Books I've Loved but Not Written Reviews For, Yet

This would be the books I physically own, or want to own, and have never wanted to sell. There are a few thousand of them. Since I own more than I want to own, the list is not accurately reflected by my Amazon and Bookshop Wish Lists. 

Below is not a Top Ten List so much as a list of Ten I Can See from Here, "here" being my office where I'm surrounded by Net-free computers, books I am or think I'm likely to be reading or consulting, and yarn... 

1. Pingouin Classic Knits for All the Family by Sally Harding 

Pingouin was a brand of yarn made in France for about seventy years. For many of these years the company also published full-size magazines of patterns--not just to be knitted with their yarns, but, for each magazine, to be knitted with a specific kind of their yarns., As knitters know, yarn comes in different sizes, thicker or thinner yarns making heavier or lighter fabrics, and each Pingouin quarterly magazine used to feature things you could make with any of up to five kind of yarn they were making that year. The company would send their yarns to designers and ask for new patterns that would sell more of their yarn in the next season...these things are actually planned three to twelve months in advance. So the company archives contained tens of thousands of sweater patterns. 

From these archives a well known British knitwear designer selected thirty that were "classic"--or at least "iconic," in the sense that some of them look like things people would remember having seen but not actually wear. I've not made any of these sweaters but recently thought that, having had the book in my pattern hoard for so long, I ought to make one of them. 

2.My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

This has been a favorite from the day I first read it, about twenty-five years ago. Jane, the TV producer, didn't think she could ever have children but is delighted to find herself pregnant even if baby-daddy runs away...but he doesn't. She and her crew of three younger men are ordered to produce shows that present beef and the beef industry in a favorable way. Every person they interview gives them more evidence that commercial beef production is not producing healthy food. Jane learns that she didn't have siblings (her crew sort of fill in the gaps) and will at best find it difficult to have children because she was exposed to a hormone commonly fed to beef cattle. Meanwhile Jane's boss's marriage is falling apart, and beef becomes part of his family problems too.

3. Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut by P.J. O'Rourke 

I've blogged about having this one on the shelf, I think last year? It's still on the shelf. I am still making a samizdat copy of it, a page or a paragraph at a time, on days when the Internet is working sporadically. Eventually I'll finish the samizdat copy and sell the printed copy. I'm in no hurry. I've enjoyed all of O'Rourke's other books that I've found, too. 

4. Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple 

A ridiculous rich eccentric character goes missing; eventually her family track her down. 

5. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett 

I've counted this one as a favorite since grade two. A typical precocious reader, I chose to take it home from the library after reading a grown-up book that surveyed sixth graders on various topics, one of which was their reactions to this book. I always wanted to read anything I was told to wait until I was ten or twelve to read. I didn't understand all the books in that category that I read, but A Little Princess really does seem to me to be more suitable for advanced readers in the primary grades--it presents sensitive topics deftly, but through simple, black-and-white characterization. I've lost count of how many copies I've bought secondhand in order to dress a doll to match the cover illustration. I think every little girl should read it, and it won't do the boys any harm, either.

6. No Coins Please by Gordon Korman 

Finally, a writer from outside the US or UK, though my understanding is that Korman lives at least part-time in the US. He created his best known characters, Boots and Bruno, in middle school and his best selling books have been about their adventures at the second wackiest prep school on Earth (they have girlfriends at an affiliated school that's even sillier). 

This early novel does not have Boots and Bruno in it, but it was also marketable as "for kids, by a kid." It features a character who has to have been inspired by Alex Keaton on "Family Ties." College kids their parents never met are the sole custodians of middle school kids on a bus tour of the United States (even in the 1980s, or even in the 1940s, would parents ever have bought an idea like that?). Each bus is for boys or for girls, not both, but some socializing among different bus groups takes place for an hour or two at a time on rest stops. Rob and Dennis, who apparently go to an all-boys school, have the goal of just meeting girls to whom they can write next year. The eleven- and twelve-year-old passengers are there because their parents had the goal of getting them out of the house for a few weeks, but they become friends with each other...even Artie, who is different. Artie has the goal of finding out how much money it's possible to make with unauthorized, unlicensed, unsupervised, and deeply silly business ventures, starting small by repackaging ordinary fruit preserves as "attack jelly," eventually hosting a disco night that promises celebrity guests and actually has some. 

