Telecommuter Talk

My Food and Me or Why I Eat What I do

2012-01-26T12:18:00.005-05:00

I figure if I'm going to be writing about food and giving you recipes on a regular basis, I ought to provide you, my readers, with a little bit of information about what I eat and why I eat what I do. First off, I am an omnivore, not really by choice. If I could choose, I wouldn't eat meat, because I don't at all relish the idea of eating animals I so love. However, one thing I've learned over the years is that, no matter what the FDA would have us believe, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all nutrition guideline. Everybody's body is different, and some (lucky dogs) can thrive on a vegetarian diet. Some can thrive on a vegan diet. I, unfortunately, can't. My body needs animal fat and protein, which, actually makes sense, if you look at me: super pale, from head to toe. My ancestors obviously lived in cold climes where there wasn't a lot of sun. Foraging was probably difficult in such a climate, and they probably had to hunt quite a bit, needing fat and protein to sustain them. I know I don't do well without meat, because every Lent, for years, Bob and I have given up meat, and I just don't feel very well during that period.

That being said, I've read three books that have influenced me greatly over the years. One is Mark Bittman's (I love Mark Bittman. He can do no wrong) Food Matters. This is the book that most convinced me to focus on eating organic and locally grown food in season, as much as I possibly can (I'm not perfect. Sorry, but I'm not giving up salads 9 months of the year, because lettuce isn't in season where I live. Nor am I willing to give up things like avocados, bananas, and citrus fruit because they aren't grown locally. I do think, though, that I do better in this regard than about 90% of Americans, which is fine with me). He eats this way, and it makes sense to me, so I've pretty much adopted it: one vegan meal a day, one vegetarian meal a day, and one "anything goes" meal a day. Some days, that means I still don't eat any meat or seafood at all, but most days I eat a little.

The second is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. This is the book that convinced me to stop eating white pasta (in fact, to stop eating anything made with white flour) and to cut down drastically on my sugar consumption. I'm not perfect in this regard. I may not keep white flour and tons of sugar and candy in my house, but deliver a chocolate cake to my door, or present me with a table laden with luscious desserts, and I'm not going to turn them down. Still, I try to eat very little sugar and white flour. Fallon was also the one who convinced me it was okay to drink (preferably raw) milk from grass-fed cows (in fact, better than okay, good for me) and to eat grass-fed red meat.

The third is Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel. Despite the fact that I take meticulous care of my teeth (brushing, flossing, and gargling), I've had all kinds of trouble with them over the years. Finally, because I'm convinced foods are drugs, many with healing properties and many that are bad for us, I decided to turn to diet as a way of caring for my teeth. This book reinforced the need to raw milk from grass-fed cows, to eat eggs from free-range, grass-fed chickens (actually, the first one to convince me to do that was Andrew Weil), and to eat grass-fed meats. It also introduced me to the idea of fermenting grains (almost all the bread I eat now is sour dough, and when I eat oatmeal, I make it myself and soak it with a little yogurt overnight to ferment it), which has not only benefited my teeth (I think), but has also benefited my intestines, because I suffer from irritable bowel syndrome (or, I should say, I used to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome. Once I discovered that mine is not improved, but rather made much worse, by the standard prescribed diet: lots of whole grains and other high-fiber foods, I haven't had much trouble with it).

Basically, then, here's how I eat:

Very few foods are off-limits. The only thing I absolutely avoid like the plague are trans-fats (not the kind that can be found in small doses and naturally in butter, but the kind that used to be in manufactured margarine and all kinds of other manufactured foods) and high fructose corn syrup.

I eat organic whenever possible, bought locally and in season most of the time, and I don't eat factory-farmed meat. In fact, I don't eat any meat that isn't grass-fed or free range, and I eat so little of it, that mostly what I eat is beef and chicken. I also eat sustainable sea food.

I buy raw milk from grass-fed cows and free-range eggs right off my Amish friends' farm. I know raw milk has gotten all kinds of bad press -- a good deal of it originating with the dairy industry -- but that mostly comes from the days in which people were not so meticulous about cleanliness. The barn where I pick up my eggs and milk is cleaner than my house a good deal of the time. I highly doubt I'm going to get sick from drinking this milk. I also buy butter and whole-fat yogurt from grass-fed cows, and I buy raw cheeses.

So, you can see, I'm not exactly on the low-fat, plenty of grains, and avoid red meat diet that is what so many nutritionists recommend. Nonetheless, I have low cholesterol levels (plenty of the "good" kind); my blood pressure is normal; and my IBS is under control. It works for me. It may not work for you, because your body isn't mine, and for any recipes I include, I will, when possible, let you know how you can substitute lower fat ingredients (if that's what you want to do) or even make some of them vegan (there are vegan options for a lot of what I make). I also will label my recipes for you: ominvore, vegetarian, vegan, so you can skip those you won't make.

Finally, I probably ought to tell you that one of the reasons I've been so reluctant over the years to publish my recipes is that I cook so much by taste. Measuring cups and spoons are for baking, in my book, but cooking is done by experimenting with a little of this and a little of that until it tastes "right" (i.e. is something both Bob and I will love). I've realized, lately, though, that plenty of recipes call for, say, "red hot pepper flakes to taste," so I will measure as best I can, but please forgive me if I often rely on letting you figure out what tastes best to you. I consider most recipes to be guidelines, and so, you should consider mine to be such as well.

I hope we have fun with this new adventure. I'm off to figure out which recipe I'll give you-all first. Stay tuned...

1984 by George Orwell

2012-01-24T09:27:00.006-05:00

Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classics, 1984.

I'm about halfway into 1984 by George Orwell for November's Autumn Classics Challenge. It's a book that I'm having to discipline myself to read very, very slowly, because it's so terrifying and such a nail-biter that I want to race through it to see what happens next, but it's so meaty that it deserves to be chewed and digested bit by bit -- so much insight and wisdom on every. single. page. Why has it taken me so long to read such a brilliant work? (I now know I couldn't possibly have read it before, despite thinking for years that I may have read it in college. It would certainly have stuck with me the way other great classics I read back then have).

If you've never read it and think you couldn't possibly like it, you might want to re-think that thought. In many ways, it reads like the best of spy thrillers. The reader is constantly worried that the characters are going to get caught: have they made a mistake? Have they trusted someone who can't be trusted? I don't have the answers yet, since I haven't finished reading the book, but I'm hoping everyone, thus far, is what he or she seems to be and can be trusted. Since it's a dystopia, though, I'm guessing that horrible things (as if things can get much more horrible than living in this world in which a good idea -- socialism/communism -- has, in the hands of the wrong sorts of leaders, turned into a horrible reality, a totalitarian world in which no one is free and everyone is kept in oppressive roles) are yet to come.

Anyway, I've got prompts to answer for the challenge, and even though there are different levels, depending on how far the reader is into the book, I'm going to take a stab at answering all three prompts. It will be interesting to see if I change my mind by the time I reach the end of the book, and I'll let you know if I do.

Level 1

Who is the author? What does he look like? When was he born? Where did he live? What does his handwriting look like? What are some other novels he's written? What is an interesting and random fact about his life?

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in 1903 in India. I've posted his picture above. I think he looks intelligent (probably that large forehead makes me think that) and kindly (the look in his eyes and the way he's holding his mouth). He lived in India, England, and Spain (the latter because he had volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising). I thought I might have a hard time finding a sample of his handwriting, but I eventually found one here. I'm glad to see that his writing, like mine, isn't exactly the neatest or the easiest to read. I wonder if he suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome, too (which is why my writing, which used to be quite neat, has gone way down hill over the years. I think that may be a problem for all those of us who've spent long hours writing ever since we learned how to grab a pen and get to it). He also wrote Animal Farm, which I haven't read, either. During his lifetime, though, he was better known as an essayist. An interesting fact about him is that, during WWII, he wrote propaganda for the BBC (they called it "programs") to gain East Asian and Indian support for the British war effort. He knew exactly what he was doing and said he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a dirty boot." It didn't take him long (2 years) to decide the pay wasn't worth it, and he resigned.

Level 2 What do you think of his writing style? What do you like about it? Or what would have made you more inclined to like it? Is there a particular quote that has stood out for you?

Orwell's writing style is crisp and clean without being fragmented or disjointed, and it's seamless. I'm not aware of an author who is desperately trying to write, to get his stitches straight, and to weave in awkward symbolism to make me think. Orwell just glides along like a well-oiled sewing machine, making me think, and I can disappear into his story without worrying about odd stitching. This seamlessness is what I like about it (I am always drawn to seamless writing). There are numerous good quotes, but here's a nice example of one:

'They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.' (p. 138)

Level 3

Why do you think he wrote this novel? How did his contemporaries view both the author and the novel?

I think he wrote this novel to portray the dangers of any political system if put into the hands of the wrong man. He'd fought and had been wounded in Spain and had seen what totalitarian socialist and communist dictators like Franco and Stalin could do. He was a "democratic socialist" himself, but he was able to imagine how someone (or a group of "someones") could twist and pound ideologies, using them to fulfill selfish goals and ambitions, to the detriment of those living under them. Again, I come back to the word "brilliant" to describe this work. I imagine his contemporaries who were pro-democratic and anti-communist probably also thought he was brilliant, while communist sympathizers probably loathed him. I found this bit of information here:

In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanantion is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause - anti-Stalinism - that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings - or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements.

You can see why I've been led to believe that probably many of his contemporaries despised him.

I'd like to end this post with one more observation. I don't know why on earth any student would be made to read this book in high school, as many have been through the years. It's one of those books that people need to read after they've lived a while, have observed human nature and emotions in ways most teenagers haven't, and who have a pretty good understanding of different sorts of political states. (Having said that, I know that Bob taught it to high school students, and my guess is that he made it come alive.)

The New and Improved Telecommuter Talk

2012-01-20T12:01:00.008-05:00

It's been over a month since I posted anything on this blog, and I haven't been reading any blogs, either. Some of this is due to the fact that 2011 -- a year that will be memorable for not being one of the best in the Barton household -- went out with a bang (our car broke down on the way to Maine and what should have been a relaxing vacation, after an exhausting Thanksgiving and Christmas season, instead became an exhausting vacation dealing with what to do with it and, ultimately, buying a new car -- the Prius v, Prius's new station wagon, which is proving to be a fabulous car so far). That happened during the week of December 26th, and we got back to Pennsylvania on January 3, though, so I can't really blame it for my disappearance from the blogosphere for all of January as well. I can say, however, that because I didn't have the relaxing vacation I'd planned, in which I was going to spend the majority of my days reading in front of a fire, I came back with three long books to read for our One Book, One Community committee (I'm serving on that to choose the book our three counties will be reading for 2013). I had to spend every spare minute reading them. Then again, that meeting was a week ago, so I can't really use it as an excuse anymore. Finally, I've decided that I was just a little bit bored with my blog, but I don't want to give up on blogging altogether. After 5 1/2 years, I just needed to tweak it a bit.

First up: a face lift. I've changed the design template (Blogger has much more to offer in this regard than they did when I first came on board with them). I hope you like it. I'm way too much of a Luddite to design my own look, but this one caught my eye.

