• Complain

Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House: A Romance

Here you can read online Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House: A Romance full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2007, publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Elizabeth McCracken The Giant's House: A Romance
  • Book:
    The Giant's House: A Romance
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Dial Press Trade Paperback
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2007
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Giant's House: A Romance: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Giant's House: A Romance" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt the over-tall eleven-year-old boy whos the talk of the town walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person whos ever really understood her, and as he grows six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight so does her heart and their most singular romance.

Elizabeth McCracken: author's other books


Who wrote The Giant's House: A Romance? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Giant's House: A Romance — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Giant's House: A Romance" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Elizabeth McCracken

The Giant's House: A Romance

for Robert Sidney Phelps

a giant of a friend

Part One

See Also

I do not love mankind.

People think theyre interesting. Thats their first mistake. Every retiree you meet wants to supply you with his life story.

An example: thirty-five years ago a woman came into the library. Shed just heard about oral histories, and wanted to string one together herself.

We have so many wonderful old people around, she said. They have such wonderful stories. We could capture them on tape, then maybe transcribe them dont you think that would make a wonderful record of the area? My father, for instance, is in a nursing home

Her father. Of course. She was not interested in the past, but her past.

If I wanted to listen to old people nattering on, I told her, I would ride a Greyhound bus across country. Such things get boring rather quickly, dont they.

The woman looked at me with the same smile shed had on the entire conversation. She laughed experimentally.

Oh Miss Cort, she said. Surely you didnt mean that.

I did and I do, I answered. My reputation even thirty-five years ago was already so spoiled there was no saving it. I really dont see the point, do you?

I felt that if those old people had some essential information they should write it down themselves. A life story can make adequate conversation but bad history.

Still, there you are in a nursing home, bored and lonely, and one day something different happens. Instead of a gang of school kids come to bellow Christmas carols at you, theres this earnest young person with a tape recorder, wanting to know about a flood sixty years ago, or what Main Street was like, or some such nonsense. All the other people in the home are sick to death of hearing your stories, because really lets be honest you only have a few.

Suddenly theres a microphone in your face. Wham! just like that, youre no longer a dull conversationalist, youre a natural resource.

Back then I thought, if you go around trying to rescue every fact or turn of phrase, you would never stop, you would eavesdrop until your fingers ached from playing the black keys of your tape recorder, until the batteries had gasped their last and the tape came to its end and thunked the machine off, no more, and still you would not have made a dent on the small talk of the world. People are always downstairs, talking without you. They gather in front of stores, run into each other at restaurants, and talk. They clump together at parties or couple up at the dinner table. They organize themselves by profession (for instance, waitresses), or by quality of looks, or by hobby, or companion (in the case of dog owners and married people), or by sexual preference or weight or social ease, and they talk.

Imagine what there is to collect: every exchange between a customer and a grocery store clerk, wrong numbers, awful baby talk to a puppy on the street, what people yell back at the radio, the sound the teenage boy outside my window makes when he catches the basketball with both his hands and his stomach, every oh lord said at church or in bed or standing up from a chair. Thank you, hey watch it, gesundheit, whos a good boy, sweetness, how much? I love your dress.

An Anthology of Common Conversation. Already I can tell you it will be incomplete. In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior. All those words go around and end up nowhere; your fondest wishes wont save them. No need to be a packrat of palaver anyhow. Best to stick with recorded history.

Now, of course, I am as guilty as anyone, and this book is the evidence. Im worse; I know my details by heart, no interviews necessary. No one has asked me a question yet, but I will not shut up.

Peggy Cort is crazy, anyone will tell you so. That lady who wanted to record the towns elders, the children who visited the library, my co-workers, every last soul in this town. The only person who ever thought I wasnt is dead; he is the subject of this memoir.

Let me stop. History is chronological, at least this one is. Some women become librarians because they love order; Im one. Ordinal, cardinal, alphabetical, alphanumerical, geographical, by subject, by color, by shape, by size. Something logical that people one hopes cannot botch, although they will.

This isnt my story.

Let me start again.

I do not love mankind, but he was different.

He was a redhead as a child.

You wont hear that from most people. Most people wont care. But he had pretty strawberry blond hair. If hed been out in the sun more, it would have been streaked gold.

He first came into my library in the fall of 1950, when he was eleven. Some teacher from the elementary school brought them all trooping in; I was behind the desk, putting a cart of fiction in order. I thought at first he was a second teacher, he was so much taller than the rest, tall even for a grown man. Then I noticed the chinos and white bucks and saw that this was the over-tall boy Id heard about. Once I realized, I could see my mistake; though he would eventually develop cheekbones and whiskers, now he was pale and slightly babyfaced. He wasnt the tallest man in the world then, just a remarkably tall boy. Doctors had not yet prescribed glasses, and he squinted at faraway objects in a heroic way, as if they were new countries waiting to be discovered.

This is Miss Cort, the teacher said, gesturing at me. Ask her any question you want. She is here to help you. That is what librarians do.

She showed them the dusty oak card catalog, the dusty stacks, the circulation desk I spent hours keeping free of dust. In short, she terrified them.

Fiction is on the third floor, she said. And biography is on the second. I recognized her; she read Georgette Heyer and biographies of royalty and returned books so saturated with cigarette smoke I imagined she exhaled over each page on purpose. I wanted to stand by the exit, to whisper in every eleven-year-old ear, Just come back. Come back by yourself and well forget all about this.

At the end of the visit, the tall boy came up to talk. He seemed studious, though studious is too often the word we give to quiet odd people.

I want a book, he said, about being a magician.

What sort of magician? I said. Like Merlin? Recently a teacher had read aloud from The Sword and the Stone, and they all wanted more stories.

No, he said. He put his hands on the circulation desk. His fingernails were cleaner than an ordinary eleven-year-olds; his mother was then still alive. Just tricks, he said. I want to make things look like they disappear. I looked in the card catalog under magic, but I didnt find anything.

Try conjuring, I told him.

We found only one book, an oversized skinny volume called Magic for Boys and Girls. He took it to a table in the front room. He wasnt clumsy, as you might expect, but terribly delicate. His hands were large, out of proportion even with his big body, and he had to use them delicately to accomplish anything at all.

I watched his narrow back as he read the book. After an hour I walked over.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted? I asked.

Yes, he said, not looking at me. The book was opened flat on the table in front of him, and he worked his hands in the air according to the instructions, without any props. His fingers kept slowly snatching at nothing, as if he had already made dozens of things disappear, rabbits and cards and rubber balls and bouquets of paper flowers, and had done this so brilliantly even he could not bring them back.

I may be adding things. Its been years now, and nearly every day I dream up my hours and meetings with James Carlson Sweatt. I am a librarian, and you cannot stop me from annotating, revising, updating. I like to think that because I am a librarian I offer accurate and spurious advice with no judgment, good and bad next to each other on the shelf. But my memories are not books. Blessing if they were. Then maybe someone would borrow one and keep it too long and return it, a little battered, offering money for my forgiveness, each memory new after its long absence.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Giant's House: A Romance»

Look at similar books to The Giant's House: A Romance. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Giant's House: A Romance»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Giant's House: A Romance and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.