The Baroque Cycle

Ah, holidays. Time to claim a little space of one's own, and sink into a good book. We're about to go on a long trip, which takes me back to the last long trip we made. Five years ago, we spent a couple of months pottering around Italy. I was still so shocked at the constant presence of my first baby, then eight months old, and so desperate for time alone, that I would wake automatically most nights at midnight, walk on the cold tiles through to the small loungeroom, and lie on the couch reading until 3 or 4 am in the morning, lost in the story and revelling in the blessed peace. Then I'd take myself back to bed, sleep for a few more hours, and get up to face the day.

Question: What books could impel me to dispense with infinitely precious sleep and keep me awake until the wee small hours? Answer: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

The Baroque Cycle consists of three enormous novels (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), or eight sub-books immersed within the whole, or almost 3,000 pages; in other words, a whole lot of reading. And the reading is thrilling.

The books chart the evolution of modern science through the antics of the Royal Society and the development of the calculus; the evolution of the modern money markets through German mines, London moneylenders, the development of futures markets, and the endemic tampering with coins; and the evolution of modern government through the power plays of the the rich and powerful. Incidentally, we read about the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and Christopher Wren's vision for a modern London; the Spanish Inquisition and slavery in the New World; Puritans and Barbary slave galleys; the many uses of the Tower of London; and the customs of mudlarks at Tyburn Cross.

It's an immense series, sprawling, endlessly fascinating, and hilariously funny. Stephenson is a natural storyteller with a terrific eye for character. The books are peopled with an enormous cast, real and imagined, yet each person is fully realised and developed. The linch pins are Half-cock Jack, the Vagabond hero, who creates mayhem and havoc wherever he goes; Daniel Waterhouse, Isaac Newton's College roommate, who provides regular insights into the Royal Society and the vicious dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the development of the calculus, as well as engaging in political intrigue; and Eliza, rescued by Jack from the Ottoman harem during the siege of Vienna, but slowly ascending to grace the French Court at Versailles. Meanwhile, dozens of major European figures in science, politics and architecture make their appearances in all their glorious eccentricity.

Stephenson writes about everyday aspects of Baroque life well - the collection of human urine to make phosphorus; people dropping of the Plague in crowded markets; the elaborate negotiations required for every monetary exchange, as the coinage changed so often and was compromised so regularly that currency was always negotiable; the terrible impact of kidney stones; the rampaging Press Gang; the dogs, rats and feces that filled the London streets; the use of feathers and whalebones to induce vomiting and balance out one's humours; the power of the elite over all aspects of human life; the society of coffee houses; the effects of smallpox and French pox - that the reader gains a rich, almost visceral, sense of daily life so many years ago.

The books are an education. Ideas which I had previously had no understanding of or interest in, such as the buying and selling of futures, were clearly explained; even some of the machinations of politicians and royals became intelligible. Yet interwoven into this crash course in history, science and politics are characters so vile, events so dramatic and conversations so hysterically funny that the reader is completely engaged from beginning to end. It is worth setting aside a year, or some very long holidays, to read them. They are absorbing, nourishing, and enormously entertaining.

While we were in Tuscany, we had the first two books with us. The third was released in London during our holiday; a friend purchased it there and brought it with him. I had a week in Venice to read it before he took off home again. It was the perfect location, as the city evoked so much of the story. I remember days and nights in 'our' apartment, curled in an old armchair overlooking a canal, completely immersed and interrupted only by excursions to the Venetian islands, glances at the medieval buildings opposite, and meandering walks through narrow alleys to the fish market, cheese shop and Doge's Palace. Happy days.

The daily round

Half a lifetime ago, long before I had any kids or had even met my husband, I picked up The Quotidian Mysteries, a slender book by Kathleen Norris. I was on an extended lazy holiday, and remember devouring the book in one gulp, along with a few too many coffees, deep in an armchair at a coffee shop as heavy rain pounded the footpath outside.

The book was a turning point. I had always thought of lives as measured by big projects: achievements, awards, titles, publications. And yet I was most of the way through a university course that I wasn't enjoying, working in administration which I never loved, and had no idea what to do next. According to my own ideals, my life was quickly becoming a failure or, at the very least, nothing to write home about.

