Veronica's Book Blog

Robin McKinley Dragonhaven

2007-10-26T13:24:00.000-04:00

I have loved McKinley's work for years, and was excited to read her new novel. I waited eagerly all summer, and finished the book in three days when it finally came out.

Dragonhaven is the story of an adolescent boy who lives in North America's last dragon preserve. In the world of the novel, dragons are real but elusive, and interfering with them in any way is illegal. During his first overnight hike in the park, Jake Mendoza finds a mother dragon killed during birth by a poacher, and he rescues one of the baby dragons. In order to avoid criminal prosecution and the possible closing of the park, he must raise the dragon secretly.

In many ways, this is McKinley's most daring novel. Like her vampire tale Sunshine, it is told in a rambling first-person narration, but Sunshine's narrator was a determined, experienced and likable adult woman. The narrator of Dragonhaven is an uncertain and unfocused fifteen-year-old boy.

The story is not really about the dragon, the story is about Jake. His blindnesses and self-involvement, his resentments and passions form the narrative. We cannot see any of the events of the book except through his eyes. His voice is authentic, but it is authentically adolescent, leaving the reader to decide if they can actually enjoy a 300 page monologue from a teenage boy. Not everyone can.

I found myself impressed that McKinley could so insightfully and accurately portray the feelings of a mother of a newborn (which is effectively what Jake becomes to the desperately needy dragonlet), especially since she has (apparently) never had a baby herself. Exhaustion and confusion and the drive for the survival of the baby, a drive that might feel like love if only you had a little rest - this is all present in Dragonhaven and easily recognizable to anyone who has been the mother of a newborn.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, but the way that dragons communicate is also handled very well. It is a plot device frequently employed by incompetent authors, but in Mckinley's hands it enhances the story and highlights the otherness of the two species (human and dragon), rather than becoming a crutch for a poor storyteller.

There are a few missteps in the book. The depiction of scientists as reluctant to accept the challenge dragons pose to current taxonomies rings false. Biologists love new species and new arguments. I kept wondering if the hostility Jake expresses toward "Good Scientists" was derived from McKinley's feelings as a homeopathist.

I also found unconvincing the lack of change in Jake's narrative style. When the book opens, he is fifteen. In the closing chapters, he is a father in his mid-twenties, yet he has not significantly changed the way he tells his story. When the book is so realistic in the use of an adolescent voice, this seems a mistake. I can't imagine writing something at age twenty-five the same way I would have at fifteen.

Dragonhaven is also McKinley's most political book. The constant threat to the dragon preserve from politicians hangs over every page. At any moment the foolish and ignorant powers-that-be in Washington might do something destructive. This is a necessary part of the plot, but in the last fifty pages of the book, McKinley pulls out all the stops, and throws out phrases like "big oil" and "hardened senior Republican senators." Hmm. I wonder what she's talking about. Also near the end, a character is revealed to be gay and in a relationship, and all the good guys accept this blithely. Of course. What else would good guys do.

The political bits at the end did feel a bit like following a guide through the woods only to have her thwack you in the face with a tree branch at the end of the trail. But I still came away impressed with McKinley's insight into characters different from herself, and her ability to tell a good story.

Carol O'Connell Mallory's Oracle

2007-10-26T12:51:00.000-04:00

When I try a mystery author unfamiliar to me, I rarely start with her first book. The first book is rarely the best, and I want to read the author's best work first, if possible. I began reading Carol O'Connells's series about detective Kathleen Mallory about eight years ago, and have enjoyed it so much that I thought it was time to read the book where it all started.

Many of the themes that occur throughout the series are also in the first book. Mallory is just as sociopathic, though her character is younger and less thoroughly herself in the first book. The love of her adoptive parents is still a powerful force on her life. The mystery of her character in the first book focuses more on determining whether she takes after her mother or her father more.

The book begins shortly after the murder of her adoptive father. Mallory, while grieving in her emotional hampered way, follows her father's investigation of a series of murders, trying to figure out what he knew that got him killed. Her challenge is to know all he knew, without sharing his demise. She follows his clues into the world of illusionists, magicians and psychics, uncovering old and new murders.

A few flaws are present in the first of the series. The opening prologue is never adequately connected to the rest of the storyline - the author was a little too subtle. In later books, I was always a little frustrated by the magical way Mallory used the computer. She could hack into anything, but how was never explained. In this first novel, a few more details of the how are supplied, but they are inaccurate. You can't electronically slip into someone else's computer through the outlet, regardless of whether they are connected to the internet. certainly you couldn't in 1995.

But the strengths of the later series are here as well: the interplay of callousness and mercy, truthfulness and deceit, faithful love and abandonment, friendship and isolation. Mallory is as bewitching as ever, and though Killing Critics and Stone Angel are probably the best written of the series, Mallory's Oracle is still an a satisfying read.

Anne Fadiman At Large and At Small

2007-09-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

I have a special place in my heart for Anne Fadiman's essays. Several years ago my husband bought me her first collection Ex Libris, and spent my birthday reading "Marrying Libraries" aloud to me under a rose arbor in a favorite park.

When I saw her new book at the library, I had to read it. Unlike her first collection of essays, this book does not have one theme throughout. Instead, she meanders through varied interests, and whether she is discussing biographies of Charles Lamb or flavors of ice cream, she engages, amuses and informs. Fadiman's essay voice is so much like BubandPie's blogging voice that I sometimes find myself uncertain, as I muse over a remembered quote, which of the two wrote it (and I mean that as a compliment to them both).

Fadiman's book concludes with an essay describing her memory of seeing a boy drown when she was a teen. The essay does not fit with the rest of the book, or rather, it changes the rest of the book. Instead of a pleasant diversion, her book of essays acquires a darker edge, ending with a kind of mea culpa for the detached observant nature that writes and makes connections between seemingly unconnected things.

I am uncertain why the final essay was included, and I frankly wished it had not been. Whether it was an extra bit included because there was no other place to put it, or it was a necessary catharsis for the author's memory and emotions, or was included for more deliberate reasons, I think it was a mistake. The book generally maintains the tone of conversation between familiar friends, and the final essay ends the conversation on an abruptly tragic note. It would have been better developed into a separate book, or as a larger essay earlier and more integrated with the rest.

Ian Fleming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

2007-09-13T19:29:00.000-04:00

The famous author of the James Bond spy novels also wrote one children's novel, a story about an unusual car rescued and restored by an eccentric family.

Caractacus Potts is an impecunious inventor who finally has a success with a new kind of candy. With the profits from his invention, he and his wife and son and daughter decide to buy a car. After looking around, they find an elegant old junker and decide to bring it home.

