What I'm Currently Reading
April 2007

Anyone paying attention to such things might note that there was no entry for March. I wanted to read, but dayjob overwork did not permit me but a few pages here and there, and those were mostly rereads of old favorites, as it's a terrible way to try to read a new book, getting thirty seconds here and there--always interrupted. Not fair to someone's hard work.

So I slogged impatiently through the first week or so of April until the blessed relief of Spring Break. After catching up with overdue stuff, I've been able to read again, and oh what bliss! Here's what I've managed so far.

First, one I'm sipping a few pages at a time in the evenings before bed. This being a non-fiction book, packed with interesting goodies, I don't want to race through it. The book is The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, an Inklings scholar as well as a professor.

Here's the thing. Glyer obviously did her homework. I see many familiar quotes, always used in the right place, never distorted or misemployed. She's also found some good stuff that I've never read, or haven't read for years and years (being no scholar). She has an impressive bibliography (anyone wishing to study the Inklings ought to buy the book for the bibliography in and of itself) and superlative notes. But here's the real appeal: the engaging, lucid, crystal clear writing style that graces her steel-strong research. I spoke with her briefly at her launch party in San Diego, and she explained that she'd written a thoroughly scholarly book. I forget how long that took--a couple years at least. But then she tried it on her freshman English classes, and saw them struggling grimly away, so wrote it over again, this time with an eye to catching and keeping the interest of those young college students. I cherish first-rate scholarly work written in an engaging style, and this book is a pleasure to read. One gets a strong sense of the personalities of the Inklings--and also the people who knew them and wrote about them. I will probably talk about the book again when I'm finished, but even just a few chapters in, for anyone interested in Lewis, Tolkien, the Inklings, or even in writers' groups and their processes, I cannot believe this would not be an excellent addition to one's personal library. And finally, who can resist a book whose author hands out pins at a launch party that depict a manual typewriter key and above it Paradigm Shift Key?

Devilish by Maureen Johnson is a contender for this year's Andre Norton Award. What a wonderful read! Johnson's voice is sharp, funny, insightful. I've got to check out more of her books. The story: Jane Jarvis, who is short and feisty and a senior at a Catholic school, is worried that her best friend Allison (who is kind of wimpy as well as clueless) is going to get burned badly in a yearly event. Jane is so right . . . and so wrong. Because Allison goes down for a more spectacular fall than anyone could have guessed--and yet returns from it stylish, with nifty things, and an attitude that surprises students as well as teachers. Jane wonders if it's too good to be true. She's warned by the school's single priest, Brother Frank, to watch out and be careful of her soul. She figures his words are just more adult preaching and goes on a hunt to figure out what happened to her best friend. Because Jane's smart, she can take care of herself. Right? Well, maybe she can, against her fellow human, but what about . . . demons? Oh, yeah, right, demons, ha ha ha. Ooops. The story gets more tense and exciting as the pages turn, the characters interesting, the story fascinating because it manages to present the supernatural with hints of a greater structure to the universe without committing to any party line. Even more daring and incredibly innovative these days, Brother Frank is not a child molester! Wow! Even more amazing, the nuns are not stupid, venal, sex-starved witches. Stunning and radical new idea! Enough said--I loved this book, and hope there will be more about Jane and this fascinating setup.

Flora Segunda...[etc] by Ysabeau L. Wilce. I say [etc] because I am not going to type out that enormous sub-title, witty as it is. This is a first novel by an author who has apparently done some shorter work for adults in the magazines, using the quirky and unique setting, her kingdom of Calafia. (dang it, and wouldn't you know in my piles of magazines here, I can't find those stories?) Calafia is sort of a modern Rome with magic...and not. Flora Segunda is the heroine, an almost-fourteen year old who is in charge of cleaning an 11,000 room house. Not that you have access to all those rooms at once. Or any time. They can shift around, and do. Flora Segunda was named 'segunda' because her older sister Flora (who was apparently Perfect in all ways) was taken prisoner of war on a daring mission, along with her father, but only her father returned. Flora Segunda's best friend is Udo, a snappy dresser whose mother married triplets since she couldn't pick just one. Flora's mother is a great general, and her father was a great hero, but he sits up in the attic, drunk and howling and smashing things. When Flora finds out why, the reasons are comprehensible--and unexpectedly poignant. This is a very military world, but magic is mixed in, and Flora and Udo have a decidedly non-military goal: to restore the magical Butler to keep Crackpot, Flora's home, so she won't have to be constantly doing the scutwork while she studies to become a ranger, which apparently is a kind of ninja-magician-spy-maverick. Also highly illegal.

The story is exciting and funny and tense in turns, the voice highly original, the world quirky, sometimes in the extreme. (I doubt kids will be looking up the real meaning of Mollymop for example, and it's used in a context that wouldn't clue them off necessarily, but there are some sly references here that are decidedly not YA, but I think would fly right over the heads of the kid audience.) Anyway, anyone complaining about familiar tropes and dull, interchangeable and preachy voices in kidzlit ought to give Flora Segunda a try. I can hardly wait for the second one.

Then there is Autumn Term by Antonia Forest. I don't know how I managed never to discover Forest when I was younger, but I'm glad to find her now. She was recommended to me by some friends on-line, and four books kindly sent to me by a friend in England. They are hard to find here--I don't know why the heck they are not in constant print. At the front introduction of one, an old friend of hers speculates that critics scorned her for her first book being a 'school story'--a type that fell into disrepute earlier in the twentieth century, due to its extreme popularity, and the almost rigid storylines and character types so many writers churned out. (George Orwell had some fascinating--and excoriating--things to say about School Stories in some of his posthumously published essays. I happen to think school stories are fascinating, and have studied them rather a lot, but this is not the place to get into that.) Anyway, out of 14 books, apparently only 4 are considered school stories, if I got that right.

In Autumn Termn, Forest does not pay any attention to accepted character types or storylines. You cannot predict what will happen--her characters are distinct, even the minor ones. Her prose is beautiful. What a remarkable writer. I am determined to get all of her books if I possibly can.