Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children: It's All about Timing

Readers may be as tired of hearing about my move as I am of the process itself, but the ongoing experience of unpacking and the discovery that results has provided opportunity to muse on certain life concepts. The biggest challenge centers first on what to keep, what to give or throw away; now, though, I am making decisions about what to leave stored in boxes and what to place within reach. I came across a Pampered Chef ice shaver I've had for years and used just once--just in time to entertain my grandsons who are visiting for the week.

Now that I have a few sets of book shelves installed in what can still be called "the box room," I have made the hard decisions about which books earn a spot. Do I shelve the ones I have read and loved, the ones to which I return as references, or the ones I hope to read next? I did a little of all three.

As I finished one book and selected another, in this case for a trip to the beach, I came across Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, a book that I've owned since its publication. I came across it at the NCTE annual convention, where I often discovered good books. I'll confess, I judged the book by its cover. I was drawn to the old black and white photograph of the little girl who, on close observation, appears to be levitating.

The book starts far from the home mentioned in the title, as Jacob, sixteen-year-old boy, responds to a frantic call from his grandfather and finds him in the woods behind his house the victim of a deadly attack. In the aftermath, Jacob suffers from nightmares and spends time with a counselor.  Going through his grandfather's collection of letters and photographs, he is drawn to visit the English island where the man had been sent as a boy escaping the Nazis.

Once he and his father reach the isolated island, he finds himself moving back and forth in time, meeting all the "peculiar" children who lived in the home with his grandfather before the man chose to leave to fight against the German forces in WWII. At this point, author Ransom Riggs moves back and forth between realism and fantasy as Jacob is drawn into the challenge facing the children who have been living and reliving the same day the island was bombed by Nazi forces.

The conclusion begs for a sequel, and since I waited to read the book, I don't have to wait for the sequel to be written. I particularly look forward to the photographs, which I learned at the end of the book, are real photographs from several collections. My first instinct is to start looking for this kind of photos at antique stores. But then I'd have to find somewhere to store them.

Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children: It's All about Timing

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
--Anna Quindlen

Sometimes my different blogging venues experience some crossover. Over at the Alabama Tar Heel, I'm "hosting" an online book club this year, reading through Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, month by month.  This month she focuses on marriage, a Valentine's tribute I imagine.  But one thing struck me: she said that since she had started her research on happiness, she had accumulated lots of books on marriage and relationships. Her husband Jamie remarked that people who saw their bookshelves would think they were having marital trouble.

That made me wonder what anyone would gather by looking at my book collections.  As I shared over at that site, I have a disproportionate number of books on reducing clutter. And they haven't worked.  But since I love to organize my books--my own special blend of Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress method, and indie bookstore, I found I had pockets of related books too. Especially as I started packing up and trying to prioritize which books I'd keep within reach and which I'd want to unpack first, found interesting groupings. 

I have a huge number of poetry collections and chapbooks, particularly by North Carolina poets and my friends from my poetry network. I also have lots of books of Southern humor and lots of books on the Holocaust. Among my books of music and about music, I have so many different hymn books (including Christian Hymns No. 2, in which "Trust and Obey" was song no. 2. (You're much younger than me if you didn't know that but you know 728b.)

Tomorrow the moving van will pull into the driveway in our home in Nashville. I dread the unpacking, especially since I know the movers packed up our dirty bath towels when we weren't looking. The biggest challenge, though, will be what to do with my books--all those books--because this house doesn't have the walls of bookshelves--yet.

The Downside to Loving Books

Here we go again: Packing boxes with everything we own, this time to move to Nashville, Tennessee, where we will live less than ten minutes from our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren! As with every move I've ever made, the hardest part is packing the books. At least they fit into boxes well, but I spend far too much time putting them together by my odd categories. I'm even trying to weed out books I might take to the used book store. After trying to read a mass market paperback copy of Michener's The Source, I realize my eyes can't read that small print anymore.

I'm also farming out books I love to friends who haven't read them yet. The odds of getting the books back some day are higher--with the added benefit of seeing my friends here in North Carolina again. I also have books set aside for some of my favorite Young Adult readers. (Some are actually young adults themselves!)

I've come across several books that are worn either from re-reading or from teaching over and over. In the photo here I feature my copy of The Prince of Tides, which may be tattered in part because my sister threw it across the room when she read it.  the middle copy is John Knowles' A Separate Peace, which I taught over and over (even though I learned that if I showed the film I should stop it before they start singing their song about Hitler's genitalia over and over and over). At the bottom, also rubber banded is Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. I have a hardback first edition, signed by the author, but this is the paperback I used to teach the book in AP English for years. When I bought the paperback it was packaged with a "soundtrack to the book," long before the movie, by Tim O'Briens, John Herrmann, and Dirk Powell.

I've also had occasion to recommend books I've loved to friends who missed them the first go around: Stout's Olive Kitteridge and Wroblewski's  The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  To be honest, if I had time, I'd re-read them myself. Even some of my old classics have beckoned: Watership Down  and The Once and Future King.

But I don't have much time to read right now. I'm packing.

The Downside to Loving Books