"A gentleman asked me what beauty meant to my mind. I must confess I was puzzled at first. But after a minute I answered that beauty was a form of goodness -- and he went away."

I picked this book up expecting struggle and hard-won triumphs, and a glimpse into a world populated by scent and vibration rather than sight and sound.

What I got was a book which L.M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) might have written if she had no sense of character and plot. Helen Keller made some outstanding strides in her life -- she learned not only to communicate with the world, but to do so with signs, lip-reading and different kinds of Braile, and also learned to read several languages -- but she was not a good writer. Most of her imagery, rather than being a genuine expression of how she "saw" the world, was drawn from what she read, and much of the book uses color imagery, lighting effects and descriptions of scenery to tell the story. I did find this notable, but ultimately disappointing, exception:

Sometimes, however, I go rowing without the rudder. It is fun to try to steer by the scent of watergrasses and lilies, and of bushes that grow on the shore. I use oars with leather bands, which keep them in position on the oarlocks, and I know by the resistance of the water when the oars are evenly poised. In the same manner I can also tell when I am pulling against the current. I like to contend with wind and wave. What is more exhilarating than to make your staunch little boat, obedient to your will and muscle, go skimming lightly over glistening, tilting waves...

Dammit, what does "glistening" mean to her? She lost her sight before she was two years old. Does she still remember it?

Keller wrote the book while she was still in college, and a lot of it consists of glowing accounts of the books she's read, understandable for someone who's led the ultimate sheltered life, but not very interesting. If the book had been written today, it would be in conjunction with a skilled ghost writer who would be able to dredge Keller's brain and come up with a story that really reflects what it is to be blind and deaf in a sighted, hearing world.

However, just when I was fed up with the whole thing, I got to the end of the book and found the section reprinting Keller's letters. These go back to her earliest days of letter writing, and span from when she was only able to use nouns and very simple verbs to her eventual flawless grasp of grammar and punctuation. The real story is told in these letters, and they are everything I hoped the book would be. (But I think it's still useful to read the book, in order to get a sense of the events and people that the letters discuss, and at 106 pages it's not really a hardship.)

"Thank goodness Helen Keller existed," said my fella warmly. "Because without her, we would have no Helen Keller jokes."

Weighing in at 310 pages (and that's not including the footnotes and index, ladies), The Uses of Enchantment is a comprehensive and scholarly work that explains the underlying meanings of fairy tales based on the teachings of Freud. It enjoys generalizations about childhood, specific real-life examples and long walks in Vienna.

And in this corner...
Heavy Words, Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, by Chris Roberts

Without the index, this bantam weight clocks in at 185 pages. Heavy Words is an explanation of the origin of popular nursery rhymes. It enjoys rhyming slang, snide commentary on modern British celebrities, and endless deconstructions of the British monarchy for the past several hundred years.

ROUND ONE
Heavy Words jumps in with an analysis of "Little Jack Horner." It's a swing and a miss for Heavy Words. Is this rhyme about a stolen deed of land? A rightful inheritance? Heavy Words is unsure.

Uses responds with a clear explanation about why it's useful to study fairy tales, providing a key to the book to follow. It's a solid clout to the jaw from Uses; Heavy Words is down for the count.

ROUND TWO
Heavy Words is rocketing all over the place now. The audience is frequently referencing the English-to-American slang index at the back of the book, but still sees no real point to most of the catty asides that Heavy Words throws into the mix. Meanwhile, every nursery rhyme in Heavy Words seems to be about a monarch named James, Mary or Henry, and Heavy Words is flailing around trying to explain which goddamn James, Mary or Henry it is. Why do we care? No one is sure.

Meanwhile, Uses continues an effective policy of solid one-two jabs to the face, explaining why and how each fairy tale is relevant to the reader's life. Heavy Words is thrown to the mat and stays down.

ROUND THREE
Uses has succeeded in returning fairy tales to the reader with something extra added: now we can appreciate them both as the children we were and the adults we are. Whether or not you're a fan of Freud, Bettelheim's observations are often spot-on. The evil stepmother, for example, represents our mother when we're mad at her, the mother who makes us eat our greens or won't let us play outside after dark. When the story's hero wins through, defeating the evil stepmother, we feel like we've gotten even with our own mother and can forgive her. A useful way for a child to make sense of the world.

