But then there are the gems. Those books that made just a bit of sense when you first read them. Those books that require too much experience of the reader to make any sense to the thirteen-year-old trying to figure them out. Read now it’s like a light coming on in a closet. You always knew there was something there, but just could never find any of it. Now the motives make more sense and the long, dragged out descriptions with no purpose fly by and suddenly become the foundation for half the story.

I am rereading C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (yes, Seth, trilogy) and it is making so much more sense to me this time through. Last time I read it I was around fourteen years old. I got the basic premise of a man travels to Mars and then Venus. I understood that the third book is a modern fairy tale and thought that concept was very cool. But just about everything else went right over my head. All the symbolism, the internal conversations, the wonder, depth and splendor of Lewis’s worlds and stories blew right by me. I was expecting this time around to be better, but was completely unprepared for how much better it would be.

Book one of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, introduces our main character, a philologist named Ransom. He in kidnapped and taken to Mars where stuff happens and then he gets back home. It’s way more interesting than that, but that book isn’t what I want to talk about. In the second book, Perelandra, Ransom goes to Venus, know in Old Solar as Perelandra, on a mission for Maleldil, the Jesus figure of the story. He lands on the planet and finds himself in paradise.

Lewis’s descriptions are vivid. This is Venus, the planet of pleasure. But on Venus is pleasure without sin. There is nothing to pervert the enjoyment of the planet. There is food right at hand that nearly requires a new word to describe it. It is better than our food like a chocolate cake is better than mud. All is soft and easy and pleasant. It is a world of sensuality without lust or perversion. The colors can only be called blue, green or red because that’s the closest we who walk the silent planet have ever known. But they are brighter, more vibrant than our colors like the sun is brighter than a mine shaft. All is good on Perelandra, though ‘good’ is too simple of a word to describe what is depicted in the book.

Ransom meets a woman, the Green Lady, who is the Eve of Venus. She has been separated from the King, the Adam of story, though this only brings her joy as now she can look forward to being reunited with him. She and Ransom have many conversations about the world and about God. She is a very young woman with very simple thoughts and Ransom unconsciously goes about helping her to be wise. It is very pleasant for them both to sit among the animals and talk of great matters in the very presence of God. But then the Tempter comes.

It’s Eden all over again. There is a new Eve is all her splendor listening to the almost-lies of the Devil. He is patient and cunning and she has become used to contemplating what an outsider says about the world and doesn’t have any words in her language or world for ‘evil’, ‘lie’, ‘bad’. She hopes to be wise. All that stands in the way of Perelandra falling is Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged philologist from Cambridge.

It was like watching a horror movie in slow motion. In my mind I’m screaming at Ransom to do something as the Enemy twists the truth around and around until it is unrecognizable. Ransom is doing his all, he is holding the line as best he can, but he is only a man. He needs to eat and sleep, he needs to rest. The Enemy doesn’t. Everything hangs on Ransom and even he knows he will lose eventually.

From a writer’s perspective it was skillfully done. Lewis spent enough time on Perelandra before the Evil showed up that I’d come to love it. Actually, I’d come to long for it. It woke a hurting in me like being homesick for a place I’d never even visited. To walk along the floating islands in the warm ocean with the golden sky above. To ride on the mighty fish as they race through the waves. To sit with the Lady as she was delighted with everything around her. A delight that had never known anything else. Her joy was nothing like mine. My happiness is when something is good instead of bad. There is a bitterness in each smile because always there lurks the knowledge that it could have gone otherwise. And there is a fear behind each surprise joy because next time it will not go the same. Next time there will be sorrow instead of delight. So much of our happiness is based on the pain we have known.

But not so the Green Lady. Lewis talks about how sometimes Ransom couldn’t look her in the face because there was too much pure virtue in her face, too much pure joy unmingled with tears. She delighted in a thing because it was delightful and it made her happier than she had been a moment before. There was no doubt in her mind that the next thing would be just as wonderful.

