Books that Define You/Me

There's a meme on Facebook that circulates about once a year--and like all Facebook memes, there are several versions--that asks what the 10 books (authors, songs, albums) that most influenced you.  You're supposed to list these off the top of your head without thinking too much about it so that you can tag your friends and keep the ball rolling, or whatever memes do.  This is is not really practical for someone like me, who tends to overthink things--and who doesn't simply read books, but ingests them, internalizes them--lives them.  When I came up with the list, it looked something like this:

1. The Little House Books (mostly The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. The Chronicles of Narnia (mostly The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Last Battle, and The Magician's Nephew)
3. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
4. The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
7. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
8. Victorian People and Ideas by Richard Altick
9. Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian
10. Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

My Facebook list looked a little different, as I had forgotten #4, and couldn't come up with another to take its place.  I had to scramble a little for #8, #9, and #10, which were all influential nonfiction.  But fiction was what defined me at various points in my life.

In fact, #1, #2, #3, #4, and #7 were all on the list because I read them more times than I know--and the list is in rough chronological order.  I read Little House on the Prairie in 3rd grade, and perhaps the following year, I got the boxed set of books, and read them voraciously for the next several years.  I remember specifically brining the books to school each day in 4th, 5th and 6th grades, and reading one of the books in a single day.  The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years became worn from being read over and over, more than the rest--the former because it was an amazing tale of endurance, the latter because it was a portrait of growing up.

When I was in 6th grade, I attended a Christian school for part of the year because my mother had a job there, and at one point, the librarian, impressed with my appetite for books, and recognizing my resistance to "girl books" like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, or books about animals, directed me to the Chronicles of Narnia.  I was in love.  I read all but The Magician's Nephew while I was at the school--repeatedly.  When I returned to my public elementary school that same year, I bought The Magician's Nephew from Scholastic.  Years later, when I was 15, I worked as a camp counselor of sorts at Camp-of-the-Woods in Upstate New York, and I was able to buy my own set from their bookstore.  They fell apart almost immediately, and I wrote HarperCollins for a refund of the $40+ that they had cost.  The following year, it began to click for me that they were not simply fantasy, but Christian allegory--and so began my disillusionment wiht the Chronicles, and in a way, with Christianity (a symptom, also, of the particular type of Christianity I encountered at Camp-of-the-Woods, the superficiality, the compulsory nature of faith, and the loneliness....)  The books remained with me for a long time, as I learned more about Lewis, wrestled with his Christian identity, his adpotion by the evangelicals who made me feel alienated from Christianity, and his curious and often disturbing biography....  But even so, they stayed close as the more I read, the more I understood Lewis's influences, allusions, and techniques.  By the time I entered my M.A. program, I wanted to "redeem" The Chronicles of Narnia from those who would dismiss them on the basis of their Christianity.  My first graduate paper, my first abstract, and, consequently, my first article and my M.A. thesis came from that impulse.  From rereading, I was able to see exactly how to make a complex argument about how to read the books.  I squeezed another conference paper out of the Chronicles as well.  And this is what books should do--stay with us, grow with us, and lend themselves in some way to our intellectual or spiritual development.  My daughter has started reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though she might be a little young to get through it on her own.  Someday, I'm sure I will reread them again.

The first non-children's lit--although it might justifiably be called"adult"--novel on the list is The Mists of Avalon--I credit--or blame--a high school English teacher for introducing it.  It's about a million pages long--longer than any of the Outlander books, for certain.  And sort of a poisonous, intoxicating book for a young woman/girl, disenchanted with Christianity, and sexually curious.  I read it probably ten times over the years, and fashioned myself into Morgaine--Bradley's version of Morgan le Fay.  For me, it epitomizes a "dangerous book"--I might say more about that one day soon, as I am currently rereading it--20 years later--to find out what my younger self found so captivating.  And really?  It is still captivating.  And I have found that the little bit of serious fiction I have written is heavily influenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley's tale, but perhaps I'll return to that in another post.