Yet this little book suggested that every action, no matter how mundane or domestic, might have significance. Even the most repetitive tasks of running a household could be performed graciously, as the necessary and concrete acts which enable a household to function and bind its members together in love. We need to eat, to clean, to do the washing; this work is not mere drudgery to be escaped, but part of a daily ritual which includes work, play and worship. Even more, Norris suggested that we could perform these tasks attentively. We could watch for God's presence with us in even the most everyday tasks; we could perform them as an act of worship; we could use the mindlessness to achieve the meditative state into which God's voice might speak.

Housework and worship have much in common, she claims. They can both be tedious and boring, something to get through - and yet both affect us even when we perform them in the most perfunctory manner. They are both part of the daily round, particularly in monastic circles. And they both reflect serious commitment, the sort of commitment that one makes without understanding the depth of the promise. We have a baby without any concept of what is involved; we become Christian without understanding what will be required of us. Both work and worship, she argues, are about transformation, and transformation is only possible for humans in the daily round.

These ideas have stayed with me ever since, and sustained me through the neverending demands of parenting and housework. But after six years, I thought it was time to revisit the book, to take a refresher course so to speak.

What was interesting this time was to read it with three kids in the background, one still in nappies, toys all over the floor, laundry on the line waiting to be brought in and folded, dinner needing to be cooked - and knowing that Norris is childless.

Ah, those pre-child days. I could sit in an armchair and read a book in a gulp; we ate out for lunch and dinner most days; nobody dropped their breakfast cereal on the floor or rubbed it in their hair. I recall groaning at having to sweep the floor once a month. We're neat people, we ate out a lot, we had no pets; the only thing that happened to our floor was that it got a little dusty sometimes. And now... well, now I sweep the floor twice a day, sometimes more, and it's still usually crunchy underfoot. I do loads of washing every week, and fold washing every afternoon. My bathroom is putrid, especially since my three year old decided to clean the mirror with a soapy toothpasty sponge and I can't be bothered scrubbing it all off; and someone has managed to smear a little poo on the toilet pedestal. When I finish writing this, I'll go clean it.

The other night as I was tidying up prior to family coming over for dinner, someone emptied all the plastic containers onto the floor THREE TIMES in an hour, and dumped all the Duplo out too for good measure. In between picking up several hundred small plastic objects, I cooked dinner for nine. (Yes, I am a goddess.) I have a theory that if you can't tidy it up, you can't play with it, but it doesn't work with a highly inquisitive fifteen month old. She can reach high, and climbs to reach even higher, and she leaves a trail of scattered books and papers and pens and toys and clean nappies and shoes and colanders and leaves and raisins wherever she goes. And when she's not doing that, she's sitting, plump down on the kitchen step beaming at me, and I can hardly get cross at her for being a messy curious baby.

Anyway... let's just say that it's rather vexing to have a childless woman, WHOSE HUSBAND COOKS (yes, I shouted that), suggest that I find dignity in the daily round, and go on to comment that "young parents juggling child-rearing and making a living" should, "if they are wise... treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape, to distract themselves with television and the like." Well, if I wasn't completely and utterly exhausted two nights out of three - having prepared, served and cleaned away three meals and one or two snacks, much of which dropped onto the floor and some of which was subsequently stepped on - I probably wouldn't watch any television; but I am, and I do, and I'm unapologetic.

And yet, I have to admit that she's right, of course. I am infinitely happier and more refreshed when I spend quiet time just being quiet, or reading, writing or making something; and when I have the energy, I do just that.

And overall, I am still grateful for the book. Her words have rippled through the eleven years since I first read it, and have sustained me through the chaos of raising three young children thus far. Norris reminds me of my love of laundry, even if my laundry is a mountain compared to hers; I hang it on a line outside above the lavender bushes, and when I bring it in, the scent of lavender and sunlight thread through the house. And her insights into worship were part of my journey to a church congregation which focuses on liturgy, which has enriched my life immeasurably; I carry the words and songs of the liturgy with me in whatever I do.

