Canadian Book Challenge 5: Who Brought the Cat?

In early October, I was all about Margaret Atwood.  Wonderful Atwood and her dry, ironic tone.  You've probably read her, but have you ever heard her speak?  It's one of the true pleasures in a civilized world.  I could listen to her all day.

The first Atwood book for this month (my first ever was the 1976 novel Lady Oracle) was a 1991 short story collection called Wilderness Tips.  this has been on my TBR shelf for a couple of years.  There are some books, like this one, that I hoard like candy because I know I'm going to enjoy them thoroughly and I'm heightening my delight by delaying it.  Sometimes that doesn't always work out.  I'm thinking of Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill.  My fault, not Gaitskill's.  When a book sits on your TBR for 5+ years, your expectations can get wildly over-inflated.

Anyway, this was not the case with Wilderness Tips.  I knew I would enjoy it and I did.  First of all, it contains one of my very favorite short stories, "Hairball", which I first read when it was published in The New Yorker under the title "Kat".  Kat, an editor for a fashion magazine in Toronto with a reputation for her edgy style has been hospitalized with a large but benign ovarian cyst.  The cyst is removed, and the surgeon saves it for Kat as she requested.  While she's recuperating, her married lover whom she has transformed from provincial to cosmopolitan, maneuvers himself into Kat's job and maneuvers her out the door.  "Gerald couldn't edit the phone book," Kat thinks, upon hearing that "Ger" is her replacement.  I love that line; I can hear Atwood saying it!  The current-me loves "Hairball" as much as the much-younger-me did.  If you were to read only one story in this collection (but why stop there?) my vote is for this one.

After "Hairball", others I enjoyed were "True Trash", "The Bog Man" and "Death by Landscape".  "Weight" was vintage Atwood; a woman is raising money for a battered women's shelter in memory of her friend Molly who was murdered by her spouse.  The woman is having lunch with a rich company owner and she bitterly notices that he's viewing the whole thing as a prelude to a seduction.  "Isis in Darkness" is one of two stories from a male point of view about a would-be poet who develops a lifelong fascination with an enigmatic female contemporary who is much more gifted than he is.  The title story and the last story "Hack Wednesday" I didn't find very strong or interesting in comparison to the others.

My other Atwood read was the 2003 Oryx and Crake, a dystopian novel.  The book begins with Snowman who is sleeping in a tree, clad only in a sheet and starving to death.  The weather seems to be all messed up and he has to be on guard against threatening  and obviously genetically engineered animals like pigoons and wolvogs.  There seem to be no other people around except the very odd green-eyed herbivores that Snowman refers to as the Children of Crake, who treat him kind of like a monster and kind of like a prophet.  They have created a theology about Oryx and Crake, and always ask Snowman questions about them. Oryx was a a former sex slave who Jimmy and Crake both loved.

Snowman tries to make sense of his world by going back into his past when he was Jimmy, a young boy who grew up in the Compound, where extraordinary people lived (those gifted at science and technology).  At school, he becomes friends with Crake, a brilliant and strange newcomer.  During these recollections, Jimmy/Snowman makes an actual and treacherous journey back to Crake's top-secret lair, the ironically named Paradice Project.

In the early pages, Oryx and Crake feels a little bit like The Road, but during the passages detailing Jimmy and Crake's teenage years, Atwood's dry wit is apparent.  She writes adolescent males so well.  She even gets pretty silly with her names for animals and names of products and the video games and websites Jimmy and Crake play and visit, some of which seem creepily familiar.  I'm now reading The Year of the Flood, which was published several years later.  It is a companion piece to Oryx and Crake. Jimmy's in dire straits at the end of Oryx and Crake, so I hope that he'll turn up or some mention of him will be made in The Year of the Flood.

This huge dip into Margaret Atwood's work makes me sad that my TBR pile of her books is dwindling.  After I finish The Year of the Flood, all that will be left is The Tent.  It might be time to venture into the pleeblands for more Atwood.

The Elvis Game

Sheila at The Sheila Variations is always so nicely obsessive about books, theatre, film, music -- in short, everything I enjoy reading about.  She delves and delves into her subjects until you think she can't come up with anything else, and then she comes up with yet another handful of pearls.  Brief is not her middle name and I love her for it.  I found her last year when I was doing a little of my own obsessing about Harriet the Spy and Louise Fitzhugh and I've been a faithful fan ever since.  The way she tears into her topics with such gusto is beautiful and frightening.  Did I mention her intellectual generosity?  She'll never be accused of merely phoning it in.

Lately, Sheila has turned her predilection for obsession as well as her crackling intelligence and her dizzying writing talent upon The King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley.  Young Elvis?  Old Elvis?  All the Elvises. Any age, any angle, any order.  She's seeing Elvis through a prism, or maybe Elvis is the prism.  She's reading about him, she's watching him, she's and loving and analyzing everything.  Her delight has become my delight. Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (born January 8, like Elvis) comes to mind.  I still smile at the thought of him sitting politely with Bush through all those U.S. State dinners back in 2006, his mind fixed purely on going to Graceland.  He'd love Sheila's retrospective.

