Mutual Admiration Society and Ladies' Book Club

Aw, shucks.

My cyberpal Allie was kind enough to give me a shout-out in her blog yesterday. So I'm returning the favor. It's officially a lovefest!


Also, I just really love cats. I want to hug all cats.*

Here's how it went down. Allie was traumatized by the death of a character in the last "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" book. I commented that I never got over the death of Beth in Little Women. Then she was kind enough to post a link to her commentary about the book, and she even named her post after me! Which basically ruined my evening, because the only thing to which I have a worse reaction than criticism is praise. Seriously, I took to my bed with the vapors. If I'm ever going to be a world-famous writer, I'm going to have to my practice my smug, condescending author persona a lot more.

Anyway, read Allie's post about Little Women, because it's pretty darn fabulous. In fact, her whole blog is really entertaining. Check it out.

Here's the thing: I worship Little Women. I can't tell you how many times I've read it over the years. When I was a kid I really identified with Jo March, the opinionated, socially awkward tomboy writer. Er...when I was a kid, that is. Yep. I'm past that now. Whoo-boy.

Except I totally would have gone for Laurie. Still would.

I love everything about Little Women, from its wonderfully flowery language to its outdated ideas of social graces to the fact that it goes on for hundreds of pages without any real plot, just random slices of the March girls' lives, and then Beth dies. (That is not a spoiler. You should know that if you know anything about literature. By the way, in the Bible? Matthew 27:50? Jesus totally gives up his spirit.)

Little Women is one in a long line of books I loved as a kid that featured heroines who were aspiring writers. Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy books. Harriet the Spy. Laura Ingalls Wilder (it's never mentioned that she's a writer in the "Little House" books, but of course she grew up to write them, with herself as the main character.) And let's not forget Snoopy - he made me want to be a writer as much as anyone else.


I never understood how he balanced the typewriter
on that doghouse roof.

So while I thought Allie's Little Women post was hilarious, I have to say the book is beyond snark for me. In fact, now I want to read it again, even though it would mean putting aside Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, which I'm reading at an absolute snail's pace because my elves are failing to clean the house for me and leave bags of money at my door every morning. I'll add it to the queue of Things I Want to Do, right behind Put Up Kitchen Backsplash but just before Get Mammogram. I'll get to it, really. No, really.

And don't forget to read Allie's blog. See you in the funny papers! ;) (Inside joke. 'Cause we's tight like that.)


*If you don't get the reference in the caption for the computer graphic, watch and be entertained:

The Childhood Book Nostalgia Project: House of Stairs

Sometimes tracking down a book you loved as a kid is as easy as going to the Teen section of the local library.  That's where I recently found an original edition of William Sleator's House of Stairs.  I'm going to count this as "acquired," even though obviously I have to return it.

I love freaky 70s minimalist cover art.

Unrelated note:  Our library has self-checkout stations, where you run your books under a barcode scanner.  The machine is frankly a little fussy, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who don't use it often enough to become experts at scanning their books just so.  There is a particular breed of snob that stands in line, rolling their eyes and sighing and muttering "Geez Louise" if they have to wait an extra 30 seconds while the person in front of them fumbles with the machine.  These people should get a life, because people who have lives don't feel the need to passive-aggressively broadcast their moral superiority to the patrons of a public library.  But I digress.

House of Stairs is one of many young adult novels published in the 1970s whose goal was to inform a generation of readers that the world was cold, cruel, and determined to turn them into unthinking minions of an impersonal society.  Yes, if those damn hippies taught us anything, it's that freedom of thought and expression are unstable elements that should be purged from periodic table of democracy, but don't worry, we won't make that mistake again!  You have no idea how many books with this theme I read growing up.  I didn't know what nihilism was back then, but I knew a downer when I read it.