Living attentively, and understanding the daily round as an act of loving service and an opportunity for reflection, is vitally important if those of us who perform it are not to go right out of our minds. This little book lends drudgery a little dignity, and even helps us find joy in it; it is a great gift. Those of us with young children might just have to be gracious enough not to snarl at the writer when she makes suggestions about parenting that grate.

> Kathleen Norris The Quotidian Mysteries. Laundry, Liturgy and 'Women's Work'. 1998 Madaleva Lecture in Spirituality. (New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998).

Slow reader

A friend asked me the other day what I had been reading lately, and I was shocked to realise the answer: nothing. Well, not quite nothing, but close enough. A couple of throwaway mysteries, that's all. What happened to the person I used to be, forever lost in a story? Curled in a favourite chair, the light behind her shoulder, devouring book after book? Crowded into a tram on the way to work, grateful when it took longer so that she could get in a few extra pages? Reading over breakfast, at lunchtime, after dinner?

Well, she got busy, that's for sure. Three little kids, mountains of dishes and laundry, a couple of weekly volunteer jobs, and a meditative session at the gym every few days: that pretty much eliminated the bulk of my reading time.

Then my kids chat through every meal - if I'm reading, they just talk louder until I pay attention. And in the evenings, we have people over. When we don't, I'm so tired that my limbs ache - my typical day starts at 7, and finishes between 8 and 9, with a heap of kids and cleaning and food preparation in between. Don't get me wrong - I love being with my children, but the constant vigilance, discipline, negotiation and mediation, not to mention the neverending housework, can be incredibly draining. Plus my kids shriek more than I ever expected. Girls are very shrill.

I once heard of a woman who, for an hour after lunch every day, read with a face washer lying next to her. Her children were made to understand that if they came into the room their faces would be scrubbed clean. They very quickly learned to leave their mother alone.

But my children are too little to leave for any length of time. It takes only a minute's inattention for one of them to climb up something and fall off; otherwise, they squabble and screech and drive each other - and me - nuts. When they're resting, the housework beckons, as do the occasional blog and the other tasks I perform each week.

Despite this, I was sufficiently hooked on Patrick O'Brian's novels that I found ways to read them all this year. Twenty novels, devoured in chunks late at night, or nibbled away in paragraphs while standing at the coffee machine. But it took determination, planning, and stamina. I haven't come across anything since that has inspired me to squeeze my time so hard. And I feel such a sense of loss at the end of the series, as if close friends died suddenly, that I am reluctant to immerse myself in anything else for the time being.

In any case, with loss of time comes loss of browsing library shelves - ever tried doing that with automatic doors and a runaway toddler? Browsing online, even other blogs, doesn't come close. It's proving hard to find something to read.

So I'm happily dreaming of O'Brian's sailing ships and concerts in the captain's cabin, and every other story I carry with me until I stumble across something new: another book, another series, another writer which will inspire me to stay up late, or read by the coffee machine, or find other ways to get through a book. Any suggestions?

An Advent list

I love a good list. Elsewhere, I commented on developing rituals for Christmas; and I'm thinking that they will include a lot of good stories. So what follows is a dozen stories that my family will read aloud between December 1 and 24. Most of them are not Christmassy per se. Instead, they are about hope, joy, bravery, generosity, vocation, sacrifice, community, and love.

'The Singing Bus Queue' (Margaret Mahy, in The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: JM Dent, 1982)) sings rain or shine in seven-part harmony. No matter how hard the town grumps try to silence them, they continue to warble joyfully. Eventually, they are imprisoned for creating a public disturbance - yet even there they sing so sweetly, in such high and pure tones that the prison crumbles. They walk out through the ruins to sing through the night with the moon and stars.

Continuing the singing theme, in 'Four Angels to my Bed' (Joan Aiken, in Past Eight O'Clock: Goodnight Stories (London: Puffin, 1990)) Little John sees four angels carved on wooden bedposts. As he falls asleep, the angels sing him a fugue, and he joins his voice in a new tune that dances with, through and around the heavenly music. Downstairs, his mother smiles at the sound of her little John Sebastian singing as she realises he has discovered his calling.

