Month: March 2011

It’s odd to me how much news now comes to me via my RSS reader, and how much more quickly I thus learn of things than I might otherwise. Just now I learned from Monica Edinger that Diana Wynne Jones has died. I never got around to writing her a letter to tell her how grateful I am to her work, and thus, as so often happens, I am doing so now, after her death.

What’s funniest in a way is that I’ve actually read very little of her. She was was prolific — books and series and more books and books tangentially related to various series and their worlds — but I have read only a handful of them. But those few are books I have come back to again and again and again.

My grandmother gave me a copy of Charmed Life once when I was sick. I was sick quite a lot as a kid, and I was home by myself all day and would grow terribly bored. Any book that could pull me out of that into another world was a charm indeed, and that book I particularly loved — the setting of the old castle, the jewelry that screamed its enchantment, the sense of trying to shield people from a fate that can’t be denied — it was all wonderful.

A year or so later, my mother and I picked up a copy of Fire and Hemlock from B. Dalton, of all places, which had a huge display of the paperback. It had the most garishly godawful cover — at some point I folded a piece of math homework around it to make a cover for the thing because I was so sick of looking at it. And I looked at it a lot, because I reread this book all the time. I read it every finals week during junior high, and those are perhaps my clearest and best memories of times with it. I was the in the midst of the ages that Polly is in the book then, and I was living in a place I hated, and the people I liked best in the world were musicians, as the other most important character in the book is. And I loved my grandmother more than almost anyone else in the world, and I loved the grandmother in the book, too.

It’s a retelling of Tam Lin (and oh how I love retellings of Tam Lin), and it is about magic and friendship and love and good and evil and spells. It’s got a lot going for it, then, if you like that sort of thing. But the scene I always looked forward to the most, and that I still replay in my head from time to time, is one where Polly is lost in the streets of Bristol, having been dropped off at the train station by her father, who hasn’t bothered to see if she has money for a ticket home. She has, perhaps magically, been drawn to a building where a quartet is rehearsing — her friend Thomas Lynn, and the three other members, and they take her in and give her food and coffee and then, apologetically, go on with their rehearsal, but they don’t need to apologize, because really it is a private concert, just for her.

“If you could hear lime juice, it would sound like violins,” Polly thinks. I can see that basement as surely as if I’d been there, and I go there in memory the way I go to places I’ve really been. But of course I have really been there: that is what books do. And I will remain grateful to Diana Wynne Jones for providing me with such a place for as long as I live.

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos — This is this year’s selection for All Iowa Reads, and so I’ll be doing a book discussion for it sometime later this year. It’s a very book-discussiony book (albeit a long one), full of family issues and small town issues and social issues and that sort of thing. Between the length and the number of issues, it almost seemed like there was almost too much, as if the novel were both crammed full and sprawling. But the characters are wonderful, and having recently moved from a town of 351 people, I loved how well Kallos got small towns and how they are both very private and not private at all.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley — This was the choice for this month’s mystery book discussion at the library. There is almost nothing to discuss in Bradley’s very sweet, very enjoyable tale about an 11 year old girl who is an aspiring chemist and accidental sleuth in rural England in 1950, but we managed to eke some conversation out of the setting and the degree to which a willing suspension of disbelief was required.

[listen] The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison — I’m doing my best to use our library’s downloadable eaudiobooks. Since I’m a Mac user with an older iPod Touch and since Overdrive only lets one person check out a digital file at a time, my selection is generally somewhat limited (I don’t listen to books enough to make placing holds practical). I was quite pleased with this selection. There are two narrators (done in slightly different voices by the same woman on the audio version), Stella, a woman in her twenties who is lost in a sort of twentysomething Manhattanite way, and Tillie, her aunt, who is lost in an alcoholic living in a trailer park in the desert kind of way. The novel deals with how they come to learn of each other’s existence. It is not a happy story, but it is a good one.

The Neighbors are Watching by Debra Ginsberg — There ain’t no fun like making fun of suburbanites, so if you like that sort of thing, you will probably like this book about how a suburban San Diego neighborhood is sent into a tizzy when the pregnant daughter of one of its residents shows up on his doorstep and is greeted by his wife, who had no idea he even had a daughter.

Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music by David N. Meyer — I have loved biographies of rock stars ever since the day I happened upon the 781s at the Iowa City Public Library as a high school freshman. This one is my favorite kind — long, overwrought, filled with music trivia, drenched in more music knowledge and snobbery than the clerks in High Fidelity (I mean, this author hates the Eagles, hates them*), and incredibly snarky. Of course, since it’s about Gram Parsons, it’s also incredibly sad or completely overwrought, depending on your feelings about musicians who die of drug overdoses in general and Parsons in particular. I’m a fan, so I liked it.

How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward — I picked this up off a donation pile sitting in my office one day when I had forgotten my book. It was blurbed by someone as being “like The Lovely Bones,” which I guess it is in that it involves the disappearance of a young girl from a suburban home. I guess they also both require some willing suspension of disbelief — but accepting that a dead girl is narrating a story makes for a riveting and interesting book in Sebold’s case, whereas accepting the broad series of contrived coincidences just makes for annoyance on this reader’s part in Ward’s. Oh well. I did finish it, but I don’t recommend it.

Daughter’s Keeper by Ayelet Waldman — I love a book where the Amazon reviews ricochet back and forth between “best writing I’ve ever read” and “can’t write her way out of a slush pile.” I think neither of these things. It’s very clearly a first (literary) novel sort of a novel, but I admire a book that manages to portray a naive young political activist in a way I don’t find totally offensive. Said young activist comes back from Mexico and goes to live among the poor in Oakland, and then the guy she’d been seeing in Mexico shows up on her doorstep, so she takes him in. Of course, he is an illegal alien and thus can’t get much in the way of work, and thus he gets involved in a drug deal in which he gets her marginally involved, too, and then the forces of law and order sweep in and everyone gets caught up in the travesties of mandatory minimums for drug sentencing. It’s a novel about a white girl, and thus it is a little bit the Hallmark version of mandatory minimums. In that regard, I look forward to reading Orange is the New Black, which sounds like it might be similar.

* “The Eagles were and remain the most consistently contemptible stadium band in rock. Gram famously referred to their music as ‘a plastic dry-fuck.’ He bore the Eagles a special loathing, as any sane listener might.” p. 366