Forgotten Books
Tonight I’m hoping to make the Seattle Urban Fantasy Author-A-Thon, 7pm-9pm at the Beaverton Powells. Mark Henry and Mario Acevedo will be there, and the audience will hold such luminaries as Richelle Mead and (I think) Caitlin Kittredge. I am certain there will be heckling and much fun. My own attendance is based upon the car not making that knocking noise and the Muffin getting home from work before 6:30. Wish me luck.
Yesterday I (are you ready for this?): knocked off 4K on the young adult book, made bagels from scratch, made homemade pizza, started Mixed-Starter Bread, and cleaned. Of all those things, it was the work on the YA that made my brain feel like it was ironed out flat and squeezed dry.
I’ve been thinking lately of books I feel are sorely neglected, so I decided to list five of them. Your mileage may vary, but I love these little books I’m about to list–and should you try them, I hope you like them too.
* A New England Girlhood, Nancy Hale. I read this when I was about nine, and I loved it. It’s a slice-of-life, a woman who grew up as a New England debutante thinking about her childhood and telling what it was like to live in that world. Some childhood experiences are universal–like losing something precious, or being cruel to a tag-along and only realizing later how bad that is, or wanting to go with your parents so badly you throw a tantrum. Interspersed with this are little stories about living as an adult, and how childhood memories can be misleading or illuminating, sometimes on the same day.
* Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, Various. This is an anthology I bought once at a library sale that has some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read in it, like The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman, Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, Stephen Vincent Benet’s King of the Cats, and more–like Henry Martindale, Great Dane, or The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. It’s just one of the finest compilations I’ve ever read, and I’ve read three copies of it to pieces now.
* Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson. I read this, again, when I was about nine. (That was a good year for formative books.) Sara Louise is born first, and her twin Caroline almost dies at birth. Everyone cossets and pets Caroline, who is a musical prodigy, and Sara is left feeling ignored and unloved (at one point, her bitch of a grandmama quotes the Old Testament to her, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated). So Sara turns to making her own way. The great thing about this book is the setting, an island in Chesapeake Bay fast losing land every time there’s a storm, crab pots, the stultifying suffocation of small-town life when everyone has already decided what you are. The ending leaves a little to be desired–even when I was nine I thought that Sara Louise deserved much more than nursing and marriage–but it has the virtue of being the ending Sara chose for herself and worked toward, so it made sense.
* Psion and Catspaw , Joan Vinge. Every once in a while I get the great urge to reread these two books; nothing else will do. Xenophobia, telepathy, poverty, outsiders, the longing to belong–it’s all in here, and Cat is a hero the way Sam Spade is a hero. He’s trying to do the best he can, measuring himself by a fierce internal standard, at the mercy of forces and people he can’t control, taken advantage of, and just generally mistreated. I think Cat was the first hero I ever really wanted to marry and “take away from all this.” Ironic, no?
* Passion Play, Sean Stewart. I think Stewart’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. In particular, Passion Play, which was one of the major influences for Dante Valentine’s world, is a dystopian work that kind of mixes a less-repressive Handmaid’s Tale with Psion, structured like a medieval morality/passion play, and with a tough female protagonist that could probably arm-wrestle most male protags under the table without breaking a sweat. I like a lot of Stewart’s other work, but Passion Play is a book I wish I’d written. And that, for me, is the sincerest form of flattery. The codification and government use of psionic talents in Dante’s world gets a lot from the structure Stewart built in this one slim little volume.
There you go, five books I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years and hope other people will discover.
And now I’m off to knock off more of the YA. I am SO SO hoping I get out to Beaverton tonight! If only to squee with Richelle about some neat stuff that I can’t share with everyone just yet, and to possibly see Scockercrew. *wink*
*crosses fingers*
