Reading: Guess

In the midst of: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost;

On deck: Don Quijote

Moving: gardening

House:

Garden:

3 May 2002: Eleven years

Eleven years and more.

In the fall of 1990, I noticed a fourth Jean Auel book in the UConn bookstore. It was a hardcover and my student job didn't justify this at all, but I bought it. How not? I spent a lovely afternoon at Charenton, in the windowseat under the grape arbor, reading. Plains of Passage was hideously dull, punctuated with tedious graphic sex, and didn't even get Ayla home. Auel wrote a travelogue for a paleolithic Danube, interspersed with minor plot threads in communities along the way, with a ridiculous, 100-page tangent detailing how women just can't be left to their own devices.

Didn't matter. I'd loved Ayla since early in high school, when I was fourteen and independent. I like to think I've recovered from my first forays into adult books--V.C. Andrews, Papillon, and Stephen King--but there is one way in which I certainly have not. Ayla appealed to me at 14 the same way Harry of The Blue Sword appealed to me at 32. Who wouldn't want to be fierce and independent and have a fantastic horse and a passionate lover? The only thing about Harry that would have repelled me at 14 (well, besides the science fiction sticker on her spine) but that I love now is her waist-length braid. I love a long braid.

The last time I talked to REB on the phone, she told me that there was a second book. And maybe that it wasn't as good. I had found Clan of the Cave Bear by myself, the way I found a lot of books: on the library cart as I sorted the returned books to be reshelved. But REB told me about Valley of Horses. I remember mentioning Clan to my grandmother but that she discovered Valley on her own. That was embarrassing. Grannies aren't supposed to read smut. Apparently my intergenerational censorship applied only to grandparents, though: by the end of high school, The Mammoth Hunters had come out, and my high school math teacher (and friend) RCS and I talked about it. I suspect he liked the invention of a culture whereas I was disgusted by its being a romance novel set 30,000 years ago.

I had to wait only five years for the travelogue. At some point I learned the author had planned six books, and I had been waiting since 1990 for number five, until Tuesday.

Til Tuesday! I hope everyone who snarked at "Voices Carry" has been humbled by Aimee Mann's solo work.

Anyway, last fall I discovered through one of my persistent web searches that the fifth book would come out in spring. I assumed March. I later read April, and thought happily of April. Then I learned April 30, and I thought that was going just too far with my patience.

Except I hadn't read the book yet.

Shelters of Stone was the actual test of my patience. I wanted someone to giggle with over it, but Haitch does not read trash and CoolBoss, though she was also eager, isn't as giggly or, truth be told, as obsessed. Others who anticipated it lived too far away. I looked through an online forum on Jean Auel, but oof, I am accustomed to the quality of writing at the Usual Suspects and ruined, I say, for lesser places. So I had to struggle through alone.

Even more disappointing than I had expected. It seemed like Auel worked on the first day--one hundred and thirty-seven pages devoted to introducing Ayla to her lover's family--and then strung disparate, plotless bits in among what actually interested her (although, sadly, not enough to compel her reader), the geology of the region. There always has to be a bad guy--Broud, Frebec, that chick from Plains, and now four--well, it's a longer book--none of whose clumsily foreshadowed interests in Ayla's life (or, da-da-da-da, ending it!) are followed up.

Random observations: The Ninth Cave allow children to suffer their parents' laziness? Jondalar omitted to mention being raised with a quarter-breed? "No ill will resulted," such that in four words an author merrily ignores human nature? Two chapters on the funeral of a minor character? Also, they've been using the atl-atls for two years, not "a few."

Which reminds me. At Hateful, I worked with a fundamentalist Christian who hated me from jump street (this non-me phrase occurs to me because of Disappearing Acts, of which I was recently talking). One day the current among the support staff was which connoted a larger number, "few" or "several." The fundie, who as I recall started it because she had a problem with someone's wording, was the only hold-out for "few" being greater than "several." Neither concept is closely defined, but several is just more, damn it. She held out for "few" being the greater--how does Tock put it? greater possible magnitude--because that's how her Bible class once defined it. Yeah, I declined to snort, not because it's logical in English but because it served your fundie purpose.

Anyway. Most of my Shelters of Stone snarks are in my DayRunner--those above I scrawled in my journal--and I am so not into going to fetch it. As of today, the 13th, my book is on its third reader. CoolBoss read it in a weekend, but she skimmed and was sick--in bed at home, I mean, as an excuse to read it. Not caused but perhaps prolonged by the book. Now Minne has it. I'm considering posting a sign in the women's lav offering its loan. The more people who read it the less I'll feel like I wasted my money this particular volume, because I'll hang on to it until I can buy it in paperback and hide it on my Shelf o' Shame. Hey, I got more alliterative than Auel did. Bet she's jealous.