yet endowed with such a list.  It turns out that the people of the Children’s Literature Association of Utah, although great at picking out their nominees and booktalking them at the conference, aren’t that quick at updating their web site.  Well, that’s okay, neither am I.  Getting desperate, I then consulted my friends Google, Bing, and Twitter, in the hopes that some insider or fanatic had posted this info on their blog or tweeted about it, but the only semi-relevant hits these engines gave me was someone’s beehive-2011-long-list shelf on Goodreads, and one guy’s tweet from UELMA.  It turns out that Utah’s school librarians aren’t exactly Twitter fanatics.  A true librarian, unlike the wanna-be librarian that I am, may point out that it is less effective to choose these popular search engines when researching information.  However, I stand by my methods, as I have little faith that any database or resource on Pioneer will help with this research problem at this point in time.

It was at that point that I realized something. Because there is apparently nothing out there about these new nominees in the electronic world, if I were to publish the lists here on my blog (purely as an informational/journalistic service, of course), I would possibly become one of the top search results for “2011 beehive nominees,” and also I myself would become that fanatic that I was searching for.  This has proved to be an opportunity I can’t pass up, so, without further ado, here are the 2011 Beehive Book Award Nominees in every category except for young adult fiction. If anyone out there in bloggie land has that young adult list and feels like sharing, holla back in the comments. YA nominees now added! I hope that CLAU doesn’t blacklist me from joining now that I have scooped their own website.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

2011 Beehive Children’s Fiction Award Nominees

• 11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass (Scholastic)
• The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill (Front Street)
• Binky the Space Cat by Ashley Spires (Kids Can Press)
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Henry Holt)
• Extra Credit by Andrew Clements (Atheneum/Simon & Shuster)
• The Leanin’ Dog by K. A. Nuzum (Joanna Cotler Books)
• Me and the Pumpkin Queen by Marlane Kennedy (Greenwillow)
• Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta (Alfred A. Knopf/Yearling Books)
• Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown)
• The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (Bowen Press/HarperCollins)

2011 Young Adult Book Nominees

• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen (Viking)
• Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gartz (Dial/Puffin)
• The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Simon & Schuster / Atheneum)
• The Compound by S.A. Bodeen (Feiwel & Friends / Square Fish)
• *The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan (Alfred A. Knopf)
• *Eon: Dragoneye Reborn by Alison Goodman (Viking / Firebird)
• Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith (Putnam / Speak)
• Musician’s Daughter by Susanne Dunlap (Bloomsbury)
• My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison (Walker & Co.)
• Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George (Bloomsbury)
• Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger (HarperTeen)

(* = “mature readers”)

2011 Picture Book Nominees

• The Apple-Pip Princess by Jane Ray (Candlewick Press)
• Birds by Kevin Henkes; illustrated by Laura Dronzek (Greenwillow)
• That Book Woman by Heather Henson; illustrated by David Small (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
• Chicken Cheeks by Michael Ian Black; illustrated by Kevin Hawkes (Simon & Schuster)
• The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen (Candlewick Press)
• Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal; illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle Books)
• Higher! Higher! by Leslie Patricelli (Candlewick Press)
• Just What Mama Needs by Sharlee Glenn (Harcourt)
• Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Hegamin; illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera (Houghton Mifflin)
• Tsunami by Kimiko Kajikawa; illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel)

2011 Informational Book Nominees

• 14 Cows for America by Carmen Deedy and Thomas Gonzalez (Peachtree Publishers)
• Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone (Candlewick Press)
• The Boy Who Invented TV: the Story of Philo Farnsworth by Kathleen Krull and Greg Couch (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Darwin by Alice McGinty and Mary Azarian (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children)
• Down, Down, Down: a Journey to the Bottom of the Sea by Steve Jenkins (Houghton Mifflin)
• George Washington Carver by Tonya Bolden (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
• Life in the Wild: George Shaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mermaid Queen: the Spectacular True Story of Annette Kellerman, Who Swam Her Way to Fame, Fortune & Swimsuit History by Shana Corey (Scholastic)
• Nic Bishop Frogs by Nic Bishop (Scholastic)
• You Never Heard of Sandy Kofax? by Jonah Winter and Andre Carriho (Schwartz and Wade)