This lush cornucopia of Elvis has been going on at The Sheila Variations for about a month now.  At first, I merely wanted to put on my Elvis Greatest Hits CDs and reread Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography and page through a curious little number on my TBR called The Psychological Elvis (or something like that), but I was so into Elvis by now as well that it just wasn't enough.  Maybe a viewing of Kid Creole or Roustabout or Flaming Star?  Perhaps my secret guilty pleasure A Change of Habit?  Keeping pace with American retail, I got a jump on the holidays by playing Blue Christmas.

I'm not a huge Elvis fan, but he seems embedded in my life.  For me, there was no time before Elvis.  We had his albums at home.  I grew up being taken to every single Elvis Presley movie that came out during the 1960s then the concert films in the 1970s.  For several years, my mom cleaned house to the strains of her Promised Land 8-track.  ("Strains" might be the wrong word.  She turned it WAAAAY up.  Elvis sounded like a drunk.  The whole duplex shook.)

When Elvis died, I obsessed about he and my dad both being born in 1935.  For the next week or two, when my dad was at home, I hardly let him out of my sight.  I followed him from room to room.  When we went to the mall in Oklahoma City, I didn't want to shop.  I sat on the bench next to him.  "What?" he said irritated.

I shook my head.  You could die, I thought.  I didn't want to say it; I didn't want him to worry.  Even at the mall, Elvis was all over the piped-in music (not Muzak, for a change) -- old stuff, new stuff.  My father liked Elvis' last single Way Down because J.D. Sumner was doing those impossibly low notes, and he, like Elvis was a rabid Southern gospel fan.  Southern gospel irritated me, but I did like Sumner's backing vocal and my father was a 1935 model so I tried to dampen down my usual surl and look for things we could mutually appreciate.

All of this has been churning around inside me while I've been visiting Sheila's blog this past month.  A couple of mornings ago, I woke up and clearly realized that my longing for Elvis had gone all the way to the bone and taken a peculiar turn.  What I really wanted, I couldn't quite have:  I wanted to play the Elvis Game again.

The Elvis Game was something my friends and I concocted in third grade (1969-1970). At least three people were needed for the game:  A person we dubbed 'the stuck-up dookie brain', an Elvis and the audience.  The SUDB was an authoritarian figure always trying to show Elvis how to sing and dance or behave without his customary soulful vocals and trademark gyrations.  Elvis would dutifully try to follow these strictures but eventually he would break free and revert to type and the audience would go wild.  The SUDB was all sorts of things:  a minister trying to teach Elvis how to sing dull, deadly hymns in church while stiffly holding a hymnbook; a stern teacher trying to keep Elvis from making school fun; a drill sergeant attempting to show Elvis proper lockstep marching; and someone that I can't remember that was supposed to admonish Elvis when he wanted to break out and sing The Star-Spangled Banner at a rock-and-roll tempo.  (Someone's mother actually yelled at us for that one, saying we were unpatriotic, we were bad Americans for egging someone on to "mock our national anthem.")

The Elvis Game was entertaining because all of the roles were fun.  It was a laugh to be the SUDB and adopt an overdone, bossy, straitlaced tone, then crumble into exaggerated frustration; it was always good to be Elvis and be as opposite as the SUDB was telling you to be, while politely agreeing.  (My crowning success as Elvis was when I was sternly instructed by the SUDB to "teach arithmetic properly" and I did a sultry --or rather, an 8-year-old's interpretation of sultry -- rendition of  the multiplication table to the tune of Love Me Tender. I'm pretty sure I got most of the products wrong, but I even had the SUDB laughing hysterically.)  Even being part of the audience was great because you could yell and shout ideas and help raise the outrageous bar.  For example, I once coaxed ("coaxed" sounds too gentle) my little brother to don my stringy brown wig and "be" Ann-Margaret.

Sheila's view of Elvis seems much the same as our view in that long-ago backyard game:  An Elvis quick to spot bullshit and incapable of dissembling.  Not a hint of stuck-up dookie brain about him.  He was all about delight and his cool went beyond posturing; it was transformative.  Sheila is capturing this.  Junichiro Koizumi understands it.  I appreciate in varying degrees the performer who was Elvis Presley, but the one I carry in my heart is actually a compilation of eight and nine-year-olds from The Elvis Game.

Readathon: The End

1. Which hour was most daunting for you?  Hours 8 and 9 were rough.
2. Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year?  You can never go wrong with graphic novels or YA.
3. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year?  No.
4. What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon?  The challenges were so interesting.
5. How many books did you read?  3 and 32% of a 4th book
6. What were the names of the books you read?  (unpublished, untitled thesis), The Onion Field - Joseph Wambaugh, The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans - Rick Geary and The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti - Rick Geary  
7. Which book did you enjoy most?  The Onion Field
8. Which did you enjoy least?  The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans
9. If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders?  Continue with the brief but quality comments to the participants.
10. How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again?   Very likely  What role would you be likely to take next time?  Maybe 80% reading and 20% cheerleading

This is my first totally non-fiction readathon.

