Stacked: A booklog

Role Models

If you're not sure you could love your children, please don't have them, because they might grow up and kill us.

John Waters, Role Models

Title:  Role Models 

Author: John Waters

Publisher/Publisher Date: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/2010

Library/Bookstore: Amazon Kindle

Date Borrowed/Bought/Read: June 2011

Rating: ****

What It's About:  John Waters talks about the people who have influenced him in life such as Johnny Mathis, a member of the Manson family, Tennessee Williams, a Republican lesbian burlesque dancer, and many other strange, fascinating people.

Why I Chose to Read It:  John Waters is like the creepy uncle I've always wanted.  I love listening to him talk about random things that he finds interesting.

Notes About the Book:

1. I also love Johnny Mathis and listen to his Christmas tapes every December.  His voice is like buttah.
2. Wouldn't it be great if more celebrities talked about their favorite books?  What does Dieter Laser read?
3.  You get to learn about the origins of his pencil mustache and the woman behind his clothes.
4. I loved the chapter on his interview with Little Richard.
5. Um, I may have skipped a good chunk of the last chapter about his collection of art.  The only thing I hate more than modern art is reading about modern art. 
6. Is it just me or does John Waters kind of look like Freddie Mercury on the cover art?

Do I Recommend It?  How could I not recommend it?  It's by freaking John Waters!  Reading this book is almost like you're having an actual conversation with him.  

Links:

NPR Interview with John Waters on Role Models

Dreamland

 

Educating Esme

"People snicker, “Those who can’t do, teach.” But, oh, how right they are. I could never, ever do all I dream of doing. I could never, ever be an opera star, a baseball umpire, an earth scientist, an astronaut, a great lover, a great liar, a trapeze artist, a writer, a dance, a baker, a Buddha, or a thousand other aspirations I have had, while having only been given one thin ticket in this lottery of life! In the recessional, as I watch them, mine, the ones I loved, I overflow with the joyous greed of a rich man counting coins. Wrongly I have thought teaching has lessened me at times, but now I experience a teacher’s great euphoria, the knowledge like a drug that will keep me: Thirty-one children. Thirty-one chances. Thirty-one futures, our futures. It’s an almost psychotic feeling, believing that part of their lives belongs to me. Everything they become, I also become. And everything about me, they helped to create."

Esme Raji Codell from Educating Esme

Title:  Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year

Author: Esme Raji Codell

Publisher/Publisher Date: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill/1999

Library/Bookstore: Inklings

Date Borrowed/Bought/Read: November 2008

Rating: ***1/2

What It's About: Esme Codell shares the diary that she kept as a first year 5th grade teacher in a Chicago public school.  She writes about dealing with abusive parents, an idiot principal, and a broken education system.  I love how she stands up for what she believes is the best thing for her kids despite the threats made to her by administration.

Why I Chose to Read It: I'm a first year teacher.

Notes About the Book:

1. I wish I was as confident and self-assured as Esme when it comes to teaching.  Someone thinks highly of herself. 
2. I would LOVE to hear her co-workers' version of what happened.  Her principal couldn't be that incompetent.
3. Where did she find the time and the money for all of the wonderful things that she did in her classroom?
4. It's sad that she only taught for two years.
5. Like Esme, I've gone home in tears after discovering what my students had to go home to every day.  Students have asked me how to send their schoolwork to parents in jail, begged me not to send them back home, explained to me how their parents take drugs (in great detail), and bragged about how a relative was shot or stabbed in a gang fight.  These kids are between the ages of 5 and 8.

Do I Recommend It?  Yes.  This book will make you want to be a better teacher.  If you're not a teacher, it will make you appreciate what teachers have to deal with every day.

Links:

Planet Esme

Esme's book reviews