I may or may not have read The Vampire Lestat before The Mists of Avalon.  Or it might have been the same time.  It is the second of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.  At the time, she had written up to The Queen of the Damned, and by the time The Tale of the Body Thief was written, I was disenchanted.  I read them out of order, so I worshipped Lestat and hated Louis--narrator of Interview with a Vampire--which is not what is supposed to happen.  Rice's vampires showed me an agnostic vision, at best, and a homoerotic one, and I dwelt there for a while, idealizing something I could never know.

I would think it odd that I did not find another book that I could reread and live in for many years, but as an undergraduate, I was a poet.  Then, as a new mother at 20, and in graduate school, I simply didn't have the time.  The Odyssey was influential intellectually as my introduction to Orality-Literacy theory, while the Inferno started tipping me toward Catholicism.  The next on the list was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and in a very short time, I read it as many times as some of the others.  As the first book I "lived in" as an adult, and a new Catholic, I found a lot of ways to work out ideas in The Lord of the Rings.  It refreshed my spirit, much like the story Lucy read in the magician's house in Voyage of the Dawn Treader--and I was able to share it with my husband as well.

So as I'm rereading--and reliving--The Mists of Avalon, and wondering what thoughts it will yield about books, about my former self, and about ideas that I could not have seen in the novel 20 years ago--I want to ask you--and consider it a tag:  what books have defined you?  What books have you read again and again, and lived in, so that they shaped the person you were, or who you would become?  Because a book can do that--it's the beauty of books, and also what makes them feared (the missing narrative of banned books week, present in dystopian literature).

Comment, blog about your books, and if you would, link back and leave a comment!  Happy reading.

Another Disney Aside: The Aesthetics of Frozen

As I sit here on Saturday morning, the first day of my long birthday weekend, as I like to think of it, I am dreading going back to work on Tuesday for a completely novel reason.  Yesterday evening I took my girls to see Disney's Frozen.  I had been avoiding it deliberately--first because of the snowman, Olaf.  Second, because I had heard about a certain plot twist, whereby the initial love interest is revealed to be the bad guy.  I don't like when films--or books--trick the viewer/reader in cruel ways.  But in the course of a Facebook exchange, I became intrigued enough to resolve to see the film.  It sounded interesting.  So when I was "surprised" with a cake on Thursday by my co-workers (it's an office ritual, and I'm not one to scoff at an opportunity to stop working), I mentioned that I was thinking of taking of Friday afternoon (my actual birthday) and bringing my girls to see Frozen.  We chatted about it a bit.  My boss, who is a very sweet person, and a former dance major/instructor, mentioned that when she saw it with her teenaged daughter, she didn't know it was a musical.  She said the songs were awesome.

Therein lies the difficulty.  *sigh*  I didn't think the songs were awesome--or even very good--with one notable exception.  "Frozen Heart"--the ice-cutters song.  And the other thing that people defend for one reason or another (and I think it's because everyone secretly knows that the film would have been better off without) is the other element I couldn't stand--the snowman, Olaf, whom I knew would be a problem for me just from the previews.  Defending Olaf is a lot like defending Jar-Jar Binks, but Olaf has a better backstory.

So as I think about Tuesday (long weekend), I think about being asked what I thought of how I liked the movie, and what I will say, and how I can say it without bringing judgment upon myself as the snob with the English Ph.D. who can't enjoy anything.  I can't help remembering a fellow English major I was dating at the time remarking, "Oh, so you're saying that you want your animated films to be more realistic?"  He should have known better, but in a way that mirrors what you see all over the internet when someone applies analytical skills to pop culture-- "Are you kidding? Shut up and enjoy the film."  (Only spelled worse.)  I had similar successes trying to get students to analyze or evaluate Disney films and children's literature.  No one quite sees the point.

Here, for a change, I am not actually dealing with analysis, but evaluation.  Because I believe (and it's an unpopular belief) that it is possible to set criteria and judge whether something is a good or a bad work of art, a successful or (artistically) unsuccessful film, book,whatever.  And in fact, I'm not a culture snob.  I love children's media in particular, and bought "What Does the Fox Say?" from the iTunes store, whatever judgment that might bring upon me.  So what did I think of Frozen?  Well, taken as a whole, I didn't particularly like it.  And I wanted to.  But at the end of the day, the elements that were pleasing, and what the writers of the story were attempting to do broke down for me because of the elements that simply got in the way or did not contribute to the overall purpose of the film.  And the purpose of the film was to tell a story and convey ideas, not merely to entertain.