Secondly, I've decided to be more purposeful in my posting. Those of you who've been with me since the beginning know that I started this blog with the intent of writing about my experiences as a telecommuter. I quickly ran out of content and started writing about any and everything. My blog's title now seems like false advertising; I don't even telecommute anymore; but I like it (I'm a huge fan of alliteration), so I'm going to keep it. How to be more purposeful? I started thinking about my passions, and I came up with three:

1. Books

2. Food

3. Music

I'm not at all original in my passions, huh? I'm passionate about other things: animals (especially frogs), for instance, but I don't particularly like reading and writing about them. I mean, there are only so many fascinating facts about frogs that I would care to share with my readers and only so many pictures I could take of new additions to the frog collection I've had since I was five. Books, food, and music, though, are passions that lend themselves well to blog posts. After all, I've already been blogging about books and music for years. I recently realized that, although I talk about loving food and cooking, I rarely ever post anything about my adventures in the kitchen (kind of like I talk about writing a novel and a collection of ghost stories and never seem to finish them -- but I am. I promise! It's just taking much longer than I'd like). I think it's about time I did.

With these three passions in mind, I've come up with a weekly game plan for the blog, as follows:

One post a week will be focused on books. This won't necessarily be a book review, although I hope to include plenty of those, but it will always be about books or authors or publishing or libraries or some such thing.

One post a week will be focused on music. Again, it may be more than a favorite song (which I've been doing for years on Music Monday), and I do still plan to share favorite songs, but I want to broaden this category and write about groups or composers or types of music, etc. And I hope to stop being so lazy, giving you something a little more substantial than mere links to YouTube videos.

One post a week will be about food. Same thing. I hope to share original recipes with you, but I also want to share other aspects of food that interest me, like nutrition and the celebrity chef phenomenon, etc.

Finally, one post a week will be a free-for-all. This is where all the other stuff I like to ponder will appear.

I'm not going to assign days of the week to these posts, although Music Monday seems like it ought to remain on Mondays (lovely alliteration yet again), so it probably will. My goal is to be more purposeful but not more anal: no need to assign specific days of the week to specific types of posts. I'm going to start using the label function, so if you're not interested, say, in reading about music, you can skip that post and spend your time reading what does interest you.

So, Happy New Year, everyone, and Happy New Telecommuter Talk (I hope)!

R.I.P. Challenge Catch Up: The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories

2011-12-13T10:48:00.004-05:00

Newton, Michael, ed. The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Pierce. London: Penguin Books, 2010.

(Yes, I know it's December, but I'm still catching up on writing about my R.I.P. challenge books. I've got two more to tell you about after this one. Oh well, the winter is as good a time as any to pick up a spine-tingling book, so maybe I'll inspire some good winter reading for you -- or titles to put on your list for next year's R.I.P. challenge).

Ahh, what could be better than to sit down on a rainy afternoon in Maine, large mug of tea at hand, and a collection of ghost stories? I read the majority of these stories while in Maine in October. They were a perfect complement to a volume of Victorian vampire stories I'd also brought with me to read.

I liked this collection because it included some of my all-time favorite ghost stories (W.W. Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw", M. R. James's "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"), but it also introduced me to stories I didn't know, most written by authors I didn't know (Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "The Cold Embrace", Mary Austin's "The Readjustment"). Talk about a book that leads one to read more. I could probably spend 2012 doing nothing but reading books and story collections I've been inspired to read just from this book. Instead, as is typical, despite notes I've made in the book and titles I've put into the T.B.R. tome, this book will probably go on a shelf, and I'll read nothing more that I learned about from its pages until years from now when someone says to me, "Have you ever read this collection of Margaret Oliphant stories? You really must."

What makes this collection great is Michael Newton's Introduction and his Notes. The Notes are terrific. They provide biographical information about each author as well as information on when and where each story was first published. I hate cheap collections that give the reader absolutely nothing to help put stories into context. Occasionally, I came across what I consider classic "Penguinesque" endnotes, the sort that make me think, "I flipped all the way to the back of the book and nearly lost my place for that?" Here's a prime example for you:

He was made welcome at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by windows looking seaward. (p. 264)*

This passage is followed by an endnote. Hmm. What might it be? Perhaps there's some information about superstitions surrounding windows that look seaward. Or maybe the fictitious Globe Inn is based on a real inn that still exists. Or possibly (one of my favorite types of end notes), we'll get some details about how this story connects to some other story, either by the author or one of the author's friends. But, no, flip to page 406, and here's what you'll find:

"apple-pie order: perfect neatness"

Sigh!

Luckily, as I noted above, most of the endnotes weren't of this sort, and Newton's Introduction is well worth reading. He explains why he's chosen the stories he has, and he gives descriptions of different kinds of ghost stories (useful to those of us who dabble in writing our own such stories). He follows his Introduction with a "Further Reading List" that is more enticing than most such lists. He's done a superb job, really, of putting together an anthology, taking care to include all the bits and pieces that are necessary to make an anthology complete. That's the editor in me speaking. Now, let's hear the reader in me give you brief commentaries on each story.

Elizabeth Gaskell: The Old Nurse's Story

This one effortlessly and effectively combines many classic elements of the genre into one story.

Fitz-James O'Brien: What Was It?"

If you like a little humor thrown in with your creepiness, this is a story for you. Thank goodness for the endnotes, though. O'Brien expected his readers to be literate way beyond what I am.

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain

The alternate title says it all: the irrational meets the rational. We all know I love a good irrational v. rational tale.

Elizabeth Bradden: The Cold Embrace

Oh, if only this sort of vengeance could be visited upon all such cads. I think I must read more Bradden.

Amelia B. Edwards: The North Mail

This one's a great twist on the sort of fears loving wives have experienced ever since the institution of marriage was created.

Charles Dickens: No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-man

Dickens was a Master when it comes to describing the ghostly. This is a good one for those of us raised on urban legends of ghosts of train wrecks.

Sheridan Le Fanu: Green Tea

(Beware, those of you obsessed with drinking green tea for your health.) This story's a prime example of the moving away from the romantic to the scientific. Here, spirit possession is nothing a physician can't handle, given permission and the time to do so. Oh, and there's a monkey, so wonderfully evil, a touch I loved.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House

Bet you didn't know that Beecher Stowe wrote ghost stories. I love the way so many of our classic writers experimented with the genre. This is a fine example of how urban legends might start and spread. Each of the two women in the story is convinced that her version of it is the honest truth. And what fun everyone in town is having with both.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Thrawn Janet

Was ever a more Presbyterian tale written? I found it difficult to read because of all the Scottish dialect but well worth the trouble. The Scottish glossary in the back of the book, whose inclusion I initially questioned (silly me!) came in handy.

Margaret Oliphant: The Open Door

Here's a story to verify everything the medium James Van Praagh would have to tell you about ghosts. I loved it! Oliphant's writing style is sublime. She's already in the TBR tome (thanks to you, fellow bloggers), and I must read more.

Rudyard Kipling: The End of the Passage

I found it interesting from a historical perspective, but I really didn't understand what happened. And not in a "Was there or wasn't there a ghost?" way. I mean in a "Huh? What are these characters doing and why?" way, the sort of story that has be rereading pages and still not understanding, while my mind wanders (basically, the way I read every story I had to read for high school English classes).

Lafcadio Hearn: Nightmare Touch

This story's horrific in its own right and is made even more so by the treatment of the poor child -- whether his horror was real or not.

W. W. Jacobs: The Monkey's Paw

Okay, I take that back about the way I read every story for high school English classes. I loved this one when I read it for high school, and I still love it, even though I've read it God knows how many times since then. Is there a single ghost story anthology that doesn't include it?

Mary Wilkins Freeman: The Wind in the Rose-Bush

(I wonder when we stopped hyphenating rose bush.) This is a classic ghost story, sort of an imaginative take on your friend's friend's brother's tale about the young hitchhiker who left her sweater in his car and when he went to return it to her house, his parents informed him she'd been dead for several years.

M.R. James: "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

It's the epitome of an M.R. Jamesian tale (clever, intelligent, funny, and creepy with great twists) and one of my favorites, especially since if I happen to be traveling alone, staying in some b & b with two beds, I can spook myself if I think about it too much (most especially if I'm dumb enough to watch one of those ghost hunting programs on the TV that's also in the room).

Ambrose Bierce: The Moonlit Road

I loved this one because it's a brilliant merging of mystery and ghost story.

Henry James: The Jolly Corner

I'm surprised I'd never read this one till now. Very Henry Jamesian. That means it's very erudite in a way I shouldn't like, that should bore me to tears, but I loved it anyway, which has been my experience with everything I've ever read by James. (I wish my last name were James. It seems then I'd automatically be a great ghost story writer.)

Mary Austin: The Readjustment

This one's a marvelous exploration of how a couple can love one another and never be able to communicate that love to each other.

Edith Wharton: Afterward

(How clever to end a book with a story called "Afterward".) I barely remembered anything about this one from the first time I read it, but I love Wharton's ghost stories, so it was a pleasure to read it as though I were reading it for the first time. Like Edwards's story (and also like many of Wharton's other ghost stories) it's another one that preys nicely on wifely fears.

* Guess the author of that quote. I'll put all correct guesses in a hat and send a copy of this book to the name I pull.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

2011-12-06T10:30:00.004-05:00

Sankovitch, Nina. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my life (as I recently emailed Friend-Not-Husband Bob), decided to do one of its periodic imitations of hell. We received a call from Bob's brother Peter telling us he was in the intensive care unit of the Stamford Hospital in Connecticut. We knew he had been bitten by a couple of ticks two weeks prior; that, not feeling well, he had gone to the doctor on Tuesday to be checked for lyme disease; and that she had immediately sent him to the emergency room when she saw his condition, mostly because he was very short of breath. We are, basically, Peter's only next of kin. Bob has no other siblings; both his parents are dead; and Peter never married or had any children; and he lives alone, in what was his parents' house. It was important for us to be there for him.

To make a long story short, Bob found someone to cover for his Thanksgiving Eve church service, and we raced up from Pennsylvania to Connecticut (as much as anyone can race, packing up, for an indefinite amount of time, two humans, two cats, and a dog and traveling the New Jersey ~~Parking Lot~~ Turnpike the day before Thanksgiving). By the time we got to the hospital, Peter had been intubated. Soon, thereafter, he suffered acute renal failure. He did not have lyme disease. He had ehrlichiosis, which is another tick-borne infection that systematically attacks all the muscles and all the organs in the body. It's supposedly extremely rare, although we've subsequently discovered that Peter's neighbors' dog had it. Also, it isn't always so severe. Peter's case was complicated by the fact that he lost his spleen when he was in a car accident back in his twenties, so his immune system is compromised. Typically, the infection is treated on an outpatient basis with antibiotics.

We got back to Peter's home Wednesday night completely exhausted. All I wanted to do was eat the takeout food we'd bought and then crawl into bed with a good book. I'd brought a couple of books with me, but somehow, nothing appealed, so I went searching through boxes of books that Peter, who works for a company that displays books for publishers at trade shows and gets many books free, had in what his parents called "the pool room." Most of these are thrillers and mysteries, which seemed like good fare for the circumstances, but then I realized that he also, inexplicably, because I can't imagine his ever reading it, had a copy of Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. I grabbed it, and a couple of mysteries, and headed up to bed.

