15 books in more than 15 minutes (Part One)

If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen these notes that go viral: one person makes a list of their favorite movies or albums, or answers questions about themselves, and then tags their friends to make similar lists. Sometimes I like to participate, and I couldn't resist when someone tagged me to list 15 books in 15 minutes, works that are especially memorable or important to me. I dutifully made my list, dividing it up so one book corresponded to around three years of my life, and posted it to my Facebook page. Limiting it to 15 minutes meant I didn't have time to do more than brainstorm the list, and I wanted to make comments. Making a list of 15 life-changing books seems incomplete without being able to explain why. Luckily, I have this blog, so I can spend time happily reminiscing about my favorite books.

1. The Bad Island, by William Steig: Sure, cartoonist and writer Steig is better known for classics like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Shrek, but I received this book as a Christmas gift from my aunt and uncle when I was five, and I couldn't stop reading it. Was it the super-colorful illustrations of bizarrely shaped monsters that were the attraction? Was it the fact that they fought over who was ugliest, and finally destroyed themselves in a horrible war caused by uncontrollable fear at the sigh of beautiful flowers? (I do so love end-of-the-world books.) Was it the big words, which I loved reading at that age? Probably all of those things; it's the one book from my early childhood that I still have today. FYI: the book today is published as Rotten Island; I don't know why the name change.


2. D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire: Actually, I could have picked any of the many fairy tale and mythology collections I devoured when I was in early elementary school, but this one features the extraordinary art of the Caldecott-winning married couple. This work and Andrew Lang's "colored" fairy books gave me a taste for the fantastic that has never waned throughout my life.


3. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle: I was probably in third grade when I encountered this Newbery Award-winner about a misunderstood teen who pursues her missing scientist father to the conformist planet where he is being held prisoner, and rescues him through the power of love. Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? I don't know and I don't care; its unique characters and deep themes made it a favorite for a long, long time. I remember anticipating its second sequel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, so avidly I made it the subject of an eighth-grade assignment about "what I want most for Christmas."


4. Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander: I love all of Alexander's award-winning Chronicles of Prydain, a five-volume fantasy based on Welsh mythology, but this one has a special place in my heart. Strangely enough, it's the one volume with very little magic in it, as it relates the journey of young Taran as he tries to uncover the mystery of his parentage. In the end, he discovers who he is depends on what he does, not who his parents are. I first read this book when I was nine or ten, and I found Taran's search for identity fascinating. I think I've read the books in this series at least twenty times, including a few times as an adult, and I'm always enchanted. It's a bonus that I actually met Mr. Alexander once, and managed not to stammer as I told him how much I loved his books. He was charming and gracious in return, and my autographed copy of the final Prydain book, The High King, is much cherished.


5. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin: I was in sixth grade when I first discovered this fantasy by this pioneering grandmaster of sci fi. I was captivated; not so much by the story, of a motherless boy who ends up attending a school of magic, but by the intricate world-building that LeGuin employs. Her Earthsea has dragons, but otherwise is outside the fairy tale/medieval knight settings of most fantasies I had read up to that point; it was something entirely new for me. Besides providing me with beautiful language and compelling characters, Earthsea showed me the wide potential available to writers to fantasy.

I'm going to continue this survey later; this first five is a good stopping point as any, taking me up to my teen years. I could have listed a dozen other books from my childhood (and strongly considered the World Book Encyclopedia, I spent a lot of time reading it), but I think these five are a good representation of my pre-teen years. What are your favorites from your early years?

I'm not a nun ...

... and so I'm not good with habits. This is my way of explaining why I've been slacking on the blog this week. Last week I went on vacation and had limited internet access. (Meaning I had to walk across camp and endure a slow network ... don't get me started on the glacial slowness of checking my mail via Yahoo instead of Outlook. In any case, I was on vacation and taking a break from all kinds of work except cooking.) Upon my return, I had yet another deadline staring me in the face, and so the blog took a backseat to writing a sports profile.

At least, that's my excuse. But really, it's because it doesn't take that long to get out of the habit of doing something. Inertia isn't just a principle of physics; it's a lifestyle. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and so when I got back from vacation I didn't want to do anything I'd been doing before. I didn't want to go to TKD class, although once I got there I had fun. I didn't want to go into the basement and do my regular cycling, although once I got started I kept going for 45 minutes, distracted by a great book. And I didn't want to engage my brain and think of something to write in the blog.

