The Books that Mattered

Books have had a huge impact on who I am.  And, so I thought I would take this opportunity to share with you some of the books that mattered to me most in my life.

As most of my readers know, I am a Christian, so the Bible is big for me.  It is tempting to give you a list of all of the secular books that impacted me as a child and young adult and save the Bible for the end, highlighting how it's power is greater than all the others.  But, things like that, as least coming from me, always seem a bit self-serving and obnoxious.  Like when I say to Hubband, "I just want you to be happy."  So, I am going to mention the Bible up front.  The Bible matters, but in a way that is outside the scope of this list.

Hop On Pop by Dr. Seuss was the first book I ever read.  Well, sort of.  When I was three, I memorized all the words, and when to turn the pages.  I would "read" to anyone willing to sit still long enough.  When I had kids and got a copy for them, I was surprised at how long it is.  And boring.  So thank you, to any and all family members who sat through a 1972 reading of Hop on Pop.

The Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, with pictures by Garth Williams were a pre-teen favorite.  The television show was on at the same time, so I really got carried away by the idea of wearing long skirts and riding in buggies.  I remember pulling my knee sock up as high as they would go so that they looked like Laura's stockings.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl was haunting.  I can't quite put into words the way it changed me.  It was personal and historical and universal all at the same time, and I think it was the first time that I could imagine those things intersecting.  I guess, you could say, it gave me perspective.

The World Book Encyclopedia was the internet of 1976.  You can say what you want about the value of letting your kids watch television, but many was the night that I sat up late with a volume of the family's World Book Encyclopedia researching something I had seen on Fantasy Island.  Before the internet put a universe of knowledge at out finger tips, we had to look things up in books, and it was a true luxury to have a complete set of encyclopedias right there in the house.  I'm sure those books cost my mother a fortune, but they were worth every penny.

Some book by Jane Austen, probably Pride and Prejudice.  I can't actually remember which book of hers it was, but it used words like countenance and terms like three and twenty.  I found it very confusing, and I had to admit that, for the first time, I was out of my depth.  This was not Hop on Pop or Fantasy Island.  It was good for me.  Rather than give up, I learned that countenance means face and three and twenty means twenty three.

I read The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach hoping it would make me Jackie Kennedy or at least get me into a good school.  It did neither.  But I learned what a diaphragm was.

Seventeen Magazine, September 1984.  I read every inch of this issue of this magazine.  I have no idea why, but this back-to-school issue was like my life for six weeks in the late summer of 1984.  I still remember that the cover girl was named Gracie Santana.  I can conjure up a few of the photo lay outs.  Nuts!  But, for better or worse, this is what passed for influence on the fifteen year old me.

Fatal Vision by  Joe McGinniss is a true crime book about a Marine doctor who kills his family.  It was the first true crime book I ever read.  I was riveted.  This book probably played a roll in my future career in law enforcement.  Have I ever written about my police years?  I don't think I have.  Oh, well, I will let you imagine it for now.

Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton was an oral biography of Edie Sedgewick.  She was a socialite, model, drug addict in the Warhol culture of New York in the sixties, and her story is told through interviews.  This was fascinating to me.  A world I had no idea existed, laid out in vibrant detail.  Drugs, orgies, electroshock therapy, the state mental hospital.  It was not pretty.  It satisfied a primal teenage need to dabble in counter culture, without straying too far from the safety and comfort of my pleated skirt life.

Those Who Love by Irving Stone, was assigned reading for my high school history class.  It is a biographical novel about John and Abigail Adams.  It was so rich and detailed.  I fell in love with John and Abigail, and it had a lasting impact.  My undergraduate degree is in Early American History, and no matter what the fashion of the day becomes, I will always prefer Adams to Jefferson.  So, there.

Well, that's it for now.  These are the books I can remember as really having an impact on me.
 

What about all of you?  

What books do you remember from your history?

My Diana Years

Lady Diana Spencer became engaged to Prince Charles on February 24, 1981.  She was nineteen.  I had just turned twelve.  I had never heard of her before the engagement was announced, but she immediately captured my adolescent imagination.

Diana was young, pretty, a bit fleshy.  She seemed very accessible to me, the way many impossibilities seem accessible to Americans, especially the young ones.  I suspect it comes from being told we can be anything we want to be, if we work hard enough.  That's a load of carp really.  All the hard work in the world was not going to make me a tall, leggy, blond.  Or, a princess.  But, that did not stop twelve-year-old me from dreaming.

From the moment I saw her in that blue suit, showing off that gigantic sapphire ring, I wanted to know everything about her.  What she ate (very little, as it turned out), what she read (very little, as it turned out), what her life was like down to the minutest detail.  And then, I wanted to live that life too.  So, I thought.  I was twelve.  And a hopeless romantic.  What did I know?

She was pretty.  He was rich, and titled.  What could go wrong?

