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Summer Reading

Lauren

After a long night of knitting and homeworking, I am about to curl up in bed with a book I’ve been looking forward to rereading for a week. In fact, I managed to line up a good deal of my summer reading in one fell swoop.

Nostalgia crept over me when I passed the discount table outside of the bookstore last week. The entire Earth’s Children series by Jean M. Auel was on sale for $1 per book. I couldn’t resist. I loved these books when I was a kid, and now that I know a bit more about history and evolution, hope to reevaluate the books from a more critical perspective, and assuage some of that nostalgia for little Ayla as she grows from a child to one of the finest fictional role models I had as a sniveling tween.

It had better be as good as I remember it.

13 thoughts on Summer Reading

  2. I had heard about that series for years and was recently requested to read it by my boyfriend who is an anthropologist. It took me a surprisingly long time to get through it because pieces of it frustrated me. The science was sketchy at best, the historical pieces were…well, not, terribly, and the writing was not the best I have read, to say the least.

    That being said, I hope you enjoy it. I was pleased that the main character was a female who was strong, adaptive, and very capable, but until I could read it the same way I read scifi (suspension of disbelief) all it did was frustrate me.

  4. the first one still rocks.

    i used a lot of what i learned about herbs and healing from these books to write a paper about how women, as midwives and herbologists, were the first doctors. the professor started stuttering! couldn’t take the idea, reluctantly admited that we ‘might’ have been the first pharmacologists!

  5. I, and all my girlfriends, loved them too. I think that the first one still stands up reasonably well to re-reading. The second one was okay too, in the third and fourth the emphasis on the “thrusting manhoods” became, yeah, a little much.

    Also, to be honest (and a complete downer, I know), I got tired of how Ayla was superwoman, inventing everything (bleach, the needle, the bow and arrow protoype, surgical stitching, horse-riding, the domestication of animals, etc., etc.), figuring out all the mysteries, seeing parts of the future (planes, trains, automobiles) that even the wisest mystics had never seen and couldn’t see without her. By the fourth book it was evident that she was a complete Mary-Sue.

    Still, they’re good fun reading for summer (except the fifth one, which was kind of awful) and $1 a book is a damn good deal. I’m looking forward to seeing your thoughts on the books when you’ve re-read them.

  6. I don’t mean to be overly negative – the first book especially was good – and I loved that Ayla invented everything. I really think th later books went downhill and perhaps the editor’s pushed for more thrusting? It was embarassing even in puberty when I read it, but it didn’t keep me from reading the rest of the series….

  7. Update us on what you think! I read them a couple of years ago, when the fifth book was being hyped. I was working in a bookstore, and I just couldn’t ignore the hoardes of people telling me to read them. I remember loving the first couple, but getting exasperated with them by the end of the series.

    Incidentally, how long do you think it will take you to get through all five? It took me ages, which might have been part of the problem, now that I think about it.

  8. I don’t know, I agree with Titalayo. I enjoyed the books, I really did. But after awhile I was also frustrated by the concept that Ayla seemed to invent everything. Plus, I think the quality has kind of gone down since “Valley of the Horses”. I waited for years for the last one to come out and was sorely disappointed when it did.

    That said, is it bad that I enjoyed the whole thrusting manhood part? I read those books before I started having sex and parts of that book were more useful than “The Joy of Sex”. Especially since I could check out “The Earth’s Children” series from my school library.

  9. I loved Ayla’s character and swore if I ever adopted a daughter I’d name her Ayla. And while I thought it unlikely that this one woman could have invented everything and resolved so many mysteries that are now common knowledge, my burgeoning feminist understanding took it to be that it’s possible that a woman did these things and Ayla is the stand in for that mythical woman.

    But I loved the sex bits. Read these books well before I had any experience to relate it to and I often reread the naughty bits several times before returning it to the library.

  10. The only one of the series I read was “The Mammoth Hunters.” Possibly my memory of it is colored by the fact that I was traveling alone in Ecuador, had nobody to talk to, had nothing else to read, and had some sort of intestinal parasite, so that I read the book while lying in severe discomfort on my ratty hotel bed, between frequent trips to the bathroom. I hated it. I finally managed to trade it to another traveler for a copy of a Kurt Vonnegut novel — Galapagos, I believe, but that might just be a mental association with Ecuador. It was a long time ago.

  11. Yeah, the fact that her lover Jondalar was a professional virgin de-flowerer always gives me giggles; also that he loved her partly because she was the first women he was with who was “big enough” (ahem) to “take” him. Hee.

    Really, besides the sex, the only thing I remember from them is that the author introduced the Venus of Willendorf mother-goddess figurines (and mother-goddess ideas in general) which were new to me.

  12. Since school let out I have devoured… Where We Stand: Class Matters, Bone Black (both by hooks), Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand, and Jane Fonda’s autobiography, My Life So Far.

  13. “Jondalar awoke with the urge to make some tools.”

    My father’s very favorite line ever. I agree the first two books were good, but the others slid a little. Valley of the Horses was, according to my mother, the ultimate “DF” book. (DF=”Delayed F*ck.” I have odd parents.)

    The Mammoth Hunters was the only one I actively disliked. I don’t think that the author intended me to desperately want to reach into the story and strangle her main characters like that.

    It wasn’t so much that Ayla invented everything, it’s that we had to keep hearing her explain it over and over and over to everyone they met. I got so tired of hearing the same conversations. I know how Ayla domesticated the wolf: you told this story less than ten pages ago and my memory is actually quite good, you know. Editing is our friend.

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