Sunday, June 08, 2008

Jezebel: Fine Lines

This week, Jezebel's Fine Lines feature is A Wrinkle in Time.

One quick tangent: what I love about reading, and what makes readers advisory so very challenging, is the ultimately complex and contradictory reading choices of people. For example, as I mentioned last week, I love the author Norma Klein. But I also love Madeleine L'Engle, and the teens in both those books who live in New York live very different types of lives. Very different families. Yet both authors and both books rock. My moral: be careful about judging readers by their reading choices.

Topic! Jezebel manages to put the entire L'Engle reading experience in one beautiful, I'd wish I'd written it paragraph:

If I had my way, none of us would have to read this review at all. Instead, we'd join hands, hear a great dark thunderclap, and be whisked off to a rambling house in the country, where we'd view odd things bubbling in a lab with a stone floor, then eat limburger-and-cream-cheese sandwiches while swinging our legs at the kitchen table. We'd sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes, then be inserted into some mitochondria. We battle for the soul of Madoc /Maddox, and eat small crayfish with our lesbian kind-of aunt who insisted on calling us our full name (Polyhymnia). We'd hop on a freighter and solve a mystery, then go to boarding school in Switzerland. We would make a brief detour on the Upper West Side by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We'd be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. Most important, whatever happened, we'd know we could get through it—because we are creatures that can love.

If you are a L'Engle reader, right now you're trying hard not to cry. How many of her books do you recognize in that paragraph? And doesn't it suck beyond the telling that there will be no more L'Engle books?

7 comments:

Sarah Rettger said...

Hmm... I count at least twelve different books, but so many of those details apply to more than one.

Have you read The Joys of Love yet? It's a sort-of-new L'Engle.

EM said...

Hi, Liz - I have tagged you for the Favorite Authors meme. Do with it what you will. :)

Bibliovore said...

If you are a L'Engle reader, right now you're trying hard not to cry.

I'm gonna need a moment here.

And doesn't it suck beyond the telling that there will be no more L'Engle books?

*wail* Yeeeeeeeeessssssssssss!!

Angiegirl said...

Oh, man. That was a loaded paragraph. I'm experiencing all sorts of yearnings to go reread them all.

Anonymous said...

That was a beautiful paragraph! Thank you for sharing.

Colleen said...

limburger? What is this limburger business? It was liverwurst which is a totally different thing!!! (The reason I remember this is because my family were the only ones on the planet to eat liverwurst until I read "Wrinkle". It rocked my world from those very first two pages.

heather (errantdreams) said...

Oh wow. What a beautiful, beautiful paragraph.