A car so well-built, so carefully restored and so loved proves to be more than meets the eye, and with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as they name the car, magical things begin to happen. Chitty takes the Potts on several suspenseful adventures, each chapter ending in a cliffhanger. If you make this the kids' bedtime book, expect a lot of complaints when you stop at the end of the chapter.

Fleming maintains an innocent lack of realism in Chitty. Throughout the story, even with its suspense and many dangers, there is an assumption that no one would really hurt the children. Criminals kidnap them, but, despite threatening them with harm, are too tenderhearted to wake the children from their nap.

The book is delightful, and unusual in its appeal to both girls and boys. It deserves to be a children's classic, and deserved a better movie than the one it got.

Nancy Mitford Pigeon Pie

2007-08-31T21:51:00.000-04:00

Mitford wrote Pigeon Pie in 1939 and it was published a year later. This short, satirical spy novel describes the unexpected adventure of Sophia, an upper-class Englishwoman who spends her days idly amusing herself until the looming war draws her into action. I did not warm up to this book immediately; I was half done before I realized that Sophia really was as stupid as she seemed, but the author meant the reader to like her anyway.

Sophia lives with her husband, Luke, a boring man for whom she has some fondness. She has a long-term affair with Rudolph, and her husband Luke is in love with Florence, a fellow-member of an enthusiastic new religion that meets at Luke's estate. The blithe affairs, the passion for fashion and the constant competition between women convey a picture of the upper class as very silly people, astringently yet affectionately lampooned.

My favorite passages always concern Sophia's chief competitor, Olga:

Sophia rang up her enemy. Olga Gogothsky (nee Baby Bagg) had been her enemy since they were both aged ten. It was an intimate enmity which gave Sophia more pleasure than most friendships; she made sacrifices upon its altar and fanned the flames with assiduity.

"Hullo, my darling Sophie," Olga purred, in the foreign accent which she had cultivated since just before her marriage and which was in striking contrast with the Eton and Oxford tones (often blurred by drink but always unmistakable) of Prince Gogothsky.

Written just before the start of the war, the story involves the infiltration of German spies into Britain. There is murder, kidnapping and betrayal, clever disguises and secret plots. Sophia is forced to act at last when her beloved lapdog is kidnapped and threatened.

Pigeon Pie made me laugh, if quietly. It was a quick, easy read, light and frothy, with just enough acidic edge to make it flavorful.

Felix Salten Bambi: A Life in the Woods

2007-08-19T20:36:00.000-04:00

Felix Salten was a Hungarian Jew whose family moved to Austria shortly after he was born, when Austria offered Jews full citizenship. He wrote several stories featuring animals as main characters, and his books were banned by the Nazis in 1936.

I began reading Bambi for my Disney Reading Challenge. Based on the movie, I expected it to be a novel written to deter hunting, and certainly many people have read it that way, but the further into the book I got, the more it seemed that this was a book about hunting the way Bulgakov's Master and Margarita was a book about the Faust story. Hunting provides the plot, but the real story is about something else.

Almost everyone knows the story, at least as the movie presented it. The novel is darker, soaked in the terror the animals feel for Him, the constantly capitalized pronoun for the human hunters. Bambi begins life innocent of the dangers He poses, and is only gradually taught the reasons for his mother's caution. The novel traces Bambi's development into an adult and a prince of the forest.

Trying to interpret the symbolism of a book always makes me want to pile on disclaimers, because I don't feel particularly good at it. Sadly, symbolism has to be pretty obvious for me to get it.

While Bambi is more than a simple allegory, it is the oppressive forces of totalitarianism and enforced social conformity, rather than hunting, which are the focus of condemnation here. The human hunters are organized and powerful and remorseless, unlike the woodland animals, who kill individually and out of simple bloodlusts. The human hunters enlist other animals (like dogs) in their hunt, and (in the novel) they kill massively and indiscriminately.

Animals who aid or abet Him are held in particular contempt. Gobo, a deer captured and hand-fed by Him, returns to the wild with stories of His kindness, only to die from stupidly trusting Him. The dog is attacked for serving Him in his hunt. Domesticated species are reviled for being traitors.

The high point of the book comes when Bambi is travelling through the woods with his father, who has been imparting his wisdom to his son before his own death. They smell Him in the woods and hear the terrible sound of his gun. Bambi's father insists that they move closer, telling Bambi that this time is different. They find the man lying dead on the ground, and Bambi's father says:

"Do you see how he's lying there dead, like one of us? Listen, Bambi. He isn't all-powerful as they say. Everything that lives and grows doesn't come from Him. He isn't above us. He's just the same as we are. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way. He can be killed like us, and then he lies helpless on the ground like all the rest of us, as you see him now."
There was a silence.
"Do you understand me, Bambi?" asked the old stag.
"I think so, "Bambi said in a whisper.
"Then speak," the old stag commanded.
Bambi was inspired, and said trembling, "There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him."

I don't think the author is trying to make any particular statement about God, but rather the inevitable destruction of forces that try to restrict and enslave the spirit of the individual.

There are other elements that do not fit perfectly into an allegorical interpretation, and the novel can be enjoyed for Salten's beautiful descriptions of the forest and its creatures alone. It was worth reading once, and I will probably read it again, though it will be awhile till my kids are old enough to handle the scary parts.

Julia L. Sauer Fog Magic

2007-08-08T16:11:00.000-04:00

Julia Sauer's Fog Magic would probably not be published today. There are no bad guys or obvious conflict. The adults are all people worthy of trust. The magical experiences of the book are never explained. Even the heroine's adventures away from her parents are accepted and subtly encouraged by them.

Most of what creates tension and resolution in children's literature today is absent from this short novel. Published in 1942, this is a simple story about a girl in Nova Scotia who finds a magical place in the fog, a place only she can go, even though, strictly speaking, not much happens to her there.

But reading it awakened in me the longings of a child, longings for a place that is magical and meant, a place that is both utterly alien and full of welcome and belonging. Deftly, Sauer creates in an adult reader a reminiscence of childhood that is something more than nostalgia. We are caught up in Greta's love of home, sense of adventure and bittersweet appreciation for the things we leave behind when we grow to adulthood. At the same time, her portrayal of growing up as the next great adventure offers children a sense of mystery and anticipation for the future.

It is a lovely book, one I plan to strategically locate for my daughters to find on their own someday.

Patricia C. Wrede The Raven Ring

2007-08-05T21:13:00.000-04:00

Patricia Wrede frequently combines her fantasy novels with elements of detective fiction. This handily serves to move the plot along, but sometimes feels like I am reading two incomplete stories instead of one fully-developed one. I have read four of her novels now, and I always come away not quite satisfied, but thinking, "She has potential as a writer. I wonder how her next book will be."

