Monday Listicles: Books! Books! Books!

I haven't participated in Stasha’s Monday Listicles in a loooong loooong time. But this week's topic is near and dear to my heart, so I had to jump in. This week, Stasha herself asked us to write a list about... books.  

That's it: Books! Anything about books.  So... Easy - I love books!

Also? Not so easy - I love books - so I can think of 10,000 things to say about them, how can I narrow that down to ten.

And is this a list of MY favorite books? My kids' favorite books? Books I've really enjoyed, even if they're trashy? Or books I think are IMPORTANT?  Or... or... (Yes, I AM capable of over-complicating anything, thank you.)

In the end? I decided to go with, simply: 10 books that I love. (Even though it is guaranteed that as soon as I hit the publish button on this post I will hit myself upside the head with a "Oy! How could I have left THAT book off the list!) So without further ado:

Varda's List of Ten Books That I Love (or are important to me in some way) in no particular order:

1.  Just Above My Head, by James Baldwin

This last novel of his is, in my opinion, vastly underrated, and one of my favorite novels. It's gloriously shaggy. And it has one of my favorite 1st lines: "The damn'd blood burst..."



 2.  No Place On Earth by Christa Wolf

One that I can guarantee 99.9% of you have never heard of. The first line: "The wicked spoor left in time’s wake as it flees us."

3.  An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

I love Annie Dillard. She is one of my very favorite writers on the planet. I once found hardcover copies of this book on cheap remainder somewhere and bought 5 so I could give them away to friends.

4.  A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
These were favorite books of mine as a child (then a trilogy, now a longer series) and still are wondrous tales. Ursula Le Guin is an amazing writer.

5.  White Noise by Don Delillo

No description really necessary. Much lauded. A wonderful novel. Unfortunately the first Delillo I ever read, and nothing else ever measured up.

6.  Wave Without a Shore by  C.J. Cherryh 

Science Fiction. I love it. And C.J. Cherryh is an amazing writer, one of my favorites. I can't even begin to describe this book, a strange one. But it makes you think and think and think; and that's what science fiction does, at its best. And I just found out that she's a blogger and calls her blog Wave Without A Shore, so this must be one of her favorites too.

And now, some important books written by writers who are all on the autism spectrum. How important these are to me is hard to explain, except to say I read them all when Jacob was young and much less expressive of his thoughts and feelings than he is now, when once I feared I would never catch even a glimpse into his inner life.

Now, he is nowhere near as articulate as these folks - all adults with aspergers and thus not with Jake's specific language processing issues - but still, every day I am moving closer and closer to him. It is wonderful, and deeply appreciated.

But when I read these books, Jake was still so much a cypher to me. Hearing these authors talk about their experiences as autistic children in the confusing and cacophonous world has been invaluable to my early burgeoning understandings of my son: 

7.  Songs of the Gorilla Nation by Dawn Prince-Hughes

This is a beautiful and important book about autism, written by an autist who became a primatologist and began to understand people though gorillas. Incredible writing.

8.  Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison

Wonderful and richly detailed memoir of John Elder Robison's life both before and after his diagnosis of Asperger's. And much of his life takes places in Amherst, my old college town!

9.  Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Another wonderful memoir by an autistic author. Daniel is a math savant with major synesthesia who has memorized Pi to an amazing length.

  

10. Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

The mother of all autism memoirs. Temple is probably the most well known autists on the planet, and she is an amazing woman.  I met her once, and remember her asking the person standing next to me if he preferred her to look at or listen to him because she was having trouble doing both.


OK, I'm done - let's call it a night!  What are some of YOUR favorite books?

Q is for Quietude

Q is for Quietude

Something we know precious little about around here.

I live in the house of noise.

And this is not my natural state.  Certainly not how I was raised.

I was an only child.  A bookish only child.

I was raised in a house filled with reading, and classical music.

Bird watching, gardening, art and photography.  (A little TV, not too much, mostly PBS.)

I was a "good" girl.  No one yelled.

But it wasn't stuffy, deadened.  There was ebullient love.

Dinnertime was lively.  There was always much laughter and conversation.

But also?  Often peace, tranquility, quietude.

We could be separate and quiet and yet feel all together, the three of us in that house; my mother, my father and I.  (Well, up until the teen years, of course, which are never less than turbulent, but were not excessively so, for us.)

Pleasant memories abound: the three of us splayed about the living room sofas on a Sunday morning, pancake breakfast being digested, cats in laps, trading off sections of the Sunday papers, reading to ourselves but sharing especially wonderful bits with the others, working the Times crossword puzzle a group effort.  

But this is not how I live now.

I have a son on the autism spectrum who talks a lot, often repetitively, nearly all the time.  He also sings, screechily, and repeats noises he hears, because they delight him.

I have another son who would have a 24 hour a day conversation, if he could.

I have boys who love all things electronic and noisy; whose TV shows and computer sites and video games explode, clang, or play loud pulsing music all the time, often clashing rhythms assaulting me from two different directions, no escape except into the bathroom, and really, how long can I spend in there?

And I know that some folks with a non-verbal child would give their right arm to have one who talks all the time, like I have. (So I feel guilty for complaining.)

And I know that when the boys were 18 months old and not talking, when I wondered if I would ever hear their sweet voices, I longed for days like this, filled with their chatter.  And that when people told me this time would pass and I'd one day be wishing they'd just shut up, I looked at them like they had two heads, could not possibly picture that day.  (They may now say: "I told you so.")