There were very strong elements in the movie.  I enjoyed the story.  The dynamic between the sisters was interesting, and the character development--though not as strong as in Tangled (in part because Tangled had fewer characters to develop)--was better than one expects from a fairy tale.  The twist was fine--the way it was executed struck me as overly dramatic.  Surely, Hans knew he would betray her before he leaned in for the kiss, and the kiss--having nothing to do with true love--wouldn't have worked anyway.  I liked that Ana saved herself and her sister.  And I liked Christof.

The animation was, at times, stunning, though I had to keep reminding myself that the sisters were not the new Strawberry Shortcake, because their exaggerated eyes and top-heavy movements reminded me strongly of that animation.  But the ice was lovely, particularly in the opening sequence.

In fact, the opening sequence--with the ice cutting--was my favorite part of the film.  Just as we get past the odd chanting--Lion King in Scandinavia?? (I'm assuming there's some reason for the chant, but it didn't set the tone well)--we see (and hear) boots crunching across the ice--which we see from below.  And then the saw pierces the ice.  The motion of the saw forms the rhythm for the sone "Frozen Heart"--also the best song in the film.  When my husband (who did not see the film, but who enjoyed Tangled along with the rest of us) saw this sequence, he said, "Now, we need a good work song."  And that's what "Frozen Heart" is, in spite of it being, as one YouTube commenter so eloquently said, "the whole freakin' movie."  Men's voices chant a vague legend about a frozen heart while describing the danger and wonder of ice.  The music itself has folk elements to it, including a stringed instrument that reminds me of the Swedish nykelharpa, an instrument I discovered by listening to Vicki Swan and Johnny Dyer on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast, because several of their songs had a stringed instrument that was low enough to be a cello, but was clearly (to my son, who plays one) not a cello.  This song--the song that opened the action of th film--clearly set the stage for the action, and also established the setting, both musically and thematically.  All without being distracting and calling undue attention to itself as a musical number.

Unfortunately, the other songs did not follow suit, and that is my largest problem with the film--well, that and Olaf.  The other songs in the film were, quite simply, pop.  They were a cross between Beyoncé and Evita--clearly meant to facilitate the movement of Frozen to Broadway and other stage venues, and also to be sold on CD and through iTunes and other digital music vendors.  And that was the problem.  The music was not part of the whole--it was thrown on top.  So when people say that it is catchy when you listen to it repeatedly at the request of your children, but that it nearly put them to sleep as part of the film, they are simply confirming:  the music did not belong in the film.  Particularly after the stage was set--by the amazing work-song, "Frozen Heart."  Someone at Disney knows that the folk elements integrated well with the Scandinavian setting, but let's fact is: pop sells.  In ways that folk music does not.  Every dance recital for the next two years, and several Olympic ice skating routines, will feature music from Disney's Frozen, cementing everyone's impression that the film is wonderful and amazing.  Which it would have been, had the disparate parts--the parts, like Olaf, designed to appeal to the most base sense of humor, and the soundtrack, meant to stand alone--held together better.

The good news is that I'm not alone.  Far and few between there are people who acknowledge the problem, however much their children may have enjoyed it--and I don't think that it's a problem to teach my children that a good work of art is a unified work of art.  At a birthday party on Saturday, shortly after strating this post, I spoke to the mother of my daughter's friend.  They are Korean, and she has a Ph.D. in Chemistry, and when my daughter mentioned seeing the film, we talked, and she--cautiously, it seemed--volunteered when I did not gush about the film that the music didn't really seem to fit, and said many of the things I have said here.  But she, too, knew that it would not be a popular opinion.

Meanwhile, here's what a nykelharpa can do, first folk:

And then more of a classical fusion: