What I'm reading right now.

One of the nice things about having as extensive a library as I have is that there's never a lack of things to read. Even with the sheer amount of books I own that I haven't read yet, I can't get through more than a handful of them before I want to go back and reread an old favorite.

Right now I'm reading an odd mixture of old and new books, along with a library book thrown in for good measure.

Fire and Hemlock, by Dianne Wynne Jones.
I mentioned this in my last post. Writing about it then made me realize how long it'd been since I'd read it, so I pulled it off my shelf and dove in. I forgot how enjoyable and tantalizing all the name-dropping of books is in it. It's also a truly enjoyable, very mysterious retelling of Tam Lin, as I mentioned before, and I'm falling in love with the love story all over again.

Meet the Austins, by Madeleine L'Engle.
I've been a fan of Madeleine L'Engle's books for years. I'm more familiar with her fantasy books, starting with A Wrinkle in Time, but I've read a few of her Austin family Chronicles as well (of which this is the first, which I haven't read before). I picked this up at a small independent bookstore in Cannon Beach last week. I like to buy something from independent bookstores whenever I visit one, just to do my part in helping them survive.

The Lost Prince, by Francis Hodgson Burnett.
I've read and absolutely love FHB's most famous works for children: A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Secret Garden (one of my all-time favorite books). This work is much less well-known, but I've found I'm enjoying it very much. It's a very exciting story about a father and son working to restore the long-lost prince to the throne of Samavia (a generic, Ruritania-like, small European country), and takes place in London and Europe just after the turn of the century.

A Civil Contract, by Georgette Heyer.
This one has been a little difficult for me to get through. I normally love Georgette Heyer's books, but this one is fairly non-traditional. In typical romance novels, arranged marriages usually end up with the hero and heroine falling desperately in love after all. I'm not sure that's going to be the case in this one. It's a very realistic portrayal of the type of arranged marriages popular in British aristocratic society during the Regency period, and I appreciate it in that regard, but I live for happily-ever-after endings. I hope this one has it.

The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.
According to Wikipedia, The Golden Bough is s "wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion," focusing particularly on the primitive methods of early pagan cults throughout civilization. I haven't read much of this yet, but it's one of the books cited in Fire and Hemlock, and is considered one of the most influential books of the past hundred years.

A Short History of the Honey Bee, by E. Readicker-Henderson.
This book is pretty much what the title suggests, a history of honeybees. I came across this while doing the ToC for it at work, and immediately requested a copy from my local library. It's a very new release and my library only finally got their copy in a week ago. I may end up having to take this to Hawaii in order to finish it before it has to go back to the library. It's a very satisfying way of assuaging the curiosity about bees that Laurie R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books have stirred up in me.

The Box of Delights, by John Masefield.
This is a recent addition to my library, and, incidentally, another book referenced in Fire and Hemlock. I've been waiting for a used copy for some time now and finally Powells got one. I haven't read it yet, but I'm very excited. This is one of The New York Review Children's Collection. They took a number of high-quality children's books by English and American authors, most published before 1950, and printed them in gorgeous hardcover volumes with heavy paper and beautiful artwork and covers. These are books built to last, and meant to be handed down, and make me long for the days (which ended before I was born) in which children's books were worth reading. Most of the stuff coming out today (if you'll pardon my crankiness) is cheap rubbish written hastily to make money, rather than stories that will continute to have an impact on children long after they've been read. In fact, the books in the NYR Children's Collection are the kind of books I would love to carry in my hypothetical children's bookstore (which looks a lot like The Shop Around the Corner in You've Got Mail).

Here's the cover, just so you can see how pretty it is:



John Masefield just so happens to be the author of "Sea Fever", one of the poems I posted during Poetry Month. I will never, ever get tired of the line, "All I need is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by."

Besides the stack of books I'm in the middle of right now, I have a stack of books to read. These are all books I haven't read before. I'm trying to go through them all so that I can clear room off my bookshelves for all the books Mom and Dad are bringing me that I left behind in Iowa.

Out of the Ordinary, by Annie Dalton.
One of the Tam Lin retellings. It should be a quick read.

A Dark Horn Blowing, by Dahlov Ipcar.
A fantasy for young adults that references Irish mythology: a young human woman is stolen away to be nursemaid to the princely son of the king of Erland (elfland).

A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin.
A well-regarded work of High Fantasy that parallels the medieval world of The Wars of the Roses. I'm excited to read this; HBO and the BBC are producing a mini-series based on this book that is sure to be absolutely gorgeous, and two of my favorite actors (Sean Bean and Jennifer Ehle) have been cast. If it does well, they'll turn the later books into mini-series as well.