The Raven Ring is a novel set in a world (or country? I wasn't quite clear on that) called Lyra, and is part of a series set in that world. This book features a woman named Eleret from an egalitarian tribe called the Cilhar. She is an accomplished fighter who must travel to a major city to retrieve the effects of her deceased mother, a warrior who died while serving as a mercenary.

Much of the book focuses on the stock fantasy conflict between a strong woman and the sexist men around her. Wrede portrays Eleret's strength clearly and consistently within the story; I never felt she was subverting the story to her political purpose. Eleret is simply unaffectedly competent, a rare enough quality for women in fantasy literature, who usually have to make a much bigger to-do over their abilities to be taken seriously. Even surrounded by the inventions of the fantasy genre, Eleret struck a more realistic chord with me than other imaginary female warriors. She seemed more like women I actually know, and I enjoyed the book for that quality alone.

But again I found myself wondering when Wrede would write her best book. I think there is a very good one in her, but this one wasn't it yet.

Adrian Plass The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4

2007-07-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

Feel led to keep a diary. A sort of spiritual log for the benefit of others in the future. Each new divine insight and experience will shine like a beacon in the darkness!

Can't think of anything to put in today.

Presented as a diary, Plass's novel depicts an ordinary man in an evangelical church in England with a gift for making a fool of himself, and a lovable obliviousness to his own flaws.

Plass's title is a spoof of Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, so some comparison between the two is inevtitable. Mole is the better novel, with fuller characters and a subtler manipulation of its readers, but (probably through my own quirks) Plass made me laugh harder. I suppose I have trouble enjoying whiny adolescent males enough even to laugh at them. Well-meaning, pretentious, self-pitying adult men, however, I can laugh at for hours.

The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4 is written for a much smaller audience. A reader has to be familiar with evangelical beliefs and subculture to get the jokes. THe humorous treatment of evangelical church life is affectionate and honest, and the family life, while including conflict, is more obviously loving than that found in Adrian Mole. To fully sympathize with the characters, the reader has to understand and appreciate their desire to evangelize, but the book avoids saccharine spiritual resolutions.

Hugh Laurie The Gun Seller

2007-07-24T00:46:00.000-04:00

Look! There in the distance - is it an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker? A Tasmanian tiger? Perhaps a Crumple-Horned Snorkack? No, a creature even rarer than these: an actor who can write.

Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller is a comic take on the popular spy novel. The usual action and intrigue vie for place with wordplay and wry humor. His protagonist, Thomas Lang, is a former soldier with deadly fighting acumen and a constant inner monologue. He is introduced to us in the middle of a fight, musing on how best to break a person's arm, because someone is trying to break his.

He gets out of that fix, and manages to hoodwink the police and avoid arrest. He explains to the reader:

I've been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand, but when you've had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has 'HATE' tattoed on one hand, and 'HATE' on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing the little things in life. Like not being in prison.

Lang gets involved in your standard international conspiracy. There are layers of deception, a beautiful woman or two, displays of prowess and lots of guns. Everything necessary for a spy novel.

There are Americans in this book, big, heavy-handed Americans whose mixture of idealism and hard-bitten man-of-action shtick makes them easy dupes for the real bad guys. In fact, there are a lot of complaints about Americans in this book, but Laurie writes well enough that it never degenerates into the whining tedium so common to anti-American rants. Of course, I am a frumpy middle-aged American housewife, so it may simply be that I am not likely to be offended by portrayals of Americans as hulking go-getters.

The chief pleasure of The Gun Seller is Lang's voice: observant, self-deprecating and undecidedly cynical. As the novel draws near to its ruthless but satisfying ending, he takes the usual precautions of the spy genre to reveal the truth in case of his death.

I typed a long and incomprehensible statement, describing only those parts of my adventure in which I behaved like a good and clever man, and deposited it with Mr Halkerston at the National Westminster Bank in Swiss Cottage. It was long because I didn't have time to do a short one, and incomprehensible because my typewriter has no letter 'd'.

I promise I did not just love that paragraph because I am a blogger.

Laurie's book was published in 1999, and in reading it I had to constantly remind myself that it was written before 9/11. The conspiracy does not play as well since then, and I kept wondering if he would have written the book the same way after 9/11.

It looks like I'll have a chance to find out. He has a new book, The Paper Soldier, soon to be released.

The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell

2006-09-14T20:49:00.000-04:00

Sarah Caudwell wrote four mystery novels before she died, and everyone who has read them wishes she had lived to write more. Her formal, almost Dickensian style is full of humor and wit. If you can get through the first ten pages, you will enjoy the rest of the book. Consider her prologue, after her narrator insists that the story contained herein is a true one:

Some of my readers, perhaps many, having expected to find in these pages diversion rather than instruction, will now hasten back to their booksellers to demand indignantly, it may be with threats of legal action, reimbursement of the sum so ill-advisedly expended. So be it: such readers will give me credit, I hope, for having enabled them by my prompt confession to return the volume unread and in almost pristine condition; and I for my part (for publisher and bookseller I cannot speak) would rather forgo the modest sum which would accrue to me from the sale - very modest, meager would be a better word, one might even say paltry - would infinitely rather forgo that sum than think it obtained by deception."

If that intrigued you, you will enjoy The Shortest Way to Hades. If you skipped down after the first fifteen words, then this book is not for you. It just goes on like that.

Caudwell's detective is Hilary Tamar, a professor of law at Oxford who frequently haunts the offices of a group of friends who practice law. Here I will avoid certain terms, because I know so little about the British legal system, and cannot tell the difference between a lawyer and a barrister and a solicitor and so on. Tamar is a busybody whose nosiness is alternately tolerated and enlisted by the friends, who sometimes stumble upon crimes in need of solution.

The first time I read Sarah Caudwell's novels, I completely missed one of the ongoing gimmicks of her books. In the U.S., Hilary is almost exclusively a female name, so I naturally pictured the protagonist as a woman. But Caudwell deliberately left the sex of her detective ambiguous. The name is androgynous, and the story is told in first person narrative. No one - author or character - ever says in the four novels whether Hilary Tamar is a man or a woman.

This approach is carried out in the relationships her characters carry on. Sexual interest is frequently described, without apparent restrictions of gender, and there seems a general promiscous bonhommie throughout Caudwell's books. Combined with her refusal to assign a sex to her main character, this works to erode any traditional understanding of sexuality and gender. I suspect Caudwell tried to destroy any perception that sees the world through binary thinking, not only that of male and female, but perhaps even right and wrong . It is all quite deliberate, and sometimes leaves me with the sensation, after I have laid down the book for a half hour or so, that I have forgotten to wipe the slime from my hands.

