9. The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Book: The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Author: Beverly Cleary

Number of pages: 159

What I’m watching: TV: The Office

What I’m playing: Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Kingdom Hearts, Far Cry 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

            I rolled a four! Honestly, this was the one I wanted to read next, anyway.

I remember loving Beverly Cleary’s tales about Henry, Ribsy, Beezus, and Ramona as a kid. I also remember Runaway Ralph, the ABC TV-movie based on The Mouse and the Motorcycle’s sequel, with stop-motion mice and a young Fred Savage. For me, reading this book would be like eating a slice of my childhood out of some nostalgia pie, even though I've never read this particular book.

            So, Ralph the mouse lives in a hotel wall with his family. They make a living by eating fallen crumbs from guests in their room. A family stops by and the kid, Keith, gets the room to himself. He brings along toys, including a –whaddaya know– motorcycle. At his first opportunity, Ralph checks out the motorcycle close-up, fascinated by it. Beverly Cleary is pretty funny. As Ralph gushes over the toy, he thinks “it even had a little license plate so it would be legal to ride” (23). I enjoyed that. Ralph mounts the motorcycle, and not too long after, crash lands into the garbage basket and can’t escape. Oddly enough, all the while Ralph is failing at climbing out of the little bin, the illustrator included a picture of Ralph successfully knocking the basket over.

There’s a picture in the book of something that doesn’t happen in the story, not even in Ralph’s mind.

            Keith comes and finds Ralph still stuck in the garbage with the motorcycle. Turns out they can talk to each other because “two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language” (38-39). Groan…Anyway, Keith says Ralph can borrow the motorcycle at night, letting Keith play during the day. Keith explains that to make the motorcycle go, you have to make a motorcycle sound, like “pb-pb-b-b-b” (44). Groan…I guess I should’ve expected this kind of stuff in a kid’s book.

            I also didn’t expect coming across words I didn’t recognize. I graduated with an English degree, and Beverly Cleary just taught me two new words in a children’s story: “antimacassar” (14) and “zwieback” (33), a cloth furniture-cover and bread.

            I’m sad to say, I was bored throughout most of the book. Maybe I’ve outgrown The Mouse and the Motorcycle. I hope I would still enjoy Henry and Ribsy and Beezus and Ramona if I re-read those. Maybe I just don’t have the nostalgia factor here, even though this book was so close to being a part of my childhood.

Maybe The Mouse and the Motorcycle was just plain uneventful. Which I think is true. Ralph drives around the hallway at night. At one point, he pisses off a dog, but the dog is securely held in the arms of its owner, so nothing happens. Oh yeah, the dog and also the elderly busboy Matt, can talk with Ralph. I guess they love motorcycles, too? Later, Ralph drives into a pillowcase and loses the motorcycle to the laundry. Keith gets a fever one night, but there’s no medicine available. Ralph goes on an adventure to find an aspirin tablet. His search through the hotel for medicine might’ve been harrowing for a mouse, but it was too tame for me. I hope if I re-read Stuart Little, I’d still enjoy that.

Of course, again I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t have expected anything too intense for a kid’s book. Man, now I’m really worried that I can no longer appreciate good children’s literature.

            Anyway, Ralph finds a pill hidden until a dresser or something. He manages to get it back to Keith’s room. Transporting the pill was a big part of the book. Early in the book, I read how aspirin killed Ralph's father, so Ralph looking for aspirin is kind of a big deal for him and his family. Ralph’s father once kept an aspirin tablet in his mouth, but “the aspirin had dissolved with an unexpected suddenness, and Ralph’s father had been poisoned” (22). I actually know a guy who did that to try to relieve a toothache. However, aspirin is an acid, so it burned away his gums. In my psychopharmacology class at Stritch, I learned that it’s possible to overdose on aspirin. So when I was reading this part, I was thinking, “Yeah, that can happen, but poisoning from just one pill?” And then I thought, “Oh yeah, he’s a mouse.”

            In the end, Keith feels better and gives Ralph the motorcycle as a gift to keep. Everyone is happy. They all learned a few things, grew up a little, and so on.

            I’m just disappointed. I was excited for this book, and I ended up bored. I still like Beverly Cleary in general, and the book did have a few funny moments. This one just wasn’t for me.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Pb-pb-b-b-b. This book is going.

 

Works Cited

Cleary, Beverly. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Print.

