Sad news - Madeleine L'Engle died last week, age 88 (which doesn't seem that old to me). I missed the news until I saw it on Susan Wittig Albert's blog this morning. A Wrinkle in Time has been one of my favorite books since grade school or junior high. I read her other Austin and O'Keefe books, but Wrinkle was the one that I read over and over, until my copy fell apart. (Many Waters didn't do a lot for me, and the nuclear war part of Swiftly Tilting Planet creeped me out a bit. Blame it on watching The Day After when it was on TV years ago.)
Anyhoo. Wrinkle is one of those books that I periodically re-read, usually whenever I come across one of the two or three copies I own. It's the book version of comfort food for me, I guess. I identified somewhat with Meg when I was in junior high, being one of the smarter kids in my grade, plus the glasses that I'd had since 2nd grade. I think I may still feel a bit Meg-like, because I still have the feeling that I don't quite fit in anywhere. It still surprises me that it's on the ALA's Top 100 Banned Books list; I'd go the other way and probably want it on the require-reading lists, but then I'm not typical, am I.
Although, if you love or even just like the book, don't bother with Disney's television adaptation from 2003. It's crap, plain and simple. I watched it out of morbid curiosity, but it managed to suck all the good parts out of the book and replace them with dreck. And I say this as someone who started watching the X-Men cartoon just because Chris Potter was doing the voice for Gambit. His appearance in this movie didn't save it.
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Other notes:
White vinegar will get tea stains out of Burrito's clothes.
Proof that my taste in music is eclectic, to say the least: I went to the big fall sale that the Friends of the Library had this weekend and came home with
^ The Sounds of Nova Scotia volume 2 (Canadian artists)
^ Songs of the Sea (more Atlantic Canadians)
^ two CDs of chanting monks - the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos & another group
^ Andy Griffith
^ an NPR jazz compilation
^ Lee Roy Parnell's greatest hits
Ended up wearing jeans to the play (Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming, by the way - pretty good, lots of hilarity). It was a matinee with lots of kids in attendance, so jeans weren't out of place as it turned out.
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