The Three Questions, Jon J. Muth

A boy named Nikolai wants more than anything to find the answer to three important questions that he feels will make him into a good person: When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? His three friends each have their own answers, but Nikolai doesn’t discover the deeper meaning behind the questions until a series of events lead him to reflect on his experiences. Jon Muth based this tale on a short story by Leo Tolstoy and weaves his love of Russian literature throughout this book for children in the names of the major characters (Nikolai, his friend Sonya the heron, Gogol the monkey, and Pushkin the borzoi dog). The illustrations, also by Muth, are graceful watercolors. This is a wonderful book to share with a thoughtful older child. It is also used in the “Giving” series of New Books, New Readers. (Diane Magras)

About the Author: About the Author: Jon J. Muth grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has drawn and painted since he was very young. His mother, an art teacher, exposed him to fine art in museums across the country, and Muth himself held his first solo exhibit of paintings and drawings at Wilkington College when he was 18. His studies of different artistic media took him to Japan, Austria, Germany, and England. While well known for his children’s books, which include Zen Shorts, Muth is also a comic book artist, has had a graphic story aired on the BBC, and was commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to paint a portrait of their music director. Among his children’s books have been a Caldecott Honor Book, a Gold Medal winner from the Society of Illustrators, an ALA Notable Children’s book, winner of the Sydney Taylor Award, and winner of a National Parenting Book Award.

Rules, Cynthia Lord

Rules is the story of a middle-school girl whose younger brother has autism. Over the course of a summer, new friends and neighbors enter her life and force her to rethink how she deals with her brother. Catherine is the kind of character I loved as a girl: brave, but not heroic; quirky, but still completely recognizable and real. This would be a good read for any family affected by autism, but it’s just as much about friendship in general; in my experience, girls in middle school can use all the positive input they can get on that topic. An interesting connection to the Council is that the little brother frequently speaks in lines he remembers from Arnold Lobel’s Frog & Toad, a book used in several of our programs. Keep an eye on our Humanities on Demand podcast for another connection, still to come: we’re in touch with Cynthia Lord about recording her reading excerpts from the book and/or discussing it with young readers. (Brita Zitin)

About the Author: Cynthia Lord is a Maine author who received a Newbery Honor commendation in 2006 for Rules, which was her debut novel. Her first story was published as part of a competition when she was in college. Rules is partially based on her own son, who is autistic. These days, Lord creates a private writing time for herself, beginning each day before 4:00 AM when her children are still asleep and the house is quiet.

Pastoralia, George Saunders

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

I have a sort of morbid fascination with dystopian fiction, and have just finished reading Pastoralia by George Saunders, a collection of wonderfully-crafted satirical short stories and a novella probing at the current state of American life. These are bizarre and bitingly funny tales, often lurching firmly into the realm of the absurd, yet they do provide a sort of fun-house mirror look at some serious themes around family, commerce, and work culture in 21st century North America. This was a 2000 New York Times notable book.

Pastoralia brings to mind another terrific, even more sinister, view of life in the future: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. This 2003 novel, short-listed for the Booker Prize, is the account of a man who at first seems to be the sole survivor of a bio-technological disaster that has caused the destruction of the human race. While the overall tone of this work is unabashedly grim, its plot moves along at a snappy pace, leavened throughout with Atwood’s acerbic humor. (Erik Jorgensen)

About the Authors: About the Authors: George Saunders, a contemporary short story writer, was born in Texas but grew up in Chicago. He received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines, shortly followed by a M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. This odd juxtaposition of the sciences and the humanities has certainly made an impact on his work, which helped him receive both MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim Fellowships in 2006.

Born in Ottowa, Ontario, Margaret Atwood began writing when she was six years old. An active feminist and environmentalist, she is best known for her novels and literacy criticism, but is also a poet. She had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, the Booker Prize, and twice won the Governor General’s Award. Her futuristic novel The Handmaid’s Tale was made into an opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Jeannette Walls

This memoir begins with Walls’s powerful remembrance of getting into a limousine in Manhattan to go to an important event when, to her horror, she sees her mother, dirty and disheveled, rummaging through garbage cans along the street. Walls quickly puts her head down and hurries into the car before her mother sees her, as guilty as she is relieved to have escaped her mother’s notice.

Walls fills out the story behind this incident in the rest of the book. Walls left home in her late teens in order to save herself from the terrible dysfunction of her family, guilty at leaving her siblings but working to get them, too, out of the household as soon as they were old enough. Her love of her parents, and the deep joy and pain that they gave their children, can be felt throughout the memoir. Her parents were intelligent, creative, non-conformist, loving and unorthodox. Rose Mary devotes her time to painting and writing, feeling burdened by the responsibilities of raising four children and often leaving them to take care of themselves. She enjoys the continual upheavals in their life because, she admits, she is “an excitement addict” bored by routine. Rex is a perfect match for her, as he is brilliant, restless and charismatic. He is beloved by his daughter and gives his children a rich education in how to love life and live fearlessly, use their imagination, and explore physics and other subjects from an early age. This man who, one Christmas, took the children out into the desert night and gave each of them their own star (something that Walls still treasures), also drank, moved his family suddenly in the middle of the night as he lost job after job, felt he must be constantly vigilant against a society wanting conformity and mediocrity and periodically disappeared for days with the family’s meager grocery money, leaving them hungry. As the story progresses, the family’s life becomes increasingly unstable as both parents deteriorate. The children slip through any safety net that society might provide, and the family becomes even more impoverished, often going hungry and living in almost unimaginable—but all too real—living conditions.

Many have written about their troubled childhoods, but this memoir stands out because it is so beautifully written in both its form and in its emotional complexity. It would be understandable if Walls’ memoir were an angry indictment of her parents or left us pitying a girl whose first memory is of catching on fire when cooking herself dinner at the age of three. She does not settle for either. Instead, Walls has written a loving, deeply felt and unflinching account that refuses to settle for easy answers, judgments or emotions that would dilute the depth of the complexity—the love and the pain—of her relationship with her parents. The book left me with a lot of things to ponder, but most of all it left me in awe of the strength, and the fragility, inside Walls and in all of us. This text is used in Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®. (Elizabeth Sinclair)

About the Author: For twenty years, as Jeannette Walls worked to create a successful life for herself (she is married and is a regular contributor to MSNBC), she worked equally hard to keep her past a secret. With encouragement from her husband, she finally wrote about her life growing up with her very unconventional parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, and we are the richer for this.