'Brother Ninian's Blot' is also about calling (Robin Klein, in Ratbags and Rascals (Ferntree Gully, Victoria: Houghton Mifflin Australia, 1989)). Brother Ninian, a messy medieval copyist, spills ink across a nearly completed piece of parchment. In his horror, he tries to disguise the blot with doodles of leaves, flowers, birds, butterflies, and even a jolly abbot. He becomes completely absorbed, and in his absorption creates something wonderful, beautiful and entirely new: the illustrated manuscript.

The illustrated manuscript recalls Jane Ray's lavish illustrations in The Happy Prince: From the Fairy Tale by Oscar Wilde (London: Orchard, 1994). She retells Oscar Wilde's fairy tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has to the city's poor - its ruby eyes, its gold leaf - via an obliging swallow.

On the theme of gifts, in 'The Gift Giving' (Joan Aiken, in Up the Chimney Down and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)) a blind grandmother can, with the help of a special tune played by her adult son, Mark, see and describe gifts and vistas in rich language. When Mark dies, the gift fades until Mark's nephew and namesake and Mark's daughter together make a new pipe and work out the tune that recalls Grandmother's gift.

Tomie dePaola has also written about gift giving between young and old. In Now One Foot, Now the Other (New York: Puffin, 2005), Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.

In a similar vein, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge lives next door to an old people’s home. He is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names, just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her (Mem Fox and Julie Vivas (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1984)).

Thinking about neighbours recalls Rose Meets Mr.Wintergarten (Bob Graham (London: Walker Books, 1992)). In this lovely book, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.

Other misers are persuaded to share in Nail Soup (Eric Maddern and Paul Hess, (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007). A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can eat together.

The Mousehole Cat is also about sharing food. When a Cornish fishing villages faces starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser brave the winter storms to catch fish for the town. On their safe return, the town celebrates with a feast of morgy-broth and stargazy pie (Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley (Aladdin, 1996)).

One of the most lively renditions of the Christmas story is by Julie Vivas (The Nativity (Gosford, NSW: Scholastic, 1986)). She illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; we see the newborn baby, hands outstretched, still attached to the umbilical cord; the shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical, real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, rather than resembling some medieval nymph.

Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine (Mem Fox and Kerry Argent (Scholastic, 2009))? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. But Emu finds him the perfect role, and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

PS For out of print books, try here.

Joy writ large

I review so many children's books because they are what I mostly read. I'd like to claim that it's only because I have so many children (three); and that, if I had my druthers, I'd be working my way through the world of serious adult fiction. But boy, would that be a lie. I've always read children's books, right through my teens and early twenties. I never stopped. And while several thousand adult books may have slipped in under my guard, they are the exception rather than the rule.

Am I suffering from arrested emotional development? Perhaps. Because quite simply, I find most adult books lacking. They may be beautiful or clever or funny, but, unlike so many children's books, they rarely achieve what I am looking for in a book. And what, you may well ask, is that?

As I ponder this question, I realise it's something quite simple. Fundamentally, I look for joy. I want to celebrate this funny old world, in all its beauty and ridiculousness. I want characters who are fully themselves, who are bursting out of their skins with being alive. I want to feel emboldened to stretch out and touch the edges of life, and find out just how far I can go. I hope that as I age I can become more fully me - not that crimped, cramped and watered down shadow who apologised her way through her late teens; not that angry, brittle and self-righteous young woman who thundered and wept through her early twenties - but someone bigger and more alive by far. And I trust that books will show me the way.

Paradoxically, it is children's books which so often invite me to be more adult. So many children's books leap with joy, tackle fear head-on, and positively crackle with life.

Having said this, I would now like to turn my attention to those precious adult books which do, in fact, crackle. Which stories leap off the page? Which writers inspire me to become more fully human? Which books are so steeped in wonder, that I catch my breath in awe? Where have I read joy writ large?

One of the more exuberant, energetic and honest books I have come across is the memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book opens as Gilbert's marriage is falling apart. We meet her on her bathroom floor, sobbing, and then, to her utter astonishment, praying for the first time. It marks the begining of a lifelong conversation with God. This new conversation slowly leads her to a different way of living, in which she learns to structure her life, not around other people's needs, but around that which brings her joy - which is pretty much to say, that which brings her closer to God. Gradually, she decides to go on a year's pilgrimage: to Italy, to eat well; to India, to pray well; and to Indonesia, where she learns to love again. Her pilgrimage is the subject of this book.

