Seasonal Reading

On the day of the dead, when the year too dies...

Cader Idris, by umbrellasheep

There are certain books that are forever linked in my mind with specific seasons. It's October again, and as I do every year, I'm rereading Susan Cooper's The Grey King.

Set in late October in the mountains of northwest Wales, The Grey King paints its scenes with Cooper's typical precision. One of her most striking gifts is the ability to integrate the minutiae of time and place into her stories so that the land and the seasons become characters in their own right. Take, for example, a passage from The Grey King:

... he peered out at the little grey town as the windscreen wipers tried in vain, twitch-creak, twitch-creak, to banish the fine misty rain from the glass. Deserted shops lined the little street, and a few bent figures in raincoats scurried by; he saw a church, a small hotel, more neat houses. Then the road was widening and they were out between trim hedges, with open fields beyond, and green hills rising against the sky: a grey sky, featureless with mist....

Rhys turned the car inland, towards the mountains, and almost at once Will had a strange new feeling of enclosure, almost of menace. The little road was narrow here, like a tunnel, with its high grass banks and looming hedges like green walls on either side. Whenever they passed the gap where a hedge opened to a field through a gate, he could see the green-brown bulk of hillsides rearing up at the grey sky. And ahead, as bends in the road showed the open sky briefly through the trees, a higher fold of grey hills loomed in the distance, disappearing into ragged cloud. Will felt he was in a part of Britain like none he had ever known before: a secret, enclosed place, with powers hidden in its shrouded centuries at which he could not begin to guess.

Stone hut in Snowdonia, by magnuscanis

I don't know when I first read the books in the Dark Is Rising cycle, but now I can't see the trees changing colors without wanting to reach for The Grey King, just as the smell of pine needles and the metallic tang of snow makes me wish to curl up with The Dark Is Rising (book 2 in the series).

Cooper is one of the rare authors who uses her setting as something more than just a frame on which to hang her narrative. Like a candle in a dark room, she picks out elements of beauty from the treasure trove of British and Celtic legends, yet leaves a sense of infinite mystery hanging just beyond the light. The world her stories inhabit seems to exist long before and long after her characters come to life.

Two of the five books in Cooper's young adult fantasy cycle received Newbery nods. In the hands of a lesser author, they might have been reduced to narrow cubbies like "action-adventure," "neo-Celtic Arthurian fantasy," or the dreaded "bittersweet coming-of-age story." The Dark Is Rising books both inhabit and transcend these genres; they are true classics.

What books do you read every year, and when?

Anne and Laura

A bedroom in the original "Green Gables"

I’ve recently started rereading the “Anne of Green Gables” books. Maybe I was inspired by a Facebook meme asking me to list the 15 books I’ll never forget. Maybe “Green Gables” is my official summer reading, infused as it is with memories of Junetime PBS pledge drives and afternoons too hot to do anything but read.

I think the real reason, though, is that I’m getting married in seven weeks. The “Little House on the Prairie” and “Green Gables” books shaped my ideas of womanhood like no other books I’ve ever read. As I prepare for my wedding, I revisit these touchstones of my girlhood to remind myself who I used to be and learn again who I am.

What strikes me now is how different they have appeared to me as I’ve grown. Following Anne and Laura in their journeys to adulthood, I can trace the evolution of my own attitudes toward adulthood and marriage. When I first read them, I was nine or ten or twelve years old and they embodied everything I wanted to be. I, too, was precocious, dreamy, gawky, the smartest in my class. Of course I dressed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder for Halloween! My life, I thought, was on an orderly path to a career in teaching, qualified independence, and the inevitable wedding to my Gilbert Blythe or Almanzo Wilder. Since there was no romantically-charged academic rivalry between me and any of my classmates, I figured the Almanzo model—quietly heroic, plainspoken—would be my fate.

After a few years at my feminist-leaning all-girls Catholic high school (yes, they do exist!), my opinion of the Green Gables and Little House books was entirely different. My readings of my childhood favorites were tinged with contempt; Anne and Laura forsook promising careers to get married and… that’s it? They quit? Just to spend all their time worrying about jam and babies? They might have been good enough icons for, say, the unenlightened 1950’s, but surely the late twentieth century needed feminine examples better suited to reversing millennia of male oppression.

I didn’t read Anne and Laura’s stories for many years after that, thinking that I’d left them behind. Then I met Tony. Our courtship was uneventful except for the remarkable serendipity of our first meeting—not storybook material at all. In the weeks and months leading up to our wedding, we talked about the future: careers, houses, children. I was surprised at the desires I found myself expressing, incompatible with the relentless ambition I once believed to be my duty as a Western woman.

Now, as I read their stories again, Anne and Laura’s choices don’t seem like inevitable defeat at the hands of the patriarchy. What stands out are their rebellions, the fierce spirit that inspired them to strike out on their own in times when women still depended on men for their livelihoods—and then to negotiate marriage on their own terms. I’m reminded that while a wedding may be the end of one book, it is the beginning of another.