The Royal Wedding was in July, 1981.  There was an eight hour time difference between my suburban California home, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London, but it was summer and there was no school, so I stayed up all night to watch every second.  You might have been able to pull me away, if the house were on fire, but only maybe.  There was something about that day.  The combination of my youthful fancy, the sleep deprivation, and the pageantry of it all that just caught me up.  It felt like magic.

And, in a way, for me, it was.  The next day, I cleaned my room.  This was not a small thing.  My mother was of the attitude, that it was my room, and I could keep it however I wanted, as long as it did not escape past the door and into the hallway.  You can imagine the chaos.  But, all of a sudden, I wanted to be tidy, and take care of my things.  I wanted to grow up.  A nineteen year old English girl got married and I stopped being a little girl.  A bit dramatic, I know.  I mentioned I was twelve, right?

All through that following year, I saved my money to buy books about her, that were nothing more than photographs really.  I wore those pages out, dreaming.  There was on in particular, Princess by Robert Lacey, that also had quite a bit of text.  I devoured every word.  I can still remember the smell of the paper.

It didn't take too long to out grow being twelve.  And, while I maintained an interest in Diana gossip (for lack of a better word), the first blush of adolescent fantasy began to fade with talk of eating disorders, infidelity, and obsessive phone calls to other women's husbands.  I grew up.  I moved on.

Diana, died on August 31, 1997.  She was thirty-six.  I was twenty-eight.  I heard the news on the television, as I was unpacking all of my worldly possessions from moving boxes.  I had just bought my first house.  I was handed the keys that very day.  I felt like such a grown up.

At the risk of sounding like a melodramatic twelve year old, it seemed appropriate to me that I should share this day with her.  She was with me when I left the little-girl-me behind, and she left, just as I had reached a milestone of adulthood.  I was, of course, more than prepared to move on without her, but it was still sad. 

As I was unpacking, I found all of those old Diana books in a box.  A few days earlier, as I was packing for the move, I seriously considered throwing them away.  I felt kind of silly still holding onto them.  But, I could not part with them.  And, I was glad I didn't.  Silly or not, I loved those books.  They were such a part of my growing up.  I have them still.  Well, my mom has them, in a box in her basement.  (Did you hear that mom?  You have the times of my life in a box in your basement.  Think of that the next time you threaten to throw out anything we won't come get.)

I still think of Diana occasionally.  Neither of our lives were like we dreamed they would be in 1981.  But, I like my fairy tale ending, even if Hubband is not rich and titled.

There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Book

This weekend, I bought a book.  I paid actual cash money.  And then, I read that book.  In great, big, gulps.  Hubband pointed out that paying $26 for a book, and then reading it in as many hours, was a waste of money.  I should at least make it last awhile.  But, I just couldn't.

The book was The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst.

I read one of Parkhurst's earlier novels, Lost and Found, and I loved it.  I was so engaged that I cried by page eight (though the novel itself is not a big weeper).  Her writing style is such that, to my brain at least, the book sort of read itself.  And, she has a way of making even unlikeable characters sympathetic.  I found myself thinking about the book, even when I was not reading it.  I think the word is resonance.  I liked it so much, I wrote her a fan letter.  And she wrote back.  (Note to all you writers:  If you answer your fan mail you will sell books, even if it is only one at a time.)  So, I was eager to read her follow up.

The narrator of The Nobodies Album is Octavia Frost,  a successful writer, who has just finished her eighth novel, also called The Nobodies Album.  Octavia's fictional version is not really a novel at all, but a revision of the endings of her previous seven books.  She thinks this is ground breaking and revolutionary, but it is really just what it sounds like.  Weird.

As the novel opens (the real novel, not the fictional one written about within it) Octavia is in New York to deliver the book to her publisher.  In person.  This is a quirk that no one finds particularly charming, not even Octavia, but, as she puts it, "My idiosyncrasies are my right, and as long as everyone does me the courtesy of not mocking them to my face, we'll all get along fine."  Though I respect her attitude on this, (and I love the line), I am pretty sure I dislike this woman by page two, but as I mentioned, Parkhurst has a way of manipulating me fleshing out a character.  She also has a way of sneaking up on me, and wrenching my heart out, but more on that later.

Octavia Frost is a woman who has lost one child to tragedy and another to estrangement.  A woman whose rock-star son just got arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.  A writer who thinks that if she can re-write her novels, she can re-write her life.  A woman trying to get the butter, back out of the cookie dough.  (If you read the book, that last one will make sense.)

So, that's the set up.  But, what is the book about, you ask.  Well, hold on.  I'm going to tell you. 

The Nobodies Album is about how quickly the mother/child bond can go from latched on to disengaged to completely estranged, leaving the mother, at least, wondering, "When did this happen?  Where did I go wrong?"   Or, as Octavia puts it, "I don't know where the magic line might have been.  That's how it is with children, or at least how it's been with mine:  you have chances and chances and chances.  And then you have none."