But now I've met my deadline, forced myself to exercise, and written this entry. So now I have no excuse; besides, while contemplating what to write today I came up with two or three ideas, so it shouldn't be hard to keep going. Although it may be a few days before I review the second part of Faust; returning to a 19th-century German poetic drama requires overcoming a great deal of inertia.

Photo of the Week--8/10/09

I could have kicked myself: I forgot my real camera on our trip up to the UP last week. So I only managed to snap a few shots with my cell phone; some of them didn't save properly, and others didn't have very good lighting. But it's hard to miss with this shot: Chapel Rock, on the coast of Lake Superior's Picture Rocks National Lakeshore. It's very cool from the beach as well, but I like this photo with the lake in the background. We couldn't have had a better day for the 3-mile hike to the shore, so I wouldn't mind going back for a better picture some time.

Faust Part One: The Official Haiku Review

While considering what European classic to choose next for my Remedial Lit Project, I knew I should find something by the German polymath* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a philosopher, scientist, poet, dramatist, and novelist. He is one of the foremost figures in German literature, and with his drama Faust he influenced many writers, artists, even composers. The Faust legend, of a man selling his soul to the devil for magical knowledge, is older than Goethe; I read the version by Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe in college. But Goethe's reworking reflects a more modern concern with earthly knowledge, making it quite appealing for a modern age where science was becoming more and more prominent.

Goethe's Faust was published in two parts; the first in 1808 (although a fragment appeared in 1790), and the second after his death in 1832, as part of his collected works. Because that's how it was published, and that's how I got it from the library, that's how I will review it. So here's my reaction to part 1:

Faust seeks highest truths
But Satan tempts him with love
This doesn't end well

As I mentioned before, this version of Faust is a character obsessed with knowledge and learning the ultimate truths of the universe, not with wealth or power or the usual earthly temptations. He is despairing of ever learning enough to satisfy him and considers suicide before Easter bells recall him to himself. Enter Mephistopheles (aka Satan aka the Devil), who offers a deal: he will assist Faust in any way to achieve ultimate knowledge, and in turn Faust will give him his soul when he finds himself perfectly satisfied in his life. Faust takes that bet, believing that he will never be so pleased that he doesn't want to learn more.

Notice another difference from the original legend that makes Faust more sympathetic: not only is Faust searching for knowledge (not pleasure), he doesn't make a deal, he enters into a wager. But here's where it gets weird. Does the devil tempt him with the promise of discovery and knowledge? No; after a weird interlude teasing some hapless drunks, he takes Faust to a witch, gets him all rejuvenated, and has him fall in love with a maiden named both Margaret and Gretchen. (Thank goodness for footnotes, or I would have been lost.) Faust immediately forgets all else besides closing the deal with Gretchen, eventually leaving her pregnant and accidentally poisoning her mother and stabbing her brother to death. He runs away, seemingly forgetting the girl who used to be the point of all his thoughts, until after a strange Walpurgis night party with all sorts of political satire, Faust finally remembers the poor girl, who is now languishing in a prison after drowning Faust's bastard infant. Faust tries to escape with her, but she's too crazy and the play ends with a voice from heaven proclaiming she is saved.

Whew. That's one wacky, weird ending, and it definitely seems like a work that was written over the course of many years, there are so many differing threads in it. I will admit, however, that the language this scientist uses to describe everything around him is very poetic. This particular translation, by Peter Salm, eschews copying the rhyme scheme in favor of reproducing the "sense and spirit" of the text. It still felt poetical, though, with rich language and good rhythms that I enjoyed as I tried to make sense of the story. All in all, strange but interesting. We'll see how Part Two stacks up; Goethe spent even more time writing that part, so I'm anticipating all sorts of weird bits in that one.

*polymath="somebody with knowledge of many subjects." I love this word, but now I have to think of a different one for my "P" Word Nerd feature.

Wordless definitions: Naptime

Awwwww, aren't they cute? I wish I had time for a nap, but I have a few details to manage before we leave for vacation on Saturday: review and invoice a job, do the laundry, get my haircut, donate blood, shop for supplies, pack for the trip, update the SCBWI website, leave instructions for the cat sitter, make sure Boy packs, clean out the fridge.... Good thing I'm going on vacation, I'll need it just to recover from the preparations. If I can manage, I may leave a few funny pictures to post automatically while I'm gone. If not, this blog may be quiet for a while. But I haven't really had any time off this year (one of the disadvantages of working from home, you're always at work) so keeping my faithful readers* entertained is not high on my priority list. So I'll be back in about ten days, hopefully with more pictures and stories to share.

