On the Possession of (Mostly Fictional) Books

It's funny; I used to be the type of person who never purchased books.
 I didn't see the point in spending money on something that's going to last me half an afternoon—a whole day, or two, if I was unusually lucky—and might never reread. But in the last several months, that's started changing. Oh, I wouldn't buy books on a whim, and I still much prefer to read them for free (via the four libraries to which I have cards, plus the heavensent MeLCat interlibrary loan).
 Yet there are books I would buy (some of which I already have bought) in a heartbeat if I could afford them—Tolkien's works, for example, which I will probably never stop adulating until I die—and most of C. S. Lewis' works, Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, Tosca Lee's books,  Francine Rivers' Mark of the Lion trilogy and Redeeming Love, Karen Hancock's The Light of Eidon, and L. B. Graham's The Binding of the Blade series. And there are some books that I don't know if, no matter how many times I've read them already, I'd really reread them once I owned them (weird phenomenon that's happened to me before), but they're so beautifully written and I loved them so the first time through that it feels like a crime not to own them, like Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series, The Books of Pellinor series by Alison Croggon, and Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy. Then there are the books, like Castle In the Attic and my Black Stallion novels, that I already own and reread even long after I've outgrown them, because it's almost as much paper nostalgia as my own childhood journals. Then there's books I ended up with and have utter intention of reading eventually, such as Julius Caesar (by Shakespeare)  or The Once and Future King; and the books I have read and can't recall a word of, like The War of the Worlds. And the books that I cried over the first time I read them, but have not reread since purchasing, such as Memoirs of a Geisha. And then there are books that I feel like I ought to own because they're classics, but I have only marginal interest in actually reading. And there's books that I may not have even read all the way through, but am somehow convinced that owning them adds somehow to my quality of life, like my four anthologies of Irish myths, or my three-inch thick "concise" French-English dictionary.  And the books I didn't realize I'd outgrown until I spent money on them, like the Dragonspell series.  And the book series that were really good when you bought the first books, but now that the last book is out, you realize you don't really care about the plot anymore but you feel like you should buy it so you'll own the complete series (Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle).  And the books that looked good in Barnes & Noble yet turned out to be worth about as much effort as it would take to throw them off a cliff, like The Summer King by O. R. Melling.

It's funny (again) that, unlike many people with whom I've chatted, going to college has not made me sick of reading; it's made me want to really know what I'm reading.

End of August…WHAT.

So, there have been a dozen or so blog posts floating around in my brain for the last two weeks or so, but I have been too tired/lazy/sick/far away from a halfway decent Internet connection to actually commit them to the blogosphere.  My apologies.  I have plans to update this soon.  ("Soon" being a relative term which here may mean anywhere between "later this afternoon" and "next Monday".)

I have five days left before I start classes again *sigh*.  My two weeks "off" are flying by with the sort of speed that makes me want to curl up in a corner and cry until the laws of physics are emotionally moved enough to alter themselves and spontaneously generate a few more hours (or days?) for me.  So much to do, not as much time as would be highly preferable.  Oy vey…

In other news, I want to do a virtual happy dance with two of my friends (you know who you are! Or at least one of you does!) because their sheer adorableness makes me happy.

Say hey to more weddings, eh?

I went to the U.P. for my cousin's wedding this weekend.  That was completely super.  It was a sort of deep, incongruous experience, because this particular cousin has never previously either a) held a serious conversation with me, or b) hugged me, both of which happened on Saturday.  (Well, a didn't really happen, because I barely saw him, but it didn't happen in reverse, which is new.)  I saw a whole new side of my cousin, and it was sort of amazing, in a great way.  (Shout-out to all my relatives who started reading my blog while I was up there this weekend.  Haha.  Hello, there! :)
*Obligatory extra paragraph for my grandmother.  Love you!  Am I correct in inferring that you like mushroom pizza? That's great, because as far as I know, we two are the only people I know who like it.  Also, hurrah for dessert options!*
Weddings are the best, and by golly, I've been going to a lot of them this summer.  Three already gone and one, possibly two, more yet to go.  Weddings always turn on the faucet in my brain that thinks about the future.  I wind up investing several hours of deep thought into ideas and plans for my own wedding—assuming it will someday happen—and, this time, perhaps because this wedding was full of family members, my siblings' weddings (Weird thoughts, especially since it's going to to be some time before any of them get married.  So I presume).  I even got somewhat teary-eyed, which is an interesting rarity for me.  Considering how emotional I tend to be, one would think I'd cry more at these sorts of events, but I don't.  I just marvel.  And dance a lot.

