Give and take and give back: German children's book edition

In an ideal world, I would be more graceful. The tactful kind of graceful. I would always say the right things, say them softly, etc. I live in the real world though, and in that real world I can be sort of sarcastic. I always mean that sarcasm in the best possible way, and only use with those I'm close to - those who I think know that love and respect underlie the caustic humor.

Oliver is my main target. Forgive me Lord; I mock him mercilessly. I can't help it - he just gives me so much fodder! I admire the fact that he speaks every day in a language that is not his own. I respect him so much for that... think it takes such brain power... but man he says the funniest things. Some of my favorites:

*Occasional references to former presidential candidate "Mike Huckleberry"
*Concern that a small wound would leave a "scarf"
*Heartfelt insistence that, were he an artist, I would be his "moose"
*Confusion between beloved '80s sitcom and "White Christmas" crooner = "The Crosby Show"

What goes around comes around though, and he's having the time of his life with the sad little German sentences that dribble out of my mouth. He points and laughs at the children's books I bring home and struggle to read. It's all good. I best be taking it, after all the dishing out I've done. And honestly, it is funny.

So yes, I am reading books with two sentences per page. And it's hard! The books are really cute though, so I don't mind the struggle. And I'm no expert in German children's books, but I've noticed a few things in them that are, um, a little different. Coincidence? Culture? Let me know what you think.

Here, for example, is an image from a really sweet story about a boy, his grandpa, and the grandpa's guardian angel. In this picture the boy is visiting his grandpa at the hospital :

Do you see anything different in this picture? Something you don't remember seeing in your own childhood books?

 

...Like a pisspot? And it apparently wasn't enough just to draw the pisspot. No, the pisspot had to be full of urine. Because... um, because... um, you know, I actually have no idea why. I'm so confused.

 

Then there's this image. This is from an adorable story about a cowboy who is afraid to ride horses. Here you see the cowboy falling out of the hole in his wall (long story) onto the back of a horse. This is sort of a central, crucial page in the book. Again, notice anything that sort of surprises you?

...Like a naked woman? With carpet that doesn't match the drapes, if you know what I mean? I'm no prude. If I were reading this book to my child I like to think that I wouldn't even cover the picture up. Nudity. Nothing wrong with that. It's just... really? Is that level of realism really necessary here? "Yes sweetie, cowboys like to look at pictures of naked ladies. Just because, that's why."

In the end, I've got a healthy amount of respect for a culture that adds these sorts of details to its children's books. When I showed the pictures to Oliver (snickering like a child), his response was along the lines of "well, of course. My grandparents had one of those pots under their bed. Why wouldn't you put one in the book?" Children are going to live in the real world someday; why gloss over these sorts of things now?

So Germany, I love you and respect you. That's why I hope you don't mind if I tease you mercilessly about things like this.

Why I Love it Here

My neighborhood, Park Slope, has its detractors. Too many smug families! Too many overprotected children and yuppie/bobo moms with their organic, locally-grown baby food; mommy-and-me yoga classes; off-the-books nannies; thousand-dollar strollers. Most of these detractors come from Manhattan.

Maybe they're jealous?

Jealous because yes, the sidewalks do seem to be littered with stay-at-home moms in LuluLemon, but those same sidewalks are also littered with free things! People who don't want the hassles that come with Craig's List postings simply put things out on their stoops. Clothing, furniture, dishes, electronics, music, baby stuff, etc. Take a nice walk on a sunny day - you'll come back with a coffee maker.

I don't generally take. I leave. A flower pot here, an old picture frame there. It's so simple! And there's no guilt about throwing something away - it's all just a part of the circle of stuff.

To be completely accurate though, there is one thing I stop for: books. Free books! Good ones! Out on the street on any given day! I couldn't resist sharing my bounty with you (in image form only - hands off my books, villain!) - here are some of my best finds:

Stacking Up

So... phew. Crazy week. Great week. Things are really, um, stacking up. In good ways.

