DELUSIONS OF GENDER

I would like all my feminist friends to read this book. (Actually, I’d like everyone to read this book, but I’m trying to be realistic.) As someone who believes gender is a social construct, it’s a little discouraging to reach childbearing age and hear from a million different people, friends and cultural pundits alike, “I used to think that, too, until I had a kid and realized differences between girls and boys are totally innate! I tried to raise my son/daughter gender-neutral and he turned everything into a gun/she turned everything into a doll!” Thank goodness for the wry, reasonable voice of Cordelia Fine, who in this book, subtitled How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, handily debunks the pervasive scientific myth that gender stereotypes are rooted in actual hard-wired differences between men’s and women’s brains. Instead, she demonstrates that those stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in human culture that they color every survey, psychological study, neurological experiment, and expert analysis, as well as our own thoughts and actions.

Good news: The human mind is incredibly adaptive! Bad news: It loves to adapt to society’s expectations, even against our conscious will. (For instance, women perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests after being told that women usually perform more poorly on spatial reasoning tests—or even after simply being asked to check a box indicating their sex at the beginning of the test—than those given no gender cues.) In an environment so completely saturated with gender tropes, is it any wonder that one parent’s well-intentioned purchase of a toy fire truck for her daughter or a pink sweater for his son isn’t enough to reverse the barrage of traditional-gender-role messages from all other sources? After all, gender is the central signifier we use when identifying babies (as the rigid pink and blue dichotomy makes clear), and studies have shown that gender stereotyping begins even before birth (pregnant women who knew the sex of their babies characterized the strength and frequency of their kicks accordingly—calling the boys more “strong” and “athletic” and the girls more “calm” and “quiet”—even though fetal monitoring showed no difference). It should be no surprise, then, that small children quickly pick up on the fact that their gender seems to be of the utmost importance to the adults around them, minutely study the smallest clues as to how boys and girls are “supposed” to behave, and then do their best to conform. Gender differentiation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is usually a topic guaranteed to make me both righteously indignant and depressed, but those feelings were leavened by sheer glee at watching Fine so methodically demolish biased studies, pseudoscience, and the distorting sensationalism of the media in her measured, well-researched, yet incisively witty prose. Although the overall tone is serious, Fine’s frequent displays of sardonic humor and occasional sparkles of self-deprecating personal asides reminded me of Mary Roach, my all-time fave science writer. For instance:

When I tell parents that I’m writing a book about gender, the most common response I get is an anecdote about how they tried gender-neutral parenting, and it simply didn’t work. (The next most frequent reaction is a polite edging away.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Delusions of Gender and will definitely check out Fine’s earlier neuroscience title, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives.

PEGASUS

I’ve been putting off writing about this because, honestly, I’m a bit embarrassed to have read a book called Pegasus. I mean, it sounds very My Little Pony, doesn’t it? Right from the first line:

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus. 

But this book is by Robin McKinley, author of The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, and many other YA classics I have loved since my preteen years, and she is messing with you with that first line, because the next sentence begins:

This had been a part of the treaty between the pegasi and the human invaders nearly a thousand years ago… 

In the world McKinley depicts, the pegasi are not cuddly, pastel Lisa-Frank-style winged horses, but intelligent beings with their own intricate civilization (including a semi-telepathic language, agriculture, history, and beautiful arts and crafts that they create with tiny proto-hands) who share their land with humans in exchange for protection against incursions of various monsters. The arrangement includes a system of binding ceremonies pairing royal/noble humans with royal/noble pegasi of the same age. This is intended to promote understanding between the races, yet even paired humans and pegasi can only communicate with each other via a rudimentary language of gestures, with the aid of a specially trained magician. (Humans and pegasi are also not allowed to touch, supposedly to protect the pegasi from being treated like common horses.) No one really questions this until 12-year-old princess Sylvi meets her pegasus, Ebon, and finds that they can talk easily. The unheard-of close friendship between Sylvi and Ebon rocks their respective societies to the core, with some hoping that it will lead to greater cross-cultural understanding while others maintain that it spells doom for the entire kingdom.

I really liked Pegasus, but I’ll be the first to say that it’s an odd book. Like another of my faves, Connie Willis, Robin McKinley is Not for Everyone. Her books are often long, she breaks many of the traditional rules about showing vs. telling with large passages of exposition and description and little dialogue, her stories hinge more on abstract/internal conflicts than traditional actiony plots, and she yanks you right into the worlds she creates, leaving you to gradually figure out their rules later. Pegasus in particular could be considered very rambling and slow-moving, although I found it fascinating and prefer to think of it as expecting a healthy level of intelligence on the part of its readers. I can definitely see why some people were frustrated with it, particularly because (again like Connie Willis, with Blackout and All Clear) it ends with a jarring surprise cliffhanger. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it a cliffhanger—it’s an ending of sorts, just not a happy or satisfying one—but most people are referring to it that way, and at least Willis included a mention of her planned sequel at the end of the first book, whereas I had to track down McKinley’s blog to learn that there would indeed be a Pegasus 2. The funny thing is that as I reached the last sentence and realized the book was going to end on a major downer with everything unresolved, even as I suspected this must mean there would be a sequel, I was totally willing to believe that this still might be a standalone book, and that McKinley was just trying to do something wildly experimental, albeit severely depressing. I certainly didn’t get as enraged as many of the Internet reviewers; I just thought, “Huh. That’s weird, and if that’s really the ending it’s kind of a bold choice.”

So, like Willis’s Blackout, this is really one huge book split into two volumes, which pissed off a lot of people but which I enjoyed, even though I can’t really render a final verdict on it until I read the next one. I definitely loved the characters, especially Sylvi and her badass mother, liked the concept, and adored the comfortable, lived-in way McKinley always writes—her fantasy is not high-flown, but very realistic, rooted in little everyday details, giving you a sense of what it would really feel like to inhabit that world. Also, although I haven’t reread The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in years (time to remedy that, I think!), I suspect that McKinley dropped some clues in Pegasus that might tie it in with the world of those books, which would be awesome.

THE SINGING SANDS

This was the last of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, published posthumously in 1952, and it ended up being my favorite—surpassing The Daughter of Time, which, although it appeals heavily to the historical nerd in me, is really just a playful curiosity in the Grant canon; the stakes are a lot higher here. Like Daughter, The Singing Sands has Grant on sick leave from his Scotland Yard job, but this time his illness is mental, not physical: he’s had a nervous breakdown and is traveling to Scotland to recuperate at his cousin’s house when, naturally, he stumbles across a murder. Although he struggles not to get involved, of course he can’t resist the temptation to sleuth for long. I’m always a sucker for a reluctant hero, but Tey takes it farther than the usual “one final heist” trope. What’s interesting about this book is how very introspective it is; the real focus is on Grant’s emotional state, with the mystery existing primarily as his means of redemption—large portions of the story don’t relate directly to the crime-solving plot at all. Alan Grant is a complex, intelligent character, and it’s a pleasure to watch his mind at work. It’s pointless to mourn what might have been, but I can’t help wondering what would have happened to him if Elizabeth Mackintosh (Tey was a pen name) hadn’t died of cancer at age 55. I’m definitely sad to have come to the end of this series and Tey’s limited yet oh-so-pleasing oeuvre.

A SINGLE MAN

I saw the movie when it came out (yay, Colin Firth) and thought it was beautiful, but it never occurred to me to seek out the book it was based on until I was perusing the rare book exhibit at the Huntington Library (where we are members) a couple of months ago, and one of the rotating displays happened to feature the first page of Christopher Isherwood’s original manuscript. A and I stood there and read it, then turned to each other and said, “This is really good.” I promptly went home and put the book on hold at the library, and I was not disappointed. Both daring and restrained, transcendent and simple, this slim stream-of-consciousness story of a day in the life of George—a middle-aged British professor grieving the sudden death of his partner—is a singular achievement. Not only is it a milestone in gay literature, but it also captures its time and place so well (Southern California in the early 1960s) that I’m surprised it doesn’t appear more often alongside the usual suspects (Raymond Chandler, John Fante) on lists of great L.A. novels. Although the film admirably captures the tone of the book, I was surprised to find that the actual events varied significantly; director Tom Ford added a lot of original touches that are not strictly true to the book, but are so much in keeping with its sensibility that I almost can’t say which version I liked better (a rarity in comparing book-to-screen adaptations). Both are gorgeous, absorbing, and moving.

Here are the first two paragraphs that caught my attention at the Huntington that day:

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it had expected to find itself; what’s called at home.

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labelled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later or sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: It will come.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

There was so much buzz about this book when it came out earlier this year that I assume you know all about it already, but just in case: Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black working-class woman who died agonizingly of cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. Before her death, without her knowledge, doctors at Johns Hopkins took a sample of cancerous cells from her tumor and ended up using them as the source for the first-ever line of human cells that could survive and grow in a laboratory culture. Her cells, christened HeLa, spread across the globe, becoming the go-to resource for medical research, from testing the polio vaccine to being shot into space. For a long time, Lacks’s husband and children had no idea any of this was happening, and few members of the scientific community or the public knew the truth about where the cells came from. In her painstakingly researched book, Rebecca Skloot sets the record straight, providing the full story of Henrietta Lacks, her cells’ massive contributions to science, and her family’s struggle to discover and understand what really happened to their mother.