I have to admit that I started with a mystery (Michael Malone's First Lady -- top notch!). Sankovitch's book had caught my attention. I'd read about it in the blogosphere and Goodreads.com (mixed reviews) and had come across it at my favorite bookstore in Maine, but I wasn't overly eager to read it. I knew the premise: Sankovitch used books as therapy to help her deal with her sister's untimely death, spending a year reading a book a day. She wrote about each one on her blog, which I've skimmed, but I'm not a faithful reader. Her year was something that sounded both extremely exhausting and extremely fun to me. The exhausting part was what made me a little hesitant. A slow reader like I am could never take on such an enterprise. Also, we all know how good I am at writing daily blog posts.

Despite my hesitancy, I took it along the next day to the hospital and was hooked from the moment I read the first paragraph. Her Prologue is about the day she made the decision to read one book every day for a year. She was on a weekend getaway with her husband, and she read Dracula -- one of my favorite books -- in a day. Her description of doing so was a real page-turner (complete with such things as missed dinner reservations), and I realized this was going to be a great book -- funny, poignant, real -- to get my mind off the horror going on around me.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is supposed to be a roundup of that year (after all, she's already written reviews of all the books), but it's actually much more than that, and little did I know what therapy it would actually be for me while I sat for hours at the hospital, listening to doctors and nurses and hoping and praying that Peter would be okay. Sankovitch's rich writing captures the way reading is such a part of the lives of those of us who have been obsessed with books since before we could even read. The book is like a memoir told through the books she's read since she was a child, what they have meant to her, what they have taught her. She focuses specifically on this particular year (Oct. 2008 - Oct. 2009) but expands details to encapsulate her whole life. As our stay in Stamford began to drag on (I'm still here), I said to Bob at one point, "One of the things I miss most is our books," which would be a silly thing to say to a non-reader. I mean, I had plenty of books to read, but Bob understood. My statement marked me as a perfect audience for Sankovitch's story: a reader who thinks of books as friends, just like Sankovitch does, and who gets great comfort from being surrounded by those friends, even if she isn't necessarily engaged with them. The books around me right now are virtual strangers, many of which I have no desire to get to know.

Another plus for this book is that Sankovitch happens to live in Westport, CT. I worked in Westport for 11 years. When she described the Westport Public Library, one of my favorite lunch-time haunts, I could envision it. She even, in her Acknowledgments, thanks one of the librarians who served on a library advisory board for me. She takes the train into NYC. I know that commuter train well. She talks about walks along the river that I used to walk along. All of this familiar turf was comforting. Not only could I relate to her relationship with books, but I could also relate to her setting. Finally, I could relate to the fact that she's a third daughter.

Peter is now well on his way to making a full recovery. At this point, I am dying to go home. As much as I love Connecticut and all my friends here, it is no longer home. I don't have a routine here. I don't have my kitchen here or my aforementioned book friends. I'm hoping he'll be out of rehab this weekend and able to care for himself, by which point I will have been here for over two weeks. Meanwhile, I've been both comforted and inspired by Sankovitch. No, I don't plan to read a book and write a blog post a day, while running a household in which she and her husband have four boys. It helps that she reads about 70 pages an hour, which is almost twice the speed at which I read. I wouldn't want to have to limit the books I choose to read to a certain number of pages. But I've definitely been inspired to stick to a new reading and writing schedule I've set for myself (it was meant to be a New Year's Resolution, but I started it on Dec. 1 instead of Jan. Always a good idea to get a head start). I'm very sad for her that she lost her sister at such a young age, but we are fortunate that she took that sorrow, took on this project, and turned it into such a delightful, thought-provoking book. If that's not inspiring, I truly don't know what is.

Music Monday/Lyric Lundi

2011-11-21T19:00:00.003-05:00

When I was growing up, my parents had this big, rectangular clock radio that they turned on every morning when they woke up. I'd inherit -- or, actually, more like steal -- it when I was in high school and use it as my alarm. By then, I had it set to my favorite FM album rock station, but back when I was very young, my parents had it set to the popular AM station that was mostly news and played the pop songs of the day. I remember many songs wafting out of that radio, but this is one of the earliest I can remember. I loved it, and my brother and sisters and I always sang this when we were on long car trips.

I particularly love this video, despite the fact that it's a little blurry. I love the shots of the audience, and look at that orchestra backing up a pop group. Most of all, though: look at that dress! I want a dress just like that. I also want to be able to sing like that. Oh well, one can always dream.

The 2012 Classics Challenge

2011-11-20T18:12:00.007-05:00

Yes, yes, I know. I haven't even finished posting on the books I read for the R.I.P. Challenge, although I have finished reading them and will be getting posts up on the last three soon. Oh, and yes, I did just get chosen to be on Central Pennsylvania's One Book One Community committee, which means reading something like 40 or 50 books, but you know, winter is on its way, and for some reason, when winter hits, I like to turn to the classics. Maybe it's because I have fond childhood memories of reading Louisa May Alcott during Christmas breaks, but I love to curl up with mugs of tea or hot cocoa and a book that has stood the test of time, especially if it's a book that was actually bound and printed over 75 years ago and looks as if many, many have enjoyed it over the years.

How could I possibly not join A Classic's Challenge, created by Katherine Cox of November's Autumn? If nothing else, you've got to love that button you see here and that I get to put on my sidebar (if I can remember how to do that. If you don't see it there, someone in the know, please tell me how to do that in Blogger). What's really great about this challenge, though, is that it doesn't necessarily involve writing individual posts on each book (although I'm free to do so if I like). Instead, on the 4th of every month, I'm going to be responding to a prompt as it pertains to the book I'm reading (or have just read). That's a great idea, and I'm very interested to see how it goes. I'd never gone blog hopping until I joined the R.I.P. group read of Fragile Things, and I discovered that I really enjoyed it. It's more fun than bar hopping, for an introvert like me, and there are no hangovers to fear.

And now, without further ado: here is the list of seven books I will be reading in 2012. We are to read seven, three of which can be rereads. I've listed them alphabetically by author (I'm such a librarian).

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (a reread). When reading classics in the winter, one must read Austen. I have a suitably old, old copy of it to read, although I'd be tempted to buy one of those new Penguin hardcover editions like the copy of Emma Zoë's Mom gave me for Christmas last year. I can't justify doing that, though, in this house overflowing with books, especially when I have my grandmother's copy (in two volumes, nonetheless).

The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy (based on the text of the fourteenth-century Syrian Manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi). I actually have a three volume set of the tales, but I thought I'd start with this single-volume first. I've been wanting to read these tales for a long time (obviously, since I have acquired both a single-volume and a three-volume set), but recently reading Neil Gaiman's "Inventing Aladdin" has moved them from the "want-to-read-one-day" category to a "must-read-soon" category.

Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace. This is actually two books in one, but I'm counting it as one, because each one is relatively short, and they're both in this one volume that I got on sale at Borders before it went out of business. I never read the Betsy-Tacy books when I was a kid, but I read an article about Maud Hart Lovelace not long ago that got me interested. In these two books, Betsy has gotten to high school. If I like them, I'll go backwards and read about her childhood years.

The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy. I got this one at a library book sale ages ago. I read The Group when I was in my twenties, loved it, and have been meaning to read something else by her ever since. This will keep me from waiting another twenty years to do so.

1984 by George Orwell (a reread?). Maybe I will discover once and for all whether or not I actually read this one in college. Then again, maybe I won't. Anyway, I've become more and more interested in it as of late, given the "Big Brother-like" world we seem to live in today, and, really, I just think it's something I ought to have read.

The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles. Believe it or not, I've never actually read the whole thing, only Oedipus Rex, so, it will sort of be a reread but not really, and since 1984 may not be a reread, I figure I'm still well within my limit of three. A friend of mine has been reading Greek tragedies lately and has gotten me interested in doing so.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. Litlove wrote about this one some time ago, made it sound great, and I figure it's probably one of Stein's most accessible works, so I thought I'd start with it and see if I want to explore her further.

I reserve the right to swap out any of these titles with something else that comes along and interests me more, but right now, this is my plan. Join the challenge, if you'd like, or just enjoy it vicariously through all the other participants.

Friends and Socks

2011-11-19T09:54:00.004-05:00

For a number of years, I wished for a pair of hand-knitted socks. Ideally, I'd knit them myself, but we all know how well my little knitting project went. I finally had to admit that I just don't have the patience for it. Maybe it's something that could teach me patience, but not at this point in my life. I'd rather spend my time reading and writing.

Since I'm probably never going to knit my own socks, the next best thing, of course, would be to have a friend who is so-inclined knit a pair for me. In fact, that's better than knitting them myself, because every time I put them on, I would think of my dear friend who'd spent all that time and effort knitting me a pair of socks. How humbling.

Well, for my birthday last year my friend Linda did just that. She gave me a pair of socks that she had knitted for me. I probably shouldn't say it was the best birthday present anyone ever got me (after all, I got an engagement ring one year for my birthday), but it was definitely one of the best. And I was right: I think of Linda every time I wear the socks, which I happen to be doing today, because it's suddenly turned quite chilly here in Pennsylvania.

For a number of years, I've also wished that I appreciated poetry more than I do. It's high time I got over my fear of poetry, left over from my high school days. I've had this wrong belief for so long that all poetry is chock full of hidden meaning that I'm too stupid to understand. Now, confronting this irrational fear is something, unlike knitting, that I know I can actually do. In 2011, I've chosen to read more poetry than I ever have, and I've begun to make great strides when it comes to poetry appreciation, begun to realize that, yes, some poetry is chock full of hidden meaning that I'm too stupid to understand, but plenty of poetry speaks worlds to me, or touches me, or makes me think. I've also realized that there are plenty of novels out there with hidden meaning that I'm too stupid to understand, but I don't avoid reading novels, and you'd never hear me say, "Oh, I'm not a big fan of novels."

I mentioned in my recent post on what I read while I was in Maine that one of the books I read was Americans' Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinksy and Maggie Dietz. In this collection, Emily Wilson Orzechowski, a 59-year-old teacher from Oneonta, NY, chose the following poem by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

Ode to My Socks

(translated from the Spanish by Stephen Mitchell)

Maru Mori brought me

a pair

of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheep-herder's hands,

two socks as soft

as rabits.

I slipped my feet

into them

as though into

two

cases

knitted

with threads of

twilight

and goatskin.

Violent socks,

my feet were

two fish made

of wool,

two long sharks

seablue, shot

through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons,

my feet

were honored

in this way

these

heavenly

socks.

They were

so handsome.

For the first time

my feet seemed to me

unacceptable

like two decrepit

firemen, firemen

unworthy

of that woven

fire,

of those glowing

socks.

Nevertheless

I resisted

the sharp temptation

to save them somewhere

as schoolboys

keep

fireflies,

as learned men

collect

sacred texts,

I resisted

the mad impulse

to put them

in a golden

cage

and each day give them

birdseed

and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers

in the jungle who hand

over the very rare

green deer

to the spit

and eat it

with remorse,

I stretched out

my feet

and pulled on

the magnificent

socks

and then my shoes.

The moral

of my ode is this:

beauty is twice

beauty

and what is good is doubly

good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool

in winter.

(Pinsky, Robert and Maggie Dietz, eds, Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000. pp. 200-202)

Emily Wilson Orzechowski chose it as her favorite with this comment, "I have knitted socks." (p. 200) Emily Barton would say, "I have received socks knitted by a dear friend. Everyone should be lucky enough to have such a friend in life." I'm pretty sure Pablo Neruda would agree with me.

