If three mystical referencesto1987 weren't enough already, tonight I give you The Enchanted World.
I don't know for sure when these books first began to be published (even wikipedia dates them to a vague "the 80's") but for me they figure importantly in my memories of that year.
The Enchanted World series was only available through mail-order, and - having always been one to burn the midnight oil - I recall seeing the rather intriguing commercials in the wee hours of the night. There were several, but this was my favorite:
They were beautiful books which (alas) did not fit into our budget, but my cousin Anna's parents were more indulgent. The books were sent one per month, and by the the time I arrived at Anna's house that Summer, she had several. Wizards and Witches, Fairies and Elves, Ghosts, Night Creatures, Dragons, and Water Spirits, I think she had by then. They were Anna's prized possession, and of course I dove right into them.
They were utterly fascinating, not the least because they were chock full of art.
So much of this, to me, blended with the atmosphere of Anna's house, and of course the mysterious aura of Anna herself. We'd burn incense - Gonesh #6 Perfumes From Ancient Times (mine, bought from the hippie record shop*) or violet Spiritual Sky (hers, bought at the renaissance faire). In fact, the combined scents from all the incense we had stored in Anna's room made the entire hallway smell like a temple. Add in Anna's lace tablecloth cloak, her glowing-eyed anthropomorphic tree and Stevie Nicks' Blue Lamp and you may start to get a clear picture of what things were like that Summer, down near the ocean where ghosts drift close at hand.
I don't know how many volumes of The Enchanted World Anna eventually collected. It was maybe 14 or so before she stopped. I was never able to order a set of my own, but happily, years later, my mother-in-law gave me her old set. All the favorites are there, with the exception of Night Creatures. It pays to marry into a family of bookworms.
Lacking Night Creatures, It's one of my hopes this year to procure a copy. Then one day I'll pass the books on to my own children.
Not quite yet, though.
*Sundance Records In San Marcos, when they were in the little shop downtown. Where I'd once bumped awkwardly into Stevie Ray Vaughan (I didn't recognize him at first because he wasn't dressed like a pimp.)
During a discussion of favorite book covers this weekend, I recalled this one from back in the day. The right cover can make a book memorable, and this is a good example. I was a huge Nancy Drew fan as a kid, but the plot of the Witch Tree Symbol wasn't my favorite - that honor might have to go to The Secret of The Wooden Lady or The Mysterious Mannequin. However, the cover painting was truly awesome. Girl detective, dark night, spooky tree - what's not to love? But the best part, the very best part, is the witch.
Since I've been doing the brain-fog shuffle lately (really, the number of unfinished posts hanging around in draft is embarrassing) I decided to take the easy way out and post a list of the books I've read most often.
These aren't necessarily the books I'd consider the best - if I could even decide upon such a thing - but the ones I've picked up again and again over the years, whether because they are simply enjoyable or are interesting on some other level. A few are geared toward younger readers, but I continue to enjoy them as much (or more) as an adult.
Also, in keeping with the "not hard" spirit of this post, the books in that photo are truly random. I picked up a couple of armloads of books without looking and plunked them down. They aren't even arranged, because if I'd started doing that, I would have had to coordinate them by color or size or alphabetize them or whatever, and I ain't got the stamina for that. If there's anything embarrassing in that stack, it will just have to stay. :p
The list (in no particular order)
1. Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
2. The Boyfriend School - Sarah Bird
3.A Dark-Adapted Eye - Ruth Rendell as Barbara Vine
4.Lolita -Vladimir Nabokov
5.Jazz - Toni Morrison
6.Journey To Ixtlan - Carlos Castaneda
7.The Willowdale Handcar - Edward Gorey (this is a picture book, but it counts as far as this list goes.)
8. The Romance Reader - Pearl Abraham
9.Paradise - Elena Castedo
10. Wild At Heart - Barry Gifford
11.Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones
12.The October Country- Ray Bradbury
13.Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
14. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
15.The House With A Clock In Its Walls - John Bellairs
16. Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury
17. The Mothman Prophecies- John Keel
18. Tales From Gavagan's Bar - Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp
19. Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones (a close contest with A Sudden Wild Magic, by the same author)
20. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
There are a few short stories that are favorites, as well. (Actually there are a lot, but I want to keep this list short)
1.That Evening Sun - William Faulkner 2.Elvenbrood - Tanith Lee
3.The Vampire Lover - Tanith Lee
4.Simon's Wife - Tanith Lee (probably should have just made a Tanith Lee section, eh?)
