Take a look, it's in a book! Or something like that...
Hi! As you can, I've been busy catching up on my wintertime reading. As the son of a librarian and a mailman, I grew up doing a lot of two things: obsessively reading stacks of books, and running from barking dogs. I thought that this week I'd share some of my favorite books from over the past 30-ish years.
" So You Want To Be a Wizard" by Diane Duane was written back in 1982, and I remember it being one of my first real favorites. It's sort of an ancestor to the "Harry Potter" books, about 2 kids in NYC that find a manual in their local library about how to perform magic spells. They soon learn that the world is secretly filled with magic, and they begin their training to become real wizards. One thing leads to another, and soon they find themselves trapped in an alternate "dark" NYC fighting an evil force and trying to find their way home. Honestly, I haven't read it since I was a kid, so maybe it wouldn't hold up now, but I remember it being a pretty great book.
"Allen Mendehlson, the Boy From Mars" by Daniel Pinkwater. Again, this is back from my childhood, and I credit Daniel Pinkwater for being a key figure in the way I turned out. All of his books deal with kids going on crazy bizarre adventures, usually without their parents knowledge. If you love wacky humor, corn muffins, weirdo hippy aliens, parallel dimensions, and hot chocolate, then you'll love Allen Mendehlson.
"The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockmeier is a haunting story about death, the afterlife, and the connections that bind us together. A plague is wiping out the last humans on Earth. The souls of the deceased reside in The City, in which everyone exists as long as there is someone alive who remembers them. As the residents begin to vanish, they start to make their final preparations for the end, and explore what it means to have lived and loved. Seriously, I think about this book all the time.
I started reading the Spellman series a few years ago, and the first one, "The Spellman Files" by Lisa Lutz is still my favorite. It's about a family of private detectives in San Francisco that spend most of their time spying on each other. The main character, Isabel Spellman, is a hard drinking, witty 28 year old who tries her best to keep her meddling parents, perfectionist brother, and troublesome younger sister from ruining her good times. She's one of those characters that you wished would think you were cool enough to hang out with.
This is a really hard book to describe. "The People of Paper" by Salvador Plascencia is a strange experimental format of storytelling. The basic story is about a group of Mexican flower pickers that realize that they are just characters in a story and begin a rebellion against the author. The page layout begins to shift and change as the characters learn new ways to keep the sullen author, who is in a deep depression about a breakup, from controlling their lives. It's great but takes some getting used to. It contains one of my favorite quotes about love lost: “One day I will forgive you; until then there are scabs everywhere that you have touched me.”
Lastly, "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" by Peter Reinhart is an amazingly thorough book about the art and science of breadmaking. I had about 6 months of unemployment at one time and my wife encouraged me to follow a passion and do an apprenticeship at a local tiny bakery. It was hard work, and I still daydream about someday opening up my own place. This book is well written and accessible to the home baker, though maybe skewed a bit more towards people with lots of time to prepare 2-3 day step recipes. I don't get to bake as much as I'd like to, but I still thumb through this book constantly and dream.
So that's it! Go get lost in a book for a couple hours. Maybe while you're reading, someone very nice will bring you a hot chocolate and fold that laundry. I kid, honey, I kid!
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Brian
"Always onwards, ever upwards and forever twirling, twirling, twirling."
