SEPTEMBER READING NUBBINS

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith: I’ve never quite fallen in love with Smith, but she’s brilliant and a fan of E.M. Forster and Buffy, so that makes her A-OK in my book. Although this collection is a bit uneven, it’s always interesting to watch the elegantly expressed workings of her mind, and I loved some of the literary and personal pieces. Thanks for the recommendation, Editor A!

Sh*t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern: Lent to me by Editor A. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up on my own, but I’ve got to admit it was pretty hilarious. The Twitter-feed quotes provided most of the laughs, but Halpern adds some welcome content by interspersing brief essays about his dad. Still semi-disposable, but I didn’t regret the hour or so it took to read.

The Complete Peanuts: 1963-1964, by Charles M. Schulz: More Peanuts awesomeness. ’Nuff said.

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

I was a fan of this book (by Sheila Burnford) and the movie when I was younger (NOT the early-’90s Michael J. Fox/Sally Field-voiced atrocity where the animals talked to each other, but the nearly dialogue-free 1963 version—I had an abiding love for all the obscure classic live-action Disney movies and would always rent them on video when given the opportunity). I even, embarrassingly in retrospect, performed an excerpt from it as a Declam piece in eighth grade. I loved animal books, and this was one of the few in which the tears jerked were happy ones—no wrenching death scenes here.

I hadn’t revisited it since then, and upon rereading it for book group, I was pleased to discover that it’s still good. Burnford didn’t write it specifically as a YA book, and I think it shows: it’s short and the story is simple, but except for the focus on animals there’s little here that screams “hey kids” (yeah, two of the pets’ owners are children, but the POV dwells more on the adults). The vocabulary is sophisticated and the tone realistic, occasionally—in that no-nonsense midcentury way—grimly so. One thing I hadn’t remembered was how violent parts of the book are; of course narrative drama requires the lost pets to overcome hardship and obstacles on their trek, but the middle of the book feels like a series of bloody cage matches: Dog vs. bear! Dog vs. dog! Cat vs. lynx! Dog vs. porcupine! It started to feel a tad repetitive. By far the best elements of the book are the descriptions of the Canadian wilderness and the animals themselves (pet owners will particularly appreciate this accuracy), plus the gorgeous illustrations by Carl Burger. For the most part, Burnford admirably resists anthropomorphizing (not only do the animals not talk to each other, but they aren’t even referred to by name most of the time, just as “the old dog,” “the young dog,” and “the cat”) and excessive sentimentality. Yet did I still cry during the big reunion scene at the end? Yes. Yes I did.

A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET

This has always been my favorite entry in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet, and I’ve probably read it more times than all the other books combined. Mostly it’s because I’m a sucker for time travel and all its altering-the-future-by-influencing-the-past complexities. Also because it has a unicorn, and no little girl of the 1980s could resist a unicorn. But on this latest reread, I’ll admit I was less enchanted. The story of Charles Wallace saving the world from nuclear war on Thanksgiving by entering a series of interlinked stories in the past is cleverly suspenseful and all, but maybe…a little cheesily mystical in parts? And I gotta say, there’s a major logic hole for me in the concept that one could stop an evil dictator by going back in time and changing who his ancestors were. In this book, some people are super-good and others are just plain bad, and the good people have good descendents and the bad people have bad ones, which is at best oversimplistic and at worst smacks alarmingly of eugenics, and it kept bothering me the more I thought about it. There’s still a lot to love here—especially the present-day scenes with the always-adorable Murrys—but this may be one of my few childhood faves that holds up less well under adult scrutiny. Still, it does include a kitten, so bonus points there.

PACKING FOR MARS: THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF LIFE IN THE VOID

I want to have a beer with Mary Roach. Not only is she hilarious, brilliant, and talented, but we also seem to be fascinated and amused by exactly the same aspects of history and science—specifically, the audacity and quirkiness of human endeavor. Her books don’t just answer the question “What do we know about this topic?” but “What crazy-ass studies did we have to perform to learn it and who the hell had the bizarre job of thinking them up and doing them?” She hunts down interesting factoids, but it’s her irreverent, fearless, delightfully nerdy, voraciously curious approach I really adore; I could read a Mary Roach book about watching paint dry. So, although I have no particular interest in space travel, I loved this book. Bonk and Stiff remain her best works, but this is still a must-read. Roach’s dogged search to discover whether one of the first chimps in space was nicknamed “Enos the penis” by his trainers because he touched himself at a news conference or just because he was kind of a jerk is in itself worth the price of admission.