5.High Mysterious Union - Ruth Rendell
Rest assured, this is not my only reading material (I've read more than half of The Telegraph's "100 novels everyone should read" list, and plenty more that's not) I read history, philosophy and scholarly works. I'm not scared of books, even big fat ones with double columns. I'll even cheerfully (after a fashion) take on post-modernism. But I suppose, for good or ill, this list signifies my literary comfort zone.
High Summer. The cicadas scream in the trees. It was July, many years ago now.
All that month, information seemed to crackle through the air, blowing like the wind through the house. The house itself was like a sailboat on a sea of grass atop the hill.
It was all very secretive.Word had come from down the coast that our cousins, Anna and Edward, would be coming to stay. We weren't supposed to know why, but of course we did - anyone who thinks they can hide things from children is a fool - so of course we knew their parents, along with our other aunts and uncles, would be attending to Serious Family Business. We just had to pretend not to know.
This sounds much darker than we felt at the time. For once, there was no trace of anything ominous in the air. School was out, the weather was fine, our parents were otherwise occupied. What wasn't to love? Our family drama had become part of the background by then, just another thing we weren't allowed to talk about. There was nothing to do but carry on.
At Grandmother's house in the next county, all the family had arrived. If our own house was like a sailboat, grandmother's house was like a tall ship in a storm. The adults sat around the kitchen table and whispered while the rest of us cousins (how many by then, 20? 24?) ran about like wild things, playing with Anna's little dog or swapping cassette tapes and comic books. At nightfall, Anna and Edward would be coming home with us, dog included. The dog! Over mother's hysterical protestations, the dog had to come too, there was no way around it. She tried to insist it be kept in cardboard box for the duration, a plan that fell apart within the hour. Score one for us.
That night, at the Sac-n-Pac on the edge of town, we raided the candy aisle for packets of Razzles and those cheap wax bottles with kool-aid inside.When mother didn't give us the death glare but simply paid up, it occurred to me that the rules were different for cousins. We sat in the back of the station wagon with the dog and our candy, the night wind whipping our faces. For the moment, adult tribulations had given us free pass.
...
I'd never thought our house was mysterious, or not very, or at least not for a long time. With Anna in it, it became mysterious. I suppose it was seeing it through someone else's eyes, but then again I'm inclined to say it was because Anna herself was mysterious. A curious sense of anticipation bubbled up in the corners when she was there. As we sat on the floor of my bedroom, Anna unpacked her belongings, full of arcane things like Blondie records and old issues of Punk magazine. Our ages weren't even in the double digits yet, so how the girl had laid hands on Punk magazine I can't imagine, but there they were. We put the magazines in the stack along with my collection of Nancy Drews. We did not find this even slightly ironic at the time.
Anna had brought her piano music, too, so we could play duets and she could keep up with her lessons while she was away. What this really meant was that we played duets while making up rude lyrics to every song in the Leila Fletcher piano course, books two and three.
All around the neighborhood we ranged that month. This was a new thing for me - I'd never previously been allowed to wander, but again, rules were different with cousins. Besides, we had to walk the dog. While our brothers exploded leftover fireworks in the yard, Anna and I clattered down the hills in our Dr Scholls, plotting and scheming while her little dog nosed around in the sweet-smelling grass. Once, we walked to the river with mother, who gossiped with the neighbors on the way. Mr. Jonas next door said how much I looked like Lady Diana. Anna snorted at this, but I recognized it as the compliment it was meant to be, maybe the first compliment I'd ever had. Anna twirled her Jordache purse with studied casualness, and said she'd rather look like Debbie Harry anyway.
Inside the house, we were up to no good. When we weren't watching The Facts of Life and eating Chef Boyardee pizza, we were inventing secret codes and signals. Surveillance was gleefully carried out with tape recorders, messages passed through windows. All sightlines in the house and yard were carefully noted, as well as the silhouette of mother in her studio, where she spent hours on the phone.
