The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, by Jennifer E. Smith

From the jacket: “Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan’s life. Having missed her flight, she’s stuck at JFK airport and late to her father’s second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother Hadley’s never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport’s cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he’s British, and he’s sitting in her row.”

My take: Compared to many of my Cybils reads, this novel (which I started reading while on the way to New Orleans solely because it included an airplane ride) was sweet, but without a lot of substance. Although it touched briefly on Very Important Issues, it did not dwell on them and instead focused on the budding romance of Hadley and Oliver, who share an overnight plane flight from New York to London.

Hadley, who missed her original flight by four minutes, is a high school senior from Connecticut prone to anxiety attacks and remarkably angry with her father. After heading to England for what was supposed to be a semester, he made the move permanent by separating from Hadley’s mother and finding a new girlfriend, a woman whom he’s about to marry even though Hadley’s never met her. Hadley’s agreement to participate in the wedding has been lukewarm at best, so between that and her panic attacks at being trapped in enclosed spaces, she is not looking forward to her rescheduled flight.

Then she meets Oliver, a British student studying at Yale, also toting dress clothes with him on the plane. He’s cute and dryly witty and helps her keep the panic at bay both at the airport and through the flight. His flirtations are enjoyable, but, of course, it’s just for a few hours. They’re heading their separate ways when they land in London, after all, with Hadley still needing to get through an event she’s loathing with people she can’t stand.

But when a series of events unfold during the course of the wedding day, will she be able to get over her own initial perceptions in order to see things — and people — as they really are? Or will she find that it’s too late?

Reading this book was like eating all the chocolate chips out of a container of trail mix. You might suffer through the raisins and enjoy the peanuts, but each one of those chocolate chips is going to make you smile for the very respite it offers from an otherwise reasonably healthy mix. And, let’s face it, sometimes you just want a sweet snack — or novel — to devour in an afternoon.

Pages: 236

When I was a kid, I’d always participate in the library’s summer reading program, and I’d always sign up for whatever the top level was. It wasn’t going to be a problem. I read a lot and I read fast. If anything, I read too much.

I admit that by the time I got to college, while I still read a lot, I was not always reading what I was supposed to. I was an English major and sometimes I’d … neglect … to read a particular book — or three. Yes, sometimes even books I wrote papers or took tests on or offered up theories about in class. (You’d be surprised by how well you can get by if you listen to what other people say. If you’re in a class where the teacher is prone to asking people what they think about comments posited by other students, however, I’d like to suggest you get your own comment in early. Teachers rarely call on you again if you’ve been proactive in raising a point.)

Where was I before I got started on academic subterfuge? Right! Books!

So, I still read in college, but I coasted a bit. But then I graduated and started reading again. And if I don’t read as much as some people, I still average 3-4 books a month. Not a bad figure…

But then I applied to judge the Cybils and they accepted me. And I totally understood this was going to mean a lot of reading. I got that this meant I’d need to pick up the pace in more than just an incremental way.

People, I have read 14 books this month. (A few of them have been really good and several above average, by the way.) That’s a book every other day.

Sounds impressive, right?

Sadly, it’s not. I knew the math suggested I was going to have to read a book nearly every day in order to stay on top of things. And I knew I hadn’t done that in October. Which meant I was behind.

And an email today confirmed it. I’ve read fewer books than any of my fellow panelists. (This was not helped by my having only read two of the 189 nominated titles before the whole thing started.)

So, I’m tucking in my chin and turning on the night light to try and put a dent in the 35 titles I currently have checked out from the library.

Blog posting will continue to be light. I know you aren’t supposed to apologize for site absences (the blogosphere takes a rather Yoda-esque approach to post writing), but I do. If only to myself, since I’d like to be writing more.

But I have 39+ more books to read before Christmas, so I’m just not sure it’s going to get better anytime soon. I’ll try to come up with a solution so I don’t disappear totally. Maybe 3-sentence book reviews?

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be the one with my nose in a book!