I tend to avoid trendy books, at least until the buzz dies down and I can get a better sense of their enduring value, mostly just to save myself some time—I would read almost every book I could get my hands on if given the opportunity, but life is only so long and I already have a to-be-read list that approaches 100 items, so I need to be judicious sometimes. Immortal Life sounded interesting to me, but so do a lot of nonfiction books, and then where do you stop? Luckily, I met someone at a party who had just listened to it as an audiobook and highly recommended it. Of course! This was the perfect solution for me, since I could still get the content without having to devote precious reading time to it. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge audiobook fan, but I do better with the nonfiction ones because I’m already conditioned to listening to factual content on NPR, and the books just feel like long news stories. And Immortal Life was an absolutely riveting listen, like a 10-hour episode of This American Life. I listened to it everywhere I drove for the next few weeks, not just on my daily commute but on my way to friends’ houses or while running errands. Lacks’s story is amazing, and Skloot tells it with intelligence, sensitivity, restraint, and grace, particularly as she details her interactions with the surviving members of the family and her rollercoaster friendship with Lacks’s daughter, Rebecca. The book is informative, entertaining, and moving, an addictive mixture of biography, medical history and ethics, science, race and class issues, and investigative reporting. I highly recommend it, whether in paper or audio form. It’s so good, it would have been well worth my precious reading time.

(As a trivial but amusing aside, I was surprised to learn, during a chapter on the history of cell culturing, that Bill Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” routine, which I listened to over and over again on the record player as a kid, was based on a real radio show about a chicken heart that ate New York City, which was in turn based on a real quack scientist who claimed to be keeping chicken heart cells alive in culture. You can’t make this stuff up, apparently.)

THE NIGHT BOOKMOBILE

Audrey Niffenegger is best known as the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I love), but she’s also a visual artist who has written and illustrated several graphic novels. This one is more like a picture book for adults, clocking in at just 40 pages, with large full-color art and simple, spare text. The plot is both enchanting and haunting: a woman walking alone in Chicago at night stumbles across a bookmobile that contains every item she’s ever read, even cereal boxes (my favorite detail is that in the books she never finished, all the pages are blank after the point at which she stopped reading). In the morning, the bookmobile departs, but she’s become obsessed with it and spends the rest of her life searching for it. She encounters it only twice more over the course of many years, both times with life-changing results.

This story resonated deeply with me, as I assume it should for any dedicated book lover; it captures the fascinating power that books hold over those who read them—their pleasures (you are made of sterner stuff than I if you don’t think the night bookmobile sounds like the supercoolest thing ever), but also their perils (the prevailing tone is dark, particularly the ending). The book took about 10 minutes to read, but its spooky loveliness will stay with me for a long time. I was excited to read in the afterword that Niffenegger plans to make it the first volume of a larger project called “The Library.”

THE PENDERWICKS AT POINT MOUETTE

As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I loved Jeanne Birdsall’s two previous Penderwicks books, The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardham Street, and this one was every bit as adorable. Cozy but not cloying, old-fashioned without being out-of-touch, and gentle but never boring, all the stories about the smart, lively, prickly, closely knit Penderwick sisters are instant classics. I want to load this description with words like “sweet” and “cute” and “adorable,” but don’t get the wrong idea; there’s nothing forced or precious here. As lovable as they are, the Penderwicks are realistic characters: intellectual but not overly precocious, just as interested in soccer as in books, quirky but not neurotic, nice but not saintly…and sometimes downright cranky. In this installment, watchful eldest sister Rosalind departs for a much-needed vacation from her duties, leaving hot-tempered Skye as the reluctant and often frantic OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick) as she and her two younger sisters—dreamy writer Jane and shy little Batty, who quite frankly steals any scene in which she appears—their friend Jeffrey, and their aunt Claire head up to a cottage on the coast of Maine. This book combines two of my favorite kid’s-book tropes, the Warm Large Family and the Idyllic Summer Vacation, into a very unique, funny, and even moving tale. I’ve read that Birdsall has planned this as a five-book series, and although I’m thrilled that there are two new Penderwicks books in my future, part of me is thinking, Only five? I could quite happily read about the Penderwicks until they are old and gray.

DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

I’ve loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels since high school, so I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to check out any other books Douglas Adams may have written until I saw Dirk Gently mentioned in glowing terms at Bookshelves of Doom. And, duh, I really liked it—as of course I would, since it involves both time travel and a quirky private detective, two of my favorite literary elements, handled with Adams’s signature wit. (There are also ghosts, cats, pizza, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to sweeten the deal.) It will take repeated readings for Dirk Gently to rival Hitchhiker’s Guide in my affections, but with a book this fun, the prospect is hardly a chore. In the meantime, I’ve laid hold of the sequel, and I’m crossing my fingers that the forthcoming BBC show will be a worthy adaptation...and comes to the U.S. soon.

SWIMMING IN THE STENO POOL

Given its subtitle, A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office, and its cheeky vintage-art cover, one might be forgiven for assuming that is just another one of the heaps of lightweight hipster nostalgia books that began to flood the market in the early 2000s, when reviving/celebrating/satirizing midcentury culture and design became all the rage. That is, if one didn’t happen to know that Lynn Peril is one of the sharpest, wittiest feminist cultural historians around. As the author of the sadly defunct zine Mystery Date, the books Pink Think and College Girls, and the “Museum of Femorabilia” column in Bust magazine, she specializes in examining the ways in which women’s identities were portrayed and constructed through pop culture—advertising, advice books, etc.—throughout the twentieth century. She continues this effort in Steno Pool, exploring the history of that much maligned, celebrated, and even fetishized figure, the secretary: a topic near to her heart because, it turns out, she is one.

I picked up this book mainly because I loved Peril’s previous two and it seemed like good retro fun. I was not surprised to be so interested and entertained, but I was a bit taken aback by how much it resonated with me. A history of secretaries is by proxy a partial history of women in the modern white-collar workforce (since it was one of the few jobs outside the home that was socially acceptable for women—at least, single women; there is an entire chapter on the additional obstacles, including outright firing, faced by working married women—and remains female-dominated today), and as an office worker myself, I connected with it quite personally. The story is both empowering (working girls, yay!) and depressing (sexism, boo!); even if you think you know it—typing and dictation, groping and harassment, the glass ceiling and making coffee—seeing it all laid out with Peril’s stringent analysis is informative. So much of the material she quotes might seem hilariously antiquated and irrelevant if she didn’t do such a good job of demonstrating how systematically it reflected complex social norms that still resonate today. I’ll resist launching a rant, but much of the book inspires a healthy sense of outrage, though it’s leavened by amusing factoids and Peril’s wry humor. This is a natural follow-up to College Girls and a good companion to one of my other favorite twentieth-century histories, Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girls. Not to mention a great reminder of how fortunate I am to have a job that values me and doesn’t limit or discriminate against me, which is useful to think about when I’m dragging myself reluctantly out of bed on a Monday morning.

TROUBLING A STAR

In Madeleine L’Engle’s final Austin family book (which takes place during the school year directly following the momentous summer of A Ring of Endless Light but was published 14 years later), Vicky travels to Antarctica to visit Adam Eddington, who is working at a research station, and becomes embroiled in international intrigue. The setting is interesting and I especially like that L’Engle makes use of the fictional South American nation of Vespugia that she created for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but overall I found it a bit dull. The story is mostly travelogue, without either the excitement of Arm of the Starfish or the coming-of-age introspection of The Moon by Night. The good-vs.-evil struggle feels low-stakes and tacked on, the conclusion unsatisfying, probably because Vicky has very little agency; she’s just on a tour, and the big climax is that she gets stranded on an iceberg by the bad guys and then…waits to be rescued by the good guys? I didn’t see much continuity between this Vicky and the passionate dreamer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it seemed especially weird that there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to recent discovery that she can communicate telepathically with dolphins. I’m just saying, if I discover I can talk to dolphins one summer, and I find myself on a boat in the Antarctic a few months later, I might try conversing with a seal or a whale or something, especially when in peril, but it doesn’t even cross Vicky’s mind. Devoid of that mystical wacky awesomeness, Troubling a Star feels flat.

MRS. AMES

Another one of the fab Bloomsbury Group vintage reprints, and this one by E.F. Benson, author of the fab Mapp & Lucia series. A match made in heaven? I think so! Mrs. Ames starts out seeming very familiar, set as it is in the small town of Riseborough, which the reader may be forgiven for confusing with Riseholme, the setting of the first two Lucia books. In Riseborough, as in Riseholme and Tilling, dwell a great many upper-middle-class people with too much time on their hands, and thus nothing better to do than to pry into the business of their neighbors and endlessly jockey for social supremacy. As always, Benson documents their infighting with affectionate but wicked wit; here’s my favorite line, the initial description of Mrs. Ames herself, the town’s queen bee:

In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.

