The Aviary

Things:

- My normal dinner is toast + cheese + raw fruits and veggies, but that is Too Cold for the current weather, so tonight I had toast and miso soup with tofu and veggies instead. This was an excellent idea and I am now planning to just continue making miso soup every night till it's too warm again.

- I'm rereading some of my John Bellairs books for the first time in a long time. You guys, they are still really great. I just finished The Curse of the Blue Figurine and it is delightfully spooky. ( Also I'm going to ramble about my experience of reading these books as a child now. ) Anyway, I'm starting another one tonight. I may have to start purchasing all the ones I somehow don't own.

- In other spookytimes news, tonight's entry on my movie schedule is Mad Love with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive and I'm terribly excited to rewatch this extremely goofy movie. So far in my revisiting-1930's-and-40's-horror journey, I have watched Black Friday, The Raven, and The Mummy. All good times.

- Next weekend, my siblings and I are getting together for a board game day. I have to figure out which is my spookiest boardgame.

Sent out my library's copy of The Wind in the Willows for a hold this morning only to discover that it's one of the editions that cuts the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter. Now I kinda want to stick an apologetic post-it on the book to explain this to the person who's receiving the hold.

Look, I do not claim to be an expert on children's literature (or anything else) but I have two long-held opinions that are Correct and I will fight you on them:

1) You read Narnia in publication order.

2) You don't buy/print editions of Wind in the Willows without "Piper at the Gates of Dawn".

Yesterday, the children's librarian at Bainbridge made a difficult decision - we have a bunch of John Bellairs hardcovers with the Edward Gorey illustrations, and they just don't check out. They've consistently been on our dusty shelf reports (the reports of books that don't ever get checked out) for years now and we just don't have space to keep them. So they had to be weeded.

Now, this is a tragic thing. But, on the upside for me, she knows that I also love John Bellairs and she wanted the satisfaction of knowing that at least some of the books would be going to a loving home. Which is why I now have hardcover copies of The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb and The Secret of the Underground Room with the Edward Gorey illustrations.



Friends! Do you like: kid-lit, excellent writing, gorgeously spooky things that aren't gory, inter-generational friendships, well-researched occult phenomena, American small-town life in the late 1940's, and happy endings that usually involve eating cookies? Then you should go to your local library and get some John Bellairs - save them from the dusty shelf report. You will not be disappointed.

There are three series, each about a different boy and his elderly friend: Lewis Barnavelt (and his uncle Jonathan and their neighbor, Mrs Zimmerman, both of whom are witches), Anthony Monday (and Miss Eels, a librarian at the library where Anthony volunteers), and Johnny Dixon (and Professor Childermass). I'll give you a recommendation from each series:

For Lewis Barnavelt, you should start at the beginning with The House with a Clock in its Walls. Lewis comes to live with his uncle Jonathan, but Jonathan's house used to belong to a wizard working to bring about the end of the world and there is a clock hidden somewhere in the house, ticking down to Doomsday. I basically stole this book from my third grade teacher and read the cover off before I returned it to her.

For Anthony Monday, try The Dark Secret of Weatherend, in which Anthony and Miss Eels have to stop an evil wizard from transforming the world into an icy wasteland. There's a scene in this book where they almost get killed by leaves that I think about every autumn.

And for Johnny Dixon, start with The Curse of the Blue Figurine. There's ghosts, dead priests, possession, Egyptian artifacts, and evil magic rings. It's pretty great. Honestly, all the Johnny Dixon books are pretty great.

There's also an adult novel - The Face in the Frost - which is about two wizards and is lovely (and scary enough that I don't listen to the audiobook at bedtime). Well worth checking out.

So go - read John Bellairs! And then come back here and talk to me about it, because these books were a mainstay of my childhood and I don't get to talk about them nearly enough.

Last night, because of reasons, I downloaded an audiobook of The Jungle Book.

OMG, you guys, The Jungle Book! I loved The Jungle Book so much as a small person - we had a beautiful hardcover copy with paintings by Gregory Alexander and I read it over and over again. I still have bits of the poetry memorized, and it's one of the books I read while small that taught me to conjugate the thou form of verbs, which teachers tend to look at askance when you are in third grade.

(Incidentally, it is also the source of my first experience in being disappointed with a film adaptation. I'm sure I'd seen the Disney version before reading the book and but I clearly remember rewatching it after reading the book and the feeling of "What the hell is this, what do you think you're doing, no, stop that.")

My childhood library didn't have the first Jungle Book available as an audiobook, but it did have the second. (Which is how tiny me learned that there was a second Jungle Book. I haven't read it in a long time and not near as often as the first, so my memories of it are hazy, but I remember thinking Red Dog was awesome and being really freaked out by The King's Ankus and having a weird affection for The Undertakers.) I was disappointed in this gap in the library's collection, so I decided to make my own audiobook of the first one. Which I did by holding the book open in front of me and reading from it into the microphone on one of those old Fisher-Price tape players. I put Mowgli's Brothers on one side of the tape and Tiger! Tiger! on the other side and listened to it at bedtime. (I have been using bedtime audiobooks for a very long time.)

I have long since lost that tape, of course. But now, I have an actual full-length audiobook! So exciting!

I should find myself an audiobook of Just So Stories* too.





