Review: Bookchair “just right” bookholder

You know you’re a word person when your books have more furniture than you do. Over the past few months I bought myself 2 “Bookchairs,” which have a semi-Goldilocks feel about them — I have a Medium one for paperbacks and a Large one for the computer books, but haven’t found a reason I would need the mini one.  They’re  book holders with pegs to keep your place, but they look like folding beach chairs that beat up Snoopy in Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving. (Pardon the mixed similes.) These, however, are multicolored and nonviolent — they won’t even so much as collapse.

Note: charming wooden things that look like they were stolen from the Three Bears’ vacation or Charlie Brown’s garage are made better than a lot of the overpriced plastic crap they sell in medical catalogs. The Bookchair is made to be a single unit, with proper hinges so that you can easily fold and unfold it. When unfolded, the base of the chair has grooves to fit the support bar to create 3 different angles for the back. The pegs are more like arms, actually, screwed as to be horizontal on either side of the “seat.” Since the pegs are horizontal, you don’t have to worry so much about pulling the page around them, as you would with vertical pegs. I think they have a slight springiness in them, so that they can account for the way the pages sometimes bulge out. They fit against the pages tightly enough to hold them, but not so tightly that you can’t move the page when you need to.

Actually inserting the book is very easy — open the book to the desired page, lift it up by the top with one hand, and set it behind the pegs. If it’s a heavy book, of course, it takes me a couple of tries because my good hand is now not so good, but that’s not the chair’s fault. To turn a page, sometimes I don’t even need to adjust the right side peg — just move the page out from behind, and flick my thumb or finger to move the left side peg out of the way. Often, the left side peg will fall back into place by itself to hold the page. I don’t understand the Amazon review in which some guy complains that his wife — who, like me, is hemiplegic — can’t hold the device and turn the page at the same time. You don’t have to hold the device and turn the page at the same time. The most you need is good fine motor use of a finger or thumb on the same hand to flick a peg out of the way as you turn the page.

The only potential issue is the multi-size one, because you need to pay attention. (Why the heck did the people complaining about books not fitting order the Medium size for a hardcover math textbook?) If you mostly just read paperbacks, you should be fine with the medium size. If you read different types of books, however, you may need a larger size as well. I can’t see reading my C++ books on anything but a large Bookchair. The need for more than one might suck. However, if your large books aren’t quite so thick as that, the Standard size may be “just right” for both your paperbacks and your other books. I tried a couple book holders that seemed to be more universal, such as the Fellowes and Roberts, but they were multi-piece and rather flimsy and the pegs didn’t keep my place well enough, besides being vertical.

The Bookchair can be found on the Thinking Gifts website, though you might want to select US dollars from the drop-down so as to get the accurate price for you. You can pay with your PayPal account if you have one, which is also convenient. If you don’t want to wait for the UK shipping, you can often find them used on Amazon or eBay, where there’s a better chance that the seller might be closer (and cheaper).

Stress relief for word people

I am always more at home in printed English, be it in books or DVDs with the captions on, just because it’s more accessible and expressive and stable. Sometimes, though, it’s more than that. There are times I just need to see printed words in front of my eyes: a kind of silent-printed-English white noise. Spoken English is just so much babble when I’ve been awake for too long, or when I’m well worried about something, or I can’t take the level of screaming swear words going on in other rooms. Glancing over a few words on a page is the equivalent of wearing smooth a worry stone. To do that, I need an excuse — trying to concentrate on the plot of a novel won’t work, because I’m sacrificing the entertainment for the visual/sensory aspect and would need to return to the book later when I actually wanted to read it. Having half registered the story already, I’d feel like I’d already read it even though technically I hadn’t, I’d just run my eyes over it. So, that doesn’t work. What does work, however, is an etymological dictionary.

An etymological dictionary isn’t like your average Webster’s or American Heritage paperback. It doesn’t give you usage or regional notes or tell you what anything means — it tells you all the words that borrowed and branched and blurred to make up a single entry for an English word.Etymological dictionaries tend to be a little pricey since they tend also to be thick and usually hardcover, so about six years ago I bought the first dirt-cheap ex-library copy I could find for 10 bucks.

The one I have is out of print — the older hardcover edition of Origins by Eric Partridge. (The paperback is being reissued on January 4, but it’s expensive: about $60. Try Amazon or ABEBooks. Check your local library for older editions and keep renewing, if you have to.) I don’t know what its merits are compared to other dictionaries, because I haven’t read any other dictionaries like that. I don’t know if any of the entries are definitive; many are annotated with the abbreviation for “possibly.” But it’s pleasantly dizzying, just trying to follow chain after chain of words and to speculate on how it must have happened. Raw poetry, almost.