I enjoy Caudwell's books in part because I think she failed in her purpose. The mystery genre still maintains too much commitment to a truth/lie dichotomy to completely demolish morality. Tamar's mocking of a friend's quotations of Thomas Moore remain unconvincing when Tamar still doggedly pursues the truth of the crime.

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

2006-09-14T20:17:00.000-04:00

I have put off writing this book review because I do not know how to go about it. Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel Tarzan of the Apes is a classic adventure story that has been rehashed and reinterpeted many times. If you have not read the book, you may still think you know it. You probably do not. None of the screen versions have been completely true to the story. The novel itself works well as a stand alone book, but continues through many subsequent novels.

I have hesitated to write this review because of all the things Tarzan is. It is racist and sexist. There is a palpable confidence in English racial superiority. The blithe chauvinism of the author about "civilization" against all the non-Europeans of the world is a running theme in the book. In a dozen ways this book is embarrassing to read, and even more embarrassing to enjoy.

Because I did enjoy it. I could not help myself. Despite Burroughs's gall in writing dialogue like the following, when John Clayton confronts the African jungle where he and his pregnant wife have been abandoned by mutineers:

Ah, the triumph of the Englishman over the ignorance of the past. The Englishwomen do not seem to fare so well, however. Civilization seems to have rendered them rather wimpy. Clayton's wife, unable to mentally withstand the horrors of life in a jungle, goes insane and spends the rest of her short life happily believing she is in her parlour at home. Clayton and she are both killed by savage apes, and their son is adopted by an ape mother recently bereft of her baby.

The superiority af the English genes are shown by the boy's brilliance and physical prowess. He grows up to be stronger, smarter and more deadly than any of the apes, and outwits the African men and women living in the jungle, too.

The story is, of course, preposterous. The existence of feral children raised by animals has been claimed but never proven, but the children possibly produced by it certainly remained mentally and physically underdeveloped for the rest of their lives. Animals cannot raise healthy human children.

But the appeal of the story is something mythic, something as old as Gilgamesh: a hero, stronger and taller and better than most men, but still a man, faces impossible odds, suffers great heartbreak, but survives. Tarzan is both pitiable and admirable, and I found myself trying to imagine the story as occuring on some other planet so I could enjoy the thrills of his exploits without the racist baggage of history. Because this is a great story, and everything else considered, I still cannot help but like it.

White As Snow by Tanith Lee

2006-08-15T11:01:00.000-04:00

I have continued my reading in Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series with this adaptation of the tale of Snow White. I have dreaded writing about Tanith Lee's White As Snow. I found the book almost repellent.

The story opens with Arpazia, a young princess, facing the conquest of her father's city and her own certain death. She attempts to escape and is captured by the enemy king. After he attacks her, he decides to make her his queen. She bears his daughter Candacis, who is quickly rejected by her numbed mother and ignored by her brutal father. Arpazia finds some pleasure in life again when she becomes involved in the pagan fertility plays held at night in the woods. When her daughter becomes old enough to usurp Arpazia's role in these rites, Arpazia pays someone to kill her.

Lee combines the Snow White story with the Greek myth of Persphone, Hades and Ceres. Snow White (Candacis) is conflated with Persephone, and the queen who seeks her death is also her mother, Ceres, searching for her throughout the world. Names accrue around the characters as the story goes on, until each character has several. This serves to depersonalize the character, so that the mythic role they play becomes more important than their individual identities. The inescapability of fate and the inevitable repetition of pagan cycles features largely. The magic in this story only highlights its despair. There is neither hope nor solace in this version of Snow White.

The contempt for men expressed in this book borders on revulsion. The female characters, though tormented and possibly evil, are nevertheless full human characters. Their motives can be understood and may even garner sympathy. The men are merely bestial. Most are flat, cartoonish figures without reasons for their behavior. The only vaguely positive male character is a dwarf who, like the female characters, has been tortured and enslaved most of his life, so he is allowed an almost human quality.

This is the first book I have read by Tanith Lee. Perhaps she has other novels where something other than despair, meaningless and inescapable, happens. But this sample of her work leaves me disinclined to try anything else.

Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint

2006-08-03T11:38:00.000-04:00

I have continued to read in Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series. After a regrettable experience with Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (I read 176 pages before putting it down because I simply could not make myself care about the indistinguishable characters), I tried this 1987 publication from Charles de Lint. I was curious how I would experience this book as an adult. When I was a young teen, de Lint's Moonheart was one of my favorite books, but I had not read anything of his in a decade or two.

Jack the Giant Killer sets several classic fairy tales in modern day Ottawa. I confess that charmed me at the start. I do not know the city very well, but my husband and I honeymooned there after a dreadfully hot American summer, and the city holds a cooling magic for me (though I understand they are suffering a heat wave now. My sympathies.). De Lint's book combines the stories of Jack the Giant Killer and Katie Crackernuts, and adds allusions to the Seven Swans and other tales. His Jack is a young woman named Jacky, who fills the trickster role assigned to the Jacks of fairy tales. Jacky, drunk and heartbroken, accidentally witnesses the murder of a Hob, an elf-like fairy creature. She takes the hat dropped by the deceased, and when she puts it on, she can see into the fairy realm, which exists invisibly in the same time and space as our own. She meets the Gruagagh of her city, and through him takes on the task of rescuing a fairy princess from the dark Host that seeks the destruction of the good fairies. She acquires friends and helpers along the way, like her mortal best friend Kate Hazel (i.e., Katie Crackernuts).

De Lint's novel is swiftly paced, and combines heroic action with ordinary behavior. His heroines do impossible things while remaining recognizable twentieth-century Canadians. There are few profound themes here, though the book has a significantly Tolkienesque morality. It was fun, light reading.

There were two burrs in my enjoyment of this book. The first was a premise, fairly common in fantasy literature, that fairies and other magical creatures depend upon human belief for their existence. As humans cease to believe, the fairies are weakened. I have always found this premise a little disappointing. The power of magical realms and mythic stories, it seems to me, lies in their ability to convey the Other, the alien realities that intrude onto our own. To make magic dependent on human belief removes some of the Otherness, and changes the frisson of fearful strangeness into pity for the sadly helpless. Instead of taking us to Balder's country, it says Balder's country is in our imagination, and could we help it out a little. How utterly drab. Myth hardly seems worth bothering about, then.

