Summer Reading 2015 (5(a)): The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart, 1970)

Summer Reading 2015, #5a: ‘A trilogy’, part 1

It’s time for Merlin!  Well, young Merlin.  The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart is the first Arthurian tale I’ve read in... longer than I care to admit.  Especially given my background in such things.

I’ve been a fan of different takes on the Arthurian mythos since a very young age.  Admittedly, part of that is just the fun of the romanticized medieval setting that usually comes with it.  As a child, it absolutely caught my attention, something that certainly wasn’t hurt by a gift I was given for my eighth birthday, an Arthur-themed pop-up book that features no shortage of excitement in its pages.  The Sword in the Stone may not have been my favorite Disney film growing up (that would be Robin Hood), but that didn’t stop me from being fascinated by the story of the boy king.

(As an aside, my aunt, who gave me said pop-up book, never ceases to remind me that at the time, I was reading The Hobbit, and it made her feel kind of bad about giving me a pop-up book.  I always remind her that quite honestly, it's the only pop-up book I had as a child that stuck with me into adulthood quite that way.  Part of it may be the way it doesn’t bowdlerize the content; the illustration pictured here features those weapons plunging into and through the combatants, and the arms make plunging motions as the pages open and close.  My aunt was unaware of its presence in the book.)

So, on to this one.  The Crystal Cave is the first of Mary Stewart’s books dealing with the Arthurian themes, and focuses solely on the early life of Merlin.  Arthur only puts in two appearances, both in visions of the future.  Of course, Arthur’s childhood is the theme of the next book, so that can be better-explored next time.  Merlin is positioned as being the grandson of a Welsh king, the bastard son of Ambrosius, the cousin of Arthur, and rather than the Disneyesque wizard that he might be depicted as in many conceptions, comes across almost as a variation on Leonardo da Vinci, much of his magic being simply a sharp mind and the ability to take poetic metaphor and drag usable knowledge from it, then apply that knowledge to his works.

From the start, Merlin is an outsider, the sort who is far more interested in learning how the world around him works than in learning the ‘traditional’ male things of the era.  Even as he grows up and is drawn into travels outside of his native Wales, he’s always in that mindset, devoting his energies to a combination of learning engineering and mysticism from the chain of teachers he learns from over the years.  And these skills are put to good use; by the end of the book, Merlin has used the know-how he’s developed to get a large stone moved from Ireland to Amesbury to serve as a centerpiece to Stonehenge, here positioned as being already ancient but with the stones having fallen, a problem that he remedies as well.

Stewart absolutely knew what she was doing here; even though she calls herself out on the historical inaccuracies in an appendix at the end, it’s largely a matter of language used, not technology or politics, erring on the side of ‘recognizable’ in the sense of saying Cornwall instead of Dumnonia every time.  Honestly, I see no problem with this; one doesn’t read Arthurian lit for historical accuracy.  She also provided, as the first appendix to the book, the passage regarding Merlin from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which she drew from in order to construct her narrative.

Of course, the story of Merlin is, almost by definition these days, inextricably linked with that of Arthur.  And as good a read as this was, it really does leave you wanting more, not least because of how it sets itself up, from the introduction but especially in the last section of the book, as being the first part of a longer tale.  Speaking of which, on to The Hollow Hills.

Summer Reading 2015 (4): The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Zac Bissonnette, 2015)

Summer Reading 2015, #4: ‘A Nonfiction Book’

Thank you, public library new book shelves, for letting something cut in line.  Merlin a little later on, as I’ve allowed The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette to slip in ahead of it.  Two-week checkout limits on new books will do that.

So, to start with, I suppose I should begin with what led me to pick this book up at all.  It’s somewhat eye-catching on the shelf, with the title on the spine matching the coloration of the title on the front.  And let’s face it, a book in 2015 about Beanie Babies is going very, very much against the grain, and seems rather outside of its era.  I mean, Beanie Babies haven’t been relevant since their value tanked fifteen years ago.  But that was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look... and then the jacket flaps went and mentioned the Tulip mania and yup, I’m going to pick it up and take a look, because that makes perfect sense.

For those who weren’t conscious of what was going on at the time, Beanie Babies were... possibly the most bizarre example of a collector’s frenzy over anything in my lifetime.  Let’s face it, when the popular wisdom around a line of exceedingly play-friendly plush toys becomes ‘don’t let children touch them at all’, something has gone horribly wrong.  But that, in and of itself, wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting book.  And this is where Zac Bissonnette hit on a rather more interesting way to handle his book: more than anything, this is a biography of the business life of Ty Warner, from his beginnings as a salesman for Dakin, through the start of his own company (initially specializing in plush cats), all the way up to (and past) his 2014 conviction for tax evasion.

The link to Dakin surprised me somewhat; as a child, I had a downright ridiculous number of Dakin-made Garfield plushes (along with a few Applause-branded ones after the companies merged).  But they weren’t terribly play-friendly, as I recall; the traditional plush as created by Dakin was very, very full of stuffing, so they tended to stick to a specific pose.  That, as noted in this book, was the big trick to Ty Warner’s success: by understuffing the plush as a whole and filling a few strategic spots with PVC pellets to add weight, the Ty plush could be easily posed and played with, and he absolutely used that as a selling point.  Additionally, Warner has hand-designed almost every single plush that his company has ever marketed, and his attention to detail is definitely noticeable.

That said, the rise and fall of Beanie Babies as a valuable commodity was only partially related to the attention to detail.  That aspect of the bubble is explored as well, when the book reaches that point in the timeline, along with an examination of how the mania spread geographically.  The whole book is filled with original research the author did, interviewing as many people involved in the mania as he could; he even reached out to Ty Warner, who declined the offer, but Warner’s personality absolutely shows through, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

It’s absolutely a fascinating read, this.  And let’s face it, speculative manias on the scale of Dutch tulips, Dot-Com stocks, and Beanie Babies are one of those things that one should be aware of, if only to have an idea of how to avoid getting caught up in one.

Next up: Merlin stuff (again, for real this time)