My Words Trickle Down

Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

( Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.

Day 20 – Favorite romance book

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Not much to say about it that wouldn't spoil it all, but I recommend that everyone read it. It's one of those all-around perfect books.

( Upcoming Days )

Also: it's cold now. So cold, so windy.

Day 18 – A book that disappointed you

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. After all the hype about it, I expected it to be just about unbearably awesome. Or at least pretty awesome. Or at least good.

I suppose my opinion of it wasn't helped by my having listened to an audio version of it read by some guy with a really annoying voice. And I couldn't even get away from it, because I listened to it during K's and my somewhat-ill-advised bus-tour of western Europe, in situations where it was dark or I had already finished my other book and I was tired of all my other music and so I was just trapped with it, it or boredom or having no auditory barrier between me and the other bus passengers and ugh. Ugh.

Anyway, had I not been in that situation, I don't know that I'd have finished it at all. It was just so boring and self-righteous and absurd! Not even the good kind of absurd. It was like a whole book of talking to your boring drug-obsessed friend who doesn't have much of anything to say about anything except drugs. Which, in retrospect, is probably about what I should have expected. After all, it mostly was my boring, drug-obsessed friends who went around calling it so very very awesome.

(I quite liked the film, though!)

( Upcoming Days )

Incidentally, I am also disappointed in my ability to complete a 30-day meme within a month. Shame on me!

Day 16 – Favorite female character

As with male characters, I don't have an overall favourite -- and in this case, I can't even pull an example out of A Clash of Kings, since it has no particular female characters who jump out at me as potential flavourite of the week. Thus, here are a few subcategorized favourites, in no particular order:

Favourite female villain: Cathy from East of Eden. Oh my goodness, she is just so deliciously evil!
Favourite female unreliable narrator: Iris from The Blind Assassin. I was pretty much onto her from about halfway through (and had my suspicions much earlier still), but she is a sneaky one!
Favourite female obvious-author-fetish: Susan Calvin from I, Robot (&pre/sequels)
Favourite Smurfette: Trillian from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

... And then I got distracted by TV Tropes when I went to get a link for 'Smurfette', and then suddenly it was 2:40 am. Goodnight!

( Upcoming Days )

Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer

Yesterday I had a little blab about how I don't really have a single 'favourite writer', but ended up naming John Steinbeck for reasons of Future Meme Consistency. Today, for the same reason, I'm naming The Grapes of Wrath as my 'favourite' of his novels, even though in reality it's definitely a tie between that and East of Eden (which I counted for a few years as my Favourite Book Ever, until I read others that slotted themselves into joint first, including The Grapes of Wrath).

( Upcoming Days )

Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore

There are surely dozens, if not hundreds of books in this category, including most of the ones I read as a child, and especially as a small child. Were I to re-encounter Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree, I might find it charming, but I doubt I would feel the same love for it that I did as a three-year-old.

However, I think I can answer this most honestly by naming the series that falls most emphatically on both sides of that question -- used to love, don't anymore -- god this is embarrassing -- The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin. I was first given a few of these at the age of six, by the daughter of a family friend who would've been around 11 or 12 at the time, and was thus a Cool Older Girl whose tastes I sought to emulate. The books themselves were also about Cool Older Girls, who did grown-up things like babysit for other children and have weird emotional disagreements that I didn't understand at all. I was addicted immediately. For the next few years I read all of them I could get my hands on, working my way quickly through the stacks inherited from the aforementioned family friend, then plundering our local library for the rest of the series. God help me, I even read some of the Baby-Sitters' Little Sister spin-off series, although with a protagonist who was both my own age and an insufferable prat, they failed to hold my interest.

I read a whole bunch of other trash over the same period (The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley [whatevers], &c.), but my mother seemed to have developed a particular distaste for the Baby-Sitters. I don't know why she picked on them more than the others -- perhaps she sampled one -- but in any case, by the time I was eight she was trying desperately to distract me from them, telling me how awfully badly they were written, trying to get me to read something else, something better for my developing little mind. Which a) seemed a bit unnecessary, since at the same time I was reading all that trash I was also reading every animal book I could get my hands on, as well as various potted children's histories and sanitized biographies of major historical figures, and all sorts of other 'educational' type books (and, yes, even the occasional book from the high canon of children's literature); and b) only served to make me all the more aggressively voracious in reading them. At one point she even drew up a bargain with me whereby I had to read one 'good' book in between each Baby-Sitters book. The deal lasted for all of one book, and totally ruined Sounder for me, since rather than enjoying the story as I might have, I was only dragging myself through it so I could get back to my teen-adulation crack-pipe.