A Little Eye Candy

2011-11-15T07:12:00.002-05:00

Every so often, we need a little candy instead of a real meal, don't we? As long as we don't eat enough to gain 25 pounds and rot out all our teeth, it's certainly okay. I've had a bit of a craving for some empty calories lately and thought I'd share them with you, so here you go.

As far as I'm concerned, forget any half-dressed pop-movie-star-of-the-moment with his ridiculous six-pack abs and bulging biceps. It just doesn't get much sexier than this. And look at that! They're fully-clothed (my God, Baryshnikov even has on a jacket). Then again, you all know what a sucker I am for a man who can dance. Two men who can dance, dancing together? Well, I can almost understand all those ridiculous lesbian fantasies men have.

Take our eyes off the double handsome physiques for a moment, and it's really fun to compare the difference between a tap dancer and a ballet dancer. Even someone like me, who knows absolutely nothing about the details of dance, can tell that they move differently. (But, you know, that's kind of like claiming to read Playboy for the articles or something.)

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy: enjoy! If not, I'll try to provide a more substantial meal in my next post.

P.S. If they didn't dance, I would actually find Gregory Hines the more attractive of the two. In fact, when I was in college, I didn't understand why women swooned over Baryshnikov, and hung posters of him all over their walls, but that was before I'd actually seen any footage of him dancing. I changed my mind once I finally saw him dance.

R.I.P. Challenge: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

2011-11-11T20:46:00.012-05:00

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

(This book was originally published in 1764.)

I'm still catching up on my R.I.P. challenge reads (and will be for quite some time, so bear with me). It's great to go away for three weeks, but not so great to do it in the midst of the R.I.P. challenge, when you finally decide to join it. Anyway, this was one of the books I chose for the challenge.

When Walpole first wrote The Castle of Otranto (as many fiction writers are wont to do today, although I'm guessing it may have been rare in his day), he claimed it was an old manuscript recently discovered and translated by "William Marshall Gent." I had to laugh when I read in the Introduction to this edition that,

His friend, the Revd. William Mason later wrote to assure Walpole that he himself had been entirely duped: 'When a friend of mine to whom I had recommended The Castle of Otranto turned to me with doubts of its originality, I laughed him to scorn and wondered he could be so assured as to think that anybody nowadays had imagination enough to invent such a story.' (xi.)

I am quite sure I would be as "duped" as the poor Revd. were someone to present me, tomorrow, with a so-called "lost" manuscript that manages to weave into it every gothic detail known to readers of such fare. That's because I'm convinced no one in the 21st century has the kind of imagination our ancestors had. Ironically, I would believe it whether the manuscript was "lost" from the 12th or the 18th century. You see, despite the fact that Walpole wrote the book, in part, to protest the 18th-century's "realist fiction," as he called it, he'd seen nothing, as far as I'm concerned, compared to the 21st-century's cynical, realistic fiction.

Forget what he might have thought about today's realistic fiction. I wonder what he might have thought about much of what's written today under the guise of "supernatural" and "fantastic" by authors who, outside the contexts of their bestsellers, would gleefully join in debates to prove that, personally, they believe in nothing other than the rational and the scientific. We've done our best to rid the world of all mystery and romance, other than Hollywood's simplistic and sentimental versions, and to make humans the center of the universe (very Darwinian of us, really).

I read The Castle of Otranto a number of years ago, or so I thought, but I now wonder if I just started it and never finished it. It doesn't show up in past book journals I've kept, and all I could remember about it, before I read it this time, was some sort of wicked prince, a sickly son, and a huge helmet. I couldn't possibly have finished it, because there's so much more to it than that, and the "more to it" is very memorable.

Anyway, I agree with the one thing I've heard everyone I know who's read it say about it: it's hilarious, because it's so over-the-top. May I repeat myself (or am I repeating the Revd.?)? It's incredibly imaginative, especially given the fact that it was the first novel of its kind. Walpole had no contemporaries to read who made him think, "Ahh, I could do that. Let me try," which is not to say that Walpole didn't provide plenty of nods to other writers, most especially Shakespeare.

Speaking of drama, if I were to sum up the book in one word, "melodramatic" would be my word of choice. So much so that I often felt that I was reading a play rather than a novel, despite the fact that all the dialogue is woven into the text in paragraph form without the use of quotation marks. That is, the human characters are all melodramatic and engage in the sort of dialogue (e.g. "'Villain! monster! sorcerer! 'tis thou hast slain my son!'" -- p. 21) that makes the book so funny.

We mustn't ignore the Castle, though, a character in its own right. The castle's large and lovely and complicated, with his turrets and towers and secret passages, not to mention just plain secrets. Oh, and did I say ghosts? I mean, would he be able to hold his head up without some ghosts? Add some ghosts to this most magnificent hero. He's a most magnificent hero, and I just may have fallen madly in love with him, but then, I've always been a sucker for a lovely castle. Like most romances, we can forgive it for not exactly being the best written book we've ever read. I mean, it's provided us with a heroic castle and a fun plot that has as many twists and turns as a secret passage.

Pour yourself a steaming cup of tea. Pull some short bread out of the cupboard, and place it on the tea cup's saucer. Turn off the phone. Tell everyone in your household that you have some horrible communicable disease, and they must stay away from you. Then, light the fire, sit down by it with your tea, short bread, and this little book, and don't get up until you've turned the last page. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Dear Smithereens requested a few photos from me. I thought I might use them to demonstrate details from the book. Here they are:

These characters did not appear in The Castle of Otranto, but that bridge did, I'm sure. Some knight and princess are stuck in the woods behind it.

The forests around the castle probably didn't look like this. Too golden and New England-y, and well, New England hadn't yet been invented.

More like this, I would think. There must be a witch hiding in there somewhere, huh?

The sea as viewed from the castle window. If you're lucky, some ghostly vessel will soon arrive on the horizon. In this case, it might be a giant ghostly vessel.

A most treacherous path for a princess to follow, should she choose to run away from a castle.

What I Read on My Fall Break

2011-11-07T11:42:00.005-05:00

I recently got back from our annual 3-week stint in Maine in the fall. It was, as always, a lovely time in which Bob and I basically became complete recluses when we weren't out hitting the hiking trails (where I'm still a recluse, but Bob isn't. He chats with everyone he meets along trails. Luckily, this time of year that isn't as many as it is in the summer time) or eating in fantastic restaurants. I had all kinds of grand plans to do things like write all my pen pals (sorry, guys. Despite all promises to be a better pen pal, I suck, I know. Does it count that I constantly think about writing each of you?), make to-do lists that would help organize my life once back home, consult nature guides to learn about wild flowers and trees, etc., etc. What did I actually do? I read. And cooked. And outlined and wrote ghost stories. Oh well, it was vacation. Why should I have done otherwise if that's what I wanted to do? I thought I'd share my reading list with you, so here you go.

Books Finished

PRINT BOOKS

Americans' Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (2000, W.W. Norton)

This is a great collection for a "reluctant reader" of poetry, like me. Quotes by Americans of all ages and from all walks of life precede each poem, and these quotes explain why people have chosen it as a favorite. Some of these explanations helped me to connect better to certain poems myself. Others made me admire people for making connections I didn't see or just couldn't make. I was reminded that reading is such a personal experience, but it can also be wonderful when shared, and I was heartened to discover so many who still turn to literature when faced with tragedy, which many seemed to do. I also found some new poems to add to my own "favorites" list, while enjoying rereading many that are already there (surprising I'd have such a list, being a "reluctant reader," but, apparently, I do).

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (2008, 1764, Oxford University Press)

I read this for the R.I.P. challenge, and I will write a proper blog post soon. Warning: I will be gushing.

The Demonologist: The True Story of Ed Warren and Loraine Warren, the World Famous Exorcism Team by Gerald Brittle (1980, Berkeley Books)

If you lived in or near Monroe, CT in the 1980s and 1990s, which I did, you knew who Ed and Loraine Warren were. Their most well-known "case" was probably Amityville. Bob got this book from them when he invited them to come speak at the boarding school where he worked in the eighties (before I knew him). I've been planning to read it for years and finally did. When it wasn't scaring the bejeezus out of me, I was busy thinking it was the dumbest book I'd ever read. Talk about clichés straight out of B movies (a possessed Raggedy Ann doll, a sorceress who even as a young child played games with things like pentagons, teens who invite trouble by playing with Ouija boards, etc., etc.), and I'm pretty sure you could find the word "havoc" on every single page of the book. Eventually, though, I came to the conclusion that it had been what I had hoped it would be: a worthwhile read, because it provided me with much fodder for my own attempts at writing supernatural fiction.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (2006, William Morrow)

At this point, you're saying, "Really, Emily? You read that one?" Great book, though. Truly. Read it.

Love in Idleness by F. Marion Crawford (1894, Macmillan)

When in Maine, one must read a book that takes place in Maine. This is a very light read, which is not to say it isn't a delightful one, as well as a wonderful walk back in time. Crawford's characters are well-drawn and easily imagined, and the book provides a glimpse of Bar Harbor just before the turn of the 20th century, with photos and everything. I was enchanted.

Murder of Angels by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2004, New American Library)

Another R.I.P. challenge read, and, yes, expect more gushing when I finally post on it.

AUDIO BOOKS

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Narrated by Jennifer Ikeda (2011, Penguin Audio)

I actually finished this one just before I left for fall break, but it's another R.I.P. challenge book, so I thought I'd include it in this list. Blog post (not quite so gushing) coming soon.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. Read by Neil Gaiman. (2006, HarperCollins Audio)

Yes, here it is again. The recurring dream. I have to say, though, that this was the first time I ever simultaneously read and listened to a book, and I highly recommend doing so with this particular book. It's best if you do it this way: read his annotation in the Introduction about a story/poem, then read the story/poem, and, finally, listen to him read it. You won't be disappointed.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. Narrated by Stephen King (2000, Simon and Schuster Audio)

Friend-not-husband Bob recommended the audio version of this one to me, which I've been meaning to read for years. Can I say that listening to Stephen King read it made me feel as if I were taking a class with him? I've always respected King, but I respect him even more now, because he comes across as someone who knows exactly what he is: a good storyteller who enjoys what he does and has been successful but who knows he's no literary genius. If you are an aspiring writer who needs inspiration, you must read this book. Combine it with If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland and Eudora Welty's On Writing, and I guarantee you'll be sitting down at your desk to compose something. King offers sound advice, and he's honest, and funny, and endearing along the way.

Books Still Reading

The Town that Forgot How to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey (2006, Picador)

Part of my effort to read more Canadian authors, and Bob read it and urged me to do so. So far: eerie with well-drawn characters and a dreamy quality. How could I not like it? It's got ghosts and fairies.

Dracula's Guest and Other Victorian Vampire Stories edited by Michael Sims (2006, Walker and Co.)

Reading Neil Gaiman the way we did has taught me to slow down when it comes to reading story collections -- which I typically race through, especially collections of this sort. This is one of two other non-Gaiman story collections I took to Maine with me, and so far, so good. The Victorians (unlike today's writers) knew how to create vampires: spooky, mysterious, and dangerous.

The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories edited by Michael Newman (2010, Penguin)

I'm dragging this one, the other non-Gaiman collection I brought on vacation, out, because I just don't want it to end. I need to finish it, though, because it's the last of my R.I.P. challenge reads. Another gushing post coming your way soon.

