Category Archives: Reading

Review: A Door Near Here

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Anyone who knows me well knows that C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia was a huge factor in the person I’ve become. I cannot say I’ll read them again, but when I read them in my mid-teens I was somehow different aftwards.

I remember devouring anything that was in any way associated with the Narnia stories and now still get a small thill out of mentions of the Wardrobe or Aslan like when I saw a car with ASLAN on the license plate outside Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago. Or when I remember the time I ate dinner off a table with a pedistal made out of the packing crate in which the Wardrobe travelled to Wheaton College.

Back when I was frequenting the bulletin boards on a forum discussing the Narnia movies I heard mention of a book about a girl who looked for the door to Narnia. I found it on Amazon and put it on my wishlist, expecting to know when I should buy it. I eventually broke down and purchased it about a month ago, and began reading it last week.

The book, A Door Near Here, is not the light fiction/fantasy I was expecting. It is a very heavy story about alcoholism that resulted in child neglect. It is about four siblings who stuck together and survived a very nasty part of their lives.

Katherine, the eldest sibling has a lot on her plate. Besides being only 15 years old, and all that that entails, she has been responsible for ther younger siblings for several years while her alcoholic mother worked long hours and dated promiscously. After losing her job, Katherine’s mother drank more and spent much of her time, intoxicated, in her bedroom, leaving her four children to fend for themselves.

When the story opens, Katherine’s main concern, apart from feeding the family from an empty larder, is her youngest sibling, Alisa who has developed a strange attraction to the woods behind her school. Alisa believes that a door to Narnia lies beyond the fence, in the forbidden woods. She also believes that if she finds the door she can bring back a magical cure for her mother.

Katherine thinks that Alisa is losing her mind and tries to disuade her from looking for the door and believing in Narnia and Aslan. Katherine’s religion teacher is no help because he seems to be meddling in her life and encouraging Alisa to belive in Narnia.

This story, although it ends on a positive note, is not a happy one. It doesn’t have the magic of Bridge to Terribithia, another book that elicits images of Narnia. The book kept me interested. The writing was never clumsy or stilted. The characters were compelling enough – not perfect, any of them. The jacket of A Door Near Here explains that the book was the author’s Masters Thesis. It is certainly the most interesting Master’s Thesis I’ve read.

Used books

Life, Reading

On Mother’s day between brunch and the movie we stopped at a used bookstore. Whenever I enter a used bookstore I wonder why I rarely go to them. I love used bookstores. I love used books, especially well-read, jacket-less hardbacks. I love books that have writing in them — inscriptions, notes in margins, autographs. It’s not the bargain I love, I love holding a book that was owned, read and loved by someone else.

As I wandered through the fiction section at the back of the labyrinth-like bookstore, I picked up a few paperbacks I’d been meaning to read. After a while I realized I really didn’t want those books — I could pick them up at a library and if I loved them, buy them somewhere. I wasn’t really looking for anything special — maybe an H. E. Bates if they had one.

At the end of the fiction section is an unmarked room. It held the store’s only armchair and seemed to hold a mish-mash of genres. There were craft books and books about sex. There was also a long, tall self of children’s books. It was obvious the proprietors didn’t expect children to be looking at these books because they ascended far above my head — that and the sex books a few rows away. Directly in front of me as I scanned the titles on one of the children’s shelves was a small, worn-looking book that had slightly familiar type-set on the cover. I picked it up, opened it and was delighted to discover it was a book by James Whitcomb Riley. We own two other antique books by him – An Old Sweetheart of Mine and Farm-Rhymes. The book at the shop had an inscription:

To Grace E. Montgomery
Aug. 5 1899.

From C. F. Benedict

It also had a scrap of paper between the last page and back cover containing someone’s homework, done in pencil on notebook paper. It was in another language and looked very old.

Of course I picked this book up.

Two other books I found were a Larry Woiwode book I didn’t have and a book called The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor. I’d been meaning to pick this book up after I had a brief discussion with the author on Flork.

Clare found a very good copy of the Harry Potter book she lost and a copy of Froud’s Faeries.

Those books and one Dean picked up cost us less than $20 thanks to the 60% off everything in the store sale they are having. Great books for a good deal in Bethesda. Can you think of a better way to spend Mother’s day? I can’t.

Book snobbery

Reading

I really don’t think I’m a book snob. There are books I don’t want to read – whole genres  and certain authors. However I don’t think I look down upon those who do read them, and hopefully I don’t make those who read those genres and authors feel uncomfortable.

I’ve known book snobs. Candy, was one of them. We could discuss movies we liked – her taste in movies often matched mine, but we could never really discuss books. See, Candy didn’t read contemporary fiction. The books she read were often out of print, and smelled of age. They lined the shelves of the library in her Victorian home.

Once I made the mistake of telling her that my reading goal was to read all of the Washington Post best sellers at any given time. She looked at me and smiled in her knowing way. I went on to remark that best sellers aren’t best sellers for nothing – they must have merit to become best sellers. She simply smiled and replied that best sellers could very well be best sellers for other reasons than their quality.

I didn’t believe her at the time, but also didn’t follow through with my goal of reading the books on the best seller list. Now I understand what she meant, I think – although I would not use the word “quality”.  For instance, I don’t have a desire to read Janet Evonavitch’s Stephanie Plum series, as much as I wanted to like the books, the first one was enough for me.  Looking at last Sunday’s Washington Post Book World Best Seller list, I’ve read only one out of ten of the listed books (although another one is the book group choice for this month – but I’ve chosen not to read it at this time). Of the remaining eight, three are authors that I’ve tried to read, but not found their work to my taste.  The remaining books are about subjects of no interest to me (Mafia, kidnapping, murder). So, I won’t be reading many of the books on last week’s best seller list.

Candy worked in a bookstore for a while. She told me that she sometimes gave condescending looks to people who asked for books she didn’t approve of. I can believe it.

I bring this up because I felt a little uncomfortable in the wonderful book community I’ve been promoting.  It was a small thing – and likely not intended, but it bothered me nonetheless. It was a comment in a group.  It seems as if the writer of the comment was trying to not offend anyone, but in trying to not offend, did offend. (any time a person writes or says “no offense” it seems as if they are trying to offend, in a backhanded sort of way).  And it isn’t as if I like the kind of books she describes as not her kind of book either – it is more that I feel as if she thinks I do. And feels superior for that.

I know I’m going to always come upon people who say things that make me feel uncomfortable. I guess I need to learn to deal with it. I’ve been repeating Howard Rheingold’s motto: “Assume Good Will” to myself whenever I think about the comment, but it is not helping much. I think what bothers me is the misunderstanding. However, to be fair, I am probably making a to-do over nothing.