E is completely in love with the Kit books right now and I got her the cookbook for Christmas, which is almost a promise to let her try the recipes.

I doubled the spices and then just dumped a bunch more in and it was still bland, even for F who is the most pepper-phobic of us (I blame the fact that he was born in Europe) but we actually had a really nice dinner anyway.  So despite having reinforced my suspicions of any food that claims to be from north of Oklahoma, bland chili was a pretty good idea.

Should you read and enjoy this book, I can only hope it will lead you to as great a love of the Gothic novel as that which inspired me to buy and then share Villette on bookmooch.  I think you will find that there are many good ways to find great literature for free without stealing if you look.  I highly recommend bookmooch, Project Gutenberg, librivox, and of course your local library.  Hopefully the moralistic nature of your current reading will prick your conscience against further mail theft and you will make use of these resources next time.  In the event that you try to sell the book instead of reading it,  I am pretty sure you will get less than a dollar, which is much less than its value and more than you deserve (not only because you stole a book that I would gladly have given you for free if you had asked, but because you have wasted an opportunity to read it).

However, I will try to console myself by hoping that you will instead read and be inspired by this book, in which case I highly recommend the other works of the Brontes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula – the book, but I guess the movie also, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, Northanger Abbey and the juvenilia of Jane Austen, as well as the poetry of Coleridge. 

Please however try in the future to make use of the numerous resources available to book lovers on a budget, and if it’s not too much trouble, when you are done with my book, please give it away.

The book I just finished seemed perfect for reinforcing my resolution to live more and read less; the main characters in the game seem unable to extricate themselves from stories and books until the ascendant storyteller appropriates so much of the narrative of the more reclusive sister’s life that she has no way to regain control of it but to end it.  I am sure I am bungling this.  It is a forceful book and has some of that same uncomfortable and yet reassuring familiarity that the Potter family books had for me.  I love Byatt’s books because her characters are all such readers and/or storytellers apart from their existence as characters in her stories.  So few books seem to be about people who are too involved in books, but I have a hard time identifying with any other kind of character.  I did wish that more of the sisters’ story game was retold in The Gamebut other than that, enjoyed it thoroughly and am left feeling a bit scolded about my own reclusiveness and preference for books over most aspects of reality.  I am sure that partly that is because I spent the entire time I read it feeling guilty for reading instead of doing schoolwork or housework or playing with the kids. 

However, now that I have gotten my fix for pages, I have no excuse for procrastinating algebra or the dishes and will have to face the inevitable.  Sleep, too.

And I actually want to.  It is amazing how reading too much makes life unbearable but reading too little does too.  I guess I may learn moderation one day after all.

But being back in school, my abilities and deficits are more obvious than they used to be.

My first day of math tutoring went reasonably well and my tutor remarked that I was actually pretty good at algebra.  Three sessions later, I am working on basically the same thing and suspect he may be surprised by the lack of progress.  And it’s not that I am particularly bad at math either, at least not compared to other Texan public school graduates anyway; it’s that I do math very, very slowly and often completely miss the point of a lesson until I have repeated it several times.  That said, on assessment and aptitude tests, I appear to be better at math than average, which raises the question: am I impaired or not? 

Yes and no.   (And it doesn’t help any that when my parents and teachers first began to suspect that I learned differently, I was put on huge doses of Ritalin and had to take one of them about an hour before my math class, leaving me barely able to write and definitely unable to focus appropriately through my first year of algebra.)

I can learn.  I passed the equivalent of a college level algebra course when I was in tenth and eleventh grade.  But the key there was that I did it very slowly and took a year per semester to do it.  Granted, it was a higher level math than 99% of the students at the alternative school were taking, but it took hours of one on one tutoring for me to accomplish it so again, I was ahead and behind at the same time.

Your perception of my intelligence would vary drastically depending on the circumstances of our acquaintance.  If you had worked with me at the cafe where I last worked, you probably would have noticed that I was pretty slow at making drinks and finding things in the back room.  You may have judged from this that I was not very intelligent.  If you knew me from a job I had at my first university, as a peer tutor, you may remember that I had a set of regular students who came back every time they wrote anything because they knew that I could explain the structural problems in their papers well enough to raise their GPA and would be patient enough to do that even if it took hours.  From this and the fact that I was recommended for the peer tutor position without having taken the courses usually required for consideration, you might conclude that I was extremely intelligent.  And oddly, the assumption that I was extremely intelligent may be harder for me to cope with than the equally flawed assumption that I was not very bright at all. 

As with many aspies, I have a “spiky” neuropsych profile.  My strengths are very strong and my weaknesses are very weak.  Anyone who has ever lived with me can testify that I frequently forget why and how I arrived in a room, when and what I need to eat, what day and date it is, where my keys/shoes/backpack/coat/children (just kidding – you can hear them anywhere) are.  I load the washer and put the soap in and forget to start it.  I have burned up so many kettles and pots and pans that I will never ever under any circumstances attempt to boil water in anything lacking a whistle ever again.  For an aspie, I am on the overly hygienic side, partly because I go into the bathroom for the other reason, forget why I am there, and take a bath.  I have had pneumonia several times because I fail to notice that I am a little sick until I can hear the wheezing.  Fevers usually lead me to change the thermostat or wear fewer layers if I am even that aware of my body temperature which is not always the case.

Because of the gap between my strong and weak areas, I have had to defend my right to be in appropriately challenging or unchallenging classes, I have disappointed many people, and I have been lectured on laziness countless times. 

But I don’t really see it as a problem anymore.  With a formal diagnosis, I have been able to request and receive appropriate accomodations this school year, which hopefully will help me to actually graduate one day.  I may never finish the math courses that my coworkers at the writing center took, but I will do way way better in history and literature courses than my math tutor would ever suspect.  Similarly, my water bills may be higher than if I was a little less distracted,  but I smell a lot better than I might.  And this is a good thing for me because most people are much  more tolerant of eccentricity in others if they at least smell nice.

But I am quickly coming to the conclusion that I like A.S. Byatt’s writing much much more than her taste in other writers.  It is a sad thing, because sooner or later I will run out of books by Byatt and I was hoping that maybe Murdoch would be a good substitute, but no.  Unless The Unicorn is terribly unrepresentative of whatever is good about her work, Iris Murdoch will probably not be my next favorite author.

On the upside, I have gotten The Game by Byatt on bookmooch and will read it as soon as I have a break from studies.  Also, I have wanted to read The Bee Season forever, basically because of a Decemberists song, and I have a copy of that waiting for me too.

I am hoping that what this year lacks in quantity of books read it will make up for in quality.  So far, no good, but it is early yet.

“If we screen out autism we run the risk of losing genius.”

With that in mind, I start a book list.  It will most likely be incomplete unless it is a total   of a year, and it may be but that would hardly make for a book list worth reading.

So with that in mind, here is my 2009 non-required reading so far:

I read a version of Rapunzel that was given to F6 for Christmas.  It was a sweet and thoughtful gift and I am an ingrate and a beast for what I am about to write.  It is a terrible retelling. 

The pictures are okay but really can’t compensate.  Among the good points: it explains what rapunzel means, which modern readers might not really know without some explanation.  And also good is that the description is accurate but brief.  (It would be interesting to add in a footnote, although I doubt any children’s author ever will, that early modern people in some places held the mistaken belief that a pregnant woman who did not satisfy her dietary cravings risked giving birth to a monstrous child.  It was a horrible way to explain various unexpectedly shaped children and an early modern scam was pretty successfully executed by a couple who claimed to have given birth to, I think, a rabbit or something.  I can’t remember what.  But the gist of it was that denying her craving to eat rabbit caused the child to be turned into a rabbit or something.  I took a class on this and should have saved my notes so I could give some credit but it was many moves ago.  It does add meaning to the parents’ actions.)

On the downside: complete omission of Rapunzel’s child.  I think this really does a disservice to children, not just the omission but the reasoning behind it.  In the time when these stories were told, children were much more aware of the process of reproduction.  So fairy tales often involve issues of blended families, etc.  In Rapunzel, there is some illegitimacy, which should not be such a huge thing now when so few families are two married adults with however many biological children born after wedlock, but the thing is, and maybe this is a cultural attempt to come to grips with the separation of sexuality, parenthood, and family structure, we now try to hide sexuality from children until a really late age.  So, whereas the audience of the tale as it was told would likely have witnessed animals copulating and shared a bedroom (if they even had one) with their parents and yet had siblings, these days we pretend that even acknowledging the events that lead up to the existence of so many children (i.e. sex without marriage) will completely destroy the same kids who are bombarded with sexual imagery any time they watch tv. 

