The Readathon that really wasn't

Get read for the massive "hours read" total....drum roll....three.

Yup, a rather poor showing.  I just couldn't scrape up the time and when I did, I fell asleep in a blink.

Friday night, I went to dinner/indulged in Coach Outlet shopping with friends from out of town, hooray for seeing old friends (Kate and Beth were in town for a wedding - congrats Anna and Mark!).  When I got home, I fell asleep with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest on my face.  I don't think I made it more than a page or two.  Oops.

Saturday morning, I ran around like a nut to get kitty litter purchased (and a couple throw rugs to keep the cats from picking at a few bad patches of carpet - Chaucer has been picking the nap from the carpet where it was poorly installed) before my parents arrived to inspect my broken dishwasher/take me to lunch/wander the mall until my shift at the store.  Also, as a last-minute addition, my baby niece Alexis came along because her big sisters were going to a pumpkin-patch thing so I had to run around and "baby proof"/de-cat hair my house.  But Alexis makes me laugh with her great, big, see-my-two-front-teeth grin and Buddha-baby cheeks, so it's OK I only got ten pages of Wire in the Blood read on my nook.

So then I worked a full shift at the store.  We had a bookfair and the store was packed and one bookseller picked a fight with me on the salesfloor.  I probably shouldn't have blown my top but she was being a back-stabbing, dishonest, completely out-of-line b-that-rhymes-with-witch (not to mention she's one of the worst employees we've got) and she's really lucky that she doesn't work for me...I'd fire her in a heartbeat.  I got about 20 pages of Wire in the Blood read on my dinner break.

After work, I settled in to finish Wire in the Blood and then succumbed to the two knitting books I'd held off reading: Veronik Avery's Knitting 24/7 and Julie Turjoman's Brave New Knits.  Not exactly what I'd planned on reading but I wasn't really about to concentrate on much of anything anymore (I fell asleep somewhere near the end of Brave New Knits and finished it off between breakfast and another full shift at the store).

So to wrap up:
Wire in the Blood (read 124 pages - finished)
Knitting 24/7 (128 pages - finished)
Brave New Knits (224 pages - finished)

Many thanks to jewelknits, kinnareads, and jensfgeek for popping by my Readathon post for a bit of early Readathon cheering :)

Next Readathon: take a vacation!  Maybe I'll get more reading time.

The Mermaids Singing/The Wire in the Blood

One of my favorite television channels is BBC America.

I haven't watched it in years because I refuse to pay extortionate fees for hundreds of channels I don't watch just to get two that I do (the other is Ovation - does it exist anymore?).  Thank god for Netflix because I can now catch up on many of the television shows I got started on and never finished when I ditched my cable package. 

One of those shows was Wire in the Blood - a crime drama about an academic crimial psychologist/profiler named Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan set in the fictional town of Bradfield (which I guess was supposed to be about three hours or so north of London near Yorkshire).  The series is based on a series of crime novels by Val McDermid but I never got around to picking any of them up.  A recent Netflix Instant-inspired Wire in the Blood binge combined with the ease of buying a book with my NOOK caused me to read the first two Tony Hill/Carol Jordan novels.  Incidentally, the first two books provide the basis for the first two episodes of the television show's first season:  The Mermaids Singing and The Wire in the Blood.

The Mermaids Singing introduces Tony and Carol amid the mess of a serial killer who is causing quite a scene (and turns out to nearly be more than Tony or Carol bargained for, in the end).  McDermid pulls no punches in showing many members of the police establishment to be not only sexist and bigoted but also too stubbornly working class to appreciate the mental work of profiling that compliments standard police work.  I have no idea how accurate the description is for the mid-nineties (I have a feeling it may not be far from the mark) but it does make for great tension that adds to the urgency of multiple murder inquiries.  McDermid structured the book so that the reader alternates between sections of the killer's diary (presumably recovered at the end of the case) and the crminal investigation.  Tony and Carol are great characters, each with their own problems, but also very much drawn to one another.  Carol also has a great internal voice, revealing how frustrating it must be to have to prove yourself at your job everyday just because you aren't one of the "lads".

