Ten Favourite Reads

I was just nominated by a friend (who just happened to be the supervising prof for my Master's thesis) to take part in the "Ten Favourite Reads" challenge. So I rose to it (the challenge, I mean). I had to resist the urge to primarily list serious works of literature in order to make myself look good to the academics via whose postings I received the challenge, and stop myself from feeling self-conscious about including Georgette Heyer and Rosamunde Pilcher in that list. Well, actually, Pilcher didn't make the Top-10 list, sad to say - but more on that in a minute. So here it is, the honest list of ten favourite books. In fact, I couldn't pick just ten favourite books - more than half the list would have been taken up with Austen, she did write six novels. So I just picked my favourites of the favourites: ten favourite authors, and then the one story I might, by a slim margin, like better than their other works. Here goes, in no particular order:

Jane Austen: Sense & Sensibility
Georgette Heyer: Venetia
J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
C. S. Lewis: The Horse and His Boy
Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters
Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night
Agatha Christie: Murder on the Links
Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones
L. M. Montgomery: The Blue Castle
Brothers Grimm: "Snow White and Rose Red"

I'm sure you're shocked and amazed at the list; you had no idea I like Austen and Heyer and the Brothers Grimm. Yeah, well.

But then, I ran into a problem: there were others (and some of them, yes, serious classic literature) that I also like - they're sort of my almost-favourites. So I ended up with a second list of ten, the runners-up:

Wilhelm Hauff: "Zwerg Nase"
M. M. Kaye: The Ordinary Princess
Rosamunde Pilcher: The End of Summer
Patricia C. Wrede: Dealing With Dragons
Diana Wynne Jones: The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant
Jean Little: From Anna
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werther
George Elliot: Middlemarch
Edith Nesbit: Harding's Luck
Carola Dunn: Smuggler's Summer

And I'm sure if I kept going, I could end up with a third and fourth and fifth list, ad infinitum. Or, if I actually spelled out all of my favourite books by all these favourite authors, there'd be over a hundred on the first list alone. But there's limits. Really, you have to quit somewhere. So that's where.

Life, the Universe, and Favourite Reads. What's yours?

Jane and Valancy

image from wikipedia.org

I'm re-reading L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill. Yes, I do that - read fiction for fun, I mean, even though I already spend all day sitting on my rear end and reading for school. Bedtime reading is something I have to do; I can't go to sleep without engaging with a good story for a while first. It's a form of putting on mental pyjamas. So it's got to be something soothing - something that holds my interest, but not too exciting, else I'll not be able to put it down and/or will be tossing and turning all night because my adrenalin is pumping too hard. Just a good story that allows me to leave behind my everyday reality, and live someone else's life for a while - and I want to know that it's going to be a good life, not something terribly painful and upsetting. You don't put on your pyjamas if you think there might be burrs in them, do you? Neither do I.

So a nice re-read of a favourite book is a good choice for a bedtime story. And Jane of Lantern Hill is my most favourite of L. M. Montgomery's - well, Jane, and The Blue Castle. Oh, I love Anne of Green Gables, of course - who doesn't? - and Emily of New Moon is great, and so is The Story Girl and Kilmeny of the Orchard and so on and so forth. Montgomery was just good, that's all there's to it. But Jane and Blue Castle top them all, for me.

And it occurred to me this morning that that might just be because, underneath it all, they're really the same story. Even though Jane is eleven, and Valancy twenty-nine, they're very much alike - particularly in their situation at the beginning of the book. Both of them are capable people who are utterly unappreciated by their bullying families (particularly the mother in Valancy's case, the grandmother in Jane's). Through a circumstance they are snapped out of their downtrodden existence, they leave their repressive home and find a new family where they are appreciated, and a man to love. And that's the thing that struck me so forcibly today: those men, they're just the same person, and they're the reason I love these stories so much. I'm talking about Jane's dad, Andrew Stuart, and Valancy's husband, Barney Snaith. Both are successful writers, both are slightly (or, in Barney's case, very) bohemian, and both have just the same way of talking, the same sense of humour.

My guess is that Montgomery wrote herself a dream man - kind, witty, sensitive, handsome, a good provider, in need of a loving capable woman to mend his socks and make him shave every morning - wrote him twice, in fact, and Jane and Valancy, who are so very easy to identify with, get to be that woman who loves him and cares for him and is loved and cared for in return. Of course, in Jane's case it's her dearly beloved mother who is dad's wife, but it's Jane who is the caretaker of the family. She is the one who rescues her childlike mummy from grandmother's clutches, and she gives her prince (aka dad) back his most precious treasure (his wife); at the end of the story Jane is left with the bliss of taking care of both her parents at once. Jane takes the decisions in her own hands, makes things happen for the people she loves. And so does Valancy. Also, the pattern of their relationships is similar: both of them love their man from afar while they're still in captivity - Valancy harbours a secret crush on Barney just from having seen him drive through town, and Jane cuts out dad's picture from his byline in the paper, not knowing he's her father, because she finds the face so attractive - and once they're sprung free, they let their love have full reign.