For starters, last Saturday was Book Expo America, the publishing industry's big trade show. Translation: free books. Scads and scads of them. Hardcover. Autographed if you're willing to wait in line (which I always am). See that picture above? Those are all the books I took home with me. (Did I mention they were free? Hot off the presses? Awesome? Free?) Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal!

Then came Sunday. Moving day. Looong day. But good. We're in Brooklyn now, and tripping over boxes at every step. And walking down the block to fabulous coffee houses, antique stores, vintage clothing stores, pizza places, parks, farmers markets, bars... Seriously. Brooklyn.

Then came Tuesday. The first day of my summer internship. I'm working with metadata at Fancy Pants University (if ever mentioned again, hereafter referred to as FPU). It's a challenge, which is a good thing. And I really like working with those librarians! I really like just about every librarian I've met in the last year, actually. That's a good sign. Maybe I've chosen the right profession.

Then there's the rest. I'm taking a summer Rutgers course in web design, which is condensed from the usual 14 weeks down to 6. That means twice as much work per week. Oh, and did I mention that I signed up for a photography class in Manhattan? And that I'm training for a 4-mile run in July?

So I'm a little busy. But it's a good kind of busy - days jam packed with things I'm really excited about.

Another End

The semester is rapidly coming to a close now, and I have fewer and fewer pressing tasks to complete. Feels good. I look forward to doing things aimlessly in the next few days. No plan, no desired outcome. I don't do that enough.

I've had the chance to do a bit more pleasure reading, too. Mostly on train rides to and from campus - that hour and a half I no longer have to fill with readings for class. Ah, pleasure reading. My dear pet. I'm just finishing up Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, my progress slowed by the occasional and distracting desire to rip pages out of the book and eat them. Those words. Those passages. What a beautiful book.

2008's Pleasure Reading, in Convenient List Form

Taking my inspiration once again from a friend whose list is always longer than mine (BeeKay, I'm so jealous!), I'd like to present to you the books I read for pleasure in 2008. This list is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. It takes me back to train rides in Germany this summer, those five beautiful weeks of down time when I first moved to New Jersey, our camping trip to Algonquin, the lazy days leading up to Christmas at my parents' house, all those mornings on the cramped PATH train from Jersey City to 33rd Street in Manhattan, etc. It's been a good year.

I've been trying to pinpoint it lately: why exactly do I love to read? One answer I've come up with so far: your life is basically what happens inside your head. When you read, you give yourself the opportunity to live wildly beyond your limits. I lived on the American frontier this year. I solved mysteries in the 1950s. I went back to China; I lived with the expatriates in 1920s Paris; I hung out again with Anne Shirley. Reading is, of course, beyond simple adventure. There's a lot more to say on this topic, but I'll leave it at this for now.

And now, in case you're curious, my list (in chronological order):

1. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
2. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
3. Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder
5. The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields
6. The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
7. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World - John Wood
8. Fault Lines - Nancy Huston
9. The Mystery at Lilac Inn - Carolyn Keene
10. Foreign Affairs - Allison Lurie
11. History of Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Frederick Hartt
12. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
13. Our Oriental Heritage - Will and Ariel Durant
14. The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way - Bill Bryson
15. Farmer Boy - Laura Ingalls Wilder
16. The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
17. Collected Stories - Roald Dahl
18. The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden
19. What's Bred in the Bone - Robertson Davies
20. Balkan Ghosts: a Journey Through History - Robert Kaplan
21. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
22. On the Banks of Plum Creek - Laura Ingalls Wilder
23. By the Shores of Silver Lake - Laura Ingalls Wilder
24. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World - Margaret MacMillan
25. The Te of Piglet - Benjamin Hoff
26. A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
27. The Magic Barrel - Bernard Malamud
28. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze - Peter Hessler
29. The Long Winter - Laura Ingalls Wilder
30. Little Town on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder
31. These Happy Golden Years - Laura Ingalls Wilder
32. The First Four Years - Laura Ingalls Wilder
33. Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
34. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
35. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
36. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
37. Small World - David Lodge
38. The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
40. The Deerslayer - James Fenimore Cooper
41. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
42. The Shipping News - E. Anne Proulx
43. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
44. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis - Dave Eggers
45. Anne of Avonlea - L.M. Montgomery
46. A Mighty Fortress: a New History of the German People - Steven Ozment
47. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
48. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
49. A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
50. The Monster of Florence - Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi
51. Into Thin Air - John Krakauer

A couple notes on all this:

Of the 51 books listed, only 5 were read in the 3 and a half months class was in session. Looks like my 2009 list will be a short one.