2011 Poetry Nominees

• Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow)
• The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry edited by Bill Martin Jr. (Simon & Schuster)
• Button Up: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle (Harcourt)
• Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian
• Far From You by Lisa Schroeder (Simon Pulse)
• A Fuzzy-Fast Blur: Poems about Pets by Laura Salas (Capstone Press)
• Partly Cloudy: Poems of Love and Longing by Gary Soto (Harcourt)
• Truckery Rhymes by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster)
• The Underwear Salesman: Jobs for Better or Verse by J. Patrick Lewis (Ginee Seo Books)
• Whiff of Pine, Hint of Skunk by Deborah Ruddell (Margaret K. McElderry)

As you may or may not know, I am a wanna-be school librarian. As such, Friday I had the opportunity through my work to attend the UELMA conference (Utah Educational Library Media Association) at Mountain View High School in Orem (“Family City U.S.A.”), Utah.  This was my first time attending such a conference, and I actually enjoyed it.  My boss won an award based on a nomination letter that I drafted (well, and maybe partly based on all the great things he’s done for libraries in our school district that made it easy to draft said letter).  Plus, I got paid to be there and I got a free lunch out of the deal.

Examples of things I learned

• All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with.  This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
• It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book.  Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps.  This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
• Not every session you attend in a conference is great.  This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing.  I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid  the whole time.
• Perhaps most importantly for my current job, I learned  how to steal MARC records from the Canadians.  (Thank you, Summer Cornelius of Hurricane High School.)

So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience.  Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.

(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

So, this was going to be the year when I finally got my act together and published a nice bunch of reviews of my favorite albums of the year by the end of the year. Turns out it’s not going to happen, as I got dumped on this December with snow, work, family stuff, and, most recently, preparing to move.  So, no plethora of album reviews for you, but I will try to do better next year. I figured the least I could do is put together some lists of favorites, even if I can’t provide much of any context, description, or justification for my choices.  Here are my favorite albums of 2009, arranged in an arbitrary manner most convenient to my purposes.

Fifteen Favorites:

1. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
3. Holiday Shores: Columbus’d the Whim
4. M. Ward: Hold Time
5. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast
6. Woods: Songs of Shame
7. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
8. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
9. Passion Pit: Manners
10. Caetano Veloso: Zii e Zie
11. Mormon Tabernacle Choir: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
12. Kurt Vile: Childish Prodigy
13. Girls: Album
14. Atlas Sound: Logos
15. Ganglians: Monster Head Room

Five EPs:

1. Neon Indian: Psychic Chasms
2. Abe Vigoda: Reviver
3. Deerhunter: Rainwater Cassette Exchange
4. Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
5. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

A Trio of Great Rock Albums:

1. The Dead Weather: Horehound
2. Dinosaur Jr.: Farm
3. Sonic Youth: The Eternal

Two Magic Albums:

1. Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic
2. Memory Tapes: Seek Magic

A few other albums I feel are worth mentioning:
(alphabetical by artist)

• Crystal Antlers: Tentacles
• Dan Deacon: Bromst
• Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
• Harlem Shakes: Technicolor Health
• Heartless Bastards: The Mountain
• Little Dragon: Machine Dreams
• Mos Def: The Ecstatic
• Small Black: Small Black
• Wavves: Wavves
• Wilco: Wilco (the album)

Enjoy.

Disclaimer: Of course, these lists are only a frozen instance of my musical taste at this moment in time.  I reserve the right to add to or take away from them at any moment in the future, as I discover new music that came out in the past year, or discover upon repeated listens that an album is much better than I thought it was, or much inferior to what it initially sounded to me.

