Reading kids' books

I read kids' books quite often, and by kids' books I don't mean those aimed at any particular age group but ones ranging from delightful full-colour picture books to books that just come in just under the young adults' age range. I've read some YA books too, but usually they're romances or gloomy apocalyptic things, and I'm not so strung out about those.

I had a real go at Diana Wynne Jones' books in 2011, when I read eight of them (they vary in quality but are always imaginative). I read a couple more earlier this year. Her books are in the same kind of fantasy genre as mine, though of course, so far, she's been considerably more successful than me in terms of a wide readership and lots of sales.

However, in the last month I've read a couple of other books I'd like to mention. The first is Speed. Speed is a word with several meanings of course, and Grant uses that ambiguity in her title and in her book. But it's also something of a speed read, because she piles on the angst and the action. I'm not sure if anyone's yet invented an equivalent of the phrase 'page-turner' for e-books, but whatever the correct phrase is, it applies to this book, which I read on my Kindle.

It's probably aimed at young teens: the hero was around 14, if I remember rightly, and proved to be a pretty tough character by the time he'd got himself through dealing with his parents dying and lying policemen and houses burning down. This book is by the Kiwi writer, Dawn Grant (although she writes under D C Grant). It's the first in a series and I wrote a brief review on Goodreads: The book races along at a great pace with the young hero gradually getting himself deeper and deeper into difficulties. Along the way there's a good deal about coping with grief as well as making the right decisions even if they may cost you your life. 

The second book was one I finished today. It starts off a bit more slowly than Speed, is aimed at a slightly younger age range, and is written by someone living here in my home town, someone I haven't met face-to-face but have corresponded on email with. I'd written to her husband on a few occasions - he writes a column in the ODT called WordWays - and it was he who introduced me to his wife and told me about her book. 

This author is called Beatrice Hale, and she's written an exciting adventure called Ice Escape. (You can see my review on Goodreads here.)  This book has two young narrators, both boys, and while initially it's a bit of a puzzle as to why the second narrator is there, it soon becomes evident that the two lads' lives will connect. 

The story is about a family embarking on a long flight together, on a flying boat. It's set in the 1920s and their adventure is meant to take them around the world. Of course, this being an adventure story things don't quite according to plan. The characters are straightforwardly-drawn, and the adventure itself is exciting enough to make you keep turning pages again. But the interesting thing is that a great deal of information about flying, and living in a perilous situation, and being rescued, and working on a fishing boat is included. There's no sense that it's there just because the writer thinks it's interesting, but because it's integral to the story. 

I probably won't write a thriller like Speed or an adventure story like Ice Escape. But each book you read shows you better how to write your own - quite apart from the sheer enjoyment involved in sharing the adventures of fictional characters. As poet Billy Collins writes in One Life to Live: 
...this is the only life I have and I never step out of it, 
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel...

Rubato

I'm currently teaching one of my granddaughters to play the piano.  At this stage you spend a lot of time getting the pupil to play in time, that is, making sure they understand the relationship of each note to another in an almost a mathematical sense.  One crochet has to be as long as another crochet, a semibreve has to be held the length of four crochets and so forth.  It's all very relative.  With a fast piece the crochet is shorter than it is in the slow piece, and as a longstanding player of music, you take this for granted, often failing to realise that it's not as obvious to a pupil as it is to you.

And as time goes on, and children play more complicated music, you begin to teach them that the first crochet isn't necessarily quite as long as the second crochet, or vice versa, because you give more emphasis to one than the other.  And that one bar may be stretched out longer than the previous one, even though they're both strictly speaking the same length.  I've just been practicising a piece for the Brass Band competitions with a cornet player, and of course there are different 'speeds' for different sections (meaning that the crochets, for instance, aren't the same length in the fast section as they are in the slow) but even within the sections, notes are stretched, sped up and generally twisted according to the mood of the piece at that point.  Music is actually hugely fluid, and this is a difficult thing to teach. 

I saw a film years ago, a documentary about Isaac Stern going to China after the Cultural Revolution, called From Mao to Mozart.  There were plenty of young Chinese musicians after the Revolution, and they were playing Western music, but they had no sense of the feeling, the rubato, the shifting of pace that is common to this kind of music. Western influences in China during the Cultural Revolution were banned, and the musicians lost touch with the way the music was played.   They played strictly in time, and of course, it sounded like clockwork.  There's a time and place for this in music, but it's rare by comparison with the normality of pulling music about like plasticine.  You get to a stage in life where you never think about this, you just do it. 

