What exactly do you meme by that?

Per Amy, “list six book-related things about [your]self….”

Really? That’s it? That seems awfully…unstructured. Or something. Not sure why that bothers me, but it does. Maybe because it makes it harder to judge whether I’m completing the assignment satisfactorily, and if I can’t judge myself--harshly--what kind of life am I leading? A better one, you say? Sssshhhhhh.

Anyway, here are six random things that come to mind when I think of the word “book”:

1. As a kid, I loved reading more than anything, with the possible exception of my stuffed animals. I read constantly and never went anywhere without a book. My parents actually used to get annoyed by it--my mom was forever telling me that it was a beautiful day outside and I should be out there enjoying it, and my dad was convinced I was going to ruin my eyesight. (I know that my dad’s point has no basis in science, but considering the crummy state of my vision, it’s hard not to wonder. Even so, I’d do it all again.) Speaking of animals, stories about them--stuffed or real, I suppose, but mostly the latter--were my first reading passion. My grandmother had a large collection of Thornton W. Burgess’s animal stories, which were among the first books I ever read. (That page describes them as “charming stories of well-dressed loveable creatures that captivated little boys and girls”, which pretty much sums it up.) I loved reading them over and over whenever I was at her house. That was the beginning of a lifelong fondness for animal fantasy, which I’ve written about before, with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH being one of my adolescent faves and Watership Down one of my adult ones. But I also liked more realistic fiction, like the dog stories of Albert Payson Terhune (I thought it was cool that he was from New Jersey, and I thrilled when local landmarks like the Palisades turned up in a story; also, even though I adored our German shepherd, Sargent, I totally coveted a collie as beautiful as Lad) and, of course, Jack London. And then there was nonfiction: for several Christmases running, the aforementioned grandmother gave me one of James Herriot’s books from his series that began with All Creatures Great and Small; thanks largely to that series I wanted to be a veterinarian for the better part of my childhood. (That idea was briefly supplanted by the notion of becoming an astronaut, which lasted until I was 13, when it was in turn supplanted by the desire to become a rock star, which lasted until…well, pretty much now.) But my absolute favorite childhood book, without question, was Born Free. I could never hope to adequately convey the depth of my love for that book and for its leonine heroine, Elsa. Even though tigers were my favorite animal, I dreamed, literally, of having Elsa for a friend. Born Free is such a beautiful and amazing story that it seems like it should be fiction, but it’s all the more poignant for being true. I don’t know how many times I read it, but I do know that it’s the only book I’ve ever begun re-reading immediately after finishing it. I just couldn’t stand that it was over. Even today, even now as I’m writing this, just thinking about the ending, when the now-wild Elsa brings her new cubs to meet her human “parents”, makes me choke up.

2. One genre that I loved as a kid but never read as an adult is mysteries. I remember going to the library and walking down the rows of books looking for the skull-and-crossbones logo on the side that was the marker of mysteries. (I also remember being mad that you could only take out five books at a time from the children’s section. I’m telling you, I was voracious. Why can’t I recapture even a fraction of that passion now?) I would pull them out and scan the front flap to see if the protagonist was male or female. I would read stories with boys as the main character--I read all of my dad’s Hardy Boys books--but I definitely preferred books with girls leading the action. One that I clearly remember was by Phyllis A. Whitney and was called The Mystery of the Crimson Ghost--and look, it was set in New Jersey, too, amongst the horse farms in the northwestern part of the state. Another that I’m perpetually trying, and failing, to remember the name of was set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina--one of my favorite places in the world--and featured the ghost of Virginia Dare. I’m always fascinated by anything that has to do with Virginia Dare and the Roanoke Colony in general. Oh, and speaking of the tony northwest of New Jersey…

3. I’ve sold books to several famous--or at least semi-famous--people. The first bookstore I ever worked at, in the late eighties, was Brentano’s, in Bridgewater in Somerset County, NJ. Somerset County and the adjacent counties of Hunterdon and Morris all rank among the top ten wealthiest counties in the nation--basically, a lot of very rich people live in northwest New Jersey. While I worked at Brentano’s, I sold books to John DeLorean and Malcolm Forbes. Some years later I worked at Borders, also in Bridgewater, and there I sold books to Forbes’s son Steve (this was in 1996, when he was running for President) and to the then-governor of NJ, Christie Whitman. Finally, when I worked at Barnes & Noble on Astor Place in Manhattan, I sold books to Kyle MacLachlan. One time Madonna bought some books there, too, but I wasn’t working that day.

