I haven’t posted in a while, and the reason is two fold. First, I have to admit that I’ve abandoned Misfortune yet again. I started, I really did, and I really enjoyed what I read and fully intend to finish it. But, and this is also the second part, I’ve just been in a reading funk lately, and have had a hard time sticking with anything. Since the last post I’ve started and put down at least 5 different books.

But I did manage to read two books:The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, and Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.

I don’t know when I first read The Illustrated Man, but I’m sure I was too young at the time. I say that because beside the fact that I was rather precocious in my raiding of my dad’s books, I’ve known the stories in The Illustrated Man for as long as I can remember. As disturbing and thought provoking as some of them are, they’re like a favorite blanket, one I can slip into and feel completely at home. Reading it again this time I realize that it influenced my thinking a great deal, and I can honestly count it among my favorite books.

I can also count Howl’s Moving Castle, even though this is the first time I’ve ever read it. I was prompted to pick it up after I saw Miyazaki’s gorgeous animated version, and while I figured I would love the book even more then I did the movie, I wasn’t prepared for just how much I would enjoy it. While the story is almost entirely different from the film, the book is just as magical, joyful, and imagination inspiring. I wish I had read this as a child, and will definitely be reading to my children once I’ve got some. I’m completely enamored with Howl and the idea of his roaming castle; the door that opens into different towns depending on which way the knob is turned is fantastic. I can’t wait to read Jones’ other books, if they’re anything like Howl’s, I will have a new shelf of loves.

Speaking of books made into films, I recently saw I Capture the Castle, and now I must get the book. The film was beautiful, about a young girl at the edge of adulthood, living with her eccentric family in an abandoned castle. Bill Nighy is incredible as her tortured writer father, and the love story that develops is touching and suprising. If the book is anything like the film, (which I suspect it is), it would be an interesting companion read to Bonjour Tristesse, which I need to read again. I think a trip to the library may be in order. Even though I still have 6 unfinished books from said library. I hate book paralysis.

Current total: 64
Just finished: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Currently Reading: Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford

Back in July of last year, I posted about rereading Harriet the Spy. I briefly touched on my mixed feelings about the book, saying:

“I hated the end of it passionately, and reading it again this time, I kind of agree with my six year old self. I love Harriet and her honesty. She’s a little confused girl with little to no parental guidance, who is just trying to figure out the world around her. Ultimately she gets caught and punished for thinking the same things that all her friends are thinking, and that’s what I hated and still kind of hate.”

I bring this up, because I just finished Fleur de Leigh’s Life of Crime by Diane Leslie, a book that very much reminds me of ol’ Harriet. Like Harriet, Fleur grows up in a home where parents are scarce, and nannies are prevalent. But where Harriet learns about human nature by spying, Fleur’s lessons come fast and furious in her very own home. Fleur grows up in 1950′s Hollywood, and as nannies and relatives come and go, 10 year old Fleur sees the seedier side of life. While Harriet’s parents are simply hands off, Fleur’s are actively dismissive and unthinkingly cruel– Fleur is simply a possession, and any opinion or action of hers that disagrees with theirs is a nuisance and can’t be tolerated. Any semblance of stability is dashed as her prized possessions are plundered any time her parents feel the need to make donations for tax write offs, and she’s not even allowed to sit on her own bed, as she might damage the antique bedspread that she should feel “honored” to have in her room. Nannies that come into the home are treated with the same disdain and either get trampled on and quit, or are themselves a bit off in the head and end up being fired. Fleur’s only friend is the gardener, and once her parents find that out then it’s off to a therapist who asks intrusive and embarrassing questions about the nature of their relationship. By the end of the book Fleur ultimately learns to be more secure in her place in the world, but she mostly learns that the world is dangerous, people will screw you over, and the ones you love will almost always leave you.

The writing of the book is skillful, as it captures the tone and perspective of a precocious and world-weary ten year old. It’s just so sad. It’s like something that Lemony Snicket would write, but not witty, and based in a reality that is just depressing. Maybe I’m taking it and Harriet too seriously, but I just feel sorry for these girls, so smart, so sweet, and so neglected. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good book, I just won’t be rereading it any time soon.

Using neglect as a segue: it was pointed out to me after my previous post that I had similarly abandoned poor Wesley Stace’s Misfortune, a book which I think wins the award for “book I’ve cast aside unopened the greatest number of times in favor of something else”. As I stated previously, this has nothing to do with the book itself, which I fully intended to crack open each of those times, until something shiny caught my attention. So, now, I aim to rectify this sad situation. I started the book this evening, and am quite enjoying it, even though some sick compulsion is pulling at me to just read Howl’s Moving Castle really quickly and then get back to Misfortune. But I will neglect it no longer!

PS. An afterthought: Fleur de Leigh’s Life of Crime, while similar to Harriet the Spy, is not appropriate for the same age group. Who knows if any one who reads this is in the position to buy it for a Harriet the Spy loving kid, but be warned, you’ll be explaining way more than you’ll probably want to.

Current total: 62
Just Finished: Fleur de Leigh’s Life of Crime by Diane Leslie
Currently Reading: Misfortune by Wesley Stace

About a week ago I got a call from my dad. “On July 29,” he said, “you posted that you were starting to read Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. And then on August 3 you post about all these other books, but not that one! What happened?” As often happens, my attention had wandered, and mainly due to the trip to the library (and the fact that Card’s books tend to be intense and therefore make me nervous), I’d left Magic Street by the wayside, expecting to stop by later and pick it up. My sweet husband, who’d already read it, kept assuring me that there was no reason to be nervous about this one, and that I really would enjoy it, and really should finish it.

So, I did.

Magic Street is really a beautiful book. It tells the story of Mack Street, a young boy found in a garbage bag as a baby after a quite abnormal birth. As he is raised by a sweet nurse and the 15 year old boy that found him, it quicklybecomes evident that he’s no ordinary kid, and that strange things are afoot. Mack has the ability to see into people’s dreams to see their deepest wish. When he lets the dream end, when he allows himself to also wish for whatever they wish, their wishes come true in horrible, and often tragic ways. (Think of the story The Monkey’s Paw, where each of the wishes comes out perverted.) The book follows him as he finds out the truth behind who he is, and what’s going on in his neighborhood. There’s magic, there’s Shakespeare references, there’s love, there’s redemption. I really can’t say more or I’d ruin the suprise of what the whole underlying concept is, but I can highly recommend it. Dad, you would love it, and should read it.

PS. For those keeping track, I also finished Constant Reader. I was tempted momentarily to change the name of this blog to be a reference to Mrs. Parker, but then there would be a standard of wittiness to which I’d have to aspire, and that’s just too much pressure. 100 Books we will stay.

Current total: 61
Just Finished: Magic Street by Orson Scott Card
Next Up: Fleur de Leigh’s Life of Crime by Diana Leslie

I finished Mirror Mirror on the Wall, and ended up with a grand total of three essays I just could not bring myself to finish. Just not my cup of hot chocolate. The number of essays that I loved is far more than three however, with the number that were just ok hovering right in the middle.

Linda Gray Sexton’s essay, Bones and Black Puddings:Revisiting “The Juniper Tree” is one of the most heartbreaking readings of a fairy tale-heck, ANYTHING- I’ve ever read. Sexton is the daughter of Anne Sexton, a brilliant and very troubled writer, who wrote a series of poems based on fairy tales called Transformations. (Which I highly reccomend.) Anne Sexton had severe bouts of depression, coupled with what was most likely catagorized as psychosis, and Linda Gray Sexton grew up amist her mother’s brilliance and terrifying madness. Her essay is a meditation on the lesser known fairy tale The Juniper Tree, as it compares to her own experience, and as she writes, her story and the story of the fairy tale become irevocably intertwined. Her descriptions of her mother’s slips into madness are chilling, as is her account of reading her mother’s old letters (as part of her role as her literary executor) and coming across one in which she (her mother) detailed trying to choke her (Linda) in her crib. That she (Linda) was able to come through these experiences as a compassionate, functioning soul is a fairy tale in and of itself. I can never do this essay justice in my description, it really must, and should be read.

Maria Flook’s The Rope Bridge to Sex is also heartbreaking. In it, Flook looks at the reality of the fairy tale conceit of young girls leaving their homes. (Gretel, Snow White, etc.) She uses her family, in which all the girls leave in their mid teens, either running away or getting married, as an example of how this plays out in real life.

Fern Kupfer looks at the reality of being a step-mother in the exceptional Trust, and Connie Porter sheds new light on the meanings of hair in Rapunzel Across Time and Space.

Over all I highly enjoyed this collection.