In grand Luciaesque fashion, Mrs. Ames soon faces a contender to her throne, her younger, new-to-town cousin Mrs. Evans, and a series of competitive parties and other social maneuvers ensues. But in the Mapp & Lucia books, feelings (except perhaps jealousy and pride) rarely run very deeply, with romantic relationships absent, irrelevant, or considered downright gauche. Mrs. Ames ventures into more emotional territory when Mr. Ames becomes increasingly infatuated with Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Ames finds she minds this very much. At first, the situation seems comical and harmless, as Mr. Ames makes a mild fool of himself and Mrs. Ames makes failed attempts to recapture his attention by dying her hair and using anti-wrinkle creams; there is nothing Benson does better than exploit the foibles of his characters to hilarious if uncomfortable effect, like an early-1900s version of The Office. But as the relationship between Mr. Ames and Mrs. Evans (who is bored and unfulfilled, “an unexploded shell, liable to blow to bits both itself and any who handled her”) grows more serious, Mrs. Ames finds herself reassessing both her marriage and her life. All comes right in the end, but there’s much more poignancy and self-discovery in this story (as well as an interesting semi-sympathetic, but occasionally derisive portrayal of the women’s suffrage movement) than the cover blurb led me to expect. (“A clever, laughable little satire in the author’s lightest and happiest mood,” said the Time Literary Supplement on its publication in 1912, which is either a severe case of missing the point completely or a reflection of the fact that Benson was best known for writing ghost stories, in comparison to which this is no doubt light and happy, before he started the Mapp & Lucia series 10 years later.)

There is more pathos and a sharper edge to the humor here, and I found the story moving, even sad. It’s not as charming and lovable as Mapp & Lucia, but it’s just as clever and entertaining, and a good demonstration of Benson’s range as a writer. I just wish I could find more books by him! My library only has some collections of his ghost stories, a few of his nonfiction works, and Dodo, the book that apparently first made him a sensation (it seems to be a darker satire about a ruthless social climber). I may have to check out Dodo by default, though I’d prefer something more cheerful.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO

As I predicted, I checked out another Ralph Keyes book on language, and also as predicted, it quickly verged on language-book exhaustion—or, possibly, this one wasn’t quite as good a read as Euphemania. Subtitled Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, this one deals with what Keyes calls “retrotalk”: allusions to past phenomena that still exist as artifacts in our language today. It’s an interesting concept, one that was first introduced to me as a teenager when my much-younger cousin asked me why we say “roll down the window” and I realized he’d never seen a car without automatic windows (!), and which is increasingly a topic among my peers as we get older, especially for my friends who are college professors and repeatedly shocked by the pop-culture references their students don’t understand. And I certainly learned a lot from this book (although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head), particularly about older and more obscure phrase origins.

However, my problem with it was twofold: (1) The book doesn’t flow as well as Euphemania; it contains less high-level analysis and so often reads like lists of words and their origins organized in paragraph form. Admittedly, Keyes acknowledges this in his introduction, noting that it can be dipped into rather than read straight through, but I was reading it straight through, and at times it felt scattershot and tedious. Part of the tedium also stemmed from the fact that (2) the book is so broad-focused that at times it laps over into simply being an elementary history of the United States. I know there are plenty of people who don’t know what Watergate or the Cuban missile crisis are, but couldn’t they just look it up online or in an encyclopedia? Do we really need to explain them here? Isn’t anything considered common knowledge anymore? I wish Keyes had focused on some of the more obscure concepts and left the basic ones alone. Keyes does argue that there are plenty of people who don’t know the basic ones, and that someday most people won’t remember them, the way there are already many people who don’t remember pay phones, but that doesn’t make it any less dull to read sections that amount to “once upon a time, there were these things called record players, and here is the associated terminology.” This book would make an excellent primer on cultural references for non-Americans, the young, and anyone else who’d like to brush up them (I know post-WWII history always got serious short shrift in my schooling; I happened to learn most of it from a childhood spent reading Doonesbury, my former job as an editor of middle-grade history books, and a personal fascination with the era), but to me it was only of mild interest.

THE BONESHAKER

This should have been such a slam dunk: a YA novel set in small-town Missouri in 1913, featuring a mechanically-minded tomboy protagonist who must beat the devil at his game, plus the titular bicycle, an ominous traveling medicine show, a blues guitarist reminiscent of Robert Johnson (with a similar Faustian story attached), steampunky automata, and a healthy dose of American folklore. But it just didn’t do it for me. I hesitate to place too much judgment on Kate Milford’s writing because I listened to this as an audiobook—which I plucked semi-randomly off the shelf at the library for my commuting entertainment, perhaps having confused it with Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which, confusingly coincidentally, is another YA novel published at around the same time, with harder-core steampunk elements and zombies to boot. I’m not a committed audiobook fan, so it’s possible something about this just didn’t translate from page to voice (I do know the book featured plentiful illustrations, which of course I missed out on), and maybe I’d have enjoyed this more if I actually read it (it’s gotten a lot of good reviews, strengthening the It’s Just Me theory).

I really did like the idea of the book, just not the execution. The characters, particularly Natalie, the heroine, felt flat and wooden; the pacing was often ponderous; there were lots of descriptive passages that seemed like they were supposed to be lyrical but didn’t sing; too much of the plot seemed to be contrived around Natalie having inexplicable visions at convenient moments; and in the end some narrative threads were unresolved—I think because Milford is planning a sequel, but it felt unsatisfying. Would it be insulting to say that I’d like to see someone adapt this into a movie? With the action at the forefront and some awesome visuals (I’m thinking Tim Burton would be perfect for this), it would make a damn cool and creepy Southern Gothic fantasy film. As an audiobook, however…meh.

THE DAUGHTER OF TIME

This was the first Josephine Tey book I ever read, way back in 1996; my father handed it to me during my freshman year of college because I had just read (and loved) Shakespeare’s Richard III. (I was also primed to read it because it gets a shout out in my beloved Tam Lin.) It’s an Inspector Grant mystery, but with a novelty twist: Grant is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg and, bored silly, he ends up investigating the murders of the princes in the Tower. I’ve said before how ridiculously seductive I find books that involve a lot of suspenseful historical researching (Possession is another), so of course this one grabbed me: I reread it in one sitting, on a flight from L.A. to Minneapolis, and was enthralled the whole time, even though I already knew the outcome: Grant proves, quite convincingly in my opinion, that Richard had no motive to commit the crime, whereas Henry Tudor did and certainly had reason to try to pin it on Richard (pro-Tudor historians such as Thomas More are definitely responsible for Richard’s portrayal, in Shakespeare and popular culture, as an evil hunchback).

The book definitely stands on its own enough that fans of historical mysteries can enjoy it without having read the rest of the Grant series (obviously, I existed quite happily for 14 years after reading this without feeling compelled to check out another), but this time around, after having read all the books in order, it was even more fun—I had a better sense of Grant’s personality and could recognize recurring characters like Sergeant Williams and Marta Hallard. This is one of Tey’s best works and definitely my favorite Grant book…at least so far; I still have one more to go.

BOSSYPANTS

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.

See, even the back cover is funny! I don’t normally gravitate toward large-print, wide-spaced, photo-on-the-cover celebrity/entertainment/humor books, but I love Tina Fey and think she’s a great comedy writer as well as a seemingly swell person, so not surprisingly, I acquired (as a thoughtful birthday gift from Friend M), read, and enjoyed her book. This collection of short, mostly biographical essays is a quick read; it’s full of Fey’s wry, self-deprecating humor, but also thoughtful and honest about her experiences as a nerd, woman, actor, writer, and mom. It was especially interesting to read the last chapter, in which she explores her indecision about having a second child—she wants one, but knows it could perilously interrupt her career at its peak (or as she calls it, her “last five minutes of fame”) and put her TV show’s staff of 200 people out of work (“I thought 30 Rock would be canceled by now”)—given that since its writing, she had obviously made up her mind; she recently announced her pregnancy, and 30 Rock will return midseason to give her a maternity break, which seems to work out well for everyone—except possibly me, who will miss it in the meantime.

But it’s Fey’s smart, snarky feminism I love the best, as in the piece where she responds to fictional (but obviously based on reality) Internet hate mail. Here’s her answer to the complaint that she ruined SNL, is only famous because she’s a woman and a liberal, and isn’t funny:

Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?

UNFAMILIAR FISHES

Sarah Vowell’s latest explores the history of Hawaii, about which I knew absolutely nothing (I’ve never even been there), so I can attest that it is definitely informative, at least for the newbie. It’s also, of course, entertaining—tongue-in-cheek but affectionate, funny but often poignant. It doesn’t have quite the offbeat passion and sharp focus of good old Assassination Vacation (a book I am apparently invoking often these days), but it’s less uneven and rambly than her previous effort, The Wordy Shipmates (which, despite some good wisecracks and a sound premise, I didn’t end up loving)—although in a lot of ways, it’s a natural extension of that book’s insights into American Christianity and imperialism. I think Vowell has pretty much guaranteed at this point that whatever she writes about, I will read.