If you're interested in recommendations, definitely read The Hours, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and Into Thin Air. (Should I really stop at 3?? I feel like I could chatter on and on about at least 25 of the books on this list)

I would not however, recommend The Maltese Falcon. What a disappointment! I can't stand Dashiell Hammett's writing style - so clunky and over the top.

A couple stats:

7 books with a stong Canadian connection - Canadian authors, settings, etc.

13 books written for a younger audience.

7 Pulitzer Prize Winners

2 Pulitzer Finalists

On to 2009! I've got two weeks to cram in a semester's worth of reading. Better get going.

Done!

Our Oriental Heritage is the first book in the "Story of Civilization" series by Will and Ariel Durant. It provides an overview of eastern culture, from Sumeria to Judea to India to Japan, from prehistory to today - "today" being 1933. I got this book for Christmas 2006, started reading it shortly afterwards, and finally finished it this week. It's not often I spend a year and a half on a book, so I thought I'd mark the occasion.

It's a great book, as long as you can overlook 1930s-style comments like "the people of India are lazy and weak, as centuries of an unbearably hot climate have worn them down." Yikes. The occasional foray into racism aside, the densely-packed 940 pages of factfactfact were fascinating. Some points (of the many) I thought were interesting:

Civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it has to be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption may bring it to an end. Man differs from beast only by education, and education may be defined as transmitting of civilization (p4).

Our incredible work ethic: probably thanks to centuries of slavery. No one would do any hard, drawn-out work if he could avoid it without penalty, after all. All those ancient slaves instilled the discipline that prepared man for industry (p20).

The Indian caste system was started by the invading Aryans. Outnumbered by a subject people they believed inferior to themselves, the Aryans saw that without restrictions on marriage they would lose their racial identity. The first caste division therefore, was not by status but by color. The first Untouchables were war captives and slaves (p399).

To Buddha, the worst delusion of mankind was individuality. We are all simply parts of the whole. When we have learned to love not our separate life, but of all men and living things, then at last we will find peace (p436).

Good times, good times.

Illuminated Manuscripts

Illustrated books: is there a tiny stigma attached to them? You know, you can't handle a full-on book, so look at these pictures and give your mind a rest. Are they for children? Are you supposed to grow out of them?

Naaah. In recent months I've read a number of illustrated books, and have been taken in by the pictures of each. Some were stylish or beautiful, and some added to the story. I thought I'd post a few pictures here, since I love looking at them too much not to share them.


The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder

This book is number 37 on the MLA's list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th Century. I've had a copy of this list for years, and check off one entry or another from the list on occasion. I found San Luis Rey at a "friends of the library" book sale last summer and read it while Oliver and I were in Montreal last fall. It's a beautiful story... I highly recommend it... but instead of a plot summary I'll just show you one of its illustrations:Beautiful! And it's from a really old copy too - from 1928 if I'm reading things right. The pages are thick and have a smell to them that reminds me of my elementary school library. The artist, a woman named Amy Drevenstedt, has captured Esteban as he walks through the late-night streets of Lima. Esteban's twin brother is in love but swears he will not leave Esteban for the woman. Heavy-hearted, Esteban knows he is in his brother's way.


The Cricket in Times Square, by George Selden

I love this story, and I love the Garth Williams' illustrations just as much. Chester the Cricket, a country cricket from Connecticut, accidentally winds up in the Times Square subway station with no idea how to get back home. Amidst the clamor of the city he befriends Tucker the Mouse and Harry the Cat, and the two take him outside to see the Square one evening:
Just perfect! I can feel the heat of the city, squint in the face of the neon, and feel as small as the cricket in the crush of all those people rushing from here to there. Such danger, such awe, and such safety in the company of your friends.


