Guess What I'm Reading

I had the day off work and spent most of the afternoon cleaning out my back bedroom. I can now recognize that it holds a bed and even a desk. It was in pretty bad shape. While in there, I started looking over my bookcases for titles to get rid of. I do this every couple of years. I'm a bit compulsive as a book buyer. Without frequent weedings I would have no place to walk in my house. So I was looking to start a box. A huge series of books attracted my attention as possible shelf space but after glancing through them I think I'm going to keep them. They're just such fun.

Years ago my parents subscribed to the Time-Life Series of books. We would get beautiful hard bound books in the mail on every subject imaginable. My favorite then, and possibly still now, was a series called The Enchanted World. This was an illustrated collection of stories and myths broken out by subject. There are books on ogres, witches, brave knights, creation myths, christmas, and dozens of others. This 21 volume series covered every type of story imaginable. They are beautifully bound, richly illustrated, and amazingly heavy. For a fanciful child like myself, they were pure gold.

I've always loved fantasy stories and tales of the occult. I remember spending hours pouring over the book on witches and witchcraft trying to learn spells that would allow me to vanquish my enemies and make boys fall in love with me. In high school I played with tarot and palmistry, often earning me some interesting nicknames. I still love fairy tales and myths.

So I'm going back through those old stories that I may or may not have read. I started and finished The Book of Beginnings which covers creation myths and origin myths from around the world. There are Native American tales about how corn was introduced to the world. I was fascinated by the old Navajo story of the Woman Who Fell From the Sky and the Finnish story about the Princess of the Air who falls to earth and is impregnated by a clash of air and water, creating mankind. I particularly like the old Norse myths. The cover image tells an interesting tale of how animals got their tails. The section on Noah's Ark myths covered an interesting story about how cats came to be that I've never heard before.

I'm now reading Dragons. With only 150 or so pages for each book, many covered with illustrations, it shouldn't take me too read all the way through. Check out this 1985 trailer for the series. This would have come out right when I was the hungriest for stories. At nine I was desperate to still believe in magic. I wanted the world of fairies and dwarves and dragons to be real. I craved something beyond the ordinary. Funny enough I still do. These books are a treasure trove. I can't get rid of them.

Lovecraftian fun

This post (my 200th, can I really have posted 200?) is for Jon, who I'm sure will be out buying this game before the end of the day. :-)

I have a confession to make. I'm a little ashamed of this but here goes: I consider myself a geek, yet I've never read Lovecraft. There I've said it. I'm familiar with the stories of Arkham, Massachusetts and the Cthulhu mythos but I've never actually sat down and read some Lovecraft. I consider it a failing in my upbringing and I look forward to rectifying the situation soon. In fact over this past weekend I borrowed a collected works from my dad and will start them as soon as I finish with my two library books.

What got me thinking again about H.P. Lovecraft was a game my brother brought with him this weekend. His kids are on spring break so they have come down to Des Moines to hang out until Thursday. It's been a lot of fun to hang out these last two days and each night has ended the same way. We all sit down at the dining room table, break out the board, and play Arkham Horrors.

Now I'm a gamer from way back. I love board games, role playing games, and video games. Even my current WoW addiction is nothing compared to my love for board games. Absolutely nothing makes me happier than sitting around a table with friends or family and a board game. Snacks don't hurt either. And this one is one of the more interesting games I've gotten to play. Each character is given an investigator who will go out into the streets and locations of Arkham to fight back the monsters and keep the ancient ones from spawning. The investigators, who have been pulled directly from the stories, have different occupations, different possessions, and more importantly different levels of sanity and stamina. At the beginning of the game the ancient one is chosen. The characters then travel around the city gathering clues and closing gates to the other worlds. During that whole time you have to keep track of your sanity (which you can lose easily) and your stamina. Those are the things you will use to fight the ancient one when it awakens

This picture was blatantly stolen from Board Game Geek because I forgot my camera last night.

We played last night with seven people and that might have been too many. The game is a complex turned based game. Each character, led off by the first investigator, starts first with a movement turn, then encounters turns for people in Arkham, then encounters turns for people in other worlds, then monster movement turns, then new gates opening turns and status updates for the ancient one. That is the end of the first turn. Then it is repeated until the ancient one spawns. We played from 8 last night until nearly 11 and weren't even close to finishing. Be prepared for a long evening. But this is a great game. Each turn is very different and the monsters that spawn keep the investigators jumping around the board. And with the game set in the Cthulhu mythos, there is an interesting level of horror. Cards include direct quotes from the stories and Cthulhu himself may be awoken. The game was interesting and definitely one of the better thought out games I've played in a long time. But even better they make me want to read some Lovecraft.

Tales From Outer Suburbia

Are you all tired about hearing about this book? Are you wishing I would stop mentioning it? Well today is your lucky day. This is the last day I will reference this book. At least for a little while.

