Areas of Unrest

11 February 2001 - Reading Eagerly

QOTD: "Yea, though goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, chances are they will never catch up." - Steve Post

Reading: Edward Eager, The Well-Wishers

Listening to: Warren Zevon, Life'll Kill You

I survived yet another business trip, this one characterized by challenging driving conditions. "Freezing drizzle" leaves a nasty layer of black ice on the ground and the snow on top didn't help much. I was slightly late to my Thursday morning meeting since it took me nearly an hour to go about 6 miles along 270. I just figured that it was better to be late than to have an accident and not get there at all. Still, you can imagine how enthusiastic I feel about going back this week.

I suppose by now everybody's seen the news story about the dead coworker who nobody noticed for an entire week? Okay, I can see that if somebody was very quiet and tended to hunch over his desk all day, one might not notice the lack of movement. But, surely, the body began to smell? I don't know about you, but I think maggots crawling around a coworker are kind of a big hint. It's not like this was a grad student, after all.

I've been dealing with yet another slight cold, the inevitable result of sleep deprivation, dry air, and airplanes. So I spent the weekend in the throes of a major reading binge. Eight books in one weekend is a bit much, even if they're half children's books. The non-children's fare consisted of Lowell Handler's Twitch and Shout, about his life with Tourette Syndrome, a collection of Jewish-themed mystery stories, and the two Buffy the Vampire Slayer script books. I felt really pathetic buying the latter, which I rushed off to get pretty much as soon as I heard of their existence. I'm not an obsessed fan, no, not at all. Didn't I go out with a whole big group to an extravagant meal at Triana Tuesday night and miss seeing both Buffy and Angel? Okay, so I whined about missing the shows, but I did enjoy the food anyway. (I also had a very nice meal of steamed veggies with peanut sauce, followed by a warm fruit crisp, at Sunflower on Monday night, by the way. Wednesday's ice storm led me to the pathetic and disappointing solution of the hotel restaurant, which is not worth discussing.)

As for the children's books, I've been reading Edward Eager. Last weekend, I read Half-Magic and Knight's Castle and found them thoroughly charming. So I read the next three and I'm in the middle of The Well-Wishers and I will inevitably run out and get Seven-Day Magic soon. I like how Eager throws in references to other children's books, with a particularly great scene early in Magic By the Lake that hits pretty much every classic. And his work is moralistic without being preachy. That is, the children learn that bad things happen when they break the rules of magic, but they figure that out for themselves without adults hitting them over the head with it.

Eager wrote in the late 1950's, so his books must have been available when I was a kid, but I never heard of them then. I don't think we ever got new books other than what was at school booksales and a Nancy Drew or two at the department store, so that might be why. We went to the library every week (Monday nights, after ballet class) and bought books at garage sales and thrift shops and the like. I remember Elliot getting a whole boxful one year at Hospital Day in New London, New Hampshire, including things in languages we couldn't even identify, never mind read. And I'm pretty sure that my first ever used book purchase was a crumbling copy of Sonnets From the Portuguese that I found at an antique store in Rockville Centre (closer to home on Long Island). When I think about it, I don't think I was ever in a real bookstore until I was in high school and started buying paperbacks at whatever chain it was that was in the Roosevelt Field mall. I'd go clothes shopping once a week with my best friend, Debby, and we'd finish at the bookstore where I bought Vonnegut novels and she'd buy the latest Agatha Christie. Somewhere around junior year, we started going to Barnes and Noble in the city. The original store, down on 5th Avenue around 18th, was a veritable paradise of used books.

Any book shopping deprivation I might have suffered as a child has long since been made up, of course. Now I can just fantasize about having enough shelves for all the books. Maybe if I found a magic charm and made the right wish...