Nope, the only plan that works for me is the one I discovered when I was about six years old:

1. Go to the public library.
2. Pull a random book off the shelf.
3. Read the first few pages.
4. If it seems good, put it in your tote bag.
5. If it doesn’t seem good, replace it on the shelf.
6. Repeat until your tote bag is full.

I know there are plenty of people out there who prefer to own their books, but I much prefer to borrow them from the library. It’s not just the “what if I spend money on it and then I don’t like it” problem, although that is certainly part of it. But even more, it’s that I like sharing books. I like knowing that someone read it before me, and someone else will after. Because that’s the greatest thing about books: they fill you up, but they don’t get used up in the process.

Oh, yes, and I like it when the pages are soft and a little fluffy around the edges. I like the library bindings that truly allow you not to judge the book by its cover because the cover is completely blank. And I like the other ones that have the original dust jacket preserved under a layer of deliciously scotch-tape smelling, delightfully crinkly, plastic wrap.

Yum!

Anyway, Lena, my second third grader, was in desperate need of Oz books. While she browsed among the Baums I moseyed a little farther down the aisle and happened upon the Babbits, the Natalie Babbits, and among them was The Search for Delicious. I immediately snatched it off the shelf and slipped it in the middle of Lena’s stack. My plan was just to leave it there for her to find and read on her own but as soon as we got home I succumbed to temptation. I sat Daniel down in front of the latest PMK video (remember his obsession?), retrieved the book from Lena’s stack, and finished it in time for dinner.

What can I say about The Search for Delicious? If you haven’t read it yet, or if you (like me) remember loving it as a kid but don’t remember the actual story, you simply must get yourself a copy of this lovely little book. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but I will share some random thoughts I had while reading.

First thought: The book reminds me a bit of The Phantom Tollbooth, but where Tollbooth is raucous and rowdy, Delicious is gentle and tender. What they share, though, is playful language. For example, listen to the Mayor: “It’s possible that, on the whole, part of it could be an overall undercurrent of dissatisfaction. If the King lies down on the job, the people will stand to gain a loss of confidence in him. Mark my words, in the end it will be the beginning of trouble!” Isn’t that just charming? And, like Phantom, this book doesn’t just happen to contain playful language. It’s quite deliberate. The slipperiness of words is what this book is about.

Second thought: The illustrations in this book are exquisite. And dammit, they were made by the author herself. A double whammy! In fact, not just the illustrations but the book design as well, perfectly reflects the tenderness of the story.

Third thought: The King’s Prime Minister is a sweet, loving, good guy. Isn’t that unusual? In all the other stories, the Prime Minister, Advisor, Grand Vizier, etc., is the bad guy. (Think Wormtongue.) What a pleasant surprise!

Fourth thought: The bad guy in this story, with the lovely evocative name of Hemlock, has an interesting characteristic. He is the one adult in the entire kingdom who believes in the existence of fey creatures like mermaids and dwarves and woldwellers. Because of this I could not hate him.

Fifth thought: Hemlock is just one of many characters with lovely evocative names. The Mayor’s daughter is named Medley. The little old lady is Mrs. Copse. And the Prime Minister? His name, ha ha, is DeCree.

Sixth thought: Although there is something poignant in the very concept of a mermaid, the one in this story takes the cake. You could not imagine a sweeter, sadder creature.

Looking over what I just wrote, I see the adjectives lovely, tender, gentle, charming, sweet, poignant. That’s what this book is. Read it, and by the time you finish you’ll feel like you just had a drink of cool water when you were very, very thirsty.

[Updated 6/19/07: Lena read it today, practically in a single sitting. At one point she said, "Mom, I'm so sorry I didn't clean the bathroom sink like I was supposed to, but this book sucked me in like a suction cup!"]

Still, although I know it wasn’t my library’s fault, I feel really let down that the ILL thing didn’t work out. I mean, it’s amazing that ILL exists at all, that someone in Dallas mailed a book to Ann Arbor just so that I could read it.

