I was killing time, waiting for a movie to start in Glendale. There was a bookstore nearby, and I thought I would go look in there.

“Hello There!” A man in a baseball cap sat at a small table right inside the doorway smiled big. “I’m doing a book signing! Would you like one? Here: The Adventures of Rodney Appleseed”

He handed me a book with a color cover. “Oh, It’s fiction!” I said, “Fiction is hard.”

“Thank you for saying that,” he said. “Not everyone understands that.”

We talked for a moment about whether Rodney Appleseed had anything to do with Johnny Appleseed. Then I decided to buy the book.

“It’s like nothing else you’ve ever read, ” the author said.

“Don’t say that!” I told him. “I’ve read a lot of books.”

Thank you, Ross Anthony, author. I’ve read it. Now I can tell everyone about it.

—————

The Infinite Adventures of Rodney Appleseed
By Ross Anthony

The hero of this book, Rodney Appleseed, might be just any boy with a preponderous ability to ask questions. But if he were, his adventures would not be infinite. And when you get a bit into the book you realize that infinity is an essential part of Rodney’s adventures.

Anthony tells his story with the kind of quirky irony found in The Phantom Tollbooth . He has a message, a kind of moral to the story, similar to Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Which is not to imply that the book is in any way derivative. The whole thing was quite original, and a pleasure to read.

Anthony obviously loves the fact that as the author he can do anything he wants in his book. He twists and contorts the impossible and the plausible, having his characters do impossible things that make absolute sense. It makes the reader think about the possible things that are done in real life that make no sense. The book encourages its readers to ask questions and take chances in order to reach their dreams.

Continue reading →

Samantha Dunn loves horses. So much that she is willing to suffer the pain of riding, and the various injuries that came from spending time with them. But one day, she was out riding with her horse and got into a life-threatening accident. Her leg was essentially severed from her body.

I have to say, this book starts out reading like the Reader’s Digest stories, you know the ones where someone suffers some horrible accident and then has to crawl bleeding to help. I swear, every issue has that story in it. I find them hard to read, but somebody must be eating them up. Otherwise they wouldn’t run them.

So Not by Accident must appeal to the same sorts of people. But Samantha Dunn does what I think those stories ought to do, she takes the incident as a sign to re-assess her life. The “Why me?” gets to be more than just a pathetic whine. Dunn turns it into a soul-search, which then turns into real changes.

The book was nearly 250 pages. I could not put it down. I got it from the library on my lunch break, and I was finishing it before midnight that same night.

It’s terrifying! Staring into the face of death in this story, and then the relief of being saved quickly transitions into the realization of how small and vulnerable we are. Not having strength to stand. Being dependent on others. Being a burden. Who doesn’t deeply fear these possibilities? And no one is immune.

I had to keep reading, I had to know how things turned out. I wanted to know that she would be okay, so that I would know that I would be okay. If anything like that ever happened to me.

Dunn realized that she got into too many accidents. She took a long hard look at herself, and began to take responsibility for these so-called accidents. There were reasons and circumstances that led to these accidents that actually were in her control. Not to say that accidents aren’t also accidental, but that the individual has to be responsible for themselves. She decided to take responsibility for herself, to become bravely involved in her recovery. And then being honest with herself and the consequences of her actions started to spill over into all of her relationships.

Despite the potentially airy-fairyness of her yoga and meditation, the book feels extremely physical and earthy. The centrality of horses and the brute reality of the injury keeps it planted.This is a great story, gripping to read and giving a meaningful payoff at the end.

It turns out that classics just sell better than best-sellers.

All those books, even if they aren’t assigned for classes, get steadily picked up and read. People know about them, recommend them to other people, and they keep selling.

I knew that. I love the classics. I make a point of reading them. I feel like I can know that I will enjoy the book, if it’s made the “classic” standing.

Sure, it’s exhilarating to read a new and undiscovered book that knocks my socks off…I think…I’m not sure it’s really happened.

Oh wait, yes it has.

But it’s risky to try new things. And there are so many books that come so highly recommended. I reach for the tried-and-true.

With the second graphic novel, Speigelman pulled out all the stops. He had already experienced the success of Maus, and he even addresses it in the book.

His character is conflicted about the book and his success, and of course the whole Holocaust.

But he Goes There. The first book was disturbing, but this second one went right into the camps and describes it. I found it really hard to read. I couldn’t do it straight through. It was just too tough to contemplate.

I certainly wouldn’t want a younger child to read this book without some adult interaction. The issues are just so disturbing.

I really appreciate that Speigelman didn’t try to tell us a moral at the end of the story, that he just told the story. He just told what he could about what happened.