But in the library of your memory, people live in their books

[sovay]

Bits of this post: shamelessly condensed from conversation with the friend I had chai with yesterday afternoon, who does not have a livejournal but is excellent company. Now to hope I haven't said anything self-contradictory.

In the tumult of this year's pre-Thanksgiving cleaning, I wound up reorganizing almost all of the children's books in the downstairs of my parents' house. It's not a small collection. Probably it's still about three-quarters my mother's, with the remainder being books which were either given to me, but stayed in the house when I moved out (and are therefore not in boxes now), or which I added to the shelves myself in high school, like reprints of Rosemary Sutcliff, back-catalogue Lloyd Alexander, and both kinds of Diana Wynne Jones. I hadn't gone through it in detail in years.

I did not grow up within science fiction fandom. The first convention I attended was Necon in 2004, after I'd been publishing short stories and poems for three years and was being encouraged to interact more with the field; before then, the closest I'd gotten to a wider reading community was co-founding the science fiction and fantasy library at Brandeis (which faintly surprises me by existing to this day, with a permanent home in the new student center. This is like finding out that the congregation my grandmother belonged to in Portland now has an actual building on Westbrook Street as opposed to a peripatetic existence in other institutions' basements. Easier to locate on Google, I'm sure, but I still feel like some essential quality of diaspora has been lost). My god-aunt was a serious fan and filker, but she never succeeded in describing a convention to me in ways that made it sound like anything other than loud, crowded, frenetic, and full of strangers who would want to talk to me rather than let me read, meaning I refused even the year she tried to take me to meet Ursula K. Le Guin.¹ A college friend of my father's was Neal Stephenson, but he never talked about his writing with me. It isn't that I didn't have friends with similar tastes in reading—who also wrote, who would stay up for hours talking over both—but I had no identification of myself as part of a subculture, and sort of oddly elliptical contact with people who did. (I didn't belong to writer's workshops, either.)

The most immediate result is that there are degrees to which I still feel like an outsider even at conventions I enjoy.² The more relevant one is that I've had no idea for most of my life whether my childhood authors were popular or obscure. I bonded with kraada on the first night of Brandeis orientation because we could both recite the Sign-Seeker's chant from The Dark Is Rising, but I was in graduate school before I knew anyone else who read P.C. Hodgell. (My brother's godparents didn't count; it was their copy of God Stalk (1982) I read for the first time in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, the summer I was thirteen.) Clare Bell turns out to have a fandom, but not enough people have read the right Elizabeth Goudge; Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels (1950) is not generally read by eight-year-olds, but apparently everybody imprinted on the D'Aulaires. I still haven't met, personally, more than three other people who grew up on Eleanor Farjeon's Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1921). It was only last year I found anyone who'd even heard of Grace Chetwin's Gom on Windy Mountain (1986). Anyone else who read Robert Lawson's Captain Kidd's Cat (1958), stand up now?

Below, then, are some of the books I was reshelving before Thanksgiving, which I've never seen in libraries or written up elsewhere, but which for one reason or another stuck with me. Some are genre, some not. A couple are probably unclassifiable. Given the great success I had with bouncing pop-culture parody melodrama off my friendlist, I'm curious: anyone know these?

Jane Louise Curry, Shadow Dancers (1983)

Julia Cunningham, The Treasure Is the Rose (1973)

Clarence Day, This Simian World (1920)³

Nan Denker, The Bound Girl (1957)

C.S. Forester, Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942)

Beth Hilgartner, A Necklace of Fallen Stars (1979)

Herbert A. Kenny, Dear Dolphin (1967)

Gladys Malvern, Behold Your Queen! (1951)

Robert Newman, Merlin's Mistake (1970)

Roger Nett, Thorntree Meadows (1957)

Rita Ritchie, The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan (1958) and Ice Falcon (1963)

Louis Slobodkin, The Space Ship Returns to the Apple Tree (1958)

I would have added others to the list, except that I know one or two people who've read them. Feel free to add your own books no one else seems to have heard of. I'm always curious about this sort of thing.

1. And that, boys and girls, is why I did not attend Readercon 7. We only figured that out a few years ago.

2. The correct response to this statement is not to tell me that I have a home in fandom now, because I really don't; I am not at home in groups. I do not feel automatically safe around people just because they like the same music or read the same languages or even hold some of the same political opinions I do. I form attachments one by one. When I stop feeling strange in a crowd, I'll get my head examined.

3 I do not really believe this book was responsible for the existence of Sam the Eagle, but it does contain the nearly prophetic line: "If we had inherited our dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville." I should write about this one in any case; it is an odd mix of philosophical treatise, evolutionary biology, and science-fiction extrapolation of alternate planetary histories. The chapter in which he imagines at length a civilization descended from the great cats—even if I don't agree with his judgment of its ultimately limited nature; this is a book that flirts with transhumanism, but always comes back to the simians in the end—is worth reading for all by itself.

Comments

[sovay]

I have really been enjoying your LJ posts, especially since LJ seems so dead now.

Thank you! I am truly hoping Livejournal is not dead; it would essentially end my online interactions. I'm not taking to Facebook and I don't have the time to invest in other social media.

the childhood book that influenced me that people I know IRL have never heard of is "The Wonder Clock." Gorgeous illustrations.

Howard Pyle!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I too hope LJ is not dead. I only really use FB for signal-boosting and occasional squibs: the format bugs me, as does the philosophy. If LJ falls over I may start using my Dreamwidth account again, but will more likely begin a Wordpress or Blogspot blog from which to preach to the wind (or shout at strangers in the park, depending how you look at it). I do prefer a conversation, though!

I'm sorry/pleased to say that I've read none of your obscure books. Pleased, because I'm now minded to seek them out in months to come.

My mind went blank when thinking of obscure books of my own - except for Roger Norman's Albion's Dream, which is marvellous and which I think you would really like, but you probably know already it.

[sovay]

This comment exploded. Take that, Facebook.

I do prefer a conversation, though!

Yes! Facebook is not made for thinking.

I'm sorry/pleased to say that I've read none of your obscure books. Pleased, because I'm now minded to seek them out in months to come.

I don't know if I can recommend Shadow Dancers; I'd have to re-read it. At the time, it made me think the author was stealing from Patricia McKillip and P.C. Hodgell, which probably means she was really stealing from Tolkien; I didn't read The Lord of the Rings until late high school, so I wouldn't have been able to tell. There is a conjuror with a scarred hand, a fabled set of twelve seeing stones linked to the heavens, a land under shadow, a forgotten city with a small, long-lost halfling race. (It was once Avel Timrel; now it is Nagharot, the fortress of an evil wizard. His mercenaries are called the Rokarrhuk. I wonder if I will even be able to read this post-Tolkien, as bits of it come back to me.) The shadow dance itself—a kind of dark circling of the celestial year—is what really stuck with me, the one bit of strangeness and numinous. The heroine Cat is drugged, enchanted, set to dance in the pattern that will alter the stars out of their courses, pull the worlds awry: as below, so above. She's a darkling, a throwback with strangely shaped ears. She sends the sun rolling down into the roots of the dark. It's the second half of a pair; I have hazy memories of tracking down The Wolves of Aam (1981) in a library, but I can't remember a thing about what happened in it.

The Treasure Is the Rose is an odd, parable-like encounter between a twelfth-century châtelaine, widowed in the wars, and the three young brigands who come to rob her of her castle's rumored riches; it's true her dying husband's words were "The treasure is the rose," but she has always assumed this refers to the damask roses she tends in her garden, the living reminder of her husband's love. Otherwise the place is poor, crumbling, inhabited only by Ariane and her old nurse. Toadflax, Ragwort, and Yarrow each have a different story of how they came to lead a violent, thieving life; Ariane easily disarms the first two by listening with compassion, but Yarrow has spent his life making himself impervious to other people's respect or affection and sees the Countess de Mon Coeur as a challenge to be broken. A song which the author wrote is central to the action; there's sheet music for it at the back of the book. Being unable to read music in elementary school, I always heard it to the tune of "Greensleeves," which I didn't then realize would have been an anchronism, either.

See footnote for This Simian World. I'm going to try to assemble a post on it in the near future, but I don't know what I can promise. This cold has gone serious; I'm exhausted.

I have The Bound Girl classed mentally with Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), which it's probably not really like except insofar as both deal with outsider protagonists in colonial New England. The thirteen-year-old heroine is a Huguenot refugee in 1712; with no living and/or locatable relatives beyond an uncle somewhere in the wilds of not-yet-Canada, she is taken on by a Puritan family as their bound servant for seven years, renamed Félicie to Felicity and set to clash instantly with the local piety, especially the humorless Tither Stoneman. I don't believe there are many surprises in the plot (aside from a random scene with a drunken Indian that took me aback on re-read a few years ago, thank you very much, 1950's), but it gets points with me for having most of the characters turn out to be three-dimensional, complicated people, at least within the limitations of YA at the time.

[sovay]

The preface to Poo-Poo and the Dragons explains that Forester (as in Horatio Hornblower and The African Queen, which I didn't quite realize for years) originally told the stories to his son as a form of shameless bribery for finishing his meals while his mother was out of town; then it turned into a habit, meaning that for years Forester has been unable to sit down to eat, even in a restaurant, without starting to think of a story with dragons in it. Poo-Poo's real name is Harold Heavyside Brown; he discovers the first dragon in a vacant lot, brings him home and names him Horatio; the second one turns up of her own accord and answers to the name of Ermyntrude; they all have adventures. I can remember almost none of them, except that they're silly and charming and the text is obsessed with naming even one-line walk-on characters by their full names in all caps, which makes me think Forester's son must have wanted to know what everyone was called. Our copy is a first edition, completely falling apart; the spine is no longer held together even by string. I will have to be very careful when I re-read it. Robert Lawson did the illustrations.

A Necklace of Fallen Stars takes its title from one of the stories the protagonist tells, a rebellious princess named Kaela who would rather earn a living as a vagabond storyteller than conform to the niceties of court. The frame story is what happens when she finally runs away, wounding her father's pride beyond bearing; he makes a terrible bargain to get her back and now her two elder sisters, who have previously signified as her docile or better-loved foils, have to step actively into the story to keep everything from turning into King Lear. Meanwhile, Kaela is traveling with a dirt-poor minstrel and telling the stories that make up the majority of the book. Some of them are like folktales, some of them like magical O. Henry. It's a Renaissance-ish kingdom, but I recognized some of Kaela and Kippen's relationship in the Regency romances I would read years later. I should see whether it holds up; I remember certain details of the language vividly. If any of the terrible, terrible stories I tried to write in middle school ever came to light, I can guarantee this book would be all over them.

Dear Dolphin is an extended nonsense riff on maritime legends and heart's desires that feels slightly like The Phantom Tollbooth, only not really. A girl slips off a rock in Kettle Cove (if it's not the one in Maine where I used to swim with my grandparents in the summers, I shall persist in the belief that it is) to talk with an unusually chatty dolphin and winds up being introduced to the Right Lobster, the Saw Serpent, Captain Teach, Nimble Crone, Delia the dugong, Charybdis the manatee, and eventually Davy Jones. Most of the characters are looking for the Lost Atlantis, which doesn't like to be referred to that way. I imagine now there was an entire atmosphere of humor I couldn't pick up on. I do remember the poetry: "The Dimity Bird in the Denim Tree / purled soft notes of wool and lace . . ."

Behold Your Queen! is a retelling of the Purim story. I was amused to note that in the original jacket copy, which is pasted to the back page of the library binding, there is no mention whatsoever of Judaism.

