rabbit

When I was a child, my family had a tradition.

On the first day of every month, we each had to say the word "rabbit" as soon as we awoke and realized the date.

"Rabbit!" mommy no plot would call out and five little no plots eagerly sang out "Rabbit" in reply.

To me, it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but as I got out into the world and learned its many ways and customs, I found that the no plots were the only family I could find who indulged in this behaviour.

And everyone I told about it thought it a little on the strange side. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

I began to think my father had invented this tradition, along with tales of the Headless Axeman of Middle Three Island Pond and various other stories of questionable provenance.

In time, I learned to live with the family eccentricity and even embraced the tradition. I felt that more people should celebrate all things Leporidae on a monthly basis.

I cried "Rabbit!" to all my friends as each first day came and they replied in kind, but only when I insisted.

The Rabbit Revolution made little headway. It failed to spread with the alacrity I had envisioned.

Then one day, I met with resistance. My friend who didn't know... refused to say the R-word or any of its many synonyms, despite my repeated attempts to recruit her into the movement. As time passed and my frustration with her position grew, I stooped to trickery, asking leading questions whose answers naturally led down a rabbit hole and posting bunny display pictures on my msn to pry that word past her lips.

To my knowledge, she has not let the rabbit out of the hat on the first day of any month for the past 20 years.

Some years ago, I read an item in a university newspaper in which a folklore professor spoke of the practice as a means of bringing luck, but it had become very obscure.

Then I discovered one first day that one of my favourite bloggers, jonny b of private secret diary fame, was a fellow Leperidoptrist. But I could not be sure he was passing this tradition on to his child or if he would have enough children to ensure its survival (sadly the Toddler (aka Servalan) is an only child.)

In desperation, I fixed on a new plan - I myself would have to marry and produce offspring so that Leperidoptry would not die with me. New generations would keep this tradition alive.

Fortunately, my husband has been true to his wedding vows and can always be counted on to give the correct response to my cry.

But lately, She Who Does Not Obey has been forming her own resistance movement. My rabbity cries are more often met with silence and rebellion.

This morning, I said "Rabbit." She needed a bit of prompting but finally said "Ra-" raising my hopes skyward.

Then she smirked and followed with a "-bish" of defiance.

Rabish.

Alas, I am too old to produce more obedient children so I fear this tradition is doomed to extinction.

witless with wanting

Ah, romance!

Despite my inclination for murder mysteries, I am basically a hopeless romantic. But I have never been very fond of romance novels. I haven't read very many and liked very few.

My favourite has to be something I read back in university, a paperback that one of my friends in the English Society found one day and brought back to the society room for us all to enjoy. I think it was called The Heart of the Flame or perhaps it was The Flame of the Heart? Whatever it was, it was flaming crap.

It was so bad it was good. We scoured it for particularly hilarious turns of phrase, ignoring the sex scenes (were there any?) and underlining all the purple prose.

The best line is seared into my brain, a description of the heroine which summed up the whole enterprise: "Cat was witless with wanting."

We thought that a much more appropriate title, so we relabelled the cover of the book with the words Witless with Wanting and left it in the society's bookcase in the hopes that our successors would enjoy it as much as we did. I like to think it's still there waiting to be discovered by a new generation of English nerds.

As I mentioned before I recently read a romance novel called Hero Worship which was recommended in the comments of a blog I had read. It was about a woman who falls in love with a character in a book and wishes herself into the book. I read it to the end but it didn't have even the satisfaction of a smattering of smut to make up for it's failure to perform.

Then my friend who didn't know.... loaned me a copy of a book she had read whose story sounded intriguing. It was called Fantasy Lover and it was about a man trapped in a book called forth to be the summoner's love slave. Apparently I have a thing for romance with fictional characters.

It started out well and then made up for the previous book's disappointments by jumping straight into the sex by chapter 4.

