What Tony is reading

After a craving to read British novels of the first half of the 19th century (which is why I read Frankenstein in February), I got sidetracked. After Frankenstein I read The Namesake because I wanted to know the book before I saw the movie. However, I ended up being too busy to see the movie, which in the meantime has closed. (Good planning, Tony! Well, I was busy with things like visiting Paris and moving to Brooklyn.)

I then read Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson--my craving had shifted to catching up on other things I hadn't read. When all the other boys read Old Yeller, in the Scholastic edition, I read the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body. And I didn't see the movie of Old Yeller--although not because I was going to Paris; it was probably because I wanted to see The Ghost and Mr. Chicken instead. I can't help thinking that my life might have gone in a different direction if I had read Old Yeller in second or third grade, when other boys were reading this incipient-testosterone coming-of-age story. Then again, for that to happen I would have had to have been a different person anyway.

In May I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass--they're late 19th century, but oh, so British. They are also totally crazy books. I hadn't read them since I was 12 and I had forgotten how off-the-wall they were. This is the culture that brought you Monty Python and "I Am The Walrus," which didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere in the 1960s. By the way, here's a trippy fact I gleaned from the Wikipedia: When Alice Liddell was hard up for money, she auctioned off the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Lewis Carroll had given her. In 1932 she visited America when the manuscript was displayed at Columbia University for the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, and it was on that trip (when she was 80 years old) that she met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, one of the brothers who were the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. So, there you have it: Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan, and I’m sure if you had enough patience you could eventually connect them to Kevin Bacon.

I also read Growing Up, by Russell Baker. On Monday I finished Wuthering Heights. And I am now reading a P.D. James for the first time, A Certain Justice--which is British but certainly not from the first half of the 19th century, which I still want to get back to.