The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I love books, love to read.  I will read just about anything I can get my hands on.  Every once in a awhile, I come across a book that sticks with me.  A book that I want to read over and over again.  A book with lines that make me think, smile, laugh out loud.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is one of those books.  (Sorry about not underlining the book title - I don't know how. . .)  It's set in the aftermath of World War II, and is as much about healing as it is anything else.  Here are some of the quotes that caught my eye and my heart.

"I should be thrilled.  But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war.  Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people.  Especially the people."

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey?  Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.  How delightful if that were true."

"Lamb also taught Hunt's youngest daughter to say the Lord's prayer backward.  You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that."

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."

"I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers - booksellers really are a special breed.  No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one - the margin of profit is too small.  So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it - along with first dibs on the new books."

"It's amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don't really know what they're after - they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. . . . Our faces are always a dead giveaway.  A lifted brow or curled lip reveals that it's a poor excuse for a book, and the clever customers ask for a recommendation instead, whereupon we frog-march them over to a particular volume and command them to read it.  If they read it and despise it, they'll never come back.  But if they like it, they're customers for life."

"While I question her taste, her judgment, her misplaced priorities, and her inappropriate sense of humor, she does indeed have one fine quality - she is honest."

"It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever.  There's no end to that.  But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.  Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take some time to recede.  But already, there are small islands of - Hope?  Happiness?  Something like them, at any rate."

"Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and 'fruitfulness' is drawn in."

"He's all charm and oil, and he gets what he wants.  It's one of his few principles.  He wants Juliet because she's pretty and 'intellectual' at the same time, and he thinks they'll make an impressive couple.  If she marries him, she'll spend the rest of her life being shown to people at theaters and clubs and weekends and she'll never write another book.  As her editor, I'm dismayed by that prospect, but as her friend, I'm horrified."

"All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged - after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.  But it's a lie.  The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot."

In-service Result

Due to the city's annual basketball tournament/carnival, we teachers planned an in-service day for today, knowing that attendance would be awful (kids out until well after midnight all weekend).  Our illustrious leader decided that it would be an in-service about art and integrating art with other content areas, and brought in an art instructor from Fairbanks.  I've never been particularly good at art.  Never have, probably never will.  As a result of that, I don't particularly enjoy art projects.  Thus, I wasn't particularly excited about today. 

It wasn't as bad as I envisioned it.  The hours sped by, and while my lack of creativity left me feeling somewhat less than successful, my art samples didn't turn out too horribly.  Right at the end of the day, we did a questioning/writing exercise that was actually kind of fun.  The instructor showed us a picture, we asked questions about it in groups, and then wrote about it, our creative juices fueled by the questions that we had brainstormed/heard from others.  Here's the picture, by Sandy Skoglund:

Depressing cat people, surrounded by radioactive green cats.  Lots of possibilities here.  The writing part of the exercise was open-ended - we could write whatever we wanted, in whatever format/genre we wanted.  Here is the beginning of a story that I would finish if I had any literary talent:

"As hard as he tried, he couldn't remember a life without cats. Harry sat in his chair with the broken slat. A cat had once tried to squeeze between the slats, but hadn't quite fit. Harry hadn't bothered to fix it, figuring it would probably break again soon, anyway. He and his wife, Bertha, hadn't always lived this life, this life consumed by the abnormally green cats. They used to have the perfect life: a nice clean house, children, a pet dog, white picket fence - the American dream. If only he hadn't stopped to help that poor, "injured" cat on the way home from work on that fateful day. If only they hadn't been sucked up into this nightmare. . . ."

And from there, it goes into a mystery of epic proportions, involving alien cats invading Earth. . . telling the back-story of poor Harry and Bertha. . . how the cats came to take-over the lives of poor, innocent civilians like the ones pictured above. A tragic tale, really. And it's begging to be written. So, if you have literary talent and would like to continue this train of thought, please feel free. Take it with my compliments. Change it, make it better, finish it. Consider it my anonymous contribution to the field of (bad) literature.