Category: Uncategorized

(Or was it Emily?)

It’s a little known fact, but Charlotte Brontë ran a rather successful adventure tour on the side. Once she’d really gotten it going, it practically ran itself. She’d tried to enlist Branwell’s help, but he turned out to be rubbish at it, poor fellow.

Charlotte Brontë had had a stroke of inspiration while proofreading something or other that Branwell had written. It was dreadfully dull, but she had promised. Anyway, his writing was so ponderous and stodgy (he’d learned all the wrong lessons from Anne) that she’d found her mind wandering.

Soon, it was all forbidden tombs, poisonous marshes, terrifying fens all up in there. By which I mean her brain. She had just the thing to cure all that writerly and intellectual ennui that so afflicted all her friends and relations.

Six months later, and she was leading an expedition into the Lost Catacomb of Ros Amidras Fyrrentas. Among her party were Branwell (gamely trying his best to fasten on his helmet, but really, he just couldn’t get the hang of it–Charlotte had to help), Erasmus Darwin, George Eliot (she turned a blind eye to the fake mustache, natch), William Makepeace Thackeray, and her good chum Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. There were some others, but they were hardly worth mentioning. Her sisters had declined to attend.

Thackeray very nearly fainted in terror during the Triangle Mishap, but otherwise it all went stunningly well. Apart from Branwell getting his head stuck in a funereal urn, that is. Charlotte had to break it. Sometimes beauty had to yield to necessity, especially when Branwell involved. George Eliot swung across the ravine deliciously, and Cleggs handled that animated skeleton like a champ.

At the end, Thackeray shook her hand profusely, while George Eliot winked and strode manfully away, golden amulet twirling around her gloved fingers.

Yes, Charlotte Brontë thought, this will be just the thing.

Lloyd Alexander is a writer who made me cry. Not with this book, but with his Chronicles of Prydain series. If I remember right, which I rarely do, this was a funny little book about a minor character and a magic pig. I think the pig foretold the future or something?

I read this particular book, which is really more of a novella, because I was hungry for more stories about Prydain, and this one was pretty much it. The pig escapes, Coll chases after it, there are adventures of some sort or another, and then he gets the pig back. In case you don’t know, Prydain is a fantastical/mythical world that seems to be inspired by Welsh (and possibly English and Irish) mythology.

[It occurs to me, thinking about this and Susan Cooper’s DARK IS RISING books, that there seems to have been a real thing for Welsh-inspired young adult fantasy novels in the 1970s. Fascinating!

[At the time, Lloyd Alexander was a huge favorite of mine, and I read just about every book of his that my public library had on its shelves. (This was helped by the fact that I got it into my head to read every book in the library, starting with the As, as long as it didn’t look too dumb. Hence, reading so much of Lloyd Alexnder.)

[A short visit to Wikipedia later, and I learned that he passed away just a few short years ago.]

I don’t really have much else to say about this little book, except that it reminds me, happily, of all the time I spent romping through Lloyd Alexander’s adventures. I expect that Coll and his white pig are deeply out of print, but perhaps not? At any rate, if you haven’t read any of his books, I wouldn’t recommend you start with this one, but rather THE BLACK CAULDRON, one of the Vesper Holly books–think Indiana Jones, except twenty years younger and a woman–, or perhaps even THE FIRST TWO LIVES OF LUKAS-KASHA.

Thanks for all the good times, Mr. Alexander! (even though you did make me cry)

Ah, Douglas Adams. Talk about another formative book/author. I had only been friends with Joel for weeks, or possibly months, when he pressed THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY into my hand. One long gulp later, and I’d read all four books in the HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE “trilogy”.

For me, I think of all of those books as a single piece, and their surreal, science-fictional whimsy tweaked some kind of humor center in my brain, nudging it slightly off-kilter. Actually, I’m not sure I remember having much of sense of humor before reading Douglas Adams. Am I ascribing too much importance to the man? Maybe, but I do know that much of humor from the age of 12 to 15 involved reciting Adams humorous set-pieces and recreating Monty Python dialogue, from QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL, natch.

It’s not so much that I was a humorless child, although I remember myself being an oh-so-serious one, drawn, usually, more to the gloomy and doomy. Hey, I liked Winnie-the-Pooh as much as the next guy, but it was also Eeyore that I felt the closest to, with his thistles and mournful birthday parties, ever uplifted by the love and kindness of friends.

Even now, with those who’ve known me longest, I feel like I labor under the misapprehension that I never josh, or joke, or giggle. It’s true, much of my humor–the stuff that most tickles me–involves playing the straight man to the world’s goofballs and weirdos, pretending as though all their most wacky pronouncements are true true true. It’s my version of the improvvers “yes, and…” Without being fed those whacked out lines, I flounder in the subtlety of my own humor, because it begins to seem like not so much a joke at all.

So, Douglas Adams has much to answer for, providing me with one exit door out from my gloomy room. As far as the RESTAURANT goes, as an individual book, it’s time-loosed restaurant itself that stands out, with the beast offering itself up for dinner, and the glorious view onto the beginning and end of the universe. POW!