The second flaw was de Lint's willingness to mix a little religious speculation with his Fairy Tale. I much prefer Tolkien's way in Lord of the Rings of leaving religion as an unmentioned undercurrent. De Lint's novel has a rather explicit henotheism, the belief that each land has its own particular god who rules it. One character tells Jacky that the "dying desert god" (Jesus) has no power in North America, which is ruled by a Native American deity. This brief conversation has little relevance to the rest fo the story, and I am not sure why de Lint chose to include it, unless it was to voice his opinions on Christianity. The mixing of religion and Faerie merely serves to weaken the spiritual power of both. Disappointing.

Other than that, my only complaint, which says more about my own lack of education than de Lint's writing, was my bewilderment at the pronunciation of some of the Gaelic terms. Gruagagh, for instance, is apparently a Manx term for brownie or ogre, but I still have no idea how to say it. A pronunciation guide would have been nice.

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

2006-07-22T21:47:00.000-04:00

Briar Rose is Jane Yolen's contribution to Terry Windling's Fairy Tale Series, a set of novels that retell fairy tales set in real historic periods. I discovered the series when I read (and enjoyed) Patricia Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, and I have another volume, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, on my shelf awaiting me.

The first few novels I tried by Yolen were forgettable, and I probably never would have bothered reading her again if I had not found one of her short stories in a collection in honor of JRR Tolkien. I do not now recall the title, but it was a story of children kidnapped by goblins, and it was simply wonderful. So I decided to give her novels another try.

Briar Rose is the story of Sleeping Beauty set in the Holocaust. Unlike the other books in the Fairy Tale Series, there is no magic in this story, unless it is the magic of improbable survival. Yolen opens her book with a quote from Jack Zipes in Spells of Enchantment:

"(B)oth the oral and literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer terror through metaphors."
Presumably this is her purpose in writing about the Holocaust. A difficult goal, but one which she manages reasonably well.

Gemma is an old woman, living in the US. She is dying. She has three grand-daughters, who have heard her tell the story of Sleeping Beauty throughout their lives. Gemma has always insisted that she is Sleeping Beauty. On her death bed, she asks her youngest grand-daughter, Becca, a twenty-three-year-old journalist, to find her castle. Becca promises. The rest of the book details Becca's search for her grandmother's identity, leading her to a death camp in Poland. Yolen alternates chapters of Becca's search with segments of the version of Sleeping Beauty which Gemma told. This structure works surprisingly well, creating an aura of magic around a painful reality.

The characterization is mediocre, but the novel still works. The fairy tale rubric renders the horrors of Gemma's experience somehow real enough to touch the heart, but magical enough to leave hope alive. The beautiful princess survives, and there is a happy ending of sorts. Yolen's choice to make the princely hero a gay man gave me pause. Within the story it serves to remove romance from the happy ending, which I found satisfying, but the choice was so obviously a political one that I almost put the novel down.

I am still trying to figure out my own reaction to Briar Rose. The disturbing details of genocide in the book mean it is inappropriate for children. The details of history are gruesome and horrifying, and Yolen gives only the barest description necessary, which is horrifying enough. It is definitely an adult book, and she classifies it as such on her website. Briar Rose would be a useful book for inspiring discussion in a book group. In fact, I think I might suggest it to mine.

The Case of the Journeying Boy by Michael Innes

2006-07-20T00:31:00.000-04:00

I love men. Really. (Okay, my love may be 1/2 pity, but I'm not emphasizing it). Men have their own companionable ethos for relating to each other, they have those rumbly voices, and they look nice in sweaters. Reason enough. And I am always intrigued when I get a glimpse into the male world. Despite what you see on tv, groups exclusively male do exist that have nothing to do with football or firefighting. But there's not much of it visible in popular culture. TV portrays groups of men mostly by their extremes, usually evil ones. The best popular media can find in a bunch of men is a little gentle buffoonery.

But there was a time when the world of men was not so circumscribed. Men used to consort with each other for purposes other than farting and watching porn. Michael Innes's The Case of the Journeying Boy is a mystery published in 1949, telling the story of a boy and his tutor. The tutor, a fiftyish intellectual whose career has been spent preparing boys for school, is a remnant of the now extinct world of bachelor scholarship, a quiet and cerebral haven for the contentedly womanless. Mr. Thewless, the tutor, is not only the authority for the boy's studies, but also the father figure whose expertise in raising children is assumed. He quietly opines to himself throughout the novel about the best way to deal with his charge's problems, without the five pages of musings on the absent father and changing roles of men a current novel would insist on.

Innes's style is formal and carefully circuitous. He both respects and gently mocks the academic brain of his protagonist. His characters talk around a subject rather than state things directly. He uses the Victorian habit of slowing down his prose during dramatic action. When the tension is high, his sentences become downright turgid. For example, at one point, Mr. Thewless is being followed through a darkened house by two dangerous criminals. Innes describes Thewless walking up the steps toward a light:

And again - and this assuredly was more ominous - he derived no satisfaction from the reflection that he was climbing steadily into a lesser darkness; into what was, comparatively speaking, a medium of light. It was clearly within our friend's recollection that the upper corridor upon which his own room lay admitted through some system of skylights considerably more of whatever mild moonlight lay without; and moreover that the periodic illumination from the lighthouse lent fleetingly to the scene a quality of which the only description at once compendious and fair would be one free of any hint of inconvenient tenebrosity.

Not the language of a best-seller, but, I must confess, I love it. It is a linguaphile's thriller, paced for someone who will enjoy the plodding, carefully chosen words as much as the action. Perfect.

The details of the mystery itself, though improbable, are expressed with just the right amount of suspense. We uncover the clues only slightly ahead of the detective, Inspector Cadover, and watching him decipher the clues and make his own guesses is half the fun. There are secret caves and chases, coshes and countless impersonations. Thewless's character is tested, and a father learns to respect his son. How could it be better?

** I also loved Innes's From London Far, which I would have read just for the set up: a classics scholar wanders into a tobaccanist's shop while quoting a favorite bit of poetry. Unknowingly, he has uttered a secret password that sweeps him into a covert world of post-war art theft. Delicious.

Winter House by Carol O'Connell

2006-07-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

On our recent vacation, I brought along a treat I allow myself only rarely: one of Carol O'Connell's Mallory mysteries. I have enjoyed these for years, but I need to be in the right mood to read about gruesome murders, a mood that is rare when I spend my day caring for toddlers. But this last week I finally felt primed for a new Mallory mystery, and picked up Winter House.