As a footnote to that movie, I remember a pitiful scene in which a music teacher told us how he'd been locked in the equivalent of a cupboard for some long time during the Revolution; the Red Guard did horrific things to artists.  In spite of that, after the Revolution's worst excesses were over, he continued to teach. 

Old and crochety

For some time now my PC has been working sluggishly in some areas: I thought it was the browser, so I swapped from Google Chrome back to Firefox, but that made little difference.  I cleaned out the programmes that load up at start up, and that helped sometimes.  There's a curious inconsistency about how things run these days.  I'll click on a link in one browser page, and it'll begin to load up that page, and then everything gradually stops.  Sometimes I use control, alt, delete to bring the machine back to the restart page; I don't actually have to restart; just giving things a little fright by threatening to seems to be enough to get things working again - and the page that's causing the trouble will load.  Now if it was always the same kind of pages, I'd have an idea perhaps why things are sluggish, but it can be all sorts of random pages.

Perhaps the machine is just getting old and crochety, like its owner.  Or perhaps there's just too much stuff loaded onboard, and it's tired.  I've tried various clean-ups, like getting rid of excess stuff, but that only helps for a bit and then things go back to this other normality.

I see there are various sites offering to help me speed up PCs, but I'm not keen to try these (and anyway, one of them just tells me to get rid of some of the programmes that load at start up, which I've already done) because I don't know what they're adding to my machine as well as the program they offer.  It's possible that I need more RAM - there seems to be plenty of hard disk space available still - and I suppose that would be an option.

Or else it's just that they're digging up all the roads around my suburb at the moment and wiring us up for super fast broadband - and this is temporarily slowing things up.  The only problem is that by the time super fast bb arrives, my machine may have conked out entirely...

Just a wimp, obviously

Call me ultra-moralistic if you want, Mr 'Working-to-the-Rules', a namby-pamby, a non-risk taker, and anything else, but I can't for the life of me see the point of radar detectors.

The reason police use radars on roads is to prevent accidents primarily, rather than to make money. You can argue this till you're blue in the face, but making money from radars is a secondary aspect - they are there to prevent people speeding.

To me the mindset that goes with using a radar detector is one that says to itself: the whole radar thing is a game. This is how it's played. The cops set up their radar. I speed as much as I can, and if I get caught, it's not my fault. They shouldn't have been being sneaky in the first place. I'm an innocent victim here. Therefore, in order to cease being an innocent victim in the game, and to get one up on the cops, I install a radar detector. This means that when my detector detects, I can slow down. And the cops won't get me. That's how the game is played.

It's a stupid game. It fails to take into consideration the fact that even though you may think you can drive safely at a greater speed than everyone else, it's possible you can't. Furthermore it fails to take into account the fact that there are other people on the road who may not appreciate your speeding and the possibility that you may cause them to be involved in a crash.

I've been told by someone who's a member of our family (an in-law) that he always drives faster than everyone else because he knows he's in control. Yeah, right.

I know I'm banging my head on a wall on this one. I've never yet met anyone who's told me outright they wouldn't think of using a radar detector. Must be a kind of macho thing that I just don't understand (being the little wimpy person that I am, the kind who used to get the sand kicked in his face by the big muscular guy).

Fallacious Arguments

I've always struggled to understand the justification for radar detectors. People talk about using them as though they were playing some game with the police radars, yet this isn't a game. The intention of the police, whatever many people think, is to prevent speed accidents. Yes, lots of people claim it's to make money out of motorists, but surely if the motorists didn't speed then the police wouldn't make the money. There's some failure of logic on the part of people who want to use radar detectors, I think. But I've always felt as though I was in the minority on this argument. Still, being in the minority on an argument doesn't necessarily prove you're wrong; it may only mean that a lot of people believe a fallacy.
I don't enjoy speed restrictions either, along with most drivers. I always think I can drive safely at the speed I'm going at. But the issue isn't what I think, but what the law is. And in general, the law has accepted the argument that people are killed because they don't know how to control speed. Of course there are drivers who can control speed, but they're a minority, and many people have illusions about their ability to control speed. This becomes obvious on days when the weather is iffy, such as heavy rain, or frosts, or snow (it's just started to snow outside again as I write). Some people don't change their driving habits on those days at all, which to me is foolish. But again, I'm probably in the minority on this argument.