However, 2010 is still young, fresh and optimistic and this year I am going to be, if not more disciplined, at least more conscious of what I’m reading, in a zen kind of way.

To that end, I am joining The Story Siren’s 2010 Debut Authors Challenge, which means I promise to read at least 12 — if not more — MG or YA books published in 2010 by debut (see how this works?) authors. In the next post, I will make a Plan. Or if not a Plan, at least a plan. If you might be interested in playing along — and if nothing else, know that you’d be supporting new writers and filling their days with rainbows and their nights with mariachi bands — then check out the Siren’s posts here and here.

But that is not all! No, because if I’m in for a penny, I might as well be in for a pound and I think I will actually occasionally mention what I’m reading and whether I like it and why. See, a little while ago on the Upstart Crow Blog, Chris Richman asked what we had most enjoyed reading in 2009 — and it would have been really convenient if I had ever made any record of what I’d read rather than trying to dredge it up from the polluted crevices of my memory, which grows ever more unreliable as I soak it in ginger wine and rum.

On the other hand, I believe — as I always have — that we are in some way the sum total of our experiences and those experiences include the books we read.* In that sense, I have never lost a book because it has embedded itself in some small part of who I am. I am the walking library of my life.

*Including some we wish we hadn’t. For instance, if I could carve out the bit of my brain that read Running With Scissors, I would.

plea to Dumbledore

In case you are not au fait with first grade writing, it says “Dear Dumbledore, I’m stuck at a school for Muggles. I need your help. Send me an owl when you get this. Thanks, Helena.”

This resonated with me because I used to feel like that all the time. Like I was stuck at a school, in a house, in a world for Muggles and that I just wasn’t one of them and some day I would find out what made me different and then I would go off and be different and everything would be much much better.

Thing is, I was kinda right. That’s what growing up has given me — passage out of a school overrun by deeply muggle-ish Muggles and into a world where I fit in. No more must I lie and say that yes, I was allowed to stay up and watch SNL when I really wasn’t and even if I had been allowed, I’d have fallen asleep long before it was on and I probably wouldn’t have understood it anyway.  No more do I have to feel wrong and out of place because I don’t wear designer jeans or day-glo socks. (Yes I was at middle school in the early 80’s; how did you guess?) No more do I have to pretend that I’m not that smart really and no, I don’t really like to read. Bah.

Now I watch what I like (GLEE!) and read what I want (just read a whole bunch of Andrew Clement taken from Daniel’s bookshelf) and go to bed when I want (now) and eat what I want (mostly) and wear what I want (pajamas! and Doc Martens!) and no one looks down her nose at me and tells me “That’s just not cool.” Or if someone does, I don’t care. Who cares about being cool? I care about being kind and interesting and interested and fed in body and mind and heart.

And not about doing or being or saying what anyone else thinks I ought to.

The meme is to reach for the nearest book, to turn to the 123 page, to find the fifth sentence and post the next three. So here I am, reeeeeeeaaaaching for that book. Flip flip flip.

“Any word from August?” They didn’t answer, and he held up to show them four fat speckled trout neatly strung. “Supper!” he said, and for a moment they were all motionless, a tableau, he with the fish, they with their thoughts, the rest only watching and waiting.

from Little, Big by John Crowley. One of about fifteen books on my nightstand waiting for me, promising me brief respites from reality, tidy endings and brave adventurers. I am still waiting for my courage to rise.

C.S. Lewis wrote about his respect for the physical book, how he would wash his hands before handling them, how he would never eat while reading, nor sip tea nor read in the bathtub (egads!). I gave this deep thought since I generally like C.S. Lewis and respect his views. In the end, I decided that the physical book is simply a vehicle for words, almost an illusion and certainly should not be worshipped, idol-like, but used. This does not extend to allowing the children to jump on books or use them as weapons, but on the whole, we are not great respectors of the book object in this house. We eat while reading (and read while eating); we drink things and drip them on books. We read in the tub. I would read in the shower if I could figure out how to do it. We read in the garden and forget we left our book under the rosebush. We drop books accidentally in the sink while trying to read and wash-up at the same time. We even write on books sometimes (although never to obscure the text).

However, we adore the words. We injest them, pet them, roll them around in the inky caverns of our minds and mouths and make them part of ourselves. A bad book is worse than a Twinkie. It’s brain junk. Not just a lifetime on the hips but a lifetime in the neurons, firing off other texts, other words and creating monsters. Our children seem to be inheriting this word-lust. Daniel quotes what he’s reading almost unconsciously and could recite Jabberwocky in its entirety before he was two. Helena can now recite huge swathes of Winnie the Pooh and is often heard to mutter phrases like “Oh help and bother.”

What this suggests to me is that it is vitally important what you pour into their spongy brains. What you pour in, stays in. It can be fluff or it can be stuff, or ideally a mixture of both. Like this (which I found via the Middle of Nowhere, for which I thank her. It’s wonderful, a British TinTin (if that’s not too facile a description) and I’m thinking Daniel will love it.

