On releasing books

In September, 1975, I was seven years old, a second-grader newly insistent on wearing pants to school, reluctant to comb my hair, snaggle-toothed, and inclined to read anything with print in it.  My dad took me out of school for a week to go with him on a business trip to Chicago, where three-fifths of my grandparents lived (some of us lucky people get an extra grandmother).  I am not sure why I got to go, why my mom and brother stayed home, but I think it ended up causing some kerfluffle, because all of us went back at Halloween that year.

It was a magic trip for me, going with my dad.  First, there was the airplane.  I got pin-on wings from the flight attendant.  My dad let me play with his calculator, his graph paper, and his Pentel pens in red, black, blue, and green.  I thought it must be pretty amazing to get to carry that stuff around in a briefcase all the time.  We played gin with the pack of cards the airline gave us and I’m sure that my dad discarded cards I needed to beat him.  At some point, I got out my orange binder and my number two pencil to write the “log” Mrs. Skillman had assigned as my homework for the week.

We stayed with my mom’s parents, my Nana and Poppy.  My dad’s mom lived with my aunt in a strange, dark little house with evil schnauzers named Bounce and Poppins, but Nana and Poppy had space for us in their house with the big, unfenced back yard, the basement with its two slot machines adopted from some long-defunct speakeasy, its shiny piano, and its stash of toys for my cousins, my brother, and me to play with.

My cousins are all boys.  Nana, as a result, spoiled the heck out of me.  I arrived to a beautiful new doll with curly red hair, a pink and white dress with a skirt that twirled, and a stack of books.  In exchange, I let her put my hair in curlers, said please and thank you, and thought she was the best ever.

There was a darker side to all of this, but my seven-year-old self didn’t see the narcissism that made my Nana manipulate everything to be about her or the rigid perfectionism that insisted on appropriate gender roles and impeccable appearance at all times.  Perhaps it helped that she lived 2,000 miles away.

That rigid gender roles thing affected which books she gave me.  At some point, she bought a set of ten “classic” books for children, intending them for my cousins, my brother, and me.  It turned out that none of the boys particularly liked to read, so I eventually ended up with all of them (all books still tend to come to me… it is my superpower.), but it took a little longer to get Tom Sawyer and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Robinson Crusoe.

I devoured Little Women and Black Beauty and Heidi and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and The Little Lame Prince.  I wasn’t ready for Alice in Wonderland; I didn’t follow the funny conversations.  I read Hans Brinker, but I couldn’t tell you what it is about (I have put it on my to-read shelf to find out).  Robinson Crusoe utterly defeated me (multiple times.  I finally finished it not too many years ago and never need to read it again.).

When it came time to tidy my bookshelves yesterday, I found myself, as usual, a little short on space.  I had always, for sentimental reasons, kept the set together.  The thing is, I hated Robinson Crusoe.  This edition of Little Women is abridged and I have a full version.  I have multiple other copies of Alice (annotated, purse-sized, extra fancy, and as part of the complete works).  The time has come to take a couple of photos and release these particular volumes into the wild to find other children.

First of the Spring 2020 Reading

One of my goals for my recent vacation was to do a bunch of reading.  I packed ten books and read eight and a half of them while I was away and finished the ninth today.  Which means it is time to do another book report.

I bought Silent World by Jacques Yves Cousteau for a quarter many years ago because I thought one of the kids would be interested in it.  I was wrong about that.  I figured it was time to check it out myself and either keep it or send it along its merry way.  I did not have high hopes, frankly, for a book written in the 1950s about diving in the ocean.  Wrong again.  It was fascinating to read about the development of the aqualung in occupied France during World War II, with challenges ranging from the technical to the physiological to the caloric—with food rationing in place, the divers had to do the math to decide whether spearfishing was worth the calories it cost (generally, no).  I am keeping it.

My mom gave me Lucille Stott’s book, Saving Thoreau’s Birthplace.  She and my dad got a call from the author as she was writing it because she wanted permission to print my grandfather’s photo in the book.  Why?  Well, he was kind of a Thoreau nut and set up a foundation to promote things Thoreauvian.  For a variety of reasons, my grandfather’s dream was not realized in the context of this particular project, but his foundation did provide some much-needed funds.  The book as a whole is an interesting portrait of the kind of grassroots organizing that can, eventually, do remarkable things.  A bonus for me was that not only did I get to see my grandfather’s picture, there was also a photo of my Grandma Marian.  (My grandfather had a debilitating heart attack when I was three and was not himself from then until he died when I was eight, but Grandma Marian lived to be 91 and T. has memories of blowing bubbles with her when he was small.  I miss her.)  (None of which is about the book, but I am being honest about why I had it and read it.)

The quest for all things Alice led me to read Go Ask Alice again.  I first read it when I was an extremely gullible twelve-year-old and I believed that it was a Real Diary.  Now I find it to be a very odd book, even for anti-drug propaganda.  The author could not actually find much bad to say about the drugs themselves; all the bad things that happen to poor Alice are caused by bad people.  The most memorable line remains:  Another day, another blow job.