It is a cautionary tale for any mother, like me, who has ever thought, "I can't wait until this baby is weened," or "I can't wait until his father gets home," or "I can't wait for school to be back in."  What are we so eager to get to, exactly?  The day they leave for college?  The first Christmas they would rather spend somewhere else?  The day when we are sitting in an old folks home, complaining that they never call?  As one of Octavia's characters puts it, "All children are lost, eventually."  We have to be careful not hasten that eventuality.

If you are a mother, and you don't get at least a little bit misty eyed by this book, you are made of stone, and it is no surprise that your kids never call.

That's the heavy stuff.  There is also a murder mystery (If you read it, I want to know when you figured out who dunnit.), some insightful truths about the world since the internet, and an amusing look at how easy it is to get even a bad book in print, if you are also willing to sell your soul, and write about your celebrity-criminal son.  And, it's funny, in a tragicomic, real life, sort of way, which is always nice.

So, would I recommend that you read The Nobodies Album.  Absolutely.  And, Ms. Parkhurst isn't even my cousin or anything.

Twilight-Schmilight

Okay, I finally broke down and read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.  Well, I have started reading it.  I was not sure that I would like a book about vampires.  I like some fantasy writing.  Harry Potter, for example.  But, Vampires are creepy.  I don't like anything too disturbing.  I really am a rated-PG kinda girl.

Well, so far, I like the story.  I must, because I keep finding time to read it.  But, the words are slowing me down.  I come across sentences like, "The tall one was statuesque," the awkwardness of which stops me cold.

There are other quirks to her writing too, which I find distracting.  The vampire-hero, Edward, is good looking.  And, lest you forget, it is mentioned every time he is.  The book could have been twenty-five pages shorter had just half of the adjectives describing this boy's beauty been edited out.  He has ocher eyes and bronze hair.  Really?  He sounds like a paint-by-number set gone wrong.

I applaud any woman who can craft such a popular story while her three children sleep.  Good for her.  But, what about the women who don't have blockbuster films made out of their work?  What about some of my favorite women in Bloggyland?

Instead of Twilight, may I suggest the following.

If you want super natural stories, visit Tina at The Clean White Page.  She even does vampires.  Check out her Velvet series.

If you want to read about a small town in the Pacific North West, Rebecca from Letters to the World has lived in several and writes lovingly about them.

If you want to read a love story written by a Mormon (Stephanie Meyer is Mormon, but if you are a big fan you probably already know that.) then Fruit of the Carolyn has just that.

If you want to read someone dreamy and funky at the same time, go see Leah at The Weather in the Streets.

For heartbreak and happiness, nothing beats Kate at Calamity, Kids, and Other Stuff.

And these are just the ones suggested by Twilight.  So, put that book down!  And spend more time at your computer.

UPDATE, JANUARY 8, 2009

I am half way through the book.  I like the main character.  She is very likable.  And I am enjoying the story.

As an added layer of enjoyment, the hero's eyes have now been described as like honey, butterscotch, and liquid topaz.  Each new one give me a giggle.

Turkey and Pie, the Children's Book Edition

This what the children and I have been reading to get in the mood for the big day. They are both great fun. The boys just love them!

Run, Turkey, Run! by Diane Mayr

and...

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie by Alison Jackson

The Miserables

Based on the strong recommendation of Rose, my second favorite college student, and the only one I know who is an English major at Cal, I have started reading Les Miserables.

The back of the book informs me that “Many of the characters are well known: Valjean… Javert… Fantine… Cosette… Thenardier… Gavroche.” Seventy pages in, I have met none of these people. Les Miserables is a long book.

Anna Karenina is also a long book, which several summers ago, I read, thinking that the very act of plodding through it would somehow make me a better person. No. That’s a lie. I read it so that I could say that I read it. And, look here. I’m doing just that.

I read Anna Karenina.

Well. Okay. This may be another lie. I did not read ALL of it. Every other chapter was a political treatise about farmers or poor people or something. They were very boring, and had nothing ot do with the plot. So, after the first third of the book, I started skipping those chapters. Honestly, I’m sure that Socialist propaganda was written for somebody, but it wasn’t me.

I read 2/3 of Anna Karenina.

I mention Anna Karenina only as contrast. Les Miserables is actually very good. Well, so far. The book, at least the edition which I am reading, is twelve hundred pages long. I suspect that the seventy that I have read thus far are, for the most part, a digression, (Can one digress before one has begun?) having little bearing on the plot. But, I don’t care. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting Monseigneur Myriel, the Bishop of Digne. Victor Hugo is very insightful and witty. And the language (even in translation) is poetic.


A few of my favorite quotes:

“A dowager, one of those ladies who mistake audacity for wit…”

“Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblance to merit.”