MISS HARGREAVES

In this 1940 novel by Frank Baker (another of the awesome Bloomsbury Group reprints), after a young man invents an eccentric octogenarian friend named Miss Hargreaves as a joke, his world is turned upside down when she turns up on his doorstep, exactly as he described her. I’m a great fan of books where imagination becomes reality (Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy, for instance), so this concept was right up my alley, and for the most part I loved the story, which is a nice blend of silly comedy-of-manners and darker musings on the godlike creator’s power over and responsibility toward his creation.

My only quibble is that I wanted more Miss Hargreaves! Norman finds her so mortifying that he spends a lot of time being quite rude to her and trying to change her or get rid of her entirely, even though he admits that deep down he likes her, and that frustrated me at times, because I thought she was pretty awesome. I found myself wishing Norman would just relax and enjoy himself—probably unfair, I know, because that’s not what the book is about, but it was just one of those cases where the protagonist’s awkward handling of the situation seemed to cause more trouble and embarrassment than the situation itself. I felt more sympathy for Miss Hargreaves than for Norman most of the time, which amplified the more tragic aspects of the plot and made it feel a bit less like pure madcap fun than some of the other books I’ve read in this genre. Still, it’s definitely a unique book, and highly recommended for those who like their charming WWII-era British fiction tinged with the surreal.

THE WILDER LIFE

This book is like Assassination Vacation, but with Laura Ingalls Wilder instead of dead presidents. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a compliment; Assassination Vacation is one of my favorite nonfiction books. The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie achieves a similar balance of nerdy personal obsession, entertaining travelogue, snarky commentary, and hard historical fact. I was suspicious when I first heard about it; it so easily might have been one of those trendy I-did-one-crazy-activity-for-a-year-and-then-got-a-book-deal gimmicks, or a shallow, remedial “Oh, hey, did you know you can visit the actual Little House sites?” play-by-play, the thought of which made me bristle—I feel a fairly strong sense of ownership toward Little House, having grown up in Ingalls country, read the books over and over as a kid, and visited both Pepin (Big Woods) and Walnut Grove (Plum Creek) multiple times. I even refused to watch the TV show when I was little because it was too unfaithful to the books (actually, I still refuse to watch it, although I have met Dean Butler). But The Wilder Life is written by Wendy McClure, author of the stellar bygone blog Pound and a famously hilarious online feature, Weight Watchers Recipe Cards circa 1974 (later published as a book, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, which I own), as well as a memoir called I’m Not the New Me, which I have read but rather embarrassingly don’t remember anything about. McClure won me over to The Wilder Life after revealing herself as the author of the HalfPintIngalls Twitter feed, which I had been enjoying for the past several years for its spot-on blend of clever humor and encyclopedic knowledge of Little House minutiae; e.g.:

Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, churn on Thursday, ROCK ON FRIDAY.

Why don't wise old Indians ever come to town to tell us we're going to have an FUN AWESOME winter?

You can always tell it'll be a long winter from the way the muskrats build their houses. And from their tiny hats and scarves.

McClure brings the same wit to The Wilder Life, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed it. Having read all the books and a LIW biography (Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder) I’d thought it would mostly be old hat, but either I didn’t retain very much information from the bio or McClure had some new insights to share, because I learned some stuff as well as being amused and, in parts, moved by McClure’s exploration of her obsession with the blurred line between the historical reality, the fictionalized book versions, and the pop-culture TV version: What exactly is it that we’re responding to when we love these books so deeply and yearn to be absorbed in that world—a world that is long gone and, in some ways, never existed? McClure delves more deeply into her emotional journey than Vowell does in Assassination Vacation, but both perfectly capture that wonderful feeling of being so enthusiastic about something that you can adore it and—well, not make fun of it, but make informed in-jokes about it—and the same time. I highly recommend this book to Little House fans, but it’s also got enough going for it to interest newbies as well. Here’s a sample (a passage I heartily nodded along with, given my feelings about the TV show):

More than once, a friend or acquaintance has gushed, “you mean you’re a Little House fan, too?” only to discover that we have two very different sets of memories. One of us is thinking of the time Laura taught a calf to drink from a bucket. The other is thinking about the Very Special Episode when some kid named Albert got hooked on morphine. The ensuing conversation often ends awkwardly, with one of us a bit disappointed that the real Laura Ingalls did not have an opiate-crazed adopted brother and the other feeling, well, just depressed.

TO LOVE AND BE WISE

The third of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, and my favorite so far (mostly because it featured the small-town-where-all-the-eccentric-characters-are-suspects trope). It’s still only a fraction as awesome as Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, but it was an absorbing train read and gets bonus points for a very interesting twist ending.

P.S. Although a lot of the selections are pretty bonkers, I was happy to see Grant included, and decently ranked, on this list of bangable male characters in British literature. I’ve got a bit of a crush on him.

A RING OF ENDLESS LIGHT

In the fourth book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin family series, we’re back in Vicky’s first-person narration (after a third-person detour for The Young Unicorns) and the clan is heading back to their former life in small-town New England after that adventurous year in NYC. But first, they’re spending the summer at the island home of Grandfather Eaton, who’s dying of leukemia. As if trying to come to terms with her grandfather’s illness weren’t enough, Vicky is also mourning the death of Commander Rodney, a family friend, and dealing with the reappearance of Zachary Grey, the bad-boy-with-a-death-wish from The Moon by Night whose suicide attempt was the cause of it (the Commander had a heart attack after rescuing Zachary from drowning). And she’s not only getting romantic attention from Zachary, but also from Leo, Commander Rodney’s solid-but-boring son (awkward!), and maybe from Adam Eddington of The Arm of the Starfish, a colleague of Vicky’s brother John who wants her to help him with his marine biology research. Which leads to the little matter of Vicky’s discovery that SHE CAN COMMUNICATE TELEPATHICALLY WITH DOLPHINS.

I know I read A Ring of Endless Light once as a child, because who could forget OMG DOLPHINS. But I remember being a bit befuddled by it, and with good reason. This is a superb book, all casual-beachy-relaxing on one hand—morning swims, hamburger cookouts in the cove (I was always intrigued by islands as a child and still have a real soft spot for summer-vacation-at-the-seaside stories, although Over Sea, Under Stone is the only example I can think of off the top of my head)—and serious metaphysics on the other, but it’s even stronger within the context of the other books. Vicky has been gradually coming of age since the series began, but in this book she’s grappling with the Big Two, sex and death. Death in particular looms large, not only in Grandfather’s heartbreaking deterioration, but Leo’s loss of his father, Zachary’s loss of his mother, Adam’s mourning for Joshua (from Starfish—so glad I detoured to read that book before I got to this one), the demise of a baby dolphin, and even the death of a sick little girl in Vicky’s arms. The sex is purely theoretical (although Vicky does at least acknowledge that it could happen if she wanted it to, which surprised me at first until I realized this was published a full 20 years after the very wholesome Meet the Austins), but it remains a constant undercurrent as Vicky tries to untangle her feelings for the three very different men she encounters. I like, though, that the story isn’t a conventional teen romance where the central question is “Which boy will she choose?” Vicky is a fully realized character with bigger fish to fry (those newly discovered pyschic powers, for one), and the guys don’t represent a potential happy ending, just three very different possible responses to death and approaches to life. Although there’s no good-versus-evil battle here, this is hands down the deepest YA book I’ve ever read: It is literally about a girl trying to figure out the meaning of life. With a little help from some dolphins.

HENRIETTA SEES IT THROUGH

This sequel to Henrietta’s War, by Joyce Dennys, is just as lovable as the first volume. As World War II drags on, Henrietta’s narrative of small-town life on the home front is increasingly shadowed by anxiety and melancholy, but she and her friends endure all indignities with wit and aplomb. She derives much humor from her own endearing haplessness; as, for example, when she enters her dog, Perry, in the local dog show:

We nearly won the Dog Race (Owner to Run Backwards) too, but just at the finish Perry caught sight of the spaniel and twisted his lead round my legs. Some people fall elegantly and gracefully—I am not one. When I got back to my chair, Lady B said, “Fancy those knickers lasting all this time. Didn’t get you get them before the war?”

And if Henrietta hadn’t already earned my affection, her status as a fellow book lover would have won me over:

To part with even one of the tattered and incongruous volumes which form what I am pleased to call my library is, for me, worse than losing a front tooth. Sometimes I wake in the night and writhe to think of the books I have lent to people and never seen again. Once I groaned aloud and woke Charles. “What is the matter, Henrietta?” he said. “Have you got a pain?”

“No, Charles, but I keep thinking of that copy of Barchester Towers which I lent somebody and never got back.”

“For crying out loud!” said Charles, and went to sleep again.

This leads to my favorite part of the book, in which Henrietta’s agony at having to donate books for a scrap drive to aid the war effort results in her stealing a complete set of Fielding to rescue it from being rendered into pulp (which seems perfectly reasonable to me). I highly recommend that you check it out for yourself.

