Day #7 of the 60 Days of Gratitude Challenge

[shadowkat]

The prompt is Name a book you are grateful for.

Hmmm.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle

As a child, it was hard to find science fiction novels with female protagonists in the 1970s. There were mystery novels, regular novels, and to a lesser degree fantasy novels that had them, but not quite that many scifi for some reason or other. I'm not saying they weren't out there - just that they weren't easy to find. My Aunt, my mother's oldest sister, who was a sixth grade librarian in Vegas, Nevada - introduced me to science fiction through Madeline L'Engle. She also sent me an interview with the writer. She did the same thing with Zelphia Keatley Snyder, a bit later. In Vegas, they apparently had a school district - with on school that only had sixth graders. She was the librarian for that school in the 1970s and early 80s.
(My Aunt died at the age of 55 from a blood clot - in 2000.)

I loved the books and devoured the series. Years, later, on my birthday, I saw the movie and was utterly charmed by it. It managed to capture what I adored about the books.

Watch on YouTube

And much like the lead character, I too, struggled with a bothersome younger brother.

Comments

[wendelah1]

A Wrinkle in Time was my favorite childhood book. I loved Meg's fierce intelligence, bravery, and social awkwardness. Looking back, I see many parallels between her family and mine, minus the scifi aspects of course. After I received my own copy for Christmas, I reread it countless times. I still have the book, though it's a bit fragile and yellowed.

I'll have to give my response more thought.

[trepkos]

I'm sad to say, tried this book on a recommendation from a friend, and found it extremely tedious. The heroine was far too emotional for my taste, and Charles Wallace was irritating, especially the fact of having to say his mouthful of a name so often.

[shadowkat]

How old were you? I ask because it's written for teenage girls and younger, and may not hold up well for an adult.

I've not read it since I was in the 5th grade - I was about ten or eleven years of age at the time. And it was in the 1970s.

[trepkos]

It was a month ago, so - 61!

[shadowkat]

Yep, wrong demographic. It's not written for someone in their 60s, it's written for children and YA.

Also, mileage it varies.

As an aside - I get the desire to tell folks you dislike something they loved, but it kind of goes counter to the whole point of this meme - which is talking about something we're grateful for. Negative energy kind of foils the purpose. I'll let it go this once, but the next time - I'm deleting. Against the rules of the meme. The book meme, I'm more lenient regarding it. But not here.

Thank you for understanding.

[trepkos]

No problem!

[atpo_onm]

The very first science fiction book I ever read, I think it was in fifth grade, and it was in the library. Wrinkle started a serious reading trend in the genre for me, which lasted many decades, and shapes much of how I view the world and universe to this day.

Oh, so many books to choose from? I believe I'll go with one of the most thought-provoking ones, from one of my favorite authors. The subject matter of the book resonates strongly with a favorite line from a Dylan song, which goes...

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

The book would be Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which studies the possibility of a society based on as close to anarchy as possible-- that is, could humans ever become moral / ethical enough that government, or even traditional vertical hierarchies would simply become unnecessary, or at least bare minimal?

Impossible? Probably, but what would such a society look like if it was?

One of her best works, which is... kinda, what isn't? PBS aired an American Masters episode about her earlier this year, which both pleased and surprised me, as fantasy and SF writers still aren't always taken seriously by the literary community at large.

[mefisto]

I absolutely loved A Wrinkle in Time.

Have you ever read Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage? Another book from that era with a female protagonist that I really liked (haven't read it in probably 50 years).

[atpo_onm]

Oh, internet. There you go again. You've found another person-- right here in this little out of the way social media place-- who has read that book, and remembers it fondly.

I not only loved the book, I was so enamored of the cover art (on the paperback, don't know if it was on the hard cover edition) that I had an artist friend make a wall-hangable copy of it for me, which I still have to this day. He used, I think pastels, he called them? It was like charcoal, but in color. Did a darn good job considering how small the source was.

Dug through my old paperbacks, and lo and behold, here's a pic:



(click to enlarge)

Howzabout that! :-)

[shadowkat]

The cover art on that book is truly amazing.

[mefisto]

It's a small world after all.

I can't see the picture. When I click I get the message "not authorized".

[atpo_onm]

Sorry about that... forgot that my journal default sets images to my flist members only. I've reset the image to public view, see if you can see it now:

[mefisto]

That's quite different from the paperback version I have. I like it.