The Wire in the Blood picks up approximately a year or so after The Mermaids Singing ended (it was pretty crazy).  Carol has received a promotion and Tony is setting up a national profiling task force.  So they haven't spoken much recently and aren't working together....but, of course, Carol needs Tony to consult on a serial arson investigation and Tony asks Carol to show his trainees how an experienced detective can work with a profiler.  One of the trainees comes up with a potential serial murder investigation as part of a classroom exercise; when Tony hesitates to actively pursue the idea, the trainee goes off on her own and in a crime novel you know where that leads....The narrative of the book then starts to split between Carol's arson investigation in her home territory (and troubles with her team of stubborn DIs) and Tony's team of fledgling profilers fighting an inattentive system and disbelief.  While the situation of two simultaneous investigations is very true-to-life I really felt that the arson plot detracted from the serial murder plot - considering both cases are completely separate it got very confusing after a while.  Still, it was a very compelling book and I enjoyed it very much.  Carol is still a favorite of mine but I liked Tony's growth of a character in The Wire in the Blood.  I finished this one during the Readathon.

There are currently six books in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series (The Last Temptation, The Torment of Others, Beneath the Bleeding, and Fever of the Bone make up the rest of the series) and I'd like to read them.  Tony and Carol remind me very much of the main characters in the USA television series Silk Stalkings - Chris and Rita - who have great chemistry and tension but avoid getting into the sack with one another (Chris and Rita only got together when the characters were leaving the show).

Readathons and best-laid plans

Hurray!  Dewey's Readathon is Saturday, October 9, starting at 7am (I live in Chicago's timezone, all start times are based off 5am Pacific).

Fail!  I have to work 8 hours Saturday plus I think at least two of my family members are going to make an appearance that morning to see what's wrong with my dishwasher.  AND I work at 11am on Sunday for a friend.

Bye-bye, reading time!

I'm still going to Readathon, though, just not as much as I would like.  I plan on starting on Friday evening and reading for a while, catching some reading time Saturday afternoon/evening/night, and maybe a bit on Sunday morning before I go into the store.  I'll stitch it all together and call it a Readathon.

I'm not going to plan my reading beyond the idea that what worked well last fall will probably work again, but I will be finishing books that have lain around disgracefully "in progress".  Books on the Readathon shortlist are:
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (I stopped because of the awful realization that there are no more Millenium books....if I finish the book, no more Lisbeth to look forward to)
Matterhorn (half-way done, then I got distracted)
Revolutionary Road

Let's see how far I get - I have loads of half-finished books laying around!

Room

What if a single room and its contents were your entire world, the only thing you had ever known?  Only a television and the occasional "Sunday treat" provide information about the outside world - but you don't know that a world exists outside your door.  You only interact with your mother and she with some shadowy figure called Old Nick.

This is the world of five-year-old Jack and his mother, Ma, in Emma Donoghue's Booker-shortlisted Room.  Jack narrates the book and he's very articulate for a young child.  All the furniture in the room has a proper name - Chair, Bed, Wardrobe - and a gender.  For Jack, everything in Room is his world and everything on the television is make-believe or Outer Space (the channels are "planets").  Ma is trying to raise Jack in as close to what the outside world would consider "normal" as she can get: she tries to get healthy food to eat, limits sweets and television time, teaches him math and reading, keeps them moving through imaginative exercise.  Between the lines of Jack's childlike narration is the very dark figure of Old Nick and it takes no time at all for the reader to determine that Ma has been kidnapped, held against her will, raped repeatedly, and the kidnapper/rapist has fathered Jack.  Sinister stuff indeed.

Donoghue does a remarkable job keeping Jack's narrative voice going throughout the novel.  He is the child of a young mother and they are both observant of the pop culture delivered through the television; current popstars like Lady Gaga are name checked, Ma and Jack dance to music videos, Jack is a great friend of Dora, and Oprah makes several appearances throughout the book.  Jack's view of the world - Room - is so sharply defined that he eventually has some trouble assimilating new information.

One of the things I found so interesting was the shift in attitude that I had to make as a reader at the beginning of the novel.  I would assume that a child cooped up in a single room would be intellectually behindhand and Jack and Ma wouldn't make for interesting reading.  Well, Jack's opening narration changed all that and Donoghue gave Ma a wonderful way of making everything either a game or a teaching moment; very ingenious.  It was a way of saying a mother would do anything for her child, even setting aside her own fears and depression.  Later in the book, the outside world had to make the same shift in attitude that I had in order to accept Jack and Ma.

I appreciated the subtle play on the myth of Danae from Greek mythology, especially since there are several references to God's face (the sun) through the skylight.  Ma does keep knowledge of Jack's father from him, inferring instead that Jack came from heaven in a parallel with Zeus's golden rain in Danae's lonely chamber.  Eventually, Jack is instrumental in bringing Old Nick down, also a parallel with the outcome predcited by the Oracle in the myth.  I do also love Old Nick's name, a chilling intersection of jolly Old St. Nick, bringing presents, and Old Scratch, the devil.

I have yet to read Donoghue's Slammerkin but I can definitely say that it's in the TBR now.

The Midwife's Apprentice

Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice was published in 1995, winning the Newbery Medal in 1996 (the same year I finished high school).  It's not a long book, only about 120 pages, but is a wonderful historical novel for middle school readers.  A strong central character really pulled me into the story.

The narrator is Brat, a young girl who has never known a family and has fended for herself since she can remember, scrounging for scraps and sleeping wherever she can find shelter.  The medieval English setting doesn't afford Brat many kindnesses and she is regularly teased, taunted, and chased from town to town as an outsider.  One cold night she finds a dung heap to sleep in (which can be nice and warm) and wakes to find the town midwife looming over her.  Although the midwife is gruff and suspicious she allows Brat - renamed Beetle from her origin in the dung heap - to carry her bundles, fetch firewood, gather herbs, help with the laundry, and so on.  Beetle is very clever and learns very quickly; she visits other artisans in town to learn about their professions and even chooses to give herself a new name - Alyce - in a boost of confidence.  Even though the midwife won't let Alyce learn midwifery, she peeps in the windows to learn how to deliver a baby.  Or at least she thinks she learns.  Alyce makes a mistake and runs away from the village; she finds an inn in need of a scullery maid and determines to to forget the midwife and her life in the village.  However, Alyce has one more lesson to learn...

Brat/Beetle/Alyce is a great role model for girls and young women.  Alyce is stubborn and refuses to kow-tow to others simply because she is a girl and doesn't know where she comes from.  She is resilient, resourceful, clever, and intelligent; Cushman has given her character a great thirst for learning, particularly in a setting where women did not receive an education, and Alyce excels at one of the few respectable postitions open to women at that time.  Cushman also lends a lot of period detail to her short novel - the style is similar to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth - as well as a wealth of herbal knowledge that Alyce garners throughout the novel.  The Midwife's Apprentice is definitely a book deserving of the Newbery.

Vocabulary (and I'm sure many of these are herb nicknames):
fleabane
ragwort
dung
jasper
columbine
comfrey
wormwood
boneset
borage
bryony
milwort
wag
lardy
pockmarked
mewling
mallows
birthwort
anise
dill
oskins
boskins
rebec
gitterns
sackbuts
Magister
larkspur
meadowsweet
foxglove
thimbleberry
fennel

Women #Unbound Challenge: Wrap-up!

Huzzah!  I did it!

I finished the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.  For this challenge I had to read at least eight books (at least three of those non-fiction) and I did - I read eight books and six of them were non-fiction:
The Help
Little Women, read by Barbara Caruso
The Life of Elizabeth I
Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters
A Jury of Her Peers
A Bookshelf of Our Own
Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Holla!  Now I just need to read five Booker winning books to make the end of the Booker Challenge by December 31!

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

As my last selection for the Women Unbound Challenge, I decided to read a book I had parked on my bookshelves for quite some time: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.  I thought it would be a nice complement to the other history/biography books I already read for the challenge.  Thatcher is a historian and the author of the quote (oft mis-quoted) that gives the book its title.

I thought this was a very good overview of women in history who refused to roll over and take it. Beginning with the Amazons and a chapter on Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf, there are many (MANY) of anecdotes and the sheer number adds many more women to Ulrich's history than if she just focused on de Pizan, Cady Stanton, Woolf, de Beauvior, Friedan, etc. However, it felt like we were just skimming the surface of history to create a "readable" book - to avoid creating a very thick, weighty tome.  Even with a perceived lack of depth it was still an interesting book and adds many more individual women to the list of famous names we already recognize.

Banned Books Week: I read "Banned Books"

I do. So sue me.*  And I am proud to do so!  Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is my current staff pick at the store - come to the dark side, we have good books.  Ha!

That does it for Banned Books Week 2010!  Read widely and get behind those books other people feel the need to pick on for having a different perspective.


*I have always wanted to adapt Joe Fox's "I sell cheap books.  I do.  So sue me."  Tee-hee.

Banned Books Week: A Light in the Attic

Meet one of the banned/challenged books that makes me go - why? (Don't get me started on what I think of people who object to Winnie-the-Pooh)

What, pray tell, is wrong with A Light in the Attic?  Hmmm, it apparently has suggestive illustrations and might encourage children to be disobedient.  Or "disrespect, horror and violence."

Excuse me while I go snort derisively.  There aren't any suggestive drawings in A Light in the Attic and if I had ever decided that breaking the dishes instead of drying them was a good idea, I'd have earned myself a hot backside and a one-way trip to my room for an extended grounding.  I used to have a ridiculous number of Shel Silverstein poems memorized - most notably "I Cannot Go to School Today" (said little Peggy Ann McKay, I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash, and purple bumps....and so on and so on) which I used for a play audition (didn't get the part; I get verbal diarrhea if asked/forced to speak in public, probably why I always danced and sang instead of acted or gave speeches).  We had gales of laughter when reading "Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout will not take the garbage out" or when admonished not to pick your nose.  I never got any stupid ideas.

Now, I have an ornery and mischeivous little brother* who had a ornery and mischeivous little friend and the two of them could get into oodles of trouble in a blink.  They didn't look beyond the moment to see if there were consequences to jumping off the roof with an umbrella to see if you could fly (Mary Poppins can be a bad influence, too) or sticking an egg up the exahuast pipe of the mini-van (the two of them could be hell on legs when left to their own devices).  But even my reckless brother would have thought twice before breaking the dishes instead of drying them (he was also a pretty lazy kid so if I'd ever caught him even thinking about putting the dishes away I would have been very surprised) and mom kept him and his friend on a tight leash so they wouldn't get into too much trouble while thinking up silly things to do.

So go ahead - find where the sidewalk ends and fall up but don't bump the glump.

*Technically, I have two little brothers; they are the two halves of Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.  One could spend hours drawing and making things up using his imagination while the other could be found hurtling down a sheer cliff on his sled or playing naked in the birdbath.  They were both pesky, as alluded to in my Judy Blume post, and entirely allergic to chores (still are, actually).

Banned Books Week: His Dark Materials

                                 Into this wilde Abyss,

The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,

Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,

But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt

Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,

Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain

His dark materials to create more Worlds,

Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,

Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith

He had to cross. 

~Paradise Lost, Book II, John Milton

 

Thus begins Satan's descent to Earth and his mission to cause the Fall of Man.  Phillip Pullman uses the epic battle of Heaven and Hell as an underlying theme in his fantasy-steampunk-coming of age trilogy, His Dark Materials.  The Golden Compass introduces the reader to Lyra, Pantalamion (her daemon), and her alternate-history world of Oxford, London, and Lapland; there are some spectacularly bad people in Lyra's world (Lord Boreal, Mrs. Coulter, and Lord Asriel, just to name a few) as well as some spectacularly good people and giant, talking, armoured polar bears to boot (Iorek Byrnison, FTW!!).  There is also Dust, a strange particulate that is attracted to adults but not children.  The Subtle Knife introduces a new protagonist, Will Parry, who lives in our Oxford.  He meets up with Lyra in a strange world, Citt'gazze, and becomes the posessor of the Knife; the Knife has such a fine edge that it can cut through the fabric of space to make a window into another world.  The children also meet Mary Malone, a former nun who researches mysterious particles (the Dust of Lyra's world).  The Amber Spyglass (awarded the Whitbread Award in 2001, Pullman is only children's author to have received the prize) finds the major characters of the series readying for a battle between the Kingdom of Heaven and Lord Asriel.  At the heart of the conflict is Lyra, who must "fall" or grow-up to save all the worlds and prevent Dust from disappearing forever.