Even following, though, isn’t required. If you have synesthesia, attach facial expressions or gestures to words, or are adept at creating sound symbolism, just looking down the list is the comfort — something like caffeine, or soft clothes [insert comfort object here].

Book review: Inside Out Girl

Fiction, despite being just that, is still one of the most important vehicles for portraying the sheer range of human beings and emotions in the world. Fiction allows us to “meet” people we may never encounter otherwise — including people with various disabilities. By no means is fiction a substitute for actually getting to know somebody, but if it’s done well, it can provide a tentative reflection. Being fiction, however, does not absolve a book for having incredibly stereotyped characters just for the sake of a soap opera plot. This was my problem with Inside Out Girl by Tish Cohen, which purports to “deal with” NVLD (NLD) via a character named Olivia. But it doesn’t deal with it. That would require introducing the fact that NVLD can BE dealt with, which kills the sappy factor.

Now, granted, I haven’t read many love stories, which this also is in part. It may be the law that love stories must be nauseatingly cliched. The rough summary is this: Rachel Berman meets Len Bean and his daughter Olivia on the side of the road, and they decide to date on the spot. Rachel is haunted by Olivia’s fairy-child-like beauty, and the fact that she resembles the daughter with Down Syndrome she gave up. Rachel’s kids are mortified, because Olivia is the most mocked girl in school. But they have to get along, you see, because Len is dying and has granted guardianship of poor, annoying, clueless, helpless Olivia (sarcasm) to Rachel to assuage her guilt, which is apparently a better qualification than being a licensed foster parent devoted to accepting the quirks of kids like Olivia. Olivia’s quirks include talking solely about rats, hanging onto her decomposing gerbil, asking every day if it’s her birthday, wearing inside out clothes, and basically being nothing but her quirks.

Olivia fares much worse in this book than I expected her to, which I could swallow if only it weren’t so obvious that Cohen was tugging her harder than necessary as a token “heartstring.” I don’t mean to say there aren’t children who exhibit all the symptoms Olivia does — like anything else, NVLD varies widely, and that includes the extreme end. However, because the negatives were never balanced with any positives, Olivia seemed a caricature of every possible item on the NVLD checklists, a walking info-dump rather than a fully fleshed person. I believed the way the kids bully her; that was all too real. I wondered, however, if the author weren’t heaping it a little thick; Olivia exists, it seems, only for the bullying scenes. Certain omissions puzzled me.

For example, Olivia was fortunate enough to be diagnosed at 5, receiving a teacher’s aide and extensive role-playing treatment and counseling. She is 10 when we meet her, and 5 years of treatment haven’t made one dent. I’m sorry, but children do grow up and learn a little, even if by sheer trial and error. Plug in a rote action or phrase often enough, and you will eventually sift what works and what doesn’t. Especially with the benefit of private treatment, for god’s sake! And where was this teacher’s aide? I know too well that the worst bullying can be outside school, but there were scenes that this elusive aide could well have prevented. But that would cut the heartstring of lines like, “As she matured, she’d become more and more aware of the trap she was in. No matter how badly she wanted to escape, there was no real way out.” Oh, poor NVLDers! Aren’t we all just rats in a cage pining to be drowned in a bucket. Olivia, poor changeling child, whose eyes change color (I kid you not) must be protected all her days. AUGH. I’m not saying NVLD isn’t rough — I’ve admitted it, here — but jesus.

Also — who is Olivia? We know she likes rats and Lucky Charms, okay. But what does she do in school? Does she like word games? Is she good at reading or spelling bees, the way we’re shown that even Rachel’s son — a frigging minor character — likes to skateboard? We don’t know. Even her favorite band, Aly & AJ, is a pity prop — they sing about bullying, aww. Olivia is never given a frigging BRAIN. Even when she inadvertently saves the day, Rachel thinks, “Throwing her a party for being a hero was having no more impact than ironing her T-shirts.” So EXPLAIN it to her, then, and show her that one of her weaknesses turned out to be a strength. But no; Rachel just pats her head and pretends it’s her birthday (since apparently no one taught the child how a calendar works! Yes, Ms. Cohen, we do eventually remember our own birthdays.).

Because of sappy romances, we get book review comments like this — “The worst thing that can happen to a family is to be told a child has a learning disability. No, wait. It’s to lose one of the parents. No, wait. There is still one more disaster to hit the Bean family, but that comes later in the story.” Disaster, my arse. Difficult? Absolutely. Disastrous dumb rats? NO. For all Tish Cohen dedicated the book to a real girl with NVLD, Olivia the fairy child is unfairly doomed. The review in question can be found at http://www.bloggernews.net/116718. Cohen’s blog — better written than this book, which is kind of sad — can be found at http://blog.tishcohen.com