A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD

My feeling for Alan Bradley’s third Flavia de Luce book is pretty consistent with my thoughts on the first two. I can’t resist mid-twentieth-century small-town British novels or intelligent and intrepid girl detectives, so when a new title in this series is released I snap it up at the library with great satisfaction. I’m still not sure I really buy Flavia as a character—not that I expect her to hew to any sort of objective reality for average 11-year-olds; on the contrary, I prefer my literary children as precocious as possible. It’s just that there’s a whiff of artificiality in Bradley’s writing that puts me off at times. I can barely put my finger on it, and if the Internet is to be believed, all of her other readers love Flavia unreservedly, so I may be alone in this opinion. I have a feeling that my increasing addiction to quirky-charming books actually written during this period makes me a bit more critical of modern-day simulations (I had a similar vague feeling about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, if you will recall).

But even if nothing quite beats the real thing, it’s fun to see a mashup of that old-fashioned screwball eccentricity with the whip-smart badassery of good YA heroines today. (One of the things about Flavia that rings most true for me is her relationship with her trusty bicycle, Gladys, which she personifies as adorably as only a lonely kid can: “‘Sorry, old girl,’ I said to Gladys in the gray dishwater light of the early morning, ‘but I have to leave you at home.’ I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face. ‘I need you to stay here as a decoy,’ I whispered. ‘When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they’ll think I’m still in bed.’ Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy...At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, ‘Don't do anything I wouldn't do,’ and Gladys signaled that she wouldn’t.”) This book kept me happily entertained for a couple of days of train commuting, and sometimes that’s enough.

JULIE OF THE WOLVES

I chose this book for book club and was relieved to discover that it’s still good after all this time. I loved it as a kid, not quite with the same intensity as Island of the Blue Dolphins (I didn’t own a copy of it, so there was less obsessive rereading), but in the same general manner, with admiration for its protagonist’s genius for lonely survival in extreme wilderness (eating regurgitated caribou meat from the mouth of a wolf, for instance), jealousy for her close kinship with animals (let’s face it, getting accepted into a wolf pack totally one-ups having a pet sea otter), and the fetishized grief that only preteen girls can feel at the sad parts (oh, and they are still sad, twenty years later). Jean Craighead George’s Eskimo heroine, Miyax/Julie, is just as hardcore but a bit less stoic than Scott O’Dell’s Karana, allowing for more focus on her emotional journey; she braves the elements not because she’s forced to, but because she’s caught between cultures, trying to navigate the shift between the traditions of her people (Miyax was raised in a remote seal camp, living in a manner you get the feeling was already old-fashioned even at that time) and the white-influenced modern world of plastic parkas and hunting by plane. When I was younger, the most tragic part of the story seemed to be the death that occurs (if you’ve read the book, you know what part I’m talking about), and while I still shed tears at that point, now it seems to me that the true sadness lies in Miyax being forced to accept that the life she yearns for is impossible; “the hour of the wolf and the Eskimo is over” (just as the real heartbreak of Island of the Blue Dolphins is knowing what happened to Karana once she left the island). Miyax must come to terms with the world as it exists, not as it should be, which is the kind of message that only increases in poignancy for adult readers.

I was shocked to discover that George wrote two sequels to Julie of the Wolves, Julie and Julie’s Wolf Pack, until I realized they were published more than two decades after the first installment, in the 1990s, when I wouldn’t have been looking for them. I’ll definitely be checking them out now.

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

“Before my eyes he grows suspicious, capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, Pa, think how terrible the fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet I have money always in my thoughts and my desires; and the whole life I place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of life!”

And money, in a word, is the theme of Our Mutual Friend, my Dickens read for 2011. I enjoyed five-sixths of this book a lot—it’s Dickens’s last complete novel and a showstopping demonstration as his maturity as a writer, chock-full of what he does best: colorful characters with awesome names, from Rogue Riderhood to Fascination Fledgeby (rather than being structured around a single plot and a few subplots, OMF has a huge cast of interlocking characters revolving around a central idea, similar to Bleak House), and social analysis (sometimes earnest, sometimes satirical).

Unfortunately, near the end, there is a plot twist that almost ruined the book for me. There’s really no way to explain this plot twist succinctly (as friends subjected to my in-person rants about it can testify, it requires me to summarize a very complicated story, and even then I don’t think that expresses the full magnitude of the twist), but suffice to say that it is so supremely ridiculous that it could only have been topped by one of the characters waking up to discover the whole thing had been a dream. I read it on the train, and I could barely restrain myself from grabbing the arm of the passenger next to me and demanding, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!” (I suppose I have to at least hand it to Dickens for completely surprising me, since usually he telegraphs all story developments from 100 pages away.)

Now, Dickens is known for having some silly plot devices, from long-lost twins to spontaneous human combustion, and usually the more crazypants he gets, the more I like it—I don’t read him for restrained realism, but for larger-than-life Victorian melodrama. The problem with this twist is not just that it’s so outlandish, but that it invalidates his entire message, including most of that nice little speech at the top of this entry. The narrative arcs of two characters I’d really been interested and invested in turned out to be a sham, part of a scheme so overwhelmingly creepy that if Dickens had presented it as horror, I would have eaten it up with a spoon; but instead he makes it out to be the best thing since sliced bread, and after the big reveal the manipulated character actually thanks her manipulator for totally making a fool out of her and secretly controlling her life for years on end! I might even have been able to handle this if I felt that Dickens had done it intentionally, but instead it seems like a last-minute cop-out to avoid having to go through with making one of the book’s more lovable characters into a villain. So the author forces through a deus ex machine and gets his happy ending (which, usually, no matter how contrived, is one of my favorite parts of a Dickens novel), but only by betraying his premise (the power of money over people) and shutting down any possibility for character growth (I’d found it so fascinating that here were two Dickens characters who seemed to actually be changing, one for the better and one for the worse, when usually he writes people who are either obviously good and stay that way, obviously bad and stay that way, or ambiguous until tested by events).

This insanity left a bad taste in my mouth as I finished the book, but upon reflection, I still liked OMF overall. It’s certainly not my favorite Dickens (those honors remain with Bleak House for serious goodness and Nicholas Nickleby for frothy fun), but I’m glad I read it, and I’d still recommend it for the advanced Dickens reader (one who already loves him and has read the major works already), as long as you take the ending with a huge grain of salt—like, maybe one of those big blocks of salt they sell for water softeners. There were an awful lot of good bits, after all; I dogeared about a hundred pages, but here are just a few of my favorite excerpts:

• …cheeks drawn in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. [The introductory description of Melvin Twemlow]

• Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.

• “You incarnation of sauciness,” said Mrs. Wilfer, “do you speak like that to me? On this day of all days in the year? Pray do you know what would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R.W., your father, on this day?”
  “No, Ma,” replied Lavvy, “I really do not; and, with the greatest respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do either.”

• Of an ungainly make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures born to be indiscreetly candid on the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle had Sloppy, and he didn’t know how to dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances. Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colors.

(I’m definitely going to start working “Number One in the Awkward Squad” into my everyday parlance, by the way. Possibly also “You incarnation of sauciness.”)

And my very favorite part, because I love that in two paragraphs Dickens is able to paint such a heartbreakingly astute and compact portrait of a character who plays little to no role in the novel. It’s almost like a small story in itself, and it makes me love her:

..Miss Peecher the schoolmistress, watering the flowers in the little dusty bit of garden attached to her small official residence, with little windows like the eyes in needles, and little doors like the covers of school-books.

Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one. She could write a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule. If Mr. Bradley Headstone had addressed a written proposal of marriage to her, she would probably have replied in a complete little essay on the theme exactly a slate long, but would certainly have replied yes. For she loved him. The decent hair-guard that went round his neck and took care of his decent silver watch was an object of envy to her. So would Miss Peecher have gone round his neck and taken care of him. Of him, insensible. Because he did not love Miss Peecher.

AMONG OTHERS

I’ve procrastinated in writing about this book because I don’t feel I can quite do justice to how much I adored it. I had enjoyed Jo Walton’s “Small Change” trilogy (Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown), so when I noticed she had a new book out, I snatched it up at the library. When I saw that it was a coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl at a British boarding school in the 1970s, I got excited. When I started it and realized that it was first and foremost a love letter to reading, I was smitten.

The narrator, Mori, has left her large, close-knit Welsh family for the custody of the English father she barely knows, who then sends her to a bleak boarding school where she is basically an outcast. The circumstances surrounding all this are initially mysterious, revealed slowly to the reader over the course of the book; all we know at first is that Mori has an injured leg, a twin sister who recently died, and an estranged mentally ill mother. Who is apparently a malevolent witch. Mori can do magic, too. Oh, and there are fairies.

If the mention of fairies scares you off (hell, it usually does that to me), let me say that one of the things I love about this book is how understated the fantasy elements are—so subtle that at times I half-wondered if they weren’t supposed to be real and Mori was just delusional (not so, but there are junctures where the book could have gone that way). Mori’s is an everyday sort of magic, and Walton interestingly restrains herself from turning the story into an epic good-and-evil battle. Sure, there’s a final confrontation, but the real point of book is Mori’s journey of self-discovery—and much of it happens through reading.

