My kids lugged along a ton of books to their father's house today. My older one reminds me so much of myself at the same age, at her happiest lost in a book. She seems to have outgrown Jacqueline Wilson and Meg Cabot, though I can imagine her picking up Meg Cabot once again when she starts becoming truly interested in boys - not for some time yet, I hope! She adored The Outlaw Varjak Paw, devoured Twilight and New Moon, got into a bit of Philip Pullman, and started The Book Thief, which we'd planned to read together, until she left the book in her father's house one weekend and didn't bring it back till a few months later. By then the momentum was sort of lost, but not before she'd asked about Hitler and the Nazis.
I kept urging her to give A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a try, but she only picked it up a few weeks ago, then couldn't put it down. When I finished The Icarus Girl, I suggested she read it - I thought Helen Oyeyemi did a brilliant job of getting into the psyche of a gifted 8 year old girl suspended between two worlds - but it might be too scary for her...
I was kind of geeky in school - not science-smart geeky but buried-in-a-book geeky. In grade school, there was this Bookworm of the Month thing going on in the library -the librarian tallied up the number of books you read a month ( or was it every quarter), and the three top borrowers were subjected to a test to prove they had actually read the books they took out. I don't know how many Bookworm of the Month certificates I accumulated, but there were quite a few. Then, I recall, I rarely read fiction. I used to love history and mythology and biography, especially that series by Ladybird - do they still exist? - slim volumes that packed a lot of biographical information about the kings and queens of England, famous composers and artists, the saints - I was in a Catholic all-girls school and briefly considered becoming a bride of Christ after reading about St Theresa of Avila. I also read the classics of the day - The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, Diary of Anne Frank, and a memoir about a girl called Karen who had cerebral palsy. And I had this bizarre crush on JFK - or maybe I wanted to be secretly like Jackie one day - and read everything I could find about the Kennedys - no other family I suppose has combined history and mythology so effectively!
Today I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction. I started 2007 reading Christopher Hope's novel, My Mother's Lovers, which I absolutely refused to let go off until I'd read all of it. A lot of people in Hijack City were lukewarm in their response to the book, but I thought he portrayed Hijack City and its denizens so well, warts, quirks, pretensions and all, with a sharp, sometimes sentimental, yet always wry, eye. Some of my friends thought he was needlessly pessimistic (not allowed in the new and "unified" Rainbow Nation) but I felt he was actually being pragmatic about the reality that is this continent:
Large white men telling you with tears in their eyes how much they love Africa; it's a cloying, it's crap, and, worse still, they mean it. There is also usually anger buried in this claim, maybe because these lovers know that the beloved doesn't give a toss, never thinks of them, and may well loathe the sight and smell of them...
...Of the horrible passage of whites through Africa there was no doubt. It did not matter whether they were British or Belgians or French or Germans, the pattern was the same: contempt followed by mass murder. We had moved from the era when foreign Europeans shot locals at will to the time when white Africans spend their time apologising. Homicide to homilies, rope to repentance.
But it came too late. Worse, it came from the wrong people. Those who did the damage never felt the lash of hatred from their newly liberated serfs, never indeed came close to imagining that they were not wonderfully bright, kindly, superior beings appointed to rule over savage children, to correct them where possible, and shoot them when necessary. Never failing to affirm, as they caressed their whips or oiled their guns, how much they adored Africa... while Africa went on hating them..
I don't know what I'll end the year with, but I'm just about done with Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips. It's very funny - the gods gone contemporary, Apollo and Zeus and Hera squandering their power and all that. Gods with very human characteristics, quick to anger, slow to mercy, prone to envy, their vanity easily stoked, and their insecurities easily provoked. Ha! Sounds very much like the Napoleoneta in the tropics, who imagines herself descended from the gods, if not actually having the ear of God. Well there's one god definitely waiting to welcome her to the underworld - Hades.
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