AUDIO

Soulless: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel by Gail Carriger. Narrated by Emily Gray (2010, Recorded Books)

Georgette Heyer meets the supernatural, which sounds hideous, I know. But it isn't. It works. If you are going to be a contemporary writer who insists on creating vampires (and werewolves and ghosts, etc.) who aren't (always so) spooky, mysterious, and dangerous, this is the way to do it. Carriger's attention to detail and sense of humor are admirable. Brilliant fun made all the better by the fact that Emily Gray reads it so well. I'm glad to know that when I'm done with this one, there are three more, all narrated by Ms. Gray.

That's it. I'd love to know what you've thought of any of these, if you've read/listened to them. Meanwhile, I need to get working on all those R.I.P. challenge posts, don't I?

Fragile Things Group Read Week 8

2011-10-30T08:36:00.001-04:00

The Day the Saucers Came

Sunbird

Inventing Aladdin

The Monarch of the Glen

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

And then we came to the end. I've so enjoyed this R.I.P. group read, organized by Carl. It's been wonderful to read through a collection such as this so slowly, and it's also been wonderful to read all the different reactions to what's in it (when I could get the chance. The past couple of weeks have been difficult, as I've not been home with steady Internet access, but I've done my best and can't wait to catch up when I get home next week). These last four were a great way to end the read. I enjoyed all of them.

The Day the Saucers Came

A brilliant poem for anyone who's ever spent any time wishing the phone would ring and a certain someone would be on the other end of it. I love it all the more for the fact that I didn't see that coming at. all.

Sunbird

Okay, so this is not a story to hand to your vegetarian friends. However, if you love food, love the idea of belonging to an epicurean club, love the phoenix, and love the way Neil Gaiman can take the ordinary and make it extraordinary, then this is the tale for you (or, at least, it was for me, who loves all those things). He wrote this story as a birthday present for his oldest daughter, and one of the fun things about reading it for me was speculating on how many father-daughter in-jokes he might have included and what they might have been. A story that was great fun, all around and in every way.

Inventing Aladdin

You see, we all need to make up stories to survive. Only, Neil Gaiman says that much more eloquently in this little gem of a poem than I ever could. You see, also, some of us are better at putting the words together for our stories than others are.

The Monarch of the Glen

I really mustn't put off reading American Gods any longer. I loved this novella, featuring AG's Shadow, with its opening quote from Angela Carter (another one not to put off reading any longer,) from the get-go. The contemporary spin on Beowulf was done beautifully (of course. Would Gaiman do it any otherwise in a story? Although, full disclosure here, you can read what I thought about a movie version of same, here, if you'd like. I did, eventually come around to the wonderful graphic novel version by Gareth Hinds). Grendel and his mother are just perfect in this tale. The evil Mr. Alice shows up again here, but he's a bit less repellent than he was in Keepsakes and Treasures, probably only because we didn't get as many details about him in this tale. He's more of a mystery. This is the novella to give to a friend who's never read Gaiman to show off his brilliance and what sheer joy it is to read him.

And that's it. Overall, a fine, fine collection, with a few I didn't like as much as others, but none I could completely dismiss, that just makes me want to read more Gaiman. My final note is that I highly recommend doing what I do: read each piece first and then listen to Gaiman read it. You won't be disappointed, I promise.

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

2011-10-28T11:39:00.004-04:00

Sjöwall, Maj and Wahlöö, Per. The Laughing Policeman. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

(The book was originally published in 1970.)

In typical American fashion (i.e. mostly clueless about authors in countries other than America and England), before this book was chosen for the Connecticut mystery book club, I'd never heard of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who wrote ten Martin Beck mysteries together before Per died. Also, in typical American fashion, I'd never read any Swedish mysteries until The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became impossible to ignore, and my curiosity got the best of me. I've now read two Swedish mysteries. Based on this completely unscientific sample, I'd say that Swedish mystery writers are a bit obsessed with sex, especially -- shall we say? -- abnormal sex.

Of course, many American mystery writers are obsessed with sex, as well, and this book did happen to have been written during the height of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, so I can't fault it for its "adult" content, and I don't. I found that recent history part of the book fascinating (protests against the police, protests against the war in Vietnam), but there a. wasn't quite enough of it to satisfy me and b. what was there, was tossed about in a way that the authors figured their readers would know and understand. In other words, they didn't provide enough details for someone like me, reading the book 41 years after it was published who knows next to nothing about Stockholm today and even less about Stockholm 41 years ago.

Still, the purpose of this novel wasn't to provide Emily Barton with a detailed history of Stockholm circa 1968. It's a mystery, and as a mystery, it's quite good. The authors pulled me in very early on with a set-up that maybe someone smarter than I would have seen coming, but I didn't. I was immediately drawn to the main characters, especially poor Martin Beck, who suffered from a cold throughout the entire book. There were points at which I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, and I really empathized with the police who were stuck with, as the New York Times Book Review endorsement on the cover of my edition notes, "... an apparently clueless crime."

This clueless crime was a mass murder on a double decker bus that took place late one rainy, mid-November night. The first two policemen to arrive on the scene bungle the investigation so much that, even if there had been clues, there are none left. The scene in which senior policeman Gunvald Larsson (a character I'd probably find obnoxious if I met him in real life, but whose sarcasm provides wonderful comic relief in this gritty tale) chews them out for their incompetence made me chuckle. At first, it seems as if the crime is just a random act committed by a lunatic, but Martin Beck, in a police briefing, soon notes,

'It seems far too well thought out. A mentally deranged mass murderer doesn't act with such careful planning.' (p. 49)

Eventually, the police, thanks mostly to Beck and his colleague and friend Lennart Kollberg, begin to make connections and to piece together an answer to the riddle of why someone they all knew (I'm trying to avoid a spoiler here for those of you who might want to read the book, but I'm not doing a very good job) was on that particular bus at that particular hour that night.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö's clipped writing style (definitely from the "no unnecessary words" school) were effective, and I loved the way they used dialogue to tell the story and to fill in gaps instead of providing long descriptions. One of my complaints about the book is that they broke one of the cardinal rules of mystery writing (oh, to hell with it. I'm going to have to include a spoiler, so don't read past this if you don't want one. However, it may not ruin the book for you. In fact, it might make the book better if you know this going into it): the murderer was someone we didn't meet until the last twenty or so pages of the book. There was no way we could suspect and nail the culprit before the police did. I was busy working on a huge, completely wrong theory for a while, because I'm used to reading mysteries in which part of the fun is trying to figure out whodunnit. If I'd known I was only supposed to be enjoying the riddle of how everything was connected and watching the police solve the crime, I might have read the book differently. In that sense, I would call this book more of a thriller than an actual mystery, a thriller disguised as a police procedural.

My other complaint is not really something I can blame on the authors, since they were writing in their place and time. Granted, it was, as I noted above, during the height of the sexual revolution, but since we all know that, long since that revolution has passed, the world is not in any way rid of its sexism (and especially not in Sweden, according to what Stiegg Larsson thought), I can't really be too upset with authors who weave sexism into their novels. That doesn't mean it doesn't bother me, though, and it does bother me that when a woman behaves the way a man does sexually (or the way, a "healthy," "normal" male is supposed to behave), she's labeled a nymphomaniac, whether she's a real life person or a character in a mystery. I was disturbed by the use of the term in this book and the way such woman were dismissed.

Finally, I have one question for the other members of the group. I didn't really get it: why, exactly, did Asa Torell go live with Kollberg and his wife for a while? Was that just some sort of red herring, or was there a real purpose in that plot detail? Or perhaps we were just meant to understand what a nice guy Kollberg was.

Overall, I'm glad to have read this one. It's nothing spectacular, but it's a perfectly fun way to spend a rainy afternoon and evening.

Fragile Things Group Read Week 7

2011-10-23T09:07:00.002-04:00

In the End

Goliath

Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

from Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Week seven, already, for the group read of Fragile Things. Then again, it may seem like it's been forever for those of you who realize I've posted on nothing else in the past seven weeks. Oh well, only one more week to go, and then we'll get back to blogging about other things.

In the End

Being the wife of a minister, and being someone who, along with that minister, knows that humankind has a responsibility to care for creation, not to destroy it, I found this "going back to Eden" tale fascinating. What a wonderful, imaginative concept, the man and woman returning to the garden. The touch of man taking away each animal's name, as if he has no right to name them, is magnificent to those of us who know that the sacred (e.g. God) was never to be called by name.

Goliath

I'm pretty sure this one wouldn't have made any sense to me at all had I not seen the movie The Matrix. As it was, I saw the movie so long ago that I had to do a bit of thinking and piecing together to make it make sense. A bit of work, but I came away from it really liking it. I can't help making the connection to Corporate America. After all, doesn't the following quote sound like someone who's just retired from a cushy, corner-office job at G.E., say, a company that took good care of him, allowing him to support a family and send two kids off to good colleges?

They may be heartless, unfeeling, computerized bastards, leeching off the minds of what's left of humanity. But I can't help feeling grateful to them. (p. 248)

Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky

Meh. I loved the title, but this one just did nothing for me. I did, however, like the fact that one of the journal entries is dated "Friday the 32nd."

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

If his children's books make us realize Gaiman certainly remembers what it was like to be a child, this story makes us realize he also remembers what it was like to be a teenager. His sense of humor shines brightly in this wonderful tale of teenage insecurity in which one boy (our narrater) attends a party with his friend Vic. Vic is the sort of guy who has success with all the prettiest girls at parties while our narrater Enn gets stuck talking to mothers in kitchens. Although I was a girl, that's a very familiar story from my own teenage years. Anyway, Enn tells Vic that he doesn't know how to talk to girls, and Vic chides him, telling him they're just girls. But are they? I love the girls in the story and the conversations Gaiman dreams up for them. I also love wondering, what, exactly happened to Vic in that upstairs room.

I may or may not get around to posting about the last week's stories next Sunday. If not, I promise to write about them as soon as I can.

Fragile Things Group Read Week 6

2011-10-20T14:42:00.004-04:00

My Life

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

Feeders and Eaters

Diseasemaker's Croup

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Here I am in lovely Maine, but it's a rainy day today, so I brought the computer over to the Southwest Harbor Public Library in order to weigh in late on the four stories in the R.I.P. Group Read of Fragile Things. I haven't had the chance to read what anyone else had to say, but here are my thoughts.

My Life

I've never been a fan of sock monkeys, thinking they're ugly. I guess I want my stuffed animals to be cute. I absolutely love this monologue, though. Gaiman explains in his Introduction that it was written to accompany the photo of a sock monkey who looked to Gaiman like his life had been hard. He certainly gave the heavy-drinking narrater of this monologue a hard, unbelievable life. Just like the stories in The Weekly World News, which Gaiman says were an inspiration, you don't know whether or not to believe the guy. Yet, you keep listening to him because he's extremely entertaining and you love wondering if anyone really could live such a life. Pass him another drink. He's someone I don't mind sitting next to in a bar (as long as he doesn't try to hit on me. He probably will. Only the weirdos ever hit on me in bars).

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

I don't know that much about tarot cards, but I absolutely loved this one anyway, probably because I so love vampires. In each of these vignettes, based on various tarot cards, like "Priestess" and "Magician," the vampires act the way vampires are supposed to act, that is, in monstrous ways. No Twilight-y, kind, falling-sweetly-in-love vampires here. These vampires are scary, and obsessive, and dangerous, which is exactly how I like my vampires.

