This is the last post in the Bookshelf. I’ve decided to merge all my blogs into one, so going forward, my thoughts on the books I’m reading will be at www.katycooper.com. I’m still planning on writing about reading every day.
Just not here.
I don’t generally read scary books, but I have occasionally read things that completely creeped me out. As it happens, two of my most vivid memories involve novels I read while alone in Salem, MA.
The first one was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot – it scared me so much I had to stop reading it. I was living in a residential hotel with my sister and her best friend, and the two of them had gone to visit a friend at college. So there I was, freaking out about vampires in Maine while in the middle of the city of Salem.
The second was a reading of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, one of the most deeply creepy books I’ve ever read, especially when you consider that nothing overt happens. I was once again all alone, only this time in an apartment in a building that was close to 100 years old, the kind of building that pops and creaks as it settles for the millionth time. Very scary when you’re essentially reading about a house that’s insane…
It’s been years and years since I read either of those books, but I can still remember how scared I was.
Happy Halloween.
The plan yesterday was to (finally) start reading Sherry Thomas’s Delicious. I adored Private Arrangements and made a point of getting Delicious at the at the RWA booksigning in San Francisco in July. (It’s entirely normal for me to buy books that I don’t read for months or even years.)
But plans are what you make to keep yourself busy until you finally act. Which means I planned one thing and did another. A quote on Newsweek.com sent me to the library’s online catalog to see if Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought was on the shelf; a happy answer there sent me to the library itself; poking in the stacks gave me the book I wanted as well as a few I hadn’t planned on.
One of the surprises was Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which is what I am now reading with a great deal of delight. It’s crammed with ideas and information, offered up in lively, witty, zestful prose that is a pure pleasure to read. For me, it’s pages and pages of messing about with the architecture of language itself, playing with my favorite toy in a way that doesn’t smother the fun while also staying true to the science. If you love language, if you love grammar (actual grammar, not formal grammar, which is “the etiquette of written prose”; the grammar “that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words”; both quotes from The Language Instinct), you will love Pinsky. You will love him because he shares your love.
Or maybe that’s just why I love him.
As I expected, I finished Black Ship last night. It was very satisfying, but I’d expected that, too.
Talking about it, though, lands me square on the horns of a dilemma, one I haven’t resolved: how to describe something light in a way that doesn’t make it sounds stupid. The appeal of the Dalrymple mysteries and other types of light reading is that they don’t make particular kinds of demands of me, whether those demands are intellectual or emotional. In the case of the Dalrymple mysteries, I know nothing horrible is going to happen — there’ll be a murder, but it won’t be presented in a disturbing way, and the thread of violence isn’t going to hang over the narrative.
That description strikes me as damning with faint praise, which is not my intention. My life makes demands on me that use up a lot of mental and emotional energy, and sometimes my reading is all about escaping those demands so I can recharge my batteries. Fiction that lets me do that is welcome and beloved.
So maybe you’ll join me in a moment of gratitude for the pleasure to be found in smart, light fiction, even if I haven’t figured out how to describe it in a way that praises it properly.
Last night, I read half of the latest Daisy Dalrymple mystery, Black Ship, and I’m itching to read the other half. I have stuff to do tonight, including work out, but the temptation to blow everything off in order to read is almost overwhelming. In fact, I’m cutting this short tonight to get back to reading all tht more quickly.
A girl has to do what a girl has to do.
What is it about gift certificates that makes me absolutely itchy to spend them? My sisters-in-law gave me a Borders gift card on Friday night, and I’ve already spent it. Saturday I ordered The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip from Borders.com; this afternoon I ran across the street to the brick-and-mortar Borders and spent the end of it on Meljean Brooks’s Demon Bound.
I finished two books this weekend: Things the Grandchildren Should Know, a memoir by Mark Oliver Everett of the band EELS; and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Both were books I reserved because I’d read good reviews and/or they had good word-of-mouth. Both were worth the time spent reading, and I recommend both.
