Bibliotica

I’ve been singing and acting in some fashion ever since I learned to talk, and I grew up watching the FAME tv show, even before I ever attended a performing arts school, so when I heard about Gonnabe, I was actually a little jealous - WHY couldn’t this have been around when I was a kid?

But I grew up in the pre-internet days, when we learned to type on actual typewriters, and the computer class we did have was stocked with TRS-80s, and PONG was a cool game. Yes, I’m THAT old. Of course, I also no longer live in California, and I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d want them to know about Gonnabe.

Of course, you’re probably wondering - what is it? Well, it’s a production company and networking opportunity headquartered in Emeryville, CA, and it specializes in entertainment for and by kids. By joining, bright talented youngsters and their families will be provided with information about auditions, classes, and local shoots, as well as be able to network with professional casting directors, singers, dancers, actors, and models already in the business.

There’s a common adage that it’s not what you know, but who. GonnaBe helps kids who don’t already have those connections, but do have drive and talent, get the WHO.

If I were a kid in this decade, and I knew about GonnaBe, I’d be pestering my parents. If I had kids who were interested in the arts - I mean REALLY interested - passionate, even - I’d be signing them up.

As a production company, GonnaBe is already responsible for Kids Unlimited and Say What. As a networking community, I suspect it’s gonna be even bigger.

As I’ve been reading and writing about auto insurance quote all week, and today is Mother’s Day, I thought I’d spend a moment talking about reading with my mother.

When I was very young, before I was entirely comfortable reading long novels without pictures, my mother used to read to me, doing all the voices. I especially remember reading Fletcher and Zenobia with her, and I blame this book for my dark tastes, because the illustrations were done by Edward Gorey.

A bit later, she began to read Little Women to me, but by then I was a voracious reader, and our “chapter a night” system was beginning to chafe. That was the last book she read TO me, but several years later, when I was nine or ten, she began to read WITH me.

One book I remember reading together was a collection of Katharine S. White’s garden essays from the New York Times, a year of them, one for each week, I think. It was thick with a lovely color, and we would take turn reading the essays aloud to each other during a hot Colorado summer - there was actually a drought that year, but I didn’t realize it til long after. I’m not certain, but I think the title was Onward and Upward in the Garden. (Katharine S. White, btw, was married to E. B. White, who gave us Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

That was the year I began stealing her Ms. magazines and reading them before she could. That was also the year I discovered Judy Blume.

We haven’t read together since then, I don’t think, though we’ve often passed books back and forth, fought over who was going to read one first, or spend lovely Saturdays going first to the library, and then out to lunch or a cafe.

While I can only handle my mother’s forceful personality in small doses, those sorts of days, where were together, but not necessarily engaged in conversation, are very comfortable, and one of the things I miss most when she goes home to Baja Sur, where she retired about seven years ago.

IF you’re reading this, I’d like to know when you stopped reading with your parents, or when they stopped reading TO you.

Six years ago, I had Lasik surgery on my eyes, and went from not being able to see the big E at the top of the chart to 20:20 vision, though it wasn’t instant - it takes time for eyes to settle.

People always ask what having the surgery impacted the most, and they generally expect grand answers like, “I can scuba dive without a special mask,” but the reality is, it’s the little things that you really notice, things like being able to see to shave your legs in the shower, or put on make-up, being able to read the numbers on the alarm clock when you wake in the middle of the night, and being able to read in bed without fear of rolling over on your glasses, or forgetting to remove your contacts and harming your eyes. (Ditto falling asleep on planes)

It is with this in mind that I present the following meme, in honor of the first 48 hours after surgery, in which I was forbidden to read anything at all.
These are the top 106 books most often marked as unread by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

A friend’s writing about her “bicycle going nowhere” reminded me of the Eowyn Challenge - a virtual walk through Middle Earth to keep you motivated to keep up with daily use of your elliptical or exer-cycle or whatever. Four of us are beginning the journey on Monday, and I’m looking forward to our imaginary, 478 mile, trek from Bag End to Rivendell.

I’m reminded also of a scene from one of my childhood favorites, Little Women in which Jo talks about sewing sheets, and making a tedious task less so by dividing up the seams into continents and talking about the countries and cultures they were likely to meet on a journey through whichever place was being discussed.

The imagination provides not only virtual journeys, but also the “spoonful of sugar” we need to make our own hated activities into fun and games.

When I was in college, I worked in the snack store, a fro-yo and candy store that also had one of those big commercial popcorn machines like the kind you see in movie theaters.