I disapprove.  Also, I think anyone who ever even wished they had premarital sex should wear a scarlet “H” for hypocrite if they really have a problem with unbowdlerized fairy tales as children’s literature.

Hansel and Gretel by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Jen Corace

This was the big drool item on my wish list this year.  Well, the only one that we could really afford.  And it is beautiful.  I got the autographed (by Jen Corace) version from tiny showcase and was so excited that I put it under the “tree” (actually a rosemary bush on the table) unwrapped and refused to let anyone read it.  And here is where I am a big hypocrite.  I love it.  The whole point of fairy tales in childhood education is that they present archetypal characters and morally charged situations and do not offer commentary on them.  Children are smart and they get it.  They do not need to be told that Goldilocks should have respected the bears’ privacy and even if they don’t get that before hearing the tale, they will after the 67th “read it again!”   The point of these stories is that they teach without sermonizing.  Okay, there are a lot of points to them, but that one is a big one. 

Rylant crosses that line.  She explains.  And either I am making excuses for my own bad behavior or I see a valid distinction here.  She explains without condescending.   This is part of why I love her so much.  She can write pretty much any story for any age group without belaboring the point.  Even if she does explain a bit, she does not clonk the kids over the head with it.  She tells it well and offers explanations that kids won’t really mind since they do not scold or break up the storyline too much.  She has written many, many books, and we read most of them and love quite a few of her original characters too but she does Hansel and Gretel like an adored grandmother, recounting it from memory to a beloved little one in footie pajamas.  Not the stern grandmother who gives you the eye when you squirm in church.  The one who slips you a cookie when no one is looking. 

And it passes the giggle test.  My dad says that when he played the opera of Hansel and Gretel, he could hear the kids cheering every time Gretel pushes the witch in the oven.  When I read fairy tales wherein evildoers get their just rewards, F giggles.  The worse the reward, the more gleeful the giggle.  If the story is told badly, no giggle.  If the characters are coerced into a modernized sanitized version and reconcile or some other nonsense, he does not giggle and I have to stifle the urge to scream obscenities.

With this version, he giggled and I sighed as the witch gets hers.  He retold that scene to me the next day, commenting on how that witch never saw it coming.  No she didn’t.  It is a good version indeed.

And I can’t not mention that the thing that first attracted me to the book on the bookstore shelf was Corace‘s lovely, dreamlike, hard-candy-stained-glass-glowing-colored illustrations.  Go see them yourself.  They are beyond words.

I also read F one of his Christmas books: Elsa Beskow‘s classic, Ollie’s Ski Trip.  It is good, but not as good as Children of the Forest or Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip.  Those are my two favorites.  I like all her illustrations and the illustrations in this one are better than the story itself, in my opinion.  There is more decorative symmetry than usual and it may be because Christmas is often in the 70′s here, but the lovely snow scenes are just gorgeously surreal to me.  Then again, when we lived in Europe, I was shocked to discover that seasons were not an old wives’ tale but something that actually happened by the book in some places, so maybe the illustrations are not surreal.  Either way, they are gorgeous.  I almost would rather look at them without reading, but can’t really see text and not read it so that would require scissors and would scandalize my children, even if I bought a special copy for it.  Elsa Beskow is awesome, or was awesome, and I highly recommend her works, but I no longer get excited about them.

I am about to read The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch.  I am not supposed to be reading for pleasure because I have work to do, but I also have pneumonia so for a few days I am going to break all the rules, eat tangerines in bed, and read with abandon.  I am already thrilled because the copy I got from bookmooch has a really almost impossibly fitting bit of writing and stamping on the inside cover.  (I will giddily pay extra for marginalia if the handwriting or the content is intriguing and this marginalia was in a free book so it is just bonus. )  I will share if I remember it.