Towards the end of reading the book I came down with an ear infection. Once again I was trying to find a way to explain the sensation of an infection in my head and once again I was overwhelmed by everyday sounds. My body died just a bit more. I was sick and hurting again. All because Mother Eve listened to the Deceiver.

So, I’m shouting still more for Ransom to do something. Perelandra must not fall. It must stay pure and unsoiled. There must not be a repeat of what happened here on the silent planet so long ago.

I’d read the book before and knew how it ended and still I’m figuratively jumping up and down and shouting. It is a powerful book and a very different read now than when I first read it. Though I’m afraid it’s ruined me for Earth. There’s a longing in me now for a place that doesn’t exist. If it did I’m not sure I’d go; I would just bring the darkness in with me. So I remind myself that even Perelandra is just a picture of a place that is real and will be. And when I walk on the floating islands or the streets of gold there will be no more darkness to carry. Then my ears will be healed with no possibility of infection and I will be able to rest under the golden sky.

So, today I’m reading the book and it’s as good as I’d thought. The cartoons are biting and witty and there are glimpses of where the look and feel of his future books came from. The commentary on the cartoons is very informative both in what Dr. Seuss was thinking and the historical events and trends he was reacting to. The only issue is that I’m finding I disagree with his politics.

It is so weird. I didn’t even really know I had any opinions about the US policies around World War II. But I’m reading the cartoons and I’m reading the commentary and I think Dr. Seuss was wrong. This has me spun because I’m the butterflies and flowers person; I don’t have opinions about politics, right?

Also, I am disagreeing with Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss! The man who brought us those Sneetches nobody thought could learn, but who end their story with Star-Bellied and non hand in hand on the beaches. The man who took us all the way to Solla Sollew (On the banks of the river Wahoo where they never have troubles at least very few), back again and then out beyond Zebra where the Sneedles and the Yekkos live. Who stood with the Lorax and who asked questions about the Butter Battle. The man who gave us that faithful elephant Horton who was so stalwart and so brave. Whether he’s standing by a promise (”I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”) or safeguarding lives only he knows or cares about (”A person’s a person no matter how small.”) Horton is high up on my list of favorite characters. I can’t disagree with Dr. Seuss!

Well, I guess that’s just part of growing up. Finding out where you differ from your heroes and still admiring them and appreciating their genius. Theodor Seuss Geisel, I still like you. Your books still rock and I still plan on enjoying them fully.

It’s really not their fault. The issue is that they’re movies and so can’t do the same thing a book does. I think my biggest issue with the movies is that they can’t capture what I find so engrossing about the books

Harry is at the center of a war between light and dark, good and evil, charming and creepy. He is the lynch pin the rest of the fight is resting on, the one weakness of the uber evil villain, Voldemort. Harry started regularly fighting for his life when he was eleven and has had to do so again and again each book, I mean, year. In each book there is something to be overcome, some way to thwart Voldemort’s plans yet again, some crisis that forces Harry to grow up a bit more. And yet, when he wakes up the morning after the huge coup de grace he’s still just a boy.

Harry may be the epicenter of a war, but he’s also a kid going to school and having friends. So yeah he’s up all night fretting over the latest mystery, but in the morning he’s still going to have to take exams. He has two friends that will stick with him come hell or high water, but sometimes they have a fight. Sometimes Harry has to go say he’s sorry or figure out when to be truly honest and when to be tactful. Sure, maybe he’s the Chosen One who will defeat Voldemort once and for all, but there’s this girl that he thinks is really cute, but he doesn’t know how to talk to her. The grand, epic tale is told in the framework of everyday life.

This is the same reason I enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is, again, the Chosen One, the one imbued with powers to fight the forces of evil. But she’s still just a teenage girl. She might be late to class because she was talking to her Watcher about what she killed on patrol the night before. Or sometimes she needs to choose between fighting evil where it lurks or spending some quality time with her friends. Sure, the fight’s important, but so is her relationship with her mother. She only has so much time so which will she choose? The war she is fighting is fought in big and little ways throughout her day.

