Blue-Footed Musings

We are a family of happy readers. Not that we don’t have our reading ups and downs. We do. It’s my job to keep everyone supplied with books, so I know better than anyone.

The downs can be difficult. As the Provider of Books, one of the downs for me is when the kids turn their noses up at books that I’m nearly certain they’d like. For example, neither of them wants to read The Hobbit. I practically begged Livia to read it. I told her, “It’s like Harry Potter before Harry Potter existed. Almost everybody likes it. Plus there’s a dragon in it!” And you know what she said? “Just because there’s a dragon in it doesn’t mean it’s good!” Can’t argue with that, sadly.

And though Livia keeps rejecting so many excellent books, every few days she comes into my office and announces, “I need more books!” As if I can make books magically appear! It’s my own fault, I suppose. Somehow I always manage to find a few more age-appropriate books that are likely to please. This time it was three Robin McKinley books that had been hiding behind a picture of my grandfather and the Harper Hall trilogy from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, which I hadn’t thought of before because most of the books from that series were were written for an older audience.

Livia reads fast, and those books won’t last long. Getting more reading material isn’t as easy as I’d like it to be, though. We’re still holed up at home and my library card has expired. So, buying books is still a more appealing option than it would normally be, and I admit that I gave in to the impulse this week and bought a ton more. But this is the last time for a while. (You know that even if I meant that as I was typing it, and I’m not sure I did, I can’t be trusted to keep my promise, but please pretend that I can and will.) Livia’s and Marshall’s library cards aren’t expired, so I’ll try to show the library a little more love.

Right now Marshall’s really digging a series that I gave him for Christmas (Matt Myklusch’s Jack Blank Adventure series). Livia’s rereading Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series, which makes me glad that I bought them. I am almost done with The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. I have a lot of books to choose from next, and I’m eager to get started on something new. We’re a happy reading family.

• I finished The Constant Rabbit and gave it an A- grade. The high grade is based almost completely on Fforde’s cleverness. I admire cleverness. Still, I wish he’d given us an easier and happier story to go with it.
• The next book I picked up was Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi. I ordered this book for Livia, but she turned it down. After reading a little bit of it myself, I couldn’t blame her. Nothing about it worked for me, not the writing style, the setting, the pacing, the characters, or the relationships between the characters. I took this as a sign that I wasn’t the right reader for the book and put it in the donation pile.
• I have been pecking away at The Waste Land. People on social media are really keen right now on the juxtaposition of April (the current month) and the word “cruellest” (like the current circumstances), so over the last few weeks I’ve seen many references to the poem’s opening line, and I’m glad to be in the know. But, this poem is also one of the cruelest I’ve ever encountered in terms of playing fair with its audience. It’s every bit as hard to understand as I’d heard it was. Whatever else it may be trying to communicate, it’s seven (!) languages say something about showing off. It’s possible I’ll change my mind, but based on what I’ve read so far, plus a reread of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (included in the same book), I think that Eliot’s work represents both the best and the worst of what poetry has to offer. Some of it is so perfect that it will stop you in your tracks. And some of it, if you’ll pardon my French, is obfuscatory bullshit.
• Two more books snuck their way onto my reading shelf: Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale and The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation by Robert Grudin. The Hale book is as light and frothy as the Grudin book is deep and challenging. I’m enjoying both of them so far.