Pages read during Hour 24:  70

Total page count:  638

Readathon: Hour 23

Books read:  The Onion Field -Joseph Wambaugh
The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans - Rick Geary (graphic novel)

Books finished:  The Onion Field

Pages read:  86

Food:  Chocolate-covered almonds

Less than 1 hour to go!

Readathon: Hour 22

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field

Pages read:  83

What else?  Nothing but book

Readathon: Hour 21

Blogs visited:  A lot.  Maybe 20.  I'm officially laying down my pom-poms till next Readathon.

Books read:  0

Pages read:  0

Food:  Nope.

Drink:  No, but I am thirsty.  Time for water.

ZZZZZ?  No way.  That morning nap is paying off like crazy now, just as I thought it would.

Plan:  A concentrated effort to finish The Onion Field during Hour 22.

Readathon: Hours 18-20

Where did I wander off to?  Down the hill with Val to Family Mart.  We sat and drank coffees, ate some grapes, basked in the sunshine and talked.  Finally, Val pulled out her Maeve Binchy novel and I pulled out The Onion Field.

How many pages did you read?  61

Gotta love that Vitamin D:  It was nice to go outside for a while, but at one point, my brain started feeling like it had bald spots --  like a worn out and picked over chenille bathrobe.

Does anybody really know what time it is?  Does anybody really care?  I forgot to put my watch back on after my nap this morning and I kept checking my bare wrist to see what time it was.

Readathon: Hour 17 The Onion Field (1979). Crime scene

I've been thinking about the challenge question posed back in Hour 7 or 8:  "What music fits the book you're reading?"  Since Ian Campbell (played by Ted Danson in the film version, see above) played the bagpipes as a hobby, that would definitely fit.   I also thought of Johnny Cash's "Murder" songs or something bleak like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.  Now that I'm at the part in the book in which the trial is in progress, I'm thinking badly played carnival music on an out-of-tune hurdy-gurdy organ.

The Cardinals won Game 3.  I'm going to go outside and sit in the sun for a while and have a coffee with Val.

Readathon: Hour 16

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field.  This terrible crime happened on a Saturday night and Karl Hettinger had to be back on duty on Monday.  Insane.

Pages read:  32

Baseball:  The Cardinals are ahead at the top of the 9th.  Albert Pujols just hit a home run, making it 16-7.  I wish my Cardinals t-shirt with Pujols' name on the back wasn't in the washing machine right now.  I suppose Texas could still rally in the bottom of the 9th.  Baseball's a freaky game.

Readathon: Hour 15

Whatcha doin?  I took a walk down to the little convenience store for milk, juice and a small bottle of Coke.  Beautiful day.  I'm not going to waste it; I'm going outside to read as soon as the game is over.

The Game?  O my Cards.  They're leading Texas 12-6.  There's no surprise about the large number of runs; I thought it would be a high-scoring game since the stadium in Texas is a bandbox.

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field.  Wambaugh's very good when he's talking about the criminal mindset and police procedures, but his literary flourishes seem ham-handed. Maybe they'll pay off for this reader by the end of the book.

Pages read:  10

Food:  Choco muffin, warmed in the microwave

Drink:  Hot cup of tea

Blogs visited:  2

Readathon: Hour 14

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field  Wambaugh keeps talking about an unnamed red-faced, green-eyed junior officer who disagrees violently with the Hettinger order, but is too green to say anything.  I wonder if he's talking about himself.

Pages read:  39

Food:  None.  But I'm studying on a chocolate muffin

Drink:  I'm also pondering a cup of hot tea with milk and sugar

Baseball:  The Cardinals are ahead 6-3.

Readathon: Hour 13

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field

Pages read:  14

Food:  Salmon steak with minced ginger and onions

Baseball:  The Cardinals lead, 1-0

Readathon: Hour 12

Whatcha doin'?  Well,  I think I'm done with the eyelid check.  Woke up in the middle of this hour.

How do you feel?   A little dazed, but I've opened the curtains and the patio door.  The sunshine and cool breeze are bracing me.

Blogs visited:  3

Plans?  I'm going to see the rest of the Readathon through, reading and cheerleading the Ls, but I'm also going to be following the fortunes of my beloved St. Louis Cardinals.  World Series Game 3 is just now starting in Texas.

Readathon: Hour 9

Blogs visited:  2

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field -- One criminal has been caught (the worse one) and the other is still at large.

Pages read:  16

Food:  None

Drink:  A few glugs of water

Complications:   My hands are trembling so much that I keep dropping the book every few seconds.  I hate to admit it, but I need to nap for a bit.  It's not giving up, but it feels like it.  Looking on the bright side, giving in to sleep now will pay off later.

