In Search of Gawain

OK.  I’ve got my geek on.  I’ve been reading Arthurian stories to Rowan, who is six, and we’ve listened to Sean Bean read to us, and, on my own, I’ve read Rosalind Kerven’s Arthurian Legends, published by the National Trust in a beautiful hardcover with thick, creamy paper and stunning illustrations by Arthur Rackham and other classic illustrators.  I’ve read a gorgeous Folio Society edition of Simon Armitage’s poetic translation of  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and tonight, I watched a one-hour BBC documentary of Simon Armitage’s travels through Britain to trace the places where Gawain is set.  Along with fantasy novels, this is a parenting-induced reading trend I would never have predicted.

(A quick bibliophilic, book-hoarder aside:  I very, very rarely give or throw away books.  I just don’t.  But I did, at some point long ago, decide that I would never again read Geoffrey of Monmouth or Thomas Mallory or Gawain, and I gave the books away.   You see what happens when you give books away?  You live to regret it.)

Anyway, if you find yourself with a spare hour, I highly recommend this documentary.  Armitage is passionate about his subject, and it adds so much to my reading to see the Green Chapel in all its mossy, misty glory.  Armitage, who is from Yorkshire, travels back home to the Pennines, where he believes part of the story is set.  My grandmother lived there, and it was such a treat to see that landscape again, to hear the cadences of speech that formed so much a part of childhood.  One theme that I have seen for the celebration of Mother’s Day for booklovers is to celebrate your first narrator, the mother who read to you.  My first narrators spoke with Yorkshire accents.  So this reading voyage has been as much about being a reading mother as it has been about remembering those who first read to me.

And there is an inspired soundtrack, which includes music from The Cure, another route on Memory Lane.  Check it out.

Audiobook Convert?

One of my reading challenges last year was to listen to 3 audiobooks.  I listened to none.

But I think I’ve discovered a way to warm up to them: listening to them with the kids.  I am reading a lot of King Arthur material with my six year old these days, and I’ve been a bit frustrated with the fact that I have several pronunciations rattling around in my head for the characters and place names.  (Tintagel: where is the accent?  hard g or soft g?  I’ve heard it so many ways.)  When I asked at the library for a pronunciation guide, we could not find one, but the very clever librarian suggested borrowing some books about Arthur on cd.  Perfect solution, in so many ways.

My son was rapt.  He listened to both cds of the story, read by Sean Bean of Boromir fame, in one sitting.  And I sat too.  And loved it.

Now, I will admit, I did fall asleep for some of it, but falling asleep to someone else reading is far preferable to falling asleep while I read aloud.  Believe me, it is possible to read aloud and sleep at the same time.  I’ve done it.  I’ll just close my eyes, I’ll think, and read the rest of this sentence with my eyes shut, and the next thing I know I’m speaking gibberish while I sleep.  I wake to the kids nudging me and basically saying WTF?

Nap included, then, this was a wonderful audiobook experience, and we now have several more on hold.  And the avid boy is now on his second time through the story.

An Addiction to Love: Kids on Books

My kids are Norse gods these days.

via Burning Through the Pages

The Green Man by Michael Bedard

The Green Man

Michael Bedard

Toronto: Tundra Books, 2012.

This is the first book I’ve read by Michael Bedard, whose Redwork won the Governor General’s Award for children’s literature in 1990.  The Green Man is a loose sequel to A Darker Magic, but I don’t think you lose anything in the telling by not having read it first.

A little like Jo Walton’s Mor, who picks up I Capture the Castle thinking it’s about medieval siege strategy but finds a delightful novel instead, I picked up The Green Man in the hopes of reading more along the lines of the Arthurian trails I’ve been following with my middle son.  The Green Man is, in fact, the name of a bookstore, so while I did not get what I was looking for, I got what I wanted.

Fifteen-year-old O, short for Ophelia, goes to spend the summer with her aunt Emily, who owns a second-hand bookstore that has seen better days.  Emily has had a heart attack, and while she is stubbornly independent, the plan for O to stay with her, while her father goes to Italy to research his book on Ezra Pound, works to everyone’s advantage.  Emily encourages O’s budding interest in poetry, O begins to restore order to the bookstore, she meets its ghosts, and she begins to sense the magic that lingers there, not all of it good.  There is a (too-thin) thread of time travel, a shape-shifting magician, a handsome stranger and lots and lots of references to poets and poetry.  And books.  Lots of books.