Feeders and Eaters

If you love cats the way I do, this is not going to be your favorite Neil Gaiman story. I know it's a very effective horror device, but I hate it when harm comes to innocent animals. Still, I can't say I completely disliked this odd story that sort of merges the zombie-like with the vampiric. Anyone want to fry up some shaggy inkcaps, butter, and garlic with me? I promise we won't eat any sort of meat with them.

Diseasemaker's Croup

You would think that I, someone who suffers from a touch of hypochondria, would've appreciated this one. Instead, I found it a bit tedious. Gaiman, who usually seems to be so effortlessly clever was trying a bit too hard or something here. Then again, maybe I just didn't like it because I'm someone who suffers from a touch of hypochondria.

Now, if all goes as plans, my thoughts on the next four stories will post all by themselves this Sunday. A little bit of magic for you (or a little bit of telling Blogger when to post it, whichever you choose to believe).

R.I.P. Group Read: Fragile Things 5

2011-10-09T12:50:00.003-04:00

Locks

The Problem of Susan

Instructions

How Do You Think It Feels?

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow.

First of all, before I discuss the four selections for this week's R.I.P. group read, I have to tell you what a dolt I am. You see, I completely forgot, when I signed on for this challenge (and the whole R.I.P. challenge) that I would be spending most of the month of October in Maine without easy Internet access. I can get it at the library, but when you are in Maine in October, you don't tend to want to spend most of your time at the library. And the library in Maine is closed on Sundays, so this will be my last official post on Fragile Things. Have no fear, though, if you are still interested in what I have to say about it, because I'm going to continue to read it and will post my thoughts when I can (along with the other books I'm reading for the R.I.P. Challenge). It just may be that you have to wait till November for me to finish up.

Now, onto my thoughts about this week's four:

Locks

Another poem. This one is absolutely charming, all about Gaiman telling "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" to his young daughter. First of all, can you imagine getting to be Neil Gaiman's daughter and having him read you bedtime stories? It's charming, but it's also poignant, as Gaiman remarks on the changes he knows will be inevitable as his daughter ages. It's also a commentary on the importance of story telling (you won't get any argument from me on that point). Finally, it's a commentary on the protectiveness a parent feels for a child. It's beautiful, really. Again, I wish I had a whole collection of his poetry.

The Problem of Susan

I've mentioned over the years, in other blog posts, that I was not the fan of Narnia that it seems all the other kids I knew were. I liked The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but not anywhere near as much E. Nesbit's fantasies or the Oz books. I read some of the other Narnia books, but basically just to see what all the fuss was about, and I don't think I even bothered to finish out the series. I was surprised, then, to find, that I absolutely loved this story. It doesn't matter that I had no idea what Susan's fate had been. Gaiman explains that both in the Introduction and in the story itself. What I love about this story is that he answers the question the reader wants answered, the one he or she has been asking, even after multiple readings of a favorite novel, and because he's a writer he can. It's like reading Little Women for the hundredth time and thinking, "Why couldn't Jo just have married Laurie?" The question, in this case, happened to be, "But what about poor Susan? Just because she liked to do things like wear lipstick?" It's the sort of thing that seems so unfair, her being denied her family's great reward. Gaiman does a superb job of imagining what happened to Susan. It's not blissfully happy, but it's probably not nearly the punishment C. S. Lewis probably had in mind for the child who was more fond of worldly things than she was of godly things (I like to think that even as a child I couldn't handle the Christian allegory in the Narnia tales, the way Lewis hits the reader over the head with it, which is what I discovered when I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe a few years ago. But, I suspect, it had more to do with not really liking any of the characters).

Instructions

Heavenly, heavenly poem. I can't even begin to describe it. You must read it for yourself.

How Do You Think It Feels?

This is a melancholic love story. When I was young and went through my fair share of breakups, I used to wish that I could just, somehow, cut out the part of my brain that remembered the person, that remembered both all the lovely times we'd had together and all the heartache at the end. I felt I'd be better off if I could just throw out all the memories. Now that I'm older, of course, I'm glad I couldn't (and not only because I'd probably have less than half a brain at this point). All those experiences are very important for making us who we become, and they do make us wiser, and they do harden our hearts -- a little, at least. Luckily, most of us do not harden our hearts the way the heart is hardened in this story. Or do we? If Gaiman gave us hope in Harlequin Valentine, he sort of takes it away here. Nonetheless, I liked the story. If nothing else, it's always a comfort to those who've had to glue their hearts back together time and again, fearful that next time they might break beyond repair, to read a new theme on "'Tis better to have loved and lost..." even if it's an extremely bleak one.

R.I.P. Group Read: Fragile Things 4

2011-10-02T13:52:00.007-04:00

Good Boys Deserve Favors

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

Strange Little Girls

Harlequin Valentine

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 1006.

(Before I begin, I must say that you-all are a polite bunch for not pointing out to me that, in my previous Fragile Things post, I'd magically turned Kingsley Amis into a Pennsylvania Dutchman by adding an "h" to the end of his last name.)

Ahh, this week, for the R.I.P. group read of Fragile Things, we returned to Neil Gaiman stories that I can honestly say I loved, nothing in this week's readings repulsing or disgusting me. Instead of searching for redeeming qualities in stories that unsettled me, I could just sink into my chair and enjoy the brilliance of Gaiman's imagination.

Good Boys Deserve Favors

Okay, so now I know why this one was paired with The Flints of Memory Lane in Gaiman's Introduction. Like that one, it appears to be based on something that happened to Gaiman when he was a kid. Apparently, he chose to play the double bass in school. Read this story if you want to discover what a brilliant writer Gaiman is without having to worry about being spooked or disturbed. He does a masterful job of weaving the ways in which a love affair might manifest itself in a boy before he's old enough to have a love affair with a girl (or a boy, if that's the way he happens to be made). It's not the sort of thing one would expect from a story about a boy learning to play a musical instrument, which is exactly what makes it so magical and endearing. Nonetheless, there it is, a pre-adolescent love story, in its full glory: the fact that his teacher refers to the instrument as "she;" his not realizing, at first, how attached he is to his Object of Affection; his OoA helping him reach new heights in a dizzying performance; and his losing his OoA through his own clumsiness, never to find another who could replace her. I loved it; I could gush about it forever, but then it might be overwhelmed by my clumsy affection and dump me, so I'll stop here and try to keep it guessing, for a little while longer, how I feel about it.

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

I love any story that uses a circus, a carnival, or an amusement park as a setting for the weird, fantastic, and the supernatural. Such human forms of entertainment are, to me, the most likely places for dark magic to hide and manifest itself. I love the humor in this story. I laughed out loud when we encountered the man dressed as a giant fish riding his bicycle. The idea of the hunchback and the topless nun racing to rescue him is priceless, punctuated by the girl asking if that was meant to happen. Even more than the humor, though, I like the mystery that surrounds Gaiman's very dark circus (hidden, of course, underground). Miss Finch is a flawless character, exactly what she should be, in every way. Oh, and wouldn't that stocky woman be the one you'd want to scare to death? It's all so perfect.

Strange Little Girls

I suppose I liked this one so much because I'm a huge fan of characterization. This little collection of character sketches proves that, in the right hands, merely describing key elements of a character can tell an extremely powerful story. I also loved the way it ended, basically telling us to change our points of view, see things from different angles.

Harlequin Valentine

Okay, so I should be disturbed by a "human" heart being nailed to someone's door, but I'm not. I should also be disturbed by what ultimately happens to that heart (yes, I'm still attempting to avoid spoilers, although I know I haven't always done a very good job in writing my posts for this group read). I'm not, though, and I absolutely loved this story about love and trickery and broken hearts and power in relationships. Again, we had a great ending: a little ray of hope to prove what a romantic Gaiman actually is.

I'm realizing, as I write this, that one of the key factors in this week's collection is that all the stories provided learning opportunities for me as a writer. The first one is all about including the unexpected, using what might be nothing more than a mere fact (e.g. for a time, as a boy, I played the double bass) and giving it meaning. The second one was all about setting, although I also learned from it ways that details can be omitted, encouraging the brain to come up with its own details. The third one was a study in characterization. The last one demonstrates the way hope can keep romance alive in a story. Were I teaching a creative writing class, I think I'd have my students read these four stories.

An October 1 "Gift": Whose Story? by Emily Barton

2011-10-01T12:16:00.004-04:00

Happy October 1st, everyone! In honor of my favorite month of the year, I give you a short ghost story I've written. Any feedback you'd like to share will be gratefully received.

Whose Story?

Emily Barton

March 18, 1978

This isn't my story to tell. My creative writing teacher would write "cliché" above that, but, then again, it's a cliché for a sixteen-year-old girl to keep a diary. Besides, who else is going to tell it? Jenny and Van don't want to talk about it. Tony’ll forgive me for telling. He was that kind of guy. The thing is, I'm just not sure who to tell, who would believe me.

I won’t waste time with long, descriptive passages. The story's plot is this: Tony didn't kill himself. I know he didn't. He never would've killed himself. He loved life too much, everything about it. Well, almost everything. He hated school. Not the classes. He was always reading ahead in his textbooks. He liked most of the teachers, too. What he hated were the other kids, the cliques, their mob mentality, their cruelty.

He was tall and thin and awkward and nonathletic. In other words, he was a prime target for bullies, but he could fight back when pushed too hard, because he was passionate. Those morons didn't understand passion. They'd have bullied Byron and Wordsworth, too, probably did in some past life.

Yeah, he was bullied and picked on, and everyone thinks that’s why he killed himself, but he didn't, not after eleven years of this, when he only had a year and half to go. That would've been letting the bullies win just when he was almost done. He told me, "Another year and a half of these assholes, and then I'm free." And he would've been free. He was gonna apply everywhere in New York, just in case he didn’t get into Columbia, but who are we kidding? He would’ve gotten into Columbia. He just wanted to be in New York, though.

I know it looked like a suicide. His father's gun, his body up in the tree house they'd built together. How come no one gets that he never would've killed himself there? The tree house always made him happy. A guy like Tony would've chosen somewhere significant, the boys' bathroom at school, the baseball field at the park, not the tree house.

Something else killed Tony. His house is a weird one. He used to tell me about the strange scratching noises, locked doors unlocking themselves, things like glasses going missing and then reappearing. I used to think he was teasing, that he made up the crazy old guy who'd committed suicide in the basement back in the 1920s just to spook me when we were alone at night. He swore he wasn't making it up, but he always seemed to think it was funny, not scary. He'd laugh when I got jumpy.

When he stopped laughing, though, a few months before he died, I stopped wanting to go over there. He'd come to my house and tell me he'd felt an eerie, evil presence, something more than unlocking doors or glasses disappearing. He swore he was being watched, both inside the house and outside, in the woods around the house. One night, when his parents were out of town, he came over and told me he just couldn't go home. He was so shaken, so different. We asked Mom if he could spend the night in our guest room…

They stared at the sort of scene they’d both hoped they wouldn’t find. The young girl's body was pale and naked in the bathtub full of crimson water. Soon, they’d move her arms to find the angry slashes on her wrists. Razor blades found in the bottom of such tubs, once drained, shouldn’t be allowed to shine so insultingly.

"I never thought we'd have to worry about teenage suicide pacts in this town," the taller, heavier one said, sadly, to his partner.

"No," she admitted. "Funny, though. Don't they usually do it together? Did you read the note?"

"Yes. Her mom says it’s her handwriting.”