*all six of you, half of whom will be at camp with me

More science, please.

Something rare happened the other night: Boy and I looked at our TIVO list, saw the second part of a miniseries, and looked at each other and said, "delete this, right?" It's a rare thing, because I almost always will stick with a story to find out the ending, even if it's poorly written/acted/filmed. Sometimes it's even fun to watch something trashy, in that so-bad-it's-good way. Boy and I call these kinds of programs "Cheesy goodness," and apply that label most often to disaster movies.

Ah, disaster movies. We can't get enough of them. My excuse is that I'm a child of the '70s, and grew up in a time when disaster movies were enjoying unprecedented popularity. The Towering Inferno? Loved it. The Poseidon Adventure? Ate it up. Earthquake with Sensurround*? I still remember feeling the seats in the old Michigan Theater shake. Boy, of course, is a boy. When he was little, he was fascinated by disasters; destruction was even better than construction. We watched a lot of Discovery Channel; if there was a volcano/tornado/hurricane/earthquake/meteor strike, he was fascinated. There was a renaissance of sorts of the disaster movie in the late '90s, so we watched them all: Deep Impact, Armageddon, Volcano, Dante's Peak ... so cheesy, but such fun to watch all the destruction!

Television networks believe that summer is the best time to dump their cheesy disaster flicks, which often look like an episode of the Love Boat, with all the network's various series stars showing up to take parts. In 2004 NBC aired 10.5, about a super-duper killer earthquake, and followed that up two years later with a sequel, 10.5: Apocalypse. We wallowed in the cheesy goodness. It was stupid and totally predictable, but that was part of the fun.

So we were excited this summer when not one but two (because of course no television network comes up with anything original, or if they do they soon kill it) miniseries were scheduled to air about big space objects hitting the earth. The first one aired on ABC; called Impact, it featured a celestial object striking the moon, sending big chunks our way. It got a little out there when it turned out the object that hit the moon was a brown dwarf that made our gravity go crazy, but overall it was just as advertised: cheesy goodness. I'm willing to suspend disbelief quite a long way as long as I get lots of destruction, with scientists predictably saving the day.

Our first sign that NBC's earth-meets-space-object miniseries, Meteor, might not be up to even our low standards came in the very first shot: a large, rocky object sailing through the darkness of space, trailing gas and making whooshing noises. "Hey," Boy said, "that's dumb. There's no air to carry sound in space!" I snorted and kept watching the first pieces of meteor hit in California overnight. Things went boom! Yay! I kept watching, between increasingly ridiculous predicaments facing a various characters—a couple of which had nothing to do with the meteor—as over the next ten hours of story as all the meteor pieces kept hitting in the same town in California.

Okay, I'm willing to suspend disbelief to a certain point, but you're telling me the scriptwriters couldn't be bothered to incorporate what Copernicus discovered in the 16th century, that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis? (Thus meaning that any meteor fragments would be land at different points the earth, "traveling" like the sunrise.) By the time the ingenue scientist had survived running out of gas, having her mentor splatted by a van, encountering thugs who had taken over a police station and tried to rape her, and being imprisoned by border patrol, only to have the car taking her and her vital data to safety be struck by a meteor-ignited gas hauler, I'd had enough. If there isn't any science in your science fiction**/disaster flick, if you're going to treat me like I'm really that stupid, I can't be bothered.

Good thing Wipeout is on tonight; Boy and I will watch something mindless that doesn't insult us.

*Sensurround, aka souped-up subwoofers, was pioneered in Earthquake, actually winning the film an Oscar for best sound.
**Don't get me started on the atrocity that is Total Recall. I could rant for days on the errors in that film.

Photo of the Week--7/27/09

We had a full day to spend exploring the area around Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, before leaving on our cruise to Antarctica. We took a taxi to a ski lift which took us up to the Martial Glacier. Being early summer, there was still quite a bit of snow on the glacier, although there was enough meltwater to create lovely streams running down the mountainside. Quite a nice way to get acclimated to the southern season, I think.