While this goes on, Heavy Words is in the corner of the ring, head in a bucket of ice. The simple fact is that nursery rhymes aren't as rich with meaning as fairy tales. However, that doesn't excuse the many, many chapters where Heavy Words provides several possible explanations for a rhyme, then sort of shrugs its shoulders and admits it doesn't know which is right. Shoddy scholarship, Words.

And the winner is...
The Uses of Enchantment. Obviously.

Heavy Words, Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, by Chris Roberts, dealing with where nursery rhymes come from.

Helen Keller: The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller, telling how she learned to communicate with the world.

Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, by Daniel Tammet, telling how he communicates with the world.

A Writer's San Francisco, by Eric Maisel and Paul Madonna, subject rather obvious (but I bought it for the Madonna illustrations, I swear).

Warmly Inscribed: The New England Forger and Other Book Tales, by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, re-telling facts and legends about libraries and forgers.

Books, writing, communication. Thank goodness I've got sailors' journals from the nineteenth century on hold at the library or I really would be in a rut.

July 7: Y: The Last Man, Volume 10

The final volume of Brian Vaughan's popular graphic novel series comes out in July. If you're keeping up with this issue-by-issue then you already know the answers to the series' questions: what killed all the men? What happened to Yorick's Beth? Who will he wind up with? Is humanity going to recover? I'm reading the series by volume, rather than issue, and cannot wait to find out.

July 14: Jhegaala

Steven Brust's fantasy books about a young assassin and his jhereg (kind of a reptile/bird) have been keeping me on the edge of my seat since I was knee-high to a Dzur lord. The world is complex and original, the assassin is sharp-tongued and quick-witted, the jhereg is sassy and the stories are always surprising. I am doing a little dance in preparation for the latest installment.

August 4: Breaking Dawn

The last book in the much-touted Twilight series comes out in August. Will Edward make Bella a vampire? Will Jacob bond with the irritating wolf girl? (Well, duh.) Will Edward and Bella finally do it already? Will Bella's self-esteem develop to normal human levels, and will she then tell both her supernatural dudes to take a hike and walk off into the sunset with nice, normal Mike? No one but Stephanie Meyer knows.

Second, I now discover that Salinger published a story which I have never read and cannot get at. Called Hapworth 16, 1924, it's a Seymour Glass story and I am drooling giant puddles on my desk in my desire to read it. It is currently difficult, if not impossible, to find, but rumour has it the story will be re-released in January of 2009, though Salinger has changed his mind on this before and may do so again.

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is also alive (I think they mentioned this at the end of Capote, but I guess I missed it). Both Lee and Salinger wrote some of the best fiction ever produced in the English language, then stopped publishing for years and years and years. But they're still here! Lee could still write another To Kill a Mockingbird. Salinger could tell us more about the Family Glass.

I don't know. I'm so used to the frustration of reading dead authors. That two of my favorite authors of all time are still alive makes me feel the world is a very promising place.

"Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was a child..."

This is one of the worst books I've ever read. I picked it up at a library sale for a quarter, and thought it was one of those finds of the century that one does occasionally discover at sales of this kind. Finding a quirky book from a notable children's author (Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz and sundry other Oz books) is like finding a live album recorded in a tiny bar in Memphis by the hugest band you've ever loved. Quite possibly you are the only person in the world who owns this album. Your cool points become astronomical. Paying only a quarter for it is just the cherry.

Unfortunately, the quality of the narrative is piss-poor in this book. The story is just a catalog of all the happy woodland immortals who love Santa Claus from his early boyhood. There is no conflict, no plot, and very little character detail. This is a ninety-eight page weakling of a book, and even at that short length I could not force myself to finish it.

I'd love to see the story of Santa Claus in the hands of a sharp-voiced re-teller of legends like Gregory Maguire, who wrote Wicked. In the hands of Baum it becomes something so cloying that I would not recommend it for even the dullest idiot child.

However, I will totally keep it. Because it's still an awesome find.

