Loving Something to Pieces

It's difficult for me to take A Wrinkle in Time off my shelf. No, I don't mean emotionally...though in the wake of Madeleine's passing this past fall, there was a bit of that involved too. I mean it's literally hard to take the book off my shelf because my original copy is broken in three pieces.

Wrinkle is one of the few books of my life that I have loved so much I have literally read it to pieces. The binding broke years ago, on who knows which repeated reading. It's in tatters. The pages are brownish-yellow. The cover is completely off. I used to keep a rubber band around the whole thing to hold it together, but that seemed to hurt it worse, so now I just let it be, sandwiched in between Dance in the Desert and A Wind in the Door, near the beginning of my L'Engle collection.

I confess, when I re-read Wrinkle last fall, I read another copy, one I bought at a used book sale. But I just can't get rid of this one. It was the first Madeleine book I ever read, the copy I clutched in my eager eleven year old hands the first time I followed Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin to Camazotz. Even broken, maybe especially broken, it's one of my book treasures.

Here We Go Again!

Well, our "Re-Reading Harry" blog was so fruitful (and so much fun!) that Erin and I have decided to give it another go. This time around, we'll be reading books by Madeleine L'Engle. Madeleine's been one of the "authors of my heart" since I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was eleven years old. Her works have a place of honor on...and take up two shelves of!...my living room bookcase.

I'm eager to get the discussion started, but first we've got to decide on what to read. Erin has expressed an interest in re-reading Wrinkle, which would seem a natural place to start, and then we might head into non-fiction territory with perhaps my favorite of all Madeleine's non-fiction books: Walking on Water. After that, who knows? It should be a wonderful springtime conversation!