Carol O'Connell's Detective Kathleen Mallory is brilliant, breathtakingly beautiful and a sociopath (mostly). She was a homeless orphan living on the streets until she was adopted by a cop named Louis Markowitz when she was ten. She was loved deeply by Markowitz and his wife, who died while she was still young. They remain the most humanizing influences on her life. Mallory became a police officer herself, with a feral quality that intimidates everyone around her.

O'Connell's mysteries are dark, often with gruesome images or disturbing details. Mallory herself is a dark element, with a traumatic past and a disregard for basic morality. But throughout the series O'Connell examines realities of love. Mallory is so beautiful that men are always falling in love with her, with predictably painful consequences. Mallory cannot be wooed. The popular idea that romantic love will change a bad person into a good one is not found here. Mallory remains cold and inconsiderate. As the series progresses, she recognizes and receives love in some ways, but never expresses it as normal people do. The power of love is not in the yearnings of men attracted to her; the power of love is shown in how her adoptive parents continue to affect her life long after their deaths. Mallory can function in normal human society because of the love of her parents, and how they passed that love on to other people in her life.

I suppose I am seduced by these novels partly because the author resists the usual genre novel paradigm that dictates the strong woman must be ultimately conquered. Mallory cannot be conquered and still be Mallory. She may be disturbing, but she is always strong. That is not to say she is an example to anyone. I find her character compelling without being likable. She is someone you never want to meet, because she just might kill you. But she is a fascinating read.

Winter House sets up a fifty year old mystery that must be solved in order to understand a currently unsolved killing. There are a few weaknesses in the story. The murderer's character is not sufficiently developed. Mallory's skill at computer hacking is left unrealistic and hazy (she hacks into the IRS's database of tax records during a couple of minutes of conversation), though in Winter House it is mercifully brief. But despite its flaws, I gobbled it in three days and loved it. I look forward to more.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

2006-07-04T22:30:00.000-04:00

After reading Streatfeild's autobiography, I decided to read one of her children's novels. I began with her first and most famous, Ballet Shoes, published in 1937. Written in her spare and breezy style, it tells the story of three orphan girls adopted by an itinerant paleontologist, known affectionately as Gum. Gum travels the world for years at a time, and leaves money behind to provide for the girls. Unfortunately, he disappears and the money gets low and the girls have to decide how to manage. They all enter a dance school and train for the stage, because the only job they can legally hold at age twelve is in the performing arts.

I found Ballet Shoes a little disappointing, but I don't think it would disappoint a child. The characters are sketched rather than developed, and seem to exist mainly as a rubric to inspire a child's imagination. Pauline the eldest is an actor, Petrova is fascinated by cars and planes, and Posy is a dancer. The book closes with the question:

"I wonder" - Petrova looked up - "if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they'd choose to be?"
Young readers will ask themselves that question early in the story and enjoy the rest of the book answering it.

I suppose I also found the book a little disappointing because of one of its strong points. I read children's novels as escapist entertainment, sparing me the concerns of the adult world. But a major feature of Ballet Shoes is the strain of family finances. That's a little too close to home for me. Money is counted to each pence and shilling. And that's another problem. Between a few decades of inflation and the changing of British money to a decimal system, I haven't a clue what a shilling is. A child reading the book would be introduced to the necessity and importance of money as part of the story, but the outdated money system might make the lesson less useful.

The Firstborn by Christopher Fry

2006-06-27T17:18:00.000-04:00

The summer before I started grad school I decided to read Shakespeare's plays. Somehow I had missed them in school, and I was a little embarrassed that I could get so much education without ever reading his work. I find reading plays difficult. In narrative I have pictures painted for me; in plays I must imagine much more. It is unfamiliar brain work for me, and I enjoyed learning how to do it.

I say this to let you know that my evaluation of a play may lack something. I started reading Christopher Fry when I was looking for modern interpretations of Moses. I was blown away by The Firstborn. But I have never seen it performed, and envisioning a play is still something of a challenge. I read the play primarily as poetry.

Christopher Fry was a twentieth century playwright who wrote both verse plays and screenplays. He wrote the screen adaptation of Ben-Hur. In 1938 he began The Firstborn, a modern interpretation of the Exodus story that worked in themes of the Holocaust then beginning in Nazi Germany. He finished the play in 1945.

When the play begins, Moses has long been absent from Egypt, having fled to Midian after murdering an Egyptian. The Pharaoh, Seti, discusses with his wife, Anath, the possibility of inviting Moses back to Egypt to lead their army against a new enemy. Moses appears before Seti and Anath make a decision, and condemns them for the oppression of the Hebrews.

The play explores many issues, too many to discuss here. The responsibilities of power, the love of the homeland, the solace of pride, and the ties of ethnic identity. Throughout the play there is a tension between the comfortable life of the wealthy and safe elite, and the desperate misery and violence of the Hebrews. The focus of the play is the internal crisis of Moses, in his decision to stand in solidarity with his Hebrew brethren and as he realizes what God's demands will mean for Egypt. When Moses first appears to demand freedom for his people, he explains his return by saying:

My blood heard my blood weeping
Far off like the swimming of fear under the sea,
The sobbing at night below the garden. I heard
My blood weeping. It is here it wept and weeps.
It was from here I heard coming this drum of despair,
Under your shoes, under your smile, and under
The foundations of your tomb. From Egypt.

There are several elements of the play that become troubling when it is seen in light of the Holocaust. One is the character of Shendi, Miriam's son, who is effectively a collaborator with the Egyptians. The difference between enslavement for labor in the biblical story, even with its horrors, and the programmatic annihilation of the Holocaust make the Shendi character somewhat implausible and possibly offensive, if the play is seen as an interpretation of the Holocaust.

Another possibly troubling line occurs in Moses' debate with himself when Pharaoh's son offers the generalship of an Egyptian army:

Egypt and Israel both in me together!
How would that be managed? I should wolf
Myself to keep myself nourished. I could play
With wars, oh God, very pleasantly. You know
I prosper in a cloud of dust - you're wise
To offer me that. And Egypt would still be,
In spite of my fathers, a sufficient cause.

Moses refuses the offer, but his consideration of it shows that the play should not be read too precisely as an examination fo the Holocaust.

But Fry's deft use of tension left me feeling that these jarring choices were deliberate and meant to make us consider more thoroughly the ripple effects of oppression. There is a necessary tragedy to justice. By the end of the play, the violence and horror which Egypt inflicted on the weak has been brought home to the powerful, even those of good will and relative innocence.

