Author Bill Wallace has died. I liked his books a lot as a kid – after reading Watchdog and the Coyotes, I doodled coyotes inspired by the book on all my school assignments for, like, a year. I also did an oil painting once, as a pre-teen, of a scene from his book Snot Stew (which is not at all about what it sounds like). And poor Mr. Wallace was only sixty-four. He will be missed.
Sad News
Diana Wynne Jones has just died. I wish I could find a better article, but it’s early yet, and I don’t see much news about it yet. I heard from what I’m pretty sure is the listserv they mention – the DWJ listserv out of England. A friend of hers sent out the news.
Diana Wynne Jones has been my favorite author since I was eight, when Howl’s Moving Castle became my favorite book. (It still is.) In the summer of 2007, I had the extreme good fortune to meet DWJ. I’ve never been so excited to meet someone in my life. She surpassed all of my expectations, mostly in being so very kind.
How that came to pass, taken from my enthusiastically rambling personal LJ entries of the time
Sad News
Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series, just passed away at age seventy-one.
The Redwall series was a big deal to me as a kid and teenager. It was the first set of books I liked so much that I was willing to throw down my money (which was pretty scarce before I got old enough to babysit) for any one of them without having read it first. Even now, I own most of the series, my copies in various states of well-loved scruffiness.
Most of my copies are the paperbacks – small, fat books, quite distinctive to my eye. I can still pick out a Redwall book from a distance. Which is not to say that they’re interchangeable to me. Far from it.
Among the fuzzy-edged paperbacks on my shelf of Redwall books stands my copy of Mossflower, the first book I ever bought in hardcover. I was extremely proud of it. A hardcover book cost a lot of weeks of allowance!
Then there’s Mattimeo, a favorite of mine, which I was always bringing to school, only to hit one of those points where I had to stuff it into my backpack to continue reading at home because I knew I was coming up on one of the parts where I always cried.
Once I did get old enough to babysit, Pearls of Lutra was, for some reason, my go-to book for when I’d be staying past a kid’s bedtime and needed something to do until the parents came home. I also made myself a t-shirt quoting the poem at the beginning of the book. And I wore it. In public.
With Salamandastron, I formed a connection between the book and, of all things, Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal. I don’t normally snack on cereal, reserving it for breakfast, but I would eat these sugar bombs in the middle of the afternoon while reading Salamandastron. (I have one particularly golden memory of sitting at our kitchen table at maybe 2:00, a time when ordinarily I’d have no reason to be sitting at the kitchen table, and eating Peanut Butter Puffs while reading Salamandastron, taking a pause to think that wow, life was good.) After awhile, either of the two would make me crave the other. Even now, a glimpse of that badger on the cover takes me back to the taste of a sucrosey excuse for a cereal that I haven’t had in at least ten years.
My parents used Redwall books to bribe me to break my hair-twirling habit. (Didn’t stick long-term, but I made it work long enough to get the books.)
I learned new words from the Redwall series. “Stygian” was one I was proud of. Also “desultory.” And in eighth grade, when my Latin I teacher told our class jokingly that we were getting so good that soon we’d “know the Latin for right and left!”, I surprised both of us by guessing the words based on a reference a Redwall book. (And that’s not even getting into everything I learned about siege warfare.)
I loaned my copies out to friends in high school, got my brother and his friends reading them, and gasped over a friend’s sister’s copy that was *fans self* signed by the author.
In the winter of 2008-2009, living in England with friends, I hit up the library for the newest Redwall books – the only two I didn’t have – and read them.
Which is all just to say that, you know, books make a difference to people.
Thanks for all the good times, Mr. Jacques. You’ll be missed.
Serious News
Passing this on from the Diana Wynne Jones lj community:
Diana Wynne Jones, after much consultation with her husband and specialists, has decided to abandon chemotherapy (which is serving only to make her feel very ill indeed) and resign herself to whatever may follow. Her senior oncologist fears she has ‘months rather than years’, but we all hope that – as once or twice before – Diana can still surprise the medical profession. May the good luck return.
It was also mentioned on the DWJ mailing list.