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge.
Another British fantasy work for children. This was J. K. Rowling's favorite book as a child, and she credits it with inspiring her to write. This is being turned into a movie as well, and the pictures I've seen of it are breathtaking.

Emma Brown, by Clare Boylan.
This book was written out of fragments that Charlotte Bronte left behind when she died. Supposedly, it is very true to her style and authorial voice, and should be a very interesting read.

The Sherwood Ring, by Eliabeth Marie Pope.
Since I love, love, loved The Perilous Gard, I'm excited to read this. I may bump it up to the top of the To-Read list. It's about a young, modern girl sent to live at her family's ancestral estate, only to find that it's full of Colonial-era ghosts that lead her to mysteries, romance, and historical battles.

The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay.
The first book in The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It's about five university students who end up in this fantastical world of wizards, goblins, and mythological characters. Sounds right up my alley!

"Oh, I forbid ye maidens all / that wear gold in your hair..."

"Oh I forbid ye maidens all
That wear gold in your hair--
Do not go by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there!"

Until the age of eleven or twelve, I had only a passing interest and fondness for fairy tales. I enjoyed reading them, but they weren't a driving passion for me. That all changed when my older sister came home for a visit from college and made my family watch the marvelous film Labyrinth. Suddenly, I was obsessed.

Since that moment, I've actively sought out folk and fairy tale adaptations, both those that are still in their classic form, and those that have crossed into the genre of fantasy and sci-fi. If they at all have anything to do with fairy tales, folk tales, old ballads, and so on, I usually love them.

My three favorite tales/ballads are Beauty and the Beast (French), East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon (Norse), and Tam Lin (Scottish). Tam Lin is a Scottish ballad that dates back to the 1600s. The earliest extant recording of it is from the 1800s, and has been studied in depth at this website, which offers the following summary:

The woods of Carterhaugh are guarded by Tam Lin, a man who demands payment of all maidens who pass through, in the form of a belonging or their virginity. A maiden named Janet travels to Carterhaugh and picks a rose, causing Tam Lin to appear. He questions her presence, to which she relies that Carterhaugh is rightfully hers. She then travels to her father's house where she exhibits the early signs of pregnancy, much to the concern of the household. She states that her lover is elven, and then returns to Carterhaugh, once again encountering Tam Lin. He reveals he is not elven, but a mortal captured by the queen of Faeries, and that he may be sacrificied to hell as part of the faerie tithe. He then details how she can save him to be her mate, if she will undergo a trial on Halloween night. She must pull him from his horse as the faeries process through the woods, and hold onto him as he is transformed into various beasts, then plunge him into a well when he turns into a brand of fire. When he regains his own naked shape she must cover him with her green mantle and he will be free. She does all of this, much to the anger of the watching Queen of faeries.

That's a rough summary---the ballad in its entirety is much more complex and subtle, but most adaptations of this story follow it to some extent.

One day in 12th grade, while I was waiting at the local library for my ride home, I browsed through the children's picture books and came across Jane Yolen's Tam Lin:



It's a charming enough picture book and the illustrations are beautiful, so a copy made its eventual way into my permanent collection. However, by dint of being a picture book meant for small children, the essence of the story was dumbed down quite a bit and what was left wasn't much at all. I enjoy that picture book, but there's not much to it. I gradually forgot the story.

At the age of 21 I was living in Honolulu and attending the University of Hawaii, and since I hadn't been able to bring many of my own books to school, I was visiting the local library fairly often. One of the books I checked out was An Earthly Knight, by Janet McNaughton:



As I began to read this story, first with cautious interest and later with rapt absorption, elements of the tale started to ring with familiarity. I had a "Zut alors!" moment and realized this was a retelling of Tam Lin, and as I finished it up, I realized I wanted to learn more about it. That started off a fascinating few months of researching the ballad and finding out about other retellings, and there was a wealth of information and recommendations online.

The next version I read was Pamela Dean's seminal Tam Lin, part of DAW Fantasy's Fairy Tale Series, in which popular modern Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors retold their favorite fairy tales:



This version is my favorite. It sets the story in the 1970s at a small private college in Minnesota. The characters are all students or professors studying English and the classics, and the book is enjoyably chock-full of literary references, quotations, and allusions (Shakespeare! Milton! Homer! Keats!). The author wrote the story as a love letter of sorts to her time at college and intertwined it with the ballad to great effect.

