You Should Read This: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

John Bellairs wrote a host of children’s books, including one of my favorites, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and a single adult novel, The Face in the Frost. I wish the ratio had been in the opposite direction, because The Face in the Frost just has such an engaging world and characters that I would have loved more of it. Much, much more. It’s a woefully slim little book, and I will not claim that it has the world’s most satisfying ending, but it delights me in so many ways.

Much of the book’s richness lies in the banter between the two old friends (there’s only one place it falls flat, and it says something about the quality of the texture elsewhere that the flat spot drives me a little nuts every time I read it), who are both skilled and eccentric wizards. The friendship is a longtime one, built of mutual affection, exasperation, and shared experience. Pieces of this book are a buddy roadtrip, taken through a series of small kingdoms, some only town-sized, and the supernatural menace is one that is genuinely haunting.

I’ve read other books by Bellairs, but with the exception of The House with a Clock in its Walls (which has lovely Edmund Gorey illustrations as a bonus), I find that his children’s literature falls flat for me, though I know it’s well-loved by many middle-graders. For me, it lacks the menace that both Face in the Frost and Clock in Its Walls hold.

I used part of the first paragraph for the description of Prospero’s house for our clan housing on Dark Castle MUD, (back in the innocent days of the early Net when the majority of us had no idea what copyright meant); for all I know (and hope) it’s still there, but I somehow doubt it. Here it is, for your delectation:

Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there wa a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked in the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather-vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostril’s of the hippo’s hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates.

I love the dictionary. I have, in fact, been known to dip into it for pleasure, to swoon with delight at a new word like lacustrine or neritic. When I was in grad school, we played a version of Balderdash that far predated the boxed set, using an American Heritage dictionary that still sits on my shelf.

What: Any book of words that tells you what’s built into them, whether it’s a dictionary of hobby-related vocabularies or a more complete overview. I’ve got a shelf’s worth of them, including a number of foreign language dictionaries and the beloved Compact edition of the OED my brother gave me one year.

Who: If you are someone who uses words, and want to make sure you are using them correctly, use a dictionary. A while back while I was teaching at Hopkins, a student handed in a piece that was unsettling in a way I’d never encountered before, consistently misusing words. When we talked about it, she revealed she’d written the piece and then used a thesaurus “to make the words fancier.”

Why: If you are going to write, you must know how to use words. They are the basic building block of the trade. Read the dictionary in order to use them with rigorous precision, an appreciation for their history, and an understanding of their grammatical use.

When: All the time. On your phone. While waiting for your bus. When you want to refill your tank of words.

Where and how: The deeper the dictionary, the more interest it holds for me. I like specialized dictionaries that list fashion terms or kinds of birds or words taken from other languages.

#sfwapro