The book is not perfect, but it was the right book at the right time for me.  I read it in one sitting, and while I can’t see reading it to the boys at this point, I do think that any book-loving child or adult could find a happy escape into its pages.

Among Others by Jo Walton

Among Others

Jo Walton

New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2011.

My husband observed, not long ago, that the reading material I have been choosing to read aloud with the eldest two boys has been largely fantasy (boy magicians, hobbits, mythological creatures, both ancient and contemporary).  I was really taken aback because I had not made those choices deliberately or out of a preference from my own childhood reading.  I would never have called myself a fan of fantasy.   I did not read fantasy much at all as a child, but in my second childhood it seems to be what my boys and I are gravitating towards.

Perhaps it’s a gendered thing.  As Mor, the tweenaged protagonist of Jo Walton’s Among Others, notes, the only other girl her age at her science fiction book club was introduced to sci fi by her boyfriend, and most of the people are male.  Most, but not all.  And that’s it.  It’s a passing reference to the demographics of the group, and gender will come up again in her observations about who leads the weekly discussions, but for Mor, science fiction is a way to bring her into a community, not to divide her from one.

Mor’s story is written as a journal, and begins very much in medias res, with Mor trying (not very successfully) to settle in at a boarding school where she’s been sent by her father’s family, after having run away from her (unfit) mother and been put in an orphanage.  In the space of a few pages, she meets her father for the first time and then meets his extensive library, which contains many fantasy and sci fi titles and authors she has already come to love.  A bookworm of the first order, and, again, in a very short span of time, she discovers, to her great delight and to her social salvation, that there is such a thing as book clubs and makes friends and meets a beautiful boy at her book club.  A boy so beautiful, she is afraid she has conjured him by magic.

Magic is the fantasy element of this novel, and it is so deftly handled that you could read Mor’s engagement with magic either as genre fantasy or as a psychological puzzle.  In fact, she invites you to question her over and over (and over and over) again.  Plausible deniability is a catchphrase, and she comes back again and again to the loopholes in magic that make it possible to, well, wave a wand, and make all things magical appear perfectly normal.  She sees fairies, and so does her twin, but her twin is dead so there’s no one to corroborate her story.  She casts protective spells and makes other kinds of magic that may or may not have enormous repercussions.  Having just read and very much enjoyed Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, which is a contemporary retelling of a Russian fairy tale that keeps a graceful balance between fairy tale and realism, I felt perfectly at home in the liminal space of this book.  I neither wanted to believe nor disbelieve Mor.  I just wanted more and more and more of her story, which makes me a victim to its magic after all, I guess.

If ever there was a book designed to bring me out of books-about-books blogging hibernation, this is it.  I don’t know when I’ve ever read a novel with so many loving references to other books in it.  It was delightful.  And I haven’t even read most of the books she refers to.  I imagine that the pleasure factor is exponentially higher if you can relish with her the discovery and love of books you have also loved.  Fantasy may not have been what I pulled off the shelves as a child, but it connects me so blissfully to my boys now.  I don’t feel like an imposter in the world of fantasy that they love any more than Mor feels like an imposter in her book club (she has plenty of other places from which to feel excluded and plenty of other reasons to feel like an impostor).  What comes through so clearly is this girl’s immersion in a body of literature that has kept life and limb together for her.   And who could fail to love a narrator who so clearly lives for (and in) books?  That the book also feaures three very lovable librarians is icing on the cake.

Jenny, at Jenny’ Books, was the first whose recommendation I came across, then Kerry, at Pickle Me This, also recommended it.  Now, when Kerry or Jenny rave about a book, I generally go out and get it.  When they both rave, I know it’s  A Sure Thing.  It is.

Joel Robison’s Book Photographs

Joel Robison has done a wonderful translation of his love of books to photographs.  They are so whimsical.

Here is his blog, where he demonstrates the stages of composing his photographs, and his flikr stream, and here are more book-love photos.

Thank you, Carol, for the link.  It brought me out of hibernation!

Dear Blog

Dear Blog,

I am so sorry for my long absence.  It’s not you, it’s me.  Or it’s February, which has turned into March, which since they are months require capital letters, but if they didn’t, I’d have used them, because even though there hasn’t actually been a winter, it’s been Winter, you know? 

I saw the year’s first snowdrops today, though, so perhaps pathetic fallacy will out and I will soon sprout new posts.

I just want you to know that I do think about you often, even if I have not made it to the pile of posts waiting to be written. 

Love,

Nathalie