 

There are many thematic elements in His Dark Materials.  Pullman's Church is obsessed with the prevention of "sin" aka knowledge; this is why Dust is attracted to adults and not children.  Dust is self-awareness and knowledge through experience (also, the difference between innocence and experience, expressed in the poetry of William Blake).  The Church is trying to rid the world of "experience" - hence the insane project to separate children from their daemons.  The Church of Pullman's novels also abhors physical pleasure, whether through the enjoyment of foods or physical comforts or sexual awakening.  Lyra is a second Eve, one who must "fall" to save knowledge and self-awareness from becoming lost forever.  She is destined to do this even though she herself is not aware of this destiny until almost the end of the trilogy.  Although Lyra and Will are the Eve and Adam of the story, they must ultimately part because neither can live in the other's world for extended periods of time. 

 

Pullman comes down hard on absolutist religious dogma; although His Dark Materials uses a largely Judeo-Christian background, the message about absolutism applies to any fundamentalist religion.  It doesn't set well with some people - the Catholic League went after the trilogy for promoting atheism when the 2008 film adaptation of The Golden Compass was in theatres (books aside, that was a terrible adaptation, just awful plot adjustments).  If someone wants to have His Dark Materials removed from public school classrooms and libraries, I think Paradise Lost should go as well as The Chronicles of Narnia.  Turnabout is fair play; not everyone drinks of the communal wine and the parent, not the school district, should be the one who decides whether their child should read a more philosophical work.  I said public school because a private school of religious affiliation is allowed, under freedom of religion, to have a tighter grip over materials at the school (and one wouldn't enroll his/her children at a religious school unless one agreed with the curriculum/religious viewpoint and, besides, public libraries can suffice if a parent wants his/her child to read a book the private school finds questionable in that instance).

 

I'm all for children reading His Dark Materials.  Pullman's writing is very sophisticated and he doesn't dumb down any of the philosophical elements just because the series is meant for children.  The Golden Compass is more straightforward than The Subtle Knife which is more straightforward than The Amber Spyglass; by the time younger readers reach the third book they will be ready for the themes introduced.  I found myself reading very carefully by the time I reached the third book of the series because I didn't want to miss anything (there's a lot going on in The Amber Spyglass).

Banned Books Week: The Handmaid's Tale

Scene: Lazy afternoon in our family room around my freshman year of high school.  I am sprawled all over the couch reading a book.  My mom walks in.
Mom:  Missy, I need you to...Missy?  Missy!  [I finally look up.]  What are you reading?
Me:  The Handmaid's Tale
Mom:  What's it about?
Me:  It's really crazy - an accident happens, and some women can't have children anymore, and so the government decides to force the women that can have children to have children for the women who can't.  The government thinks this is OK because of the part of the Bible where Rachel gives Jacob her handmaid so he can have kids.  That's just wrong.
Mom:  That's awful.  I need you to gather up your dirty laundry if you want it washed.
Me [whines]:  Now?

And that was that.*  It was also my introduction to Margaret Atwood.  I was in Biology one day and one of the seniors (who for whatever silly reason had not taken the science GER previously) had a copy of a book with a woman in a red robe and white headdress on the cover sitting on the lab desk.  I asked what it was - The Handmaid's Tale - and was then told that it "sucked" and was "really hard to read" and was for "English".  Bonus, guess that means I'll like it, so I borrowed my first Margaret Atwood novel from the school library and snarfed it down.

I loved it.  LOVED.  IT.  What utter crap, that some skeezy government officials can come along and kidnap you and force you to have sex with some guy that you don't even like just so he can have a kid and YOU CAN'T EVEN READ!!!!  THEY TOOK AWAY BOOKS!!!  I think I'd have tried to escape to Canada, too.  And, wait, all these guys can go to a brothel???  Arrrgghhh.  I bet you can guess that I was already into women's rights even if I didn't formally know that it was called "feminism".

