There's many a man hath more hair than wit

And here's proof of what Tam Lin does to my reading--not just Euripides but Shakespeare, E.R. Eddison, and a smattering of poets. I finished Tam Lin, promptly got out the Norton Anthology and just as promptly gave this over for my Complete Works of Shakespeare, and read Comedy of Errors. I've never seen this play, and not read it before. Shakespeare in the park was doing it this summer, and I did very much mean to go see it but with one thing and another never did. It's a very interesting play though in some ways distinguishes itself from the others, and I begin to see how greatly varied Shakespeare's plays can be. There's less of romance than most of the comedies I'm familiar with. By the formula of those I've read before, the comedy and the errors should be in mistaken identity which turns out funny situations between lovers, but not one of these characters is really much of a lover. It's a very funny play. I noticed far more couplets than seems usual, and is it just me or is this rather a shorter play? But I liked it. It's more symmetrical and better tied off than Twelfth Night.

Having finished both Tam Lin and Comedy or Errors, I then got the great joy of choosing a new book off the stack. I'm still reading The Mother Tongue, mind you, but slowly, and I like to have a novel on the go at the same time. So I picked The Worm Ouroboros, which I've already started and put aside twice, and which is a Tam Lin-associated book so hopefully that particular wave of reading inspiration will last me the book, at least until it begins to carry its own weight.

This evening, the lasting effects of Tam Lin in combination with watching History Boys produced a desire for some poetry, so I hauled out another literature textbook I for unknown reasons possess, and read a bit. For some reason Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is at present particularly in my mind (maybe because Homer is), despite a little whirlwind tour of modern poetry (which according to this book begins with Hardy). I still associate "silent, upon a peak in Darien." with Swallows and Amazons. The poem in general I associate with Tam Lin, but the bit about Darien is all Swallows and Amazons.

Had I read something out of the 18th century and something medieval, I'd have sort of done a stop on my tour in at least one bit of every age, and I did do drama, novel, and poetry, which is rather a lot for one day, really. I have to confess I have gotten pretty much nothing done but reading.

For we're under orders for to sail to old England...

Somewhere along the line, the 1984 film Coot Club was on the shelf at the library. Some member of my family brought it home, and I remember watching it, on what was probably a summer afternoon, my mother outside mowing the lawn. I don't remember how old I was, but I would have been in elementary school.

That was how I discovered Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome's series about children and boats and adventures. I wanted to be an English child in the 1930s so bad, and I wanted a little sailboat and some siblings to play in it with. I remember reading Eyewitness books (weren't those great?) about boats and sailing, and the little rowboat we had at my grandparents house was never quite good enough. There are a dozen of the books, with some that stand out most to me such as Winter Holiday, where they built a sort of ice and snow house, I think, or Pigeon Post, when they had homing pigeons and went mining for gold, and especially, We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea, when the four Swallows were asleep in a boat in a river that slipped its moorings and took them to Holland. I spent a lot of time making maps of islands and rivers and things, drawing fancy little compass roses and whatnot. These books were an enormous part of my childhood.

I reread the first two, Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale, a few years ago, and happily they very much bore up to my more critical eye to the writing. I'd love to reread the rest, and I'm tempted to ask for a box set for Christmas. Some I have only extremely vague memories of, and one or two I'm not at all positive I actually read. When I first read them I didn't know anyone else who had, but I've since acquired a couple of friends who did and loved them as much as I did, though wouldn't it have been lovely to have been children together and maybe had a better chance of enacting numerous plans for similar nautical adventures.

Some books I read as a child I love now just for sentimental reasons, such as Little House on the Prairie, which certainly played to my interests as a child but doesn't so much any more. Swallows and Amazons, though, I still love for its content, especially its very lovable characters and its setting. I never stopped wanting a little sailboat.

Into the Hundred Acre Wood

I always think it's a bit funny how everyone has books that were absolutely crucial parts of their childhoods, and they are always completely horrified when they realize that other people never read them at all. I feel this way about all the Little House on the Prairie books most of all, because those were an absolutely enormous part of my childhood, and I would feel this way about Swallows and Amazons had I not always been aware that very few people I knew read them. I've recently acquired a friend who did read them (and even got to learn to sail, too, which I'm vastly envious of), and I was completely gleeful when I happened to make a reference to them (to Swallowdale in particular) and he happened to be around to get the reference.

Hand in hand with this, there are various children's books that I never read as a child, that even I am somewhat shocked I never read. I was, for example, rather surprised to realize that I had never read Winnie-the-Pooh. Whenever I go through those list of 100 best books, or books to read before you die, or whatever, I always hesitate over marking Winnie-the-Pooh, because I'm sure I must have read it, hasn't everyone?, but I don't actually remember reading it. I even own the book. But I was ferreting for something to read the other day, and I pulled out Winnie-the-Pooh and realized, no, actually, I haven't read this.

I read one of A.A. Milne's plays a while ago, Mr. Pim Passes By, which I liked very much, and talked about here. After reading Winnie-the-Pooh, I rather wonder why no one ever remembers his plays but everyone assumes they read Winnie-the-Pooh at some point. I think I've probably lost out by not reading it as a child, as it's definitely a children's book, rather than a book just about children. It succumbs to that occasional plague of children's books of being just a little bit patronizing, although it's not too bad here. I found Pooh stupider than I expected, and Eeyore far more depressing, and really I don't think I'd want to live with any of the animals. Despite all this, it's still rather a pleasant book, and even if I never actually read it as a child, I definitely watched all the films, so it's still got a firm place in my list of books crucial to childhood.

A little bit of history.

I finished reading Storming Heaven yesterday, and I really rather loved it. It's one of those books that I would never have considered reading on my own, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved, but which I wind up loving.

Four different people tell the story--Rondal Lloyd, a coal miner and union organizer in West Virginia; C.J. Marcum, who I think is Rondal's uncle, or at least related to him somehow, the mayor of a town nearby; Rosa Angelelli, an Italian immigrant; and Carrie Bishop, a Nurse from Kentucky who gets rather tangled in it all. Each of them has a very distinct voice (it's written in first person), both in personality and in manner of speaking. All of them speak in dialect to a greater or lesser degree, Rosa most notably since her English is quite weak. I liked reading Carrie's sections best, because I liked the way she describes things--she's the most poetic, but one very definitely feels all her descriptions to be utterly true.

It's a very character driven novel, yet still it tells the story of a real event and it definitely has a strong plot. The whole book leads up to the Battle of Blair Mountain, in 1921, which was basically the explosion of the tension over attempting to unionize West Virginia coal mines. It fascinates me that these characters are fictional, yet so powerful and real even against the backdrop of true and rather terrible events, which almost seem like they should overwhelm the book. But they don't overwhelm the book, and that makes them more powerful.

I picked up a book of three E. Nesbit novels off a table of free books at school the other day, so I'm reading Five Children and It as I have time. I'm very fond of E. Nesbit--I'm sorry I didn't read more of her when I was younger, but even so her books kind of have the same feeling for me as do Arthur Ransome's or Edward Eager's.

The next Senior Lit book is Bastard Out of Carolina.