Read-a-Thon: Let's Raise Some Money!

You may have noticed the button for Dewey's October 18th Read-a-Thon on my sidebar. How on Earth could I resist 24 hours of reading! If you're in the dark about this fantabulous event, read more about it HERE.

While I had a great time participating in this event the last time it came around, I didn't have the forethought to get sponsors together and bring in money for a charity. However, this time I'm thinking ahead! Given my interest in environmental issues and reading, what better green business to support than Eco-Libris! Click on the image above to visit the Eco-Libris website.

Through Eco-Libris you can plant a tree to balance out every book you read. Deforestation is a huge problem all over the world:

More than 30 Million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. That’s definitely a problem - trees are one of the most valuable natural resources we have. They literally form the foundations of many natural systems and provide us with numerous benefits (carbon dioxide absorption, soil and water conservation, avalanche control, desertification prevention to name a few).

Eco-Libris operates in set units. You can donate $5 to plant 5 trees, $10 to plant 10 trees, $23.50 to plant 25 trees and so on. See the website for further breakdown.

What I'm asking you, dear readers, is for whatever you can afford in these financially troubling times whether it be a monetary donation or your help in spreading the word about not only Eco-Libris, but a literacy charity I'll introduce to you in just a few minutes (keep reading!). If you're interested in donating money or word of mouth, here are some methods to consider:

• Donate a set amount for every book I read during the 24 hours of the Read-a-Thon
• Donate a set amount of money per page I read during the Read-A-Thon.
• Donate a set amount of money per hour I participate in the Read-A-Thon.
• Give a "flat fee" donation of whatever you can manage
• Post short pieces about Eco-Libris (and the charity below) on your blog to spread the word

Now, if you choose to sponsor me in this Read-a-Thon, you'll actually be giving to two worthy causes. Eco-Libris has a deal worked out with BookMooch.com:

For every 10 books you balance out you will receive a free BookMooch point you can then use to mooch a book online for free. If you don't have a BookMooch account yet go get one.
The process is very simple – Email us your BookMooch username after you make a purchase on Eco-Libris, or enter your BookMooch username in the comments box during the payment process. We will credit your BookMooch account accordingly.

When you sponsor me in this Read-a-Thon you're free to send the money to Eco-Libris yourself or send it to me, I'll put it together with other sponsors, and donate the money on your collective behalf. I vow to donate whatever BookMooch points we earn through Eco-Libris in this process, as well as a portion of my own personal BookMooch points (probably 5-10 points) to Quezon City Public Library in Pasong Tamo (Philippines):

The Quezon City Public Library - Pasong Tamo opened in April 23, 2004 in Veterans Village, Barangay Pasong Tamo. The library encourages readers of all ages to enter and read to their hearts' content. The Quezon City Public Library's role in the community is to promote community development and to support the continuous education of the residents of Quezon City. All of the library's readers live in the surrounding neighborhoods of Barangay Pasong Tamo, Barangay Holy Spirit, Barangay Balara, and Barangay Luzon.The books you give us will be read by so many people so we hope these books that you send us will be sturdy enough to withstand the many readings and re-readings of the community.

Are you sold yet?

The way I see it, even in the worst times, we can still reach out to others in new and innovative ways. Thanks to Dewey for providing another way for readers to help the Earth and other readers.

If you're interested in donating, e-mail me at andi (dot) miller (at) gmail (dot) com and we'll set it up.

State of AndiLand

Wasn't that a fantastic guest post? I *heart* Kim Powers and his super-talent. Now I'm going to tarnish the blog with my own endeavors. Nothing like a quick list o'crap to keep the quality up. Tongue firmly in cheek!

So what's been shaking in AndiLand you ask? Well....

--Daisy got a bad case of the itchies on Monday, by Tuesday I was desperate for her to stop itching, so I dropped her off at the vet. As it turns out, she has an allergy to to fleas, and the fleas have seen a resurgence since the cool weather hit. Now she's on meds to oust the fleas, and she's taking antihistamines. All that really means is that she's been drunk/hungover/goggly-eyed/asleep on my leg since Tuesday.

--I was chosen for a virtual reference internship, which only means that since I'm already working from home, I have to log into a messenger program and answer questions for confused students from 11-1 on Thursdays. And I get experience to put on my resume! Win-win situation.

--I was thinking of renting a house down the street from my mom, with a fenced yard, in the neighborhood where I really like to walk. Then I came to my senses and decided to pay off my credit card.

--I have employment for the summer! Two classes in the first session, two in the second.

--Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me and the FX show 30 Days, is going to be speaking at UNT! I just might have to go.

--I voted on Monday. Absentee. I haven't gotten all my residence stuff moved over from NC yet. Shhhh!

--In reading news, I've started my fourth RIP III book: Evernight, by Claudia Gray. I'm not very far in, but so far it seems like a winner! I'm also diving into Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe for Jennie Shortbridge's blog tour. Watch for her on November 12th!

--And if you have a moment, head on over to Unlikely Activist to read about WeCanSolveIt.org and how you can help their new Repower America ads find a broader audience.

