A Good Read—And Ingredients for i-Rumination to Boot

Yes, I know, the common myth about librarians is that all they do all day is read books. In fact, there's very little I've read for pure pleasure in many years. And not even much for professional reasons. Much of substance in that world is in the form of articles and book chapters. I will exclude from my list all the children's and juvenile audience books I've read to or in parallel with my kids. Sure, some have been diverting, well-written, and thought-provoking, but they are in a different class. What I have read for an adult audience are by authors I can name on one hand—four fingers on one hand, no less. Accept this posting as a brief reader's advisory before I get to my main point. If you know me, it's what I do; fly off on tangents a bit before returning to the flight plan.

The first author is Jan Karon. I picked up a book a friend was reading more than a decade ago and started leafing through it on a whim. The narrative about a small-town, Episcopal rector in New England instantly caught my attention and the friend graciously let me borrow it. At Home in Mitford showed what a effective author could do with the idea of life and faith. A more recent volume from Karon, Light from Heaven which is based on the same characters, came across my desk within the few years which I absorbed with as much relish as for the first book.

The second author is Stephen Lawhead. Though one national bookstore classifies his book as young adult literature, Lawhead's Dragon King Trilogy was enticing enough for me to purchase the entire collection in one—the first fiction book I bought in decades. Passed on from a church friend as good reading about faith and chivalry from his younger days, I bought it to read to my kids and ended up finishing it myself staying up nights like I did in years long passed.

The next author, Alexander McCall Smith, came as a recommendation from Landman Library's circulation librarian when she heard me comment about enjoying Light from Heaven. She rightly believed I would enjoy the details of life in another place—in this case, Scotland. In my middle age, I guess my tastes have turned more toward traditional values, though, so I didn't enjoy Friends, Lovers, Chocolate as much as I might have without Isabel Dalhousie's ostensible preoccupation with non-marital amour.

I've just finished reading a second book from fourth author, Jason Fforde. The first of his books, The Fourth Bear, I read on a trip to China last year. It turns out that book was the second in the series. As I write in the middle of a camping vacation, I've just closed The Big Over Easy, the first book in the series. Okay, his characters are not without their own share of vices, but the creativity of his Nursery Crimes Division series more than compensated.

What I enjoyed about this series is Fforde's take on a fictitious Reading, England, world where nursery rhyme characters co-exist with a very modern and human world. Fforde does a delightful job of assimilating Mother Goose's characters with other mythical creatures—how about Prometheus—in two mystery books featuring Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and Detective Sergeant Mary Mary. In The Big Over Easy, the reader learns that Jack is also (without his awareness, even) he of giant-killer fame. In actuality, three of the four were just unusually tall. He eats de-fatted bacon sandwiches and doesn't disclose to his second, human wife (his first died from eating no lean) that he himself is a nursery character until the second book, fearing her rejection of him. Fforde manages to recall the tauntings DS Mary received as a child for being contrary and successfully kills off Humpty Dumpty and Wee Willie Winkie naming adult OCD pig thief Tom Thomm and retired masher Giorgio Porgia among the suspects.

Riding on the bus, The Big Over Easy was the stimulus for a conversation about changing cultural interests. Seatmate Margaret was on her way to visit her son's family when she took interest in my reading. What she couldn't help observing is how unlikely it seemed that children of her grandchild's age would even knew anything about the nursery rhymes of old. I myself realized that I had little reason to refer to Little Jack Horner or the Four and Twenty Blackbirds in conversations with my 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. I and my wife are more likely to refer to the king and knights of the Dragon King series and anyone from the Star Wars universe than Mother Goose's alternate reality. The books we read to my kids were more contemporary classics by Stan and Jan Berenstain, Cynthia Rylant, and Donald Crews.

Perhaps to the credit of my wife and me, we try to elaborate with my kids about anything that comes up in the news or in conversations or in information we want to share from our reading. So we talked about franchising when Rita's Water Ice got bought out and about nuclear non-proliferation when we drove by a display rocket. What I mean to say is that we talk about everything including Mother Goose if it's relevant.

I observed to Margaret that college students that I've spoken to have a way of knowing about a lot that predates them, such as rock and movies of the 70s and 80s. Those bits of entertainment form the backdrop of their lives in part because of what their parents knew and because of what they can still readily hear and see themselves. In the days before parents could put their kids in front of Saturday morning cartoons or DVDs collections, they would be reading children's classics of their day such as Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm.

This made me think about my job as an academic librarian. In Arcadia's Education Department students can take courses in children's literature that could very well detail works in earlier collections by earlier authors. Though the Sciences Librarian, I can easily be taking library research questions that look at Mother Goose and the place of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. The job of a librarian is to help bridge the gap between users' experiences and what they need to know. Will all young students learn about those characters and themes? No, but those that choose to learn, I'll be around to help.