The Mystery at Lilac Inn, by Carolyn Keene
Lilac Inn is the first Nancy Drew I ever read, way back in the third grade. A recent re-reading leaves me a little less impressed with Nancy's detecting methods, but no matter. I love the feel of these books. Look at Nancy there, with her "titian blonde hair" and impossibly slim figure in a sheath dress with pearls. And we're supposed to believe she's 18? I'm still waiting for the day that I look that sophisticated. 20 years after the first read and one thing hasn't changed: Nancy Drew makes me feel like a loser.

In all seriousness though, I love this world she lives in. People get married at the respectable age of 21 to young captains of industry. They have luncheons. No one works or goes to school; they just have adventures and win the respect of those around them. Everything is as tidy and crisp as the pictures lead you to believe.

Do Not Read While Hungry

While home for Christmas, I picked up the family collection of Little House on the Prairie books. The Little House series, for those who don't know, is possibly the most famous series of children's books in America. It is Laura Ingalls Wilders' attempt to tell today's children what it was like to grow up on the American frontier. Most of the books chronicle her own childhood, but the book I just finished - Farmer Boy - follows her husband Almonzo for a year of his childhood in New York state.

Farmer Boy has always been one of my favorites, and the constant descriptions of food have a lot to do with it. Almanzo's mother is constantly running around with "sizzling hams" and his sisters are always making some sort of preserves or churning butter in a giant barrel. At least once every 5 pages Almanzo is described as being ravenously hungry, and before the chapter ends he satisfies his hunger with some ridiculously large meal. One such meal takes place early in the book and appears to be an ordinary Wednesday evening:

"Almonzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp, golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his [shirt]."

It doesn't end there.

"And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly, he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie."

Dinner is followed, an hour or so later, by popcorn, apples and apple cider by the stove. And the next morning's breakfast includes oatmeal with cream and maple sugar, fried potatoes, golden buckwheat pancakes, sausages and gravy, preserves, donuts, and apple pie. Apple pie!

Who are these people? How can I travel back in time and join them for a meal?

Did I tell you about my own dinner tonight?

"She poured the cereal into a large mug and filled the mug with icy cold milk. She defrosted a sesame-seed bagel and popped it in the toaster, watching as the red bands of heat warmed the bread. She slathered the bagel in a thin layer of margarine, then spread it with jam. She ate the bagel."

The Books of 2007

Taking my inspiration from Brianne, I've decided to put together a list of the books I read in 2007. Yes, I know it's almost February. Come now, what's a little delay between friends?

I started tracking the books I read back in 2006. I've been on the fence about it the whole time, because listing things tends to make me a little obsessive about goals and progress. I want to soak in every book I read, and a part of me worries that by listing and tracking I might become more concerned with output than insight. I think I've got a good handle on things though, so bombs away! In an approximation of reverse chronological order, here it is:


Into the Wild, John Krakauer

This is Not a Novel, David Markson

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner

Letters from Alaska, John Muir

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe

The Twelve Little Cakes, Dominika Derry

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway

The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown, Agatha Christie

The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant

Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

The Map That Changed the World, Simon Winchester

The Iliad, Homer

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Krakatoa; The Day the World Exploded, Simon Winchester

Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories, Truman Capote

E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, David Bodanis

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling

The Portable Chekhov, Anton Chekhov

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

Stalin: A Biography, Robert Service

The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever

Walden Two, B.F. Skinner

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire

One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, Mike Royko

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

Ender's Shadow, Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card


That's 35 books for the year. There are a few others I didn't count - books I read for work and larger, long-term books that I haven't finished yet. I won't worry about those.

