Reading: Don Quijote, The Great Gilly Hopkins, and The Blue Sword

Watching: "The Fellowship of the Ring"

Moving: walked 2.5 miles

19 September 2002: Books

Yet another deprivation I shall suffer after we move to Remotest Nowhere is the loss of Capitol Hill Books. Not to mention the scads of used bookstores a busride down Broadway. It's not as if they're all going to close without my weekly attention, but lunchhours are meant for browsing. Weekends are meant for reading.

So I made a farewell pilgrimage to Capitol today. I didn't buy The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven because it was a $30 first edition, and I didn't buy a beat-up How Green Was My Valley because I could get an unbeatup trade paperback for the same price. But I did come away with a gently loved Green Knight, The Great Gilly Hopkins (albeit with a Wrong cover, a girl in pigtails looking ridicuously, ineffectively defiant instead of a head and shoulders whose face is obscured behind a large bubble of gum) and an Oxford edition of Bleak House, the last because the sad fact is that I should not borrow long books from the library.

And I looked up the spelling of Tinnycoith, the Evans' estate in Valley. Tyn-y-Coed. Of course! I started Gilly on the walk back. I never liked The Pinballs much--Betsy Byars is a pale imitation of July Blume, despite her broader range, I always thought*--and Toby Lived Hereis much more an Idyllic Portrait of Foster Care than really about Toby (that's not true, really, but at 80 pages that's what it felt like this time round) but I do love Gilly. What a surprise: she's Katherine Paterson's.

When I got back I told Egg I'd had to look up Tyn-y-Coed, and I wrote out Drogheda and Braich-y-Pwll (?) for her. Drogheda she knew from the miniseries, and I must have watched the miniseries before I read The Thorn Birds. But the latter is never mentioned in the series and in the book, McCullough says that in New South Wales it was pronounced Brakey-pull, but she never tells her Gentle Readers how to pronounce it in Welsh. Nor the pronunciation of another station, named the Welsh for seahorse.

Egg asked why Bleak House and I said it was the only important Dickens I haven't read. Judgment call, that: the only Dickens I think is important that I haven't read. She didn't know Gilly but recognized that the Newbery Honor emblem meant it was good. "Paterson won the Newbery for The Bridge to Terabithia," I said hopefully.
Egg's face changed. "Oh!
So we were on the same page there. She hadn't read Gilly but now she remembered why Paterson means Good Stuff. She can't talk about Bridge at work, which I understand.
"She also won for Jacob Have I Loved." She didn't know that one. Er. Could I talk about this at work? "Probably not. Twin sisters born on a little fishing island in the Chesapeake, the younger always favored, the nasty ol' crone reciting 'Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated....'"

*This is a totally unfair assessment. I know why I don't like Betsy Byars: I was at the Acton library in Saybrook once and asked the children's librarian for a recommendation. I had clearly interrupted her Very Important Work because she said dismissively something like, "Well, most of the children like Betsy Byars." Totally unlike Mrs. Billings at Phoebe. So I read Summer of the Swans, which is depressing as hell; The Pinballs, and I remember that the youngest kid lived with old sisters named Thomas and Jefferson and that the oldest read the first and last lines of books and that the middle one's father ran over his legs; and The Midnight Fox, which also made me sad; and The TV Kid, which was too young for me and therefore stupid.

I just looked up Byars' in-print titles at Amazon. The Eighteenth Emergency sounds familiar. Didn't she have one about a kid living in an attic, with a grandfather and a drunken unemployed mother who wanted to make the attic into an apartment for her older son, the only person she carried about, and, oh yeah, also his hussy of a wife? Or was that The TV Kid? The title The Night Swimmers is familiar--hey, is this the one with the fried peanut butter sandwiches and the younger brother who wants to climb the big plant where the father works? That tidbit popped into my head the other day.

Why can't Amazon give a book's first publication date?