I’m currently reading Constant Reader, a collection of the sublime Mrs. Dorothy Parker’s literary reviews from The New Yorker. She’s hilarious, and I wish I could be as witty and insightful as she. Her most humorous columns are those where she’s writing about a book she didn’t like, as she goes to any length imaginable to avoid writing about the book itself. My favorite column, however, is about a book she loves, an author she loves. In it, she apologizes for a previous column about Men without Women, wherein she wrote that Hemingway “is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories.” She then accounts how she recieved a letter pointing out the equally brilliant Seven Men by Max Beerbohm. And so, in penance for her flippant hyperbole, she states,

“But it would be all right, wouldn’t it, if I amended my remarks to read: “Ernest Hemingway is, to me, the greatest living American writer of short stories”? Or maybe this would do better: “Ernest Hemingway is, to me, the greatest living American short-story writer who lives in Paris most of the time but goes to Switzerland to ski, served with the Italian Army during the World War, has been a prize -fighter and has fought bulls, is coming to New York in the spring, is in his early thirties, has a black moustache, and is still waiting for that two hundred francs I lost to him at bridge.” Or maybe after all, the only thing to do is play it safe and whisper: “Ernest Hemingway is, to me, a good writer.”

Amen, Mrs. Parker, Amen.

Current total: 59
Just Finished: Mirror, Mirror On the Wall ed. by Kate Bernheimer
Currently Reading: Constant Reader by Dorothy Parker

I took a trip to the library yesterday, where I had to enforce the rule my mom created when I was little- You can only check out as many books as you can carry. As I was going to be taking the bus home, I could only take as many as would fit in my backpack, which turned out to be 9. I went with a list, and my library did not fail me.

I read 2 and a half of those books yesterday, and they formed that weird connectivity that occurs when you read books in quick succession. I didn’t recognize the thread until I started the third book, when it all became clear. All three turned on the pivot of fairy tales, and the stories and fantasies we tell ourselves.

The first was Bonjour Tristesse by Franciose Sagan, one of my new favorite novels, which is really the closest I’ve ever read to a modern fairy tale. (Although I don’t know that that was the intention.) It centers on Cecile, a 17 year old who has spent the majority of her life in a convent, and has only recently come to live with her bohemian father, Raymond. (Her mother died years before.) In their two years together, she’s come to accept and embrace his lifestyle, and the parade of women who come in and out of their lives. The story in the novel takes place on their summer vacation at the beach. Raymond has brought his current girlfriend along, and they all get along just fine until Anne, one of Cecile’s mother’s friends, appears, also having been invited by Raymond. Anne is well loved by Cecile and Raymond, but the antithesis of their carefree, playful lifestyle. When Anne and Raymond announce that they will marry, Cecile sees this as a threat to everything she holds dear, and decides she must stop their union.

What results is a gorgeous coming of age story, a girl on the cusp of adulthood- physically, mentally and emotionally- stumbling furiously into responsibility and accountabililty. It has the elements of a fairy tale, motherless child, a step-mother threatening to take the father’s affection, woods that hold sexual experimentation and experience, even the ending is fitting. The writing is sparse and lyrical, and completely engrossing. This was Francoise Sagan’s first book, she wrote it when she was 18, and I’m bitterly jealous of her talent.

After Bonjour Tristesse I moved on to Big Fish by Daniel Wallace. I loved the film version of Big Fish, and was anxious to read the novel, as I was sure it would expand on the ideas of the film. It didn’t. The book and the film are two almost completely seperate entities. In the movie, father and son are distanced by the father’s seeming inability to ever speak the truth; instead he tells outrageous tall tales about his life which really contain his truth, the emotions he can’t express. The novel is made up of similar vignettes, but these are presented as the stories that an adoring, if neglected, son has created about his father in an attempt to know him. Totally different effect. One speaks to the role of fiction in things we can not say, the other to the things we do not know. (I wish that I had read the book first, so that I could have read it without the tinge of the movie. I think it would have been a different experience.) It connects to Bonjour in the vision that the main characters have created of their fathers, the fairy tale idolization they’ve perpetrated.

The book I’m halfway through, and which, predictably, started my thinking about this fairy tale connection, is Mirror, Mirror On the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer. In it, writers who have used fairy tale motifs in their writing analyze their favorite fairy tales- how they influenced them as children, how they impacted their writing, etc. The essays are very good, and I’m enjoying being enlightened by them. Interesting, although perhaps not suprisingly, the only essay I couldn’t make myself finish was by the only author included that I don’t like. Apparently her non-fiction is as unreadable to me as her fiction. I won’t say who it is though, that wouldn’t be nice.

Current total: 58
Just Finished: Big Fish by Daniel Wallace
Currently Reading: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall edited by Kate Bernheimer