That doesn't mean that these books weren't entertaining and thought-provoking, because they were.  House of Stairs was a book that stayed with me, because it was so damn out there.  The bare bones of the plot (and there's not much more than bare bones) are this:  Five 16-year-old orphans from a future society (dystopian, although that word wasn't in vogue then) find themselves in a strange place that consists entirely of flights of stairs as far as they can see.  There is one small landing that contains a toilet/drinking water station, and another that houses a machine.  Occasionally the machine will emit flashing lights and strange whispers and produce coveted food pellets.  As time goes on, the kids learn that the frequency and number of pellets depend on their performing a series of complex, dancelike movements that change over time.  Eventually, their dance isn't enough, and they come to understand that the machine expects them to behave in certain ways in order to elicit the gift of food.  Those behaviors become more barbaric and aggressive as time goes on.  Finally, they learn that they have been subjects in a government experiment into conditioned behavior.  There's more to it, of course, but it's character-driven and needs to be read to be appreciated.

As I read this book for the first time in 30-odd years, I realized that I had missed a lot when I was a kid.  In fact, I started to let Precocious Daughter read it, but as I got further into it, I saw how much language, violence, and homoeroticism informed in the story and flatly refused to let her read further.  Either I was older than 11 when I read it, or I was reading shit I had no business reading at that age.  Or a bit of both, most likely.  I had a good relationship with my local librarians, and they let me get away with a lot.  PDaughter can read this book in 8th grade if she has a mind to.

Bottom line:  House of Stairs is a great book, but very much of its time.  I guess these days vampires and werewolves are the tropes that obliquely introduce our kids to the psychological issues of the early 21st century.  I suppose my kiddo may blog about Hunger Games or Amulet in 20 years or so and conclude that her daughter is not ready for the themes they present.  Is that wise?  Should we expose our children to the books that disturbed us as kids? I don't know.  I'm not sure PDaughter should have to go through the 70s as I did.  Maybe the Aughts and the Teens provide enough sturm und drang for the modern tween without introducing the hangups I had to internalize.  I don't know.  I don't want to be one of those parents who pretend that their era was somehow more "meaningful" than any before or since.

But to the adults who read this, I would say that House of Stairs is worth a read.  I think kids in middle school and beyond will probably get a jolt out of it, too.  The themes in it certainly aren't outdated, which is a bit sad in itself.  Look this one up, dear readers.  I loved this book, and maybe you will, too.  That's what this project is all about.  But don't steal it from your local library.  If I can return it, so can you.

The Childhood Book Nostalgia Project: Lizard Music

For those of you who don't know, the Childhood Book Nostalgia Project is my quest to find copies of all  the books that made the biggest impression on me when I was growing up.  It's a pretty long list, because I was a reading sponge as a kid.  And as I've grown older, I've realized that a significant portion of who I am today - my attitude toward life, my likes and dislikes, my sense of humor - originated in these books.  They're like the source material of my personality.  For me, tracking them down is almost like reconstructing a family tree.

My goal is not just to find the books I loved, but to acquire editions that are identical to the ones I read back in the day.  Same covers, same illustrations, same typeface.  Why?  Because the look and feel of a book is almost always integral to my memory of it.  As I've pursued this quest, I've discovered on more than one occasion that even when I couldn't remember the name of a book, I could (through very, very diligent effort) eventually identify it by the design of its cover or the style of its illustrations.  More on that in a later post. 

So in the case of a book like Little Women, which is available in probably a hundred different editions, the one I wanted was the one I'd checked out from the library at Clement Avenue Elementary School when I was in the fourth grade.  It was a 1947 Illustrated Junior Library Edition, with beautiful line drawings and full-color plates by Louis Jambor, and a wonderful picture of the March girls singing at their parlor piano on the endpapers. That edition, and no other.  And I found it in a used bookstore in Boston.  Check that one off the list.

But today I'm talking about what may be my very favorite book of all time:  Lizard Music, by D. Manus Pinkwater.  As Daniel Pinkwater, the author has written many, many kids' and young adult novels; this is one of his earliest, and to my mind there is nothing in his catalog - and little in the canon of Western literature, to be honest - that tops it.  Seriously, this book is awesome.

I'll give you a plot synopsis, and I swear I am not making this up.  A young boy named Victor is left in the care of his older sister when their parents go on vacation.  She promptly runs away with a bunch of hippies, leaving him on his own.  He discoveres a band of musical lizards on late-late-late night television and becomes obsessed with finding out who they are.  He meets a strange man who wears disguises and keeps a chicken under his hat, and together they make their way to an invisible floating island populated by sentient lizards that are mostly named Reynold, but also Raymond and Helena and other things.  