Now there’s no danger of electrical surges when you’re on a laptop, right? A laptop with a good battery, that is. Best of all, this ancient iBook is so tiny that it doesn’t even have Word on it, let alone my beloved InDesign and Photoshop, without which I really can’t do any work at all. It’s got Safari, and that’s it. So what else is there to do but blog?

Friends, do not worry. Yesterday’s post was an aberration. I have absolutely no intention of turning this blog into a vegan cooking blog. Unless requested I will not post recipes or blather about tempeh and seitan. I promise!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled mishmash of books, family, and whatever.

The last time I took Joey to martial arts, O horrors, I forgot to bring a book. So I dropped him off and zipped over to the nearest library branch. The nearest library branch happens to be my least favorite, the Malletts Creek branch. Even though it’s nice and new and bright and airy and architecturally interesting, I don’t like it because the (tiny) adult fiction section is disrespectfully placed all the way back in the farthest corner. However, Malletts Creek is better than nothing and I have found interesting things there on other occasions when I forgot to bring my book to martial arts. Just the other day I stood there for half an hour reading a graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. I’d read the original years ago, remembered nothing about it, but wow was it weird and amazing the way it all came back to me. I mean, I was so wrapped up in it that I didn’t even sit down. And graphic novels are not my thing at all.

Anyway, this time at Malletts Creek I was in more of a hurry because Joey had “stripe testing” that day and I wanted to be present for as much of it as possible. True, my presence would be in body only, since I fully intended to have my nose in a book, but I still felt the need to hurry. My first thought was to see if they had a prettier copy of The Brothers Karamazov than the one I own. I had this yearning for The Brothers K because of the Dostoevsky versus Hemingway debate that came up on Lost (season 2 on DVD) that Steve and I had watched the night before. I’m sure you can guess where I weigh in on that debate. Have I ever told you that my grandmother was a Russian princess? Ok, she wasn’t a princess, but she kind of was. Subject for another post, some day.

Well, Malletts Creek had the same exact Signet Classic Brothers K that I have at home, so I didn’t bother. And anyway, another title nearby on the same shelf caught my attention instantly: The Sin Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis. What a great title, eh? I mean, what a repulsive & pathetic idea, that a person would get paid to “eat” and assume the guilt of another person’s sins. Judging by the title, I figured this book would either be fabulous or completely unreadable. Here’s a bit from the dustjacket: “Daughter-in-law Rose is stage-managing the scene [i.e., adult children coming together at father's deathbed] . . . . She relishes this post, and displays her undeniable gift for disarming family members by moving furniture about, making shocking remarks to Angela (her far more conservative sister-in-law), and presenting her mischievously seductive cooking.” Sounds pretty bad, don’t it? But continuing down the dustjacket, I learned that 1) the book takes place in Wales and 2) one of her later novels was short-listed for the Booker. So, well, maybe.

I’m such a sucker for anything to do with Wales. Just sprinkle a few cariads and bachs in the text and I’m all over it. This one’s a little slow going, though. I don’t like any of the characters yet, except perhaps Jack the Liar, but he’s (so far) peripheral. All the characters hate each other, and all their passive-aggressiveness is rendered in minute detail. Example:

“Ah yes,” said Michael nervously. He picked up a pea-stick and beat it against his leg. “I think I’ll just have a look round.”

Angela smiled after him to show Rose how tenderly good wives treated their husbands. “He always does that,” she said, determinedly fond. “Goes to make sure everything’s just the same — like a little boy.”

“Or a dog,” said Rose. “Dogs do that too.”

“You would know more about that than I,” said Angela distinctly, intending to wound. Rose’s father had been the local vet — though no one believed he had actually qualified. He had been Irish and disreputable, and she could never understand why Rose didn’t mind. “I think I’ll go after Michael,” she said.

My patience for this sort of thing is limited. I think I’ll give it another chapter or two, but if a real sin eater doesn’t appear soon, cariad, I’m going to give up.