image from wikipedia.org

Jane and Valancy are both about agency, women's agency. It's easy to dismiss Montgomery's stories as Edwardian fluff, demonstrations of women stuck in a patriarchal society who unfortunately find all their fulfilment in housewifely activities, serving a man. But if you look closer and take off  your twenty-first-century blinkers, you'll see that the books are deeply feminist. The downtrodden, disenfranchised girl, once she is forced out of the rut of powerlessness in which she is stuck (Valancy through her diagnosis, Jane through being sent to PEI), takes action, makes choices, and brings about a happily ever after for herself and her loved ones. Valancy and Jane are empowered to be who they want to be, and in reading their stories, the reader is too. That's feminism. And that's why I love those stories - Jane and Valancy, triumphant; the princess, through her own agency, gets her prince (Hero's Journey, anyone?). And he's a prince worth having. Happily ever after, the end. Aaaah.

Life, the Universe, Jane and Valancy. Always worth re-reading.

It's a Mystery

I really like mystery novels. It's a little odd, that, as I loathe and abhor violence, and you pretty much can't get any more violent that murder. But for some reason, reading about cranky old rich men being offed for their money doesn't disturb me, probably because it's not a fate that's likely to ever befall me - I'm not a man, will (alas) probably never be rich, and as for being cranky and old, I'm hoping to stave those off for a while yet.

Actually, there is a weird sense of safety in reading murder mysteries - the kind I like, anyway, which are the English cozies, preferably the genuine "Golden Age" article à la Agatha Christie & Co. They're set in a proscribed circle of people, in a time and place far removed from my own reality, and the sleuth always finds out whodunnit, so justice is served and peace restored. And if the story includes a charming romance between a pretty young girl and a handsome young man (amateur detective, part of "the Force", or simply mysterious stranger, I'm not picky on that), then my satisfaction is complete. Ah, escapism.

However, there's one thing that strikes me as being a genuine mystery, in reading mysteries. It concerns those aforementioned charmingly beautiful young girls. In addition to being charming and beautiful, they are usually also quite intelligent - it's part of what makes them so well suited for being a focal point of the story. They see the clues, they sense that something is wrong, they shiver in the cold draft emanating from the sinisterly-left-open window and jump when the soft-footed tabby cat silently brushes by them in the darkened room where they sit, thinking about the handsome young man who is so disturbing to their tender feelings but might still be the murderer. They even almost solve the mystery, usually. However, they seem to be afflicted by a peculiar disability.

See, it's like this: whenever one such girl is told, usually by said handsome young man of chiselled brow and masterful demeanor, that she should not, under any circumstances, tell anyone of her suspicions (which she has just voiced to him in the darkness of the night, leaning on the balcony railing overlooking the rose garden) - or, alternatively, that she should not, whatever else she may do, leave the house without informing him of it (this is usually accompanied by a look of more than usual seriousness from the grey/brown/deep-blue eyes of said handsome gent) - somehow or other it seems to cause the girl's brains to trickle out of her pink and shell-like ears. Or something like it.

Because as soon as a directive of this kind is issued, the girl is guaranteed to do the very thing she was told not to do. She hears the command, fully agrees to it, but somehow always figures that it must not apply to Mrs White (who is, after all, only the cook), or Colonel Mustard (who is surely too pukka sahib to have done anything so sordid as commit the murder), with the inevitable result that she spills the beans to and/or leaves the house in the company of the murderer him- or herself. Of course, as anybody could tell her, it directly leads to her undergoing several pages' worth of hair-raising suspense, being menaced by said murderer in the kitchen/conservatory/ball room with the revolver/rope/lead pipe while he or she monologues about his or her reasons for committing the murder and gleefully prophecies that no one will ever find the girl's body, foolish thing. All of which she could have avoided if she had only paid attention to what she was told.

So what do you think - auditory processing disorder? Something that affects only one very small part of what she's hearing? Because it can't be stupidity; the whole rest of the book establishes very clearly that the girl in question is not stupid.

Ah well. It doesn't really matter all that much, because, fortunately, in the nick of time, just as the murderer is about to pull the trigger/tighten the rope/swing the lead pipe, he of the chiselled features comes bursting (or, alternatively, stealthily creeping) through the french doors, incapacitates the villain (having taken careful note of the monologued confession which clears up the remaining questions about the murderer's guilt), then roughly pulls the girl into his arms while angrily exclaiming "Don't ever do this again, darling!" and presses a hard kiss on her trembling lips, thereby removing the last vestiges of doubts that the girl had about her feelings for him, and/or making her realize for the first time why she always went weak at the knees whenever he glared at her (which she had previously taken for a sign of dislike). D'oh. The End.

Life, the Universe, and Mysteries. It's a mystery, what?