From The Stacks

There's a Japanese tradition (which I picked up by some kind of Buddhist osmosis) of cleaning things up for New Year's, start fresh etc. I missed getting this done by the Western New Year--maybe the Lunar New Year...or somewhere before the spring equinox... As a book fiend, that means cleaning off my bookshelves, returning borrowed books and generally getting ready for the next crop of things to read.

January 12 to 17, 1976, I read:

The Scarlet Ruse, John D. MacDonald

The Hungry Ghosts, J. C. Oates
I have no memory of this book and didn't realize till I looked it up that "J.C." was Joyce Carol Oates. Now I have to go find it and look at it again!

January 12 to 17, 2006

This was a contrary week for me, cleaning out shelves of books I've put off reading.

Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
I never even heard of this when I was growing up, and it appears to be too late for me to read it with the requisite innocence! The first illustration shows a farmer with an axe, heading out to the barn to kill the hero, a newborn pig, the runt of the litter and therefore expendable. The second illustration shows the farmer's son, brother of little girl who intervens to save the pig and raise it. The brother carries both a rifle and a knife for reasons never really explained in the text. What is this a Quentin Tarentino film? I think I read a true crime article about this family.

Okay, okay. I realize that this is a much-loved story, and once again I'm being iconoclastic without hardly trying. But this small book made me very anxious. Not the spiders, Charlotte the spider is a nurturing sort of arachnid. I guess actual children would take the happy ending at face value. But I was uncertain about the Wilbur the pig's continued survival, seeing as how it was based on the farmer's whim, which could be easily changed.

Somebody Else's Music, Jane Haddam
I enjoyed reading Haddam's lighter novels, written as Oriana Papazoglou in the '80s, (Sweet, Savage Death, etc.), featuring romance writer and reluctant sleuth Patience Campbell McKenna.

I ran into trouble with this book, the first I've encountered (I believe there are 18) in the Gregor Demarkian series. Without going into detail, I had to stop halfway through the book because of the repeated and persistent body hatred aimed at fat characters—e.g., assuming that they were fat because of stupidity or insanity and inciting the reader to share the author's disgust at their bodies. Life is too short for me to spend my time in such a toxic environment.

This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but if Haddam were not such a skilled storyteller, I would not have lasted halfway through this 472 page book. I had to stop, because one way I protect my own emotional balance is to avoid spending much time with body-negative writings.

Heading back to the shelves...

If I were to have a country home with the requisite cute name on a sign outside (hard to imagine, but bear with me) it would be called The Stacks.