A story about the only book I’ve ever thrown in the garbage.

 A precocious 14-year-old girl had her friends over for a slumber party. As a game, they tried to rewrite Flowers in the Attic, set in the countryside of Georgian England, featuring Scarlett O’Hara.  They stayed up all night, snuck some wine coolers and got drunk for the first time, had a contest about who could fit the most adjectives on a page, and ended up arguing because they couldn’t agree on verb tense, point of view or style.  The next day they woke up with headaches and agreed to stay friends by including everything everyone had written, just to not hurt anyone’s feelings.  

But they got bored, and quit. Their unfinished chapters were dropped on the floor and found by their 15-year-old brother, who picked them up and reassembled them in random order.  He was having a bad day, so he rewrote the heroine to make her the most hateful, misogynistically-conceived and unsympathetic bitch he could imagine.  Then he added salacious and violent sex scenes just to amuse himself.  He realized he could fill in the plot holes by plagiarizing some of his mothers old Jackie Collins novels and . . .

 . . . The resulting book was better than Wideacre.

 (Widecare has 210 Amazon reviews, and  SEVENTY of them are 1-star.  Other people threw it in the garbage too, it wasn’t just me). 

I can’t say these are my definitive favorites.  I’m sure I’m missing some.  But these are 15 books that, when I read them, sucked me in and I couldn’t let go.  Books that have stayed in my dreams, became “mine,” and years later are part of who I am and how I view the world.  As far as a blog goes, and and what I remember about them. That is much easier to write about than “reviewing” a book, so I’m going to use this as a jumping-off point for the next few posts . . .

1. My Side of the Mountain, Jean George

2. The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver.

3. The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton

4. Persuasion, Jane Austen.

5. The 60 Minute Gourmet, Pierre Franey

6. The Journeyer, Gary Jennings

7. The Ordinary Princess, M. M. Kaye

8. Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik

9. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

10. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury

11. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

12. Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline, Becky Bailey

13. The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk

14. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

15. Morality for Beautiful Girls, Alexander McCall Smith (Number One Ladies Det. Agency Book 3)

So I know we don’t “need” books to teach our kids to use the toilet. But we have them (most of them were second-hand gifts) and so we read them.

My Big Boy Potty. Joanna Cole, Maxie Chambliss.  (They girls version is the same minus the pee-standing-up).  This has artoon drawings of kids following standard format: show diapers, buy potty, try it out, learn, have an accident, move on.  Why do they all show families buying a new little kid potty?  Is that really part of the American ritual?  This book is technically very descriptive (one Amazon reviewer was shocked that it mentioned wiping.  And lots of smiles from the parents, who just happen look a lot like the Mommy and Daddy in my house, which makes it very cute.

Where’s the Poop. by Julie Markes and Susan Kathleen Hartung. This uses cute cartoon animals to encourage poop-positive attitudes.  It’s good for young kids who love animals, lift-the-flap books, and who might need help learning the difference between #1 and #2.  I’m not one to cry “tmi,” but this book ends with the (cute cartoon) human animal in his own bathroom habitat.  With a lift-the-flap toilet lid complete with (cute cartoon) business inside. What did my child learn? To scream “don’t touch that!” when he lifted the flap, because that’s what I did the first time.  Also I really squeam at the phrase “making” (instead of “going”).  Also, penguin poop is pink.

Big Girls Use the Potty by Andrea Pinnington. This is a DK Publishing book with high-production photos, graphics, lots of captions and stickers.  It’s photo-essay style of an impossibly cute little blond girl and her impossibly pink bathroom and underpants.  To avoid the distastefulness of discussing a real human child on the toilet, the book walks us through it with “teddy” (who gets the really potty words). Then Molly in person recites the activities with more decorum.  The text has good rhythm; my kid likes to sit there and “dance” as I rap the lines out.  Molly gets not only a new potty but a pile of new panties, special stickers, and everything is pink.  Can a potty book be bourgeoisie?

There are dozens of more titles out there I don’t have, but I think we’ve covered our own personal potty library. Any other suggestions?

I never saw a Moor-
I never saw the Sea-
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a wave must be.

Do you see the issue? This version cuts the second verse:

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven-
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if a chart were given-

This poem is about God.  If you are familiar with Emily Dickinson, this will not surprise you.  If you me at age eight, this would’ve freaked you the hell out.  I grew up with a lot of pragmatic religious relativism, which I’m grateful for. But as a child, I got cramps when I sneezed in public because  someone might say “Bless You.”  Faith made me nervous.  This gave me mixed feelings about Emily Dickinson: Loved her poesies and her little breathing verses, all little puzzles and clues.  But she worried me, with the Christian thing.

