Book Meme, Part 6

[osprey_archer]

And the last questions from the book meme, for littlerhymes!

16. That book you don’t dare reread for fear it won’t be the same anymore.

I am actually pretty fearless on this score. I recently (well, within the last few years) reread a couple of books that had been important to me when I was twelve or thirteen: the Babysitter’s Club book Claudia and the New Girl and also the first book in Francine Pascal’s Fearless series, both of which seemed to me to have a pretty high likelihood of being visited by the Suck Fairy.

And I wouldn’t call either book flawless - the Fearless series in particular has a ton of flaws in pretty much every possible area, both social justice-related and on the basic plotting and characterization level. And yet at the same time I still enjoyed them, and could see why they had been so intensely important to my younger self.

However, I think I’m somewhat unusual on this score in that I started reading critically when I was twelve or thirteen, so oftentimes if books have issues it’s something that I was aware of at the time, at least to some extent. It would have to be a book I’d read earlier for me to be gobsmacked by the content - “Who knew there was that much racism in Caddie Woodlawn???” - but, even then, the racism isn’t the only thing in Caddie Woodlawn, and I can see the other elements that made me love it.


17. Preferred bookshelf organization scheme

Hahaha oh man. The one that gets all my books on my shelves? My books are totally higgledy-piggledy, and it’s worse than usual right now because I had to move things around for the move - I was taking one bookshelf with me, so I had to decide which books would go on that, and find new homes for the books that had been on that shelf but weren’t coming, and…

So they’re all kind of tucked in wherever they’ll fit.

I’ve seen people who organize their bookshelves by alphabetical order or even in color (which strikes me as rather beautiful) but I know that if I did it, the whole scheme would slowly but surely come undone. I tried to organize our picture book collection in alphabetical order, and I ought to be able to keep it that way because I’m the only one who uses these books, and yet there’s already a wodge of unalphabetized books at the end of the shelf.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

:lol: I have the opposite problem - I can't help breaking out in alphabetical order! My NF are even in a rough Dewey order, because... I can't help it! (Becoming a librarian was inevitable.)

I like your other answers - I think, even though it's fair to say I don't think I read critically in the kind of 'social justice' sense that prevails in fannish circles at the moment, I never really expected the past not to be different and either it was worth it for what else it gave me, or it wasn't. (I do have a couple of books I think I wouldn't want to re-read, but then life's short and they already played their part. Everything else, no matter how painfully I can see all that's wrong, like you, I can also see what appealed to me then and now. Even sometimes when it's just the perils of bad/hasty series writing!)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I haven't even separated my nonfiction from my fiction properly. Clearly I am not meant to be a librarian, alas! Not orderly enough.

I think that social justice criticism lends itself to the saying about "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It makes people see nothing but the social justice problems in books, so they can't get anything else of value out of it even if it's there. Or they read a book that does great on certain social justice points and fail to see some really obvious problems with it in other areas, Sure, maybe such-and-such a thing is accidentally kind of promoting proto-fascism, but on the other hand the representation is so good!

[thisbluespirit]

Indeed, that's very true. Life, and good media texts and people are far too complex to only use a hammer.

(I always think that, well-meaning as most are, it winds up as being like the princess and the pea, where all we can do is focus on the pea, no matter how many mattresses there were, just in case someone thinks we're not a real princess, but that's probably stretching it a bit far really.)

(N.B. Or so I say, to excuse all my watching of 60s & 70s TV, reading of 19th C lit and golden age detectives. Perhaps they are right and it merely shows me to be a terrible person, but I do hope not.)

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'm afraid of re-reading anything for fear it'll be secretly racist, or actually terrible. I find that kind of thing pretty easy to live with, for better or worse. There are a couple of books from my distant past that I'm afraid I'll die of embarrassment if I read again, though, not because they're worse but because they're exactly the way I remember them. Eventually I'll get around to them and either live through it or not.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Now I'm desperately curious to know what those couple of books are. Care to share?

At this point I've realized that so many of my favorite childhood books are racist (my beloved Little House books!) that I just kind of expect it. The past is full of dodgy things, and I'm sure in the future people will read our current books and think "How could they not notice this was full of ____ism?"

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Ancient texts of my childhood! Idk, I might be too embarrassed still! One of them is The Phantom of the Opera. Another is a published fanfic of The Phantom of the Opera. There might be one or two more that I actually keep on my shelf with the spine turned toward the wall because they embarrass me too much. I'll brave them one of these days.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I just read Phantom of the Opera (well, listened to it on CD) a few years ago! It's so deliriously over the top - sort of like The Count of Monte Cristo in a way? - I actually quite enjoyed it. OH ERIK, you and your underground lair and your UNDYING DEVOTION and EPIC PAIN and also your flesh that smells like a rotting corpse, somehow that never makes it into the adaptations.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, yes. I'm always a little baffled by the Sexy Phantom adaptations because Rotting Corpse Phantom was my original. I read the book and listened to the ALW musical at about the same time. Living corpse devotion is the purest devotion!

(Have you seen the 1925 film with Lon Chaney? Not the best movie of all time, but it has great Lon Chaney corpse devotion and proper death's head makeup, AND is one of the only adaptations that remembers to include the Persian, my favorite).

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have seen the Lon Chaney version! I enjoyed it a lot; he's so much uglier than the one in the ALW movie version (who is so emo about some really pretty minor scarring, I mean get over yourself man). IIRC it ends with the Parisian mob chasing him into the river? I actually felt bad for him in that one, which generally I don't in the versions that work harder to make me like him.

[littlerhymes]

There's been very few books that I re-read and found myself unable to like again or at least see what I liked about them. But there's been a few! And it's a sad feeling! So I am glad you have avoided that sadness lol.

Do you find it hard to find things again? Or do you kind of have a sense-memory of where you wedged it into the bookcase last time you were done with it?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Well there is a bit of organization: there's a picture book shelf, and a shelf for large nonfiction books (because it's the only one big enough to fit them), and the rest of the collection has accrued so slowly that I usually only have to remember one new book position at a time. So usually I can find things.

However, now that I've shuffled them about for the move, I may run into some difficulties. So we'll see.