Monthly Archives: September 2011

30 Day Book Meme – Day 5

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A book that makes you happy.

This question is actually hard for me. Most of the fiction I read tends to be pretty grim. Well, that’s not always true – but I read predominantly literary fiction and generally it’s not exactly uplifting. So, I stood in front of my book cases for a few minutes, trying to channel a book that I’ve read that actually made me happy…

Yeah. Maybe I need to start reading some happier material.

Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic made me laugh out loud. I had to literally put the book down and wipe the tears from my eyes. But did it make me happy? I dunno.

Maybe I’m looking at book happiness in the wrong way. Maybe I just need to choose a book that made me grateful to be a reader. I’m going to dip back into my childhood again and pick A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story of Sara Crewe who is left by her father at Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies while he returns to India to fight in the war in India is both heart-warming and heart-breaking. Sara is imaginative and kind. When her father is killed Sara’s  life changes dramatically  and she goes from being a special pupil at Miss Minchin’s to a scullery maid, forced to earn her keep.

Why does A Little Princess make me happy? It is one of those magical books that showed me a different world and made me care about a character deeply. Although Sara doesn’t get the happy ending she deserves, Sara’s story is beautifully told and A Little Princess is truly one of those childhood books that gave me hours of pleasure.

30 Day Book Meme – Day 4

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Favourite book of your favourite series.

Well, I know that my choice for favourite series was kind of juvenile given the number series out there, but I don’t care. When I think back to those years, I have to give credit to Laura Lee Hope (no such person, by the way – you can read the story about the books and their creator here) for giving me the gift of independent reading at an early age. Of course I left those books behind, but I loved them and they have a special place in my heart.

So, if I had to pick my favourite book from that series, it would have to be The Bobbsey Twins and the Secret of Candy Castle. I do not remember a blessed thing about this book’s plot (essentially they were all the same anyway; the two sets of twins solved some sort of mystery either around their home or while on vacation, which they seemed to do a lot, vacation I mean). What I do remember. vividly, is the cover of this book. I was thrilled when it turned up on my birthday. I don’t know where this candy castle was, but I seem to recall that someone disappeared in it and the twins had to figure out where he went – secret passages and doors were involved, I think. (And what kid doesn’t like those?)

By today’s standards, The Bobbsey Twins are pretty lackluster heroes. Today’s young readers have Harry Potter and cohorts and Katniss from The Hunger Games to admire. But it is impossible not to have affection for the first books that you curled up with, those books you read alone but never felt alone reading.

30 Day Book Meme – Day 3

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Your favorite series.

The series that immediately popped into my mind was The Bobbsey Twins. I know I am showing my age by saying that, but I read Laura Lee Hope’s novels about Nan and Bert and Flossie and Freddie avidly from the time I was about 7  until I was 10 or 11. My uncle used to give me two hard cover books for my birthday and I loved them…and still have many. In many of the earliest books these mystery solving twins were really young, Flossie and Freddie only 4, but they consistently solved the mysteries in and around Lakeport, Michigan. (And yes, I am remembering all these names without looking them up! I was a fan, I tell you!)

I am not really a serial reader. I associate serials with mysteries and detective stories – the same characters, different crimes. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy mysteries, I’ve just never really followed one character through a bunch of different stories. I follow authors, though and have several I admire: Carolyn Slaughter, Thomas H. Cook, Helen Humphreys, Helen Dunmore. If they’re writing, I’m reading.

Body Surfing – Anita Shreve

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I have been an Anita Shreve fan for several years – well, okay, decades. I read her first novel, Eden Close back in the 70s when it first came out and remember really liking it.  Her novel The Pilot’s Wife was an Oprah pick and, thus, huge. But I’m partial to the quieter novels: Where or When, The Last Time They Met.

Body Surfing is the story of Sydney, a once-divorced, once-widowed woman who comes to live on the New Hampshire coast to tutor the beautiful but intellectually challenged Julie, youngest daughter of icy matriarch Mrs. Edwards and kind architect, Mr. Edwards. Her summer at the seashore is disrupted by the arrival of Julie’s older brothers, Ben and Jeff. Soon, Sydney is caught in the undertow of the strange and antagonistic relationship between the brothers.