Readathon: Hour 8

Blogs visited:  3.  I'm finished with the Ks!

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field

Pages read:  35

Food:  That moon cake is history.

Close call:  Mr. Sandman was getting a little too close for comfort.  We battled for about 10 minutes.  Bring me a dream, indeed.  Like hell.

Readathon: Hour 7

Blogs visited:  15

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field

Pages read this hour:  0

New revelations:  Kristi is enlightening people about the meaningfulness of a peanut butter-and-green olive sandwich.  Now I won't be happy till I've had one.  Out of olives!  Damn!

Something that makes the expat me go "aaawwwww...": So many different countries are participating this time.

Readathon: Hour 6

Blogs visited:  1

What I'm reading:  I had to get back to The Onion Field.  Gripping, engrossing.  Perfect for a Readathon.

Pages read:  39

Food:  Not exactly.  I got so nervous reading about Powell and Smith's exploits prior to meeting up with Hettinger and Campbell that I bit my left thumbnail.  A short while later, I contemplated the beautiful little moon cake in the photo above, but haven't eaten it yet.

Drink:  Around midnight, I had poured a Coke with lots of ice, but forgot to drink it.  I threw the watery mess down the drain.

Readathon: Hour 5

What I'm reading:  No books this hour.  I decided to take a break and proceed with my Readathon Cheerleading duties.  I'm on the Golden Grahams team.

How's it going?  Pretty good.  A lot of people on the list aren't participating, but maybe they're just not up yet.  I've read some good blogs, seen some wonderful snacks and got a new addition to my wish list:  Through the Language Glass:  Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.  The author is Guy Deutscher.  Thanks, Kathrin!  Oh, and Kai is reading 35 comics --very cool, very fresh.  Wish I'd thought of it.

What's different?  This is my first time to cheer people on using Twitter.

What's difficult?  Reading everyone's post carefully and leaving him or her a thoughtful comment.  I wouldn't have it any other way, but I can feel my thought-gears starting to squeak and grind in protest.

Food:  Being on the Golden Grahams team makes me want a bowl of the same -- not so easy to find in Korea.

Wardrobe adjustment:  I turned on the heat and now I'm broiling.  I don't need my hoodie hood up anymore.

Readathon: Hour 4

What I'm reading:  Still reading The Onion Field.  Brilliant stuff.

Pages read:  31

Food:  10/30 chocolate-covered almonds.  (Thanks, Val!)

ZZZZ?  No, of course not.  But my right eye feels gravelly.

Readathon: Hour 3

What I'm reading:  The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh

Why?  I saw a newspaper article recently about how one of the murderers featured in this true-crime book about a cop killing petitioned for compassionate parole because he's terminally ill, but his request was denied. James Woods played him in the movie version.   Excellent introduction by James Ellroy.  He wrote that The Onion Field was the book that changed his life.

Number of pages read:  50

Things learned:  1.  I'd never heard of the drug Naline before.

Wardrobe adjustment:  I've got the hood on my hoodie pulled up.  I'm a little chilly, but I don't want to turn on the heat yet.

Readathon: Hour 2

What I read (and finished!):  Unpublished thesis about expatriate women and Facebook.

Pages read:  42

Books completed:  1

Reading flashbacks:  1.  Suddenly, I saw myself very clearly back in the late 80s or early 90s wearing an R.E.M. t-shirt and reading Bad Behavior, a book of short stories by Mary Gaitskill.

Songs listened to:  1  "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" - The Smiths

Food:  Still full from the bagel and cheese

Drink:  A few sips of Coca-Cola.  The real one.  Not that diet stuff

Eyes:  The right one seems to be fogged over a bit.  Time for some Visine.

Readathon: Hour 1

What I'm wearing:  Blue jeans, St. Louis Cardinals hoodie

What I'm reading:  An unpublished thesis about expatriate women and Facebook -- I have dozens of questions for the author and have started a wish list of some of the works she has cited.

Pages read this hour:  30

Food eaten:  An onion bagel with cheese

I tried to rest a lot today and not read or use the computer to save my eyes (although I got so bored I watched part of a movie, The Conspirator).  I'm hoping this precaution will pay off in the middle and late hours of the Readathon.

Overture: Cheers To The Freakin Readathon

Cheers to the freakin Readathon
I read to that, yeah yeah
Oh, let your page count pile up
I read to that, yeah yeah
Don't let your eyelids get you down
When your brain feels ground, cheerleaders gonna come around
There's a challenge every hour everybody hold your book up
and I read to that, yeah yeah yeah yeah
Gotta book in my hand and my mind on my snack pile
I got my Visine drops and I'm feeling hella-lectual
and I read to that, yeah yeah yeah yeah
I read to thaaaaaaat...

Okay, I think I'm ready now.