Tip: A great place to listen to virtually any album for free (completely legal, too) is lala.com.  They will let you stream a song or an entire album all the way through one time to try it.  I’m not bothering to link all these up there, and there are of course many other ways to check out new music, but I just suggest it as a great way to test out music.  You can buy perpetual streaming rights there for super cheap, as well ($ 0.10 a song, or $ 0.80-1.00 an album).  I don’t receive any compensation from lala.com, I just think it’s a great web site.  I hope that Apple/iTunes doesn’t ruin the things I like about them.

An Album Review

Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!

Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009

Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!

A Book Review

Cameron is an aimless, sarcastic stoner who is alienated from his family and has no real friends of which to speak. When he starts having hallucinations and loses control of his body a couple of times, everyone assumes he must be using hallucinogenic drugs. Not true: after getting fired from Buddha Burger, getting suspended from school, being forced into therapy by his parents, and having a run-in with a flaming toaster oven, he is finally diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. “Mad Cow”) disease. It will deteriorate his brain and kill him.

It is at this point when things get interesting. A pink-haired punker angel, complete with combat boots, torn fishnets, and actual feather wings spray-painted with graffiti, appears to Cameron in his hospital room. She urges Cameron to escape the hospital and undertake a quest to find the mysterious Dr. X, a traveler through dimensions who has inadvertently brought dark energy back with him to our universe. It is this dark energy that is attacking Cameron’s brain, not Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and if he can find Dr. X and get him to close up the wormhole, he will not only find a cure for himself but save the universe!

What follows is a kaleidoscopic adventure full of quirky characters and a million plot twists and details. The book is stuffed with a mess of references, touching on everything from Norse mythology to Star Wars, quantum mechanics to MTV Spring Break. Best of all, some of the hippest “references,” such as the legendary mystical free jazz trumpet player Junior Webster, are actually entirely made up by the author. While the book at times reads like both a Percy Jackson title for the 17+ crowd and Paper Towns on acid, Don Quixote looms large in the background and the idea of living out one’s life in a week’s time hearkens back to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Hilarious, weird, life affirming, surreal and ironic, above all Going Bovine is just a whole lot of wacky fun. (four stars)

[Flags: this book depicts drug use, pervasive profanity, and an irresponsible and somewhat ridiculous teenage fantasy sex scene. I hate sex scenes in books in general, and this one specifically knocks a half-point off my rating and makes it a definite “high school only” title. But really, if a dying teenage boy actually is dreaming his way through the end of his life, among other things of course he is going to dream himself up some sex, so maybe it can be forgiven?]

Going Bovine
Written by Libba Bray
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
496 pages
ISBN: 978-0385733977
Release Date: 22 September 2009
GoingBovine.com
Libba Bray – Official Website

A Book Review

I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you’re gone and there’s no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It’s all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

(When You Reach Me, page 2)

Miranda is finding notes addressed to her in the most obscure of places, asking her to write a letter. The note writer says he is coming to save the life of Miranda’s friend, and her letter will help him do it. Stranger still, the cryptic predictions included in the notes are starting to come true. Meanwhile, Miranda is just trying to get through life as a latchkey sixth grader in New York City. Sal, her lifelong best friend and neighbor, gets beat up randomly by a kid neither of them know, and afterward tells her he doesn’t want to be friends with her anymore. Now Miranda must focus on troubles such as trying to make new friends and avoiding the crazy homeless man that hangs out at the mailbox around the corner from her house. Placing the mysterious in the midst of the mundane, Rebecca Stead gives us a down-to-earth story of the home and school life of a twelve-year-old girl, interwoven with intriguing science fiction and mystery elements.

Young readers will immediately identify with the believable voice of Miranda, particularly as she navigates the tough social world of sixth grade. In fact, all of the characters are engaging and fully-realized. The storyline is extremely enveloping. Smart, shifting narrative that jumps forward and back in time keeps the clues and ideas coming without revealing too much. However, what puts this book into the running for greatness is that the day-to-day interactions of Miranda with her friends and her mother are just as captivating as the bizarre happenings with the notes, and often the notes totally escape your mind, just as they do Miranda’s. The realistic and the speculative are on entirely equal terms.