Mori is a science fiction addict, and the book is peppered with—in fact, since it is her diary, largely composed of—references to all the books she’s reading. Some of these (well, lots of them, considering I’m not a frequent sci-fi reader) are titles I’ve never read or even heard of; others are familiar (The Lord of the Rings is a touchstone), and some seem to be in-jokes put there just for my enjoyment. Having just finished my annual Dickens tome, I giggled at this one:

We’re reading Our Mutual Friend, which I secretly call Our Mutual Fiend. You could rewrite it with that title to make Rogue Riderhood the one they all know.

And even harder at this one, a misunderstanding of one of my all-time faves:

I bought Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle for 10p… I didn’t know she’d written any historical fiction. I’ll keep it until I’m in the mood for a good siege.

But it’s not just the specific books that make Mori a Kindred Spirit; it’s her ardent love of reading for its own sake:

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

…Eight books sounds (and feels) like a lot, but it isn’t as if they’ll last me all week. I normally read now in the early morning if I wake before the bell, for the three hours of compulsory games, during any boring classes, in prep after I’ve finished my prep, in the half-hour free time after prep, and for the half hour we’re allowed in bed before lights out. So I’m getting through a couple of books most days.

As a bonus, through Mori’s voracious reading, Walton manages to vividly evoke what it was to be a fangirl in the days before the Internet (not to mention a geek before geek was chic). This took me back to my childhood, when I had to rely on the ads in the back of book (remember those?) or the list of the author’s other works in the front as a springboard for future reading, and I was never sure whether I was actually reading a series in the correct order unless there were helpful volume numbers on the spine, and if my library didn’t have something or I couldn’t track it down at a bookstore I was just plain out of luck. I rely so much on online library catalogs, Amazon, Wikipedia, blogs, and author and publisher Web sites for book information now, but back then so much depended on chance, luck, and word of mouth—which is partially why I’m only just now managing to finish all the Betsy-Tacy and Madeleine L’Engle books in sequence. There was a heightened joy of discovery to pre-Internet book hunting, when you could suddenly happen upon a new-to-you book by your favorite author just sitting there on the shelf one day, but I don’t miss the accompanying agonies of uncertainty and incompleteness. Now I can track down copies of out-of-print books and have them sent to my house with a few clicks of the mouse, but in those days some things were just lost. Not to mention the potential loneliness of the solitary reader—nowadays Mori could connect to a million other like-minded fans through blogs and chat rooms, but in the book she’s an outsider (although, admirably, she never pities herself: “It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.”) until she finally finds a welcoming, compatible group of friends (and even first love, squee!) through the sci-fi group at her local library.

With its touch-of-magic-in the-real-world setting and highly literate protagonist, Among Others reminded me strongly of Tam Lin, one of my all-time nearest and dearest books. But whereas I recognize that Tam Lin is not for everyone, I believe (or want to) that Among Others is a must-read for any bookworm, especially anyone who’s ever felt like an oddball because of it. After all, its message, as Mori puts it, is irresistible: “If you love books enough, books will love you back.”

A SHILLING FOR CANDLES

The second of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries (published in 1936) was not quite as enjoyable as the first, maybe because there was less emphasis on Grant’s character development. I did, however, adore the awesome sixteen-year-old Erica Burgoyne, who despite being a police constable’s daughter, shelters a murder suspect and motors around the countryside in her “disreputable little car,” Tinny (“She used to be Christina, but the inevitable happened”), trying to prove his innocence. Smart (indeed, a smartass), eccentric, and unflappable, Erica steals every scene in which she appears and made the few chapters written from her point of view my favorite part of the book. Witness:

It was half-past six of a hot, still morning as she backed Tinny out of the garage, and no one was awake in the bland white house that smiled at her as she went. Tinny made a noise at any time, but the noise she made in the before-breakfast silence of a summer morning was obscene. And for the first time Erica was guilty of disloyalty in her feeling for Tinny. Exasperated she had been often; yes, furious; but it had always been the fury of possession, the anger one feels for someone so loved as to be part of oneself. Never in her indignation, never in the moments of her friends’ laughter, had she ever been tempted to disown Tinny. Still less to give her up.

But now she thought quite calmly, I shall really have to get a new car.

Erica was growing up.

I want more Erica Burgoyne, damn it! Henceforth, I will daydream about discovering a lost manuscript featuring her and Alan Grant as a lovably mismatched investigative duo. Or heck, forget about Grant and let’s bring back Tey from beyond the grave to pen a YA spinoff series about Erica’s crimefighting adventures.

THE TWENTY-ONE BALLOONS

Have you heard of this? I hadn’t (or of its author, William Pene du Bois), but it won the Newbery in 1948. Unfortunately, it was also the first book we’ve read for book club that I’ve actively disliked. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it much as a kid, either. It’s the story of a retired schoolteacher who decides to travel around the world in a giant balloon and ends up on the secretly-inhabited island of Krakatoa shortly before the volcano erupts—so far, so good, right? I’d expected a fun, exotic, bigger-than-life, pseudo-Victorian adventure tale a la Jules Verne, but although the essential elements were interesting, the execution fell flat. In the hands of someone like Roald Dahl, I think the premise could have led to a rip-roaring story, but du Bois’s writing didn’t do his ideas justice. To me, it seemed like the kind of children’s book someone would write if they didn’t have children, didn’t know any children, and didn’t remember being a child: plenty of bizarre and nonsensical goings-on, but nothing substantial to bind them together—no narrative arc, no character development, and oddly, none of the humor or whimsy that make masters like Dahl so awesome. Most of the book is devoted to earnest anthropological discussions of the semi-utopian Krakatoan society and dry, detailed technical explanations of various inventions (and if there is anything I have absolutely no patience for reading, it’s lengthy descriptions of mechanical and spatial concepts). I was mildly diverted while reading it, but every time I set it down I really didn’t have any urge to pick it up again. I kept wondering if standards for children’s literature were really so different in 1948—what did reviewers of the time see in it to praise it so highly? No one in my book group seemed too thrilled by it either. But a quick check of Amazon revealed that there are still plenty of contemporary readers (children as well as adults, presumably) who love it, because it has a near-perfect five-star rating. So I’m just going to conclude that this is not the type of book for me and leave it at that.

EUPHEMANIA

I’m a word nerd, but I don’t often read books about language. I’m not sure if this is because I get enough of grammar at work, or because as a hopeless smartypants I prefer to feel like I know it all already, or because I’m afraid that once I get started I won’t be able to stop—after all, there are a lot of them out there. But when I heard Ralph Keyes talking about his new book, Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms, on NPR recently, I found myself putting it on hold at the library. I’d never given a lot of conscious thought to euphemisms before, but it turns out they’re a perfect combination of two of my great loves, word origins and wordplay (especially, let’s face it, saucy wordplay), and Keyes covers them with thoughtfulness and obvious delight. The book is such a treasure trove of fun factoids that I can scarcely summarize it, so I’ll just share this info-packed tidbit (which follows a paragraph about how “white meat,” “dark meat,” and “drumstick” became preferred terms for chicken parts so that polite diners could avoid saying the dreaded “breast,” “thigh,” and “leg”; after being reprimanded by a woman for asking for chicken breast at a dinner party, Winston Churchill retaliated the next day by sending her a brooch with a note saying, “Pin this on your white meat”):

Poultry presented all manner of verbal pitfalls at this time. “Cock” in particular posed serious problems. This word was short for “cockerel,” a male chicken. But “cock” was also short for “watercock,” the spigot of a barrel, leading it to become slang for “penis.” Unfortunately, that tainted term was embedded in many others. In the United States especially, previously innocent terms such as “cockeyed” and “cocksure” could no longer be used when both sexes were present. Under this regimen, “weathercocks” became weathervanes; “haycocks,” haystacks; and “apricocks,” apricots. Those burdened with last names such as “Hitchcock” and “Leacock” began to feel under siege. In response, an American family named “Alcocke” changed their name to Alcox. Fearing that this might not be adequate, before siring a daughter named Louisa May in 1832, Bronson Alcox became Bronson Alcott.

!!!

Yeah, now I’m probably going to have to read another Keyes book. And hunt down one of the most alluringly named titles from Euphemania’s bibliography, Filthy Shakespeare by Pauline Kiernan (shockingly, my library doesn’t have it). And then who knows where it’ll end? Thanks a lot, NPR, with your interesting, Gintastic-tempting stories!

THE YOUNG UNICORNS

This is the third of Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin family books, and the first one I’ve really liked—probably because it has the good-versus-evil structure of the Time Quartet, whereas the first two volumes in the series were more standard coming-of-age stuff. Like The Arm of the Starfish, my previous L’Engle read, this doesn’t have any magical elements (there are no unicorns, as I had to keep explaining to A when he poked fun at the title and accompanying trippy ’60s cover art [designed, like the original Arm of the Starfish cover, by Ellen Raskin of Westing Game fame, woot!]), but it leans toward sci-fi (the “sci,” in this case, being a cutting-edge medical laser that can alter people’s brains). Admittedly, as in so many L’Engle books, some of the goings-on are weird (a crazed bishop holding court with gang members and a genie in an abandoned subway station, for instance), and unfortunately, although the story is supposed to have a gritty, urban feel to it (it’s set in NYC), that’s sometimes undermined by incredibly dated details (the ostensibly scary gang has the wince-inducing name “Alphabats,” the ultra-modern laser is called the “Micro-Ray,” and “acid” and “pot” are always in quotation marks). However, the wackiness is both endearing and effectively creepy, the plot is creative and suspenseful, and the characters are unforgettable. I’d been skeptical through the first part of the book, reading with one eyebrow perpetually raised, but by the end I was caught up in the undeniably powerful story.

