Category Archives: book reports

April 5, 2016 · 2:58 pm

Old Library Books

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Recently I went through my store of old books in the library.  As a collector with hoarding disorder, I do have books I haven’t read, but also old books that I have read before… but really old editions… which makes me feel like King Midas with a golden touch and a room full of collected treasure of pure gold.  I have haunted Half-Price Books for over a decade.  I buy old library discards, books from Goodwill, and old family-owned books at yard sales.

Some of these treasures are rare and very special.  Tom Sawyer Abroad is a very hard book to find in print.  As one of Mark Twain’s lesser known works it doesn’t often appear in book stores, and it has never been a best-seller list.  The edition I have was published in 1965 by Grosset and Dunlap.  It was illustrated by Gerald McCann.  It is the kind of book that might’ve been on an elementary school library shelf in 1966 when I was ten.

Nelson Doubleday, Inc. produced the Best in Children’s Books series in the 60’s and my parents bought the four of us a subscription so that these books came in the mail every other month.  I still have one from my childhood, but I found more at Half-Price Books.  They were filled with children’s books excerpts and poems, cartoons and illustrations in color as well as black and white.

The Arabian Nights Entertainment was a very special find.  I actually paid ten dollars for it.  It is from 1916 with woodcut and full-color illustrations by Louis Rhead.  It is filled with wonderful stories like the History of the Old Man and the Two Black Dogs, and the History of Sinbad the Sailor.  I read these stories with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade playing in my head.  What a wonderful old book!  A century old this very year.

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I can’t tell you how much joy I get from sitting in my library now that I am retired and rummaging through my book stacks looking at my treasures.  I am like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his money bin when I am with my old books.   I know I suffer from mental disorders that cause some of this, but I also know that I do not want to be cured.

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January 10, 2016 · 5:51 pm

Book Magic, the Empathy Spell

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I have long known that reading good books is the primary path to being a wizard.  There are many, many things you can learn from the magic contained in fiction books, but now there is also research that proves books can improve your empathetic skills.  Here is the article I found to suggest it is so;

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/fiction-readers/?utm_source=lit-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=20160108&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fiction-readers&origin=lit_twcfan_social_fb_link_fiction-readers_20160108

If you don’t feel energetic enough to actually go there and read that, let me summarize a bit.  When you read a good fiction story, you get to live for a while in another person’s skin… see the world through someone else’s eyes… and if it is intelligent, realistic, and complex enough, it rewires a bit of the part of your brain that tries to understand and make sense of perspectives that are new to you, not merely habits that you follow down muddy, well-worn paths on auto-pilot.  You get to practice understanding other people.  And the more you practice this with well-written, insightful material, the more empathetic you will become.  The article notes significantly that children reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series develop skill at compassion.  I can personally testify that as a middle school teacher, I saw that very thing happening as students in my nerd classes not only became more sensitive towards the gifted weirdos in their class because of Harry, but also became more understanding of the special education students, and other often-bullied minorities.  Harry Potter books are literally magic books.

Here are some other notable books and their magical powers;

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is taught in numerous middle schools and high schools across the country because teachers have instinctively realized how much it does to solve problems of racial and cultural tension in the school environment.  It tackles the unfairness of racism, the effects of extreme poverty, the possible side effects of too much religion, and it illustrates everything through the voice of a very intelligent young girl.  Learning hard lessons becomes practically painless.

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is narrated by the angel of death.  It is set in Nazi Germany in the war years.  The central character is the daughter of a man arrested and executed as a communist.  She is forced to live with German foster parents who turn out to be very loving individuals, though they are enduring difficulties of their own.  They not only love and nurture her, they take in a young Jewish man who is fleeing the Gestapo and the work camps.  In the face of the constant threat of death, the main character learns to read both books and people, to care about others, and face the deaths of those she loves without fear.  This book makes beauty out of human ugliness and war, and love out of fear and death.  Very powerful magic, in my humble opinion.

So what am I saying in this Paffoonied post of books and magic?  Only this.  There is magic power to be gained from reading fiction books, especially well-written fiction books.  Try it for yourself.  You may accidentally turn yourself into a frog… or a little girl from Maycomb, Georgia in the 1930’s… but it will turn out to be very good magic.  Go ahead, try it.  I dare you.

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September 3, 2015 · 1:48 pm

Books You Should Read If You Desire To Go Happily Insane

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Yesterday I wrote a post about religion that revealed my lack of connection to organized religion (I am still in recovery from fifteen years of trying to be a good Jehovah’s Witness) and my deep connections to God and the Universe and That Which Is Essential.  I feel that it is good evidence for the theory that being too smart, too genius-level know-it-all goofy, is only a step away from sitting in the corner of the asylum with a smile and communicating constantly with Unknown Kadath in his lair in the Mountains of Madness  (a literary allusion to H.P. Lovecraft’s world).  And today I saw a list on Facebook pompously called “100 Books You Should Read If You’re Smart”.  I disagree wholeheartedly with many of the books on that list, and I have actually read about 80 per cent of them.  So it started me thinking… (never a good thing)… about what books I read that led to my current state of being happily mentally ill and beyond the reach of sanity.

2657To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is the first book on my list.  The Facebook list had no reasons why to argue with, so here are my reasons why.  This book is written from the innocent and intelligent perspective of a little girl, Scout Finch.  It stars her hero father, Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer who has to defend a black man from false charges of rape of a white woman.  This book makes clear what is good in people, like faith and hope and practicality… love of flowers, love of secrets, and the search for meaning in life.  It reveals the secrets of a secretive person like Boo Radley. It also makes clear what is bad in people, like racism, lying, mean-spirited manipulations, lust, and vengeance.  And it shows how the bad can win the day, yet still lose the war.  No intelligent reader who cares about what it means to be human can go without reading this book.

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Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell is the second book on my list.  This is really not one book.  It is a complex puzzle-box of very different stories nested one inside the next and twisted together with common themes and intensely heroic and fallible characters.  Reading this book tears at the hinges between the self and others.  It reveals how our existence ripples and resonates through time and other lives.  It will do serious damage to your conviction that you know what’s what and how the world works.  It liberates you from the time you live in at the moment.

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The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini is the third book on the list.  This will give you an idea of how fragile people truly are, and how devastating a single moment of selfishness can be in a life among the horrors of political change and human lust and greed.  No amount of penance will ever be enough for the main character of this book to make up for what he did to his best and only friend… at least until he realizes that penance is not all there is… and that it is never too late to love.

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The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak is number four.  This book is about an orphan girl, the daughter of an executed communist, living in Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s.  It is a tear-jerker and an extremely hard book to read without learning to love to cry out loud.  Leisel Meminger is haunted by Death in the story.  In fact, Death loves her enough to be the narrator of the story.  It is a book about loving foster parents, finding the perfect boy, and losing him, discovering what it means to face evil and survive… until you no longer can survive… and then what you do after you don’t survive.  It is about how accordion music, being Jewish, and living among monsters can lead to a triumph of the spirit.

Of course, being as blissfully crazy as I am, I have more books on this list.  But being a bit lazy and already well past 500 words… I have to save the rest for another day.

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