"It's probably all Enid Blyton's fault.": A Secret Seven Conversation with the Terrific Two

My Cracked Spinz book group read Puzzle for the Secret Seven by Enid Blyton for our September meeting. Unfortunately, I had spoiled any enjoyment I might have gotten out of the book by first going to YouTube and watching Enid. This biopic presents a rather unsympathetic side of Blyton. Helena Bonham Carter starred as the title character and she really nailed it. I found myself -- and still find, actually -- frozen by that performance from reacting to her work.

Luckily, help was on the way. Cracked Spinz members Val and Paul both grew up in England and read Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five books at a young age. I was interested in their "double-vision" --what they remembered all these years about the books and what is there for them now as adults. For a couple of weeks they carried on the following email conversation which they've generously allowed me to turn into a blog post.

Paul:  Hi Val.  First, thanks for reuniting me with the Secret Seven after our 35 year separation.  It was quite an eye-opener.  When I was a kid, I used to prefer the Secret Seven to the Famous Five - Blyton's original band of investigating kids - because I felt I could relate to them more.  The Famous Five were clearly upper class kids from another era, whereas somehow the Secret Seven felt more modern, more democratic.  I can't believe I really felt that way after just reading Puzzle for the Secret Seven.  I was surprised at how dated the mindset was.  Although it was written in 1958, these are more like little Edwardian kids, kids of the empire, with a belief in racial superiority and a duty of care towards the lower orders.  It was appalling really how they fixed up the gipsy woman's caravan, then thought nothing of walking into it uninvited to search for the stolen violin.  I definitely want to read a Famous Five book now to check if they are really more patrician than the Secret Seven.

I don't have any problem with these books still being published and read by kids today, but I wish they wouldn't tinker with them.  In this edition, they've updated the money with references to '50 pence' which didn't exist then, and kids being given 20 pounds - a vast sum in the 1950s - to go to the fair.  It should be kept clear that these books are period pieces and that these people and they way they think belong in the past.

Val:  Paul, I totally agree with what you are saying.  As a child, I found the storylines to be kind of comforting with the cosy tales of tea and parents who were around  but not interfering with adventure!  Reading it as an adult I kept getting tripped up by the language in particular.  They way Blyton describes the poverty-stricken woman is so negative.  Meanwhile, her oldest child is portrayed as being 'not quite right in the head' -- an observation which is unchallenged by any of these so called detectives!

What did you make of her usage of the 'SS' represented in symbols on group badges and the shed door?

I also felt myself getting annoyed at the gender stratification, with the girls often being left out of the most exciting projects.

Paul:  Dunno about the SS thing, but people have tried to make the Nazi connection with Blyton.  I just Googled an article in the Independent about how she seemed not to object to talk of appeasement at some party in the late 1930s - really poor stuff, a complete non-story (it actually has a gaudy "Revealed" headline too, but it doesn't reveal anything).  I doubt she was a Nazi-sympathiser then, but Peter out of the Secret Seven - I could definitely see him in a Gestapo uniform.  I'm not sure she always presents Peter as a hero, though.  He gets called an idiot in this book for insisting on passwords from people he knows, and Blyton really does paint him as an idiot in scenes like that.

And yeah, the sexism was something else that wouldn't be tolerated now.  The girls weren't allowed to investigate anything after dark!  I'd be interested to know what you think about kids reading this kind of thing now.  Do you think 21st century girls could, or should, enjoy these stories?

Val:  My guilty secret is that I saw a lot of myself in Peter!  His need for order and protocol made me cringe but nevertheless...I never thought about the fact that she was belittling him in those scenes, though now you say it, it makes sense.  I have a lingering suspicion that he was much more a reflection of herself.  If you have seen the film 'Enid' on YouTube you'll know what I mean.

The story you linked to seems to be a clear case of self-promotion for the writer!  While I do believe that she had a lot of faults, I would hesitate to paint her as a Nazi sympathiser on such flimsy observations.

As for the sexism, sadly I think these days neither boys nor girls would be really allowed to wander around so freely.  That's a terrible shame as crime stats (concerning children as victims of abduction or assault) really haven't changed since then.  It's all about perception, I suppose.  On that subject, I felt uncomfortable when the hired hand went into the caravan - where the blind child was sleeping alone - and forbade the kids from going in with him.  It's really hard to read this stuff without being influenced by cultural perceptions of appropriate behavior.

The stories seem so old-fashioned to me now, in the language as much as the attitudes.  I'd like to think modern girls would see through that, but can't be sure.  The shelves of W.H. Smiths were stocked so I have to assume somebody is reading these!

The foreword to this story was written by one of Blyton's [two] daughters.  Did you know they tell completely different tales of their childhood?