Also on that same quest, I read In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline Leach.  It is sort of a biography of Charles Dodgson and very much a dissection of the myth of Lewis Carroll and how it was created and perpetuated.  The author contends that the evidence suggests not that Dodgson was a child-molester, but rather that he was too interested in women, that the love of little girls was emphasized to whitewash his reputation because, in his society at his cultural moment, little girl worship was emblematic of purity and upstanding nature.  It is her assertion that the passage of time has made that fabrication into something worse.  It is an interesting argument and she marshals a good amount of evidence for her case.  I will keep reading, because I have also seen the four extant photographs of naked young girls and they are disturbing.

I got Terry Pratchett’s Thud for Christmas and could not wait to read it.  It was awesome and I loved it.  I have to wait patiently for my birthday for the next book.  It will be hard.

The year we spent six weeks in Sydney between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I bought The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern for Brent.  He never read it, so recently I stole it back from him fair and square.  I’m keeping it.  What a beautiful book!  (He would not enjoy it.)  I loved all of it, the characters, the setting, the language.  Two thumbs up.

I have had my thumbs in my ears and have been humming, “Lalalalalala I can’t hear you” since Game of Thrones on television got past the point where the books left off in the (probably vain) hope that George R.R. Martin will eventually get around to finishing the series.  In the meantime, I read his Fire and Blood.  It’s a different kind of writing for him, a mock-scholarly chronicle, but I enjoyed it in all of its pretended controversies and scandals.  Fans will enjoy it; everyone else can probably skip it.

I really wanted to like The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson.  I did like it, but not as much as I expected.  The “mystery” was thin and the central scavenger hunt did not satisfy.  That said, I enjoyed the characters and many of the relationships.  I just wanted it to be better than it was.

Jasper Fforde is weird and hilarious and charming.  His book Early Riser exhibits all of those characteristics and slyly approaches climate change from the other direction—in the world of the book, the world has gotten much, much colder and almost all humans hibernate to survive the winter.  Bonus points for an excellent trans character treated with appropriate respect.

Total for the year so far:  nine books.

End of the 2019 Reading

I never finished summarizing my fall reading and since I want to get to my spring reading, I had better get it done!

Somehow, I always end up with some heavy stuff to read at the end.  It could have been Much Worse, of course.  I made it through A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-2929 by Behnaz A. Mirzai.  It was not exactly a page-turner, but I learned a lot.  What I learned was that while there was a history and tradition of slavery in Iran, it was not based on or justified by racism and it was not necessarily a barrier to social mobility.  Which is to say that slavery, while always repugnant, existed in a much different cultural context than the Atlantic slave trade that is more familiar to American history.  Further, the trade in humans was something exploited by various European powers to advance colonial/imperialist aims and to secure access to resources.  Not fun to read, but useful.

T.R. loaned me Fictions of Feminist Ethnography by Kamala Visweswaran.  He hated it.  I didn’t.  Admittedly, I did not have to read it for school, I did not have to summarize the thinking involved, and did not have to write about it, so I had much less attachment to lucid organizational structure.  What I liked about it was that it, like Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (which I got from T. also and read in 2018), explored the space between the personal and the historical and anthropological.  We are past the point where we can, with a straight face, insist that we are strict impersonal observers.  Examining what the observer brings to the processes of ethnography, history, anthropology, and other disciplines helps keep us honest and transparent about what is going on.

I was late to the Brené Brown party.  But I really liked The Gifts of Imperfection.  It is countercultural in the best ways, helping bring focus to being real and connected and human in a world that would prefer us to stay on the surface pretending we’re always Instagram-ready.

I also got to have fun.  Philip Pullman’s graphic novel The Adventures of John Blake:  Mystery of the Ghost Ship was excellent fun and dove into the kind of intersecting world stories he excels at in a new way.

Both Emily Jenkins’s book Brave Red Smart Frog and T. Kingfisher’s book Bryony and Roses worked with the fairy tale world I so much enjoy in interesting ways.  I love to see what other people do with archetypes to make them work for our time.

The next book I want to talk about is Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi, but I have to take a small digression first.  Some people do a good job of using whatever platform they acquire to advocate for less heard voices and social justice and some don’t.  Rick Riordan is doing it right.  Aru Shah is from a series “Rick Riordan Presents.”  Riordan is adding his name to get exposure for authors from other cultures to present the kind of reimagining of their myths and stories in the same vein as his explorations of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse myths, recognizing that creating a platform for those voices to be heard is the best way to enrich us all without doing the kind of cultural colonization and appropriation that can easily happen.  I loved Aru Shah.  It was fun and funny and compelling.

I rounded out my kid reading with Michael Basman’s Chess for Kids.  I want to learn to do more than shove pieces randomly around the board, losing spectacularly.  I figure starting with what third graders can learn is about right for me.  I learned a lot and now need to practice.

Georgette Heyer’s No Wind of Blame was a reasonably satisfactory mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie.  I would say that the clockwork overwhelmed the novel, but it was a good diversion and I would read more.

Finally, I got to read two more Terry Pratchetts, Wyrd Sisters and Guards! Guards!.  Pratchett makes me laugh and think.  He tells the kinds of stories that feed me.  I love him.

Fall total was 23 books; 2019 total was 62.  Not bad.