Angieville

It is a damp, drizzly November in my soul today.  RIP, Colonel Brandon.

"There will never be anyone for me but you."

The wonderful Mary Stewart has passed away . I've written about her previously  here  and  here , but I just wanted to say that I'm . . . I'm so sad. The first line of the first Stewart book I read (which happened to be her very first book as well) reads, "The whole affair began so very quietly." I spent the summer after my freshman year of college devouring anything of hers I could get my hands on. One year, for my birthday, my husband tracked down beautiful copies of every one of her books. I went into my library last night and ran a finger along their beloved spines. And as I type this now I'm stepping off the plane in Paris with Linda, navigating the twisted streets of Provence with Charity, climbing the sun-dried ruins of Delphi with Camilla, and I think—my, what a legacy.

A few days ago I received the news that a professor of mine had passed away suddenly. I hadn't seen or talked to him in a few years, but he played a large role in my academic career and I felt especially saddened at his passing. When I was an undergrad, I applied to go on study abroad to London. Three of my dearest friends went along with me and that semester remains one of the highlights of my life. We had, quite simply, the time of our lives . I've been an Anglophile for as long as I can remember and being able to walk where so many of my literary idols walked and visit their homes and haunts and graves changed me in a way that it is still difficult to describe.  Dr. Hatch was the assistant director of our group and in his early thirties at the time. He brought along with him his wife and three young children and all of us rambunctious college students had a blast living with the directors and their families in the wonderful old Victorian townhouse known to us as ...

Must they all go at once? First Lloyd Alexander and now Madeleine L'Engle. Don't they know I can only take so many childhood heroes departing at a time? I came across A Wrinkle in Time shortly after reading the Chronicles of Prydain and I still remember how smooth the pages were. And how much I dug Meg. She was my age. She was smart and awkward, angry and strong. And she never gave up. She held on to her family and those who became family like Calvin and Dr. Colubra. And when I read Mrs. Whatsit's line, "By the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract," I just couldn't put it down. I had no idea what a tesseract was or why the sound of it sent a chill down my spine. I didn't care. I just had to keep reading. I read my way through A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet and then I read all the Austin family books. The Young Unicorns is still one of my very favorites, chilling and beautiful as so many of hers are. Like Lloyd Alexander's b...

Lloyd Alexander is dead. He passed away on Thursday. Two weeks after his wife of 61 years went. Events like that never fail to make me shiver. Was it the cancer? Or did he just decide, now that she was gone, to go too? I've spent the past few days grieving, floating from website to website, blog to blog, reading memorials and tributes, soaking up the fellow-feeling out there in the ether. Not that I should have been surprised, but there were so many of us out there whose lives were literally shaped by his work. I lost count of how many of you said, "My sixth grade teacher read every one of the Chronicles of Prydain aloud to us after lunch. He did all the different voices, from Gurgi to Gwystl. I'd never fallen into books like that before. But thanks to them, I have many times since. I think I've read them all 8 times, 9 times, 10? They are among the books of my life." And I think, surely I must know you. Surely you were in my class. For that's exactly the ex...