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[littlelotte]

Oh...my... http://community.livejournal.com/waitingtables/747671.html Some very amusing things in there, and testament to what working too much can do to a person.

I just finished Tam Lin! Oh how lovely, though I have to admit I was hoping for a less fantastical explanation after such a perfectly normal book...lol For those of you wondering, I did know the ballad previous to reading the book. I've loved the ballad since near the end of high school, actually, but never heard it put to music or anything. I've actually tried to find a particular version that a_treitell has spoken of on many occasions, but never to any success.

This book really reminded me so much of college...so much. I want Andrea (my roommate for the first two years) to read it and attest to that, too, actually. Near the end, with their Halloween ghost hunt, I was reminded of the ghost in our freshman dorm room--sixth floor Harvey (my personal, two-person, equivalent to fourth floor Ericson, though Jo did live by herself in the suite attached, so it was practically a three-person affair ;-))--and the subsequent informational search we went on. Andrea, Jo, and I spent an entire rainy Saturday in Waldo Library looking through microfiche from the time period that seemed most likely from Andrea's descriptions of having actually seen him on an occasion. We found nothing, and then Jo discovered East Campus and the archives in East Hall thanks to her Speech Path classes (I didn't discover the archives until my historical archaeo class my third year--and by then I had really forgotten the whole thing...I completely forgot about it until I read this book, actually). The best we came up with was a gas leak in our hall back around the seventies, but we had no idea if our floor was a male floor that year, or if the entire hall might have been all-male, and we didn't exactly come up with any actual deaths, either.

I really want to reminisce some more (maybe I'll call Andrea later--I haven't talked to her in quite a while), but I really have to accomplish stuff now.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I finished that book and wasn't sure what I thought of it, but I knew I liked it. I'm not thrilled with how she ends books-- she's a very good writer to be reading, but the endings are a little sudden. I liked Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary better, though, perhaps because it made me a little less envious. I didn't have that college experience. I don't have it in grad school.
When I reread Juniper, I kept thinking, "I don't want to be these characters. I want to be these characters' friends. I want the ensemble." I want my children to have the childhood her characters do, filled with words and casual literacy, if that makes sense. Maybe I'm growing up in that I no longer see it for myself, but I can imagine it for the next generation.
She has a Livejournal, too, pameladean.

[littlelotte.livejournal.com]

The ending was definitely rather sudden. The first year was so leisurely laid out before you, and then everything just flew from there--though that's kind of how my memory on college works, actually. I remember the first year in great detail and the rest in little pieces. It worked, and I saw it coming, but it still just kind of hits you.

I think it would be very easy for your kids to have that sort of childhood just because of who you are and how much you love books and words. You would encourage imagination and childlike adventure. To an extent, it seems like you had at least a trace of it for yourself--anybody who loves books as much as we do, and loved them so much when young--also as we did, couldn't help but have at least a trace of it.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

It's not the books that do it, it's the friends. Dean's books are sort of like watching little kids in fandom; they're a little more casual about it because they grew up with it. Juniper et al is Tam Lin's second generation. It's not a thing you can really arrange except by being one of the people around the target children.

Wow, I've really been big on my SFF writerpeople lately.