Has everyone known about these except me? (Playaway audio books)

I did a solo drive yesterday -- two and a half hours down to southern Indiana and two and a half hours back -- and I knew before I left that I needed something to listen to. I know that it makes me out to be some kind of freak to admit this, but I hate listening to music in the car. I could play nothing but Aerosmith, Def Leppard and the Beatles on a long drive and all it would do is put me right to sleep. I have to have words.

So I went to our public library's website and looked up a book I'd been wanting to read but couldn't because the library owns only one copy and some dumb patron lost it. Do they maybe have it on audio book? I wondered. It turned out that the answer was yes, it's just that it wasn't on CD. It was preloaded onto this handy little device called a Playaway.

I hope I'm not the only dope out there who had never heard of a Playaway until the nice clerk at the public library put it into my hand. If you haven't heard of them either, click here for a description of how they work and click here for a list of titles. You can see the unit itself, front and back, in the pictures up there. It's a little smaller than an iPhone and the library in my city requests that patrons provide their own ear buds and triple-A battery. I got my copy, I suppose you could call it, of Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark -- and yes, I know it's hardly highbrow literature but I read a lot of Shakespeare and everyone needs a break sometimes, so shut up -- and deeply enjoyed my drive.

I noticed at the Playaway store that these little babies cost anywhere from around $34.99 to $104.00 each, so this definitely isn't something I'd ever buy for myself, but they're nifty little things and I've enjoyed using it today, too, while doing busy work around the house. Fun! I am a Playaway fan.

And then I fell to the floor

The girls and I have a summer plan of getting together with Kieren, Dayden, Kiersi and the grandparents on Fridays this summer with the intention of taking all the kids to the New Castle library and having lunch. Sounds fun, whether lunch or the library is your focus.

We're going to the library because of a strange contretemps Pat and Angie have experienced since moving into their house some years back. As it turns out, when you live out in the country surrounded by ALL THAT NATURE, you might not be able to avail yourself of your county's library services, perhaps because your library, with a deplorable lack of foresight, doesn't exist. In their county? The library belongs to the nearest city and if you live outside that city's limits, I guess you're just doomed to illiteracy or boredom. There are no branch libraries like there are in my city.

In New Castle, where Nanny and Poppy live, the library is called the New Castle-Henry County Public Library, which is generous of them, don't you think? Nanny checks items for Kieren, Dayden and Kiersi out on her library card, warning them all not to lose any books or risk her substantial wrath which would be....not getting a cookie for a mid-afternoon snack? I don't know. She scares me half to death, so I've never lost a book she's checked out for me.

So I was telling Aisling our summer plans and said, "Doesn't that sound like fun?" in eager happiness, because libraries have figured largely in my life, just as they have in hers. My mom took me and Pat to the library when we were kids and we brought home stacks of books. Towers. Skyscrapers of books. And that continued on into my adult years when I once checked out an entire tote of sixty books for Meelyn and Aisling, read every single one of them to the girls, and then put the tote box in the trunk of my car and forgot about it until all sixty books were three weeks overdue. Oh, my husband was so pleased! He credits the New Castle-Henry County Public Library's recent renovation and expansion to the fines I paid for that little mistake.

Aisling looked at me in the way teenagers sometimes do, not really with a curled lip and scornful eyebrows, but with the impression of such. "It sounds okay," she yawned, examining her fingernails. "But you know, I don't really like libraries that much, not like you do. I'm not that crazy about reading."

And that, gentle readers, is when everything SUDDENLY WENT BLACK.

Suhhhh-weeeeeet!!!!

I was leaving the library after Shakespeare yesterday, going by their shelves of books-for-sale on my way to return my room key, when my eye caught a glimpse of two Maeve Binchy novels. They were both trade paperbacks, albeit brand new, and priced at one dollar each.

Strangely enough, I just happened to have two dollars in my pocket! So I am now the owner of two new paperback Binchy novels, one of which (Scarlet Feather) is my favorite one of all. Hurrah!

Reading aloud

A couple of weeks ago, my husband made an interesting suggestion. "Remember when you used to read aloud to us at night after dinner?" he said. "I wish you'd start doing that again.. We could just leave the TV off after the girls get the dishes done and sit together and listen."

That was an intriguing thought. I don't think I've read aloud to the family since the girls were much smaller and we did the first three volumes in the Harry Potter series, several books by Natalie Babbitt (I think we all cried during the last pages of Tuck Everlasting), Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess and a number of other engaging novels. It was always a great success, so I thought Why not do it again, with a book intended for a different audience?

So I began thinking. But it didn't take me long to think of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is one of my favorite books of all time, as you can tell by my extremely battered paperback copy. That beat-up little book means a lot to me, so I've never replaced it with a nicer hard cover version, although I think I may need to do that after this reading: the cover came apart last night when I was reading about Miss Caroline's issues with Scout and the Cunningham and Ewell families.

This is not a very long book and we'll be reading about three nights a week or so. Do you have any recommendations for what we could read when we finish this one?

