Beginnings

Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.

New Pleasures

Last month we took off over the weekend of the kids' spring break and had a fancy dinner and stayed in a hotel. Walker wanted oysters. Ron had to point out the steamed shellfish on the menu and we all had to agree to share the raw oysters as an appetizer before he could be dissuaded from ordering raw oysters as his dinner. A good thing, as it turned out. Although he said he liked the flavor of the one raw oyster he put in his mouth, Walker didn't swallow it. (He did eat all the steamed shellfish happily, as usual.) Ron and Eleanor each tried a raw oyster. Ron ate several. I thought I could just sit there and not be noticed, but it was decided that I needed to try a raw oyster. I sat there thinking of the poem by Roy Blount, Jr.:

I like to eat an uncooked oyster.
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
Nothing's easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to disgorge.
But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster...
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

Anyway, I put the thing in my mouth and swallowed it. It wasn't too bad. And I'd tried something new.

Just as potent as the pleasure of traveling to a new place and trying a new food is the pleasure of an entirely new book by an author you already like, especially when the author is also fond of the same kind of books you are. With her first book, The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall set out consciously to imitate the pleasures of books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager. In her new book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, she also mentions Eva Ibbotson, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series (a BIG favorite at our house*), and a character from Narnia. In addition, she has one of those odd pleasures in store for parents--the pleasure of hearing the words of a story you've read to your child a hundred million times...I couldn't believe how readily the "Scuppers the Sailor Dog" song came back to me when I heard Mr. Penderwick read it to Batty.

Mr. Penderwick's Latin phrases will not be a mystery to any child who's read the Harry Potter series (we have a new game with books--try reversing initial letters to see if you can make words and phrases that make sense, like A Wrinkle in Time becomes A Tinkle in Wrime, Where the Wild Things Are becomes Where the Tiled Wings Are, and any Harry Potter book becomes Perry Hotter and the...). Mr. Penderwick's date with Marianne Dashwood probably will be a mystery for most child readers, at least until the mystery is revealed towards the end of the book. Just a little Toy Story-like pleasure for older readers.

One of my favorite parts of The Penderwicks on Gardam Street is how you can tell that a particular woman would be a bad match for Mr. Penderwick--she not only wears a rabbit coat, but she also has "rabbit fur around the tops of her boots." Shades of Cruella DeVille!

Another favorite part for me is when you see the kitchen of the woman who turn out to be a good match for Mr. Penderwick:

Jane entertained herself by looking around the kitchen. It was nothing like the kitchen at home. It was warm and cozy like home, true, but it was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either.

I have several quite intellectual friends who are good cooks and who enjoy cooking, but I'm not one of them. From now on, I'm going to think of my kitchen as "the kitchen of a Thinker." I can make some good tea sandwiches, and I have a caviar dish with room for ice, so probably I can use it to serve up oysters raw and properly chilled.

*If you want to read the Swallows and Amazons books in order, check out this link:
http://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Ransomes-Swallows-Amazons-order

Child Heroes

Walker spent much of the weekend at tryouts for Peter Pan and then callbacks. They had him sing for John at first on the callback day, but the musical director kept calling him up to sing with the Peters, too. At worst, he'll get to be a lost boy. I think they're a bit reluctant to cast a 12-year-old as the lead of the annual community theater musical, especially one requiring deep enough pockets to rent "flying" equipment.

It was kind of a shame, I thought, that there were only three boys singing for Peter in the callbacks, and the other two were too old; their voices were deeper already. Obviously, someone was trying to hear males for the role, but I think it's probably going to be a Mary Martin-type show, given the number of girls who sang better and were older than twelve (one was 20, but a very small person). I did have a small revelation, sitting in the back row of the theater listening to Walker sing. We're always on him at home not to sing at the table, and not to sing right in our faces. That's because he has an increasingly powerful voice!

At any rate, it got me thinking about child heroes, and how often in YA fantasy literature, the adults are reluctant to entrust the fate of the world to one so young. (The first examples that come to my mind are: Lyra in The Golden Compass, the four children in Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Gregor the Overlander, Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief, Lina and Doon in The City of Ember, Molly Moon, Roald Dahl's Matilda, Ethan in Summerland).

Deeba in China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is a child hero in a book that turns a lot of conventions on their heads in a thoroughly delightful manner. For the first 134 pages, it seems to be a traditional child hero tale--the "chosen one" is recognized by animals in our world and is subsequently transported to another world she has been chosen to save. But she is frightened and ultimately beaten, and goes back to her world, where she stays. Okay, maybe you guessed it from the title--the other world is a parallel universe--an Un-London--and the child who can actually save it is the Un-chosen one, Deeba, who no one has made much of a fuss over.

That's just the first delightful twist to this story. There are a lot of good word jokes that eventually degenerate into puns and actual characters (called "utterlings"). The chosen one from the first part of the book is referred to in Un Lun Dun as the "shwazzy" which we eventually learn is a version of the term "vous avez choisi." London's Royal Meteorological Society, abbreviated as RMETS, is referred to in Un Lun Dun as Armets, a magical society of "weatherwitches." And the mysterious thing that solved London's smog problem in 1952 is Un Lun Dun's magical talisman against the magically malignant smog that threatens their entire existence, the Klinneract.

There are wonderful and original details in this story, like a character who is a ghost (called a wraith), some very scary giraffes, and an army of animate umbrellas, plus a flying bus and a suspension bridge that moves around to evade people looking for it.

This is a book for book-lovers, but not too inaccessible for kids (like Summerland, you'll enjoy it more, the more other books you've read).