I'd like to teach the world to smell like strawberries…

the one on the far left makes me think a bit of marshmallows,
which are another yummy, albeit human, invention.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "strawberry" is derived (through Old English) from "straw" and "berry".  (So profound, I know.)  The problem with this is as follows:  if you look up any of the eight definitions in the same dictionary for "straw",  they all have to do with something being dry or pale or worthless.  Unless the pre-1150 A.D. Anglo-Saxons only ate underripe berries, that frankly does not describe well the amazing fantabulosity that is a strawberry.  Strawberries are bliss.  (If I were thirteen, I would write a perfectly rhyming ode to the strawberry. But I'm not, and no  longer brave enough to try.)


And—mon mot—have you sniffed one recently?  or even better, a full punnet?  I am convinced that one of God's most wonderlous gifts to humanity is the smell of ripe strawberries.  (Their genus name in Latin, on the authority of Wikipedia, is Fragraia.)  I wish I could get this into a Google picture, but I doubt it would produce quite the desired effect. And they're quite sweetly aesthetic, too.  I think I'd like to grow strawberries someday (you can grow them as potted plants, and not just beds).

Oy, I haven't had strawberries in a couple of months, and a craving is coming on right about now…

Also, this is one of the best things I have ever seen:

End result

Humans throughout history have had varied and notoriously weird takes on death.  Today's been rather full of it, in ways.  This morning I was reading C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, which is the published edition of the journals he wrote after the early death of his wife from cancer.   And then one of our hamsters died this afternoon (Requiescat in pace, Charley Pattertwig) and we held a funeral, and we watched an episode of the Cosby Show in which Rudy's goldfish dies, and my anthropology professor was talking about these royal tombs he helped excavate a few years ago in South America.

So it got me to wondering (as if my day wasn't already morbid enough) why people do the things they do to dead bodies.  I mean, physically disposing of remains makes sense.  But then people hold funerals.  And I don't see anything wrong with funerals at all, but they are kind of curious phenomena to me.  What real purpose do they serve?  It's strange that everyone has something for which they want to be remembered, as if the being remembered was the important thing.  It's odd that people imagine a graveside is the somehow the best or the most appropriate place to do that remembering.

And why do people wish to be buried with things?  Especially all of those ancient royal families.  Clearly they believed in an afterlife, or else they wouldn't have taken civilizations' worth of wealth and thousand of fellow human beings literally to their graves with them.  It's odd that everyone thought the afterlife, whatever it be, would be stratified the same way as this life.  Nobody ever wondered if they might come into the afterlife the same way as this life—that is, out of a womb and absolutely penniless?  That somehow material objects transcended some cosmic boundary, even though obviously people's bodies didn't.  If I were dying, and I believed I was going to an afterlife very similar to the present, would I be afraid to die alone?  Probably.  So, why did they slaughter hundreds of servants and cattle to take with them, instead of a family member (that probably would have gone over poorly) or a lover (that might not have been the reputation they wanted to wake up with, I suppose)?  And if I were a servant in this life and my dying king had me executed five minutes post his death, so I could share his large and dank and expensive tomb, what would I do if I did wake up "on the other side"?  I would run, that's what.

It boggles me, frankly, to think about how very different people's minds actually worked pre-Renaissance, in societies where independence wasn't taught and pursued as a crucial goal of someone's life.  "The divine right of kings" really meant something transcendent to people, and people used it in ways that weren't necessarily meant to get people to respect "the Lord's anointed".

Death is something people have never understood, and do not understand, and never will.  Obviously, I have beliefs about death, but I still "know" next to nothing about it, aside from the purely corporeal aspects, and even modern science has raging debates over that.  Death is a bizarre phenomenon, which makes sense, considering it wasn't meant to be at all.  I don't know where this post is going/has gone.  It's just something I've been thinking about today.  Eh.