4. I don’t really have a favorite book. I mean, there are plenty of books I’ve greatly enjoyed, but while I’m OK with saying that Born Free was my favorite book as a kid, there’s no one book I feel comfortable calling, as an adult, “My Favorite Book”. It bugs me a little bit, because I feel like it’s a datum I should have on hand to present to people when asked. Things like a favorite book, or movie, or animal, or ethnic cuisine, or quote from The Simpsons, or Scandinavian footwear, or member of FDR’s Cabinet--what, you don’t have one? What’s wrong with you?--are pieces of information that others can use to quickly get a picture of who we are. Which I suppose is a large part of why I find it difficult to name a favorite, as I know I’m likely to be judged on it, and so concerned am I with how others perceive me that the idea of even trying to choose a favorite anything produces instant intellectual paralysis. (One notable exception: if asked my favorite album of all time, I can confidently reply that it’s the Clash’s London Calling. This is because I not only love the music and the band, but have carefully considered how this pick makes me appear to others and am satisfied with the result.) There are a few books I know I’ve referred to as “my favorite” at least a couple of times: James Joyce’s Dubliners is one, but that’s a collection of short stories, and I feel like one’s favorite book is supposed to be a novel. That also leaves out a nonfiction book I’ve tried on as a favorite, Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things. (I do definitely recommend it to anyone who shares my love for linguistics, travel narrative, and lyric prose.) One novel I did call my favorite for a while in my twenties is Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf; while it passed the “How does this make me look to others?” test, I eventually decided that any book I’d read in translation could not legitimately be called my favorite, because no one has truly read anything unless they’ve read it in its original language, of that I’m convinced. Which brings us to number…

5. I’ve only ever read one book in a language other than English, and I’m inordinately proud of having done so. That would be The Stranger by Albert Camus. Or, to give it its true title, L’étranger--and having read it in French, I always refer to it as L’étranger, because I feel I have a right to, and because I am just that pretentious. As far as French novels go, it’s unquestionably one of the easiest to read, as it’s brief, and Camus deliberately aped the short, “muscular” sentences of Ernest Hemingway. It’s definitely no Hugo or Proust, but I’m still proud of having read it.

6. When I’m sick, I like to read plays. I don’t just read them, either--I put them on in my head. I cast them with people that I know and imagine them fully produced onstage. It’s just now occurring to me that this might be very weird. Anyway, it’s a good distraction when you’re feeling ill. It started when I was a teen--my mom was very active in community and regional theater, and as a result we had tons of scripts and collections of plays on our bookshelves. Also, I was active in the drama program at school and most of my friends were drama kids, so casting was never a problem. Comedies were preferred; specific plays that stick in my head are some of Neil Simon’s early works (The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, The Star-Spangled Girl, et al.) and Woody Allen’s one-acts “Death” and “God” from his collection Without Feathers. I also liked absurdist plays: Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is one I remember, and I swear I still recall some of my imaginary blocking for Arthur Kopit’s “Chamber Music”. Kopit is not what you’d call a household name, but he should be just by virtue of having written a play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Also, it has nothing to do with plays, but one book I always loved reading when I was sick was called The Reader’s Digest Treasury of American Humor. It was an anthology that included writers like James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker--classic stuff, mostly from the first half of the 20th century. Over the years it somehow disappeared from my parents’ house, which makes me sad. My favorite story in it was called “Yvonne”, and I can’t remember who wrote it, but it was freakin’ hilarious. I’m going to briefly describe it on the off chance--the very off chance--that anyone knows who the author was, because I’d like to read it again. The narrator lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and there was a little girl with a deep bass voice who would stand on the corner of his street and shout, “Yvonne!” endlessly. He naturally became quite curious about who Yvonne was and why the little girl was looking for her. He’d hear her yelling and would try to run down and talk to her, but she’d always be gone by the time he got there. Over the course of the story his sanity slowly ebbs as he becomes obsessed with helping the little girl find Yvonne. Of course that description doesn’t do it justice, but you’ll have to trust me, it was funny.

Stories Never Written

I just read Amy's post about the Story [She's] Never Written, which is funny 'cause just today I was thinking about one of the stories I've never written. It's so annoying to have these things in my head, trying to get out, for years, while I continue to lack the energy, ambition, and sense of self-worth to do anything about it.

Once I bought a fancy blank book with the intention of filling it with ideas for, notes on, and fragments of stories, novels, plays, songs, and such, thinking it might exorcise those literary demons from my brain. I figured that someday someone would find it and at least enjoy the flights of fancy such fragments might send their imagination on--like with this really cool book by Chris Van Allsburg I once saw, which features captioned illustrations from non-existent stories, allowing you to invent the contexts for yourself.

For instance, once I saw a notice about a contest to write a one-act play. I conceived a play called The Angel of the Sea of Reeds, which had the following dramatis personae:

SENOY, an angel
SANSENOY, another angel
SEMANGELOF, a third angel
LILITH, a woman
ADAM, a man
YAHWEH, a god

And that's it. I never wrote a single line. But tell me that's not a kick-ass cast of characters. Tell me you don't want to read that play. Tell me you don't wonder mightily how it unfolds. Because I sure do. And if I found that list in a old handmade book buried on a high shelf somewhere, it would send a tingle down my spine, I'm certain of it.

