PLT stopped à l'Hôtel Formigny last night. He skimmed our bookshelves. "Ah, here's the Gregory Maguire section," he said. "Did you like Lost?"
"Not so much. It pretty much lost me. Wicked was wonderful, and I liked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister okay, but not Lost so much. His newest, Mirror, Mirror, is better than those two."
"I thought Wicked was good," contributed RDC.
"You haven't read Wicked," I contradicted.
"Yes I have."
We went back and forth a bit. I knew he hadn't read it; and he said he had, when it was new, in hardcover, in Florida once after he had given it to his mother; and I asked if he had read it why I had heard about it from Beth and then from PLT and not from him and why we've never talked about it; and he insisted he had, that he had given it to his mother who declared it had ruined "The Wizard of Oz" for her. Light dawned, on me at least. "You mean Was."
"That was it. Was."
"So you haven't read Wicked."
"No."
"So who is right?"
"You are, dear."
This was very satisfying, because I seldom am. And with an audience, better yet.
PLT hadn't heard about Was, and I haven't read it, and it wasn't under R in the main library so I figured it was in Florida or upstairs in the living room among the unread fiction. "I've read it," RDC protested its inclusion among the supposedly unread. But he did not fill the bookcase, and the top shelf is a continually refreshed two feet of my unread. Except that Mason and Dixon, which RDC has also read, is likely to stay there a while.
PLT's seven-year-old daughter is reading a Judy Blume-ish book, in that it has Issues, which surprised me--not her reading level but that that would be of interest. In second grade I read Dr. Dolittle and Little House and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; I didn't read Are You There, God? or even Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing until...fourth grade.
Anyway, I hadn't seen PLT in almost four years, since TJZ's wedding. After dinner the three of us sat in the living room with our laptops (Blake approved of PLT and sat preening on his knee and snowed dander all over his black jeans) and played Boggle and looked at pictures of the sprouts. It was a fine evening.