Gilbert uses a friendly conversational style. The prose is quick and enthusiastic, rather than refined. It sounds as if it were dictated in a tremendous rush, all the words falling on top of one another as each idea sparked off a host of associations. One feels like one is sitting at a dinner table with a fascinating and very talkative fellow diner, who is polishing off the wine and waving her glass around wildly as she talks. Part of the fun of the book is watching the glass, and waiting for the wine to slosh onto the tablecloth.

In equal parts hilarious, challenging, and deeply moving, Gilbert's memoir is filled with joy. And her intelligence, jauntiness and wit; her willingness to investigate and deprecate herself; and the discipline she undertakes to become closer to God, are utterly captivating.

A very different but also joyful memoir is Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. In this more austere, yet gentle, book, Norris interweaves observations about life in a small town in North Dakota with her personal story. Norris is Dakotan by heritage, and, after a lifetime away, finds herself in her family's old town living in her grandmother's house. She brings the eyes of an outsider to her experience of a place that is part of her family history. Part economic and social history, part family biography, part prose-poetry, part prayer, Dakota is a unique geographical investigation.

Norris's primary commitments colour the book. She is married, and yet also an oblate in a Benedictine monastery. Her writing is suffused with the gentleness, patience, generosity and humility that ones sometimes sees arise out of hard and serious commitment: a difficult marriage profoundly affected by her husband's acute depression; the monastic disciplines of study and prayer.

She writes openly about her family, and the challenges of facing up to the demons of violence, suicide, and a corrosive fundamentalist faith. She recalls an aunt, single, pregnant and mentally ill, who committed suicide in her despair; Norris lays her good Protestant ghost to rest at last through Benedictine ritual practice.

Norris joyfully describes her twin loves: this Benedictine practice, and the landscape of the Plains. This is, at heart, a book about the labour of coming home, both to a place and to oneself. Reading Norris, one realises that one must claim one's place and work at it for it to become home. Norris has studied to understand the region's geography, history, people, and weather, and her own marriage, faith, family, and poetry. Her sense of home is hard-won.

Overall, Dakota is a beautiful, solemn book. By inviting us to explore one person's life and place, it implicitly invites us to investigate and learn to love our own place, that we too may find ourselves at home.

The theme of home recalls Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Gilead is the fictional memoir of an older minister, Reverend John Ames, as he nears the end of his life. Ames married late, and has a very young son; the memoir is a letter to his son who is his joy and his delight. It takes the form of a love song from a man who spent his life living in and loving one tiny town on the Plains. Life was hard and lonely, and Ames admits to terrible failures of relationship. But life was also precious, cherished, and joyful.

The pattern of the story evokes an older man's thinking. He writes with equal love of the past and the present, of stories from long ago and of watching his son trying to catch a soap bubble. And he describes his theology in the hope that one day his son may learn to know him as an adult. Yet even as Ames tells his story, Jack Boughton, John Ames's namesake, returns to town. Boughton and Ames have a strained history, which began for Ames when he christened the baby Boughton with a sense of coldness. Yet events require Ames to take further steps into generosity, humility and forgiveness - and love.

This is a story about transformation: a flawed and ordinary man slowly matures under the combined disciplines of work and prayer. It's a story about love: of wives, of sons, of a town, of a landscape. And it's a story about home: coming home, claiming it, and growing into it.

On a lighter note, thinking about home puts me in mind of dinner. Being, as Nigella Lawson so delicately puts it, a naturally greedy person, I am always interested to read about food. After all, it is over dinner, glass of wine in hand, that I so often experience joy and a profound sense of thankfulness for life on earth. Elsewhere, I have reviewed Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb. In short, the book uses a single leg of lamb and the ways to cook it as an excuse to muse on many culinary and spiritual themes. Capon moves between blood sacrifice and peanut butter without turning a hair. As my tummy rumbles, I will only say here that this is the apex of culinary books: eccentric, wise and totally hilarious, full of joyful jokes and cheerfully ridiculous diversions, and regular generous toasts.