A noticable difference between the biblical story and Fry's play is the absence of God as an active character. In Exodus, YHWH has many speeches; in The Firstborn he says not a word. God's speeches to Moses are implied but never described, and the closest God comes to speaking is an ambiguous rumble of thunder after Moses calls to him. But this does not mean God is uninvolved in the play. Fry was a Christian playwright, and the theology of his plays can be seen in Moses' description of God as "the infinite eavesdropper," a paradoxical title. An eavesdropper sits outside the action, listening in on what others are doing. But an infinite being cannot be outside the action; there is no place where he is not. In all of Fry's plays God appears not as a character, but as the ineffable mover in all actions, the omnipresent spirit, the place in which all places have their being.

Fry's metaphors and careful rhythms are not easily reviewed in this little prose description, and I urge you to read the play yourself, if you have any enjoyment for poetry. I find myself frustrated in trying to convey the power and complexity of his work. I have read The Firstborn five times now, and the characters are so complex that I find something new in it every time. I would love to see it performed someday, but until then, I am content to read and re-read it.

Angel Death by Patricia Moyes

2006-06-24T20:59:00.000-04:00

I am a big fan of the classic detective story. When I don't have anything else to think about, I regret that Agatha Christie only wrote 70 mysteries or so, that Josephine Tey died after six novels, that Dorothy Sayers turned her attention to translation work. While other women turn to comfort foods during pregnancy, I turned to the comfort literature of the mystery. I spent my pregnancies reading everything by Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh that I could get my hands on. God bless the public library.

I am always a little sad that the mystery's Golden Age is past. While some mysteries today are excellent (PD James springs to mind), the concisely written, spare descriptions of the whodunit of the 30s and 40s is a neglected art form. Mysteries today tend to be driven either by a new arena of specialized knowledge ("set in the heart of Samurai Japan" "fourteen new quilt patterns included" ") or exist as a way to provide a plot for characters the author doesn't know what to do with otherwise. The use of a mystery as a mystery - a conundrum to be solved by the reader using the clues provided - seems rare, at least to a casual reader like me. So I was delighted when I discovered Patricia Moyes.

Moyes died in 2000, but she left behind nineteen novels, published between 1959 and 1993, that test the mettle of any armchair detective. Like Christie and Marsh her characters are revealed more through dialogue than description. Concision is a skill, and Moyes has it. Her books are roughly the length of Christie's novels, and must be read as closely. The clues are provided, and the series detective, Henry Tibbet, mentions his suspicions in asides not given to the reader. "Tibbet explained," Moyes writes, but the words of the explanation are not given to the reader. Until the very end, you must use your wits and figure things out for yourself, much like reading Miss Marple.

Angel Death, published in 1980, is Moyes's fifteenth novel. It and it's predecessor, Who Is Simon Warwick? rely too heavily on ideas trendy for their day, trends that are now a couple decades old. The modern reader spots the plot point too quickly for the purposes of the mystery. This ruins Who Is Simon Warwick?, but Angel Death is good enough to overcome the problem. Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy visit fictional British possessions in the Caribbean and stay at an inn managed by friends. While there, they meet an old lady named Betsy Sprague, who disappears after leaving a message for Henry. The search ensues, drawing the Tibbets deeper and deeper into the hidden dangers of the islands.

One of the reasons I love the classic mysteries is that they tend to recognize the same moral universe I do. Good and evil still exist. Truth is still a governing principle for those who follow the good. Moyes's novels do not always fill my hunger in this regard. Tibbet, though he fiercely and unstoppably seeks to uncover the truth, frequently decides that justice would be better served if he presented to his superiors a story more plausible than the truth. I find this personally dissatisfying, but the pleasure of reading a skillfully written whodunit outweighs my dissatisfaction.

Necessity, Invention, Me

2006-06-19T21:57:00.000-04:00

So what do you get your husband for Father's Day when your car is broken down and you can't drive anywhere to shop? You take the bus to church, stop by the library afterwards, and pick up a children's book called My Dad Is Awesome. Then you read it over and over to your adorable two-year-old while her father is napping. When he wakes up, you nudge your girl toward him with the book she has now memorized, where she announces, "My dad is AWESOME!" and recites the rest of the book snuggled in his lap.

Hear that? That's the smug sound of success.

Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto

2006-06-08T21:55:00.000-04:00

Do you remember the peaches you ate when you were a kid? We didn't have them often, but I remember the juicy sweetness of them. Peaches just don't taste as good today. I assumed it was the nostalgia of childhood I was missing, but it turns out peaches really do taste worse today.

I just finished a marvelous book, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto, published in 1995. Before reading this, I had read some lovely farm narratives by writers who liked to hobby farm, but this is the first book I've read from a farmer who turned to writing. Masumoto's memoir of his attempt to save his peach farm is entrancing. His prose is simple but elegant, and he makes the reader love his farm like he does.

Masumoto raises peaches and grapes in California. His treasured variety of peaches, the Sun Crest, lost its marketability as new breeds with darker color and longer shelf life were preferred by the average grocery store customer. But those new varieties that look so pretty in the produce aisle lack the same juicy flavor. Masumoto says,

"Sun Crest is one of the last remaining truly juicy peaches. When you wash that treasure under a stream of cooling water, your fingertips instinctively search for the gushy side of the fruit. Your mouth waters in anticipation. You lean over the sink to make sure you don't drip on yourself. Then you sink your teeth into the flesh, and the juice trickles down your cheeks and dangles on your chin. This is a real bite, a primal act, a magical sensory celebration announcing that summer has arrived."

In an effort to reach a new market for his peaches, Masumoto turns to organic farming. During the process, he discovers new rhythms and beauties to the life of an organic farm. He walks through his fields, noting the wildflowers he plants in his orchards to add organic matter to the soil and provide cover for beneficial insects. He sees his efforts as creating a home for life.

And through this organic transformation, he remains a farmer, a professional whose business is to profitably sell his crop. This is one of the great strengths of the book. Rather than the dogmatism of the armchair extremist, he has the tempered, measured attitudes of a farmer, committed to organic farming, while recognizing its hazards. He compares himself to a neighboring farmer:

Epitaph for a Peach ends on an uncertain note, like every farming season. The primary customer for Masumoto's organic peaches decides not to buy for the next year, and the farmer must look for a new buyer for his crop. But the magic of the farm remains, and he continues to farm and continues to hope.

I looked online to find out if Masumoto has been successful in sustaining his peach farm. He has started an Adopt a Peach Tree program, so it must not be going well. He continues to write, and I found this article about an interview in 2003 (The article is worth reading for the description of his mother's hands).

For Your Next Road Trip

2006-05-23T21:54:00.000-04:00

When we do long drives, especially at night, we listen to audiobooks. Sometimes it is the only thing that makes the car hours bearable. When I was still nursing, I also put audiobooks on my ipod for middle of the night feedings. It kept me awake and gave me some brain stimulation. Nursing is the most boring activity on earth.