Paul:  That's interesting about how kids wouldn't be allowed to roam free like we did in the 70s.  During summer holidays we would be out of the house after breakfast sometimes, going on long walks or bike-rides with a butty*-box and coming back around 5pm for our tea.  It was all quite Enid Blyton-ish, I suppose.  (We also formed secret societies and had meetings in sheds and garages).  When we were a bit older we'd be getting on buses and trains and generally getting out and about in the world without adult help.  It seemed like a normal part of growing up but I'm afraid you're right that kids don't do that so much now.  I was walking to school without adult supervision when I was eight or so I think, half an hour each way.  It seemed perfectly safe because there was a couple of hundred other kids all walking the same way.  You'd be hard pressed to find a kid of any age walking to school these days.  All this must distance modern children from the Blyton stories even more, but clearly there is still an appeal.  What could it be?  Why are they still reading them?  I'd love to know.

I never felt creeped out by the bit about Matt in the caravan with the boy, but I've looked back at it and I do a bit now.  "Matt walked into the dark caravan making soft, comforting noises in his deep, kind voice.  Peter flashed his torch swiftly inside and saw Benny's dark head on a pillow in the corner.  Old Matt bent over him."  Is there something wrong with how we assess interaction between adults and children now?  Surely Blyton never intended to suggest anything untoward going on, but this passage does make alarm bells ring in our modern sensibilities.  (My cousin is a primary school teacher in the UK; she has been advised never to touch a child, even to comfort a five-year-old with a scraped knee).

I don't really know anything about Blyton's life, character or her relationship with her daughters.  It's interesting that they have different stories to tell though - were they a bit dysfunctional?

* sandwich - for our transatlantic readers

Val:  My life growing up was pretty much like yours.  We had a massive field at the back and spent entire days there making camps and wishing for a tree house!  We also had secret societies, though nothing much mysterious ever happened.  This led us to go looking for things.  I remember once we decided the bloke down the street was kidnapping people and cutting them up in his shed. (He was always in there banging about - it kind of fit.)  I'll never forget the day we were skulking about in the bit of the field behind his house, peering through the hedge and taking notes (lol).  Then the man himself came up behind us and asked what we were up to.  I have never run as fast in my life.

I wonder if kids today like the books for the same reasons I did - they represent something you can't quite touch but yet it all seems very real, like it could very well happen to somebody - not just you, and kind of comforting.  Maybe we should do some more research on this topic.  I'm going to ask about it on Twitter.

Maybe I noticed the (unintended I am sure) connotations of Matt's actions because I was reading it with an eye out for how it seems in current society and the entirely different place kids today occupy there.

I think I was about 10 or 11 when my mother told me that Blyton was 'not a nice person'.  I can clearly remember that this information upset me, and I read a lot more about it as I grew up.  In a nutshell it seems that she craved attention from children but had no real interest in her own.

I remember reading Noddy and Big Ears (very un-PC names these days), and I also loved Blyton's boarding school books.  Did you read more than the SS and FF?

Paul:  No, I never did read any Blyton outside of FF and SS, but I think you really got to the core of the appeal there, when you said that what happens to the kids in the books could, maybe, possibly happen to you and your 'secret club'.  A member of our secret club also had a sinister neighbour we used to spy on and keep notes about.  We imagined him getting up to all sorts of dastardly deeds and would often sneak into his back garden and try to look through his windows.  We got chased once or twice, too.  Our stories are really similar and it's probably all Enid Blyton's fault.  There were probably kids all over the country harassing perfectly innocent neighbours after reading her books.  Growing up in the suburbs was so boring that you always craved excitement and when it never came you just had to invent it.  Blyton was certainly an inspiration there, and it makes me think of her more sympathetically.  You don't critically examine your influences as a kid, but looking back, I think my childhood experiences were much more colourful because of what her stories egged us on to do.

I'm interested in how culture-specific all this is.  I'd like to read some Korean children's literature to find out what kind of examples it's setting.  I'm guessing there very different.  but the whole thing is skewed by chronology, Blyton being so dated, so you might have to go back in time for a true comparison.  Also, Korean children's literature today, as far as I can see is dominated by foreign stuff like Harry Potter - though I hope I'm wrong.

It's also interesting how most of our observations on this are sociological and not literary.

Bybee:  I have a question:  What would be the approximate age a child would become interested in Blyton?  Also, at what point would they have outgrown the FF or the SS?  Are there any books of hers that appeal to older children, like young adults?

Paul:  Probably started when I was sevenish.  I was done with em by the time I was ten, I think.  Val?

Val:  I am pretty sure I was into the boarding school books by 11 or so.

Paul and Val, thanks so much for agreeing to do this!  I hope you'll both decide to reread a Famous Five book and come back for another conversation.

Guest Post by Faraway Hammer: "Creating Riches for Unpopular Writers"

•  Many thanks to my friend Valerie Hamer for agreeing to do a guest post about her fledgling bookworm days for this blog.  Valerie is a British writer and teacher currently living in South Korea. Between making marmalade cakes and working on her first non fiction book, she can be found blogging at Faraway Hammer Writing & Publishing. She can also be found on Twitter @farawayhammer.
• 
  

  Non fiction writing, Faraway Hammer Writing & Publishing

  www.farawayhammerwriting.com
  

  Faraway Hammer writing features non fiction articles, blog posts and books related to expat life, travel & teaching.