I’ve decided to start writing little pieces about books that I’ve read in the past. Mostly, I’m doing it for myself so that my writing chops don’t get rusty, but if someone happens upon one of these and gets something out of it, all the better. I’m selecting books using my books read list and a random number generator.

Thomas Pynchon’s VINELAND was only the second of his books that I read, after THE CRYING OF LOT 49. If my memory hasn’t failed me, my dad handed it to me, almost on the sly, as I headed off for college, either my freshman or sophomore year. To a naive, somewhat religiously sheltered lad, VINELAND was an eye-opener in a way that LOT 49 wasn’t. I’d always been enamored of the fantastical in fiction, with my main touchstones being Tolkien and CS Lewis, I think, in part, because of the way they unearthed numinous wonder out of the real.

I’ve always had a slight aversion to the tedium of the mundane, and VINELAND proposed a solution to that: the idea that high strange weirdness, secrets and conspiracies, and obscure, occult knowledge lurked underneath that ubiquitous mundanity. I mean, LOT 49 touched on those things too, but it felt more like a fairy-tale, while VINELAND’s epicenter was Northern California, and contained enough “real” hooks that, combined with the aura of the fantastical, it reeled me in completely.

I think I can thank VINELAND for the beginnings of my distrust and skepticism of government and corporate activities, or really any organizations involving large number of hurrying, scurrying human beings.

Funnily enough, considering the random nature of this pick, I’m actually reading Pynchon’s newest book right now, BLEEDING EDGE, and it feels the most like VINELAND of any of his other books, only set in NYC in the strange days before 9/11.

I’ve read so many books, that, usually, all that’s left of a book in my mind are echoes of its impressions. For me, I remember very little of the book’s plot, which I seem to recall involved a precocious teenage girl, her hippy dad (or maybe her dad was a government agent?), some plot involving drugs and other things, and… that’s where I reach the limit of my memory.

I do recall, vividly, reading a scene involving the evil, government agent, the teenage girl, and a helicopter. I don’t recall why that scene was so vivid or why I remember it now…

For me, I tend to think of Pynchon’s books in two categories: Easy to Read and Tough to Read. VINELAND falls into the Easy to Read category, along with BLEEDING EDGE, CRYING OF LOT 49, and INHERENT VICE, while MASON & DIXON and AGAINST THE DAY fall into the Tough to Read column. Hey, me, I love Pynchon, but if you’re new to his stuff, I’d recommend something from those “easy to read” ones. This isn’t to say that they’re simple or actually “easy”, but compared to the “tough” ones, they require quite a bit less effort.

Happy reading!

I remember, vividly, reading my first book. The funny thing is that I don’t remember what the book was, or really even what it was about. What’s vivid are the emotions of it, the pure thrill of realizing what I was doing, what I had done, what I could do.

I’m sure there was a boy. And a kite. The book had pictures. I seem to recall a tree and a hill and a kite and a boy. I realize now, after countless children’s books, that I am describing many, many books. The sun was shining in my window, or maybe it wasn’t.

I remember working at a word, working to sound it out, and make sense of it. I remember leaping up, and running downstairs to tell my mom, my dad, really anyone who would listen, that I had read another word! A new word!

This all came back to me as I helped my son with his homework, and watched him sound out words, feeling those letter sounds roll around in his mouth, all stretched out and funny at first, but then snapping into place. The small, and then the big, grin on his face when he realized what he’d done. All those old feelings came rushing back, and I remembered again what it was like to read for the first time.

On thinking on it again, I realize that many of the details are missing. Was I reading out loud? Or in my head? Was it cold? Or warm? Was it the winter or the spring?

I don’t remember even liking the book, exactly. It wasn’t until later that I became a Reader with likes and dislikes, genre loyalties, and snooty dismissals. It was that moment, when I read my first book, and a whole new world opened up for me. There was something pure about it, a kind of joy in it, like the kind CS Lewis describes. Ever since, through all my life, I have read and read and read, always searching for that kind of feeling. A kind of reaching after a luminous sort of thing that mostly dances out of reach.

I’ve been told that I always loved being read to, and family story goes that I once (more than once?) put a book on top of my sister’s head while she was nursing, saying “Read to me!” I can believe it. But once I could read on my own, once I could get a direct line at those books myself, well, is it any wonder that the library became my favorite place to be.

A lifetime of reading, and it all started with that one book.

So thank you, Somebody! Thank you for writing that first book I ever read, even if I don’t know who you are, or even the name of the book you wrote.

 

The ducks! The giant hand! The grey man in the painting! The legendary hermetic architect! The insurrectionist librarians! Oracular police! (I could go on and on. The more I think about it, the more vivid details come back.)

A few days ago, I finished the deliciously sad and gloomy (and funny) THE FACADES by my old college pal, Eric Lundgren. It packs more into its relatively short length than novels two or three times its length. There were times when I had to set the book down and take a break, because my brain was just too full of beautifully crafted sentences, images, and ideas.

I recommend it highly!

THE FACADES website.

Imagine, if you will, a yellow sign of a person working.

Pinocchio and Wolverine. Pretty cool!

I just thought this was super amazing.

 

Max built this marble run.

 

And Alice drew this picture of Batman.