Hear/Say

Ramona, by Louis Darling

One of my first chapter books (outside of the usual elementary trash: Ramona books by Beverly Clearly, or Animorphs, or Goosebumps, or the series about the girl who had photographic  memory– Cam Jansen) was given to me by one of my aunts or uncles, I don’t know which, for one of my birthdays, I don’t know which one. It was grandly called: The Ballad of Lucy Whipple.

Lucy, as you can probably guess, was an anti-heroine of her age: awkward, curious, adventurous. She had moved out to the west with her Ma to help run a mining camp. Her real name is Spunky California Morning~ but she refuses to be called anything but Lucy (good sense; it would’ve been seconds before someone started calling her Spunk), and she has to live with her mom dating various miner men missing teeth (Jimmy Whiskers: “”I aim to find enough gold to make golden teeth for these empty gums”).

Her brother’s name is Butte.  I think he dies later. Sorry.

Anyway, nostalgia much? Karen Cushman also wrote other books supporting stalwartly awkward girls who dreamed of more than the world they were born into. My old best friend and me used to love love love Catherine, Called Birdy, a story about a girl who is a medieval daughter of a medieval knight (who is really just a fat, raunchy landlord) and wants to run away to a monastery to read and write, rather than be courted by the many suitors arranged by her father to make him rich.

Blogging about all of this makes me bashful of how dorky-into-books I used to be. Hours used to fly by; I’d miss dinner, even, just to finish a book. Nowadays, I can’t sit still for five minutes. I still remember my venture into adult fiction: nothing too racy, just Cat & Mouse by James Patterson– his recurring hero-figure-police-detective Alex Cross in the streets of Washington D.C. fighting for justice against  the nefarious elusive murderer villain Mr. Smith (hilarious, no?)– although I remember there was a point where I shut the book in fear because of the graphic and sexual nature of the plot. This was 4th grade. Yet– it gave me a rush! I started reading his other Alex Cross books, like Along Came a Spider (also with that villain Mr. Smith), and there was one Patterson published later about cloning and freaks with wings… I also got into Michael Crichton books, and swallowed Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Sphere, Disclosure (racy. The movie has Demi Moore scratching Michael Douglas with sexually long, red nails), Timeline, Congo, Rising Sun, Airframe, and Terminal Man (which was about some epileptic dude that had some electronic computer installed into his brain which pushed him outta control). Then came Thomas Harris and his Hannibal Lecter series (Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, Hannibal).

Then I got back into the fantasy realm: Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, starting from A Spell for Chameleon, all the way to his Adept series which is a wicked mix of science fiction and fantasy. The Belgariad series is an excellently written fantasy adventure about a war between Gods and men: the politics is intricate, complex, and I can’t believe I read all of it, up to the Mallorean series that continues the next generation. I never got into The Wheel of Time, probably because of my superiority complex exalting Lord of the Rings. Speaking of fantastic, there used to be a young adult fantasy series called Circle of Magic, with much war and politics, missed love opportunities, etc.

But let me end on a cooler note… somehow. The last full book I’ve read and completed was In True Blood during the summer, and I’m currently working on Atlas Shrugged (but slightly failing). I enjoy anthologies or published collections of poetry (aaah, college: smoking and reading Baudelaire under the streetlight at 9 at night, so dramatic, so c00l NOT), especially out loud (I don’t think that is classified as cool), but mostly I have become visually oriented, where scrolling through blogs and hyper-liking things is what I do. I think that’s slightly more socially acceptable, but others might accuse me of trolling.

Graceee