Guest Blogger: Kim Powers

Kim Powers, author of Capote in Kansas and Writer/Producer for ABC's Primetime Live, was kind enough to write up a guest post for today. When we first began corresponding, I asked if he might be interested in writing a guest post, and he tossed out a few ideas. Being the shameless blogger that I am, I asked if he had any thoughts on libraries. Thankfully, he has quite a few thoughts on libraries, and is kind enough to share some of his personal story.

It's been great to get to know Kim a bit better through e-mail, and as it turns out we have a few crazy coincidences in common: raised about half an hour apart in northeast Texas, both accepted to the same small liberal arts college, and we both have a penchant for Project Runway. Shhhh! Maybe I should've left out that last bit. Before I share too much, on to the post...

It was home, literally: the first library I ever went to was in someone’s former house. Not a mansion, but very nice. Gray-brown brick, one story, big concrete urns of potted geraniums leading up the steps, a flagpole outside, if the picture I see when I close my eyes is still correct. Surely the flagpole hadn’t been there when it was someone’s home, but since this was small-town Texas in the early 60s--yes, I’m that old--you never know. It was a few blocks from the furniture store where my father worked, and he’d drop my twin brother Tim and me off there, on his way back to work after his lunch and nap (in a Barcalounger) at home, every Saturday afternoon. I don’t remember checking out many books from there—what could they have been that early, Dr. Seuss?, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine?--I remember watching movies. The librarian would stretch out a portable screen (I can hear the metallic zzzzip it would make) and run a reel-to-reel movie on a big projector. She must have had a special fondness for Leslie Caron—yes, I’m that ancient--the two movies I remember seeing time and again were Daddy Long-Legs and The Glass Slipper, a Cinderella story. The movies did the trick; the sentimental book of Daddy Long-Legs is one of the first I remember, and I treasured it.

Then I went “hippy”, or at least “hip”--as much as an eight or nine year old boy in McKinney, Texas could go. My new book, my best friend, became A Space-Child’s Mother Goose. Not “The” Space-Child’s, but “A”; that was key. The librarian must have decided I needed shaking up, and this was the book to do it, with its psychedelic drawings and Sputnik-age rhymes. It was also the book that became the transitional item from that old library in someone’s donated house, to a fancy new one, all glass and brick, built just for books-—and a block or two from the local jail. (Maybe real estate was cheaper there.) I checked it out in one library; it was due in another. Also, between the time I checked it out, and the time it was due—two weeks, if memory serves—-my mother died. She had been a fourth grade teacher; books were her life, and she passed that love on to me and my twin. I refused to return the book. Maybe it reminded me too much of her in some bizarre way, at a time when I felt as if everything else I loved had been taken away from me. Whatever the reason, I just couldn’t let the book go. The letters and phone calls from the new library started, kind and patient at first: “We’re so sorry for your loss, we KNOW returning a little library book is the last thing on your mind, but...” I started burying the book under my bed, covering it with dust; surely they’d forget it. It wasn’t even that good. But the negotiations continued, angrier and angrier, as complicated as negotiating ransom for a Cold War prisoner (or the current economic bailout plan-—take your pick.) Finally, a line in the sand was drawn (at least in my memory—could librarians do such a thing?): my brother and I were not permitted to step foot in the new library until the old book was returned, and the fine was paid. I don’t remember what it was, but it seemed astronomical. A grudging peace was finally brokered, between the Powers family and the new librarian, whose name was—I kid you not—Mrs. Jerry Lewis.

There was nothing funny about her.

The year was 1966 or 67, and the new library smelled of freshly laid carpet and paint and sawdust and air that never moved, a smell it would never lose. The Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” came to town, and I became obsessed with checking out the Edward Albee play it was based on. I must have thought it was some sort of fairy tale—Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Woolf?—and I wanted it to replace the Mother Goose rhymes I had just given up. Mrs. Lewis, doing her job, wouldn’t let me check it out, and instead literally took me by hand to the children’s section I should be looking in. Undeterred, I kept drifting back to the plays and theater books—780s, 820s in the Dewey Decimal section? Books about puppets, Stanley Green’s big picture-packed The World of Musical Comedy, On Stage, Miss Douglas (God, what I would give if some librarian could dig that up for me)—those took the place of nursery rhymes, and kept drawing me back, every Saturday of my childhood. I checked them out week after week, and added a few “normal” children’s books to the mix--Elizabeth Goudge, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Joan Aiken. In the fourth grade, I checked out what I considered my first grown-up book, a biography called Storming Heaven about the Roaring Twenties evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I took it on vacation with me and accidentally left it in the back seat of our hot car. Its plastic cover melted, and another battle over a library fine began with Mrs. Jerry Lewis, the not-so-funny librarian. I felt like I gave most of my allowance—fifty cents a week--to that woman. But the books were worth it.

