Weekly Geeks #3: Favorite Childhood Reads

Of course, I read a lot of Judy Blume and E.B. White and Roald Dahl when I was little, but for the latest Weekly Geeks challenge to write about our childhood favorites, I decided to dig out some of the more obscure, weird, hard-to-find titles that I loved as a child. Remember any of these?

Overlooked and Forgotten Childhood Gems

1. The Owlstone Crown by X.J. Kennedy
Still one of my favorite books, even after all these years.

Timothy and Verity Tibb are orphans who live on a farm with the evil Grimbles, who force them to farm parsnips in the dead of winter, and spend countless hours sticking labels onto bottles of a quack home remedy made of... parsnips. Life is bleak. Until one night they are visited by Lewis O. Ladybug, an insect private investigator, who tells the kids that their grandparents are alive, if not well, and living in a parallel universe. The kids sneak over to Other Earth, determined to rescue their grandparents, and the world from an evil dictator named Raoul Owlstone.

This book has great characters, an amazingly inventive plot, and references to stuff like Hamlet and Ross MacDonald that I didn't catch until I was much older.

2. The Island Keeper by Henry Mazer
Rich, overweight, spoiled, and generally useless, Cleo runs away from home to escape her overbearing family and memories of her dead sister. Cheesy set-up, typical 80s kid lit trauma-drama, but it gets better.

There's supposed to be a cabin there. But when she arrives, she finds it's burned down. She stocks up on food from a camping store, but her supply is quickly ransacked by animals. Her canoe is destroyed, winter is coming, and suddenly, what started as a somewhat bratty adolescent rebellion becomes very high stakes.

3. The Sara Summer by Mary Dowling Hahn
A book about Emily, a boring, well-behaved preteen girl who makes a "bad" friend. Emily is drawn to Sara's charisma, fearlessness, disregard for authority, but she also feels a little uncomfortable around her; however, she's also too spineless to stand up to Sara when she goes too far. What I liked most about this book is that it doesn't come to any easy conclusions about these kinds of friendships -- Emily isn't simply dragged down by Sara's influence, she also learns some valuable things from her.

4. Invisible Lissa by Natalie Honeycutt
Kind of like Blubber, only told from the point of view of the girl who is ostracized by her classmates when they form an exclusive club called FUNCHY (which stands for "fun lunches"). In a scene that I remember vividly, the narrator wants to stay home from school so badly that she sucks down the remains of a medicine lollipop left over from when she had strep throat. Invisible Lissa perfectly captures the arbitrary cruelty of elementary and middle school cliques, and really deserves to come back into print.

5. Autumn Street by Lois Lowry
As I once wrote in a post about this relatively obscure Lois Lowry book, "I don't want to live in a world where future generations can't read Autumn Street and be emotionally scarred by it."

6. With Magical Horses to Ride by Winifred Morris
Sadly, I remember very little about this book despite the fact that I checked it out at least twice a year from my local library between 1985 and 1987. Basically, it's about a girl who hangs out in a cemetery with a boy she thinks is an elf. Also, there is a bunch of stuff about tarot cards, and my parents would have totally taken this book away from me if they'd known what wicked sorcery it contained.

7. The Hawkeye and Amy series by M. Masters
Kind of the poor man's Encyclopedia Brown, the Hawkeye and Amy books followed a similar format. The twist, however, was that the answers to each case were printed backwards and you had to hold the book up to a mirror to read them.

Sir William the Bloody

Chances are good that you never studied the poetry of William Topaz McGonagall in school, and that his work is not available at your local library. This 19th century Scottish poet is an overlooked gem, though not for the usual reasons.

To call McGonagall a dreadful poet does not quite do him justice, because the marvel of his work is in how inventively dreadful it is. Rather than describe it, I'll let the work speak for itself.

From "An Address to Shakespeare":

Immortal! William Shakespeare, there's none can you excel,
You have drawn out your characters remarkably well,
Which is delightful for to see enacted upon the stage
For instance, the love-sick Romeo, or Othello, in a rage

From "Calamity in London: Family of Ten Burned to Death":

Oh, Heaven! if was a frightful and pitiful sight to see
Seven bodies charred of the Jarvis' family;
And Mrs Jarvis was found with her child, and both carbonised,
And as the searchers gazed thereon they were surprised.

Fires are a popular topic in McGonagall's work. From "Burning of the Exeter Theatre":

It was the most sickening sight that ever anybody saw,
Human remains, beyond recognition, covered with a heap of straw;
And here and there a body might be seen, and a maimed hand,
Oh, such a sight, that the most hard-hearted person could hardly withstand!

And my favorite, "The Pennsylvania Disaster," on the Johnstown flood:

And when the merciless flood reached Johnstown it was fifty feet high,
While, in pitiful accents, the drowning people for help did cry;
But hundreds of corpses, by the flood, were swept away,
And Johnstown was blotted out like a child's toy house of clay.

All you ever wanted to know about William Topaz McGonagall and more is available at McGonagall Online.

Gary Phillips At the Memorial Branch Library

The Memorial Branch is one of the Los Angeles Public Library system's smallest, oldest, and most beautiful branches. But lately, they've been pulling out the big guns for their "Meet the Author" series, and proving that you don't need the Mark Taper Auditorium to host a great talk.

We just got back from a Q&A with Gary Phillips, author of The Underbelly, Politics Noir (ed.), Monkology: the Ivan Monk stories, Bangers, Shooter’s Point, The Jook and too many other projects to name.

Phillips discussed his writing process, how he keeps the language and tropes of noir fresh, and Citizen Kang, the political suspense serial he's currently writing at The Nation to an audience that included a group of students from Los Angeles High School.