Jane tames January

I'm sadly out of the PBS loop since Meelyn and Aisling no longer watch children's programming on either of the two local Public Broadcasting Service stations here in central Indiana, so I didn't even know that Masterpiece Theater was doing a production of Emma until I heard the news this morning from some internet friends.

Pictured to the left, there, are Romola Garai, who plays darling, lovable Emma, and Jonny Lee Miller, who plays her devastatingly sweet and handsome (yet somehow overlooked) childhood friend George Knightley. I can hardly wait to see this version, knowing what a completely excellent job Masterpiece Theater did with the giggles-and-swoons inducing Pride and Prejudice, starring COLIN FIRTH OH MY HEAVENLY HANDSOMELY COLIN OF FIRTHISHNESS and that girl who played Elizabeth. Uhhhhh....Jennifer Ehle. Not that she wasn't completely adorable as Elizabeth, because she was, but COLIN FIRTH OH MY HEAVENLY HANDSOM-.....

Sorry.


*ahem*


Anyhoo, Emma will be airing in three episodes on your PBS affiliate from January 23 through February 7. Check your local listings and get those DVRs and TiVos set, ladies and girls. I would venture a guess that if you loved Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 cinematic version (which we surely did) and/or Kate Beckinsale in the also-1996 made-for-TV version (which we haven't seen), you will undoubtedly like Masterpiece Theater's version. From past experience, I predict that the costuming, scenery, screenplay and acting will be just about flawless.

Jane has redeemed January. I am happy now.

And then I passed out, right there on the floor

Meelyn and I zipped over to the public library yesterday to pick up Thornton Wilder's Our Town in both book and DVD format for American Literature class -- if you're thinking about renting the DVD, don't bother; Hollywood entirely changed the ending and Emily turned out to just be having a happy dream that taught her how to appreciate her family and placid, everyday life, just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Aarrgh.

We were also there, in a not incidental way, to pay the four dollar fine that had accrued on my account. You know how it is: You check out the books, you read the books, time passes, and so does the due date. You return the books a week late or so, and by the time you've done that four or five times, you've accrued a fee on your account. And that's one of those things that just ties me up in knots, probably because my mother raised me to have a conscience as soft as warm butter. Plus, you can't put any books on hold or renew them online if you have fines, so obviously, I wanted to get that paid.

Meelyn and I were standing at the circulation desk and a clerk was checking out our several items, having already accepted my four one-dollar bills and given me a receipt, when this weird looking dude who appeared to be cheerfully and completely stoned out of his gourd approached the clerk at the computer next to where we were standing and juicily slurred, "I wanna get a lie-ber-ary ID card, one of them whatchermacallerits."

"You mean a library card?" asked the clerk politely.

"Yeah! Yeah! That's the thing there I'm talkin' to yers about. One of them cards, so I can check me out some movies." He nodded amiably about a thousand times and leaned his elbows on the counter, fixing the clerk with a pleasant stare out of one eye, while the other eye wandered around inside his head, off on a little journey of its own.

"Do you have a piece of mail with you that lists your name and address?"

I was thinking that he might have the November issue of his Mother Jones subscription concealed about his person, maybe with a mailing label affixed. Or maybe he'd used the pages to roll, like, the world's biggest spliff. I don't know. But anyway, he patted himself down, looking in vain for an electric bill, a cable bill, a gas bill....anything that might have indicated he lived in our city -- a city which is not Amsterdam -- and had utilities hooked up at that address.

"I can't find a thing," he admitted with a loopy grin. "I doan have a ninvellope, but I did used to have one of them cards."

The clerk exchanged a brief sidelong glance with the person who was checking out our books and movies. "If you have a driver's license with you, I can check to see if your library card is current. If it is, it will just be two dollars to get a new one."

The man started the laborious process of searching his pockets again. I couldn't help an unseemly interest in what he might turn out: a roach clip? A pipe? A packet of rolling papers? A rasta bonnet? A Bob Marley CD? "I know I have a driver's license," he said confidingly. "Because I drove here."

Then the two clerks and I all looked at each other. Because, dude. Smoky McReefer was in no shape to be driving anything.

He turned up his license and the clerk scrutinized it carefully. She clicked around on the computer's keyboard in that confident manner that I, a non-typing kind of person, find so admirable. "Well, uhm, Mr. Miller," she said with a bit of sternness in her voice. "You do have a current library card and I can issue you a new one for that two dollar fee I mentioned, but I'm afraid you won't be able to use it because you have a four hundred dollar fine."

The man began to laugh gently, rocking back and forth on his arms. "Oh, ahahahaha....that's right. Wooo! That's a big fine! Four hundred dollars! Guess I'm not gonna be borrowin' no movies," he said good-naturedly.

I stood there, stunned. My four dollar fine was wreaking havoc with my soul, yet here was someone who had a fine that was, well, I can't do that kind of math, so I don't know how many times bigger his fine was than mine, but I do have an awesome vocabulary, which just happens to include the word "significant": He owed a significant amount more than I did.

And yet there he was, giggling gently to himself. Now granted, he had just recently smoked about a bale of pot, so maybe the seriousness of the situation hadn't yet communicated itself to his foggy brain, but I was electrified.

"Four hundred dollars?" I whispered to my clerk, who was bagging our items for us.

"Oh, that's not such a huge fine," she said comfortably, tearing my receipt off the little printer. "We have patrons whose fines are much bigger than that."

"BIGGER THAN FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS?!?!" I yelped in a muffled shriek, taking the bag from the clerk and stuffing the receipt in my pants pocket, where I'd be sure to run it through the wash and render the return dates of the movies and the book illegible. Resulting in more fines, of course.

"I figure if we collect them all at once, we'll have enough to build a whole new wing -- a new library -- where the south parking lot is and stock it with shelves and shelves of new books," she said drily. "Your four dollars will help us achieve our goal!"

Il dolce libri

Today, I read one of the most exuberant and charming lines I think I have ever read in a book:

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and
flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them."

That bit of loveliness was taken from the semi-autobiographical novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden, written by Elizabeth von Arnim, who was actually the Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin, although she was born Mary Annette Beauchamp and nicknamed "May" by her family. Keeping all that in mind, you might understand why, in her first book and nineteen other novels, she simply published them with no name at all. All that dickering around with names would have left the poor exhausted woman with no time to write.

At any rate, that simple sentence, once read, rung in my head like a little golden bell, striking the kind of note that enchants and soothes my mind all at once. Or maybe that sentence was like a morsel of something so delicious, it had to be savored very slowly, each word a different level of flavor, layered together in a taste so complete, it was as good as a meal in itself, a meal for the eyes and the mind.

There are certain phrases in books that do that to me and make for a gorgeous bit of reading. It doesn't always have to come from a novel; I have found phrases that make me feel happy in the Divine Office, in Julia's cookbooks, in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, St. John Vianney. As far as serious writers go, I've found lines in J.D. Salinger (but not in The Catcher in the Rye, which is a book I simply do not like) and Shirley Jackson, although I've also found them in books by Maeve Binchy and J. K. Rowling. Agatha Christie treated me to several in her fabulous autobiography.

And then there were those childhood friends down in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee and Truman Capote; both of them have penned phrases that can wrench you so deep with beautiful pain that you almost have to lay your head down on the pages for a moment, just willing yourself to breathe, do Lord.

And of course, there are also children's books that have sublime bits, like Antoine de St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince and Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit. And Racketty-Packetty House by Frances Hodgson Burnett -- how I love that book. I know this may seem unkind, but it's hard for me to imagine that the same woman who wrote about the twee Cedric, the chirpy, curly-haired twit in Little Lord Fauntleroy, was the same person who sternly wrote in Racketty-Packetty House, "[Fairies] never call or leave their cards at a dolls' house where the dolls are proud or bad tempered. They are very particular. If you are conceited or ill-tempered yourself, you will never know a fairy as long as you live" and named the dolls things like Victoria Leopoldina and Aurelia Matilda. I can't resist it. It's so much fun, it makes me shiver every time I pick the book up.

Meelyn, who, don't get me wrong, can stick her face in front of a TV with the best of them, once said to me at around six years old, "What do people do who don't like to read?"

I've never really been around people who didn't like reading. My husband didn't read much for pleasure when we first got married because he said he had to read all day at work and was sick of it. But he gradually succumbed and now gets very nervous when he's down to the last thirty pages of his current book. He likes to have a new book sitting on his bedside table, ready and waiting for him.

My parents both read almost constantly, my mother carrying on with different books in different parts of the house: one by her seat in the family room, one in the living room by the fireplace, one at her bedside, one in the kitchen. I find this behavior slightly fickle and tell her that some day, those books will all find out about each other and cast off their bookmarks all at once.

My two grandmothers, the dearest companions of my childhood, both read a lot: When my Nanny died and my mother and I were wretchedly clearning her belongings out of her apartment, we were able to smile as we hauled about six boxes crammed with Harlequin romances out of her bedroom closet. My other grandmother, Ma, read everything she could get her hands on and then passed it on to me, although she begged me not to tell my mother that she'd let me read Shelley Winters's autobiography when I was about twelve, which not only included numerous uses of the eff word, but also detailed descriptions of Ms. Winters's smoldering affairs with several of Hollywood's Leading Men, including a snippet of information about Errol Flynn that intrigues me to this day. Ma hadn't been playing close attention when I asked her, "Can I borrow this book about this Shelley person?" She said yes, absentmindedly, and then her conscience smote her about two weeks later when I had long since finished the book, and she happened to remember just how racy it was.

So I don't know what people do who don't like to read. "Maybe they play a lot of solitaire," I said doubtfully to Meelyn. "Or crochet nine-patch afghans? Or join square-dancing clubs?"

I am so happy that I found a new beloved book today.