"We'd better keep a close eye on any other friends they had."

The journal tucked beneath the loose floor boards at the back of the bedroom closet wouldn't be found for thirty years. By then, the four suicides that had rocked the small New England town had become the stuff of late-night storytelling at slumber parties all over the country. It often morphed into a staged crime, the work of school bullies, or of a one-armed asylum escapee whose ghostly missing arm came knocking at doors of future victims, or even of Bigfoot. The town itself, however, had chosen to forget. No one ever talked about it.

The house had stood empty for so long, at least ten years. No one could remember exactly when Cassandra's parents had moved down to Florida, leaving it to the care of their two older children, who rarely came to town. It was such a shock when that doctor from Boston decided to move up here, taking over old Dr. Hartman's patients at Town Hall Medical Center and buying the house. The renovations took a few months, but the family came that summer.

The doctor's daughter found the diary, along with a small water pipe and some condoms, the loose floorboards in such an out-of-the-way place having been missed by the carpenters. No one had told her about the girl killing herself in the bathtub.

The diary of another teenager thirty years ago was fascinating, stories of four friends, young love, heartbreak, rebellion.... But then she came to the final entry, and a cold chill ran through her body. The entry began, "This isn't my story to tell." It continued "We asked Mom if he could spend the night in our guest room..." It ended right after that. The handwriting was different, much darker, almost menacing, mesmerizing. She couldn't stop reading it,

"This was not her story to tell."

R.I.P. Group Read: Fragile Things 3

2011-09-25T11:00:00.013-04:00

Going Wodwo

Bitter Grounds

Other People

Keepsakes and Treasures

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

(Before we get started, I just want to draw your attention to this. If you've got an hour to kill -- I listened to it on my Smartphone while out walking one day -- I highly recommend it. It's terrific, and you'll get to hear Neil talk.)

If you had told me last week that I was going to encounter stories in this collection (which I'm reading for the R.I.P. Group Read) that I wouldn't like, I don't think I would have believed you. I now know I should have -- I think. You see, my problem is I can't say definitively that I didn't like those stories that I didn't, but boy, if I thought Closing Time made me uneasy (and, to tell the truth, the more I've read everyone else's reaction to that one the less I feel that way -- or the less I feel that the uneasiness is necessarily a bad thing), I was in for a bit of a shock. "Uneasy" doesn't begin to describe how I felt a good deal of the time this week. "Dirty" or "repulsed" might be better descriptions.

Still, this is Neil Gaiman we're talking about, so even when I'm repulsed, I can find redeeming qualities. Of course, it's only logical, given Gaiman's knowledge and use of fairy tales, that I turn into Beauty when faced with the beasts of his writing. I do have to wonder, though, if I were to read one of these stories in The New Yorker, say, and Gaiman had written it under a pseudonym, if I would be patient enough to try to redeem it. We'll never know, but I have a sneaky suspicion I might, because, unlike so much garbage put out these days that's meant to do nothing but shock and repulse, everything Gaiman writes does make me think.

So, here we go, my thoughts on this week's 4:

Going Wodwo

So far, we've gotten one poem each week, and this was it for week three. This was my favorite of the four pieces we read this week. Being big on nature and the color green, the Green Man is one of my favorite mythological characters (and if anyone's looking for a really good R.I.P read, you can't go wrong with Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, which is funny and over-the-top, and still scared me to death when I was reading it alone one night). I like the way Gaiman blended the notion of the Wodwo (a wild man of mythology) with the Green Man (a god-like figure usually represented by carving a man's face that looks like it's made out of leaves and branches). Of course, I wouldn't have known he'd done that if I hadn't read the Introduction and found out that this poem was written for a collection called The Green Man (which I now must find and read). I love this line,

...I'll stumble through the green
back to my roots and leaves and thorns
and shiver. (p. 83)

You can just see the wild man's face, all leaves and thorns and buds.

This one was also fun, because I recently read Game of Thrones. That book features gods whose faces are found in trees. They brought to mind the Green Man while I was reading.

Bitter Grounds

This is a zombie tale. I was never quite sure who was and who wasn't a zombie. I loved the connections Gaiman made here, though, between those of us who are basically "walking dead," emotionally, and zombies. It's a story that's confusing in the same way Closing Time was, and so I was left feeling a little uneasy again. Overall, however, I really liked it. Gaiman seems to like to use conferences as settings (my favorite is the serial killers conference in The Sandman comics), and the fact that he had an academic conference for anthropologists set in New Orleans was perfect. I've never been to New Orleans, but I'm sure that if I were to go, it would be very much the way Gaiman portrays it in this story -- full of odd characters and tourists and a feeling that something bad could happen to you, if you're not very careful, all covered in a light, supernatural blanket. Despite its being "The Big Easy," it might make me feel quite uneasy. That, as I noted above, is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have a question, though, before I leave my discussion of this one. Did Zora Neale Hurston really know F. Scott Fitzgerald and have any influence on The Great Gatsby? Wouldn't they have run in completely different circles? I can't figure out if it's true, or if Gaiman is playing with us and showing us how urban legends get spread: sometimes we believe facts that come merely from someone getting a name wrong.

Other People

This is the story I so want to hate, but I can't. It's extremely disturbing, but extremely disturbing in the way the movie A Clockwork Orange is disturbing. I still happen to think it's a great movie. I'm not sure I would describe this story as "great," but it may be close.

Part of the reason it's so disturbing is that I like to think of myself as someone who shies away from vengeance. Yet, while reading this story about a man who has to confront a demon who makes him confront all his demons, I found myself thinking, "Oh, yes. This is the sort of fate Hitler or Karl Rove ought to suffer -- people who think they're right and have it made and think only of themselves, while causing great suffering to others. They need to be introduced to their own personal hells." That's a disturbing thought for someone who likes to think that she rarely seeks revenge. Then again, it's easier to take if you read it that way, because what's also disturbing is that, even if you don't believe in hell as a place, which I don't, it's a difficult story to read without thinking, "What if?" Asking that question leads to, "Could this happen to me?" which, in turn, leads to "Don't all humans, in some way, deserve this for all the hurt and destruction they cause?" These questions are far more disturbing than discovering a hidden desire for vengeance.

Gaiman certainly knows how to tap into primal fears. These are not the sorts of fears I like to unleash. I'll take ghosts in a creepy house over a demon with a wall full of torture implements, a knowledge of all my faults, and thousands of years alone with me, thank you.

Keepsakes and Treasures

This one was like reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. As with that book, I felt like I needed a bath after reading it. How could I find myself sympathizing with such a despicable character, which our narrater certainly was? And yet, I did. I could understand why he murdered the people he did (well, except for that poor professor). I almost felt like saying, "Good for him." It takes talent to make a reader sympathize with a murderer. Still, despite the fact that the story has this classic line, "Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics." (p. 110) and that Gaiman wove his legendary Shahinai into a tale that, up until that point, was more British hard-boiled than dark fantasy, I don't think I liked it. True, those are redeeming qualities, but just not quite redeeming enough to get me past the despicable character with whom I've been sympathizing who eventually informs us that "his cup of tea" is pre-pubescent girls. I didn't need to know that, and the story would have been fine without the information, especially since we can't even be sure whether or not he's lying.

That's it for week 3. Let's hope week 4 is a little less disturbing.

R.I.P. Group Read: Fragile Things 2

2011-09-18T10:47:00.005-04:00

The Hidden Chamber

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire

The Flints of Memory Lane

Closing Time

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Here we are already, the second week of Carl's R.I.P. group read. This time, because, while listening to the audiobook the first week, I'd found that hidden story in the Introduction a bit confusing, I decided to read the print versions first and then listen to Gaiman read them himself. Although I have, many times, started a book in audio form and then switched to print, I've never done what I'm doing with this one (both listened to and read the whole book during the same time period, although there are quite a few books that I read years ago and that I've enjoyed "rereading" recently in audiobook form). I'd highly recommend it, especially with a short story/poetry collection such as this one if you, like me, are not someone who typically reads either short stories or poems.

I like reading first and then listening better than listening and then reading. I've toyed with the idea of reading and listening simultaneously, but that seems like a waste of time, since I read more quickly than audiobooks do (although yea to Audible for now giving us the option of speeding up the reading), and I like to spend the time I'm listening to books doing something else like working out or folding laundry. I can't put my finger on why, but listening to the stories after reading them makes them come more alive somehow, and it provides me with the opportunity to think more about them and to pick up on things I missed while reading. Of course, as I noted in my first group read post, it helps if Neil Gaiman is doing the reading.

I did go back to the Introduction and read the brief descriptions of this poem and three short stories before I read each one. There was no way I could remember everything Gaiman had said about them without doing so. Those introductions to each one also help me pick up on things. I'm so glad he included them. And now, on to my thoughts on each one:

The Hidden Chamber

We turned to the gothic in this week's readings, and Gaiman explains that he's always thought the story of Bluebeard to be the most gothic. I'd never thought of that, but he's right (is Gaiman ever wrong?). This poem is his own variant on that tale, full of the gothic and also the modern and contemporary. Yes, there are ghosts and secret chambers and mystery and lacy shifts, and there's love and physical pain and heartache. How does he do it in a mere five stanzas? This second poem of his makes me wish Gaiman would publish a whole collection of poems. That says something, because I'm one of those who typically shies away from poetry.

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire

This was the perfect companion to The Castle of Otranto, which I'm also reading right now for the R.I.P. challenge. You can tell Gaiman was having such fun with this story, and it's very funny, although not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. He takes the gothic and stands it on its head. Or does he take reality and stand it on its head? You'll have to read it and decide for yourself. Listening to it, for some reason, I appreciated the brilliance of it more than I did reading it.

The Flints of Memory Lane

He plays with reality and story-telling in this one. I think we're meant to believe it's a true story, his one "real life ghost story." But is it? With Neil Gaiman you can never quite be sure. Still, it's creepy. It's the sort of thing that happens to a kid that scares him to death and that is forever told again and again at parties and in bars and to children of his own when they ask for a "real life ghost story." He does a wonderful job of telling the story the way the mind works, which is to say that it's not always linear, skipping around, adding details almost as afterthoughts. I loved this one.

Closing Time

This was my least favorite of the four, which was kind of sad, because it had originally been meant to be "an M.R. James-style ghost story" (I worship James), but he says the finished work owes more to the strange tales of Robert Aickman. I've never read Aickman, so I wouldn't know, but I found this one had less of the dream-like quality I've come to associate with Gaiman. It was cruder, and the ending was confusing, not in his typical imaginative way but in a way that didn't work for me. I'm not quite sure why, because Gaiman often writes as if he wants the reader to draw her own conclusions, but I didn't want him to do that this time. Maybe I just didn't like my own conclusions. Still, even the worst of Gaiman is better than most people's best, so I can't say I didn't like it, just that it was different, quite Stephen King-ish, actually (without, of course, drawing the conclusions for the reader the way King usually does).

There you have it. Now I'm off to read what others had to say.

