Author: Laura

I have a confession to make. I like books. I like books more than I like movies. I like books more than I like television, by a long shot. I suspect that I like books more than I like video games, although since I’ve played so few video games in my life, it may be unfair of me to make that judgment, though I suspect it’s true.

I mention all of this by way of a warning. I don’t think that everyone shares my bias, and I don’t think everyone should, but:

I went to see The Golden Compass over the weekend. I am usually deeply reluctant to see movies made from books I love, and particularly movies made from children’s books. Just the notion that someone would attempt to make a film of The Dark is Rising is enough to provoke in me a profound horror (and I’m not alone there). But Philip Pullman’s books weren’t published until I was in college, and so my connection to them is less primal. I read the Narnia books ten times by the time I was twelve: they are an integral part of the geography of my imagination, and I simply could not bear the thought of seeing someone else’s vision of them.

I had heard encouraging words about The Golden Compass movie on Twitter, though, and the reviews I had read from people whose opinions I respect were mostly good. Claire E. Gross at The Horn Book noted that the translation from book to film was done “with fastidious fidelity”. Monica Edinger and Elizabeth Bird (my two new favorite bloggers) were both suitably impressed. My friend said she’d happily see it again. So yes, my hopes were high, and I was. . . disappointed.

What everyone has said about the visual aspect of the movie is true: it is gorgeous, the effects are extremely well done, and though the daemons occasionally reminded me that they were generated by a computer because of a too-human cast to their features, they were on the whole convincing. The exterior of Bolvanger looked exactly as I pictured it. I always pictured Mrs. Coulter as having much longer hair, and I kept worrying because Nicole Kidman looked so skinny she seemed liable to break. Her golden monkey daemon in the book is described as having a black face, not the golden one he has in the movie, but these are minor quibbles, things I would have happily overlooked. But. . ..

It’s true that the movie stuck fairly well to the plot of the novel. Claire E. Gross says that the reductive nature of the movie adaptations robs the story of “some subtlety.” I am inclined to make that a more emphatic “all its subtlety,” and nearly all of its suspense. It takes days for Lyra to discover what goes on at Bolvanger in the book, and more days for her to plot and execute an escape. In the movie she arrives and is leading the other children out not much more than ten minutes later. The movie ignores such time periods, which are so essential to the building of suspense and the development of character, in order to give more time to battle scenes. And that right there may be my biggest problem, and the one to which my bias is most relevant. I don’t like watching battle scenes. In part that may be becasue I’m a bit queasy about violence, but mostly, I think, I just don’t like watching battles because that’s all they are–battles. People getting smited. Battles in movies don’t tell you much about the characters. They don’t pick up on allusions or expand metaphors. They don’t even really advance the plot, at least not until they’re over. But battle scenes, of course, are what movies are all about. Movies exist in order to create spectacle, and spectacle is what you get from bombs bursting in air.

Of course, a lot of people like that sort of thing. Me, I prefer reading.

Clearly I’m not managing to do this once a month, or even once every other month. Oh well–those of you uninterested in my reading know how to skip an entry, so I won’t apologize too much for length. As always, an R in front of a book indicates that it’s one I reread; and L indicates an audiobook. Unannotated books are things I liked but don’t have anything in particular to say about.
L Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson–This would be a great book to pair with To Kill a Mockingbird. Both have narrators who are children–or rather grown-ups remembering their childhood–and both deal with scandal and justice and politics in a small town. Good stuff.

R The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer–This is a big hit with book discussion groups because it has one of those polarizing sort of questions (if you’re thinking about breaking up with your fiance but then he breaks his neck and is paralyzed from the neck down, what do you do?). I first read it in my readers advisory class in library school at a time when I felt I was making some similar decisions. Now that I’ve made some of them, I wanted to reread it, and it was just as good.

The Afterlife by Donald Antrim–A memoir that is really a collection of essays, none of which are quite as good as the first one, which I read in the New Yorker or the Best American Essays of some year, or possibly both.