There would be many more libraries to come after that: the college library where I worked; a grad school library in a Gothic, ivy-covered building, so massive I could lose myself in its stacks for hours; a public library in Brooklyn where I continued to get books after school, when I first entered the “real world” and was too poor to buy anything (certainly not books) except for noodles and spaghetti sauce in a jar. Even a new library back in McKinney, which I would visit on trips back home. It had moved yet again, into the old bank where my father had taken me in hand to get my social security card. (Does that even happen anymore?) Mrs. Jerry Lewis was long gone; I missed her, despite all the hard times—financial and otherwise—she had given me. None of the librarians who were there now knew I had spent my childhood devouring their books, and preparing –-I didn’t even know this—for a future as a writer.

But the last, best library was still to come. At a certain point, I stopped going to libraries, and started buying books instead. I could afford them by now. My partner and I had bought a little weekend beach house outside New York, in Asbury Park, NJ (former stomping grounds of The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen!). We decided to check out their small town library, and it was like walking back into the land that time forgot, in the best possible way: the friendly “shush” of the librarian, the unmistakable smell of books and bindings, the giant oak card catalog that dominated the middle of the room. The library even had an original, stained glass Tiffany’s window! But best of all, they had, on their “New Books” shelf, my two books, The History of Swimming and Capote in Kansas. It was the best “homecoming” I’ve ever had.

--For you, Andi, as you work on your Masters in Library Science, and for all the “Mrs. Jerry Lewis’s” of the world!

Thanks so much to Kim Powers for taking time out to write this great piece. Visit his website HERE.

Capote in Kansas

Tomorrow is the big day! Kim Powers, author of Capote in Kansas, will be here at Tripping Toward Lucidity with a fantastic guest post. It's been really exciting to correspond with Kim for this blog tour, and it is with great pleasure that I share my feelings about Capote in Kansas.

It's sort of funny that I came to Harper Lee and Truman Capote late in life--Lee especially. While most people read To Kill a Mockingbird in the eighth grade or something, I waited until April of this year, after two English degrees and at the ripe ole age of 27, to finally pick it up. As most people are, I was captivated not only by Lee's writing, but also by her enigmatic place in American letters.

I wasn't quite so late to Capote, having picked up In Cold Blood after I saw the film, Capote. OK, so I was still pretty late, but my belated reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was far more scandalous (especially for an English major).

Given my fascination with both Capote and Lee, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to participate in this blog tour, and I'm happy to report that the book was even more thrilling, thoughtful, and heartbreaking than I ever expected. In Powers' story, Truman Capote is past his prime, hopped up on pills and booze, and beginning to see ghosts. The ghosts of In Cold Blood's infamous Clutter family. The dead family members, as well as Perry, Truman's favorite killer, seem to stalk him, standing in the corner of his room and staring until he resorts to calling his long-estranged friend, (Harper) Nelle Lee. What unfolds is quite literally a haunting and haunted story as both Truman and Nelle are haunted by their respective glories and failures, their broken friendship, and the great books they are unable to duplicate.

The story is told through the eyes of Nelle Lee as she reminisces about her past and laments her broke friendship with Truman. One of the greatest, and most captivating conflicts in the story is the steady stream of trouble that shows up on her doorstep. "Snake boxes" decorated with odd pictures along with small hand-carved coffins full of unsettling pictures of Nelle. and other yucky objects (dirt, red velvet, and an earthworm). The boxes throw Nelle into a spiral of anguish and fear as she assumes it's Truman sending the tokens, but she can't figure out exactly why or what they mean. And before long, the Clutter ghosts begin to materialize for her as well.

Truman never tells his own story. Instead, we experience his portions of the tale through the eyes of his maid, Myrtle J. Bennett. She was probably my favorite character. She's more or less unscathed by Truman's idiosyncrasies, his fame, and his downward spiral. She loves him, for certain, and she's his caretaker, his enabler, and his guardian angel. She cooks for him, helps him exact revenge when it's necessary, and watches over him as he sinks deeper and deeper into dependence, depression, and seemingly into madness. More than anything, Myrtle is down to earth and hilarious. She brings a great deal of humor to a story that could be pretty heavy otherwise. As it is, she tempers Truman's antics helps bring a nice balance to Capote in Kansas.

While I was very impressed with the way Powers wove his story back and forth through Nelle's and Myrtle's points of view, the tone of the book is just great and probably my favorite part. Powers' "voice" in the writing reminded me a great deal of both In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird. As I think back over those two books, it's the subtle beauty and tragedy that I remember so. There's an easy feel to Powers' writing, and there are moments of pure, simple tragedy that jumped off the page and left me breathless. And, yes, the sure sign of a good book: it made me tear up a bit at the end. Just like In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird, I cried and I wanted to turn back to the very first page and start all over again. I've said it before, those two inclinations are the highest honors I can pay to any book.

If you're reading, I sincerely hope you'll pick up a copy of Capote in Kansas for yourself, and I do hope you'll stop back by tomorrow. Kim Powers was kind enough to write a tailor-made guest post for this blog based on some things that have been shaking down in my life lately, and his post is just as moving as his superb novel.