Wednesday Books
Mar. 13th, 2013 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I Just Finished Reading
Mira Tweti's Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision Between Two Intelligent Species, which is a really good (if sometimes repetitive: how many miserable parrot sequences can one book hold?) book about parrots and why they shouldn't be kept as pets.
1. Basically, for a pet parrot to be rewarding you have to treat it basically like a child, in that you rearrange your entire house to parrot proof it, buy it lots of parrot toys, and spend absolutely enormous amounts of time interacting with it, because parrots are social birds who normally live in enormous flocks and therefore need a huge amount of attention. And you need to get used to the fact that parrots are going to chew on your furniture, poop all over everything, and be really really noisy, too.
If you do all that and are cool with the furniture destruction, parrots are the greatest pets ever, because they are almost as rewarding as children. The parallel is actually pretty close, because parrots, like children, learn to talk - and not just isolated words, but whole sentences. Engaged parrot owners have actualfax conversations with their birds. It is super cool!
But you aren't willing to completely rearrange your life around your parrot, both it and you will be miserable because it will do all the aforementioned house destruction and also scream all the time, like a naughty child trying to get attention. Something like 80% of pet parrots end up being neglected, because their owners bought them as a sort of ornamental pet, don't know how to deal with a creature so demanding and uncuddly, and thus keep the parrots in their cages way more than is good for them, which of course just makes the lonely parrot shriek more.
2. And really, we shouldn't be keeping parrots as pets in the first place, because parrot breeding facilities are incredibly awful. The parrots live in dark, miserable, dirty crates, cranking out babies which get taken away from them before they are weaned so that the parrots have to have more parrot babies. The parrots attack the people who come to steal the unweaned parrot babies, then mourn for weeks for their lost parrot babies, and then sometimes kill their mates.
And wild-caught parrots tend to be smuggled in ways that kill at least half the parrots involved. And no, we can't solve this by just legalizing the parrot trade, because if we legalize the parrot trade then we will probably kill all the wild parrots. And most parrot owners don't even ultimately like their parrots!
Tl;dr, don't get a pet parrot unless you are willing to rearrange your entire life around the parrot. And even then, the parrot would be infinitely happier living with its flock, so really, we should just leave the parrots alone.
What I'm Reading Now
Raymond Haberski's God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, which is indeed for class, but is, unusually, also really interesting, although I think ultimately it would have been more useful just to read Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History. Alas, the local library does not have a copy of Niebuhr; I tried to get his book today, but no avail.
I've also been trying to figure out how long middle grade books are supposed to be, and therefore looking through a lot of "How to Write Children's Books" books. All the books, distressingly, offer different ranges, if indeed they offer word limits at all. (Some of them offer page counts. Given differences in print size, page size, etc., this is basically useless.) Apparently anything between 10,000 and 60,000 words might work? WTF, how can it be this difficult to get word counts.
What I'm Reading Next
I was hoping to read Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken this break, but it looks like whoever checked it out of the library isn't going to turn it in early enough for me to do that. So...I don't know.
Mira Tweti's Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision Between Two Intelligent Species, which is a really good (if sometimes repetitive: how many miserable parrot sequences can one book hold?) book about parrots and why they shouldn't be kept as pets.
1. Basically, for a pet parrot to be rewarding you have to treat it basically like a child, in that you rearrange your entire house to parrot proof it, buy it lots of parrot toys, and spend absolutely enormous amounts of time interacting with it, because parrots are social birds who normally live in enormous flocks and therefore need a huge amount of attention. And you need to get used to the fact that parrots are going to chew on your furniture, poop all over everything, and be really really noisy, too.
If you do all that and are cool with the furniture destruction, parrots are the greatest pets ever, because they are almost as rewarding as children. The parallel is actually pretty close, because parrots, like children, learn to talk - and not just isolated words, but whole sentences. Engaged parrot owners have actualfax conversations with their birds. It is super cool!
But you aren't willing to completely rearrange your life around your parrot, both it and you will be miserable because it will do all the aforementioned house destruction and also scream all the time, like a naughty child trying to get attention. Something like 80% of pet parrots end up being neglected, because their owners bought them as a sort of ornamental pet, don't know how to deal with a creature so demanding and uncuddly, and thus keep the parrots in their cages way more than is good for them, which of course just makes the lonely parrot shriek more.
2. And really, we shouldn't be keeping parrots as pets in the first place, because parrot breeding facilities are incredibly awful. The parrots live in dark, miserable, dirty crates, cranking out babies which get taken away from them before they are weaned so that the parrots have to have more parrot babies. The parrots attack the people who come to steal the unweaned parrot babies, then mourn for weeks for their lost parrot babies, and then sometimes kill their mates.
And wild-caught parrots tend to be smuggled in ways that kill at least half the parrots involved. And no, we can't solve this by just legalizing the parrot trade, because if we legalize the parrot trade then we will probably kill all the wild parrots. And most parrot owners don't even ultimately like their parrots!
Tl;dr, don't get a pet parrot unless you are willing to rearrange your entire life around the parrot. And even then, the parrot would be infinitely happier living with its flock, so really, we should just leave the parrots alone.
What I'm Reading Now
Raymond Haberski's God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, which is indeed for class, but is, unusually, also really interesting, although I think ultimately it would have been more useful just to read Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History. Alas, the local library does not have a copy of Niebuhr; I tried to get his book today, but no avail.
I've also been trying to figure out how long middle grade books are supposed to be, and therefore looking through a lot of "How to Write Children's Books" books. All the books, distressingly, offer different ranges, if indeed they offer word limits at all. (Some of them offer page counts. Given differences in print size, page size, etc., this is basically useless.) Apparently anything between 10,000 and 60,000 words might work? WTF, how can it be this difficult to get word counts.
What I'm Reading Next
I was hoping to read Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken this break, but it looks like whoever checked it out of the library isn't going to turn it in early enough for me to do that. So...I don't know.
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no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 02:06 am (UTC)I suspect the word counts vary in part because of the age range? Shorter for the younger end of the range and longer for the upper end? But this is making me think I had better sell Pen Pal as low YA rather than high MG, as Pen Pal is 81,000 words. Hmmm.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 02:15 am (UTC)Pen Pal does seem a bit hard to place. Given how loose the word counts for MG seem to be, though, I don't think you need to give up on selling it as middle grade. Frances Hardinge's Mosca Mye, books, for instance, are clearly longer than 60,000 words, and they've been pretty popular. At least, among adult people who still read children's/YA, I don't know how actual young people have reacted. But her books keep getting published, so that's a good sign, right?
Also MG is the age where kids totally glom onto books, and it seems to me like Pen Pal is a book that would be good for glomming onto.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 02:30 am (UTC)There's not exactly romance, but for Kaya there's some romantic feelings . . . . OH IF ONLY THINGS HAD GONE DIFFERENTLY FOR YOU KAYA. --but it's not romance the way romance figures in the YA books.
Railsea. That's about the same level of romantic-ness, and equally or more long and complex. Note to self: find out who China Miéville's agent is...
no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-14 02:39 am (UTC)