The Handmaid's Tale was on a the reading list for one of my English classes later on (I can't remember if it was BritLit or APLit) and, even though I chose another book as my "official" assignment, I read Atwood's dystopic novel again.  By this time sexual harrassment, feminism, and abortion rights had come into play in my vocabulary and I understood how tenuous at times are the rights of a woman to her own body.  How a boy is "cool" for sleeping around but a girl is a "slut" for even thinking about having sex, how a girl who gets pregnant is extremely visible at school but the guy who got her that way can just slip into the background.  It all played into the fundamentalist atmosphere of the novel.

Although an extreme form, The Handmaid's Tale says "This is what happens when you take away a woman's right to govern her own body."  The book also comes down hard on totalitarianism/fundamental religion.  It's depressing as hell, too, because the reader is left wondering Offred's fate when the book ends - did she escape with Mayday or did the Eyes get rid of her?  Is she pregnant and is the baby OK?  How did the tapes survive?

Even though The Handmaid's Tale dropped from 37 to 88 on the ALA's challenge lists by decade, it still pushes buttons.  A recent challenge in Toronto objected to the language, sexual violence, and "anti-Christian" attitude.  When I talk about banned or challenged books, I usually talk about "truth" because a book portrays the "truth" of a situation.  In the case of The Handmaid's Tale, this is a dystopian novel, not a realistic novel or memoir, and instead of a "truth" it presents a "what-if" - Atwood uses the metaphor of a frog in boiling water to illustrate her point about gradual change.  One must be aware of gradual changes, how they can chip away at freedom.  Women need to be vigilant or agency over one's body can be compromised - be it from a government agency or otherwise.

*Not exactly what happened, but pretty darn close.

Banned Books Week: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a hard book for me to read when I was a teenager.  Not vocabulary-wise, but understanding-wise.  I am about as opposite from Maya Angelou as you can get - white, middle-class, privileged, two loving parents, a happy and uneventful childhood in Iowa - and it took a huge mental adjustment just to visualize her childhood and the events she describes in her memoir.  I have to confess I that I thought it was a novel at first; I was so unbelievably naive.  How could people act like that?  Hate someone just because of skin color or hurt a little girl?  Then I started putting together all sorts of other information that I'd learned in school and read in books....yes, Maya Angelou's story was real, as real as my own, and holy crap.

Slowly, I started to find bits that connected me with the little girl and teenager of Dr. Angelou's memoir.  She loved to read, so did I.  We were both dancers and liked the stage.  Even though horrible things happened to her as a child (and I later learned that she had a very hard time of it for quite a while, working through poverty to raise her son), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells one woman's story of how she gained courage and tried to overcome her past.  For those who have read Laure Halse Anderson's Speak, the protagonist Melinda Scordino becomes as selective-mute after her assault; Dr. Angelou tells of her fear of speaking after her attacker is found beaten to death, that she felt her voice caused the man's demise.  Both the fictional Melinda and the real Maya learn to find their voices.

I no longer remember how I happened to be reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; I know it was my personal copy, not borrowed from the library, and I was just reading it for fun.  My mother is a huge reader of biographies, we had shelves stuffed full of bios and memoirs, so reading a memoir "for fun" and not "for school" was pretty normal at my house.  I also suspect my mother had already read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, although I've never asked her, so she knew what I was getting into.  I really think that was her way of introducing me to a situation that we just didn't experience ever in Iowa, so that I could begin to understand racism as a concept and understand how treating somone as less-than-a-person on the basis of skin color is absolutely ridiculous.  African-American History Month was always celebrated in school but we never got into the gritty, dirty parts of history.

It's the gritty bits that get people up in arms.  The book covers all manner of "hot-button" subjects: racism, sexism, sexual violence, child abuse, heterosexual sex, homosexual sex/confusion over sexual orientation, teen pregnancy, and "vulgar" language, to name a few.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the third most challenged book of 1990-1999 and the sixth most challenged 2000-2009 according to the ALA so people are getting their knickers in a twist all over the place.  It's like failing to see the forest for the trees.  Y'all want to stick your head in the sand and act like it's going to traumatize teens (and I'm talking an average of twelve and up here, the actual structure of the writing is too complex for younger kids), then you go ahead, stick your head in the sand and pretend that nothing bad ever happened to anyone.  But then you miss the truth - and the beauty of Dr. Angelou's writing.  She is a true storyteller - she sings loud and clear.  Dr. Angelou is an inspiring woman.  Young men and women need inspiration.