I'd Rather Read a Cereal Box

When trying to find Captain Corelli's Mandolin a few days ago, I was reminded that I need more bookshelves, because my paperback fiction collection has been pushed to the back of our double-depth shelves.

Or perhaps, one of these days, I will sit down and give some thought to maybe editing my book collection and possibly even parting with a few books. I still have my Canadian Collegiate Dictionary from the late 1980s, even though I've been looking up words online for more than a decade. And I just read in the newspaper that Oxford may be publishing only an online version of its multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary when the new edition is ready in a few years, because it doesn't expect much demand for the printed version.

     

Two books I will part with before my college dictionary: The Bitch Goddess Notebook and Little Children. The first book I bought at the airport many years ago, before I started to buy hardcover only, because the title caught my eye. (Reading a hardcover book compared with its trade paperback version is like having home-delivery food served on my own plates and with proper utensils rather than eating from styrofoam containers and with disposable chopsticks.)

The second book was a gift from a girlfriend; she had bought me half a dozen best-sellers to read when I was pregnant with my daughter. When I went to Amazon.com to add the book cover image to this post, I noticed that Little Children had been made into a film starring Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. I'm bug-eyed.

I don't remember the details of either story or my reading experience, I just know that when I finished reading them, I thought to myself, "Wow, what a waste of my time." I must have found the plot formulaic, felt annoyed by the characters, been unimpressed with the dialogue, or all of the above.

The Book before the Film

          

This past weekend I read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I was thinking about what to read next, and saw that a UK survey of readers' favorites had listed Captain Corelli's Mandolin in the top 25. The provenance of my copy is memorable. It belonged to a man I sat next to on the plane. He had finished reading it near the end of a long flight, during which we had some polite general conversation, and asked whether I'd like to have the book since he was, in his words, done with it. This happened more than 10 years ago and I remember the incident because I found it so foreign that someone could so easily part with his book.

Being on partial bedrest, I've prescribed myself a list of physical "don'ts", including climbing, reaching on tiptoes and crouching. So I had to ask my husband to climb up to the top of our bookshelf to help me find Corelli's Mandolin. He looked and looked and, insisting that I had no such book, named each title in the vicinity of where this book should be. When he called out Hitchhikers Guide organized under "A" for Adams, I asked for it to be passed down to me. How fun to discover a forgotten book. (My husband patiently continued the search, and found Corelli's Mandolin under "D" for de Bernieres instead of under "B" where I had asked him to look.)

          

As I started to read Hitchhikers Guide (which, by the way, is also listed on that same UK survey), I realized to my dismay that I had already seen the movie a few years back. Dismay because generally I don't like to see the film version before reading the original book. Often times I am inspired to read a book after learning of a soon-to-be-released film version, just so I can read the book first, before watching the film.  Recent examples include: Everything is Illuminated, The Hours and In Cold Blood, all of which I loved both book and film versions.

As expected, I had barely gotten through the first dozen pages of Hitchhikers Guide before I found myself waiting for the part where Arthur Dent is beamed onto a spaceship. I was reading without really savouring the writing, and instead kept anticipating what I knew would be the next "scene". The book was fun and easy to read -- I ended up having to put it down and pick it up again several times over the weekend, and had no problems with starting where I had left off -- but I suspect it would have been more deliciously funny if I didn't know what would be happening next in the story.

Rhythm and Rhyme

A few days ago, out of nowhere, my daughter started singing, "Swing low sweet chariot, umma umma carry me home." It's one song out of 3 CDs full of children's songs that she listens to in the car (sung by Raffi, our favorite children's entertainer), and she hasn't listened to music in the car for a few months now. I attribute her recollection to the fact that we've been reading aloud to her for hours a day since she was a baby.

I remember reading somewhere that song lyrics are the foundation for children to learn about words, and to become interested in rhymes, poetry and the magic of the well-written prose.

