Carie Juettner

Goodreads Before Goodreads

I don’t mean to make a stink here, but Goodreads really owes me quite a bit of money. You see, I had the prototype for their entire platform back in 1999, long before Otis and Elizabeth Chandler launched their website. Yep. It was called My Book Journal.

My Book Journal is an offline system for tracking reading progress and maintaining literary lists. It comes in hardback (can you say the same, Goodreads? I don’t think so) and fits neatly on a shelf or in a medium-sized purse. It’s been in operation for fifteen years now and has never once crashed.

My Book Journal’s features include:

Organized lists of the books I read each year
Titles marked as “to read” in the future
A page for collecting favorite quotes
Convenient bookmarks
“Links” to lists and articles about authors
Very personalized privacy settings
Easily portable
Classy cover

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’m not going to make a big deal over this dispute. I’ve decided to be the bigger person and take the high road, because I do admire that little Goodreads website and I have to admit that their rating system is easier to use than mine and, what’s more, they have pictures (which is cool and also kind of cheating). But I just wanted it to be known: Goodreads started here.

Here are some of the quotes that I’ve “favorited” over the years, i.e. written into My Book Journal with my own hand, rather than clicking a simple button. Yes, this system takes more time, requires a little elbow grease, but it’s that very dedication to record-keeping which makes My Book Journal so special. If you’re not willing painfully print a passage on the page with your tendonitis-afflicted fingers (while walking uphill in the snow, etc) then perhaps you don’t really “like” that quotation so much after all, now do you? Kids today have it so easy…

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” – Douglas Adams, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. Why and how? Because I say it is so.” – Ray Bradbury, from “Just This Side of Byzantium”, the introduction to Dandelion Wine

“The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: ‘Don’t ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can’t stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.’” – Amy Tan, from “The Cliffsnotes Version of My Life” in The Opposite of Fate

“The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me. I suddenly stood upon a hill in the center of an unknown country, hearing the sky fill with a new spelling of my name.” – Audre Lorde, from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Mr. Weasley was looking around. He loved everything to do with Muggles. Harry could see him itching to go and examine the television and the video recorder. ‘They run off eckeltricity, do they?’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Ah yes, I can see the plugs. I collect plugs,’ he added to Uncle Vernon. ‘And batteries. Got a very large collection of batteries. My wife thinks I’m mad, but there you are.’” -J.K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“If you take a book with you on a journey… an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open the book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it.” – Cornelia Funke, from Inkheart

“Although a Centaur Liaison Office exists in the Beast Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, no centaur has ever used it. Indeed, ‘being sent to the Centaur Office’ has become an in-joke at the Department and means that the person in question is shortly to be fired.” – Newt Scamander (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling), from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term ‘Future Perfect’ has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.” – Douglas Adams, from Life, the Universe, and Everything (I opted for a very condensed version of Adams’ phenomenal passage on the problem with time travel. To read the whole wonderful thing on the “real” Goodreads, click here.)

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine guns, hand grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.” – Erich Maria Remarque, from All Quiet on the Western Front

“He made three separate formations that led to the same tower of dominoes in the middle. Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would all smile at the beauty of destruction.” – Markus Zusak, from The Book Thief

“‘I do not want it to rain.’ ‘Then you should not have washed the turtle.’” -Joan Abelove, from Go and Come Back

“Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive plains. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations ‘nonsensical’ in front of fifteen other teenagers. Eventually a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box: MRS. ROSS HAS DIED OF DYSENTERY. This filled me with glee.” – Sloan Crosley, from “Bring-Your-Machete-to-Work Day” in I Was Told There’d Be Cake

“As long as he and I were together I had in some ways never really left where I started because we carried that place between us like a familiar blanket.” – Michael Dorris, from Sees Behind Trees

“The gong was long gone, but the legend lingered.” – Lemony Snicket, from “Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“Prestigious. Often an adjective of last resort. It’s in the dictionary, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it.” – William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, from The Elements of Style

“‘There is no story that is not true,’ said Uchendu. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.’” – Chinua Achebe, from Things Fall Apart

(If you want to see my profile on the “real” Goodreads, click here. If you want to see what’s happening in My Book Journal, email me your request, including a specific page number and/or year, and I will get back to you within 48 hours.)