It could be easy to take for granted just how perfectly When You Reach Me fulfills the dictates of a great children’s novel. The book is clever and intricate, but not confusing. It introduces many big ideas and morals, but in small and subtle ways. It’s a relatively high interest read, and yet it also could hold up to the scrutiny of any elementary upper grade language arts curriculum. For the quality of this book and its likely ability to please young people, educators, and parents all at the same time, it seems like a serious contender for the Newbery. Indeed, search the Internet and you will find many people saying so. Unfortunately, it’s possible that such a little book could be smothered by the hype that has preceded it and that this review further promulgates, as new readers may come to it with unreal expectations. Remember, it’s not a book unlike anything you’ve ever read, it’s not a grandiose fantasy, and it’s probably never going to sell five million copies and give rise to a series of blockbuster movies. It’s just a little novel done extremely well, which turns out to be a rare thing. (Five Stars)

When You Reach Me
Written by Rebecca Stead
Wendy Lamb Books / Random House
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-385-90664-7
Release Date: 14 Jul 2009
www.rebeccasteadbooks.com

A Book Review

Kate DiCamillo can render vivid and stunning scenes with simplicity. She can create heartbreak with a single sentence. She can lead you line by line through a story and have you hanging on every word. Her seemingly magical mastery of tone is perhaps unparalleled in contemporary children’s literature. The problem with DiCamillo comes when one recognizes that she could potentially use this incredible linguistic power to enchant the reader with any story, however poorly plotted or characterized. Mesmerized by the charisma of her written word, we may not even realize that we were actually reading a very silly book. Now, I’m not saying that The Magician’s Elephant is a silly book. I’m just saying that I am so drawn in by DiCamillo’s writing style that it doesn’t really matter what tale she’s telling, I want to read and hear the whole of it.

So, the tale at hand: Peter Augustus Duchene, an orphan boy in an imaginary European city, is sent to the market with money given him by his guardian, an aging, ailing soldier. Instead of buying bread and fish, he gives the money to a fortune teller. She informs him that his deepest hope is true: his sister is alive. Furthermore, in a perplexing and cryptic instruction, the fortune teller counsels Peter that an elephant will lead him to his sister. Two days later, a magician, performing before the rich and noble of the city, intends to produce a bouquet of lilies for the audience. Instead, in a burst of hubris, he calls forth an elephant. It crashes through the roof of the opera house and lands in the lap of one Madame LaVaughn, permanently crippling her legs. The magician is imprisoned, and the citizens of the entire city, most especially Peter, become obsessed with the portentous pachyderm, very much still in existence but hidden in an undisclosed location in the city. A succession of short scenes given from the perspectives of numerous characters, including the hapless elephant herself, moves the story towards some magical eventuality that promises to provide something great for everyone, i.e., a happy ending.

My only complaint with the story is that, unlike the endings of traditional fairy tales, DiCamillo perhaps spreads the happy ending too thin between too many characters; many of them do not seem to have passed through the extreme magic-curse-based ordeals which are usually required to earn a fairy tale ending. Instead, they have passed through more realistic ordeals: disease, loneliness, guilt, poverty, etc. In a relatively short book such as this, these trials and burdens don’t necessarily impress themselves as strongly on a reader as, say, being pursued by a man-eating giant or being forced to live in a castle with a monster. The magic displayed in the book is as out-of-the-ordinary to the characters in the story as it is to us; DiCamillo clearly wanted this magic to happen in some place resembling the real world.  Even the elephant, who the other characters look to as a magical being, does not consider herself magical and is as confused and powerless as anyone to the magic that has occurred.  She’s just an elephant that has suddenly found herself in a strange, cold place without friends.   DiCamillo is quoted on the back flap of the book as saying, “I wanted, I needed, I longed to tell a story of love and magic.” It may be that the book, although dealing with magic, is more a fable than a fairy tale; all along the way, we read scenes that illustrate despair and hope, empathy, perseverance, charity, and forgiveness. Perhaps the magic DiCamillo so longs for the reader to see is nothing other than love itself, and thus it is only appropriate that she would want to spread it around to as many characters as possible.

