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A Snowy Tradition

22 Dec

I’m about to be a little cheesy.

There’s a book that I read every year, either at first snowfall or over Christmas. And since we had that little blizzard on Saturday, it’s time for . . . Winter Dreams, Christmas Love by Mary Francis Shura. It has a heart with “romance” in it on the spine. Cheesy, right? But I just kind of love it, because actually, the story is not as sappy as you’d imagine.

This book was, I think, one of my last Scholastic book club purchases in the seventh grade. (Yes, I continued to order books long after it was cool. I don’t understand how people could resist the siren call of those paper fliers!) Come on, what 12-year-old girl is going to pass this cover up? Right?

And it’s exactly the right story for a shy 12-year-old, too. Ellen is a normal 14-year-old girl just starting high school, and she falls hard for Michael, the guy–a junior–that every girl falls for. We follow her for three years as she deals with high school and her unrequited crush. Of course, at the end, Ellen finds out that Michael had fallen just as hard for her, and they get together. It warms your mushy heart, doesn’t it? Discovering the boy you’ve been crushing on does, in fact, like you back just as much is what everyone wants in high school (or, let’s face it, far beyond high school).

But Ellen’s crush isn’t easy on her. It actually sucks pretty bad. When I was in seventh grade, the YA section of our Waldenbooks was filled with mostly Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine or really, really cheesy romances. So despite the cheeserific title, Winter Dreams, Christmas Love seemed refreshingly real. After realizing she loves Michael, Ellen thinks, “She’d seen a lot of movies, read a lot of romances. She had thought love was supposed to be stars in your eyes and joy that made you feel like dancing. She didn’t feel like dancing. Her chest ached and she felt cold. She clasped her arms across her chest and held her breath to keep from crying. If love hurt this much, she didn’t want any part of it.” Love is the exact opposite of rainbows and unicorns for Ellen, and it’s the first book I read back then that showed it that way.

There are flaws in the book, to be sure. The characters often sound oddly old-fashioned for something written in the ’90s. The chronology of the scenes doesn’t always totally fit. But neither of those stuck out to me the first few times I read it back in the day; it’s something that I’ve only noticed because of my repeated yearly reading. When I was 12, I was caught up in Ellen’s struggle. She also has wonderful friends–which has always been a draw for me in a story–and a warm family. And her crush on Michael develops into a lovely friendship, too, despite the way the unrequited love hurts her. “They were friends who loved each other,” it says at the end, “and they had all the time in the world to see what came of that.”

Yeah, it still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Good advice for Halloween

31 Oct


You can see some of the inside and buy it right over here. And you probably should, since it is witty and wise.

This may be a reach.

21 Oct

So. I’ve had Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” playing continuously in my head since last Thursday.* (Thanks, Vampire Diaries.) In pondering why it’s so catchy, I realized that the refrain has something in common with another song that often gets stuck in my head, “Ultimatum” by The Long Winters.

Now, I know that the main reason these songs are earworms** has to do with the music. But both also involve the idea of reaching and holding.

Ultimatum:
My arms miss you
My hands miss you.

Enjoy the Silence:
All I ever wanted,
all I ever needed,
Is here, in my arms.

Maybe this also has something to do with why they stick in my head. The concept of reaching out and holding and connecting. It’s such an important part of life. And is it perhaps also why book jackets with images of hands are so compelling and appealing?

Or is that a crazy theory?

——

* There may also have been some secret apartment singing and dancing involved.
**I hate the word earworms. I can’t believe I used it.

Thinking about the Centuries

19 Oct

One of my favorite books is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I’ve read it many times, but the first time, I borrowed it from a friend in the third grade. She had a hardcover edition that was oversized. The cover shows us Mary in a yellow coat looking over her shoulder while pulling back a wall of ivy. I remember resting it on my lap while I read it. It had heft and weight and smelled of paper and ink and a little of my friend’s house. Even now, though I don’t have a copy of that exact edition, it’s part of how the story lives in my mind whenever I think of it or reread it.

And I thought of that reading experience this weekend after walking through some of the exhibits at the Morgan Library. The museum has a fantastic, if small, exhibit on Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which includes original art and handwritten original manuscripts. (Undeniably amazing.) But it also has a Gutenberg Bible, letters and original manuscript pages from the likes of Dickens, Eliot, and Hemingway, and a number of illuminated prayer books and bibles. At the end of the summer, I also went to an illuminated manuscript exhibit at the Met which blew my mind a little bit.

Standing in front of a book that’s a thousand years old–a thousand years old–with an eReader and a blackberry in my bag made my brain want to implode. That’s a millenia of ways to read all within a few square feet. And those centuries-old books are so full of craft. People spent years and years perfecting their skills to make those books. The calligraphy, the artwork, the bookbinding, papermaking . . . it’s a work of art. One that you can tell a person, or many people, put care and attention and love into. All books are works of art, even today. Care goes into the choosing of typeface, the layout, design, presentation. Every single detail is taken into account.

The lack of physical presence is one of my worries about ebooks. And that’s not to say that I don’t like ebooks, or digital books, or whatever is currently developing. I think it’s exciting and interesting and part of the future of reading. But have we figured out the craft of creating them yet? Right now, they seem more about convenience and availability, not design or art. A good story is a good story no matter how it’s presented, but a good package makes the reading experience even better. None of the digital readers are what I’d call beautiful yet. (Ok, maybe the iPhone is the exception here.) But I think we’ll get there, so that reading a digital book has the same physical presence, evokes the same sensory memory that reading The Secret Garden–and so many other books–has always had for me.

