Biblio-furniture

People visiting our home are immediately struck by its dominant decorating motif: books, books, and more books. Their reactions usually divide them into two camps -- the delighted and the appalled. I wonder what the latter would think if even my furniture coordinated with my passion for books?

Big Cozy Books makes book-themed furniture for libraries and schools. I'd love to own furniture shaped like giant books, pencils, and erasers. Actually, one of the local public libraries has some of their products. But I've been too shy to actually sit on it. I'm sure the staff would look askance at a middle-aged woman sprawling out to read in the children's section.

While you're at it, also take a look at Bookshelf, a blog devoted solely to, well, bookshelves. I was particularly charmed by these shelves that not only hold books, but look quite willing help you move them from room to room. (Not that I'd actually buy them for my own house -- my criteria for bookcases is that they be strong and able to pack the greatest number of books in the least amount of linear wall space.)

Do Plants Have Souls?

So, would you rather read Thomas Aquinas or watch a science fiction B-movie?

Can't decide? Now you can do both at once thanks to this post at The B-Movie Catechism.

A Second Look at YA

Sartorias recently hosted an interesting discussion at Oached Pish about YA fiction. Apparently, YA fiction is booming and is being read by adults as well as young people. Sartorias asked, "If you read YA, tell me what you read, and why."

The reasons varied. Some people like coming of age stories. Some prefer YA's shorter length or find it easier to read because the stories tend to be more focused and to include less description or other digressive elements. A few prefer YA because they don't care for the graphic sex scenes that can be common in genre fiction for adults. (Though I think YA today is less "safe" in that respect than it was when I was young.) And some felt that YA was just better written and more interesting than most fiction published for adults.

I found this discussion interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I've always been one for reading outside of my age group. Ever since I was young, if it was printed I'd have a go at it -- regardless of the target audience. Popular Science, Boy Scout magazines, my mom's parenting magazines, anything I could get my little hands on. (Okay, I really was too young for Moby Dick though the bits about cutting up whales were kind of interesting.)

But as I got older, I was never embarrassed to go down the age group ladder. A new Dr. Seuss title? I'm checking it out! A new Beverly Cleary? I'm on it! I think my parents might have been embarrassed, or perhaps just puzzled. "But you're a good reader!" they'd say. "You shouldn't be reading children's books. You could go on the adult side of the library."

The problem was that I'd already been there. And the books in the general fiction area seemed pretty uninteresting. Judging from their novels, it seemed that adults were only interested in sex and money. Boring! (I realize now that I was probably just unlucky in my selections. Or perhaps literature as such was filed under its Dewey Decimal classification.) In the meantime, there were loads of new books in the children's and YA sections and I had yet to read them all.

I gave up reading YA in the mid-seventies when it became depressing and problem oriented. Suddenly, it seemed like every new book was relentlessly hammering out a universe of hopelessness: drugs, divorce, depression, disease, and doom. Disfunctional families were now the norm, and adults were presented as uniformly incompetent and untrustworthy. It's not that I wanted books that were all sweetness and light, but it seemed to me that growing up could hardly be worthwhile, given such nihilistic worldview. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the universe was actually better than it was being painted.

Since many of the commenters on Sartorias's blog mentioned liking YA because it was hopeful, optimistic, and interesting, it might be time for a second look. I decided to take down author and title recommendations and see if I could find a few of them at our local public library. Many of the ones I wanted were not available, but I got these:

• The New Policeman by Kate Thompson
• The Stones Are Hatching by Geraldine McCaughrean
• The Book of Changes by Tim Wynne-Jones (This was an accidental grab as I was intending to get any book by Diana Wynne Jones, and the author's first name was not on the spine.)
  
• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
  

Feel free to put further recommendations in the comments box. Our library is closing for the summer for remodeling, but they'll let you check out 50 books to tide you over until they reopen in September. So this might be a good time to borrow a massive chunk of YA.

Stuff Catholics Like

Normally I just add links to my blog roll without comments. But I would like to point out the addition of Stuff Catholics Like.

This blog is about stuff Catholics like. Some of the stuff, like felt banners, Catholics shouldn't like but do for reasons they will have to explain to God.

The purpose of this blog is to take a light-hearted look at Catholic things in a way that can be educational to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. If you tend to be easily “hurt” or “offended”, this is a good place to get over it.

Among the people writing for it are Curt Jester, Ironic Catholic and Maureen Martin -- so despite being informational, it endears itself to me with its bizarre sense of humor. So click on over and read about the many kinds of stuff Catholics like such as sex (Surprised?), clapping in church (Ick!), Rome ("When someone says “home of the whore of Babylon” Catholics get warm fuzzies."), and relics (Oooo! Mummified hands!)

Ooooo! I Want One!

Is there anything that Catholic Bibliophagist would like more than a new bookcase? How about a bookcase that swings open to reveal a hidden passageway? HT to Jennifer for the link to HiddenPassageway.com . Check out their gallery of products. Although you can conceal your secrets behind fireplaces, paintings, or even have your pool table rise up from under the floor, the most common option seems to be bookcases.

Brideshead Revisited -- Again

Since my husband's death two years ago, I've lived a relatively sequestered life. I haven't subscribed to a newspaper, watched television, or perused news magazines except in doctors' waiting rooms. But I do haunt the Catholic blogsphere, and sooner or later everything I really want to know about turns up there.

According to Amy Welborn at Charlotte Was Both, the trailer for the new Brideshead Revisited movie is out. You can read her opinion of it in her post, Teddy Bears Optional. Her criticism, aside from poor casting, is that the movie appears to be a heated power struggle between Charles Ryder and Lady Marchmain. And that's not what the book is about. As one of her commenters, Fr. Steve, puts it

. . . at the heart of Waugh’s book was Charles Ryder’s relationship with God, in regards to which his relationships with the Marchmains were expressions of his resistance to God, and ultimate reconciliation with God. The richness of Waugh’s insights is that they are powerful insights into the theological as well as the interpersonal. Charles Ryder is being remade in a crucible of both transcendent and immanent realities. One might say that the most interesting character in Waugh’s novel is actually God, whose presence permeates every scene, and yet never speaks a word directly, prefering to use secondary causes to effect Charles conversion.

My own criticism of the trailer is that it strongly implies that Sebastian is homosexually in love with Charles and that Lady Marchmain is forcing Julia to marry Rex -- neither of which is true in novel. And if that's what the movie is about, then it's just not the story that Waugh wrote.

The problem is, if you gut its religious aspect, Brideshead the novel is not unlike the chapel at Brideshead after it's been decommissioned. (The description is Cordelia's.)

[The priest] took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

I suspect that this would be the key difficulty with with any dramatization of Brideshead Revisited: if you suppress the essential heart of Bridehead, it will, like the chapel sans the Eucharist, be merely "an oddly decorated room." And the decorations are indeed odd.

However, I suppose it's not fair to premataurely judge even this movie by its trailer since, through the judicious selection of music and clips, trailers can be crafted to appeal to any demographic without reflecting their movie's actual content -- as is ably and amusingly demonstrated by Scary Mary, a recut trailer of Disney's Mary Poppins.

A Problem That Doesn't Need a Solution

"My grandmother Janet said to me, 'If you don't stop reading all these books, you're going to be overeducated. I think you should go to college.'"
--Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact.