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

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Read Captain Kidd's Cat around the time it came out.

Read Behold Your Queen when I went on Malvern kick after I ran out of Geoffrey Trease historicals, when I was 12.

Eleanor Farjeon wrote other books that I read, but I didn't read that one because it had a boy's name in the title. I was soooo sick of stories in which the boys got all the fun.

Obscure books I adored: The Bounces of Cynthiann; Loretta Mason Potts; The Wicked Enchantment bu Benary-Isbert.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love Merlin's Mistake! I read it in India when I was a kid, and I have a copy still. I should re-read; it seemed like the kind of thing that would hold up.

The ones no one else seems to remember, I don't know what the actual titles are.

- An Indian book about a brother and sister named Sudhir and Shailie, whose parents leave for some reason and leave them to tend the sweet shop, but an evil dude breaks the glass keeping the flies out and they get shut down for health violations, and they go on a quest to find their parents and get menaced by a jackal-headed man in a graveyard.

- A book of fairy-tales of the world. There's a really spooky one about three sister witches, one with one eye, one with two, and one with three, and a boy and a talking red bull. (It's not the folk-tale about sisters with that eye configuration, but might be inspired by it.) In another one, a rose becomes a man and rapes a woman. (!)

- A Nancy Drew-like mystery about some kids. The villain has twisty pale brown teeth and they nickname him Horrible.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

FAMILY by John Donovan

Best known for his controversial novel of adolescence I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, Donovan is also responsible for this Watership Down-style tale of lab chimps who, led by an enigmatic gorilla named Moses, escape to rediscover their primal nature in the wilds of Connecticut. Now out of print, it deserved significantly more attention than it got.

BRANDYWINE'S WAR by Robert Vaughan and Monroe Lynch

A MASH-style send up of the uber-bureaucratized world of a forward fire-base in 1970s vietnam, although instead of surgeons, the "heroes" are a bunch of slovenly chopper jocks. Sick, profane, brilliant and unabashedly funny.

I could go on and on ...

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I've read the Lawson (actually, I've read everything by him I can find), and my partner's read the Farjeon, I /think/. I'll make sure later.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Are you counting me as one of the people who has read the Farjeon?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I read Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard because I'd first read Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field. I like Daisy Field better.

Missing from my library (I wouldn't have tossed them or given them away-- where are they?) are Jexium Island by Madeleine Grattan and The Missing Boy, whose author I'll never find using google. Never owned The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene Dubois but am chuffed to know I can now.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Captain Kidd's Cat, yes! My library had rather a lot of Lawson, actually-- I read it right after Ben and Me and right before Rabbit Hill, if I remember correctly.

Though I didn't realize until just now looking it up on Wikipedia that the person who wrote those also wrote Mr. Popper's Penguins...

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Have you read Michael de Larrabeiti's Borrible Trilogy? They're marvellous. Eternal street urchins up against corrupt London police, and in the first one, the enemies are, basically, evil posh Wombles. Pan brought out a new edition about eight years ago.

This Simian World sounds fantastic, a bit Olaf Stapledonish. I would love to hear more about it.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I read Lawson's Captain Kidd's Cat as a child of perhaps seven or nine.

I got my first pair of glasses round the same time, and dimly recall being pleased when I discovered that I could get round lenses like the ones Captain Kidd wore in the illustrations, rather than aviator frames like the ones my father had or some sort of plastic hornrims like the ones my mother wore when she took out her contacts, which were at that point the only varieties of glasses I was aware existed in the modern world.

It's funny, actually--last night I was thinking I'd read a book about a mouse who sailed with Captain Kidd, and felt too tired to work out more of it before going to bed, but this morning I realised I'd also read Lawson's Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin By His Good Mouse Amos (1939) and that I was mixing the two together. The titular cat had an earring, didn't he?

I've downloaded a pdf of This Simian World. Anything with that line about vaudeville has got to be worth reading. And it if it wasn't the literal inspiration for Sam the Eagle, I'm sure that somehow it played a role.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

None of those are familiar to me; but one of the things I love about smaller libraries is the preponderance of oddities in their collections. I read a trilogy from the Hickory Grove Public Library about a think called "gundspreaking" (pale, floaty vegetarians lived in treetops; dark, solid meat-eaters had been trapped underground) that turns up zero Google searches. I have no idea who wrote them or what they were actually called, but I could describe long passages of them, and no one I've met has ever read them besides me. I hope all readers have that - a book that populates our world but (to our knowledge) no one else's. It feels like a gift.

For what it's worth, I have never identified myself as a "fan." I've read fantasy, mythology, fairy tales, science fiction all my life, and I never thought of it as anything other than completely normal. I lived in a lot of places as a child, and every new school had cool new fantasy books I'd never read before and other kids who read them.

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

I adore A Necklace of Fallen Stars. Now I'm wondering where I put my copy.

Have you read Season of Ponies or Silver Woven in My Hair?

[seajules]

I've read A Necklace of Fallen Stars, checked out of the library when I was in junior high. It was far more adult than I'd anticipated, based on the title, and I remember being ambivalent and frustrated by it, but I can't remember why.

For years, The Seven Citadels was my go-to series of awesome books that no one else had read, but then yhlee mentioned them and we bonded over that. So now I'd say maybe Tatsinda and Under Plum Lake.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have no idea whether it holds up, because I reread it through blurry nostalgia so I can't tell, but The Power of the Rellard by Carolyn F. Logan is a book I have never heard anyone else mention. Lightning strikes, precognitive comic books, fun sibling relationships.

I think I'm the only person I know who's read Wilanne Schneider Belden (though I've handed her to a few people), besides Laura Miller, who bonded with me at Readercon about it. I only own Mind-Find but they do all hold up and I need to track the others down, including the two non-series books.

A book I recall scaring me immensely in first grade was also the first place I encountered a lot of folklore, such as the entire seventh son of a seventh son idea, except it was daughter in the book so when I heard it as son later I was confused. I can't say for certain but the internet seems to tell me it is Gypsy Summer by Wilma Yeo. Less than no idea how that holds up.

And it took me ten years to obtain a copy of Barbara Brooks Wallace's The Interesting Thing That Happened At Perfect Acres, Inc., but I still like it.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Slightly related, you need Alan Garner's A Bag of Moonshine. Illustrated by PJ Lynch!

I confess we bought a copy, used, particularly so that you could read stories out of it to Noel when she's older. (Not that we can't, but I had an agenda.)

Is The Little White Horse the right sort of Goudge? Or does it need to be Green Dolphin Country?

There was also a book about Deirdre of the Sorrows called, I think, Deirdre that really cemented for me the idea -- in primary school -- that fairy tales are not meant to have happy endings, sometimes. I've always wanted to find it again, particularly having been parted by death from someone named a variant of Deirdre, but with a title like that...

[eredien]

The Alley by Eleanor Estes. Probably one of my foundation books.
Curdie and the Pricess by McDonald. Everyone's read the other one. This one is better.
Ghost Tales of Uhwarries illustrated with woodcuts. Tales of escaped slaves and lynchings and humor and just plain creepiness that I haven't seen anywhere except the best of the Green Knowe books. Read it at 8. Scared the crap out of me. Now my sister has it, for catharsis, because it also scared the crap out of her.
Thomas by Mary Harris. Utterly amazing art, utterly banal story that transcends its banality to become almost delicate. http://www.flickr.com/photos/40423298@N08/sets/72157625232429061/with/5164761860/
Wise Child and Juniper, Monica Furlong. http://www.amazon.com/Wise-Child-Monica-Furlong/dp/0394825985