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.