What I thought was most interesting is that the book deliberately comments upon—indeed, is centered around—precisely the peculiar naiveté that I’d found slightly off-putting in the previous books. Having spent two novels painstakingly building a portrait of this unusually close-knit and virtuous family. L’Engle then throws them into a radically different situation and explores how they react. Their innocence simultaneously puts them at risk and gives them strength, adding a whole new dimension of complexity to the series.

SCOTT PILGRIM VOLUMES 4–6

Since these are such quick, addictive reads, I was happy to find Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, and Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour all available at the same time on the library shelf so that I could finish the series in one fell swoop. I’d been afraid my interest was flagging after Volume 3, but that may have been just the distracting conditions under which I read it or a temporary plateau caused by my grownup frustration with Scott’s continual cluelessness. In these last books, Scott does indeed finally get it together, and the action progresses at a good pace toward a satisfying ending. By the last volume, I’d become so attached to the characters that I was “Awww”ing sentimentally as they gained closure (I particularly loved what happens with Stephen Stills). I don’t have any big conclusions to draw here, besides that this is a smart, fun series. I’m not sure I loved them enough to buy my own copies, but I’m glad I read them once (and now I want to see the movie again).

THE MAN IN THE QUEUE

Having loved Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes so very much, of course I decided I have to go read everything else Josephine Tey has ever written, even though I’m already busy reading all of Madeleine L’Engle, my annual Dickens tome, the usual irresistible library books, all the books I own but haven’t read yet, and supposedly some of the books I own that I’ve read but don’t remember and am not sure if I want to keep. So obviously it’s the perfect time to embark on another reading project! Fortunately (only for my time management, not for the world at large) Tey’s oeuvre is managably small: aside from Ferrar, Pym, and The Franchise Affair, which I read some years ago, there are only five other mysteries, all of which feature Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant as the protagonist.

The Man in the Queue, published in 1929 under the pseudonym Grant Daviot, is Tey’s first novel. It’s a much more traditionally structured mystery than Pym or Ferrar, but Grant is a likable character and Tey’s writing elevates it above your standard whodunit; she seems much more interested in exploring her characters’ personalities than constructing a clever puzzle for the reader to solve. While it’s definitely not as memorable as Pym or Ferrar, I found it enjoyable, particularly in passages like this one, where Grant enlists the help of a suspect’s neighbor to gain entry to the suspect’s flat:

“I might tell you that you are conniving at a felony. This is housebreaking and entirely illegal.”
“It is the happiest moment of my life,” the artist said. “I have always wanted to break the law, but a way has never been vouchsafed me. And now to do it in the company of a policeman is a joy that I did not anticipate my life would ever provide.”

THE ARM OF THE STARFISH

Now this is more like it. After being mildly underwhelmed by Meet the Austins and The Moon by Night, I did myself a great service by choosing to read the next Madeleine L’Engle book in chronological sequence, rather than the next one in the Austin series. Odd-sounding, I know, but basically: L’Engle wrote four novels about the Murry family (aka the Time Quartet, which includes A Wrinkle in Time, etc.), five (plus some short Christmas books and other ancillary material, which I am ignoring) about the Austin family, and four about the O’Keefes (Meg Murry, her husband, Calvin, and their children), plus a number of other semi-standalone books. L’Engle divided her main body of work into “Kairos” (extraordinary time, the Murrys and O’Keefes) and “Chronos” (ordinary time, the Austins), but there are characters who overlap between them. Although The Arm of the Starfish is technically the first O’Keefe book, centering on Adam Eddington, a marine biology student who travels to an island off the coast of Portugal for a summer job in Dr. Calvin O’Keefe’s lab, it takes place between The Moon by Night and the next Austin book, The Young Unicorns, and introduces two characters (Adam and Canon Tallis) who will reappear in later Austin novels. Confused yet? L’Engle’s refusal to write in straightforward sequence is admittedly why I missed out on so many of these books as a kid, and the rich intertextual entanglements are why I’m so excited to be tackling them all now. But I think The Arm of the Starfish would work pretty well as a one-off read too, if you’re so inclined.

While Starfish doesn’t have the magical elements I loved in the Time Quartet, it definitely has 100% more battle-between-good-and-evil drama than the first two Austin books. You could call it science fiction, since the confrontation is waged over Dr. O’Keefe’s scientific discoveries (concerning the properties of the titular sea creature), which are based in reality but definitely fantastical in scope, but it functions more as a thriller, full of international intrigue—kidnapping, spying, secret documents, covert meetings, exotic locales…In fact, although it’s intended to take place in an unknown future, the book was written in 1965 and has very much the atmosphere of an early James Bond film. My only complaints are as follows:

• Adam takes a frustratingly long time to choose sides, despite the fact that the mysterious lady who attempts to seduce him into helping her is such an obvious Bond-girl type—(a) her name is Kali, (b) her father is a powerful diplomat named Typhon Cutter, who resembles a spider and accuses his rivals of being in league with the communists—classic villain material, and (c) she pulls that old familiar “Oh, I want to be redeemed, save me from my evil self” crap a lot. (I don’t usually picture book characters this specifically, but I kept vividly envisioning her as being played by Rosamund Pike for some reason.) I know the point is that Adam is trying to be rational and that his decision to align himself with the O’Keefes is something of a spiritual journey, but the other side was just SO OBVIOUSLY EVIL that I occasionally wanted to slap him and tell him to snap out of it.

• It’s definitely interesting to see Meg and Calvin as adults with kids of their own, but having known and loved Meg as the main character of several books with Calvin in a supporting role, it’s a little hard to see Calvin as the pivotal figure and Meg barely present. We know that she’s very beautiful and a loving mother of seven (!) children, but other than that, she’s a mere shadow of her rad teenage self. (This is much like reading Little Men et al and finding rebellious Jo March converted to a wise matriarch.) I would have liked this book to have more Meg.

• Although Starfish is written in the third person, it’s definitely third-person limited from Adam’s point of view, so L’Engle’s habit of using “the boy” as a synonym for his name (“The boy worried about what he would do…”) seems really clunky and jarring.

Beyond those minor quibbles, however, this book was full of the kind of intelligent excitement I’ve come to expect from L’Engle—a singular mix of elements that would be crazypants in anyone else’s hands (Human limb regeneration! Telepathic dolphins!) with lovably grounded, realistic characters (most notably the eldest O’Keefe child, Polly, who will feature prominently in later books) and sweeping moral struggles.

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

Another treasure unearthed at the library bookstore. Not only is it a lovely old little blue hardcover (for some reason it has no copyright date, but it looks to be from the 1920s or 30s) that cost just $1 (it does have one page where the corner’s torn away, but I was able to find the missing text online and write it in the margin), but finding it cracked me up because I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, but my library doesn’t have it. Yes, the same library where I bought it. I almost took it right over to the circulation desk to see if I could donate it to the collection, but greed prevailed and I whisked it home with me instead.

This was von Arnim’s first and most famous book; in fact, her given name was Mary Annette Beauchamp (she married Count von Arnim-Schlagenthin), but such was its popularity that after its publication in 1898 she became known to her readers and eventually even her friends and family as Elizabeth. Her subsequent books were credited either to “the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden” or simply “Elizabeth” (she is still listed that way in my library’s catalog). Like von Arnim, Elizabeth is an Englishwoman married to a rather cynical Prussian count (she refers to him as “The Man of Wrath,” which would be an adorable nickname if given with affection—like Rumpole’s “She Who Must Be Obeyed”—if the historical record didn’t show that von Arnim was indeed a domineering asshat and their marriage an unhappy one) who finds refuge in her beloved country house and, specifically, its garden. Very little happens in the story, which is written in diary format, other than Elizabeth’s lovely descriptions of the landscape throughout the seasons and witty tales of her domestic dramas (most notably, her eccentric houseguests). Here’s a sample from the opening paragraphs:

I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales….They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls….

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

I know I overuse it, but “charming” is the adjective that best applies to this quiet, meditative book. I didn’t find it as amusing and outright lovable as The Enchanted April or Christopher and Columbus, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially—as a shy and retiring type myself—Elizabeth’s passionate devotion to her home life and insistence upon her solitude. (I’ll definitely check out the sequel, The Solitary Summer, which my library does actually have on the shelf.) Recommended this for fans of the era, gardeners, nature lovers, introverts, and homebodies.