This is something that you just cannot capture in a movie. There’s just not enough time. So what ends up happening is that each Harry Potter book with it’s slow unfolding of events and it’s rich detail of daily life turns into an action movie with the one task that Harry must focus all his screen time on. The ins and outs of daily life are lost and the many of the hard decisions between destiny or friends are assumed. Destiny, of course; we don’t want this movie to be too long.

But that seems to miss the point. That turns stories that are about the tension between being special and being normal into straight up adventures. The movies lose so much of the lush details that make the Harry Potter world such a delightful and terrible place to be. And it removes the war from daily life. Suddenly the war Harry is fighting is a series of events that happen in a year and not a daily struggle.

I feel like there is profundity there, but that could just be because I enjoy the books so very much and look for profundity everywhere. But having the time and space to make the hero of the tale a normal person who is special means quite a lot to me. Because I am a normal person. I am a normal person in the middle of a way and while no, I’m not the Chosen One, I’ve still got my bit to play. There is a fight that is not primarily in the big events, but in everyday life. Battle lines are drawn up on whether or not you shout at that child, serve that person, speak those words. Battles are waged by very normal people who are also very special. And if my life were ever a book I would want it to be full of details and textures so that the world I walk through could be felt and understood. So that the reader could fall in love with the world they see through my eyes.

All of which is a luxury that is simply lost when a seven hundred page book is converted to a two hour long movie. Most of the bits I find so delightful are lost in the adaptation and all I’m left with are the highlights. I like the movie world Harry walks through and because I’m such a sucker for nifty visuals I might come to love it, but not nearly as deeply as I have through the books. The nuances are lost and the slow building of a mystery is completely shot to pieces. Much of the whimsy is maintained (for most of the movies anyway. That third movie was just too artsy.) and the important relationships are given their space and time for all that they aren’t completely fleshed out. So they are enjoyable moves, but they’re just not what I’m looking for in a Harry Potter story. This won’t stop me from watching them, but it makes reading the books afterwords that much better.

Indeed there is, but just as I am realizing this I have giving my falling geekness a shot in the arm of equal parts Red Bull and coffee. I have just finished reading a book about compost.

Now, this word ‘read’ can be understood so many different ways. There’s read as in “I had to read War and Peace over the summer.” Then there’s “I would have finished the book sooner, but this annoying thing called sleep was required.” I meant the latter. I read this little book on compost enthusiastically, avidly, excitedly and like several other adverbs, I’m sure. And while I read the book I would periodically run to Crystal to tell her all the nifty things I was learning.

The book is a really friendly little book. It’s called Mike McGrath’s Book of Compost and is written by, shocking I know, Mike McGrath. He is the former editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening and hosts a radio show called You Bet Your Garden which is kinda like Car Talk, but with gardening instead of cars. He has been composting roughly as long as I’ve been alive and is a really funny guy. The book is full of funny little asides, the illustrations made me chuckle and he always refers to the round, soft vegetables that are most common in gardens as “tamatas”. There is just enough science in the book so that one can figure out the principles of composting, but not so much that he lost me. And I am easy to lose when it comes to science stuff. Also, as he goes along he gives directions for more resources including websites, studies that were done by various universities and how to find contact information for your county cooperative agricultural extension service.

The book is divided up into two parts the first being the basics and the second being more advanced information that gets into the nitty gritty of making good compost. I read both parts. And was fascinated the entire time. I now know more about composting than I ever expected to.

Sadly, I had things to do yesterday so I can’t say I read the whole book in one day. It was a short book (194 pages) so the geek cred coming off that statement wouldn’t be much, but I could have phrased it in such a way. Like, “Yeah, and I’m such a geek I read an entire book about compost in one day.” But, as I said, it was not to be. I finished the book this morning while I ate breakfast, but reading a book in two days doesn’t give nearly the same status. So I’m hoping that just having read the book will be enough to raise me in the geek ranks.

It was a cool game. We didn’t play it to the end because it was a very long game and because it wasn’t a good fit for everyone. But I found the concept of the slow growth and change of a culture intriguing.

