A book a day keeps the Mentalist away.

" She is too fond of books; & it has turned her brain. " Louisa May Alcott.

I came to books so young I don't even remember learning to read. I was enchanted that it was so easy to access another world ~ particularly during maths period. My left~brained, logical, linear thinking daughter is completely horrified by my right~brained celtic~knot thinking. It does her head in completely. She can't work out how I live inside my head. Nothing in there makes sense to her. When Ditz turns wicked she begins radom conversations with me, within Liddy's hearing, about imaginary friends in imaginary worlds as if both friends & worlds actually existed. Ditz, whose own world has to be very calm & ordered before she can sit quietly with a book & read. That may be but Ditz & I share a brain.

Nowhere is this discrepancy more obvious than in the "realism" genre. I read "realism" ~ as I would fiction; with a large pinch of salt, devouring biographies & archeology with copious amounts of coffee & chocolate. Liddy is grounded. She reads authors like Joan Lindgard's books on The Northern Irish conflict. I got bored after the first one. She read a whole trilogy about the racial conflict in South Africa. I managed a chapter or two. Liddy has a stack of missionary books I haven't even looked at because to my mind they are dull beyond belief. Left to my own devises I choose books like Portrait of a Marriage ~ Vita Sackville~West's most extraordinary relationship with Harold Nicolson [hardly suitable reading material for a teenager but I was, & am, charmed by Sissinghurst.] I was charmed enought to move on to all Nicolson's diaries, working my way steadily through a list of most peculiar authors: Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford & Oscar Wilde.

It is not only that in many ways my mind travels along similar paths as these authors, their sexuality aside, & of no interest to me in any way. It was only as I was listing them I was struck by that similarity & wondered what on earth that says about my reading choices! Ah, well. Between the pages of the books they wrote lies a world of excruciating beauty where language is used with exquisite precision & however wrong they may be they live passionate lives. They spoilt me forever for most modern novels, especially American novels that read like somebody's forgotten newspaper, dry as sawdust & moving predictably forward along a well~defined plot path to an inevitable end & a long yawn. I stopped reading when books stopped engaging me in a world of beauty & intrigue where anything at all might happen & one needed to be braver than one ever knew one could be just to climb out of bed in the morning.

Occasionally, very occasionally, an author comes along who again charms me with their exquisite use of language & their books I store carefully on my shelves to be read & re~read as good friends who have survived the passage of the years: Margaret Attwood, particularly The Handmaid's Tale; Helen Garner: Monkey Grip; Richard Llewellyn: How Green Was My Valley; Kate Llewellyn: The Waterlilly; Randolph Stowe: The Merry~go~Round in the Sea; anything by Rumour Godden. Stowe, Llewellyn, Wilde were poets as well as novelists & it shows in their writing. There is an enviable flow, a lightness of touch, scintillating use of metaphor & simile. I devour their books like a starving man who hasn't seen a square meal in months. I savour phrases for weeks. I roll images round my mind for months. Years later I will catch a glimpse & instantly recognise something read but not fully understood until that moment.

Liddy is more than a little horrified by the books she finds on my shelves, even given that her mother majored in Literature at university.

"But why on earth would you want to read that?" Of Monkey Grip [about heroin addiction & full of foul language]. Of Randolph Stowe [about the mental devastation left by WWII ~ amongst other things]. Of The Waterlilly [about adultery & gardening; & a white garden at that.]

For lines like this: clear, simple, direct & conveying so much more than the words.

"Now a waterlily has appeared in the front yard. Was it an omen? Standing by the pond, the man I went to the city to see said in his usual laconic manner, " You have a waterlily coming." There it was, half hidden by ivy..."

Books are not about plot & story~lines. I care little for such things. I care a great deal about beauty. I like best those authors who with a word or two can deliver a crushing blow to my solar plexus & leave me gasping & winded by the sheer beauty of their imagery. What infuriates me more than anything is that so few Christian authors have even dipped a toe in this treacherous water, serving up insipidity & predictability with the inevitability of Armageddon. Where are the Christians who write with delicacy & precision, with passion, with that exquisite lightness of touch that can convey a whole world in a word or two? Who have mastered the art of being minimalist without becoming unintelligible? Wilde, who was a very naughty man indeed & not the sort of moral man one looks for in a mentor, taught me more about the purpose & meaning of Christianity in one short fairy tale [The Selfish Giant] than many far more moral & well~meaning writers who committed the unforgivable literary sin of being dull. And what is a girl to do when the worthy are so uninspiring & the inspiring so unworthy?