And I don’t know how I accepted the first stanza of Certainty without the second.  Why have faith in heather?  Heather was a friend of my sister’s. I might take on faith that it’s a flower, but with no moors on my continent, I can’t presume to yet-know-I how it looks. Dickinson’s allegory sounded presumptious, or even dishonest. Really, Emily? YOU know how heather looks?  You lived in Massachusettes.

I eventually read Wuthering heights: “I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills”  (I also grew to my own faith in God, which is not the point, I just disclose it in fairness).  Okay, Emily Dickinson knew about the moors because she read Bronte.  Yes, good literature can do this: Bronte can describe heather so well you can smell it (or Zilpha Keatley Snyder  can show you what it feels like to pit peaches). Is that what faith in God is, though? If it were that simple, a good book (or The Good Book) reveal heaven to all of us, which isn’t the way it works.  Faith is a leap, a sixth-sensing a pattern and purpose beyond the empircally-observable world.  It’s a mystery, a condition of the soul as much as an understanding of the mind and senses.

A skeptic can demand proof from a person of faith, and they’ll point to the evidence of creation and the universe, but a skeptic won’t see God there.  It’s like demanding someone to prove that their mother really loves them (after all, any acts of love could be  in fact be an elaborate and self-interesed ruse). At some point, we all take some things on faith. 

But around here, none of us have seen a moor.  So, risking both literary and religious sacrilege, I don’t think I agree with Emily D. on her poem here (still love the poetry, though).  Yes, you can be Certain of God as if a chart were given.  No, you are not going to explain this to me by saying you just know how the heather looks.  Does it really work that way?

I love books, but lists annoy me for two reasons: First, because “Score out of 100″ doesn’t tell much about a person (Why have they read Lolita but not Slaughterhouse Five?); it just uses a book tally as a status symbol, without any comment on content.  So the fact of reading becomes self-aggrandazing if not exclusionary: if we’re competing, we want our “score” to be higher, so we’ll be secretly happy when we’ve read books someone else hasn’t. And what’s the fun in that? Aren’t books for sharing?

Secondly, because I have bad taste in books.  As a demonstration, I went through the “official” list, replacing books I hadn’t read with whatever ones came to mind. This was annoying and didn’t really impress anyone on Facebook, even though I thought it was a pretty nice, “Literary Canon for American Women born in the 1970′s.” It is a pretty honest summary of my taste in books. I can’t remember why I picked The Hundred Dresses, but I did and I’m glad I did, because it’s a story about status, acquisition, exclusion and creativity, all its own.

My own quasi-Facebook-BBC list, with Free-associated substitutions as appropriate:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
3 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Member of the Wedding — Carson McCullers  
6 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway  
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte  
8 Cats’ Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
9 Baby Island – Carol Ryrie Brink
10Book of Three (and all Chronicles of Prydain) — Lloyd Alexander
11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott  
12 The Apocrypha
13 Slaughterhouse Five — Kurt Vonnegut
14 Midsummer Night’s Dream — Shakespeare  
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier  
16 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift  
17 The Ramayana  
18 The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger  
19 Sea Glass – Anita Shreve  
20 Stories – Katherine Mansfield  
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell  
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald  
23 The Quick Red Fox (and all Travis McGee) – John D. McDonald  
24 Exodus – Leon Uris
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (all of these) – Douglas Adams  
26 Evelina – Fanny Burney
27 A Streetcar named Desire – Tennessee Williams  
28 Mrs. Mike – Benedict and Nancy Freeman  
29 The Iliad – Homer
30 My Antonia – Willa Cather  
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy  
32 Complete Poems — Emily Dickinson  
33 Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman  
34 The Velvet Room – Zilpha Keatley Snyder  
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen  
36 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C.S. Lewis
37 The Andromeda Strain – Michael Crichton  
38 Paradise Lost – John Milton  
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden  
40 Peter Rabbit – Beatrix Potter  
41 The Seven Little Postmen – Margaret Wise Brown  
42 Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor  
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez  
44 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain  
45 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster  
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery  
47 The Scarlet Letter … Nathaniel Hawthorne  
48 The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding  
50 The River Midnight – Lilian Natel  
51 The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros  
52 The Bean Trees – Barbara Kingsolver  
53 The Memoirs of Cleopatra – Margaret George  
54 A Wind in the Door — Madeleine L’Engle  
55 The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series (all) — Alexander McCall Smith  
56 The Egg and I – Betty McDonald  
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens  
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley  
59 My Side of the Mountain … Jean Craighead George  
60 Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston  
61 Of Mice and Men / Cannery Row – John Steinbeck  
62 Cinnamon Gardens – Shyam Selvadurai  
63 The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury  
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold  
65 A Year in Provence – Peter Mayle  
66 The Princess Bride – William Golding  
67 The Carpetbaggers – Harold Robbins  
68 The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler  
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie  
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  
71 Ahab’s Wife – Sena Nasland
72 Away – Jane Urquhart  
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett  
74 The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory
75 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce  
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath  
77 The Good Earth – Pearl Buck  
78 Flora’s Suitcase – Dalia Rabinovich  
79 It – Stephen King  
80 The Chocolate War – Robert Cormier  
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens  
82 The Stories – John Cheever  
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker  
84 Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins  
85 Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence  
86 A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White  
88 Jesus’ Son – Denis Johnson  
89 Ramona Quimby, Age 8 – Beverly Cleary  
90 The Republic – Plato  
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad  
92 The Hundred Dresses – Eleanor Estes  
93 The Waves – Virginia Woolf  
94 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH … Robert C. O’Brien  
95 The Stranger – Camus  
96 Poetry and Tales — Edgar Allan Poe  
97 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey  
98 Hamlet –– Shakespeare  
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Then I realized I was  on a long, hard road and might appreciate some insight.   For awhile, I thought I could just read any and all books, take what I wanted, and leave the rest.  I soon realized that there are bad books out there, and they are worse than no books. Any book that makes me feel more impatient or angry with my kids is out.  Any book that promises me freedom from all pain and unpleasantness, if only I follow its instructions perfectly? Is out.