Shortly after we ended the game I was at the library poking around for books I hadn’t read yet that I’d enjoy. I found myself in the fiction section staring at a shelf of Anne McCaffrey books. I’ve liked just about everything I’ve read of hers. I found a book called Freedom’s Landing that looked fun and interesting. So why not? I got it out, started it and then devoured it.

The time is about now. Aliens called Catteni have invaded Earth using their usual tactic of simply taking several entire cities as slaves and expecting this to keep the rest of the populace in line. Our main character is Kris Bjornsen, a student in Denver who got picked up in one of the first slave runs. She and several hundred other slaves from several different races get dropped onto an uninhabited planet to see if it would make for a good Catteni colony. That’s how they colonize, see. They just drop slaves onto the world with rudimentary tools and keep checking in to see if they survive.

The ex-slaves do more than survive on the strange planet. Someone takes charge and makes everyone work together. They quickly become a well-organized community with everybody pitching in to make life work. The leader, an ex-sergeant named Chuck Mitford, figures out what people are good at and assigns them jobs accordingly. He manages to knit together Humans and the two alien races that stayed with the Humans into one group that trusts each other. He and Kris even manage to keep the one Catteni that got dropped with them alive long enough for him to prove his usefulness and trustworthiness.

It was awesome. I finished the first book and immediately went looking for the next. It was just the story I’d wanted to see play out in Agora. Now that basic survival is taken care of where will the civilization go? Will they stay united when life gets more comfortable? Will they be able to build something that will last?

So I started the second book, Freedom’s Choice. And was horribly disappointed. Not because it wasn’t what I’d been hoping for. It was exactly what I’d been hoping for, but Anne McCaffrey knows more about these things than I do.

The second book picks up just a bit after the first one ends. There are several thousand people on the planet now because the Catteni have figured out that it’s very habitable. People are beginning to spread out over the planet. And the politics start.

The group is bigger, much bigger than the first group Sgt. Mitford took command of. He’s still doing an excellent job, but now there are more people in leadership, more people with a say in what happens. More people to appease and explain to and play off each other. The politicians have showed up and the games have begun. And because Kris is close to the heart of things we have front row seats.

I stopped reading after the fourth chapter. It was too frustrating. I much preferred the first book when they had to figure out what indigenous monster would eat them. I much preferred it when the Deski were almost dying because of a severe mineral deficiency they couldn’t figure out. In Agora terms I really liked the Descent and Survival stages, but couldn’t get into the next stage.

Anne McCaffrey understands people and how they think. As soon as there is an opportunity for power there is someone standing by to try to seize it. This means infighting which is something I just can’t stand. If you’ve got enemies on the outside then why fight amongst yourselves? If you’ve got more than enough to fret about in the area of aerial bombardment then why play politics?

Who knows, maybe I’ll pick the books back up at some point. When I’m older and more cynical perhaps. And hey, maybe I’ll play Agora all the way to the end. Since I get to have a faction all to myself I’ll have a nice control on any political infighting they want to start up.

Really, I don’t know why I read these books. The stress of the current book I’m reading comes from an age old gang war between an alien race that is threatening all of New York City and from a couple who’s marriage is only okay and who don’t know how to talk to each other. So they get dropped in the middle of this war with no concept of what’s going on (though I could explain it if they just listened to me) and with no practice working together.

And no matter how loudly I yell it never seems to help. I’m giving them helpful hints and great advice at the top of my lungs, but nothing changes. It’s like they can’t hear me or something. Maybe I should yell in a New York accent. Maybe that would help.

Recently, Seth and I were talking about why I love an author named Charles de Lint. That discussion was fascinating, but it also got me thinking about what kind of story I enjoy and why. There are several movies and books that I devour and rhapsodise about that the people close to me simply don’t get. Why not? What is the connection between movies like Penelope, Hellboy 2, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and Mirromask and why did I enjoy The Fall so much? Why do I like P. G. Wodehouse so terribly much? And why doesn’t anybody else see what I see in these stories?

I think the connecting theme that runs through the stories that resonate with me is a well-honed sense of whimsy.