I might also have included, say, one of the two pages of dialogue from my likely-never-to-be-finished screenplay entitled The Breton Summer. (Evocative title, no? I'm great with titles.) Or even just a line, like maybe this one:

She pauses and turns to the window. The late sunlight falls on her
impossibly lovely face as the French countryside rolls by beyond
the glass. Underneath, the insistent noise of the train on its tracks.
Returning her gaze to the paper, she writes, more urgently now.

JULIE (V.O.) (CONT.)

We are going to contemplate the immense and lonely sea.

But I never put even those tiny scraps in the book. I never put anything in the book.

Once, about twenty years ago, I started a novel. I had a finished outline, and lots of research, and drafts of several chapters. It's the closest I've ever come to actually writing a book. It was a young adult (or, more accurately, intermediate) fantasy novel called Wren, Robin, Raven, and its theme was one of the more common in that genre, summed up by another writer as "child finds magical world and has to save it". Had I been aware at the time just how common that theme is, I probably would have quit before I even started. As it was, I told a friend the basics of the story, and she commented that it sounded a lot like Tolkien. I had never read Tolkien, and when I eventually did I realized that, in tone and execution, his works were wholly different from what I was trying to do, but I essentially gave up at that point.

My story did involve elves and dwarfs. I won't go into all the details, but the protagonist was Wren, a twelve-year-old girl who discovers a faerie world and, yes, must save it from an evil immortal, who is in the guise of a human girl named Raven. There was some cool stuff about Wren being descended from historical (or quasi-historical) figures like Guinevere and Jane Grey, while Raven's past guises included Morgan le Fay and Mary Tudor. Of course, Wren picked up some companions on her adventure, the most prominent of whom was Robin, Prince of the Elves. There was some very mild romantic attraction stuff between Wren and Robin (conveniently, although immortal, my elves looked and behaved much like twelve-year-old humans). There were two other elves in the party, Martin (another boy elf) and Sparrow (a girl elf). Martin had purple hair. I love that detail. As you may have gathered from the names, the folklore and mythology of birds were central to the story--for example, English folklore includes the couplets "The robin and the wren/Are God's cock and hen" and "The martin and the sparrow/Are God's bow and arrow".

There was also a husband-and-wife team of dwarfs named Dimplegrin and Bumblegnat, respectively. (Female dwarfs were distinguished from males chiefly by having slightly less facial hair.) Bumblegnat was actually the Chief Dwarf, an elected position which, in the democratic, egalitarian, and labor-oriented dwarf society, was similar to a shop steward. My dwarfs found the elves a bit haughty. Finally, there was an undine, whose name was unpronounceable by anyone but another undine (it sounded like rivulets of melted snow falling on a smooth rock in the spring sun), so Wren dubbed her Trinket (because she was tiny, even for an undine, and they are a tiny species). If you do the math, you will note that of the seven companions, four were female and three were male. So take that, J.R.R. Fucking Tolkien and your cocksucking all-male fellowship.

Oops, sorry, that was a burst of anger out of nowhere. Anyway, that's not even the story I was thinking about today. The story I was thinking about today began its life something like fifteen years ago. I wrote a lot back then, including a lot of letters to friends, even to friends I saw or spoke to frequently. It was something I did just for the enjoyment of writing and reading letters. Often I would include snippets of stories in the letters--just stuff off the top of my head, not anything I intended to expand upon, necessarily, but sometimes I would like the ideas enough to keep them floating around. Once I sent someone a card that had a picture on the front of a white mouse sitting in a paper airplane. Inside I wrote about a mouse named Annabelle who wanted more than anything to be able to fly. See, her best friend was a bat (this was inspired by a Warner Brothers' cartoon featuring Sniffles the mouse called "Brave Little Bat"), and Annabelle, who lived in a cage, longed to soar through the sky like her friend.

After I sent the card I continued to think about the story. I'd always wanted to write an animal fantasy--one of my very favorite books as a child was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and as I've mentioned here before, one of my favorite books as an adult is Watership Down. I figured, though, that mice had been done, so I decided to change the focus to the bat character. She was a little brown bat named Vesper. Annabelle stayed in as a supporting character, and there was a male bat named Icarus, who, as you might guess from his name, was destined to come to a bad end. I wanted the story to have some emotional heft to it, like Mrs. Frisby did. And bats are so cool, and there weren't any books about them. Well, there was Stellaluna, which is a great book, but it's a picture book. I figured I finally had something original. Of course, that didn't last. I can't tell you how upset I got when I first saw that book a few years back. I still think my story would have been better. But we'll never know, will we?