So I look for books that help me learn about myself, my kids, and where I want us to go as a family.  These books have a few things in common: they don’t promise magic solutions for every problem. They have some specific, useful tools and good examples.  They include reassuring information and a loving theme.  They help me feel optimistic, like maybe it won’t be easy, but it surely is possible, to raise my kids.

Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by Becky Bailey. Start with self-discipline. Think hard about the value of togetherness and whether you can let go of needing to be “special.”  Accept that much of life is in your own attitude.  Consider what you can (and must) control in your family in order to have a successful day together.  Then turn to your children, smile, and get ready to be in charge.

Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.  My children (above) are relatively pretty mellow. This book speaks to everyone’s sensitivites — sensorial, emotional, intellectual, with a positive and rigorously researched tone.  Non-punitive, with a bunch of great ideas.

Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen. Dense but worth it. Every book tells you to get on the floor and play with your kids.  Cohen knows why we don’t want to: it’s boring.  He might hate playing Barbies as much as I hate Hot Wheels Trick Tracks Dino Launch.  His book speaks reassuringly about finding balance between having fun, letting kids win, and keeping them challenged.  Especially great ideas for roughhousing and physical play (good for moms who often don’t come by it naturally).

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. A total classic. Useful scripts for difficult situations: what do you say when kids are sad for a silly reason? When they get what they wanted but then change their minds?  This book made me realize how we lie to our kids (and justify it) in so many little ways, every day: (“It doesn’t hurt!” when it does.  ”We don’t hit!” when they just did.  “Good job!” when um, it kind of wasn’t).  And how powerful (and easy) honesty can be if you practice.

Biblical Parenting by Crystal Lutton.  A wonderful reference for families looking for scripturally-grounded parenting guidelines.  I’ve met Crystal Lutton online and she is awesome, even though I don’t share her entire religious outlook.  Her website is at www.aolff.org, and I love to talk about how to use her “Five Step” methods (as a method of/alternative to “time outs”) to whoever is interested.

Your Two Year Old: Terrible or Tender by Louise Bates Ames.  Ames & Ilg have a book for each year of child development.  Excellent research-based descriptions for all sorts of little things: Why do kids devolve in to monsters about every six months? Why are toddlers so into their own shoes? It’s reassuring to see that the annoying habits are common (and no, they are not out to get us), even an integral and healthy part of their development. This does not mean we have to indulge them, but it does help find a respectful starting point.

Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner.  Okay, this isn’t a parenting book. It is the best book written on finding where your own boundaries are.  Any relationship is easier when you are confident about where to draw the line, how to take responsibility, and how to take care of yourself.  Anyone struggling their way through the serenity prayer (when do we need the “serenity to accept the things we cannot change” and when do we go for the “courage to change the things we can?”) would be wise to start here.

Yes, this is a genre. Spend enough time sitting on a hard bathroom floor reading potty books, and you’ll notice a few things:  Some potty books use lots of euphemism;  others obscure the biological facts with animals or cartoon characters.  Licensed characters don’t “poop” or “pee,” but animals often do.

Potty books are big on “big kids do this, stop being a baby.”  I’m not a fan of this.  I’m not a fan of any adversarial parenting, and I’ve found most reward/ punishment/ shame-methods of kid-control require more adversity than I need in my life.  I especially don’t like this when it comes to barely-voluntary bodily functions, like eat, sleep, and potty.  When I’m having a hard time with myself, does it help me to be labelled and invalidated? Does it even help for someone to clap their hands and sing a rhyme telling me I should be having fun?  I remember how it felt when my Grandma was hospitalized, and a nurse’s aide griped at her for not making it to the bathroom in time.  We need a fundamental respect around these things — and why do my kids deserve any less? 