Whimsy- n.
: the quality or state of being whimsical or fanciful
: a fanciful or fantastic device, object, or creation especially in writing or art

It’s a playfulness even when dealing with a serious and even painful subject. Not that the subject isn’t treated with all the seriousness and weight that it deserves. Charles de Lint is a great example of this. He puts his characters through all kinds of hell before they even step into the story, but he never loses the awe of something other-worldly walking through downtown. Neil Gaiman is another good example, though frequently his is a dark whimsy. He takes the world, sets it on end and gives it a twist. He doesn’t usually twist so far that the world is bent, but just enough that everything looks different. Simple things and normal occurrences take on new meaning because they don’t fit in their usually spot. Sometimes big things become small and small things become momentous. Sometimes everything stays in their spot, but the characters and the viewers move.

It’s like the difference between a small child watching the snow fall on a quiet night and a small child watching the snow fall on a quiet night when he knows that the snowflakes are actually fairy ships battling for dominance of the clouds. A simple and beautiful things takes on a whole new meaning and suddenly could be vitally important. Or maybe the child doesn’t care who rules on the clouds and just likes seeing the firefights.

I’m glad I figured this out because now I know what sort of thing to look for in a story to get my whimsical fix. And I know why have a hard time sharing what I enjoy so much. Other people have read books I recommended and watched movies I raved about. Sometimes they’ve even enjoyed them. But there are only a couple of people I know who I think could appreciate the same whimsy I like so much. Sometimes it makes me feel a bit lonely. And sometimes I feel silly because I enjoy ‘frivolous’ stories so much. With an in-house brother who lives on crime fiction and non-fiction it’s easy to feel like my whimsical tales aren’t important or weighty enough. But people say it takes all kinds to make the world go up and down so I guess I should focus on keeping the whimsical side of life humming. You’re welcome to join me if you like. There’s plenty of room in my sideways world.

It’s a simple book. A man is tucking his son into bed when the boy asks “Daddy, if I got taken by pirates, would you save me?” The father answers “Of course, son.” The rest of the book is the boy coming up with obstacles and asking if his father would still come to save him. Each time the rescue gets harder, but each time the father assures his son that he would do anything for him.

“Daddy, would you chase them if they were gorilla pirates?”

“Absolutely.”

“What if they took me in the jungle?”

“I would cut a path right through the bush.”

And so on. Really, it’s a very simple structure and I almost cry every time. Michael Rex’s artistic choices were brilliant because the father is a very normal looking man. He even has a tie on. At the end he’s scaled a cliff to stop the robot gorilla pirates from Mars and he’s standing on a hill ready to stop the robot gorilla pirates from Mars who are trying to put his son into their space ship. His clothes are torn and he’s got mud all over him, but his son is in danger and he would do anything for his son. That’s the page that always breaks me up.

I guess I’m just a sucker for a good daddy story. Women get to carry children, but men get to be a picture of God on earth. A Godly father is such a beautiful thing and makes me so happy to see. It’s like a picture that almost captures the original.

“Would you chase me even if it meant coming down here and dying for me?”

“Of course. I would do anything for you.”

This whole process was also a lot more fun than it may sound like. Except for the getting rid of books part. That was difficult on general principles, but also freeing in that it rid my bookshelf of books I was never going to read, or in some cases, duplicates of books that I wasn’t going to read often. Um, yeah. But really, I could stop buying books anytime I wanted to. This is completely not a compulsion… Oooh, books. In nice neat rows… What was I saying? Oh, yeah, I really don’t have a problem. I could quit anytime I wanted to.

Besides the fact that I got to move around stacks of books, I also got to reorganize them. I tend to like organizing things. Particularly if I get to line them up afterwards with perfect right angles and straight lines. I also reorganized some of my craft supplies this week, eliminated some chaos, and created a whole foot of clear space on one of the shelves over my desk. Sadly, this shelf is too short to be effectively used for book storage.

However, I hope to soon replace the desk and its shelves with a bookshelf which will be more effective for the things I need to store. And then guess what I get to do? Organize stuff on the new shelf! Yay!