Things Fall Apart… Again

Today I finished Things Fall Apart for the second time. I first studied Chinua Achebe’s book my sophomore year in high school, and while I liked it then, I did not fully appreciate it until now. In this powerful African novel, the author perfectly balances the complexity of his tale with the simplicity of his storytelling, and the result is a chilling tragedy in which nothing is black and white, and no man can be clearly hailed as hero or villain. The end of the book, which disappointed me when I was a teenager, both satisfied and haunted me my second time through.

Literally. (Halfway through the book, my old paperback copy required a little mending.)

In lieu of a longer analysis from me, I instead would like to share with you Skylar Hamilton Burris’s thoughts on Things Fall Apart from Goodreads. Her review is insightful well-written, and I agree with it.

From Skylar B:

I read this many years ago as a teenager, before it was as well known as it is today, and then I read it again in college. Readers often expect imperialism to be dealt with in black and white. Either the author desires to see native ways preserved and consequently views any imperial attempts as immoral and threatening, or he’s a Kipling-style “white man’s burden” devotee who believes non-European cultures ought to be improved by supervision from their European “superiors.” Yet Things Fall Apart is a novel that complicates both of those simplistic views. In it, a desire to preserve the native way of life coexists with an urge to admit improvements to it. A tension inevitably arises from the juxtaposition of these two goals. In Things Fall Apart, this tension courses through every page, and it is part of what makes the book so fascinating.

Achebe seems to despise the tendency to simplify complex human life. The events that occur in Things Fall Apart signify the destruction of an entire way of life, an obliteration of the ties that bind a people together. Yet it is not that Achebe unconditionally embraces the culture of the Ibo people. He makes the reader feel for Okonkwo’s father, whose failure by Ibo standards is the source of Okonkwo’s severity, and for his son, Nwoye, who does not fit into the strictly ordered masculine warrior society.

I appreciated, especially, Achebe’s nuanced portrayl of both the positive and negative aspects of missionary activity. When the missionaries come to Nigeria, the church provides a haven for the discontent: for the woman who can not bear to leave her twins to die, for the outcasts who are shunned by the community, and for Nwoye, who can only fit into Ibo society by denying himself. I was moved by Achebe’s depiction of how Christianity provides a place for the outcast: the hymn they sing about brothers “who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted [Nwoye’s] young soul–the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.”

Yet by providing an outlet for the discontent, the church begins to unravel the ties that bind the Ibo people together. Although the church gives dignity to the outcast and the misunderstood, the second missionary who comes fails to restrain his converts from injuring the dignity of other Ibos. Achebe makes us sympathize with Nwoye’s dissatisfaction and acknowledges that Ibo culture was imperfect, but through Okonkwo he also shows us what was lost when the Ibos failed to preserve their culture from the onslaught of the Europeans. What was lost, Achebe has said elsewhere, was DIGNITY, “and it is this that they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing in human terms what happened to them.” Achebe succeeds brilliantly. He painfully and tragically depicts the tragedy that can result when the only way of life a man has ever known begins to crumble.

To see Skylar’s review on Goodreads, click here.

1,237 Miles in 42 Hours OR The Story of the Little Green Rock

Road Trips

My dad loves to take road trips. For him the phrase is literal. He simply likes to traverse the roads of Texas. There are destinations, but the path to get there is the real fun, full of photo opportunities and yellow and black diamond signs* and miles and miles of Texas scenery. There’s a lot of Texas, and my dad has seen most of it. Last year he completed his goal of visiting all 256 counties. Now, he’s trying to hit as many border towns as he can, outlining the state that he’s already pretty well filled in. But honestly, even if he’d traveled every highway and farm-to-market there is, seen all the cities and every ghost town in between, I still don’t think anything could keep him off the roads. He likes the drive, he likes the company, and he likes taking pictures of it all.

SignPicMonkey Collage — *About fifteen years ago, my dad and brother started “collecting” all the different yellow and black diamond road signs. They now have photos of over 2,000 of them. Any difference counts. For instance, none of the three signs above are the same. **Image from http://www.smartsign.com**

Happy Trails

This weekend, my husband and I accompanied my dad on one of his “quick trips.” The destination was Presidio, Texas, a border town of about 4,000 people, but there were plenty of stops and tangents to take along the way, both there and back.