8. Blood Men

Book: Blood Men

Author: Paul Cleave

Number of pages: 329

What I’m watching: TV: How I Met Your Mother, Spiderman, Cadfael, The Colbert Report, Big Bang Theory, Downton Abbey, Twin Peaks, The Office, Kim Possible

Movies: Star Trek: Into Darkness, Project A, Die Hard, Run Fatboy Run, MST3K: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

What I’m playing: Skyrim, Bioshock, Fallout 3, God of War 3, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Left 4 Dead, Bioshock: Infinite, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Deadly Premonition, Far Cry 3

 

            So I picked out the next six books for my blog, and decided a new approach to the reading order. The roll of a die.

I rolled a one. I read the beginning of Blood Men some time ago, when I made a half-assed attempt at reading the first 10^% of all my unread books to decide if they were worth keeping. Now, I’ve finally read the whole thing.

            Blood Men is set in Christchurch, New Zealand. All I knew about Christchurch before reading this book was a news story about a 2011 earthquake damaging the city’s iconic cathedral. If this fictional book is anything to go by, Christchurch is about as safe as Gotham.

They also do things in metric down there, which means 40 degrees is really hot and people measure in meters and kilos. Also, Christmas is during summer. And buildings are so many “storeys” high, not “stories.”

            WARNING! Minor spoilers. Edward, a 29-year-old son of a serial killer, is trying to lead a normal life, but the media speculates if he will turn serial murderer like his father. Edward has a wife and daughter, but early in the novel, his wife gets shot during a bank job. The plot centers on Edward seeking revenge on the bank robbers as he discovers that he does have an inclination toward killing. The narrative’s perspective switches between him and Schroder, a detective working the robbery case.

            Blood Men is a page-turner. It was thrilling and action-y. I also really enjoyed Paul Cleave’s writing style. He blends humor, action, and emotion very well. His depiction of Edward’s overwhelming grief moved me. It reminded me of Joker’s speech in The Killing Joke.

It also reminded me of Superman in the videogame Injustice: Gods Among Us.

In each case, Joker and Superman lost his wife and in his grief, went mad and turned to violence. Edward even thinks at one point, “my neighborhood is different – darker, everything gritty, it’s now the kind of place where only one bad day separates it between a suburbia and a war zone” (173; emphasis added). His view of the world altered after his one bad day, like the Joker. I try to imagine experiencing that same level of devastating loss, and I don’t know how I could cope. All in all, this book is depressing and violent.

            Edward turns to his imprisoned father, Jack, for help. Jack points toward paranoid schizophrenia as the cause for his murderous nature. Everyone in the book wonders whether Edward inherited his father’s mental disorder. This was where I had a bit of a problem with Blood Men. Let’s say that Jack does have paranoid schizophrenia. It is true that schizophrenia does have a strong biological influence. And, “research suggests that the paranoid type may have a stronger familial link than do people with the other types” (Durand and Barlow 479). So, there is a good chance that Edward has a predisposition for schizophrenia. However, family studies reveal that genetic inheritance of psychotic disorders is more complex:

All forms of schizophrenia (for example, catatonic and paranoid) were seen within the families. In other words, it does not appear that people inherit a predisposition for, say, paranoid schizophrenia. Instead, people may inherit a general predisposition for schizophrenia. More recent research confirms this observation and suggests that families that have a member with schizophrenia are at risk not just for schizophrenia alone or all psychological disorders; instead, there appears to be some familial risk for a spectrum of psychotic disorders related to schizophrenia. (Durand and Barlow 484)

Yes, there is a high likelihood that Edward would have schizophrenia. However, it would be a large assumption that Edward not only inherited the same type of schizophrenia, but also inherited the same murderous hallucinations of a voice telling him to kill in his symptoms. What I’m getting at is that I found the serial killer inheritance a bit far-fetched. However, Cleave throws a monkey wrench into those assumed works later in the novel. There are a few twists at the end. However, I guessed the twist that I think is supposed to fuel the last bit of the novel, so the ending kind of petered out for me. Nonetheless…

            Blood Men is a captivating read. Paul Cleave authored other thrillers, and if this one is anything to go by, the others are worth reading into.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Works Cited

Cleave, Paul. Blood Men. New York: Atria Paperback, 2010. Print.

Durand, Mark V. and David H. Barlow. Essentials of Abnormal Psychology. 5th ed.

Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. Print.