LUCY GAYHEART

My local library has a bookstore where it sells used books that people have donated. Unfortunately, for mysterious reasons, the store is only open on weekday afternoons, so I was never able to visit it regularly until I started working from home on Wednesdays. Now one of my favorite Wednesday treats is to spend my lunch break biking to the library, conducting my business (as a library junkie, I nearly always have an item waiting to be picked up or due to be returned), and perusing the bookstore. Often the pickings are slim, but occasionally I find strays that seem worth the 50 cents or dollar it costs to rescue them, and now and then I stumble across a gem. Shortly after finishing (and adoring) My Antonia, I scanned the “C” shelves in the hopes of finding myself a copy and instead encountered this unknown-to-me Cather title…in a first edition. Although it wasn’t in mint condition, for $2 it was a steal.

This bargain would have been thrilling enough on its own, but then I read the book and really liked it. Lucy Gayheart is one of Cather’s later novels (1935) and centers on a young pianist who leaves her small Nebraska town to study music in Chicago. The story explores not only the contrast between urban and rural life, but also the quest for self-actualization, the joys and struggles of the pursuit of art, and the potential power of art and faith to overcome tragedy: “What if Life itself were the sweetheart?” Lucy ultimately realizes. “It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities—across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her.” As always, Cather describes the rich interior lives of her varied characters (in addition to Lucy’s point of view, we also get that of Harry Gordon, the rich, rather boorish man who courts her) as clearly and beautifully as she describes the Nebraska landscape. Although I didn’t fall as deeply in love with it as I did with My Antonia or O Pioneers!, I do think that this romantic, poignant book deserves to be much better known than it is. If you’re a Cather fan, seek it out.

GATHERING BLUE

During our book club meeting about The Giver, I was reminded that Lois Lowry wrote a semi-sequel (not the same characters, but set in the same world) called Gathering Blue—and that I had read it years ago, although I remembered it even less than The Giver. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to revisit it if a group member hadn’t mentioned the unknown-to-me existence of a third book, Messenger, which ties the first two together. I instantly got curious about that, so I decided I’d might as well refresh my memory on Gathering Blue first.

Gathering Blue is sort of like the B-side of The Giver. It’s similar in that a young person is set apart from their community, comes to learn some harsh truths about that society, and ultimately takes action to try to change it, but in this case, the protagonist is a girl (Kira, who was born with a twisted leg, is an orphan, and has a special—perhaps magical—talent for embroidery), the community is primitive and aggressive (the weak and disabled are left to die in a field, a fate Kira escapes only because of her talent), and in the end (spoiler, but not really) she makes the opposite choice that Jonas did in The Giver. Overall it’s a fine dystopia with some interesting exploration of the place of the artist in society and a few tantalizing details that expand on the first book, but it just didn’t grab me the way The Giver did—it feels a bit more forced, less fresh, with lower stakes. I could take or leave it on its own, but if there’s a big payoff in Messenger I may revise my opinion.

SISTER BERNADETTE’S BARKING DOG

Despite the fact that I correct people’s grammar for a living, I received little formal training on the subject. I remember learning the basics: subjects and objects; nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; first, second, and third person; and the various punctuation marks. Yet I had to figure out pronouns, articles, and clauses on my own; had never heard of a gerund or subjunctive until I took high-school Spanish; and still couldn’t tell you what a nominative absolute is (OK, now that I’ve looked it up, I guess I can). I scored the interview for my first editing job because the publisher was impressed that I correctly used “not only…but also…” in my writing sample, but I’d never been taught that rule, let alone given it a moment’s thought. I absorbed spelling and grammar mostly unconsciously, through my voracious reading, so my recognition of what is right and wrong (or, in this day and age, I suppose I should say “preferred and nonpreferred”) is largely instinctive. As Kitty Burns Florey describes people like me in this book, “The language sticks to them like cat hair to black trousers, and they do things correctly without knowing why.”

So I was curious to read Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, which I hoped would explain this mysterious practice (known only to me from descriptions in historical children’s books and cautionary tales from Catholic-school-educated peers) and shed light on some deficiencies in my education. “Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss,” Florey begins adorably, and then goes on to discuss her own experiences with sentence diagramming (“It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.”), its history, and its uses, with particular attention to the question of whether knowing how to diagram a sentence makes you a better writer or editor, with lots of examples from great literature. Unfortunately, it turns out that many horrible sentences diagram just fine, but Florey argues persuasively that it’s still an interesting and noble tradition. It may not have taught me how to diagram a sentence (Florey explains it cogently, but luckily you don’t need to master it before you can understand the book), but this was a quick, charming, and surprisingly fun read, not least because, in passing, it introduced me to H.G. Wells’s famously awesome quote about the prose of Henry James, which I had somehow missed in all my English-major days: “It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.”

HENRIETTA’S WAR

The more books from the Bloomsbury Group I read (this was the second, following The Brontes Went to Woolworths), the more I’m convinced that someone has created a publishing imprint just for me. How thoughtful! So far, I haven’t read an obscure early-twentieth-century cozy-genteel comedy (for lack of a better way to describe this genre) that I haven’t liked. This one, by Joyce Dennys, is an epistolary novel (I’m guessing semiautobiographical, since Henrietta, like Dennys, is a middle-aged doctor’s wife and an artist), originally published as a series of magazine articles during World War II, that humorously chronicles life on the home front. In letters to her childhood friend Robert, who is fighting in France, Henrietta details her own adventures and the shenanigans of the eccentric (of course) inhabitants of her small seaside town as they cope with blackouts, air-raid drills, rationing, donating blood, victory gardens, and scrap metal drives. Although the specters of war, uncertainty, and deprivation loom dimly in the background (the purpose of the letters is to entertain Robert and distract him from the war, but you can tell that Henrietta worries for him, as well as for her grown son and daughter, who have enlisted as a soldier and a nurse, respectively), Henrietta maintains her good cheer and self-deprecating wit, and I found the famous British endurance in the face of adversity as comforting as its original wartime readers no doubt did. This is a light read, but I highly recommend it for fans of the era or anyone who enjoys simple, warm, and often hilarious tales of daily life. (Something about the tone, combined with the letter format and the accompanying line drawings, actually reminded me of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs, which in case you don’t know is high praise indeed.)

This book covers 1939 to 1942; I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of the sequel, Henrietta Sees It Through, as it wings its way to my door from Amazon.

THE OUTSIDERS

Can you believe I’d never read The Outsiders? I had zero interest in gritty realism as a kid. In fact, when a member of my book club picked this as our February selection, even though it seemed like a perfect opportunity to remedy this gaping hole in my cultural literacy, when I actually sat down to read I was still less than excited. Juvenile delinquents: depressing, right? Well, shoot, I loved it. Turns out this is less a hard-hitting “issues” book and more a sweet, perceptive (and now slightly old-fashioned, in a vintage-cool way) coming-of-age story. Beneath their tough exteriors, the characters are funny and sensitive—if perhaps too much so; we spent a long time in our club meeting discussing whether the book was an accurate depiction of young men of that time and place or a female teen writer/reader’s idealized version of them, but in the end I don’t think it matters because, hey, it’s fiction, and they feel honest enough within the world of the book. The plot isn’t particularly strong, but I got so swept up in Ponyboy’s smart, poignant narrative voice that I was happy to go along with it. Even when read 20 years too late, this classic definitely lived up to its hype for me, and now I’m putting S.E. Hinton’s other books on my TBR list—especially since I learned that they take place in the same world as The Outsiders and contain some overlapping characters. (I’ll also admit to being quite tempted to buy myself this rad t-shirt.)

As a bonus, during the afterglow from the novel, I also watched the Outsiders movie (handily available on Netflix Instant Watch) for the first time. Of course, the cast is near-legendary at this point, a gold mine of before-they-were-quite-stars, but in most other respects I’m sad to say that it’s not a great film. Sometimes painfully so. My major complaint: no voiceover. I know that excessive narration can be a crutch for lazy filmmaking, but when you’re adapting a first-person novel told by a character as winsome as Ponyboy, doing away with it entirely is also a mistake (I thought the Coen brothers included just the right amount of narration in True Grit). I was hopeful when the movie began with the first line of the book, but confused when it faded out mid-sentence and was replaced by the blaring, cheese-tastic Stevie Wonder original track “Stay Gold” (seriously, I love Stevie, but NO). That was it for the voiceover until the very end, when, like the book, the movie came full circle—but without the book’s explanation that the framing device is an essay Ponyboy’s writing for his English class, this device makes no sense. Otherwise, the film is a technically faithful adaptation in that it covers all plot points, but stripped of the novel’s two main strengths, the nuances of the narrative voice and the character-building (most of the first third of the book is basically cut), that plot felt even more creaky and implausible (case in point: the fire in the church). Some of the casting was excellent: Patrick Swayze was spot-on as Derry, Matt Dillon was surprisingly good as Dally, Diane Lane’s performance as Cherry made me take note of her for the first time ever, and young Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise were interesting to see—not to mention, holy cow, a one-line part for Tom Waits of all people! But unfortunately, C. Thomas Howell was not the Ponyboy of my dreams, and Ralph Macchio was downright laughably incompetent as Johnny—a major problem, considering that character is the emotional linchpin of the story. Add to all this Coppola’s often-showy direction and the result is mostly mawkish. I’m still glad I watched it, but its main value is as a Brat-Pack-era curiosity, not as a literary adaptation.