I'm told that in upcoming months, the Memorial branch library will be hosting talks with writers including Paula Woods, John Shannon, Denise Hamilton, a line-up that should have any fan of L.A. crime fiction doing the happy dance.

I'll post more details when I get the dates, but in the meantime, I can't say enough nice things about the Memorial branch library, and their ability to drag a girl out of her house on a Monday night and show her a nice time. I'll definitely be going back.

What a Life! What a Dame!: Elaine Dundy, 1921-2008

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, passed away last week at the age of 86.

Though best known for the semi-autobiographical adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, an American screwball on the loose in Paris, Dundy was also the author of several other novels and Elvis and Gladys, a study of the relationship between Elvis and his mother, described as "the best Elvis book yet."

My favorite of Dundy's works is her memoir, Life Itself!, which is quite simply the loveliest, liveliest, wittiest, most eyebrow-raising, side-splitting memoir I've ever read. Here are a few of my favorite moments from it:

On giving a disastrous class presentation on "arson": "When you have got it firmly lodged in your head that arson is a chemical, a batch of newspaper clippings with headlines such as: 'Ten Die in Warehouse Blaze - Arson Suspected' is not going to dislodge it."

On discovering rampant anti-Semitism at Sweet Briar College: "My shit list was growing apace and I had only been there for two months."

On not buying a jar of peanut butter: "I was the only one in our household who ate it and the thought struck me with force that our marriage was not going to last before I finished it."

On the kinkiness of the British: "Of course Englishmen love flagellation. It's the only time they ever get touched as children."

Some other remembrances of Dundy can be found at:

Elvis News
Quiet Bubble: "Roy Turner, her old friend and late-period amanuensis, said that “she died doing exactly what she loved most: she had a heart attack in mid-conversation with someone famous and interesting.”
A Different Stripe

Dear Abby, Dear Abby

Here's your chance to help a lit blogger with an ethical dilemma in her life:

Dear Reader:

I've gone to the same beautician for the past three years, and during that time, she's given me great haircuts at reasonable prices. When I go to her salon, there's no techno music, no display of Bumble & Bumble hair products, no bored, vindictive hipster stylists. We just watch true crime programs and Princess Di biography special on cable, and discuss them at great length. I always look forward to going to her. Until yesterday.

I walked into the salon in the morning, and discovered the beautician drinking a beer from a can in a paper bag. I was somewhat startled, but allowed politeness to override my good sense, and let her cut my hair anyway. However, it turns out that the woman was not merely hungover, but still somewhat drunk.

My new haircut reflects this state. I had to do a little creative trimming when I got home to salvage it.

So, should I go back to her again? I like this woman and she's always done a good jo in the past. I really don't want to find another place to get my hair cut. What should I do?

Signed,

Still Kind of Uneven in the Back

Reason #482 Why The Hobbit Needs the del Toro/Jackson Treatment

Did you ever notice that in the animated version of The Hobbit, Smaug sounds like somebody's drunk uncle?

Don't believe me? Baby, I have evidence:

I Guess It's Just My Week To Be Grumbly About YA Lit

You Know Where To Find Me by Rachel Cohn

It almost causes me physical pain to speak ill of a Rachel Cohn book when it was her writing that sucked me in to the awesome renaissance of YA lit in the first place. Unfortunately, Cohn's You Know Where To Find Me is several steps down from thoughtful, funny, and unpredictable work like Gingerbread, The Steps, and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

The book centers around Miles, better known as "8 Mile" at her predominantly African-American school -- "white trash with the wide load, capable of an occasional decent rap." Like many of Cohn's characters, Miles belongs to a non-traditional family, and this one is particularly complicated.

It begins with Jim, a middle-aged gay man who decides he wants to be a father, so he and his lover have a daughter through a surrogate. Then, the lover commits suicide, leaving Jim to raise Laura on his own. Shortly after this, the lover's twin sister shows up on Jim's doorstep with the infant Miles. Miles and Laura are raised together, almost like sisters, and the best of friends until Laura, like her biological father, commits suicide.

All of this takes place in the book's first chapter.

The rest of the book follows Miles as she contends with Laura's death, her feelings of inadequacy and ugliness, and also with her own burgeoning addiction to prescription drugs -- hydros, Perks, and Oxys, if it's a special occasion. She struggles with her weight, is considering dropping out of school before her senior year, and is in love with her best friend, though he's in love with someone else.

There's a lot going on here. Too much.

Add to that a subplot, conducted mainly through dialogue, involving Washington, D.C.'s mind-boggling electoral situation of taxation without representation. In her previous books, Cohn has occasionally thrown out a line or two that is clearly her, expressed through her characters. Here, she abandons all restraint and uses her characters to go off on tirades against religion, neo-con politics, the electoral process, and all manner of other things.

Let me be clear -- it's not Cohn's beliefs that offend me here, it's the clumsiness with which she instills them in her characters. It's incredibly jarring to read dialogue like the following coming out of a character's mouth:

"But he has, in fact, traded support on certain measures with several Maryland representatives in order to line up their recommendations for a retrocession measure to study whether D.C. could become part of Maryland. Retrocession would allow for a capital city around the Mall for the federal government, but extend Maryland's borders inside the District so that its citizens are granted the same state's rights -- and responsibilities -- as citizens in any other state."

It's not the fact that these words are coming out of a teenager's mouth that makes them unbelievable. It's that people don't talk like this unless they're the kind of people with jobs that require them to hire speech writers.

Again, I'm a fan of all of Cohn's other books, and would enthusiastically recommend them to anyone. But You Know Where to Find Me takes on too many themes, and addresses them sloppily.