One afternoon, the house seemed unusually empty. The brothers must have been out somewhere, and Anna was nowhere in evidence. She wasn't spying through the fence out back or in the ash tree out front. Nor was she at the piano, the utility room or the shed. She wasn't even in the bathroom, where the curtain flapped (in a certain lonely way) in the breeze. Clouds were billowing up in the west and the wind chimes were just beginning to ring when I finally found her around the corner of the house. She had a secretive smile on her face.
"Look at this" she whispered, pulling out a book from behind her back. "It was in the bathroom." She tried to stifle a laugh. I didn't get the joke - it was just one of my brother's sci-fi /fantasy books that propagated like mushrooms around the house. I'd seen this one a thousand times. It was called "A Feast Unknown" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Well, did you ever look at it?"
"Of course not. Why would I read my brother's books? Especially if it's been in the bathroom. Ugh."
Anna looked around surreptitiously then thrust the book in my hands. "you mean to tell me there's dirty books lying around the house and you don't even notice!"
Indeed. I looked at the text and saw with alarm that it seemed to describe some kind of naked wrestling match. One of the naked wrestlers may have been Tarzan. And my brother had left it in plain sight, so sure that no one in the house would pick it up. Well, he was right, but he hadn't bargained for Anna.
Of course, after that, we went into our brothers' room and scoured through the rest of their books. That's how we found out that sci-fi was surprisingly filthy. We were the picture of innocence when they came home, scoffing and mocking the way they usually did. We were untroubled, content in our superiority. We knew their secret. They read dirty books.
It was August by then, and the corn was being harvested in the fields below town. A lone corn husk, blown by some updraft, sailed into the neighborhood and into the yard. I knew then that summer was almost over.
The night before my cousins had to leave, I dreamt that we were searching for Anna's dog, lost in the dark. I stumbled into a secret passage behind the fence, a tunnel of wild brush and flowers all limned with the most beautiful light. I crawled along in this mysterious place, where I found the dog playing with luminous moths that fluttered in the grass. I woke to the sound of Anna calling her dog and the sharp slam of the car door. I knew from the cold look in my mother's eye that my reprieve was over, the fun was all over. A rumble of thunder in the distance added the finishing touch.
The memories would remain, though, in places the adults couldn't reach.
Cicadas in the trees, moths in the grass, a bend in the road, the rustle of corn fields at the end of summer.
I came across this book over the weekend. I was familiar with much of Shirley Jackson's other work but had never read this one. It's astoundingly good (and the cover art of this edition is pretty awesome, too) In some ways I identified with the eccentric narrator, Merricat, and her strange ways and sympathetic magic - I often did the same as a child. With her conscienceless-ness and affinity for murder, not so much. But the state of being outcast and suffering harassment at the hands of the villagers is easy enough to understand, probably is for many who live in small towns.
I did have a struggle with the story though. It was extremely triggering to me - nothing to do with the madness or death or cruelty like one would imagine, but the elements of agoraphobia and fear of intruders made it difficult to read without panicking at times. This isolation and fear of certain people, I understood all too well. Watching, waiting, checking the locks on doors, being terror stricken at the sight of a visitor or sound of a knock - this is the sort of fear I live with. It was so vibrantly described that it was almost intolerable.
After I'd finished (and as I said before, it's an excellent book) I decided to see what literary critics had had to say about it. I had not known much about Shirley Jackson's life, except that she had died relatively young. I was surprised to find out that Jackson had suffered intense agoraphobia toward the end of her life. This had indeed been reflected in the book. Jackson had done what I can't bear to do - look directly at the thing that frightened her.
Today, my dear man brought me a most wonderful present: one of my favorite childhood books, The house with a clock in its walls. I loved it so in...fourth grade, was it? There wasn't many things I loved about fourth grade, but our little classroom library was one of them. I was always eager for a chance to grab this one at reading time. I was also intrigued by Edward Gorey's illustrations. Gorey, of course, having illustrated quite a few book in our library already.
I always imagined, should I be lucky enough to become an elderly lady, I would be Mrs. Zimmerman. Who wouldn't want to be a sharp-tongued, cookie-baking D.Mag.A. ?