I found the novel odd and oddly compelling. Shreve unfurls Sydney’s story in short elliptical passages, layering Sydney’s  day-to-day routine with memories of her divorce and dead husband. It’s hard to say what she is searching for because most of the time she isn’t even aware of it. Perhaps she is looking for family – but the Edward’s have issues of their own despite the appearance of perfection. Whatever she is looking for, it is complicated and there aren’t any easy answers.

Shreve is a good writer, but I wouldn’t say that Body Surfing is her best book. Of course, even on a bad day, she’s still a cut above the rest.

30 Day Book Meme – Day 2

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A book that you’ve read more than 3 times.

If you saw my to-be-read shelf (350+ unread books that are physically on my shelf) or flipped through the notebook where I keep an alphabetical never-ending list of the books I’d like to read, you’d laugh at the notion that I have actually read a book three times.  But I have.

The hands-down winner is Kristin McCloy’s 1988 novel, Velocity. I purchased this book around the time it was published at The Strand in New York City. I was really excited to find it because I hadn’t been able to find it at any book store in my hometown and this was before the days of ABE and Bookcloseouts.

Velocity is the story of Ellie, a young woman who leaves her life and boyfriend in NYC and returns to her teensy hometown after a car accident kills her mother. Her father, a local police officer, is lost in his own grief and he and Ellie spend their summer tiptoeing around each other. Ellie doesn’t, however, tiptoe around Jesse, the Hell’s Angel biker who lives down the road; her grief manifests itself in an all-consuming sexual relationship with him.

I tell myself, Once he was mine, and that was enough. But it wasn’t. It was never true, and it was never enough. You hunted down your needs – simple and precise – and in those days it was me.

So, back in the day, Velocity spoke to me because I was madly, crazily, obsessively in love with the quintessential bad-boy. Her story was my story (without the dead mother.) Her crazy, reckless lust for Jesse mirrored my own doomed relationship and I couldn’t get enough. My relationship ended, but my love affair with this book did not. I still read it once a year and have done for over 20 years.

Why? I think it’s the quality of McCloy’s writing and the story’s emotional weight. Ellie’s story has stayed with me all these years because ultimately this is a story about loss and reconciliation and Ellie is intelligent and fragile and so desperate to be strong that she implodes. Jesse is not just her sexual foil; he is not without shades of gray and he’s impossible attractive.

Kristin McCloy, as far as I know, has only written one other book and I haven’t read it. I don’t know this for sure but I’ve always felt that Velocity was a very personal book for her. I have passed it on many times – but only if the borrower promises to return it!

30 Day Book Meme – Day One

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Well, school is just around the corner and that means the return of routine. I love the summer. I love the lack of structure –  the simplicity of the days, knowing the kids and I can just take off if we feel like it. (I have the luxury of being off during the summer because I am a teacher.) I thought that in an effort to get back into the swing of things and sort of turn my brain back on, I’d use these book-related questions courtesy of Portrait of the Would-Be Artist as a Young Woman. I’ll post one answer a day for the month of September.

What is the best book you read last year.

I am going to tweak this question slightly because it’s September and the year’s not done and I haven’t really started to reflect on the books I’ve read this year.

The best book I’ve read in recent memory, though, has got to be John Connolly’s tremendously moving novel The Book of Lost Things. I was teaching a writing course at the time I was reading it and I took the book in to one of the students in my class and said: “You have to read this book.” Although an avid reader, this young man mostly read fantasy stuff, but The Book of Lost Things has an element of the fantastical about it and I thought the student would like it. The very next day we passed each other in the hall and he said: “I am on page 280. I can’t put it down.”

The Book of Lost Things did everything a really good book should do: it transported, it instructed, it illuminated. As if that weren’t enough,  it was exciting and creepy and made my cry. I don’t think you can ask for much more than that. I have a couple other Connolly titles on my bookshelf. I hope they live up to my very high expectations!