Simple pleasures... and books

I'm back to reading Dr. Robin R. Meyers' book, Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday 1998, ISBN 0-385-48954-4). His third chapter begins:

Children's books are now edible. This is a fairly recent development, and a very sensible one. With cardboard pages and rounded edges, these board books (or chunky books, as they're called) can be gnawed on and slobbered over in lieu of actually being read. It occurs to me that this is not only a good idea for babies, but the perfect analogy for the importance of reading in life--long after the impulse to cut teeth has faded. Because no matter what our age, we ought never to stop eating books, for books are the feast of the imagination (p.27).

I've had a long love affair with books, and for the past eight years, I've kept a list of the ones I have read. Each year I go through my list to name my own "book of the year," usually a book that has moved me or stretched me in unexpected directions, or has stuck in my brain for one reason or another. Here are the last eight "books of the year," just in case you're looking for something to read during these long, dark winter nights:

2002 Rush Home Road, a fabulous story by Lori Lansens, an amazing Canadian writer. The final scene of the book is my favourite picture of heaven, ever.

2003 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helen Hanff. A book about book lovers writing letters. It didn't disappoint!

2004 Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. Some of her beautiful images and ideas stay with me yet. Had I kept my book list in 2000, I suspect her The Poisonwood Bible would have been my book that year.

2005 Stepping Lightly: Simplicity for People and the Planet by Mark A. Burch. Most of my reading consists of library books, but this one I own by necessity, as I return to it again and again.

2006 The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It was recently made into a movie that somehow, I can't bring myself to watch. Hollywood has ways of messing up a really good book (except for The Lord of the Rings, but that's another story for another day.)

2007 Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life. Have I sung Dr. Robin Meyers' praises enough yet?

2008 Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. A favourite among my favourites, and a children's book to boot. If you're looking for the perfect Christmas present for an eight year old girl, or the mom of an eight year old girl, this is it. It will be the subject of a future moodling, I suspect.

2009 The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. An unexpectedly moving story, recommended to me by my eldest daughter.

I won't supply publishers or ISBNs for any of these, as I'm sure they can be found through libraries or the internet, and I only keep track of authors and titles on my book list. Last week, while my youngest had the flu, we read The Enormous Egg (by Oliver Butterworth) together, and I relived my childhood a little. There are so many books that I would love to share with my girls, but for memory loss -- why didn't I start my book list when I was younger? For example, today the name Mrs. Medlock came unbidden into my head, and I couldn't place it. Of course, she is the head housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, another magical book. And Julia discovered The Hundred Dresses (a fantastic little story about bullying written by Eleanor Estes in 1944) without my recommendation. I'm racking my brain for a book about a little Jewish girl that I absolutely loved, but that's the extent of my clues on that one. If you have any recollections in that regard, please let me know.

I've always preferred reading to TV and movies, especially when violence is part of the story. I never understood why that was until I read Robin Meyers' explanation further on in his chapter on books:

... by far the most important thing that books provide us is the best means for developing the most vital human faculty: the imagination. Words can describe, but it takes a reader to conjure up images, to shape them, and, if necessary, to censor them. Our children are committing too many physical crimes these days because too many visual crimes have been committed against them. Graphic images of violence are being hung in the gallery of their minds without first being checked at the door. The people who bring us "special effects" have a moral responsibility not to "burn" such things into psychic places that were meant to stay green.

Unlike the visual arts, books leave us humanely in charge of that process by which images move from type to flesh. Sadly, our society mocks this process with the pejorative phrase, "It's only your imagination." But what else can save us, if not this silent essential transportation of the soul? Most human cruelty would be eliminated if people had the capacity to imagine. As a prerequisite to empathy, imagination makes kindness possible by allowing us to inhabit the skins we weren't born in. Lack of imagination, on the other hand, makes the inflicting of pain, in all its forms, possible...." (pp. 31-32)

So here's my own little tribute to the compassion that comes from the imagination awakened by books, borrowing a lot of words from one of my favourites. Here's to many feasts of the imagination, including the one my husband is having at the moment as he plows through the second half of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

And while I'm at it, I'll put in a plug for local libraries rather than buying books. Books are like great scenery or live music -- they're meant to be shared, not hoarded.