Stylistically, as well as story-wise, DiCamillo walks the line between fairy tale, fable, and magical realism. The book is filled with beautiful, imagistic scenes and dreams that are described with the succinctness and surrealism of prose poems. The magical elements are reported matter-of-fact-ly alongside the many realistic elements of the story. Cold, overcast skies and snow storms are so vividly realized, right down to the footprints of the elephant in the snow, that the reader more readily identifies with what the characters are feeling. Sly authorial interjections do occasionally pop up in the text, (“And what did the magician say? You know full well the words he spoke,”) but they do not seem to be as pervasive as they were in Desperaux. For better or for worse, this time around we don’t receive any of the author’s idiosyncratic definitions (although there certainly are a lot of new vocabulary words for young readers in this book.) As in her other books, the strong built-in storytelling voice lends itself to a great read-aloud experience.

All in all, we have another magical little book from DiCamillo. Is the story ridiculous? You know full well it’s ridiculous; all fairy tales and fantasies are. It is nonetheless a beautifully rendered and engaging book, filled with fables of hope, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and love that will speak to children and adults alike. Four-and-a-half stars.

The Magician’s Elephant
Written by Kate DiCamillo
Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4410-9
Release Date: September 8, 2009
www.themagicianselephant.com
www.katedicamillo.com
www.yokotanaka.com

A Book Review

Nayeli, a recent high school graduate who works at a taco shop/internet cafe in the tiny tropical town of Tres Camarones in Sinaloa, Mexico, arrives one day at a startling realization: there are no men in Tres Camarones. Her own father, formerly the only cop in town, left several years ago for the fabled United States, and so did all the others. Not only do Nayeli and her girlfriends have no one to date and eventually marry, but now they have no one to protect them from the bottom-feeding narcos and bandidos who, anxious for their own territory, have recently moved in on the remote, defenseless village. Watching The Magnificent Seven at the local movie house, Nayeli is inspired with the solution to the plight of Tres Camerones: she will travel North to “Los Yunaites” and round up her father and other able-bodied men to return to Mexico and save their village.  So, with support from the village, Nayeli and three friends begin their hilarious and harrowing journey through Mexico to Tijuana and eventually, hopefully, to the United States, where they expect to quickly enlist seven Mexican “soldiers and policeman” to repatriate and save their village in short order.

This book is at once a winning comedy and an epic adventure tale of a journey into mysterious, dangerous lands (such as Tijuana, Las Vegas, and the Colorado Rockies).  It is also injected with striking moments of social realism, depicting the poverty and desperation of both those who cross the borders and those who stay behind.  It provides a fascinating outsiders’ perspective on the United States as well as a Mexican perspective on border-crossing and immigration. Having read and loved several instances of Americans on adventures or misadventures in Mexico (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses / Border Trilogy and Kerouac’s On the Road), it was refreshing to read of Mexicans on an adventure in the exotic United States.

This story is filled to overflowing with endearing, memorable and quirky characters (examples: Nayeli’s formidable Aunt Irma, nicknamed La Osa (“the she-bear”), in her younger years a Mexican bowling champion, now running for mayor or Tres Camerones; and Atómiko, a self-made samurai warrior and superhero refuse picker of the Tijuana garbage dump who gives new meaning to “trash talk.”  The mood of much of this book is such that Jared Hess (writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) just might be an ideal choice as director of a film version.  Though the characters are amusing and likeable, many of them are a little bit one-dimensional.  The characters’ lack of depth holds the novel back from perfection, but is serviceable enough in a comedic adventure context.

Although marketed as an adult novel, the book might have great appeal to teenage readers because of the age and sentiments of its protagonists, its humorous and exciting storyline, and numerous youth culture references.  Indeed, I almost wonder if, had this been Urrea’s first novel, a publisher might have marketed it as a young adult book. The cover art, though tasteful, does not seem to properly represent the book’s lighthearted tone and contemporary, adventurous story, and was probably designed to visually tie the book to Urrea’s successful adult novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which I have not yet read.  It appears as though, in attempting to market this book to Urrea’s existing literary audience, they may have missed out on a potential new and different audience in teenagers.  Furthermore, a quick survey of Internet reviews suggests that, because of this marketing misstep, some readers expecting “serious literature” have been turned off by the comedic elements and simple characterizations, two things that may actually work in its favor as a young adult book.  All in all, I think I would actually recommend this book first and foremost as a book for teenagers; it would be at home in contemporary YA literature.