So I’m picky. Meanwhile, our younger child is two and interested in the potty.  She needs to learn basics, like “you don’t have to take your shirt off” and “don’t stand on the seat.”  And I have a limited amount of patience.  Books help. A sampling:

The New Potty (Little Sister of Little Critter) by Gina and Mercer Meyer. My current favorite.  Little Critter narrates Little Sister’s adventure.  Standard potty narrative: 1. Intro with baby in diapers; 2. Mom decides to buy potty; 3. Demonstrate dolly/toys on potty; 4. Kid uses potty; 6. have some accidents but power through; 7. Conclude that they are a big kid.  This book is sweet but realistic with a sense of humor about Little Sister (my favorite line: “No potty! Ice cream!”)  Facts of life depend on your perspective: “Mom hugged her while she was still sitting on the potty, but I didn’t.”  When Mom is busy, she asks brother to help sister go, then peeks in smiling when the kids panic about an accident.  Mom, brother and sister each have their own take on it.  This is good for kids, who are always trying to sort out how “big” and “little” (and “private” and “mine”) depend on your angle (Am I celebrating this? Or am I embarrassed? Amused?) This book has a loving tone and sets a high standard for respectful family interactions.   And why does Mommy Critter wear a long skirt? Because they can’t draw adult Critter legs? That is my theory. 

Bye-bye Diapers by Ellen Weiss.  Cartoon illustrations of Miss Piggy from Muppet Babies and her piggy little panties. I like nothing about this book.  Baby Miss Piggy reminds children that until they use the toilet they burden their mothers, stink, and feel uncomfortable.  Why be such a downer? One Amazon reviewer approved this book because it helped her child learn to use the potty for “all the right reasons.”  Oh, this bugs me.  Anyway baby Miss Piggy does not tell us  much about how or when she uses her potty.  For some reason, at the end she sits in a sandbox, which my kid always thinks is a pig in a litterbox. Unnecessary.  Too Big For Diapers by John E. Barrett is similar– Photos of Baby Ernie doing the thing.  Shows him taking a break from playing to go (always a nice touch), and a good toilet paper gag. Otherwise it doesn’t really add anything. 

Am I too picky? I really believe that attitude makes all the difference when times get tough. Raising kids is tough.  A bad attitude can make it impossible. I don’t like books with attitude problems.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Velvet Room, Cover art by Alton Raible

I was joking about a blog to review potty-training books.  Then I fell asleep thinking about it, and dreamed I wrote about every book I’d ever read, and it was a good dream.   

I’ve only ever bothered to write about books when they bug me (Twilight; Harry Potter 6).  So as a challenge, I will start by describing my first Favorite Book Ever, which is also a book about a girl named Robin who loves to read books. 

Robin is a daydreamer who tends to wander off from her daily life in search of a quiet corner to curl up with a book.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if she got an antique key from a mysterious old woman in a forest cottage, and it unlocked a secret passage in a vacant well, and she discovered a velvet-curtained library alcove in a deserted mansion? And a mysterious diary written 50 years earlier by a girl who lived there?  If you are 11 and named Robin, this might be the coolest story ever.  

Snyder writes children’s books with pitch-perfect historic and emotional authenticity.  The characters, the rhythm, the secrets of The Velvet Room are perfectly scaled to its genre and setting: A preteen story about a Dust-bowl family making their way through California’s orange groves and peach pitting sheds. Even where the mystery is cliche (who could the girl from the diary be?), it’s not naive.  The Bad Guys  may be clumsy teen thugs, but Robin’s terror is real when they chase her. 

I think this is because it is awesome, not because I was just a kid when I read it.  25 years later, my memories of this book are sensory:  The sting of the peach juice where the knife nicked her fingers.  The smoke of the peat pots under the orange trees, the cool stone walls of the well. The enclosed safety of the Velvet Room, a  musty dream nestled in the dilapidated reality of a crumbling past.  At the end, the comfortable, yellow-and-white bed where she wakes up after the fire — not alone in the dark velvet alcove, but welcomed by friends and family in the hopeful  sunshine. 

The ending used to bug me — I’d rather sink into the red velvet cushions and disappear into the dream world of the diary — and the real world is gritty and glaring, even when it’s sweet.  But that’s the point.  Anyone who ever finished Grapes of Wrath, thinking wow, some of them must’ve fared a little better, couldn’t they find some work pitting peaches and set up house in a shabby but clean little cabin? What would that be like? Especially for the kids? Should pick up this book.