Joy is the underlying theme in all these books. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that they also share another thread. Although not all writers are Christian, all trust in, to use Gilbert's phrase, a 'Magnificent God' - a generous, abundant and glorious Other who is waiting, with arms stretched out towards us, to claim us and show us the way home. And maybe that's what I'm looking for, after all.

> Robert Farrar Capon The Supper of the Lamb (Modern Library) (New York: Modern Library, 2002 (1969)); Elizabeth Gilbert Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything (New York: Penguin, 2006); Kathleen Norris Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Mariner, 2002); Marilynne Robinson Gilead (London: Virago, 2004 (2006)).

Bedtime

A few nights ago, my husband was working late. In the mad scramble to wash and feed and settle three young children by myself, I let everyone get too tired. My one year old fell over a few times and began to grizzle, so I popped her into the cot. Usually, she'd go straight to sleep, but this night she was overtired. So perversely she stood in her cot and shrieked. I tried to settle her again, and again, to no effect. But I couldn't see the point of having her up and crying, so I left her to scream.

And it was story time. And my five year old was in a snit. So there I was reading one of our all time favourite bedtime books, with the baby carrying on in the next room and the five year old flouncing and huffing all over the bed - and then the three year old accidentally elbowed me in the breast. Hard.

Between the crying and the huffing and the elbowing, I was so razzed up that I could feel my heart race. I wanted to slam the book shut and shout at everyone and storm off - and yet I couldn't settle the baby; I couldn't improve my five year old's mood; I couldn't make my three year old more gentle. So I took a deep breath and decided to let the story fix it.

We were reading Jane Yolen's Owl Moon. It tells of a little child who is taken out, late at night, by her father through the snow to look for a Great Horned Owl. They walk through the cold and the shadows in silence, until they come to a clearing in the woods. And there, as her father imitates the call of an owl, an owl hoots in reply and sweeps into the clearing. They watch the owl for 'one minute, three minutes, maybe even a hundred minutes' before it flies away. And in silence, they walk home.

It is a simple story, written in the most elegant prose. A train whistle blows 'like a sad sad song'; otherwise 'it was as quiet as a dream'. The rhythm of the words demands the reader slow down and settle into the telling; it is not a story to race through. Yolen's use of metaphor brings the comfortingly familiar into the strangeness of being out at night - 'the snow... was whiter than the milk in a cereal bowl' - such that the story successfully negotiates the fine line between fear and mystery. The child knows that strange things may 'hide behind black trees in the middle of the night' - but 'when you go owling, you have to be brave.' It alludes to managing fear and trusting a loved one without a whiff of didacticism.

The illustrations are spare and gentle. The eerieness of the woods is balanced by moonbeams shining through the trees and the safety of the father's presence.

Witness the power of story: at the end of the reading, my heart had stopped pounding and my five year old was snuggling close. In the next room, the baby had settled into a cross grizzle and was slowly winding down. And everyone was ready for sleep.

Owl Moon is a pleasure to read aloud. Further, it has the power to soothe a frazzled mum and settle a couple of fractious kids! As a bedtime book, it's hard to beat.

> Jane Yolen Owl Moon.

Beautiful as pearls

If you've been reading this blog, by now you can probably guess what sort of child I was. Lost in a story. Nose stuck in a book, and rude to my mother when she called me to dinner - after all, she interrupted. Tucked away behind the shelves at the back of the school library during lunchtime. And always reading. Nothing ever felt as immediate or interesting or understandable as the life I lived in stories. Real life - negotiating my mother's moods, schoolyard politics and factions, pop culture - was bewildering. I never quite got the hang of it all. But books - now that's where I belonged.

And yet, trying to find a good book is hazardous for a child. You troll through the library, fingers running along the spines. A title catches your eye. You pull it out, and examine the cover, and read the blurb, the first page. And then, holding your breath, you plunge in.