One of my favorite things to do on rainy weekends was to make a batch of popcorn, and sit there with a good book, letting the scent of buttery salty goodness entice passers-by. In that way, not only did I sell a lot of stuff, but I also got to meet a healthy cross-section of my campus-mates.

Last weekend, and again on Monday and Tuesday, I disconnected from the web, popped some popcorn (alas, the microwave kind) and curled up with the last two books in the Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy. The only passers-by were my husband and the dogs, but the combination of a great read (two actually), and a crunchy snack were all I needed to spend some blissful time away from the glare of the LCD screen.

Of course, now I have to review those novels for ATG, and prep the interview questions for Ms. Carey, and so I have to pull my head out of my virtual life in Terre d’Ange and back into that of a working writer.

I might need more popcorn for this.

We caught the end of Ever After on television tonight, while eating dinner. Or drinking dinner, really, since my dinner was a smoothie from Jamba Juice. I always enjoy that movie, and not just because Dougray Scott looks great in tight pants (though that’s definitely a plus).

Tonight however, while watching the last snippet of this re-telling of “Cinderella,” I found myself drawn to a childhood memory, of sitting on my grandfather’s lap, my bare feet resting on top of his sturdy leather work shoes, his back resting against the back of the red leather wing chair that currently occupies a corner of my writing studio.

Together, we would read from one of the big red collections of fairy tales. I suspect they were Reader’s Digest offerings, but it doesn’t really matter. Those books were magic and I wish I’d stolen them away before he died and they disappeared.

In any case, I’d read a page, and then hold the magnifier so he could see better. Those page-sized magnifiers were used once in a while, but often a more traditional glass was the lens of choice.

I wish I still had one of those, too.

The other day when I was at Borders, ostensibly shopping for the books I need for my Algonkian homework, but coming home $149 less solvent, the various Mother’s Day displays reminded me of Mrs. Pollifax.

If you don’t know who Mrs. P. is, she’s the fictional creation of Dorothy Gilman, and America’s version of Miss Marple, only with much more modern sensibilities. She wasn’t so fussy that she had to have the latest top wrinkle cream, but she did like hats and scarves, and while she preferred a notepad, she grew to understand computers.

I haven’t visited with Mrs. P since I was 18 or 19 years old and my mother and I spend a summer passing her novels back and forth, but I confess there’s a bit of guilt in my nostalgia, because while the books are lovely cozy mysteries, I always wished my own grandmother, who was feisty in her own way, was as fiercely independent as Mrs. P.

I’m going to have to revisit the series soon. Perhaps later this summer.

To those with spouses, partners and roommates who read:

Fuzzy is a generally sweet guy, but when he’s reading and I need to talk to him about something, he gets all glarey and grumbly and says, “Can’t you see I’m reading?”

Yet if I’m reading, and clearly absorbed in my book, magazine, or website, and he needs to discuss some burning issue like adding more laptop memory to his brand new computer, it is somehow okay for him to interrupt me, and not okay for me to shoot back his favorite response, “Can’t you see I’m reading?”

Does this imbalance exist in your relationship, as well?
If so, what do you do about it?

I often find that if I’m really into a book, I come away from my reading time feeling disoriented if the weather or the mood doesn’t fit with whatever I just read.

Right now, for example, I’m halfway through Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Scion, the fourth in the Kushiel series, and there’s been some mention of an attendant who recently came from one of the houses in the Night Court, and while, for this person, the experience was something akin to attending one of our massage therapy schools, those familiar with these books will understand that such a place is more like a very elite brothel, though all arts are taught, not just sexual ones.

I mention this because when I put the book down, I was half expecting to see candlelight and fabric hangings instead of my very modern surroundings.

I’ll be reviewing this book over at All Things Girl, along with it’s immediate sequel, sometime in the next couple of months.

For now, though, I really want to fill the tub with water and bubbles, light candles, and read the other half.

While I’m on the subject of shopping for bookish things, instead of reading books, I should add that we’ve pretty much shelved the plan to make the library into a library, and are now shopping for bookshelves that will work in other rooms, which has become an important issue, since I hired a cleaning lady who starts on April 3rd, and she can’t vacuum my bedroom if the pile of books that stretches the entire length of the window is still there.

We considered using the free pass to one of those directbuy clubs to look at their stuff, but most of the bookshelves at formal furniture stores are a bit beyond what we can spend when you consider the amount of shelving we need.

I’ve decided that we should all be independently wealthy.
Who’s with me?