This list is literature-heavy for a couple reasons. First, used book stores are more likely to carry classic literature than the "hottest" new non-fiction. Since I rarely buy books at full price and even more rarely check out books from the library, I've gathered a sizeable pile of novels over the years. Second, I spent my college years as a Lit major, then spent the first three years following college reading anything but literature. I'm getting back into it now, which is nice.

New discoveries (authors who will also appear in future lists):
Michael Chabon, John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, Truman Capote

Here's to 2008!

Moth to a Flame

Here's a (focused) review of the last couple weeks:

watched: Frontline's The Undertaking. Beautiful, heart-wrenching story of a family-0wned funeral home in central Michigan.

read: The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the year that followed the death of her husband. While grieving for her husband, she also had to deal with her daughter's serious, and eventually fatal, illness.

watched: Frontline's The Age of AIDS. It starts with the first patients to display the "mysterious" symptoms in 1981 and covers the politics, science and human element of the disease through today.

read: Into the Wild, John Krakauer's true story of a young man who walked into the Alaskan bush and died after a summer of attempting to live off the land.

Yikes. Gotta get out of here. Need to look at a poster of kittens, google some inspirational quotes.

A Good Week

My reading kind of goes in cycles. I'm always reading something, but sometimes I hit a rough patch where the books aren't the greatest or the material is slow going and dry. Other times I hit it big, with one fantastic book coming on the heels of another, or several others. This past week and a half has been the latter. I have two books to thank for that.

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I got this book as a gift from a professor 5 or 6 years ago. I remember thanking my professor politely at the time but thinking something along the lines of "um...we'll see." I didn't know much about the author and the story description didn't sound all that compelling - the friendship between two couples over the course of a lifetime. Eh.

I finally pulled it off the shelf last week, and was engrossed almost from the very beginning. Wallace Stegner is a beautiful, quietly-skilled writer who takes a long chain of fireworkless events and makes them add up to the most moving story you can imagine. I loved all four of the central characters, for their strengths and dependencies as well as their full-bodied development. I loved the themes he was working with. I loved, well, I loved everything. When someone asks me what's so great about The Sopranos I answer, "everything. Every single thing is done well." The same thing applies here.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

I picked this book up at the book cart at work - people donate books and my organization sells them in the lobby for a quarter apiece. A quarter! I'm not actually finished with it yet - I've still got about 1/5 of it to go. The first 4/5 have been incredible, though. Two cousins in New York in the late 1930s. Both Jewish, one recently smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. Together they create The Escapist, a beloved comic book hero. That's just where the book starts, actually. It goes on to all sorts of places - strength and its limitations, the power of our own creations, the distance between fathers and sons, escape - both from ourselves and other places... man. So good.

Is Reading Rainbow still on? Does it still do book reviews? I feel like I need to give LeVar Burton a call.

Ronald's Warm Embrace

This is a crude drawing of my mouth and the McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese that recently entered it.

Rewinding a little bit...

This is Fast Food Nation, a book I read back in the late fall of 2002. I had just graduated from college, and was rediscovering the idea of choosing my own books and reading them just because I felt like it. Fast Food Nation was fascinating, and it was also frightening/angering (yeah, I know). Eye-opening book plus 22-year-old idealist equals McDonald's boycott. No more little hamburgers with their tasty minced onions. No more shamrock shakes. Never would a McGriddle pass my lips (it was added to the menu after I started my boycott... dang). December 8, 2002. From that day forward.

Fast forwarding a little bit...

Earlier this week, we had a big event at work. It was a healthy lifestyles carnival of sorts for about a thousand kinds in the area. Part of the focus of this event was to get kids thinking about eating healthy, and we got all sorts of product donated for them to sample. Bananas, yogurt, carrots, juice, and so forth. We even got some pre-packaged apple slices, complete with caramel dipping sauce. We had a few extras of the apple slices, so a colleague tossed me a bag. I was really hungry... the apples looked good... I saw the picture of Ronald McDonald on the bag but didn't put two and two together...

...Until it was too late. At slice #6 I looked straight into the eyes of Ronald and a chill passed through me. I was a little horrified, and confused at the same time. Apple slices? Did these really count? Did I throw away my impressive 5-year record for apple slices?