Everyone, thanks for your responses to what you’d like to see reviewed. I’ll get to work on those, but in the meantime, here’s one for a Cybils nominee I finished tonight:

Girl Meets Boy: Because There Are Two Sides To Every Story, edited by Kelly Milner Halls

From the jacket: “What do guys and girls really think? Twelve of the most dynamic and engaging YA authors writing today team up for this one-of-a-kind collection of he said/she said stories — he tells it from the guy’s point of view, she tells it from the girl’s. Stories of love and heartbreak … teach us that relationships become complicated because there are two sides to every story.”

My take: In this interesting collection of 11 paired short stories, we are given both the guy’s and the girl’s perspectives on the same moment in a relationship to show how sometimes what seems obvious to one person is not remotely so clear-cut to another. What might seem like manipulative behavior to one person, for example, turns out merely to be confusion by the other.

These are modern stories for modern teenagers. There’s cell phone stalking and IM conversations and (a lot) of hormones in various degrees of control (or not). Race and religion and sexual orientation come into play. Bullying and family farming and difficult home lives are touched upon.

With the likes of Chris Crutcher, Ellen Wittlinger, James Howe, and Rita Williams-Garcia telling the stories, you know the writing and characterization will be tight. What’s pleasantly surprising is that the concept holds together throughout, creating a compelling need after finishing the first of each paired stories to immediately find out what was going on in the second person’s head. The final story, which alternates voices (and authors) rather than pairing consecutive stories, offers a bit of a surprise and perhaps a lesson about the internalization of the book’s theme.

Pages: 204

When I get back home this week, I’m going to work on getting some book reviews written. Help me to decide where to start by telling me which titles interest you the most.

Children’s Books

• Winnie-the-Pooh
• Tuck Everlasting
• Dealing with Dragons
• The View from Saturday
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963
• The Egypt Game

Young Adult Books

• The Wednesday Wars
• 37 Things I Love (In No Particular Order)
• Chopsticks
• Ditched: A Love Story
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
• The Future of Us
• Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip
• The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Adult Books

• The Night Circus
• The Art of Fielding
• The Spellman Files
• The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
• Arcadia
• Pardonable Lies
• The Age of Miracles
• Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
• The Borrower

My life is pretty much work-read-sleep all the time right now, as I fight to keep our living room visible under my piles of Cybils nominees. The good thing is that nothing in the Burrow is going to go flying away should a strong breeze kick up in the apartment anytime soon.

However, we’re not going dark here. I might not be able to stay on top of vacation photo processing and sharing at the moment, but we can talk books. I mean, I’m going to talk books anyway, so you might as well get a bit of a say in it, right?

So, let’s run a couple polls. Today, I’m going to ask you which of the nominees currently littering my coffee table (and the ones I have to pick up at the library tomorrow) I should take with me to Louisiana when I head south on vacation later this week.*

But it’s no fun for you if you have to read summaries of all the books, so let’s forgo that. Instead, let’s break the books down and poll you based on each book’s Very Special Episode issue:

• cancer
• Nazis**
• hmmm… this one is hard to tell from the book jacket. let’s guess it’s dying family member
• murder
• royal scandal
• civil war (European)
• teen death (possibly caused by the protagonist)
• drug dealing and abusive parents
• poverty and disability
• orphans and homosexuality
• homosexuality and snipers
• hmmm… how’d this one get in the running. the worst we get from the jacket is “near tragedy.” ah, wait, now i remember: dyslexia.
• drug-addicted parent
• physical scarring
• hmmm… this one also seems kinda upbeat. let’s say it’s about broken families.
• amnesia
• cancer (again)

To give you some perspective, recent reads have included such Afterschool Special topics as child abduction, Alzheimer’s, homosexuality, and madness.

Tell me in the comments what you’d recommend. Choose well (for me)!

**Actually, don’t pick this one because it was due back to the library today and has holds on it, so I can’t renew it right now.

This week is Banned Book Week.

According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, these were the 100 most frequently banned or challenged books between 2000 and 2009:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (more…)