[Note: the book does contain some explicit language and, of course, an irritating, not-really-necessary and not-entirely-condoned but nonetheless-apparently-obligatory-in-contemporary-literature sex scene. Unfortunately, it's nothing out of the ordinary even for YA literature.]

In her search for heroes, Nayeli becomes the true heroine of the story, her journey rife with ordeals, excitement, distractions, and sorrows. She saves the mission and their lives on numerous occasions, and after trying the hard and dangerous way, always manages to find the help they need in the most unlikely of places and people.  The tragicomic, foreign, and fresh view of both Mexico and the U.S.A. that Urrea portrays through the journey of Nayeli and her companions will stay with the reader for a long time.  Four stars.

Into the Beautiful North: A Novel
written by Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown and Company
342 pages
ISBN: 978-0-316-02527-0
Release Date: May 19, 2009
www.luisurrea.com

I absolutely love music, but apparently I do not often respond to its performance with prescribed, socially-sanctioned behaviors.   Although I have vague memories that, at least in the context of compulsory elementary school performances, I may have actually been a decent dancer and furthermore that I may have actually enjoyed dancing, I don’t dance at all. I might occasionally take the liberty of nodding my head or tapping my feet to some music, but that would most likely be in the privacy of my own home, or the false privacy of my own car.  My preferred stance for watching a musical concert is to sit or stand, probably with my arms folded. Symphony or jazz performances work out pretty well for me, but moving beyond those genres I am kind of at odds with the rest of the audience.

This stoicism with regards to musical performances has given me much social trouble and internal anguish for many years (cue the sorrowful strings and/or alienating electronic soundscapes). The first time I remember being cognizant of my socially-maladaptive-live-music-behavior was at a Yes concert my friend and I went to in high school. Even at that time, I was given to understand that going to a Yes concert as a teenager in 1996 was a somewhat nerdy thing to do. And yet as it turned out, I was far too cerebral even for this crowd. Throughout the opening set, played by none other than The Alan Parsons Project, (APP, as I have just monikered them, is the 80s band famous for “Sirius,” that dramatic arpeggio synth/guitar intro that they use to announce the home team players at every Utah Jazz game ever played, that also, when played on the classic soft rock radio stations, leads directly into their proto-Radiohead/Coldplay song “Eye in the Sky,” featuring the chorus, “I am the eye in the sky / Looking at you-ooh-ooh / I can read your mind?”  That’s the Alan Parsons Project, and you’d better believe I saw them do it live), this fifty-year-old drunk guy sitting next to me was absolutely spazzing out, dancing, yelling, and swinging his arms all over the place. He inadvertently hit me a few times, and every time he did this and saw that I didn’t really appreciate it I received remonstrations from him and his wife for just standing there and not dancing or being more excited. Apparently I was not simply allowed to freak out and have a seizure over The Alan Parsons Project as they performed their opening set, but I was expected to do so. Also, apparently I’ve never enjoyed life.

Fast forward through the years, and I’ve only gotten worse in regards to correct concert behavior. A year or so after that Yes concert I saw Pearl Jam play a huge benefit concert at High School Memorial Stadium in their home town of Seattle. Pretty cool, right? I haven’t told you how at this General Admission concert, with plenty of room everywhere, I was sitting far, far away from the stage up in the bleachers of the stadium. Also I have not disclosed that I was sitting next to my parents in those faraway seats; they came not for even the slightest love of Pearl Jam or rock music, but because while on family vacation they wouldn’t let me go to a concert by myself in a strange town. Not wanting to destroy my hopes of seeing my favorite band (at the time) perform, they insisted on coming with me and were extremely nice in their paranoid over-protection. To be honest, though, I’m not sure if my behavior at that concert would have been any different had I been there by myself. I may have wandered around the stadium a bit more, but I’m not sure if I would have dared descend to the field in front of the stage where all the action was, among all the people who really “loved the music.” The concert was alright. The sound was tinny, I could barely see the band, and Eddie embarrassed me by swearing a whole bunch in front of my parents, which was kind of lame.

