Books: Folding Star of a Winding Road

With Folding Star's permission, we reprinting some of entries from A Winding Road to ensure that we highlight books. Reading is fundamental.

"Lost Within the Pages: Saturday Book Chat IV"

Well, here we are again. After two weeks of focusing on fiction, I should probably begin this week by highlighting something that falls under the category of non-fiction.

I find in my personal reading that I'm going through a heavy fiction phase at the moment. I fluctuate. Sometimes I'll rotate back and forth, reading fiction, following it with non-fiction, and then fiction again, etc, very orderly and fair. But I never plan out in advance what I'll be reading next. Or, if I do, the plans vanish like a puff of smoke as soon as the moment comes to start the next book.
That's a great moment, isn't it? You've just finished one book, and whether you've loved it, hated it, or found it to be just a decent book, you've suddenly got the choice to make- what to read next?

It's like kid in a candy store time. Especially if you're like me, and a frequent visitor to bookstores and libraries. I'm surrounded with books waiting to be read. Whenever I finish one, the choices at hand are many.

Choosing is so much fun, and so based on my mood at that moment that I can't ever plan in advance, though I sometimes forget that and try. This summer, for instance, I decided I'd focus on reading criticism. Literary criticism, film criticism, etc. I'd turn to the works of Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael.
Well, I made a good start, but my mood shifted by the time I finished one book, and I was off in a whole other direction.

That's how I am with books. So, I'll go through periods where I find myself reading either fiction or non-fiction almost exclusively for a period, though what I'm reading can vary widely even among those genres.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that I'm on a fiction jag right now! Well, sort of. I just finished reading this morning a book of essays by V.S. Naipaul, Literary Occasions. The collection was mostly compiled of things written in the 1960's and 70's, and it largely dealt with Naipaul's life growing up in Trinidad. His life there figured so heavily into him becoming a writer and into what he wrote about that to discuss anything to do with writing, he naturally seems to find himself discussing that time.

I consider essays to be literature and not necessarily non-fiction, even if they're dealing with 'real life' topics, so I count this as part of my fiction jag.
I'm about to begin reading a collection of short stories by a British author, Rachel Seiffert, entitled Field Study. I've not yet read anything by Seiffert (though I see that her first book, The Dark Room, was nominated for and won some awards) and I love taking that leap with an unfamiliar author, never quite knowing what to expect until you're already involved.

But I do want to highlight non-fiction during these chats as well, especially when it's of a political nature. 2004 was, obviously, a very political year and I read several incredible books. The one that leaps instantly to mind right now is James Wolcott's Attack Poodles.

Attack Poodles takes on the idiotic media pundits of the right wing. If you hear anyone spouting that old myth of the liberal media, think about making them a gift of this book. Wolcott lays it all out here, showing how ridiculous and biased these people are, simply by using their own words and actions as proof.
As we head into a second four year term with the Bushies, we all need to be on the lookout for these bullies who rush in yapping to set the tone and the storyline so that it's as beneficial to Bush & co as possible.

Best of all, the book not only exposes these poodles, it also makes them into the laughing stocks they deserve to be. Wolcott is incredibly funny as he goes about his work of separating the poodles from the other lap dogs.

And that's really important, because nothing deflates these pompous pundits' balloons faster than being exposed as the jokes they are. They thrive on being given any ounce of credibility, and trust me, when you give them an ounce, they'll take ten pounds as their due, people.

Wolcott has the right idea. Show them up as biased hacks, and then laugh at them. Loudly and longly. Strip them of any journalistic credibility. Being taken seriously by someone is for them like clapping for Tinker Bell. When nobody claps, Tinker Bell dies, right? When everybody laughs at the fool, O'Reilly gets a one way ticket back to Hard Copy, or wherever it was he slithered out from under before that.

So, I suggest you read Attack Poodles if you haven't yet. It's highly entertaining in and of itself and it will arm you for debate with anyone who spouts off about the 'liberal media'.

Well, I found myself thinking today, when I was wondering what I'd write about for my book chat this week, about the books that I loved when I was a child.

Do you remember the first book you loved as a child? I wish that I could. I don't really have a recollection of the first time that a book spoke to me. I do remember many books that I loved throughout my childhood, many of which I would read over and over again.

Like the books of Beverly Cleary, for instance. I do remember the first time I picked up one of those. It was in the second grade at school. My class read Ramona the Pest together. I still remember the excitement of each of us being assigned our own copy of the book, with a black number in felt pen on the top of the pages, and how much I enjoyed the story as it progressed. Even more, I remember feeling thrilled when we'd finished the book and I discovered that our school library had other Ramona books. I read them all over the next three years or so, again and again.It was another book by Cleary that really spoke to me, though, one which did not involve Ramona or the Quimby family. The book was Dear Mr. Henshaw and the main character was a young boy, Leigh Botts, who wanted to be a writer. The book took the form of Leigh's letters to Mr. Henshaw, a children's author that he first wrote as a class assignment, and later as the journal that Mr. Henshaw suggests that Leigh keep.

For a child who also wanted to be a writer, the book seemed in a way to be about me, though the character wasn't very much like me. Re-reading it as an adult, what strikes me is the home life that Leigh has. I certainly recognized it as a child while reading the book, but it was so outside my own experiences that it was more a curiosity than anything else. Now, I marvel at Cleary's ability to write such a realistic picture of a young boy dealing with the divorce of his parents and life without the steady presence of his father, who's a long distance truck driver.

It's an amazing book, one which I think every child should read, but also one which I can pick up to this day and read every so often. The first time I did so, I felt at first like I would just be trying to recapture some feeling from my childhood. But as it turned out, it was a different book to me at that very different time in my life, and I found a whole new meaning in it.

There were many books I read as a kid that I could probably still, to this day, spend hours talking about. I thought at the time that the sense of magic would continue always. When everything was so new, the magic was easy to find in each book you opened. As I've said before here, the magic becomes rarer as you get older. Those special books become a bit more rare, though they're still out there.

Maybe that's why so many of us cherish childhood favorites our entire lives. They're special in a way that is hard to match as you grow older and you can revisit them far more easily than you can anything else from that time. You can't go back and play with your old toys, for instance. The toys haven't changed, but you have, and the only stories they ever told were the ones you made for them. But you can pick up that old book again and see what you find this time around.

What was your favorite book as a kid? It would be interesting to get feedback on that, maybe compile a list of people's favorite books from childhood, as The Common Ills did recently with current favorites.

Let me know at foldingstar05@yahoo.com You can also write if there's something you think I should read, or something you've read that you just want to chat about, or for any old reason at all, for that matter.

I hope you're all enjoying your Saturday and that you get a chance sometime today to relax with a good book.