[sovay]

Merlin's Mistake is awesome. The title refers to the co-protagonist, Tertius, who had the mixed blessing of being Merlin's godson at a time when the enchanter was already infatuated with Nimue and couldn't keep his mind on his work: he intended to endow the boy with all possible knowledge, so as to make him a great magician; instead he endowed him with all future knowledge, which means he could build a transistor radio if he could get the parts in Morte d'Arthur England, but he can't cast a wart cure to save his life. He is accompanying the armiger Brian on his quest to find the Knight with the Red Shield, to overthrow the apparently immortal and invincible Black Knight who exacts tribute twice a year from the town of Meliot; of course, Brian has more or less undertaken this quest to impress a girl and that never works out the way it's supposed to. There is a third character I don't want to spoil. I don't know if the book is still in print, but it should be.

I can't really describe Thorntree Meadows, except to say it is the year in the life of a hippopotamus, a pig, an aardvark, and a small (Calvin &) Hobbes-like stuffed creature named Orlon, and it's wonderful. I've never seen another copy than my mother's. It's barely even attested on the internet. It made me go on picnics with root beer.

The Golden Hawks of Genghis Khan and Ice Falcon are both about falconry and political intrigue. One is set in twelfth-century Samarkand and the Mongol steppes, the other in Norway and Iceland during the reign of Haakon the Good. In both cases, the protagonist comes from outside into a culture he regards as barbaric and is shown otherwise; I loved them both by turns depending on whether I felt like holmgangs and haunted glaciers (I heard the story about Loki bound under Vatnajökull first from Ice Falcon) or wind-running plains of grass and hawking from horseback. I have never really looked up anything else the author has written. This is a common problem with writers I discovered before the internet, as though somehow they won't exist on it.

The Space Ship Returns to the Apple Tree is the sequel to The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree (1952), which we don't own. Eddie has a friend from the planet Martinea; he calls him Marty, which the alien doesn't seem to mind. They fly around in Marty's litle silver spaceship and get into trouble in the way of boys with spaceships in science fiction stories from the 1950's, especially boys who have access to Secret Power Z (for Zurianomatichrome). I have absolutely no idea whether any of it would hold up today.

My mind went blank when thinking of obscure books of my own - except for Roger Norman's Albion's Dream, which is marvellous and which I think you would really like, but you probably know already it.

I haven't read or thought of that in years. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have told you I'd never heard of it. I have it vaguely connected in my head to William Sleator's Interstellar Pig (1984), but with more Arthuriana—they identify the faces of the cards with people they know, until Death turns up in the person of a doctor. (Is there actually an epidemic on or do I just think he should be a plague doctor because I love them?) I need to read this again.

Thank you!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's a great list - and I think I shall definitely seek out Poo Poo and the Dragons first of all.

That's Albion's Dream, all right - except that it's a board game rather than a card game, I think (now I must check). I'm sorry to say the doctor doesn't turn up a la Schnabel von Rom: would that he did!

[sovay]

That's a great list - and I think I shall definitely seek out Poo Poo and the Dragons first of all.

I look forward to hearing what you think of it!

I'm sorry to say the doctor doesn't turn up a la Schnabel von Rom: would that he did!

This is a serious deficit. Children's literature needs beak doctors!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's funny you should say that, as my most serious attempt at writing this last year (though still abortive - or at least laid aside for now) has one as a fairly major character.

[sovay]

as my most serious attempt at writing this last year (though still abortive - or at least laid aside for now) has one as a fairly major character.

What do I have to bribe you with to finish it? I don't know if I can promise dragons.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could have accommodated a dragon anyway.

I didn't have the headspace to work on it in 2011, one way and another. It's top of my 2012 to-do list, though, if it will consent to get done. Now I know there's a public appetite for plague doctors, I will work the more merrily.

[genarti]

What a marvelous list! I haven't read any of them, I'm sorry to say, but I think now I must remedy that for at least a couple of these.

[sovay]

I haven't read any of them, I'm sorry to say, but I think now I must remedy that for at least a couple of these.

Enjoy!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I just mentioned that in sartorias's comments the other day. It is indeed gorgeous, and I read it over and over as a kid. I still have my same copy.