Since then, I have pretty much never gone to concerts. Like I said, I do love music. I have daydreamed and conjectured as to how certain songs or bands sound when played live. I’m curious to see how people manipulate their instruments, and how their voices sound live. I even made this list about a year ago, after finally going to see one of my favorite bands (Broken Social Scene) perform live at a free concert.

But when artists whose records I have pined over for years roll into town, I suddenly find that I am not that interested in going.  I fear that they may not live up to my expectations.  I don’t have anyone to go with, or I don’t know where the venue is, or I am afraid I won’t know how to navigate all the weird private club business in Utah because I never do it otherwise, or I won’t act appropriately. I won’t dance when I’m supposed to dance. I won’t be wearing the right clothes. I’ll be too old, or too young. I won’t be drunk. I won’t be screaming at the top of my lungs. I generally just won’t fit in with the theoretical crowd of my imaginings.  I can think of tons and tons of reasons why I might be uncomfortable and not enjoy the concert, and these worries combine to ruin whatever positive experience I might have listening to the music and watching the musicians.

A case in point would be the aforementioned Broken Social Scene concert. They performed an outdoor concert at the Gallivan Center in Salt Lake City, part of the city’s free summer concert series. For years I had wanted to see BSS live. From what I had read in a couple of interviews and reviews of their concerts, I had intuited that certain songs that on their records featured inscrutable vocals buried low in the mix, or that had been otherwise remixed and deconstructed into oblivion, would be recast as dynamic rockers when played live. On this count my intuitions were correct: the Scene contrast their occasional “shyness” on tape with a robust, celebratory, collective performance. They interact with the crowd, they are good showmen, they have great energy and a strong collection of songs, and musically they have a looseness and a swagger, operating practically like a jam band without the long, tepid noodling. In other words, they are a great rock group.

But the crowd ultimately kind of ruined the concert experience. Before the concert started the people around seemed like good enough folks. There were people who looked to be regulars of the concert series, younger and middle aged couples, a few young families. Hanging around in front of the stage there were a lot of kids who may or may not have been hipsters, I really can’t say, but many were the type of kids that I imagine as filling up a Kilby Court concert (I’ve never actually been to one) and making me feel not very cool, clothed in what I intuited were the latest anti-styles (in this case a year ago it was v-neck t-shirts and tight girls jeans for the guys, unflattering retro-styled dresses for the girls).  These were the types of people one would expect to see viewing and enjoying this concert, and that’s great.  However, as the concert progressed we stayed in the same spot but everyone who had been around at the start of the concert seemed to have disappeared. In their stead were seething masses of high school kids that seemed to be there just to hang out and didn’t really care about the band or the music at all.  It was mystifying to me how quickly the concert mutated into a high school stomp.  There were tons of kids up in the front moshing and crowd surfing.  There were lots of thuggish kids moving through the crowds, oblivious to what was going on onstage.  These guys in front of us took their shirts off and performed dances that looked like aerobics routines, and random girls just came up and danced with them.  Where did they all come from and why were they there?

I enjoyed that concert, but over the subsequent months the memory of the crowd has worked on me to the point that I am afraid to go to a concert again.  When this year’s Gallivan Center concert lineup was announced, it included several of my current favorite musical artists, including Sonic Youth, who you may notice are prominently included on the above list I composed one year ago.  Would all those kids show up and try to push Sonic Youth into playing punk-pop like they were part of  the Vans Warped Tour?  (Not that Sonic Youth would cede to such a push; that may have been an interesting confrontational concert to watch.)  Would they try to crowdsurf to M. Ward’s easygoing folk-rock singer/songwriter stylings?  I was afraid to even find out.  Because of a busy schedule, but mostly out of fear of a negative experience, I didn’t go to any of these concerts this year;  not even my favorite Sonic Youth.  Chicken.