On my eleventh birthday I celebrated by applying for my adult library tickets. They were made from green stiff card and quickly became my treasure. I'd long been bored with what the kids' section had to offer - now here was the world of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel at my grubby fingertips.


Being a ferocious reader, borrowing four books at a time just wasn't enough. How could I choose from the vast array of goodies? I tried hiding the surplus behind larger books, or in a different section, but they were never there on my next visit. Eventually a kindly librarian suggested I use my parents' tickets as well. Result! In no time I was working my way through an average of twelve books every week or two, and was in literary heaven.


One day I read a newspaper article which blew my mind. Evidently authors made money not only from book sales but also based on how popular they were in libraries. It was thrilling to think that I'd been contributing to their riches simply by checking out something they'd penned. For a few weeks this dominated my borrowing habits. If I was torn between two books I'd decide based on the author cover shot. Those who looked kind or were handsome tended to win!


As time passed I got to thinking about the forgotten writers. How sad they must feel when there was never any kind of royalty cheque for them. How many books were neglected, overlooked? It was quite easy to track them down. I simply spent a couple of afternoons stalking users and noting their habits. After the first dash to the returns trolley - somehow a book that's just been read by another is the first choice for many others - the majority headed for the romance, large print or contemporary paperback sections. Not one ventured to the very back of the building, where shelves of dusty cowboy stories lined the walls. Success!


Eagerly checking the fly leaf for date stamps I found most of them had not been borrowed since well before I was born. Despite having achieved my goal I felt a momentary sadness. Words are like living creatures - they need to be noticed, loved, enjoyed. But hey, I was about to make a difference. Pretty soon recognition would be coming their way and I could hardly wait.


Twelve at a time I hauled these cowboy novels home. Three times a week I returned them and did it all again. At the beginning I tried to read them too. I'd grown up with western TV shows like Bonanza, and had a keen interest in the stories and lifestyle. But try as I might the tales of 'Gunslinger's Revenge' or 'Showdown at the Cactus Saloon' were as dry and unpalatable as desert dust. It would have to be enough that they were being checked out. I just couldn't bring myself to give these unknown authors anymore than that.


My mother watched this ritual with amusement, and it was likely the non reading which worried her the most. So one day, having asked what I was up to, she listened carefully to my grand plans of creating riches for unpopular writers. It must have been hard for her to burst my philanthropic bubble. But what choice did she have but to share her knowledge of author royalties, copyright time limitations and the public domain? It had all been for nothing.


In some ways being released from this self imposed duty was a relief, leaving me free to read for pleasure once again. But any rite of passage carries a bittersweet memory, and that day I took one more step into the adult world. A place where achievement doesn't always mean success, and effort can sometimes be futile.

Skimpy Reviews

To the books below:  Sorry for my skimpy words.  It's not you, it's me.  Blame my fragmented mind.  Blame my new and sudden three-hour class on Mondays, "History of the English Language".  Ordinarily, my mind hums along in book review mode, but not anymore. Now it takes any opportunity to go skittering off to dictionary.com and wondering about skimpy (possible 19th century combination of scant and scrimp) and what it means and its derivation.  Ditto skitter (possibly Norwegian skutla, "to glide rapidly").  Ditto ditto (from the Italian detto, meaning said).  Sigh.  You see what I'm up against.  It's like the girl who has a dream about a girl who has a dream about a girl who...(dream: Old High German troum).  No!  Enough! (enough: Old English genog).

Little Men - Louisa May Alcott.
 I must have read an abridged version when I was a child -- one that had had most of the treacle siphoned out.  A veritable tag team of baby talk and sermonizing.  Sometimes they almost collide in mid-air.  I did notice something interesting, though:  a couple of times when the kids at Plumfield ran to Jo with one of their "little" problems,  the author made a point of saying that Jo was busy with something else (like writing) or she was trying to take a few minutes for herself.  It was sort of like muttering under her breath in a quick aside.  Alcott was really out to get Jo.  First, she wouldn't let her marry Laurie then she put Jo in a life that would have given Louisa herself hives.  I don't really like this book or the characters anymore except for one -- Dan, the ruffian orphan who shows up at Plumfield unexpectedly.  He is the sole proof from Little Men that Alcott had the stuff in spades when it came to creating characters.  I'm glad he's in Jo's Boys and I wish he could have had a novel to himself.  With the modern trend of authors riffing on classics, he's got a good chance.

Puzzle for the Secret Seven - Enid Blyton.
I finally made my acquaintance with a Blyton book, but I seem to have spoiled things for myself by watching Enid, a movie about Blyton that came out a few years ago and stars Helena Bonham Carter in a less-than-sympathetic performance as the prolific children's author.  That movie totally colored my reading experience.  Help is on the way, though.  My friends Val and Paul read the Famous Five and the Secret Seven as children and now again as adults.  They're in the middle of an email discussion about their 'double vision' which they've agreed to let me share with everyone here.  I can't wait.

Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay.
An American journalist living in Paris is covering the 60th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv, which was a roundup of mostly Jewish children by the French police.  As she learns more about their fate, she also discovers that one of the families is linked to her husband's family.  The 1942 story line is so vivid and horrific that the 2002 events seem bland and uninteresting and the characters cardboard-ish by comparison.  Whatever its flaws, the novel is far superior to the 2010 movie version starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Aidan Quinn, which is breathtakingly bad.

Before I Go to Sleep - S.J. Watson.
Christine, a middle-aged woman living in London, really got whacked with the amnesia stick.  Not only does she have no memory of her past, she has no ability to create new memories.  Everything she learns from one day to the next gets erased when she goes to sleep for the night. Author Watson in his debut novel brings it and brings it and brings it.  Wow.  A first-rate thriller.

The Jump-Off Creek - Molly Gloss.
A short but brilliant novel about Lydia Sanderson, a strong-willed woman who pulls up stakes in Pennsylvania when her husband dies and sets out to homestead in 1890s Oregon.  One of the best novels ever about the hardscrabble experience of pioneers.  I can't praise it highly enough.

Please Don't Shoot My Dog - Jackie Cooper.
 Despite the title, which refers to director Norman Taurog's solution for a pint-sized actor who wouldn't cry, Cooper seems curiously remote from his days as a child star.  His story gains more focus during his teens, his time in WWII and his determination to make the transition from childhood and Hollywood to an adult actor on Broadway.  He got lucky and broke into TV in its infancy.  Since much of TV was live in the early days, this was perfect for theater-trained actors.  Shortly after that, he got into the business end of show business and became vice-president of program development at Screen Gems which produced many popular shows like Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and The Partridge Family among others.

 In this autobiography, Cooper has plenty of gossipy and racy (and kind of creepy...thinking about the Joan Crawford one here) anecdotes about some of the people he knew in the movies and in television, but sometimes he comes off as defensive or occasionally, just plain dense.  These tendencies are thrown into even sharper focus because he and his ghostwriter made the decision to allow people from Cooper's life tell their side of the story in short paragraphs interspersed throughout the book.  The effect is more tiresome than illuminating, and it all feels like hack writing.  A better title might have been Please Don't Shoot My Dog of a Book.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Joshua Then and Now - Mordecai Richler

I like the idea of this book better than the actual book.  It's a comic novel done up like a mystery, but there are parts of it that feel so dated.  There is also a long middle section that feels interminable.

 Joshua Then and Now starts out promisingly:  Joshua Shapiro, a middle-aged Canadian TV journalist is recuperating from a serious accident, his wife has disappeared and he's just been outed because some tender and salacious love letters that he wrote to a young novelist 20 years before recently came to light and has been published.  He's being guarded from the nosy press by his father-in-law, a Montreal senator and his father, an ex-boxer turned loan shark heavy. But is Joshua inside upset and quivering?  No way!  He's  reading the old correspondence and laughing like crazy at the inventiveness of his side of it.  Also, what about those black silk panties the police detective sees him wearing a few days before the accident?

My favorite scenes in the book are with young Joshua and his unconventional family in 1930s and 40s Montreal.  His father is always having to go into hiding because of the nature of his work.  His mother has plans to embark on a career as a stripper, and she makes her debut at the party after Joshua's bar mitzvah.  In another amusing episode, Joshua's father attempts to simultaneously give him religious instruction and information about the facts of life during the Days of Awe.

 I also liked the parts about English financier Jack Trimble, who seems to have out-Gatsbyed Gatsby.  Joshua Shapiro regards him with loathing and Trimble seems to be the villain of the piece if you style it as a mystery but I couldn't help finding him interesting and having a bit of a soft spot for him.  Joshua and Trimble were alike because of their outsider status and dogged quests to settle old scores, so maybe Joshua was feeling a bit of self-revulsion.

I usually love this kind of novel because it makes me feel smart because I have to keep track of the jumpy timeline and the characters, but this book made me cranky.  I think it's because too large of a section of the novel is set during Joshua's adult years in the 1970s where he's spending time with his wife's crowd, a bunch of decadent WASP-y types.  I was having flashbacks to my Harold Robbins-reading days.  By the time Joshua revisits Spain (the 1950s experience and its 1970s followup are crammed together confusingly), I was starting not to care and merely soldiered on to the end.  I would have dropped this book into the DNF file without a moment's thought if I hadn't wanted to rack up some Canadian points for the challenge.

I don't recommend this book, but I would really like to see the 1985 film version with James Woods as Joshua and Alan Arkin as his father.  Richler adapted his own novel for the screen.  I wonder if he kept the same storytelling device.  Aside from the excellent casting, the movie can't help but be better than the book if only because Richler had to trim a lot of his original bloated excess.

Even though I didn't care for Joshua Then and Now, you can't kill my love, Mordecai Richler!   I have plans to both read and watch Barney's Version.