Recalling songs from my childhood, I'm surprised that, in a primary school in the Vancouver suburbs, our teacher taught us English songs like "Drunken Sailor", American songs such as "It's a Long Way to Tiperary" and Australian songs such as "Waltzing Matilda"; was it just that teacher or was the school curriculum so "cross-cultural"? I'm certain I didn't know the meanings of what I was singing back then, but I loved the way the words rolled out.

I love reading poetry out loud, and nowadays reading children's stories aloud to my daughter also brings me joy. One talent I wish I had: the ability to recite my poems by heart, at least my favorite ones. (Another wished-for talent would be cooking.)



I still have my 1983 edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. In recent years, I've tried other poetry collections, including Harold Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language, and even the latest edition of The Norton Anthology, but they don't compare to the comfort of knowing exactly where to find the old favorites, as well as the tiny thrill of discovering a new poem, in my dog-eared copy.

Mommie Dearest

Last night, over dinner with friends, we got on the subject of children reaching puberty before age 10.  Apparently there is a Korean saying that describes children as "not naive, yet pure".  One friend who works at an international school here in Hong Kong commented that, while many of her schoolchildren are worldly because their parents expose them to a wide range of positive experiences, they have yet to develop a truly mature perspective because they are in fact more sheltered than their counterparts in North America.

I thought about my two-and-a-half year old daughter. The lower quarter of our bookshelf is filled with children's books and she is free to choose whatever she wishes to flip through or have us read to her. However, I've put Where the Wild Things Are on an upper shelf out of her reach, partly because it is next to Dave Egger's The Wild Things but mostly because I'm afraid she'll be frightened by the monsters or negatively influenced by the angry tone of the story. Am I being too protective?

When I was growing up, my parents never even glanced at the covers of the books I was reading, let alone censor any of them.  And that's how, at the age of 10 or 11, I got my hands on my first trashy novel, which I remember reading over and over (I loved to look at the photos and see that I was reading about real people).  A daughter's tell-all about her physically and psychologically abusive movie star mother Joan Crawford, my copy of Mommie Dearest was hidden under my bed because even I was aware that it was age-inappropriate.

Parents today are too child-centric, focusing so much on the needs and feelings of their children. My parents are universally acknowledged as awesome parents, but I know that their children's sleep schedule was not of much concern when they brought my brother and me along (with sleeping bags in tow) to late night mahjong sessions with their friends.  And yet that's not so bad, is it?  How different would I be today if back then, my parents were actively involved in what I read or never allowed me to stray from a strict bedtime routine?

Perhaps parents today are child-centric because they worry their children will grow up to be like Christina Crawford.

Dave and Chris

This past weekend, friends came over for dinner and one of them recognized my complete collection of McSweeney's Quarterly Review.  In addition to very original content, I also enjoy the humorous copyright disclaimers and introductions from guest editors (such as Viggo Mortensen and Judy Blume). 

     

MQR was created by Dave Eggers, one of my favorite writers. The first work I read by him was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  I bought the book because of the title.  It was my first experience with "stream of consciousness" writing and I found it so contemporary and hip.  I wanted him to be the father of my children because I imagine him to be a cool dad who creates a stimulating and fulfilled home environment; our children would be so articulate and brilliant! (I had similar fantasies about Chris Martin after attending a Coldplay show.) 

Last year, I bought another book because of the title and loved it.  (The word "northern" reminded me of one of my favorite songs from the 1980s, "Life in a Northern Town".)  Imagine my excitement when I learned that Vendela Vida, the author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, is married to Dave Eggers!  Since then, my fantasy has been revised: my husband and I live in the Bay area and are best friends with the Vida-Eggers family, enjoying great Napa wines and exchanging literary banter.

Books for Pre-schoolers

I love that I am discovering new stories along with my daughter, who is thankfully going through her terrific two's. Reading these picture books through my grown-up eyes, I appreciate the ingenious and precise diction as well as the beautiful and often guffaw-inducing artwork.