Nina Balatka, by Anthony Trollope

"Nina Balatka was a maiden of Prague, born of Christian parents, and herself a Christian -- but she loved a Jew; and this is her story."

Irritated by the reading public's habit of choosing books based on the fame of the authors, Trollope published this anonymously, trying to disguise his style with a Prague setting and slightly more formal prose.

But not even Trollope could disguise Trollope. Only he could put an all-consuming world-class love affair into the hands of such charmingly ordinary protagonists. Starving to death and almost alone in the world, Nina Balatka struggles with issues bigger than she is, but Trollope never lets the narrative sink under the weight of her problems. Even in the depths of agony over the perfidy of her lover, Nina can still be delighted by the gift of used stockings from her friend. She is pleasingly real.

Read this if you've read other Trollope novels and liked them, or if you were exasperated by the melodrama of Anna Karenina.

Zinsser's job was to take great works of fiction and make them succinct works of fiction, shortening the classics into bite-sized bits for the Condensed series. I can't imagine what that would do to you. To spend your life knocking the heavy-breathing landscape descriptions out of a Lawrence novel, or the light-loafered witticisms from Wilde -- that has to be bad for your soul. Right?

Well, according to his son, "He believed ardently in the Digest's populist mission of making well-written books with strong stories and interesting characters available to people who might not otherwise be readers." I think the other name for people who do that job is "movie producer."

It's funny: this process makes literary snobs shudder in horror, but its their fault, really. When you hold up a book as an example of something everyone must read in order to be considered educated or cultured or even just human, you're putting more pressure on it than any book can handle. People who are unmoved by it still feel compelled to read it, and then you find yourself with the Readers Digest books clotting the shelves.

When are we going to admit that some people are deeply stirred by Shakespeare and some people prefer Tolkein? And some people just don't like to read at all, and that's okay too. Let's give each other a break, already.

Meanwhile, a moment of silence for a guy who did his best to fall in line with the demands of a cultureless society wanting desperately to class itself up.

When he retired in 1987, he told Publishers Weekly, "I do wish that all the books weren't so long and getting longer," adding that "the days of a good story told in a reasonable number of pages — like 'Cry, the Beloved Country' in 283; 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in 296 — seem gone."

Zinsser reportedly died of a heart attack. There is no word yet as to whether this was caused by an attempt to condense David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

I enjoyed the book, as I always do when I read bestsellers -- they're selling for a reason, after all. Like most NY Times list books I've read, this one was easy to read, with a well-paced plot and simple prose, offering up a few ideas that were clearly stated and repeated in different ways throughout the text. It wasn't a stupid book by any means, but also not a hard book. It took me somewhere else for a few hours, and when I came back I didn't feel overtaxed or like I'd been materially changed. So that was fine.

I don't always want to read books that leave me disaffected, but sometimes it's nice to have the option. I started wondering what else was out there, so for the first time in my life I actually read the NY Times list and learned a few things.

First of all, Ron Paul's manifesto, The Revolution, is at #5 on the hardcover nonfiction list. McCain, Obama and Clinton have all had their moments on the list, but then again, lots and lots of people voted for them. I'm tickled that people are happy to read Paul's ideas, probably nodding their heads the whole way, but won't vote for him.

Laura and Jenna Bush have a kid's book at #1 on the children's list, which led me to the startling discovery that I didn't know the first lady's name. I knew Jenna was a daughter, but couldn't remember if Laura was another daughter or what. I'm ashamed of this: she didn't impress me as the feminist cyclone that Hillary was, so I immediately ignored her. However, Laura was responsible for establishing the National Book Festival, which you'd think I would care about. (Upon closer reading, the Wiki page crows that this festival "invites over fifty published authors" to do their stuff. Over fifty! My goodness! It's like a little kid coming up to her mom on the beach and saying "Look, mom, I picked up over fifty grains of sand!" Wow.) More substantially, she was praised by Desmond Tutu in a recent speech for her efforts to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in Africa, and it is a big deal to be praised by this man.