By the time I finished reading it, I had a list a mile long of books to look up and find, thanks to the name dropping of the characters and Pamela Dean's list of Recommended Reading at the end of the novel (I LOVE THOSE). In the process of tracking those books down, I came across Dianne Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock:



Fire and Hemlock is a less literal interpetation of the story, but one that is also full of literary references and allusions. The young heroine, Polly, discovers she has two sets of memories about the same time period of her life, and the only thing in common between them is the mysterious Tom Lynne. Using her knowledge of the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, as well as that of comparative religon, Polly must figure out the truth of her memories and rescue Tom.

The most recent adaptation I've read is Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which I picked up last week while Amanda and Rachel were visiting:



This is a book I'd heard about for many years but never gotten around to reading, and halfway through it I began calling myself every kind of idiot. It was WONDERFUL! The author very skillfully wove the basic story of the ballad into a detail-rich plot set in the Elizabethan period. The heroine, Katherine Sutton, is banished from Queen Mary's court and sent into exile in the countryside, where she discovers a mystery surrounding her guardian's deceased daughter, and his silent, haunted brother.

I have two books left to read in my Tam Lin reading questm and then I'll have run out:



Patricia A. McKillip is a very highly regarded author of young adult fantasy--her An Alphabet of Thorn pretty much blew my mind and left me wandering around like a dazed idiot afterwards. She's doing an author reading and autograph session at Powell's next month and I'd love to go, but it's while I'm going to be in Hawaii. Curses!



I'm not familiar with Annie Dalton at all, and this seems to be one of the more obscure retellings. It got very high reviews online, however, and those were enough for me to track down a battered, used paperback from Powell's. I'll give it a try as soon as I've finished the eighteen hundred other books I'm right in the middle of.

By no means have I exhausted every retelling of this ballad. The website I linked to above lists dozens more, but most are either out of print or else they don't appeal to me for one reason or another (i.e., I can't read a picture book if I don't like the art, no way no how). So for the moment, I've come to an impasse in my quest to explore Tam Lin.

A Strange Enchantment

It is a particular weakness of mine that I'll read a fictional book which will suddenly send me off on a nonfiction spending spree. Case in point: while reading Laurie R. King's O Jerusalem, a mystery novel starring the crimefighting duo of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell and set in post-WWI Israel, I was so fascinated by the political backdrop of the setting that I hightailed it to Powells and came home with a handful of books about British Palestine and the Balfour Agreement.

While researching fictional children's books set in boarding schools (a favorite genre of mine), I came across an author named Mabel Esther Allan. She was an incredibly prolific writer of children's stories in England, though relatively unknown in America, and out of curiousity, I requested a few of her books through the library. Last night, I picked up one of them, thinking I'd give it a halfhearted try. Before I knew it, it was four hours later (and half an hour past my bedtime). I had finished the book and was itching with the desire to jump in my car and drive to Powells for some nonfiction to satisfy my sudden, blinding curiosity. The only thing stopping me was that it was 11:30 pm and Powells had been closed for half an hour.

A Strange Enchantment
by Mabel Esther Allan



This fictional book for young adults (and ever-young adults) is set during WWII in England. The heroine, a 16 year old girl named Primrose (Prim, for short), is a city girl who longs to live in the countryside. As patriotic fervor sweeps the country just after the declaration of war, Prim decides to leave school, lie about her age, and join the Women's Land Army. The novel follows her experience with the organization, as well as what it teaches her about life and herself.

I was only peripherally aware of the Women's Land Army (WLA) before reading this book, and that awareness was thanks to another Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell book. In a nutshell, when the men of England went to Europe to fight during WWI and WWII, the women of England left their homes to work in the factories and on the farms. The WLA educated them in agricultural fields and placed them with farms around the kingdom, giving them work in a time of need and keeping the land from suffering a food shortage.

I was fascinated by Prim's story and by her thirst for adventure and for the peace of the countryside. Her love of the land and of her job, difficult and occasionally tedious as it was, was imbued in every sentence of the book. I was sorry when it ended, and am now eager to learn more about the WLA.

Unfortunately, there is somewhat of a dearth of information on the topic. Powells boasts several titles, the most interesting-sounding one being:



Unfortunately, NONE of the books on the WLA that it has in stock are under $40. That's about $25 more than I'm willing to spend on a book. At the moment, I'm at an impasse, unable to quickly and cheaply satisfy my curiosity on this topic. Financially, it's probably just as well. Mentally, it's frustrating as heck.

What fictional books have fired your intellectual curiosity on a topic?