A few of my personal favorites:

                         

I enjoy collecting foreign language versions of her favorite books: French, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Italian.

Teleportation

In my enthusiasm to develop a love of books in my daughter when she was born in 2008, I started to buy all those titles I had read and loved back in my childhood. As I didn't start reading until at least age seven, I never read those early classics like Good Night Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Instead, I was buying books my daughter will not likely start to enjoy for at least another five years or so. So I re-read them as soon as they arrived from Amazon.com and am still amazed at the talent of those great writers of young fiction.



One of my first purchases was A Wrinkle in Time. Re-reading it brought me back to those wonderful years in Mrs. Taylor's class. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, the top student from each primary school in our district would be excused from regular class to attend a special class that used an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. We worked on one class project per term (e.g. "Build a City of the Future"); by having to create models and write reports describing our city (form of government, city planning, transportation, family home), we were taught math, history, science and anthropology in that context.

In my future city, residents teleported. I must have been reading A Wrinkle in Time and taken the idea from the book. From there on, I went through a phase of reading science fiction and fantasy; one that sticks in my memory is a story by Isaac Asimov about a child who is locked in a closet by classmates on the one day every seven years that it stops raining and the sun comes out. I have not read any more science fiction since my teens, but my interest in the genre never fully left me: in my 20s I became a devoted fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series (they teleport too!).



Last month, I bought When You Reach Me, a recently published young fiction book. I read it because a book review said it was inspired by A Wrinkle in Time. I loved the story and the writing, and it brought me back to my egocentric childhood where I identified with Meg and her brother because I believed I was more intellectual and perceptive and sensitive than other children around me (surely I don't believe that anymore!).

Every Reading is a Misreading

Umberto Eco says that every reading is a misreading. With English as my second language and parents whose English language skills I surpassed within a year of arriving in Canada, I must have had misread many stories in those early years. I loved to read Archie comics and Mad magazine, but now I wonder how much of their humor I actually understood. In my memory, I laughed aloud at my favorite early reader series, Amelia Bedelia. Did I really understand all those double entendres and play-on-words?



I still remember the punch line about Amelia Bedelia "drawing the drapes".  I guess the important thing is, those misreadings taught me how to read!

Cereal Boxes

For many years, I described my indiscriminate reading habits by telling friends, "I read everything, even cereal boxes!" Then last week, I read about someone attributing cereal boxes to how she started to love reading. My eureka moment: (1) there are millions of kids reading all five sides of a cereal box, often morning after morning (those sugar-coated cereal makers were doing something right!), and (2) love of reading starts at a young age.

I immigrated to Vancouver, Canada with my family a few months before my 7th birthday and started school in an English as a Second Language program. I don't remember my parents reading anything other than Chinese-language newspapers and we didn't have any bookshelves in our home until I was in senior high school.

So where did my love of reading start? Public libraries, and I have to thank my parents for encouraging my reading habit, inadvertently perhaps. Both parents worked during the week, and most retail shops were closed on Sundays back in those days. So every Saturday afternoon, my parents would drop my brother and me off at whichever public library was nearest to where they were planning to shop, and pick us up hours later, after they had finished their errands.

In those early years, I remember reading books only while at the library and participating in the librarian's circle time reading. By the time I reached the age of 9 or 10, an afternoon at the library always ended with struggling to decide which books to take home, within my borrowing limit.



To this day, I love to look at shelves and shelves of books (including those in the beautiful photography of Libraries by Candida Hofer) as well as appreciate the beauty of the book as a physical object.

Welcome!

I'm a much better reader than writer. However, since I have so many thoughts on what I'm reading and what I've read, I've started this blog to share my love for books. I also have the time these days to read more books, and to collect and record my thoughts because I'm going through a high-risk pregnancy and spending a lot of time at home, often lying in bed or on a sofa. Thank you for visiting!