Comfort Books

I've been itching to write, but lacking focus, a top(ic)less dancer of sorts, whirling round the pole of my imagination, unable to pick up a rhythm, a beat I could really groove to.
Then, someone tweeted today to author Neil Gaiman, who has himself been tweeting about feeling ill this week:
RT @SOCMusic: I always re-read "Good Omens" when I'm sick. It always makes me feel better. Good chance that won't work for you, though.
I count Good Omens, which Gaiman co-wrote with Terry Pratchett, among my favorite books, and I, too, often turn to it for comfort when I'm feeling unwell or a bit too weary. That charming tale of an impending apocalypse never fails to draw me in and cheer me up.
Gaiman then tweeted about his own comfort books:
At different times of my life, my 'Comfort Book' has been Narnia, LOTR, Glory Road, Cold Comfort Farm, Psmith Journalist, Father Brown.
This simple remark spawned a cascade of tweets that is still falling as I write this post. People everywhere, well at least everywhere on Twitter, have been sharing the titles of the books they turn to when they need to feel better. The titles, not surprisingly, have included a hefty number of Gaiman's books, a load of science fiction and fantasy standards including LOTR/Hobbit, Narnia, Screwtape (for heaven's sake!) among countless others. The Harry Potter books have figured prominently, as have the Twilight novels. I've also seen a few unexpected favorites like Silence of the Lambs.
In a later tweet, Gaiman mused
Lots of people sending in their #comfortbooks. I wonder what makes a particular book a place to go when under stress.
I wonder, too.
Some of Gaiman's other followers allowed as how a "comfort book" might be a portal of sorts, a gateway to a more innocent time of childlike wonder or a sense of hopefulness that we often find sadly lackling in our day-to-day.
I think that may be part of it, but that explanation is a bit too simple. Some comfort books are less about idealism and more about the elemental pleasure of letting ourselves go, of submerging ourselves into worlds not of our own making, surrounding ourselves with friends unlike any we're likley to meet.
Like Gaiman, my comfort books have changed up over the years. As a child, I treasured the Big Little Golden Books edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court so much that reading it got me tossed out of reading class in the first grade. I followed that up with (first) the Disney version of The Jungle Book and then the original, which I liked a great deal more. A few years later, I read Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond at least a dozen times and To Kill a Mockingbird a dozen times more. And there was The Hobbit, LOTR, and anything by Roald Dahl.
All that prepared me, I suppose for high school and college and graduate school, a 10-year expedition of discovery that led me to major in English and devour books at the alarming clip of five a week. I read fast, but I read deep. I read on my walk to class. I read at meals. I read in the bar. I even read at parties, beer in hand, book in the other.
Though my reading life was eclectic, I did light on favorite themes and authors. Tom Robbins enchanted me with Still Life with Woodpecker, and I still credit him with teaching me how to make love stay, even in the 21st Century. I return, from time to time, to 28 Barbary Lane to visit with Armistead Maupin's eccentric characters from Tales of the City. And my bored and lazy hand will almost always travel to the spot on the shelf where Vanity Fair waits to entertain and amuse me.
I've been alive too long, I think, to make even an attempt at a comprehensive list of my comfort books. And I hope to live a good while longer and to find new ones along the way.
Suffice it to say that the first book I bought for my sexy new Kindle was Gaiman's Neverwhere, a book he adapted from the 1996 BBC television series he developed with Lenny Henry. This ramble started with him, and I suppose it should end in the same place. I don't know what his next book will be, but I suspect I will want to read it more than once. That troubles me, of course, because there are just so many books and so little time.

National Poetry Month: Day #30

Today is American writer Annie Dillard's birthday. If you haven't already done so, please find yourself a copy of her most excellent book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and read it so you, too, can know what it means to see in a way that is not seeing.

Pilgrims

"I'm a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." —Annie Dillard

I thought a lot about what things mean,
what hidden messages come in the intricate veins
of a maple leaf or the spots on the back of a beetle.
I suffered myself to search for the complex
algorithms left by whatever passed for gods
before people who thought a lot came to be.

Then I followed you down
past the tree with the lights in it,
past the row of Lombardy poplars
that grew outside your bedroom window,
beneath the moon you reached for
(I reached for it, too.)
believing enlightenment
could be so easily grasped,
down the winding path,
through the meadows and woods to the creek
where you rolled up your eyes to see
in a way that was not seeing
and I just took my glasses off
and saw the same
as you.

©2004 L.A. Smith.

National Poetry Month: Day #29

As we near the end of National Poetry Month, I realize I haven't yet featured a poem specifically about the frustrations of writing poems. Here's one of my favorites:

Ambiguous Undulations

Reluctantly, they gather 

when I call my thoughts to order. 

My agenda meets 

with anguish and resentment. 

I can't write a poem 

smooth and cool

as a rock worn down 

from a boulder 

by the relentless sea 

crisp and clean

as a leaf golden green

at birth on a black limb

sleek and fluid

as a tiger 

lethal by nature

obscure by design. 

A quiet kind of treachery 

 haunts my mornings, 

 rustling like feathers 

 in a nest at dawn,

anticipating the will

of the goddess of sleeping cats.

©2001 L.A. Smith.

National Poetry Month: Day #28

Some days it's easier to imagine a simple, more satisfying life of objecthood:

I Would Be

the tuft of moss
near the roots of a white cedar,
cool and damp

the subtle twitch of feather,
a momentary adjustment of wing tip
that takes the hawk nearer to the sun

the irregular arc
of egg shell, smooth
and sturdy, speckled brown and gray

©2001 L.A. Smith.

National Poetry Month: Day #27

Few things in this world better represent mankind's tenacity than the subject of this poem:

The Tower

From the first ring of stones
set in the sand and shells
of the field of miracles,
the widow's tower, begun
by sixty coins in remembrance
of the Holy Virgin,
leaned,
its twin at flawed conception
a thousand years of engineering
hope.

From their first misguided corrections
men have struggled to put right
or to preserve,
to hold off, if only for the moment
of their lifetimes,
the inevitable surrender
to gravity.

©2001 L.A. Smith.

National Poetry Month: Day #26

Sometimes a clichè is just a clichè. Others, it's a metaphor that rings in your head, the best advice your mother ever gave you:

By the Horns

Is there a better way, I wonder,
grappling as I do with antique, agrarian clichés,
to take a bull?
They seem the obvious choice for reasons
of convenience, ergonomics, and optimism.
And it's better by far to face the thing
that frightens or threatens you
head on — snorting, struggling,
studying you with eyes full of blood —
than to meet your fate
at the other end
of the bull.

©2004 L.A. Smith.

National Poetry Month: Day #25

Yesterday afternoon, we went north to LaConner to look at tulips. It's an annual event, a pilgrimage of sorts that reminds us, when we are weariest of winter and gray walls of rain, that life is about change and color and sunlight and laughter. The year after my mother died, I wrote this poem on the day of that pilgrimage:

In Tulips

Today, beneath a plane
of sheer, unbroken blue,
while Baker's snowy shoulders shimmered
pink and gold in the distance, I caught
a glimpse of her
among the sun-drenched cups
of fairy porcelain
quivering in the breeze,
her cheeks as pale and soft as petals,
that wry smile and arched brow,
emerald eyes glistening
with a thousand hours
of laughter, dancing
with her sisters:
the flapper, the philosopher,
and the long-suffering saint.

Just then a giggling child,
his round face like an ochre moon,
set with eyes of glittering obsidian,
stumbled into me and gasped
surprised, I think, by my cool
touch on his chubby arm.
He turned and ran, clumsy as a puppy,
to grasp his mother's dangling hand.

I looked again into the endless
stripes of color, but they were gone.

Only tulips danced like swaying gypsies
on the wind.

©2004 L.A. Smith.