And I am not hermit like, I like a full, lively house.  I regularly invite multiple kids over for group play-dates.  I wish we had a bigger apartment so we could cram in even more.

I often go out for after drop-off coffee with herds of mom friends.  We laugh so hard and carry on to the point of occasionally being shushed by old ladies wishing to caffeinate in peace.

I am a very social person.

And?  Truth?  A major league talker, myself.

But also, I do wish for occasional peace.  For Sunday mornings of quietly shared reading.  Of taking a nature hike with my family and actually serenely observing nature whilst on it.

This is not my life now, and it may never be.

I have boisterous, noisy boys.  I may have Jacob on my hands for years after other children would have left home.  (I hope not, wish for his independence, but cannot discount the possibility.)

I take my moments of quietude when I can catch them, fleeting, but still savored.

And try to remember why the sound of my boys never-quiet voices should ring sweetly in my ears.

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme. And isn't "Q" a great quirky letter with its curly-q tail?

Return to Prydain, Triumphant

Ethan, in his reading, is a creature of habit.  He likes series; long, long series, so there will be no unsettling surprises.  I read a lot of Magic Treehouse books to him when he was younger.  This fall he's just chomped his way through the entire My Weird School and My Weird School Daze series of humor novels.

The other evening, wailing that he had "nothing to read" in spite of overflowing bookshelves, I gingerly pulled out a book with trepidation... was he ready?  Wasn't he?  Because this was a special book, much beloved from my childhood.  And not just the story, but the actual book, a paperback survived these 42 years.

The book?  "The Book of Three" by Lloyd Alexander.

The first book in his wonderful, award winning five part fantasy tale, inspired by Welsh mythology (oh, those names with the double "Ff"s and "Gwy"s); a time of enchantments and ancient kings, swords and barrows.  Ethan has been loving the Deltora Quest fantasy TV show and books.  We have lived in the magical world of the Last Airbender for a while now (the books and the wonderful TV show, not the goofy movie).  So maybe, maybe...

My 1969 copy of the book

The cover and the pages have yellowed, but not crumbled.  Ethan was astonished by the cover price: 75 cents (how times have changed, my computer keyboard doesn't even have the little strike-out "c" symbol to render that properly).

But Ethan was suspicious; the book was an unknown entity.  Ignoring him, I picked it up and forged ahead, using my sneak attack maneuver: starting to read out loud while he was seemingly distracted by something else (in this case drawing).  It worked.  Two pages in, he came over and snuggled up against me, rapt.

When I got to the end of the first chapter and went to put it down, he begged me not to stop. "This is too good, Mom, we can't stop here."  And that's when the trap is sprung, "I have to do a few things before bedtime, honey, but you can read the next chapter by yourself if you want."  And he did.

So now, every night for the past three nights we have read two or three chapters.  I read one or two out loud, he reads one or two to himself.  He talks and conjectures about the characters, questions their futures. He pesters me to tell him the secrets, to answer the deep mysteries that are revealed only at the very end.

He howls at my reply: "You'll have to keep reading to find that one out," is placated by the one or two bones I toss him to keep him from dying of curiosity.

And tonight Ethan uttered the words that made my book-loving mother's heart melt anew: "Mom, I love this book."

I am kvelling.  I am over the moon.  The fact that I was exactly Ethan's age when I first read this book?  As thrilling to him as to me. 

For you see, I am a reader, I have been all my life.  Books have been my dearest friends since I was a young child.  And the Prydain series?  My very best friend for many years.

How many times I read these books over and over as a child I could not count.  There is something that deeply captivated me about them, the stories full of large and small perfect moments, the characters richly nuanced.  Watching Taran mature and grow from a feckless youth to a young man, wise and capable of leadership, still stirs my soul.

I always imagined sharing these books with a child of mine someday.  And that day is finally today, and my heart is fluttering.  This is a moment made ever more sweet and precious because for a long time I wasn't sure we would ever get here.

Because Ethan, while like me in many ways, is also clearly not me, made little.  He did not come to reading with joy in his heart.  He is a child of the age of electronics, a computer game kid.  And when he was learning to read at 5?  He declared reading and books "boring."  Way to stab an ice pick into your book-loving mom's heart, kidddo!

It was hard to find the right book to hook him with, a gateway book, as it were, but I worked at it, patiently (don't laugh, I can be patient when I need to).  A lot of trial and error, me holding my peace when books I thought would be a bit hit were declared "stupid" "boring" "girly" "babyish" "scary" and otherwise rejected.

We finally found a few that he liked, such as Louis Sachar's wonderful Sideways Stories from Wayside School books and proceeded from there.

Ethan reading a Wayside School book, summer 2009

Remember, I had a deeply hidden agenda in my back pocket: there were those books from my childhood that had meant so much to me, that I had hoped to someday share at least some of with my children.

Having only boys, and in particular a boy who (my best feminist intentions to the contrary) despised all things deemed "girly," I realized it was unlikely we were going to be visiting my well loved Little House on the Prairie or All-of-a-Kind Family series together.  Island of the Blue Dolphins?  Not likely either.

But a visit to Prydain, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea?  Maybe... probably... oh YES!

And?  The next "hold my breath" beloved yet boy-friendly childhood book? A Wrinkle in Time.  Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, chill your jets a little bit longer.  All signs are pointing in the right direction, we're coming soon.

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Associate.  If you click on any of the hotlinks to buy a book, I will receive a (very) small percentage from this purchase.

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