I am increasingly confused, bemused and appalled by this country of mine and the people in it who seem to hold the majority view. These people like to ban books. They like to tell other people what to believe. They like to go to other countries and tell them what to believe. Over two thirds of the U.S. population believe that creationism ought to be taught alongside evolution in public school science classrooms. Over a third would prefer that evolution not be taught at all. These are not some wacko fringe. This is not even a slim majority. This is a huge proportion of the citizenry. Huge. This is why Bush is president. This is why the right to choose is even in question. This is why homosexual marriage is such an issue. This is why public schools are collapsing. This is why we are in Iraq. It’s appalling to me, and yet. And yet.

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. John Stuart Mill

If they were calling for something I agreed with (say, that we take George Bush and ten of his closest political cronies into the middle of the Sahara and leave them there with only Captain Underpants, some warm water and the collected works of Karl Marx) I’d be doing a happy dance. At last, I would cry, the country has come to its collective senses. But wouldn’t this be just the same thing? Wouldn’t then some uber-conservative blogger be crying out in horror that we are oppressing his right to be a complete oppressive jerk? How is this better?

I hate this. I hate being so fairminded and hooshy gooshy liberal and believing (as I do) that each person is equally entitled to her own opinion, even if I find that opinion abhorrent. I cannot see a safe way to draw a line about opinions. I cannot see a safe way to censor. I would like to. I would really really like to take all those people who voted for Bush, who think that Katrina was divine retribution for allowing abortions to remain legal, who think that eye makeup should invariably be frosted light blue, who think that I am wrong and put them in a large, reasonably well-groomed housing complex somewhere. That would be nice.

Although I fear someone has already done this, and that I got stuck here by mistake. There doesn’t seem to be much joy in swimming against this roaring tide of stupidity and conservatism. Time to move to Sweden, maybe.

Or it would, if I weren’t completely exhausted from carrying more than a thousand books back up the stairs today. Yes, really — more than one thousand. In fact, if I assume that each shelf holds about thirty books, there are probably closer to 1500 books up here. And they’re not friendly little pamphlets or mass market paperbacks either. These are large, heavy, hardcover books, some of them in Turkish, Arabic and French and many of them with savage, mind-twisting titles like The Political Economy of Social Reform and Fuzzy Set Social Science, which is what you get when your husband is doing a PhD in political science. About a fifth of these tomes are library books. Did you know that it was possible to have 200 books our of the library at once? I thought they came after you with librarian guns and staplers and inky stamps if you tried to have more than about a dozen. Clearly, a complicated librarian-PhD student treaty is in effect.

And they’re not all fitting back on the shelves. I don’t know what happened in the forty-eight hours they were in those dark boxes but I think they had babies, which would account for books like The Logic of Anarchy or How Soccer Explains the World. I’m having to double shelf these mothers (and fathers and all their offspring).

Frankly, it’s a wonder the house doesn’t collapse under all the weight.

Excuse me, crazy lady? We can hardly turn around in this house without tripping over a stack of good children’s books: picture books with words, picture books without words, board books, tiny books, I Can Read books, chapter books, short stories, poetry and books of the worst knock knock jokes you ever heard in your life. And I can no longer visit the Chinaberry website because I start filling up my cart with amazing books that I can’t afford. Also, I then read children’s books instead of something worthy, or something for my bookclub and then I have to read my bookclub book in 14 hours and try not to reveal that I spent the whole month rereading Narnia or reading these really good books by Ethel Cook Eliot that I never read as a child but should have. Or something by Enid Blyton. Or The Railway Children, my that was good. I also read a whole saga of Merlin as a boy books that weren’t in fact that great but still kept me reading. Also I just finished Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright who wrote the whole Melendy family series which I loved so.

But I digress. The point is that the world is full up of wonderful books for children with pictures that make you long for the world to be that beautiful (like Trina Schart Hyman). Not that we don’t need more beautiful books – we do, without question. But not, oh falsely-accented one, from you. I only recently let Jamie Lee Curtis get away with it and that’s because she wrote a book called It’s Hard to Be Five that has captured the tormented soul of my son. He feels, he told me, understood at last.

One of the reasons I read so many children’s books is that I’m prescreening books for Daniel (5) who is, well, to say that he’s a precocious reader would be an understatement. Last night in bed he read James and the Giant Peach AND The Enchanted Wood, both cover to cover. He was a little glassy eyed this morning, which always happens when he reads too much and talked right through breakfast about how he might live in a peach stone or where we would most likely find a Faraway Tree in Philadelphia. We discussed this and that for a while and we decided he might like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next and I said that we could go to the library this week to find it.

This evening, a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was pushed through our letter box. Daniel found it. We don’t know who might have dropped it off and why they didn’t ring the doorbell or how they had such uncanny timing. We’re simply accepting it as a gift from the Book Fairy. Who, let me tell you, doesn’t stock Madonna.

I have tried abebooks, which is a sort of a search engine for used books sold by all sorts of different sellers. But the books there are often just a little too expensive for used books and once you add shipping charges, well, usually I scuttle guiltily back to Amazon to spend the same amount of money and get shiny new copies. Today, however, I found what might be an answer.

Thriftbooks. They’re a relatively small operation and they sell their books cheap. Really cheap, even once you add the cost of shipping (which is clearly where they’re making their money). So, for example, just now I bought seven books for twenty dollars of which 17 was the shipping. Doesn’t matter that the real cost of the book is hidden in the shipping. It works out as less than three bucks a book. I’m in love.