Anyway, all our car time lately has made me think about my favorite audiobooks, and I thought I would recommend a few for you. Most of these are not recent publications, but your library might carry them, or there's always Ebay.

Stockard Channing reading an abridgement of Shining Through by Susan Isaacs. If you saw the movie with Melanie Griffith, forget it. Only barely similar. This is a spy story set in WWII. A German-fluent secretary in New York goes undercover in Nazi Germany. There's a love story too. There are a couple of steamy scenes you would not want to listen to in front of kids, but nothing too embarrassing for me to listen to in front of the husband. What makes this book so enjoyable is Channing's perfect reading. She is wry, sarcastic, awestruck and self-effacing in all the right places. I laughed, I hated, I swooned, and I listened to this reading many times. A definite favorite.

Stockard Channing reading Beverly Cleary's Ramona books. I don't know much about Channing's screen work, but the way she reads these children's novels convinced me she is an amazing actress. She manages every voice just the way I'd always imagined it. If you are a fan of Ramona, or if you're not, these audiobooks are a joy. And completely safe to listen to in front of anyone, child or mother-in-law.

Jay Leno Leading with My Chin. This is Leno's reading of his autobiography. Most celebrity autobiographies are lousy, and this may be in print too, but it is laugh-out-loud funny when Leno reads it. Although it is packaged as an autobiography, it is really more a charming depiction of Leno's parents, a tough, hardworking Italian father and a shy and funny Scottish mother. His love for them is clear in every line, and by the time the book is over, you love them too. Not all of it is appropriate for children, but it is a delightful listen.

Patrick Stewart's one-man show of Charles Dickens's "Christmas Carol." One of the best productions of this Christmas classic I've ever heard. The only down-side is that the edition I have on CD does not track every few minutes; the whole performance is on one track. So use the pause button.

Julia Sweeney's God Said Ha. This isn't technically a book. It is her one-woman show, which you can listen to on CD or watch on video. But since she basically tells stories, I'm including it. She describes the events in her life as her brother was dying of cancer and her family moved in with her to care for him. She ends up having cancer too, but survives. It is heartbreaking but also made me laugh more than anything I've listened to. If you have never tried any audiobook, try this. You will not regret it. I think it's out of print (is that what you call it when its a recording?), but your library may have a copy (ours does).

Lisette Lecat reading Alexander McCall Smith's No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency and subsequent novels in the series. This novel has been hugely popular, and rightly so. But Lecat's reading, in a rich Botswanan accent, adds a level of enjoyment to this book not to be missed. This is the only series in which I want to hear the audiobook before I read the print book.

There are other audio performaces which are not books but worth listening too. Garrison Keillor's older stuff is good, but lately he wanders pointlessly too much. My favorites are his first collection News from Lake Wobegone (Truckstop is the best), Gospel Birds, and his Stories collection of essays he published primarily in the New Yorker. David Sedaris is always funny, though I can only take soulless sneering in small doses. The husband refuses to listen to him because of his speaking voice, so he is strictly an earphones listen for me. Old radio programs are worth considering. I usually dig the melodramatic detective shows.

I am a big audiobook fan, and I hope I can persuade a few of you to be too. Let me know if you try any of these.

Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins

2006-05-23T21:52:00.000-04:00

There are people who buy books the way others collect salt and pepper shakers. They view a book as something to have, not something to read. I don't want to throw around the word appalling because it is so overused, but well, I'm a little appalled by this. Collecting books without reading them makes about as much sense to me as celibate marriage. And thank God that practice died out. (There. Now my smart ass readers can say, "Except at my house.")

So I was delighted with the kind of bookcollecting described in a recent read. A few weeks ago I finished reading Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins. Collins is a booklover and collector who moved with his family to Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a little town with an overabundance of bookshops. Collins is my kind of reader. Throughout Sixpence House he gives little tidbits from old books he has read, usually books no one will ever find again. For example, he says,

England Through the Back Door

How can you read that paragraph and not want to find that book? Collins's reading charms me, and not just because he seems to prefer literature before 1900. His tastes are eclectic and unpredictable and rarely trendy. A kindred spirit.

Sixpence House is meandering but chronological. The narrative is structured like wandering through a used bookshop. You walk in full of hope and possiblities. You browse the shelves, probably with no discerning order, get lost in books, lose track of time, and eventually wander out again a little tired and ready to go home, but with a new friend or two tucked under your arm. The next time I read this book, I plan to do it with a pen and paper in hand, so I can write down all the intriguing old books he mentions and see if our library has them.

Collins also contrasts British and American culture. His parents are English, but he grew up in the US and is an American citizen. He has affection and exasperation for both cultures. I shared his shock and horror when the American realtor told him he would have to move his books out before he showed his house because, "Home buyers don't like books." But the part that got the biggest laugh from me (apologies to any British readers who may feel slighted) was this:

presses

sucks

utility

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm laughing again. Goodbye.

A Quick Read and a Good Find

2006-05-21T21:51:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago we had one of those serendipitous days where everything clicked at the library, and the girls were contented and amused in the stroller, not shrieking or grabbing things off shelves. So I pushed that hulking stroller zippily through every section, grabbing as many varied books as I could and adding them to the pile in the stroller's luggage rack (really).

This last week I finally read one of the unexamined books I had grabbed. Beyond the Vicarage by Noel Streatfeild is the third in an autobiographical trilogy. She writes in a speedy, cheerful style that snuck its way into my affections. In particular, she describes her life during London's blitz, with the bombs and shelters and destruction. Streatfeild organized a mobile canteen that traveled around to the private shelters some families had built together and offered them food and drink. She tells some of the events she witnessed in such an simple, unaffected style that she made that part of the war real to me in a way no other book has. She did not try to wring emotion from her readers, but I still found myself crying at times.

She also wrote with an acceptance of people that is unusual to a modern reader. Our culture likes to fix people. When she describes her mother, my inner voice cried, "Co-dependent! Get counselling! Have an intervention!" But none of that occurred to Streatfeild. People are what they are; the possibility of changing them does not occur to her. And I find that both refreshing and disturbing at the same time.

It wasn't until she described her life after the war that I realized where I had heard her name before. In the movie You've Got Mail (which hardly compares to the Jimmy Stewart original, Shop Around the Corner), Meg Ryan's character is in the new enormous Fox Books when she hears a customer asking an employee about "the shoe books." She interrupts and explains that the shoe books are a series written by Noel Streatfeild, beginning with Ballet Shoes.

It's on my next library list.