* * *

Last Friday evening I walked out into the backyard of my in-laws house, just to feel the cool, rainy air for a minute. After standing out there for a second, I noticed music emanating from somewhere in the neighborhood. It sounded very much like live, amplified music. This was intriguing to me, as my in-laws home is nestled in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, nowhere near any place that would be considered a concert venue. Furthermore, it seemed to be trying to rain, not necessarily the ideal condition for an outdoor performance. Curious, I walked to the front of the house to look for any indications of what was going on. I walked down the street, towards the source of the sounds. The cars parked up and down the street convinced me that it was definitely a party, but I still wasn’t entirely positive that they weren’t just blasting a CD out over a great sound system, because the music was spot-on. As you’ve probably determined by now, I’m not much of a partier, so I just walked around the block for a minute, listening to a really tight country-funk-southern rock groove and the sounds of someone absolutely killing on the electric fiddle floating around the neighborhood. There was no questioning at this point that it was a live band. The only question was, who the heck was this band and why were they playing someone’s backyard party in Holladay?

I went back to my in-laws’ house and found Gin, and asked her to come on a walk with me to see what she thought of the music and to see if she by chance would be able to figure out who these people were and what was going on. As we reached the house, she, being much more socially brave and nonchalant than I, pulled me along and we followed some guy through the garage of the party house and out onto a balcony deck, where we found ourselves overlooking a giant pool party and backyard filled with people of all ages. The band was set up beneath the balcony right by the side of the pool, and an advertising slideshow on a TV set up next to their equipment informed us that they referred to themselves as Bonepony. This seemed a familiar-sounding name for some reason.

So we stood up there on the deck and watched them for a few minutes. This was the first time I had ever crashed a party. At first I kept expecting someone to come and ask us who we were and be irritated at our presence, but the whole thing was very casual. Nobody paid us any mind. There were people playing around in the pool, some of them dancing to the music. There were people sitting in lawn chairs, watching the band. There were people standing in groups talking and drinking beers. I actually saw a guy come up to a woman and say “Do you come here often?” and he wasn’t joking.  At one point, the singer invited all the neighbors to come over, rather than call the cops.

Thinking about this house party concert, it is totally illogical to me that at this gig, which looked to be very much a party, rather than a concert, it was easy to just watch and enjoy the music without ridiculous distractions from other crowd members, and without any social pressure to get rowdy.  The crowd was not pushing one way or the other; everyone was able to do their own thing and enjoy the experience in their own way.  In contrast, many crowd members at several of the concerts I have attended attempt to hijack the concert and turn it into some wild party.  I guess what those great men once said is true, “You’ve got to fight for your right to party,” even at a rock concert.  I guess it turns out that while I look at a concert as an opportunity to hear and watch some music performed, many people take a concert as nothing more than an opportunity to dance, drink, goof around, grope somebody, whatever. The music and musicians that may be playing are simply incidental to the main purpose: to act like an ass. It turns out you can party to the Alan Parsons Project if you are loaded enough.  You can mosh or get crunk to Canadian indie rock collectives.  I suppose you can party to Sonic Youth or M. Ward.  I guess while you’re doing all of that, I can stay home and listen to my records.

[The title of this post comes from "Do the Standing Still," an entirely appropriate song that the Dismemberment Plan were nice enough to write about me. Listen to it below. At one time, the Dismemberment Plan were my favorite band, but sadly, if nonetheless inevitably, their plan came to completion, and they no longer exist. It must be noted that one of my most regretted concert misses ever was their Death and Dismemberment Tour with Death Cab for Cutie, which happened before the Plan broke up and before Death Cab became kind of like a big deal. This song comes from the Plan's second album, The Dismemberment Plan Are Terrified. I think that album's kind of hit and miss, but their third and fourth albums, 1999's Emergency & I and 2001's Change are stone cold classics of post-emo indie rock hipster geekery. They are sorely missed.]