There is good reason though that it was the most anticipated book I have had in a while. I had read a review of it early last year and decided that I had to own it. I love Shaun Tan....Love!. His work has such an incredible mix of absurdity and darkness and fantasy that I find it irresistable. So when I found out about his new book I rushed to Amazon to buy it. Sadly I ordered it along with a book on paper engineering. To save a tree or two I had them shipped together. I ordered both of them in January and still hadn't received them by March. I would come home each day with the same type of pleading look that children get when expecting Christmas presents. I would ask Jeff each day, "Books?", with my little chin quivering. No books. So I finally went into Amazon and found out that the paper engineering book was holding things up. I canceled that and Tales was sent the next day.
This book is bizarre, thought-provoking, and strange. It contains fifteen little stories about the suburbs but not the suburbs most of us are used to. There is the very popular story of Eric, about a shy foreign exchange student who visits a family and leaves his own unique thank you gift. There is the story of the dogs that come to watch a house fire, and take revenge on the cruel owner. There is the story of poetry that no one reads, which bands together to form a ball and roam the city until the rains come. These are simple stories with wonderful illustrations that make me think. The often horrific story of the Stick People who wander suburbia and often bring down the neighbors wrath. The wonderfully touching story of a turtle rescue which almost made me choke up a little. And my favorite and perhaps the longest, a great story of a scavenger hunt that cements a marriage.

Shaun Tan hooks you from the first page. His table of contents are made up of stamps bearing an image from each of the stories. With his unique illustration style you feel drawn into the book. Tan is simply one of the best illustrators out there. His drawing mix realistic imagery with cartoon characters. He starts the book with a simple story about a very wise water buffalo. Similar to The Lost Thing, also by Tan, this book reminds us to look a little closer at our familar surroundings. The bushes may lead to a secret garden, the stick may have a life of its own, and the sea or the edge of civilization may be closer than we think. All of the stories in this book are different. They are told in different styles, from free verse to newspaper clipping to advertisement. All of the images are strickingly different and all leave you with a different emotion. This will be a wonderful book to go back to when I need a little pick me up. I can open to any story and just enjoy. Well worth the wait.

Nevermore

I was 7 or 8 when I first heard The Raven by Poe. Although I don't remember my exact age I do remember where I was when I heard it for the first time. My dad and I were huddled around the book with him reading the poem out with just the right mix of doom and excitement. I didn't understand all the parts of the poem but I knew that I loved it. Instantly. From the grim "Nevermore" to the "rapping at my chamber door". It was and still is a magical poem for me. I can actually remember the exact place I was in whenever I read any of his works for the first time (something that I can't say for any other author). They just cut deep into my psyche in ways that other stories don't.

Edgar Allan Poe and I have an odd relationship. I am thrilled by his work and terrified by his work. I read "The Fall of the House of Usher" when I was 12 or so and slept with the lights on that night. Now I am a coward when it comes to horror films. I like to say that I have too good an imagination for them. And I don't read a lot of horror, but I keep going back to Poe. "The Pit and the Pendulum" has inspired more horror and torture films than any other work. I noticed that the new Saw film pays homage. And although I won't see that movie, I will still read the story over and over and shiver.

Even before I knew his terrible past (parents dead when he was two, estrangement from his foster parents, homelessness, alcholism, and a pennyless death followed by posthumous fame) I knew that his work was dark and tortured and thrilling. I had an English teacher who spent an entire class reading "The Bells" in a way that none of us could forget. She made us (lazy high school students) pay attention with those words. We scoffed at Wordsworth and Longfellow and even Hawthorne, but we sat rapt in our seats for Poe. It had just the right mix of darkness and violence to catch our attention.

Monday was not just MLK day but the 200th birthday of Poe. I celebrated by reading "The Cask of Amontillado" (one of my favorites) and watching the incredibly creepy animated version of "The Tell-tale Heart" from UPA pictures. So in honor of his terrible life and his torturedly beautiful works, find a dark corner, light a candle, and read some Poe.

Beyond the Gift of the Magi

When I was in middle school we read The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. I'm sure it was right around Christmas. This was a charming short story so different from the Shakespeare and Poe that we had been working on. First and foremost it was funny, and secondly it was written for people like me. This was simple story, told well. it told about real people, struggling to make a living, and about love in a way that wasn't preachy. A couple years later I picked up my parent's illustrated copy of The Ransom of Red Chief and laughed along at the two bumbling kidnappers and their "boisterous" charge. (at the time Red Chief seemed cute. Now he seems more demon spawn) But these two short stories were refreshingly fun and wonderful stories.

But I never pushed on with O. Henry (actually named William Sydney Porter). I stopped with those up until now. Lately I've been bad about bringing a book to work. I just don't think about it in the mornings. So when I'm in the office for lunch I have nothing to read. And lately I haven't been writing. So I have been going to one of my favorite websites, Literature Network, for some light reading. This great site includes short stories and novels done by any author whose work is now public domain. And that I was happy to see included O. Henry.

I thought I had read the best of his stuff but I was very wrong. All of his short stories are wonderful. They all have the same charm and humor that his most famous two have. I have been treated to Cupid Ala Carte, The Third Ingredient, To Him Who Waits, The Princess and the Puma, among others. Most of his stories have a fun twist at the end that the reader can't see coming. And all of them are so well written. Now O. Henry was a southerner, writing right after the Civil War, so some of his ideas are dated. But the themes of his stories are all about regular people, living regular lives. They are rich with love stories and bank robberies and cowhands and city life. These, along with PG Wodehouse, are some of my favorite stories recently. For a quick read, there is simply nothing better.