Favourite book of 2010? The jury is still out, but I suspect my favourite will be A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller. A quirky, funny, challenging little book that makes me want to be a better person. Then again, I'm reading Robin R. Meyers' latest work, and it may steal first place... but that's another moodling for another day.

The one who dies with the most toys... has missed the point

Honestly, there should be a moratorium on stuffed animals in this world. The reason I say this is because my children, like most North American kids, have each been given more stuffies than any single child could love, enough to supply a village of kids in the developing world. Lately, when I walk into Julia's room, I've been tripping over animals. She's gathered a group of bears, ponies, kittens, puppies, seals, owls, and various and sundry others onto her bed, and they inevitably overflow onto the floor for me to step on and curse in the dark.

At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul where I volunteer on Thursdays, it isn't much better. We have a tiny space where we display necessities for our clients, and one big shelf and two fairly large bins are always full of cuddly critters, with another special bin of soft little characters whose eyes and noses won't come off to choke baby. One of our homeless ladies always takes a large teddy bear if she can; maybe it keeps her warm? In our small storage area upstairs, there are bags and bags of stuffed animals tucked in with all sorts of other toys that have been donated by families whose children have outgrown them.

When you really think about how many toys the average child has these days, it seems pretty ridiculous in comparison to how many toys my mom had, or even how much I grew up with. Today's parents have been sold a huge bill of goods by toy manufacturers who have convinced us that, in order to develop properly, children need objects to stimulate their intellects, imaginations, and physical abilities. And I'm as guilty of buying too many toys as the next parent.

My least favourite toy purchase? The little "kitchen" we bought when Christina was three and Suzanna just a baby. I look at it now and recognize that, though I had two little girls (and one more to come) who would get a lot of use out of it, really, I bought it for myself. As a child, I always wished for a toy kitchen like that because some of my friends had them, but my family couldn't afford such things. But my girls wouldn't be so deprived! Of course, their pink plastic toy (that now gathers dust in the corner of the basement) didn't offer as much play value as the cardboard kitchen creation my sisters and I built out of a packing box. And ours was biodegradable!

The reason I'm thinking about toys today is because of a few email exchanges with a friend. She and her family returned just last weekend from eight months in Ghana, and are finding, after living with just the basics in Accra, that their home here is more cluttered than they would like. They would prefer to live more with less stuff. And it's no wonder -- while there, her kids played the way kids without storebought toys play -- happily, with their friends and their imaginations. A less cluttered life leaves more room for creativity, it seems. Sometimes I wonder if the reason so many kids these days complain of boredom is because toy manufacturers leave so little to the imagination. Maybe it's because some kids have so many toys, they have to spend a lot of time keeping them in order? Or too much stuff leaves no room to play?

My favourite toy purchase? The one that's had the most staying power -- those little Danish snap-together blocks that can be "a new toy every day." But even with them, you can't pick up a jumble of assorted Legos anymore unless you go to a garage sale as soon as it opens -- now the company sells sets so you can build a specific item. Fortunately for us, our girls have never bothered with building to the manufacturer's specifications, choosing instead to use their jumbled-together kits to create incredibly intricate homes for little Lego people, or structures that use every single block and look like temples from another world.

What's most telling about the most and least favourite toys I've mentioned is that, at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, we can't keep things like Legos in stock. Creative toys are usually the first to go, long before highly manufactured items like pink plastic play kitchens. As far as I can tell, the bumper sticker that proclaims as winner the one who "collects the most toys" misses the point altogether. The winner is the one who has the most fun using his or her imagination. And biodegradable is always better, too!