I also found out that the children's list is a recent thing, prompted by the insane popularity of the Harry Potter series. Publishers of adult books were grumbling because the Potter books were knocking them down the main list, so the new list was created. Controversy ensued, as people questioned whether kids' books that are read by adults should be relegated to a kids-only list. In other words, are the Potter books literature, or are they the placeholders we give kids until they're old enough for literature? I don't have a position on this, but I think it's interesting that we tend to define literature by how elite it is. Books which appeal to a wide range of people -- adults and kids, men and women, blacks and whites -- have less chance of making it into the canon than books that appeal to a select few. Or so it seems to me.

And finally, which perhaps I should have mentioned first, my meandering research led me to discover that visitors to Orlando will soon be able to visit the Harry Potter amusement park: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (warning, plays music). Now not only can you see the movies, you can visit the theme park! Soon you won't have to read the blasted things at all!

I am totally going to the theme park, by the way.

"Not just books!" he would proclaim grandly in the all-hands meetings (and here, let it be understood, I am paraphrasing -- don't let the wholly inappropriate quotation marks fool you). "Not just music! By the time we are done, Amazon will be selling everything people need. We will be your one-stop shop on the internet for everything from lawn chairs to groceries, from diapers to caskets!"

Nearly ten years later, Bezos has made significant progress in his all-items all-the-time plot, but he's taking time out from that to return to the original idea: books. In this case, ebooks, in the form of the Kindle. Bezos's vision for the Kindle, he says, is "to make any book ever printed in any language available in less than 60 seconds."

Ambitious? Sure. But this probably won't be Bezos's Elba. (For one thing, it would be hard to fit into a palindrome.) For example, falling in line with Bezos's plan (as is best if you happen to be standing in his way), Simon & Schuster plans to release 5,000 more titles for the Kindle, bringing the total number of S&S Kindle titles up to 130,000. It's not all books everywhere, but it's a decent start.

Meanwhile, denizens of the book industry are googly eyed and freaked over this new destroyer of (publishing) worlds. I cannot speak to the rightness or wrongness of said wiggins, but I will say it won't affect my hard copy habits, just as the initial advent of Amazon didn't stop me from shopping at bookstores, it just stopped me from shopping at crappy mega-chain bookstores. When I one far-off day can afford a Kindle or similar device, it will definitely be my first choice for reading crap-slinging authors like Laurell K. Hamilton, but the Anne Patchetts and Anthony Trollopes of the world will always earn my hardcover, hard-copy dimes.

This is not my CEO.

I happened to be moving my friend that day, so a towel actually came in handy. Periodically I would dig it out of my bag and use it to mop my face, hoping someone would ask me why I was toting a lavender dishcloth around with me, but no one did. I guess Douglas was right: carrying a towel really is just common sense.

The following day, of course, was Memorial Day. In honor of my dad and all three of my grandfathers, all of whom fought in wars, may I suggest my most favorite war book to you:

The Things They Carried

In the stories collected here, Tim O'Brien uses his experiences in the Vietnam War as a jumping-off point for a series of memories/fantasies that shiver just on the edge of magical realism. They manage to stay on this side of the gap because O'Brien creates a convincing jungle of thick emotion- -- fear, hope, love, rage -- where the realities of war begin to seem as unreal as the legends and myths he weaves into the narrative. (If you are wondering, my dad enjoyed this, but said it didn't really reflect his experiences in Vietnam. Still a good book though.)

I've probably read Terri Windling's The Wood Wife twenty times since it was published in 1996, and obviously I love it. Windling's lyrical and imaginative descriptions of desert scenery and culture were the main reason I wanted to move there all through my impressionable teen years.

However.

Just once I would like to read a book where a wise, long-haired Native American makes his sweat lodge out of willow branches and lights the fire and plays the flute and listens for the spirit voices and then DOESN'T hear any mystical voices, and catches a cold from staying outside too long.

I just finished Stephanie Meyer's new book, The Host. It's your standard body-snatching alien fare, except that it's mostly told from the POV of one of the female body-snatching aliens. Meyer gets around the challenge of creating a totally foreign consciousness by explaining that once in the human body, aliens become mostly human.