On Thursday, my dad drove down to Austin with my mom from their home in Richardson. On Friday morning, Mom stayed at our house to pet sit for us while my dad, my hubby, and I hit the road at 7:00 A.M.

1,200 miles is a lot of road to cover, and we covered them fast in my husband’s Jetta (a.k.a. “the Jitney”). It would be impossible, or at least quite time-consuming, for me to share every sign and windmill and roadrunner that we encountered (there were many), but here are a few highlights from the trip:

A café called The Mercantile Garden on Main Street in Sonora—They have a sandwich called The Hobbit that hit the spot.
The Balmorhea State Park Pool—It wasn’t the right weather for trying out this spring-fed swimming hole, but it is definitely on my to do list now!
Buying some Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans in Fort Davis—Mark got black pepper, I got sausage and cinnamon, Dad got booger and vomit. Poor Dad.
The sunrise in Presidio—Beauty in every direction that Saturday morning.
Driving out to Ruidosa, TX to see what was there—The answer? Nothing really, except the Chinati Hot Springs, an unexpected oasis very much off the beaten path. I may have to take a writing retreat there someday.
Taking my first trip (via rowboat and burro) into Mexico—The hubby and I spent a couple of hours in Boquillas, just across the Rio Grande from Big Bend National Park. Dad, who doesn’t have a passport, waited for us on the Texas side. He and my brother took that rowboat journey in the mid-nineties when things at the border were less complicated.

The Story of the Little Green Rock

Traveling with my dad is fun. Having said that, it can also be a little painful. One common injury suffered on long road trips with him is a strained cornea due to all the eye-rolling you end up doing throughout the trip. The term “captive audience” is never more true than when you’re in a car, in the middle-of-nowhere-Texas, with no radio, no cell phone service, and no traffic in sight. Dad knows this. Dad uses these opportunities to tell stories.

Some of the stories are great—he tells old family tales and army anecdotes and talks about how the landscape has changed since he was a kid. Some of the stories are obvious jokes or outlandish lies, and those can be okay too. But some of the stories begin in one category before subtly sliding over into the other, and before you know it, you’ve been got. Trapped in the car on a lonely stretch of country road with not even a cow to commiserate with, you sigh and roll your eyes and push the accelerator a little closer to the floor.

This weekend, my dad told the story of the little green rock.

When my dad was a little kid, his family drove out to the Panhandle to visit his grandparents, Pap and Grandma. It was winter, and it had been a hard one in West Texas. The temperature was in the upper twenties and had been for days. The ground was frozen solid and icicles hung from the roof of the farmhouse.

Dad’s father and grandfather walked out into the pasture to check on the cattle, and my dad went with them. He was dressed in his warmest clothes, but it didn’t matter. That cold wind blew straight across those flat plains and right through him. He was shivering and wanted to go back to the house, but he wanted to stay with the men more, so he did.

While they were out walking that frozen ground, my dad looked down and saw a little green rock. It was shaped kind of a like an egg, but smaller, and very smooth. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Finally, the men turned to head back to the warmth of the house. My dad was more than ready to follow them.

When they got inside, they shrugged off their coats and their extra layers. My dad emptied his pockets, putting his little green rock on the table. They stoked the fire and got it going good, and everyone sat around thawing out and warming up.

After a few minutes, when the feeling had come back to my dad’s hands and feet and he was starting to feel alive again, he heard PHHFFFTT! He looked at the table and saw that his little green rock was gone.

It turns out, it wasn’t a rock at all. It was a frozen fart.

(I warned you. Be grateful you got the short version.)

The End

We left at 7:00 A.M. on Friday, spent the night in Presidio, and arrived back in Austin at 1:00 A.M. on Sunday morning. In the 42 hours that we were gone, we put 1,237 miles on the Jitney. Dad slept for a few hours and then he and Mom hit the road again, heading back up to Richardson before the bad weather arrived.

The whole thing was a whirlwind. Honestly, I probably won’t even remember it all until I see Dad’s pictures. (I didn’t take very many, but he did.) Some people probably can’t understand the point of a trip like that—so much driving (all done by my husband), so many hours in the car and so little time spent in any one location. But we covered a lot of ground and had some good conversations and kicked up a lot of dust behind the Jitney. We drank some coffee and collected some more yellow and black signs and learned a lesson about picking up little green rocks in winter.

To us, the trip was a success.