Read & Reread

For some reason I'm thinking of this book tonight and I'm not sure why. You see it was the only object I collected from my Nana's house after she died. When I chose it, I had no idea it had to do with British Child Labor laws or that it was a parable; a modern day fairytale. I just loved the illustrations (by Alice Stringer), the title and the inscription:

"To Gerald with love & best wishes from Auntie Eva  Christmas 1909".

I haven't had any luck finding an image of the British Children's Bookcase edition that I possess. I now wonder if it's rare, as it's a bound abridged edition. I found this image on the Amazon UK site.

Usually when I have books come and tap me on the back of the brain like this, it means it's time to read them again and understand them at a deeper or new level.

I remember listing it as one of my 20 favorite books when I was 24, an exercise that was requested of me after I'd been accepted to the Radcliffe Publishing Course for an 8 week intensive seminar. I believe some of the other books on the list were as follows: The World According to Garp (helped me through a Hurricane and later I thanked John Irving when I served him coffee at Curtis Brown Ltd.), Les Miserable (again, read it on the boat shortly before I decided to leave and was equally heart broken after both), Anna Karenina (first book that made me cry), Dove (a book about a teenager sailing alone around the world; ironically the title name ship was wrecked in the same hurricane that wrecked Pinion; Hurricane Hugo), Mind How the Sun Goes: A Folktale of the Maine Islands (which is a habit that has always served me well with situating myself in any new city or country), Trek (about a young woman traveling with two camels and a dog across Australia alone), The Color Purple (as I loved the structure and narratives in it), East of Eden (again a retelling of the Cain and Abel story in Depression Era California, only I had no clue at the time), and quite a few more.

The list may be in my file of Radcliffe stuff tucked away somewhere. We also had to submit, before arriving at the Course, three book ideas and five magazine ideas (or something close to that). I remember being very nervous about the Who's Who of NYC publishing critiquing my proposals. What a relief it was to have Alice Meyhew (who I would later learned, when considering taking a job with her, "would eat her assistants for lunch") liked one of my book ideas. It was based off of Old Man Jacque's Maine Writer's class in college and I expanded it to New England. Also a big wig magazine publisher, Daniel Okrent  then at Texas Monthly, liked my "New England Outdoors" idea, to compete against "Outside" regionally.

There are only so many books I reread and old proposals I review. But I think it's time to take stock of some of them again, as I know we are our ideas that inform our choices. Ultimately, we are our choices.

So, I'm almost done with I Am Scout, the YA version of Mockingbird by Charles Shield (which I read in 2006-7), that I'm using to refresh myself before Harper Lee's novel comes out this summer. Once I'm done with it, I'll see why my brain is summoning forward The Water Babies  by Charles Kingsley and reread it. Usually there is something to my inner knocking of the noggin and I learning to listen!

Good Night, Readers and Re-readers, G'night!