I first read Lizard Music when I was about 10.  It's the first book I ever remember laughing out loud at, and also the first I'd ever read that had the word damn in it, which seemed incredibly cool when I was 10.  My library had a first edition hardcover copy, and I can still see it:  a bright pink cover, with a black-and-white Escher-like drawing of stylized lizards in a rectangular frame in the the center, with the title above and the author's name below in block letters.  Wrapped in protective clear plastic with a little paper pocket inside the front cover like all good library books, of course.

So far I've had zero luck finding this particular book.  But when Precocious Daughter turned 10 last year, I bent my own Project rule and bought a new paperback copy of Lizard Music for her.  Because I was so eager for her to read it.  Also, I wanted to make sure that my memories of its awesomeness were authentic and not simply due to a borderline-psychotic taste for bizarre novels on my part.  And of course, I wanted to read it again myself. 

I'm happy to report that PDaughter loved it.  Loved it.  Even though I had to explain a few anachronisms to her (like Walter Cronkite and how TV stations used to play the national anthem at the end of the broadcast day), she thought it was as hilarious as I did.  So there's a recommendation from two generations.

We interrupt this post to bring you exciting news.  No, I haven't been able to lay hands on a first edition of Lizard Music.  But just now I did actually find an image of it online.  When I described the cover a few paragraphs back, it was from memory; I hadn't actually seen the book in about 30 years.  Take a look at this, and you'll see what I mean about these books impressing themselves permanently in my brain:


Mind like a steel lizard trap

Pretty damn good, no?

So...if you see this book, drop me a line at books@always-drunk.com.  Neeble neeble!  (That's lizard for "Thanks!")

The Childhood Book Nostalgia Project

Earlier this year I read Little Women for the umpteenth time. I love this book. The first time I read it, I was in third or maybe fourth grade. Although much of it seemed quaint and old-fashioned to me, that was part of its charm. Jo March instantly became my heroine. A tomboy writer who frequently felt socially awkward and never seemed to say the right things or wear the proper clothes? I found my soulmate in the pages of Louisa May Alcott's story.

Well, reading Little Women got me thinking about other books I loved as a child - some that I still pick up and enjoy every few years, others that I hadn't seen in ages, still others that I could barely remember except for a few characters, a snatch of plot, or an author's name. I started to list the ones I could recall, and to search for those that existed on the edge of my memory, sometimes going on nothing more than a mental image of the book's cover. It's been a rewarding, exhausting, and at times frustrating exercise.

Along the way, I discovered a wonderful resource that helped me not only recall some of the more obscure titles I was looking for, but also fritter away many pleasant hours that I might otherwise have spent working or cleaning house. Loganberry Books in Shaker Heights, Ohio has a feature on its website called "Stump the Bookseller." For a nominal fee (two dollars), readers can submit descriptions of favorite children's books whose titles have been lost in the dim corridors of memory. The Loganberry folks, with help from other site visitors, try to come up with the title and author of the remembered stories. They'll even try to track down a copy of the book to purchase. The entries and suggested solutions are great fun to read, and on more than one occasion they sparked my own memories.

But the very first book on my list needed no such help. Ed Emberley's The Wizard of Op was one of my very favorite stories, a slim illustrated book consisting entirely of black and white drawings and hand-printed text. I used to borrow it regularly from the Tippecanoe Library in Milwaukee, but I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. After a good bit of research, I discovered that it's been out of print for years and is quite the collectible. So I was overjoyed to discover the entire book reproduced on this website, and with the permission of Mr. Emberley, to boot. (The website itself is an interesting story - it was created by a young man named Maurice David Wagschal, who died in 1997 at the age of 22). If you've never experienced The Wizard of Op, go read it right now - you'll love it.

Many of the other books on my list aren't nearly as obscure. They include the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, Ellen Tebbets by Beverly Cleary, The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, and The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White. You can still find them in any good bookstore or public library. But others required a real mental workout on my part to string together fragments of remembered titles, plots, and characters and match them to actual books. I'll list some of them in a future post. Maybe I'll even find that they're cherished memories of some other dedicated reader.

But until then, read The Wizard of Op. Right now. You'll love it.