Penguin Classic: I only got halfway through Le Grand Meaulnes before I had to return it. It was an ILL and it came all the way from Ripon College in Wisconsin, no possibility of renewing it. Okay, this is an admittedly obscure title, but jeez, it’s a Penguin Classic, it’s not exactly out of print. And there was no copy closer to Ann Arbor MI than Ripon? Well, anyway. I sort of enjoyed the half that I read, but I was definitely handicapped by my lack of familiarity with the customs & mores of late 19th century rural France. There were a lot of descriptions of clothes that I’m sure were significant, but the significance escaped me entirely. For example, all the guys were wearing smocks. Smocks. Now I know they weren’t wearing oversized men’s shirts, backwards, with the sleeves cut off at the elbows. I know they weren’t fingerpainting. But there’s got to be some reason why these smocks (?) were mentioned so frequently. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this about any novel, but this one could have used some footnotes, or at least an introduction. Still, I’d like to go back and finish it some day. Despite the smocks, it was a vivid portrait of adolescent boys, coming of age, friendship, first love, etc. And, to answer your burning question, Meaulnes rhymes with moan, and it’s the main character’s name.

Book Group: We’re reading Beloved. I’m halfway through. How did I manage to miss reading this before? It’s really good. Really good! Query: why is “magical realism” so unpalatable in Latin American fiction and yet so perfect and true when Toni Morrison is the author?

Slaves of Golconda: I totally missed out last month. The book was The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, I felt like I joined them in spirit, anyway. During the last week of August, when I should have been reading and writing about Island, I was instead watching the first season of Lost on DVD. Yeah, that was the week before school started, when I should have been getting organized and Steve should have been working on lesson plans. And instead we were staying up until one in the morning every night for a week, watching three or four episodes per evening. I understand season two is out on video now, too. We are going to try to hold off for a while.

From the Nonfiction Department: I read The China Study. Actually, I should probably save this one for a separate post. It’s a detailed and very compelling treatise on the health benefits of a vegan “whole foods, plant-based diet.” We are working on it. I have discovered that Silk brand soy yogurt is sooooo good! Better than regular yogurt. Other than that, as I say, we’re working on it.

From the Library: Remember the contraption that allows me to browse in the adult fiction section? Well, a book called The Darwin Conspiracy caught my eye at once. This novel purports to answer the real-life question of why, after his legendary voyage in the Beagle, Darwin never travelled again, became anxious and sickly with myriad vague, psychosomatic ailments, and waited more than twenty years to publish his theory. Can you imagine a better premise for a novel than that? I’d never heard of this book, or the author, John Darnton, but there were glowing blurbs on the back from Ann Arbor’s own Nicholas Delbanco and also Elie Wiesel. So it must be good. Right? Wrong. I don’t know who paid Nick and Elie to write these glowing encomiums but they couldn’t possibly have read it. Here’s a sample. Get your barf bag ready.

And then [young Charles Darwin] had returned home to find the offer waiting for him, a bolt from the blue that could change his life forever, provide it with meaning. And to be denied it! To have his hopes elevated so high and then dashed the very next moment! How could he endure it?

This book is supposed to remind us of Possession. It goes back and forth between the present (researchers fall in love while uncovering the mystery), and the past (Darwin’s life). Here’s a bit from the present. You might need another barf bag.

That was back before Victor left [the Galapagos island where they're doing field research -- copped straight from The Beak of the Finch, I might add]. At first it was a relief to be alone — solitude was what he had been looking for, part of his penitence — but as weeks stretched into months, the loneliness he had sought became almost too much to bear. Then when the rainy season didn’t come and the lava island turned into a black frying pan stuck way out in the ocean, at times he actually wondered if he could keep going. But of course he did. He had known he would — in that way at least, in brute staying power, he was strong. It was his psyche that was brittle.

No! He actually wondered if he could keep going? Thank goodness he had that brute staying power, because you know, that lava island was just like a black frying pan. And not just any old black frying pan, but one that stuck way out in the ocean.

Boy, what a mean-spirited review. I am sorry. But honestly? I was sooooo excited about this plot idea. The disappointment is bitter. In fact . . . to have my hopes elevated so high and then dashed the very next moment! How will I endure it? ;)