No Skin Off My Nose

If it’s going to be 12°C inside the house with the heater on, at least it could snow a little more.

God bless you, Andalusia-in-the-wintertime.

alaina:

from this morning’s trip to the local library’s book sale, costing a total of $3.00:

-Critical Essays from the Spectator
-A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage
-The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
-Modern Library(!):  Scarlet Letter, Vanity Fair, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
-Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
-Lorri Moore’s Birds of America
-Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
-Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Number One Thing I Miss About The USA:  used books.

Whenever I say that Ender’s Game is one of my all-time favorite books, I always feel the need to qualify the statement by establishing myself as Not Just Your Average Reader.  I read a lot, and widely.  I’m not really into science fiction.  I’m pretty sure I’m a discerning and critical reader.  I have an English degree (that doesn’t mean anything, but I thought I’d throw it in anyway).  And I still think Ender’s Game is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  Between the late 90s, when I first pulled the book off my dad’s shelf (thanks Pop!), and today I’ve read it at least eight times.  It was unabashedly my favorite book until I went to university, at which point I started having conversations like this:

Other English Major: So, what’s your favorite book?

Me: Ender’s Game!  By Orson Scott Card!

OEM: Never heard of it.

Me: It’s science fiction!

OEM: Ah.

You can picture the expression, a cross between “I just stepped in dog shit” and “I heard you eat your boogers”.  So for a long time I didn’t mention it, and I even stopped reading science fiction altogether.  But this weekend I picked it up for nostalgia’s sake, and because there’s nothing on my shelves I haven’t read in the last two years.  I was a bit afraid that it would have lost some of its luster.  It was such an important book to me when I was younger because I felt, like all teenagers do, that I was alone against the world (just like Ender), that I was alienated because I was too smart, too eager, too good at school (just like Ender), that adults wanted me to be something I was not (just like Ender).

But not only was it as good as I remembered, it was BETTER.  There were so many things I caught this time around that I had never noticed before.  And it meant something different to me, too, because I’m five years older than the last time I read it (and what seems like a decade wiser).

I understand why intellectually-minded readers tend to shy away from science fiction, but it’s a pity.  Aren’t there really just two reasons why we read?  First, to entertain ourselves.  And second, to find out how the world and its inhabitants work.  Card himself, in the introduction to the book, says, “I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not ‘true’ because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story.  Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.”  This is why it  makes me sad that a book like Ender’s Game gets rejected out-of-hand because it has a silly cover with spaceships and it’s filed in the wrong section of the bookshop.

When I went to see Card speak in Lynchburg in 2004, I bought a brand-new copy of Ender’s Game and took it with me for him to sign.  This book is one of my most favorite possessions, not only because he signed it, but because of what he wrote: “To Kate- A survival guide for geniuses”.

If only he had thumbs, he could build his own blanket forts.

Costa Vasca, 06/09

Is it Skull Rock?  Is it a giant horse snuffling in the sea?  I never get tired of thinking about what’s in those caves.

You know what i like about this kid?  He loves me so much he’ll sleep on my damp bath towel.  What is my damp bath towel doing on the couch, you ask?  This is the part where i change the subject.