On Babysitting and Books to Read

I spent yesterday babysitting for a really marvelous baby girl. I am so glad to be able to do this again! I missed her so much in the hospital. Yesterday's highlights included the roll-the-ball-under-the-couch-and-watch-Emily-strain-to-get-it-out game, knocking on the wall because it results in an interesting sound, and seeing how many blocks we could heap on top of one another before they collapsed in our laps.

I don't really need much more than that, I have to say.

I am reading some wonderful books, including ...

The Green Man: Tales of the Mythic Forest, a collection of short stories by a bunch of wonderful authors, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow. If I go a while without reading fantasy, I tend to forget how much I like it. Only stories like these could be such a wake-up call.

Waifs and Strays by Charles de Lint. I read some of the stories in this book when I was about twelve years old and was extremely confused and a little disturbed. My mother told me to put it away and pick it up again in a few years. I did.

It was definitely worth it.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. There are a lot of things about this book that just aren't very good, says the critical part of me (and there is a rather prominent critic in me because I review books).

This book is extremely catchy and enjoyable, says the hungry reader in me.

The hungry reader usually wins.

Wishing you good reading.

~Emily

Bad Memories

I finished reading Padma Venkatraman's Climbing the Stairs -- it was magnificent. I think it's an important book. And last night I completed The Life History of a Star by Kelly Easton. Also wonderful; I think both books and their protagonists will stay with me for a long time.

The twentieth marked the three-year anniversary of my first trip to camp. It was a camp for children with juvenile diabetes. Complete overkill on any treatment, whether you were hyperglycemic (sugar too high) or hypoglycemic (sugar too low). These three days were filled with kickball under the raging sun, watching chubby spiders dance mere inches over your head in the cabins, beetles swimming in the toilet bowls, plastic mattresses stained with something that looked like rejected stomach contents, and frozen graham cracker-chocolate pudding-marashmallow sandwiches. To top it off, the girls in my cabin hated me.





"You know everybody talks about you behind your back?" a girl two years younger than I was asked me.





"No," I said. "Why?"





"Well ... when you talk, it makes the rest of us sound kinda retahded," she admitted.





(The Rhode Island accent, for those who have never heard it, sounds rather like a thinner, less refined version of the Boston accent.)





"Oh," I said. "Because I use big words?"





"Yeah," she replied.





"Ah."





"I thought you were gonna cry," said the other girl, looking disappointed.





I have to admit that I was the Hermione Granger of the cabin -- insecure enough to flaunt a broad vocabulary and refined grammatical skills. (But I can't possibly be the only one who couldn't bear to listen to, "She don' wanna be a junia counsela" and "I ain't, you ain't, he/she/it ain't". Can I?) Anyway, I am never going back to camp. Ever. This experience turned me off for life.





The only good part of camp was listening to the storyteller. I love storytellers. (Although this was around the campfire, and all but yours truly, who had a mouthful of steel, were enjoying chubby white marshmallows.)

~Emily