Why we do what we do

3 Aug

I read Neil Gaiman’s Newbery acceptance speech (in the latest Horn Book) over lunch today, and, as Newbery acceptances always do, it made me a little teary. In a good, “wow I’m so overcome with happiness that books mean so much to people and we get to give medals to writers” way.

And this bit from the very end hits poignantly on the sentiment that makes me feel sure that, however much publishing and books may change with the advances of technology, they’ll always be needed.

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.
And that is why we write.”

Head in the Clouds

27 Jul

I’ve seen a lot of my more tech-minded friends talk of “cloud computing” recently, which is something I have only the vaguest understanding of. But that’s okay, because I have my own idea of what the “cloud” is. To me, it’s the invisible something that writers can draw from.

In one of my (long ago) college critical theory classes, we talked about the idea of all authors having an antenna that is always on, always picking up signals from the wider world. This has always stuck with me. Authors have finely tuned observational powers, which always astonish me, and sometimes they are able to observe more than what they can see/hear/smell/taste/touch. Sometimes their observations stretch into that cloud. That’s how some elements and themes can end up in a work even when the author may not consciously intend it. And how there are certain themes that a number of different authors end up writing about at the same time. The most noticed recent example is probably the Kristin Cashore and Suzanne Collins books. Graceling and The Hunger Games both had characters with similar names (Katsa and Katniss), who had to confront killing other characters in the course of their stories. And now, the companion/sequel to each has the word “fire” in it. It’s odd coincidences like these that make me believe in the cloud. I see it often in submissions, too. It’s always interesting to get a number of submissions from different kinds of writers, who are all in different parts of the countries and writing about different characters and plots, that somehow have intersecting elements.

To me, that’s the magical part of writing. Somewhere out there, invisible to the rest of us, all of these stories exist, all of these ideas, emotions, and people whom we readers need to help us make sense of the world, of life, even when we might not know exactly what we needed. And authors are tapping into that cloud, giving those stories to us, maybe sometimes without even being aware of it themselves. It’s a pretty amazing gift, if you ask me.

A few favorite places

24 May

My absolute favorite place in anything I’ve ever read is the Murry’s kitchen in A Wrinkle in Time. There is something so warm and inviting about that kitchen. From the very first time we go there, with Meg, to have hot cocoa with Charles Wallace and her mother. The way the family gathers there, the way they–and we–all know that Mrs. Murry always has dinner cooking on a bunsen burner in her lab next door, the way that adventure also begins there. For we first meet Mrs. Whatsit in that kitchen, too. It’s a comforting oasis in the middle of a dark and stormy night.

There are a lot of other places I love in literature, too. Thinking about all of them, I’ve realized that they generally have two things in common. Either they are the places where the characters gather with their friends and loved ones, or they are the places where they go to be free and entirely themselves. As a kid, I definitely had a soft spot for any story in which the character had a place of his or her own–a place no one else knew about and was completely his or hers. It seemed so . . . luxurious, and even a little illicit.

My list of favorite places:
* The Murry’s kitchen, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
* Mary’s secret garden, from, well, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
* Mandy’s cottage, from Julie Andrews Edwards’s Mandy
* Miss Honey’s cottage, from Roald Dahl’s Matilda
* the room with the wardrobe and Mr. Tumnus’s house, from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* the Garland’s house in Bloomsbury, from Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke and The Shadow in the North (which made the end of the latter heartbreaking for so many reasons!)
* Gryffindor common room, from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books
* the Dancing Dove, from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books
* Terabitha, from Katherine Paterson’s A Bridge to Terabithia
* the truck in Lynne Rae Perkins’s Criss Cross
* Beauty’s room, from Robin McKinley’s Beauty

What are yours?

Adversaries, take 2. The nicer take.

17 Apr

“This isn’t romance. This isn’t a declaration of love or affirmation of friendship. This is something more.” –Melina Marchetta, Jellicoe Road

It occurred to me after reading the couple of comments on the adversaries post that the same dynamic is important in non-opponent relationships, too. Finishing Jellicoe Road recently also underscored it, as I watched how Taylor and Griggs’s opponentship and relationship unfolded.

The people who a protagonist spends time with, whether as friend, enemy, family, or love, have to be people worth that time for both the character and the reader. The king and queen of Attolia are one of literature’s greatest couples because they challenge each other both as opponents and as lovers. Nick and Norah (of the Infinite Playlist) work because they challenge each other. Mildred and Jacob in Me and the Pumpkin Queen are such great friends because they understand, support, and complement one another. The same with Billy, Tommy, and Ernestine in Tracking Daddy Down. And Toot and Puddle. The most compelling relationships are the ones in which the characters are different, but equal.

Maybe this is the germ of a future conference talk, but I’d love to hear what others have to say.

All You Need Is Love

14 Feb

I am a sucker for a good romantic story. Good, believable, subtle, difficult, imperfect, sincere, understated romance. Sometimes this is the main plot of a story, but most often, it’s the secondary one. At any rate, in honor of V-Day, here are my favorite love stories.

For the grown-ups:
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Sexing the Cherry by Jeannette Winterson
Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson
Possession by A. S. Byatt
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Much Ado about Nothing by Shakespeare

For the teens:
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by David Levithan
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
Graceling by Kristen Cashore
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner
The Truth about Forever by Sarah Dessen
Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Song of the Lioness quartet by Tamora Pierce
Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

I like a good quiz every once and a while

7 Jan
What Kind of Reader Are You?

Your Result: Dedicated Reader

You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz
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