Happy birthday to weirdness in literature. AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room is a year old. We thought it would raise a smile or two but you actually bought the books and lots of them. Hands up if you purchased Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power, the International Book of Beer Can Collecting or the Dictionary of Pipe Organ Stops? There are more than 150 odd but strangely addictive books in there, many suggested by you.
I have been away on vacation for the past week. I thought it would be nice to not think much about books but, of course, they kept cropping up everywhere. My summer holiday reading was a copy of a collection of Sports Illustrated’s best essays. It’s a thick book and I didn’t even get close to finishing it. It’s becoming rather dog-earred now as I kept carrying it about with the hope of reading it but I usually failed. The kids each took a bag stuffed full of reading matter. The eight-year-old continues to devour more Michael Murpugo books and Gawain and the Green Knight is her latest favourite. She seemed to delight in the fact that the Green Knight is beheaded in the middle of Arthur’s court but didn’t really seem to notice that ladies were continually trying to seduce Gawain.
Before leaving, we took out three audio books from the library – Tigger Comes to the Forest (voiced by Stephen Fry, Judy Dench and others), and two Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles books. We listened to Pooh many times over as we drove around British Columbia. As time went on, I became convinced that the most likeable animal in Hundred Acre Wood is Eeyore. I love how he describes the other animals as stupid and dismisses Tigger as some kind of freak.
The Spiderwick books grew on me. At first, I didn’t know what to make of them. My eight-year-old loves them and answered our questions about why there were giants, dragons and fairies in Florida. Our favourite characters from the books were the Nixies – water spirits who live in fresh water and speak in a sing-song fashion.
We visited a wonderful used bookshop in a place called Penticton where I found a copy of Essential John Arlott: Forty Years of Classic Cricket Writing. How odd to find what is now an fairly obscure cricket book in a small town buried in rural western Canada? The eight-year-old spent her pocket money on Harry Potter 5 and we’re now fighting our way through this behemoth chapter by chapter each evening.
Back to reality, back to the here and now.
I really loved the New Yorker blog Book Bench’s post this morning about the impending demise of the Cathy comic strip (finally). Many of the suggestions for how Cathy should end were hilarious, but mean-spirited. And it’s unsurprising, because Cathy, created by Cathy Guisewite, is an old-fashioned, innocent comic, out of its depth by today’s standards.
It’s funny that Meredith Blake, who wrote the post, should bring up The Family Circus, as well – I guess my mind isn’t the only one in which the two woefully outdated comics are intertwined. The Family Circus is downright eerie in some ways, with robed spectres of dead grandparents playfully haunting the children from time to time, and just too innocent to be funny in other ways. We get it, P.J. can’t pronouce “spaghetti”. It’s adorable. Pasketti. We get it.
Cathy just seems to have an enormous target on its (her?) back, in a world dominated by internet people trolling for their next victim of clever sarcasm. The simple formula of a woman trying to keep it together, constantly struggling with her weight, her diet, her (lack of, often) love life, her job, her budget and the like is nothing new to either reality or fictional media. But I think unlike the characters in Sex and the City, or Friends, who come off as lovable in their perfectly-polished quirks, Cathy often read as pathetic. She was often a sweaty mess in sweat pants, relying on the love of a cat and a tub of ice cream to comfort her when the hustle and bustle of the real world became too much. Constantly jamming the void in her soul and heart full of shoes, chocolate, sales at the mall and the like, it was hard not to wince and avert the eyes. Especially when it was intended as funny.
I think for some women, (not naming any names here, certainly not owning up to anything), the comic elicited cringes a lot more frequently than laughs. Partly, it just isn’t really funny, except in that Someone’s Got a Case of the Mondays kind of way, which has been done to death on mugs, calendars and novelty, mesh-backed hats for eons. Today’s edgy, blase audiences expect more, and sit stony-faced and yawning. Go ahead. make me laugh. Try.
But it also hits a little close to home. While Cathy is portrayed as cartoonishly bumbling, over-the-top sheepish and forever exasperated, she’s just an extreme caricature of what many of us struggle with – the battle between the desire to be comfortable but beautiful, relaxed but ambitious, honest but polished, successful, loved.
One can picture Cathy as a real woman, though possibly named Barb or Sue or Linda, easing her high heels off her swollen feet under her desk and trying to wedge the hole in her pantyhose between two of her toes. She sneaks a bit of diet, sugar-free chocolate from her desk drawer (sure, it upsets her stomach, but who can afford the calories? And we all need our little getaways during the day) and sighs contentedly. A coworker passes by her desk, and inquires what the good word might be. She replies with something about TGIF, or How goes the battle, or working hard or hardly working?, and their empty exchange is quickly forgotten. Her bright lipstick has faded throughout the day, leaving only a few coral flakes drying at the corners of her mouth, and her hairspray has given up the ghost, leaving her coiffure to sag in a slumped shadow of its earlier glory. Her smile is bright, but we see her, sitting beneath a poster of a cat dangling from a tree branch, with the words “Hang in there!”, and while her smile falters for a moment, we hope she does, and we think she will, and that is the way I want Cathy to end. With her hanging in there, and things looking up.
…in other news, how did I just end up writing a largely heartfelt (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) post about Cathy?! Need coffee…or chocolate… ACK!
Let's file this one under Free Speech, shall we?
A couple days ago someone started the hashtag #booksotherslikedthatididn't on Twitter. It was like a entering a confessional where the weight of books we hate, but so many people love, was lifted from our shoulders (I'm assuming it was like confession. I don't know. I'm not Catholic so am basing that on what I've seen in episodes of Rescue Me).
As a bookseller, it's my job to put the right book in a customer's hands. I occasionally find myself talking about a book that I dislike, weighing the pros and cons of owning up to that. I mean, there's a possibility that the customer will like it.
Is it a good idea to talk about books we want to launch into a toilet as much as we talk about books we'd like to marry? Is it still possible to handsell a despised tome when a customer is truly interested in it? Maybe if the customer wants to spite me, he'll buy the book (all the better!) I've always thought it'd be great to have a "Books VB staff hates" display, but bashing the product we're trying to sell isn't the best business model, is it?
Despite that, the weight is getting to be too much for me. I must purge my mind of these books I hate with such fervor that the mere mention of them throws me into a tirade. Does it mean they're truly awful books? Well, considering that I'm in a very small minority with, um, all of them, apparently not. Let's just say they weren't my cup of tea.
So, without further adieu, I give you "Lindsey's Books That She'd Like to See Tossed Into a Combine." (I will now be waiting patiently for the angry townsfolk.)
1.) Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross (I've never wanted to punch a character so hard)
2.) The Passage by Justin Cronin (seriously. The guy compares a foggy night to be at a rock concert with a fog machine. Really?)
3.) Moving On by Larry McMurtry (oh, Larry. You did such an amazing job with Lonesome Dove. So why did I treasure tossing this crap of a book into the trash?)
4.) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (zzzzzzzz)
The first ever dictionary comprised entirely of English slang has been republished in all it’s 1699 glory. The book was originally compiled to provide amusement to London’s elite, teaching them the slang of the lower classes.
This is one of the joys that a print on demand type of publishing can bring, it’s doubtful it will sell all that many copies in 2010 but just the fact that I CAN have a copy for my own amusement warms my heart. Granted it would be absolutely amazing to have an original, but I know quite any 300 year old book is well that’s out of my price range, no matter how low brow it once was.
The New dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew, in its several tribes, of Gypsies, beggers, thieves, cheats would be indispensible for your next historical fiction piece where your lead character is an ill-educated Renaissance urchin. Think about it!