At that point the plot seemed to call for abstinence until the climax, so to speak, but even though the lovers were supposed to refrain from intercourse for a month, they constantly ignored this fact, maintaining a Clintonesque denial of what actually constitutes sex. With little attempt at foreplay or sexual tension, the sex just kept coming and coming and coming.

I got bored.

Near the end, the heroine, in the throes of yet another passion (now with Actual Thrusting!), declares she had never felt like this before. Except that she had felt exactly like that and made the same comment 20 pages before and 20 pages before that and 20 pages before that.

I finished the book but only by thinking of England.

So it seems that my lust for romance could not be satiated by either of these books. With or without sex.

Neither of them took the time to create a character worth falling in love with, or had the patience to let me get to know them before insisting that I should care about what happens to them or climb into bed with them. (Although I'll always have fond memories of chapter 4)

For now I guess I shall have to return to Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre for some real romance.

Those other books just left me witless with wanting.

found a list

So my friend who didn't know what a meme was... reminded me that I had started a library list on Facebook. Now I actually know the last 22 books I read.

But you don't really want to know all those titles, so I've picked out the last five:

• I mostly struggled through Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors. Maybe I'm just not meant to read short stories? There was a really cool detective story at the end though set in Heaven (The Heaven) before the fall. An angel falls to his death and another angel has to solve the mystery of what happened. Lucifer is one of the suspects.

• I really liked the Hamish Macbeth tv series, but not so much Death of a Maid by M.C. Beaton. It's a later book in the series, so maybe it's suffering from series fatigue?

• On the other hand, Favorite Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesterton reminded me what I really love about mystery stories. Father Brown is a wonderful character and his mysteries are puzzlers. Why read rewarmed series when you can read Father Brown?

• Life of Pi was last summer's vacation read. It made me rethink assumptions I had made about animals, animals in zoos, and what it means to believe in God. I thought it was going to be yet another book that gained everyone's praise but my own. So many of the literary stars du jour have left me cold. I thought it might be too artsy fartsy to be fun, but it turned out to be a delightful read. Funny, suspenseful, sad, and thoughtful.

• Before that, I read Gallow's Thief by Bernard Cornwell. Yet another detective story, this time about a gentleman/soldier who finds himself out of work with no means of support. He takes on the task of proving that a man convicted of murder is really guilty so he can be duly hanged. It turns out there are a lot more likely suspects, of course. Another fun read with period detail from the age of Austen.

More thrilling tales in the reading life of no plot to follow at a later date.

15 books

My friend who didn't know what a meme is but who always taunts me with her superior knowledge of all things interwebby and computery sent me a meme without knowing it was a meme.

(I think I shall have to come up with a better pseudonym for her or I shall grow fatigued typing all that out again)


List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.

Here is my list:


Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Diary of Anne Frank
Ulysses by James Joyce
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
(but then you knew that if you read my quote thingy above)
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
(or perhaps the whole Bond ouevre)
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
(close seconds The Chrysalids by Wyndham and Alas Babylon by Pat Frank)
The Sotweed Factor by John Barth
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

I would note that The Day of the Triffids is probably my favourite what if the world ended and there weren't so many annoying people about book. I replaced my original choice of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke with Triffids because it seemed to me that my teenaged obsession with apocalyptic fiction outranked my delight in reading entertaining footnotes.

Live and Let Die was the first book I read with Sex in it. Even though I was still in the 6th grade and unclear about what 007 did with the girls once he got them into bed. I read it hidden inside another book so my mother wouldn't know I was reading a book with Sex in it. The whole series was an epiphany for me, aside from the Sex bits, clueing me in that the world was a little more dark and complicated than my previous reading had led me to believe.

I came up with The Lord of the Rings last and while that technically means I have 17 books on my list, my friend who didn't know what a meme is but... (see above) allowed it under the a-trilogy-counts-as-one-when-you-remember-it right-at-the-end exception to the rule.

I am also tempted to add To Kill a Mockingbird because I love it so.

So what's on your list?