Here’s one way I find things to read…
Today, I read a review on Boston.com of Sarah Vowell’s new book, The Wordy Shipmates. The product description on Amazon.com sums it up better than I can (especially since I haven’t read it yet):
The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times–bestselling author Sarah Vowell’s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”—a shining example, a “city that cannot be hid.”
Since I completely loved her Assassination Vacation (which is a pretty good title, since the book is about a vacation she spent visiting places associated with the first three presidential assassinations), it was a no-brainer for me to put this on the list of Books To Read.
Which is miles long, but I don’t think it’s a list that can ever be too long.
Reading has been such an important part of my life for as long as I remember, that I don’t remember what it was like not to read. Nor do I remember the experience of learning to read. All I remember is my first reader wasn’t about Dick and Jane and Spot. It was about a boy, a girl and a dog called Tip.
I’m pretty sure I took to reading like a duck to water. My mother used to say she bagged me reading National Geographic when I was seven, but I’m sure I was just looking at the pictures. Still, I never took a reading comprehension test in which I was at my grade level; I was always reading beyond it. I was intensely proud of myself at 13 because I was reading at a college level.
I lived all over the place growing up, so I can place how old I was by where I was. I have no memory of books in the third grade, none at all. I remember Captain Kangaroo, but only because I could only watch half before having to go to the bus stop. I remember playing outside and I remember my classroom and the teacher I adored. But no books.
Fourth grade is where I first saw The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The title intrigued me, but I could never quite work up the nerve to go look at it. I can still see it on the bookshelf next to the classroom door. The thing I do remember reading in fourth grade is Hawaiian history: King Kamehameha I uniting the islands, warriors going over the pali, the king’s favorite wife, Kaahumanu. (We were living in Hawaii at the time, so this actually makes sense.)
Fifth grade is when I finally read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The things that stick out for me are Mr. Tumnus’s sweetness, the Turkish Delight, supper at the beavers’, especially the jelly roll. I wanted to step into a wardrobe and find myself in a magical place; I mostly wanted to step away from my own life. Reading still does that for me, give me a respite for whatever’s oppressing me, a vacation for my mind and heart.
Fifth grade was also my introduction to English history. I went with my dad to visit my mother, who was in the hospital, but I couldn’t go in. (It was a military hospital and I was 11 years old.) My dad left his copy of Thomas B. Costain’s The Three Edwards on the seat; bored, I picked it up and was soon entranced by Edward and his lovely wife Eleanor.
Sixth grade was The Hobbit, of course. A classmate, Jim Young, turned the book into a fabulous play that the class put on. My best friend Becky went on to Lord of the Rings, but I was intimidated until at least 9th grade…and after that, I read it every summer. Sixth grade was also when I read A Crown for Elizabeth for the first time, sparking my lifelong interest in Elizabeth I.
Seventh grade was Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, which I adored. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is that Taran in the first book is the same Taran as in the last book…except he’s grown up at the end. The series does a fabulous job of showing his maturation over time…but that’s only something I recognized when I re-read the series as an adult.
Somewhere in there, I found Little Women, identifying with Jo even before I knew I’d be a writer too, even though I was never a tomboy, even though my temper was much more like John Brooke’s (a slow burn) than Jo’s (a quick, fierce explosion, soon overcome).
What are your reading memories?
I’m out with the in-laws tonight, so no post…
I need to get to bed — I want to read before I go to sleep, but I have to go to sleep early, because I have to be up early — so this is going to be brief.
I went to the library today to drop off a bunch of stuff and pick up four holds that had come in. One of them was Danny Goldberg’s Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. It looked interesting, so I started it on the bus.
It was exactly what I wanted. I’m not sure if it’s the breeziness and liveliness of the prose that makes this what I want. Maybe it’s that Goldberg the narrator is a likable guy. Or maybe it’s just that I’m interested in the stories he’s telling. I don’t know why — I just know it’s true.
This is probably the happiest place to be as a reader: The place where you have exactly the book you wanted.