The only thing to do then, was get in the car that evening and drive to a McDonald's - a really ghetto McDonald's, preferably - and do it right.

So I did it. Right. And hilariously, that night I felt a little lost. If I was no longer a person who didn't eat at McDonald's... who was I? I've decided to reclaim my identity then, with a new quest. No fast food (except for Subway and/or a Wendy's baked potato in emergency road trip situations) for one year. Oh yeah, and no McDonald's ever again. Just because it's fun.

Sweet, Sweet Book Love

I love lists. I've always loved them. I remember being nine and putting up an "Allison saves the planet" chart on my bedroom wall. I had a bunch of different items: don't use aerosol hairspray, turn off lights, etc. Each time I did one of these things I gave myself a gold star.

In college, my assignment notebook was a work of art. I wrote down every assignment - and sometimes the steps necessary to complete the assignment if it was really complicated - and neatly highlighted each entry once the assignment was done. I did a lot of studying in college, and I think it was connected with my desire to cross off the items on my homework list. The end of the semester was my time to really shine. I had so much work that I blocked out my evening: 9-10:30 read such and such book. 10:45-midnight edit such and such paper. Oh, the organization!

After university I found other reasons to make lists: steps needed to train for a 5K, ways to stretch my nonprofit paycheck each month, etc. These lists pale in comparison though, to my new discovery.

I'm cataloging my books!

Okay, this probably doesn't sound that great, but I'm not just opening a Word document and typing. Thanks to Brianne, I discovered Library Thing. This is the greatest website in the history of the world! (Okay, maybe that's a little strong. Still, it's a good site.) You can list the books in your library, complete with the books' cover art. If librarything doesn't have your cover art, you can scan and upload your own.

The site is much more, though. You can review the books in your library, and all librarything users can have access to your reviews. You can link to friends' libraries and see what books you have in common. You can record when you start and finish each book you read. You can get recommendations of other books. You can join discussion groups.

So I've listed my little library! These are all books that I a) own and b) have read - library books and borrowed books don't count, and neither do books that I've bought but not read yet. I also included a little widget on this blog - it displays the book I'm currently reading.

Such fun.

Harry Potter and the Pathetic Little Collection of Harry Potter Books

Last night I finished reading the final Harry Potter book. I've always liked the books, but I've never been a hard core fan. Never went to Borders at midnight, never wore a Gryffindor scarf, never joined forums on mugglenet - that sort of thing. I own all seven books, but until last week I had never actually bought one. I just sort of picked them up as I went along, and I realized this week as I was looking at them that they tell an interesting story of their own.

Book 4 for example, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: I got this one while working a book distribution at First Book. The cover was sliced open (scotch tape repair job visible below), so we couldn't give it to any kids... I'll take that one thank you very much. Some of the first pages were sliced too, but I thought it gave the book character. And it was free.


Then there's Book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I got this one at Book Expo America, the ABSOLUTE GREATEST trade show IN THE WORLD. It's for the publishing industry, and every publisher in America is there, giving away free copies of their new titles. They were handing out free Harry Potters! And the book cover even had a special design. Again, this book had character. And again, it was free.


But then my magical connection to free Harry Potter books was lost, and I found myself in a neighborhood bookstore last week buying Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. They don't sell the American version here, so I bought the British version, complete with strange cover art and British slang. (Oi Harry! Don't be a git. Quit snogging my bloody sister!)


This past Monday Oliver was thoughtful enough to go and pick me up a copy of the final installment. Turns out the store was out of the kids' version and he bought the "adult version" of the book. This was an exciting thought at first but then turned out just to mean that the cover looks different.


So now I have this sad little collection of mismatched Harry Potter books. A couple hardcovers, a few paperbacks, some box cutter slashes, and a mishmash of cover art. (I never realized how into cover art I was... as a result I found this site really interesting) I have to admit it's sort of killing me not to have a nice, neat row of same-size books lined up next to each other. Oh well. Makes for a good story.