R Tam Lin by Pamela Dean–This is the book that made me want to go to college. College, as it turned out, was not really like the book, but in some ways it was, and it was still goo even when it was different.

About Alice by Calvin Trillin

L The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

R Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling

Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata

At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman

The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle–A book about horses and girls in Colorado. Good.

Breakable You by Brian Morton–Now and then I like to read a book set in New York City that has a lot of eastern literary establishment type jokes in it, because I get to feel that I actually did learn something in college and grad school round one. This one falls into that category and was an enjoyable read, though it couldn’t seem to decide whether it was satirical or sincere.

LR Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr

R Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

American Pastoral by Philip Roth–I’ve long felt I ought to read some Philip Roth, and as this book was mentioned in Breakable You, it seemed like a good place to start. I finished the book, but, sadly, I was unimpressed. Why is it that the writers I really like write so little while those that I’m less fond of turn out books by the dozen?

L The Darling by Russell Banks–I am glad that Russell Banks is still alive, beause (I hope) it means he will write more books, and even though I have only read two of them (Rule of the Bone was the other), I find them totally captivating. I listened to parts of this twice and may well read it at some point, too. The “darling” of the title is a woman who grows up as the daughter of a Dr. Spock-type, becomes a radical political activist, goes underground, and eventually ends up in Liberia, where she marries a civil servant, has a couple of kids, and kind of turns into her society-woman mother, with a West African twist. Then a lot of other things happen (military coups, prison breaks, civil war, etc., etc.), and she ends up back in the States, wondering what has become of her sons and the chimpanzees she used to care for. It’s saying quite a lot that this has made me think I might want to read A Long Way Gone.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo–This is sort of a cross between The Velveteen Rabbit and Paddle-to-the-Sea.

R Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson–I’m not sure what it says about me that I like to read teen angsty books before the start of school, but there you have it.

R Dreamland by Sarah Dessen

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking by Aiobheann Sweeney–I got all nostalgic for New York City while reading this book about a young woman raised on an island in Maine who heads to the city after finishing high school in order to help out her father’s old friends at a Classics society he founded. Actually, the whole book is full of the sort of thing I like: Maine, New York, descriptions of food, Latin and Greek, Shakespearean allusion, etc., etc. I don’t know that I’d say “this is a great book you must all read,” but I’ll certainly say it was one I enjoyed.

Money Can Buy Happiness by MP Dunleavy–According to Dunleavy’s calculator, I need to save half a million dollars if I want to retire at age 65. That was about the only new thing I gained from this book, which is full of good advice

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie–Excellent–a book I’m trying to get into the hands of a number of kids.

The Second Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares–Eh. About as good as the first one, which is to say, eh.

As many of you know, I work at a joint school/public library. Although I am not actually a school librarian (though I have taken some education classes, which were enough to convince me I didn’t want to be a teacher), I try my best to balance those two duties. My co-worker, who is paid partly by the school, handles all the school money, but since we’re both there all the time, it’s not as though one of us is all school and the other all public.

This year I’ve been pushing to get into classrooms and to get classes into the library to learn about how to use the library. Since all of Wyoming’s community colleges are a part of the WYLD network, it’s advantageous for students to learn a little about the catalog now, even if it seems beside the point in a library as small as ours. I’ve gone to talk to the 8th grade studies skills class once, and they’ve come to the library for a sort of OPAC scavenger hunt. Next I’m going to talk to them a bit about looking for good information on the web. As soon as their SmartBoard gets fixed, I’m going to go visit the 5th grade. And on Friday, the 6th grade teacher stopped by to ask if there was any possibility I might be interested in doing some book talks. “Would I ever!!!” I said. (After all, I am one of those people who became a librarian in part because I love to read. I did three mini-booktalks during my 15 minute presentation to the faculty this year, and I think that was a good idea.)