If you're lucky, you'll find a good one. But so many kids' books are awful. Violent books, providing the material for terrifying nightmares. Sentimental books that stick and cloy. Dull books, devoid of interesting words or language play. Books completely lacking in humour or grace. You waded through an awful lot of muck before you found a gem. Yet given how much muck I waded through, I still missed lots of good books, even authors. It startles me. How could I, always on the alert for something interesting or funny or beautiful, have missed Alan Garner or Margaret Mahy as a child?

I stumbled across Margaret Mahy only this year. We were away at Easter, and my daughter needed something else to read. I picked up The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories for a dollar at a grotty book exchange, and we instantly fell in love. This intoxicating collection combines the suburban with the magical. All the stories are delightful, but two particularly stand out. 'The Midnight Story on Griffin Hill' tells the tale of a cross and alienated writer who ends up reading his stories to a midnight audience of griffins. The tears they weep as they listen roll down the hill and fill an old quarry, which becomes a swimming pool for his sons. 'The Singing Bus Queue' sings gloriously as they wait for their bus. Gradually, the whole town comes to listen, so the killjoys have them thrown into prison for creating a disturbance. There, at midnight, they begin to sing in separate cells a song so clear and high that the prison crumbles, and they walk out of the ruins to sing the night away with the whole city, the moon and the stars. These are stories I would want my children to internalise - I would want myself to internalise, in fact. Stories about ages past and suburban bathrooms; stories tinged with sorrow and beauty; stories about exuberant adventures and unfurling secrets; stories marked always by good humour and delight.

The Downhill Crocodile Whizz and Other Stories, also by Mahy, is overall less moving but more action-packed. My three year old daughter loves the book, and carries it around the house with her. She is particularly attached to 'Don't Cut the Lawn', about a man who tries to mow but is continually stopped by mothers whose babies are nesting in the 'tussocks and tangles' of the long grass: a lark, a cat, a hare and a dragon. She also loves 'The Downhill Crocodile Whizz', about a small crocodile who lives at the top of a very long steep hill, and whose grandmother gives him rollerskates for his birthday. Of course, he straps them on and immediately whizzes down the hill, chased by a growing collection of dogs, children, an old man in a wheelchair, a big brass band in a bus, and the army before he rolls to a stop in the park at the bottom. It's cheerfully chaotic, just the thing for a young child.

The title of Mahy's book The Great Piratical Rumbustification: AND The Librarian and the Robbers is enough to make me laugh, even before one gets to the tale of three little boys, a peg-legged babysitter with an eyepatch, a hook and a bottle of rum, and the illicit party they hold for all the retired pirates in town. The story about pirates rumbustificating is paired with The Librarian and the Robbers, in which a calmly beautiful librarian, kidnapped by robbers, introduces them to the world of books before engineering her escape and inspiring them to mend their wicked ways. Both stories are joyfully ridiculous, beautifully written, and hilarious.

Mahy loves exuberant words and the way they can rumble and roll; she revels in alliteration and metaphor ("The forest sighed and swayed... and the sea murmured as if a crowd of people were turning over in their sleep" ('The Giant's Bath' in Chewing-Gum). Her writing is rhythmic and strong, and some of the more catchy phrases have passed into our household language. Like the Frisbee sisters, we now brush so that we can have "teeth as strong as tigers' teeth and as beautiful as pearls" ('The Chewing-Gum Rescue').

Her writing is strongest when she links the thrilling mainstays of childhood imagination - tree climbing, pirates, robbers and dragons - to everyday experience (brushing teeth, bus queues, bathrooms, grumpy neighbours). Unlike so many stories of adventure or mystical beasts, these stories aren't about 'somewhere else'. Instead, they suggest that a world of possibility awaits the reader in her very own street, bathtub or veggie patch.

The books are wonderful to read aloud. My three year old loves some of the stories, but it is my five year old who is really absorbed. And they will read and re-read these books for years to come. Children of twelve or so will still enjoy the many layers; and even I, at the ancient age of 34, often re-read a story or two before my bedtime with great delight. Mahy is a prolific writer, and you are sure to find some of her books in the Junior section of your local library.

> Margaret Mahy The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories (London: Dent, 1982); The Downhill Crocodile Whizz and Other Stories (London: Dent, 1986); The Great Piratical Rumbustification: AND The Librarian and the Robbers (David R Godine, 2001 (1978)).