The Lego Book

In 1974, shortly after I unwillingly acquired a sister, my parents decided that the matchbox car they’d given me as a consolation prize was not working.  So my dad cut and saved coupons from the back of breakfast cereal packets to send away for some free Lego blocks.  Fortunately he stuffed up, and posted the coupons too late to be eligible for the box of blocks.  But the Lego people were kind, or maybe they just knew their market well, because although they couldn’t send be blocks, they did send me a pack of Lego people.  Specifically, they sent set #200, a mother, father, daughter, son and grandmother (complete with grey hair, worn in a bun) and my love affair with Lego began.

My Lego collection grew, though, in deference to my younger sister’s habit of putting everything in her mouth, my parents favored the larger Duplo blocks.  I acquired set #514 Pre School Building set, full of blocks and arches in bright primary colours, and a set of bogies, that I used to make trains for my people to travel on.  Being the smaller Lego, they didn’t click well into the Duplo, and often fell off. Only the Duplo people my sister acquired with Legoville set #524 traveled in true safely.

At Christmastime in 1977, a friend with cashed up Godparents got lucky and was given a battery operated Lego train.  As they’d previously given him a very gaudy gold music box in the shape of the Vatican, complete with saints waiving out of the windows, (which, while quite a talking piece among the children in the street, was not a lot of fun to play with), I suppose he really had earned his luck.  He was generous with the train too, allowing me to play with it for hours.  In fact, I played with it so often that I was asked to contribute my pocket money to the cost of replacement batteries.  Luckily, my parents decided that we should leave the country (for unrelated reasons) before my income could be garnered.

So how do I know all these detailed set numbers and dates of issue?  And how on earth does this relate to reading?  The answer is a set of two marvelous books published by Dorling Kindersley:  The Lego Book by Daniel Lipkowitz, and its companion Standing Small: A celebration of 30 years of the Lego Minifigure by Nevin Martell.    

These books are packed with illustrations, in what I think of as the Dorling Kindersley Style – clean white backgrounds, bright crisp photos, and snippets of informative text.  They chronicle the development of Lego, from the patenting of the first brick in 1958 to the present, and provide a reminder for every child who grew up with Lego of all the sets they had themselves, yearned for at the toyshop or begged for at Christmas time. 

Flicking through these books, I’ve been flooded by memories of my childhood; of playing with my own Lego collection, and with those belonging to cousins and friends. Mostly though, I remember how much fun we had, how the Lego would stay out on the lounge room floor for days as we grappled with construction problems and negotiated the demolition of one building to free up essential bricks for a new project.

I still have my Lego collection.  It lives in a large plastic box, shaped like a Lego brick, under my bed.  Though my Mum convinced me to give my Duplo away in 1981 (a decision I instantly regretted), the collection has grown considerably, thanks to a huge injection.  After years of marriage, my husband finally agreed to make the ultimate commitment and merge his Lego collection with mine.   We’re looking forward to the day when we can be confident that the kids can play with small Lego pieces without ingesting them, and the collection can be scattered across the lounge room floor again.

Readit 2011: A Celebration of Women

A rough inventory of my bookcase shows that many of the books I read, fall in love with, and buy a copy to keep, and read over an over again, are written by women. 

The pages are falling out of my copies of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe family books due to the wear and tear of multiple re-reads.  I’ve covered Mary’s Stewart’s Merlin series with contact to make them more durable. ’m on my second set of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series, and third copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.   When I’m in need of serious relaxation, I read to LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and the Little Princess and Edith Nesbit’s Bastable family.  I return again and again to Robin Hobb’s Live Ship and Assassin series, Connie Willis’ time traveling historians, Robin McKinley’s Blue Sword, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth and Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country.  My guilty re-reading secrets include Jean Auel’s Earths Children series and Sharon Shinn’s Samarian Angels.

Many of the authors I’ve discovered or rediscovered in the last year and really enjoyed are women too:  Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall lead me to her earlier novels and autobiography, Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I reignited my affection for regency romances, Gail Carriger introduced me to Steam Punk. I wanted to make friends with Eva Ibbottson’s generous heroines,.Scenes from Kate Atkinson’s When Will there be Good News were so vivid as to give me nightmares,.PD James led me back to the police procedural and Barbara Vine has given me an appreciation of the House of Lords I did not anticipate.

Among the (admittedly limited) non fiction collection on my bookshelf, female authors (and subjects) are prominent.  Biographies of women by Alison Plowdon, Antonia Fraser  and Anne Somerset  line up.  My copy of Virgnia Woolf's A Room of Ones Own is as worn as Helen Cresswell’s Absolute Zero. 

This is not to say that I do not enjoy books written by men.  Douglas Adams and John Irving are among my enduring favorites, and occupy space on my bookshelf, as does William Dalrymple.  Recently I’ve been enchanted by Colm Toibin’s writing, and having discovered Michael Robotham’s novels, narrated by cascading characters, I have consumed three in the space of a week.  Long before I achieved a completely mediocre score in the Guardian’s VS Naipul test, I had concluded that gender was no indication of either sentimentality or quality in literature. Nevertheless, the majority of the writers who have spoken loudly and insistently enough to me to part me from my money and a cause a serious investment of reading time over the years have been women.

And so, combining my personal challenge to read more widely and outside my comfort zone, and the Readit2011 theme for May: Grrlpower: a celebration of women, was a challenge in itself.  I decided to step out side my natural reading habitat of fiction, and try a biography of a woman written by a man and personal memoir written by a woman.  To round it off, I stepped back to fiction, written by a man, but with a female main character.

The first book, Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor, by Hugo Vickers, was perhaps not such a giant step from my comfort zone.  Most of the Historical Biography I read concerns royal (or closely associated) women.  I did writer about this book at greater length a few weeks ago, but in summary: Hugo Vickers Vickers writes with sympathy for the Duchess of Windsor, in a book that is as much the story of Vickers’ fascination with the royalty, as that of the decline and death of the Duchess of Windsor.  Beginning in 1972 with the Duke’s death, and ending with an account of the auction of some of the Windsor’s remaining household items in 1998, Vickers recounts his involvement, and quotes from his own diaries, creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy.  I must admit to enjoying this book, and Vicker’s style immensly,  with my tongue firmly in my cheek .

Secondly I read Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.  Spending time with her family after her marriage ends (her husband leaves her for a man he meets on gay.com) and she’s injured in a car crash, Janzen mulls over her Mennonite upbringing.   Plain and simple clothes, strange food, and a ban on dancing and participating in the school play were hard to endure as a child, but Janzen also acknowledges the skills that she has as a result – her ability to cook for a large group at the drop of a hat, and the innate goodness of her mother, who I think is the real star of this book.  I found Janzen’s style a rather muddled, and would have enjoyed the book more if it had been more tightly edited, but it is very readable.

Finally, I returned to fiction with Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays is Missing. Thursday Next,  (not the real one, but the written one, who plays the part of the real Thursday Next in the novels loosely based upon her outworld life) Jurisfiction’s least effective agent,  begins to suspect some one wants something covered up when she is asked to investigate (but not too thoroughly) and inter-genre taxi accident.  Meanwhile, the real Thursday Next is missing, a genre war is brewing, and readership is falling alarmingly.  Assisted by a steam powered butler, Thursday (the “written” one) attempts to work out what is happening.  The story is as inventive and convoluted as Fforde’s earlier Thursday Next/bookworld novels, and just as enjoyable.  In addition to the story, I particularly enjoyed the map showing the relative positions of different genres with the Isle of fiction.