And so now I am thinking about what books I want to talk about. I’ll do some new ones, of course, but as the new ones are more prominently displayed, I’d like to look as well at some older books, things that may have gotten lost in the stacks, even in our tiny library, which has about 25,000 items all told. I have therefore been thinking some about the books I read when I was that age. Some seem like shoo-ins for inclusion, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I haven’t read since I was 12 or 13, but I’m happy to be reacquainted with it) and Ender’s Game, which I didn’t discover until graduate school but would have gobbled up had I run across it earlier–and sticking with the fantasy/SF theme, I do wish we had a copy of Max and Me and the Time Machine–I may just have to go out and acquire one). Others are good possibilities: The Root Cellar is historical fiction, but it part of it is set in the present, so it has some appeal for people who don’t want to be plunged entirely in the past.

But many of the books I read when I was in grade school are a bit more problematic. I was an inveterate reader of old books. Partly that was because my mother and grandmother gave me so many of them, and partly it was because the new books at my school were always checked out, and I was too timid to ask how to get on the waiting list. In fact, there’s a Jill Paton Walsh book that was booktalked at the beginning of one year that I have yet to read.

So I raided the stacks. It became a kind of game with me to find books that hadn’t been checked out in ten or twenty years. My mother found Quest in the Desert for me one day in fourth grade when she was visiting for some parent function. That was 1984 or 1985, and its last checkout had been in 1972. (It’s a great book, but not a good one to read before you eat–it concerns a naturalist’s trip through Mongolia, and includes descriptions of the things he was given to eat, such as sheep’s eyeballs. We had silent reading right before lunch that year, and it’s a wonder I ate as much of the school lunch as I did.)

I read anything by Louisa May Alcott that I could get my hands on, and some–An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom (which surely must be owned by more than two WorldCat libraries, but I’m too lazy to sort through pages of results)–I’ve read more times than I care to admit. At one point I decided I was going to read all of the Newbery award winners, and I found wonders like The Trumpeter of Krakow and real clunkers like Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, which I don’t think I ever finished. My mother read The Wheel on the School to me when I was in first or second grade, and I found more by DeJong later, though sadly none were as good. I found a clutch of early Andre Norton fantasy books one day, and my mother grabbed Have Space Suit, Will Travel from amidst the Heinleins (with firm instructions not to read any more recent Heinlein titles).

We have some of these books in our library, and I may even try to pull a few. Other books that I read then we don’t have, and I must admit a certain sense of relief. I adored the Little Colonel books, which concern the child and young adulthood of a girl growing up on a plantation in the early twentieth century, but I would have some trepidation about them sitting on a shelf. My mother gave the first one to me and said, quite sternly, that while I could read these books, there were certain things I needed to understand. “For one thing,” she said, “we do not call people ‘darkies.'” (I regret that she gave me no similar warnings about the author’s portrayal of romance; the last book in the series is The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding, which should give you some idea.)

Of course, “I absolutely love this book!” is never a good way to begin a booktalk, and I long since resigned myself to the idea that books that I like are not necessarily going to be the ones that other people like, and vice versa. But I wonder also about how long a book can be viable. I started rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this weekend, and while I find it as entertaining as ever (even more so, in some instances, as I get more of it), I wonder if it won’t seem peculiar and antiquated to the “Millennial” generation we’re supposed to view as new and different. I get a little sick of reading about how this generation is unlike any one that has come before, but at the same time, there may be some point to it. Can kids who would find my TI-81 graphic calculator ancient really relate to early Heinlein novels, where people are forever pulling slide rules out of their pockets? Garfield books are as popular as they were when I was in grade school, but I don’t imagine that the Bloom County books we inhaled in sixth grade would have much meaning to people who weren’t even born when Reagan was president.

Backlist is a big what makes libraries valuable: we have books you can’t find anywhere else (or couldn’t before the age of the internet). I’m never going to get ride of all the old books in the library, but I do find myself wondering how I can make them remain vital–make them come to be as real as the Velveteen Rabbit.

Post Script:

Apparently I am not the world’s only fan of the Little Colonel–that shouldn’t be surprising, but I never cease to be amazed by the internet.