*My youngest sister has never read Just So Stories which I learned recently by quoting The Cat That Walked By Himself at the tv for a reason I do not now recall. I find this weirdly astounding because I am always bemused by the fact that my sisters didn't read the same childhood classics I did, despite them being shelved on the shared bookshelf in the basement tv room.

OMG, there is going to be a True Meaning of Smekday movie! That is the most amazing news I have read in weeks!

Guys, have you read The True Meaning of Smekday? Because you should totally read it. It has alien invasions and cats and road trips and not!Disney world and a main character named Gratuity (who goes by Tip) and families and found families and an alien named J-Lo and talks frankly about racism and colonialism in a way that I am not used to seeing in kidlit. Also, it is hilarious. And will make you cry.

Basically, you should watch this video and if you think it is at all funny, you should read this book. And then we should all keep our fingers crossed that the movie will be awesome.

(The audiobook is also awesome, btw. I was a little concerned about the way they would manage the book's frequent use of comics-style illustrations, but it's handled really well. And the reader is great, with a really wonderful J-Lo voice. So that is highly recommended also.)e

Things:

- So, the robot I was working all weekend is almost finished. (It still needs a second leg.) There will be pictures when it's done because it's very cute and I'm quite proud of it. However, today I find myself seized with a different completely nerdy stuffed thing I would like to make: a dimetrodon. Ever since I was a small person who told her teachers that she wanted to be a paleontologist when she grew up (that did not end up happening), I have had a great deal of fondness for the dimetrodon. It is my favorite prehistoric lizard-thing. I think I should make one.

- The thing I don't get is parents who watch their children run around the library, banging things and making enormous amounts of noise, and don't do anything about it. Up to and including the point where I have to myself go over and ask the kids that the parents are explicitly watching to be quiet. And also to stop trying to drag the bookbin away or climb on the empty carts or do all kinds of other dangerous things that you'd think their parents would want to prevent.

- The dude who wrote Starvation Heights is coming out with a YA novel set in Kitsap county. The amazon summary uses the phrase "the deceptively picture-perfect town of Port Gamble" which is pretty much everything I have ever thought about Port Gamble. There is something deeply creepy about that place. So, naturally, I'm going to have to read this novel. There are apparently telepathic twins investigating murders and things. In Port Gamble. Maybe they'll visit the Kingston library.

Hey, guys - do you like A Wrinkle in Time?

Then you should watch this:



The children's librarian at Bainbridge showed that to me this afternoon and I keep thinking about it and giggling. (Especially at, "Hi, Dad!" "I'm not going to solve any of your problems.") So I thought I'd share.

This is a book we have at the Bainbridge Library:

Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher.

Things:

- Yesterday was the March meeting of the Bainbridge film discussion group, so I went and watched Streetcar Named Desire, which I had never seen before. And oh, you guys, but that film is hard to watch. I mean, it's wonderfully made and wonderfully acted and is quite enthralling but it is full of dreadful people, who are either horrible or pathetic or both, and I did not want to spend five minutes with them, let alone two hours. I have found, recently, that I do not want stories about pathetic and horrible people, no matter how wonderfully written they are. I want to watch or read about people with a core of decency to them. I don't mind if they do horrible things afterwards - they don't have to be heroes - I just don't want to read about rotten people right now.

- On the other hand, yesterday I read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. People! Do you like steampunk? Alternative history? Giant flying whales? Did you, in fact, love Naomi Novik's Temeraire books but think to yourself, "Self, what these books need is Austrians in big steel mechas"? Then you should read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, which is a steampunk alternative history of WWI, in which one side has giant metal war machines and the other side has genetically engineered animals, some of which are giant flying whales. We have POV characters on both sides, both of whom are awesome. One of them is a (non-historically accurate) Hapsburg prince, who is thoughtful and quiet and politically-minded. The other is a Scottish girl-disguised-a-boy who has joined the British air force in order to fly on the giant whale dirigibles and is a bumptious swaggering piece of awesome. I love them both, and I am now anxious awaiting the sequel.



And this has been today's entry in Media I Have Consumed Lately.

Do you know what should exist? An audiobook of The True Meaning of Smekday.

Hi, I am reading that right now! It is pretty awesome. It is kidlit written and illustrated by Adam Rex (author of Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and other awesome picture books) and is about the adventures of Gratuity (or Tip) trying to find her Mom and dealing with the aftermath of an alien invasion, with the help of an alien named J.Lo and a cat named Pig. It is hilarious and touching and thoughtful and altogether wonderful. You should read it.

And there should be an audiobook, mostly so that someone can read me all the funny things that J.Lo says in the squeaky bubbly voice I imagine him having.

One of my coworkers is reading A Wrinkle In Time for the first time ever. She doesn't much like it.

I don't really know if we can be friends anymore.

Still, she hasn't gotten to Camazotz yet. I maintain that you can't meet the Man With the Red Eyes and IT without being at least somewhat intrigued.

(A Wrinkle in Time is the first book that I can remember my mom reading to me. I read our copy - and our copies of Wind in the Door and Swiftly Tilting Planet - to tatters. And for all that I have a tendency to yell, "I love you, Charles Wallace!" at the television when ever anyone gets Saved By the Power of Love, I will admit that I can't actually think the sentence "Mrs Whatsit loves me" without having to blink rapidly and swallow a couple of times.)