In real life a parent would have called the whole thing off by the first week, if parents had ever let it get off the ground. In comic fiction Artie keeps rolling and making money until the FBI come out after him. Korman has written more realistic comedies than this, and they were also funny, but this is the one of his books that's currently in the office, waiting to have a suitable boy doll dressed to match it. 

7. The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris 

In South Dakota the best place for a cancer patient's wife to stay near the patient seemed to be a monastery. Kathleen Norris, who had just published a well received book of poems, spent so much time being a good guest at the monastery that she ended up joining an affiliated group of nuns after her husband died. Before that happened, Norris's two books of essays about the monastic life she was observing, Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, became bestsellers. 

I bought copies. I sold copies. I acquired another copy last summer when a friend vacated a warehouse and left most of the books with me. Norris was just a tiny bit defensive about being a Christian due to her husband's not being one, but that only made her a better Defender of the Faith. 

8. Piping Down the Valleys Wild by Nancy Larrick 

Everybody's favorite poems for children, or at least loved by children, in the English language. Copy is probably too badly damaged to sell, even with a doll, but not quite badly damaged enough to burn. I'll probably end up putting it in a basket marked "Free with a Purchase." 

9. The Wonderful O by James Thurber 

One of those word play stories for which he was famous. They were printed first in magazines for adults, then as picture books for children who don't mind learning new words. I would have missed a lot of the fun when I was in the normal age and size range for picture books. I loved these books as a teenager. The optimal age for reading any Thurber story is whatever age you are when you find one you've not read before. 

10. Mystery of the Witch Who Wouldn't by Kin Platt 

Best known for writing hard-boiled detective stories for adults, Platt also did a series of cash-in-on-the-occult-fad mysteries for younger readers featuring a boy with rather neglectful parents, a girl with protective but busy parents, her father the policeman, and arguably the smartest one on the team, Sinbad the bulldog. The boy and girl happened to be more interested in solving mysteries (and sports, and local history, and occasionally paying attention to something at school) than in sex or drugs, but if they'd ever wandered from the straight and narrow path, you knew the dog would have steered them back onto it in seconds. They were hilarious and they left more than a hint that ghosts in one book, demons in another volume, and the witch in this book, really existed in their fictive world. 

As a result booksellers have been living for more than fifty years with a set of mixed feelings that go like "But I liked it, or would have liked it, when I was thirteen...but my parents would not have liked that I liked it, or would have liked it...but he worked in so many fun facts in such an enjoyable way... but if I sell this book to a child, some adult who feels guilty about not having been with that child that day is going to come after me with a pitchfork, screaming that I'm selling satanism..." So if we acquire copies of these books, we expect to be stuck with them for however many years it takes an adult to come in and admit that adults enjoy this series themselves.

(Oh come onnnn, someone Out There is whining, don't you have more "diversity" on your shelves than that, I mean to say, one White male writer from Canada and one Japanese-American writer, that's all? I do, but the books in Spanish are too recently acquired, the book by Alicia Garza is too politically confused, and the school music book is too much "less than" its counterpart from the 1960s, to fit into the "books I've loved" category. 

What about the books I've loved and not reviewed by (pick five) Isabel Allende, Virginia Hamilton, Fatima Mernissi, Amy Tan, or Thomas Sowell? They did not happen to be in the office today, that's what. I have a more "diverse" collection, in terms of actual languages, never mind authors' identities, than most US booksellers have. I don't work at it. Browse this web site; it has a furiously diverse and eclectic lot of reviews.)