"Mostly human" is a good way to describe Meyer's female characters, actually. They are without exception distinguished by an inclination to fall in love with men who think for them. And the men that these heroines love are invariably uber-competent. The centerpiece of their love affairs seems to be the woman's feeling of relief that she doesn't have to make decisions anymore, because X is so strong and good that he can do all that tedious thinking on her behalf. It's Lois Lane and Superman told over and over, except instead of being capable and curious and independent, Lois Lane in this case just sort of sits on the couch all the time waiting for Superman to do something cool.

As irritated as I am by these women, it took me a long time to notice the resemblance between Meyer's characters and the heroines of Anthony Trollope. Trollope was a nineteenth century English writer, like Dickens but with more romance and less satire. I love his stories for his realistic portrayal of people as neither all good nor all bad, and his creation of characters who are not unduly dramatic. (Not unlike me.) However, for all their realism, once his heroines fall in love they tend to abandon all responsibility for thinking and decision-making to the objects of their affections.

The difference, I think, is that Trollope's characters can snap out of it when snapping out of it is warranted. If the love interest proves to be unworthy, or makes a wrong decision, the heroine hesitates and frets and ultimately makes the right choice on her own. She wants to blindly follow his lead, but her good sense won't let her. For example, in Trollope's Nina Balatka, Nina's lover, Anton, asks her to search her father's things for something belonging to Anton. She is reluctant to spy on her father.

" 'Dear Anton,' she said, appealing to him weakly in her weakness, [Editor's note: heh.] 'if you did but know how I love you!'

'You must prove your love. [...] You must comply in everything with me.'"

However, Nina eventually refuses to spy on her father. (I haven't finished this one yet. Possibly she gets all spineless later. But as of page 132, she's doing well for herself.)

By contrast, Meyer's characters can't ever snap out of it, even when their Supermen start to get abusively controlling, or just plain physically abusive. In Eclipse, the third in the Twilight series, the heroine's vampire boyfriend refuses to "permit" her to see her best friend. When she still tries to see the friend, her boyfriend at various times locks her up, disables her car, and physically restrains her. In The Host, the heroine's lover smacks her around quite a bit. He does it because she's been body-snatched and he thinks she's not herself anymore. Regardless, he's hitting her and she's going on about how dreamy his eyes are when he's mad.

Ok, so why do I continue to read Meyer's books? For all that I think she's misguided when it comes to what is romantic and what calls for a restraining order, her characters do come to life for me and her stories move along at an exciting pace, and, well...Honestly? I'm just a big dumb dog for vampire books. There, I said it.

Read Stephanie Meyer's books if you want something to carry your brain off for an afternoon. If you're not into mindless fun, avoid them like the plague.

The book is a series of poems that Hughes wrote to Sylvia Plath, famous author and his wife, in the years after she killed herself, and they are lovely, mostly. Except each one takes a little piece of their lives together and crystallizes it and looks at it fondly from all angles and then ends in some variation of "that was a good day, and now you are dead." I haven't lost anyone close to me. Maybe this is how you react after a death -- specifically, a suicide -- re-examining every moment of what came before as you do after a breakup or betrayal. It gets exhausting. I have to read it in bits.

On top of this, I occasionally find his phrasing to be incomprehensible, which is probably because I managed to avoid taking any poetry courses in college except for the Romantics and never tackled Milton at all.

See, for example:

Stupid with confidence, in the playclothes

Of still growing, still reclining

In the cushioned palanquin,

The nursery care of nature's leisurely lift

Toward her fullness, we were careless

Of grave life, three of us, four, five, six --

Playing at friendship.

-Caryatids (2)

I get the gist, but the stuff at the beginning swamps me a little. But as I say, I am stupid about poetry.

Still, it holds my attention. I keep thinking "how nice to be immortalized by a Poet Laureate," forgetting that Plath immortalized herself. And perhaps I should be indignant on her behalf, that her estranged husband mined her madness and sadness to such good effect. But it seems to me that the personal stuff is irrelevant by now, and time has burned away their private betrayals from the art they left.

Which is not to say I will ever get over the shit that Abelard said to Heloise in their letters. Some guys you just can't forgive.

"The fair brings calligraphers, printers, bookbinders, book artists, and dealers together under one roof to display and sell their work," says the website. You can also take workshops on everything from creating your own books to marketing and selling your work.

This is not my book art.