Fortunately, by the time I'd reached the age of the characters themselves, I'd gotten myself a bit of taste, and started seeing the books for the utter garbage they are. I'll never get those hours back, nor clear out the mind-clutter currently and inexorably occupied by the doings of insipid characters I now care little about (tucked away in the same overspilling mental files as 'all the lyrics to involuntarily-memorized pop songs' and 'overheard celebrity factoids'), but I've made a sort of peace with that. What still bothers me a bit, though, is that all of my peers' other childhood vices, with which I had little engagement, seem to have developed a sort of pop-nostalgic caché. Mario, Batman, Pokemon, etc. I played the last a little, but for the rest I've had to learn all the references from the wrong end -- much like how, having been raised on 'The Simpsons', I tend to 'get' a lot of the references therein only years later, when I finally get around to seeing this or that Classic Film. When questioned I usually tell people, as un-haughtily as I can, that I spent my childhood out in the woods catching lizards and playing with actual rather than virtual turtles (which is also true), and carefully neglect to mention The Baby-Sitters Club.

( Upcoming Days )

Oh hey it's the book meme! But first, a riddle for you: What has eight fingers, two thumbs, and decided to do a page-a-day meme during the busiest month of the year? This guy lady! Now back to your regularly scheduled pontificating:

Day 10 – Favorite classic book

Apart from taking a rather literal meaning of 'books from ancient Greece or Rome' (in which I am woefully under-read), I have no idea what the boundaries are for the proposed set of 'classic books' from which I am supposed to select an answer. Indeed, although there's a great deal of overlap in proposed sets of 'the classics' of literature, the only thing that anyone really seems to agree on is that nobody agrees about what exactly makes a book a 'classic', and even on the rare occasions when a group of people agree on a definition, there's considerable disagreement about which books qualify. So I am a bit stuck. Also, it's 1:30 in the morning.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to answer "I reject the premise of this question", I'm gonna stick an imaginary pin in a mental card catalogue go with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, for what I assume are all the usual reasons. Good story, influential and important, deals with heavy shit while being actually quite lighthearted and funny, etc. (More importantly: unlike a few other possible candidates, it doesn't look likely to come up as an answer to later meme questions.)

( Upcoming Days )

In non-book related news, it's been getting cold again, and the buddlejas have lost almost all their purple, and reverted to looking like long brown corpse-fingers poking over the sides of walls. What was that 'summer' I was talking about a few weeks ago?

Day 8 – Most overrated book

I tried the same trick for this one as for the last: comparing my ratings to others' ratings on Goodreads. This time, though, there was a clear winner. The most overrated book is definitely Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein -- although I would extend this to all of his childrens' poetry collections; this one just happens to be the most famous of them. I wouldn't quite say I hate everything he's ever written, because I thought The Giving Tree was quite sweet, and I'm sure there must be a handful of poems somewhere in his many collections that I don't totally detest ... I've just yet to come across them. Shel Silverstein does awful things to children; he has ruined poetry for most of my generation, and I hear continues to ruin it for younger kids as well. But rather than raise my blood pressure further by talking about it, I'm just gonna copy+paste my Goodreads review:

Is there a way to give less than one star? I fucking HATED this book. I especially hated the way I was made to read it all through grade school; that I was taught that this is what 'poetry' is. It isn't poetry. This is easy, meaningless, chime-rhyming nonsense -- and not even nonsense with interesting language or ideas, like Lewis Carrol or (some of) Edward Lear. No, this is nursery rhymes but without the moral message. The wan, sugary pop-songs of poetry. Do not give this to your child.

( Upcoming Days )

*I see from looking back at my last entry that I actually ended up just over the wire, rather than just under it, so it was technically posted 'today'. Still, it was cognitively yesterday, and more importantly, who really cares?

Day 6 – A book that makes you sad

Oh my goodness. There are authors who make me sad for at least some (if not most, if not all) of the time I am reading with every book of theirs I read. Derrick Jensen, for instance, or John Steinbeck. Political stuff in particular tends to make me angry-sad, on which note, I'm gonna go with The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, here, given that it is particularly relevant these last couple of years, as the neoliberal governments of Europe and (anglophone) North America finally have an excuse to apply it to their own countries.

*despairs*

( Upcoming Days )

Day 4 – Favorite book of your favorite series

The stories in the Deverry books span over 500 years, and are not presented linearly (which is awesome because I have a short attention span the juxtaposition of past and future events shows the effects of the one on the other, without having to overstate it). We see many of the same "souls" in successive incarnations, apart from a few with particularly long lives who span several lifetimes of the others. What this means is that, for me, it's easier for me to pick a favourite time period/set of character incarnations within the series than it is to pick a particular book.

My favourite time period in the books is the 800s, in which a succession crisis plunges the kingdom into civil war, and we follow our long-lived magical hero as he helps his personally-groomed Rightful Heir win the throne back from the most powerful opposing faction. It echoes a lot of the real history of wars over kingship which plagued mediaeval Europe, without being obviously derived from any of them. It is also, to me, one of the most heartrendingly tragic sequences in the series -- in the Shakespearean sense of tragedy, in which you can see the inevitable doom coming to the characters given their own personal flaws and follies, but they don't see it, and so their deaths come crashing down around them like a thunder of fate.

Anyway, if I had to choose a particular book, I'd say The Red Wyvern, which is the one with the heaviest focus on this sequence.

( Upcoming Days )