Things THIS Wife Hopes Never to Hear Again

2011-09-14T15:14:00.003-04:00

It's completely hopeless, I know. Hoping so often leads to hopelessness. Still, it would be so wonderful to wake up one day in Emily's Fantasyland. Much goes on in this wonderful land (most of it involving books in some way), and Bob is definitely there with me, saying all the wonderful things he often says to me. However, to make it a truly magical place, there are just a few things that in E.F. I never have to hear come out of his mouth. Here they are:

1. "We don't need to call anyone. That's so easy to fix. I can do it." This means I will be 92 years old and still living with some hideous inconvenience. Perhaps it involves keeping buckets of water by the toilet in order to be able to flush it properly. Or maybe there is a window in my study that can't ever be opened, or a burner on my stove that I can never use. Whatever it is, you see, he still hasn't fixed it, even though it would be "so easy." Either that, or the "easy fix" means, say, we have some extraordinarily huge (why are such things always huge and indiscreet?) black (and why are they always black?) pipe that snakes out of the side of the house, constantly threatening to trip unsuspecting guests who venture out after dark (which almost all do, because no one ever uses the front door).

2. "Have you seen my (oh, I don't know, binoculars, say)?" This question is never asked when I'm wandering aimlessly around the house with nothing better to do than to drop everything and look for whatever is being sought. No, most often, it's asked when I'm on the phone with someone I haven't seen/spoken to in months, or I'm busy trying to figure out exactly how to phrase some sentence I'm composing, or I'm lying on the couch or in bed, having just reached the page in which I'm going to find out who killed Professor Plum. No matter how explicitly I describe the exact location of his binoculars (and why the hell does he suddenly need his binoculars at 9:30 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday anyway?), I will be forced to put my friend on hold, abandon my perfect phrase, or put off finding out whodunit, in order to retrieve them from the latitudinal and longitudinal degrees I gave him, because he claims, "They're not there."

3. "How much did that/those cost?" followed by "That's way too much!" Actually, in Emily's Fantasyland, it's perfectly okay to hear "That's way too much!" if I've gone out and bought something like a computer or a camera, or any other number of things that he obsessively researches online. However, if I happen to have gone and bought a new teapot or curtains for the kitchen, I don't want to hear it. Last time I checked, he was neither a teapot nor a curtains expert, and I'm sure he would lose every time if he ever found himself a contestant on "The Price is Right" trying to guess the prices of such items.

4. "What are we having for dinner tonight?" There's no answer I can give to this question that doesn't inspire a response that infuriates me, most especially when the question is asked at 8:30 a.m. Please enlighten me: is there a female on the planet, barring those who work in the food industry or are juggling multiple kids with multiple evening activities, who thinks about dinner at 8:30 a.m.? At that hour, I'm typically thinking about getting another cup of coffee.

5. "Don't throw that away." Good God, why not? It's a friggin' crushed toothpaste box! I know. I know. There is some good, sound, economic and environmental reason not to toss it in the garbage, but I really, really don't want to hear it. I'm not about to collect 500 of them so we can get $1.00 off our next one and so that they can be used to make car engines.

6. "Tom said I'm (fill in the blank). Do you think I'm (fill in the blank)?" You know the proverbial female-to-male question, "Does this dress make me look fat?" This is the male-to-female version. It's a question that makes me wish I owned Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. My husband is far more self-aware than many people I know. Still, he's human, which means others sometimes see traits in him that he denies, and I do not want to be the one verifying what others see.

Stating the obvious here, but in Emily's Fantasyland, here's what I hear instead:

1. "Don't worry about that. I've called the plumber/electrician/contractor, etc., and he/she will be here tomorrow to fix it.

2. (After I've given the exact location of the missing item.) "Found it/them! You're right. That's exactly where it was/they were. Thanks!"

3. "Wow! You got those curtains and that teapot, and that's all you paid for them? You're a genius! I would've thought they'd cost much more than that."

4. Silence at 8:30 a.m. Around 5:30 p.m. or so, "Let's just have canned tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and banana splits for dinner tonight."

5. "Let's call one of those junk companies and have them haul away most of what's in the attic and the basement."

6. "Tom said I'm (fill in the blank). You know, now that I think about it, he may be right."

What about you? Are there things you wish you'd never hear your husband/wife say again?

R.I.P. Group Read: Fragile Things

2011-09-11T16:28:00.005-04:00

Introduction

A Study in Emerald

The Fairy Reel

October in the Chair

from: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New York: William Morrow, 2006.

Plans are such fragile things, always ready to go up in smoke at the mere mention of a match strike. You see, I'd planned to pick up this book at the library Thursday evening when I was working. I thought things at work might even be slow enough that I'd get a chance to start reading the first four pieces in the book for Carl's R.I.P. group read before I even got it home. Mother Nature had other plans (and hers are almost always less fragile than mere human plans). She proceeded to drench Lancaster County, PA last week with so much rain that we had extensive flooding all around us. The library was closed. I couldn't pick up my book. I couldn't even be sure the library would be open on Friday in order for me to pick up the book (it was, but at the time, the forecast was for the rain and flood warnings to continue well into Friday).

Sometimes, however, when a fragile thing breaks, something even better comes of it. (The heart often breaks and then gets glued back together by something far better than the thing that broke it.) I didn't want to miss this weekend of reading and posting my thoughts, and yet, with all the flooding, I had no real hope of getting out and getting a copy of the book. Then, I remembered that I'd seen the audio version of it while re-shelving materials at the library and also that I have two unused credits sitting in my Audible account. I searched for it, discovered it was only one credit, and soon had it downloaded onto my phone.

Not only was the day saved, but it was saved in a beautiful way. You see, Neil Gaiman himself reads the audio version of this collection of stories and poems. If I didn't already have a huge reader's crush on Gaiman, this would certainly guarantee its birth. He reads it beautifully: dramatic without being overly so, inflection everywhere it should be and nowhere it shouldn't, perfect pacing, and, of course, he has a lovely accent (to an American ear, anyway). You may be thinking, "Well, of course he reads it perfectly. He wrote it." But, believe me, I've listened to plenty of audiobooks read by their authors, and nothing has ever come close to this. I highly recommend your getting a copy and listening, which is not to say that I didn't, once the flooding was all over, still pick up the print copy from the library. I'm such a reader, and Gaiman is such a writer, that, as much of a joy as it was to listen to him tell his tales, I wanted to "reread," so to speak, parts of it to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

Here's what I thought of the actual pieces:

Introduction

I don't typically read Introductions before I've read a book, because I've learned the hard way that they can include spoilers. Sometimes what they include might not be considered spoilers to most, but are to me, because, basically, I like to come to a book for the first time knowing almost nothing about it, if I can. "Oh, it's about a woman who lives in New York," is the sort of description I want. But, we were assigned the Introduction, so, even though Gaiman tells us we should read these pieces in any order we choose, I decided to start with it (especially since it's much easier to "read" an audiobook straight through like that).

Like everything else he writes, Gaiman certainly knows what he's doing when it comes to writing an Introduction. First, he gives us a little bit of background for the collection, where he got the idea for it and how it evolved, even how the title changed and why. Then he addresses each piece with brief annotations of how they came to be. There isn't a single spoiler. What there is is plenty of enticement. As I listened, I found myself over and over thinking, "Ooo, that sounds great. I can't wait to read it." If I ever find myself having to write an Introduction to something, I'm going to use this as a model.

A Study in Emerald

Well, really, how can you go wrong with a story of Sherlock Holmes meets the world of H.P. Lovecraft as put together by Neil Gaiman? Need I say more? Well, I can say one more thing, which is that I really ought to reread Lovecraft some day.

The Fairy Reel

This is the first poem by Neil Gaiman I've ever read (barring any poetry that has crept its way into Sandman comics. I can't remember any off the top of my head, but I'm quite sure it's there, especially in the third collection Dream Country). I'll (hope to) entice you to read it with these first four lines,

If I were young, as I once was, and dreams
and death more distant then,
I wouldn't split my soul in two, and keep
half in the world of men. p.28

Gaiman basically tells us, when describing a different poem in the book, that he understands some of his readers don't like poetry, that we can skip the poems in his book. Then he produces a poem that's so perfect that he could probably convert a million high school students who insist they hate poetry, and he claims it's "not much of a poem, really, but enormous fun to read aloud."(xiii) To make it even better, let Gaiman read it aloud to you. I, for one, am eager to read all his poetry now.

October in the Chair

This was my favorite of what we read for this week's post. It was the jumping off point for what would eventually become The Graveyard Book, a book I loved, so it was fun for me to see how the short story evolved into the novel. I absolutely loved the way Gaiman characterizes the months of the year, was disappointed to leave them in order to "hear the story," but was just as enthralled with the story-within-the-story the minute it got going as I was with them. (That may not make sense, but I'm trying hard not to spoil it, knowing full well that I may already have said too much. Sorry, those of you for whom I should've just said, "It's a story about October sitting in a chair.") This story beautifully highlights Gaiman's unique imagination and the wonderful way he views the world (or other worlds, as the case may be). Gaiman dedicates this one to Ray Bradbury, and I can see why.

And now, on to next week's readings...

R.I.P. Challenge Book One: The Expendable Man

2011-09-08T10:37:00.006-04:00

Hughes, Dorothy. The Expendable Man. London: Persephone Books, 2006.

(This book was originally published in 1963. If you're unfamiliar with Persephone and are wondering what that odd design I've thrown in here up above is, Persephone covers all look exactly the same. The books are defined by the end papers, chosen to match the date and mood of each book, so I've put up the end paper here.)

It seems almost impossible to write about this book without giving spoilers, but I'm going to do my damnest to do so, because I know I won't read reviews that include spoilers, and I want you to read this review in the hopes that (more important than my review) it will inspire you to read the book. I want everyone to read it. Yes, it is that good. Even if you don't read mysteries/thrillers, you ought to read this one. The book is a prime example of why genre fiction shouldn't be "pooh-poohed" the way it so often is (not by you, I know, but by all those psuedo-intellectuals out there who take themselves so very seriously). Some pooh-poohing is okay (Mary Higgins Clark springs to mind, and maybe I'm being -- psuedointellectually -- unfair to her, but I read two of her books years ago and found them to be some of the most sloppily written and plotted works I've ever read), but please don't, as my sister Forsyth would say, throw the baby out and study the bath water.

I'd love to give you all the details that prove this book is much more than a mere thriller. Yet, if I give you too many, it will spoil an element of surprise that shouldn't be revealed to anyone until he or she has fallen into the book with no hope of escape before reaching the last page. Persephone, Class Act Publisher that it is, managed to provide enticing cover copy without any of those giveaway details, and so I (despite being anything but classy) will attempt to follow in Persphone's footsteps.

Let's begin this elusive discussion, then, with a quote from a friend of mine, who also just read the book: Promise me you'll NEVER PICK UP A HITCHHIKER. How appropriate it is to be reading a thriller for the R.I.P. challenge that involves a hitchhiker. After all, we ALL, even those who didn't, at age eleven, stay up all night telling hitchhiker ghost stories at slumber parties, know not to pick up hitchhikers. Dr. Hugh Densmore, intern at UCLA, certainly knows not to pick up hitchhikers. Nonetheless, the one he spots when he's driving from L.A. to Phoenix for his niece's wedding attracts his attention. He doesn't want to pick her up, knows he shouldn't, but she's so young. She reminds him of his own younger sisters, of how he wouldn't want them picked up by the wrong sort of driver, so he stops.

He stops, and his nightmare begins. I can't tell you why (put this book on your T.B.R. list, wait ten months, and maybe you'll forget why it's there and what I'm about to say), but this fateful "good deed" of his produces a brilliant commentary on race relations, class distinctions, and abortion rights. I'm not sure whether or not Hughes intended the latter, but it's there, and because she was writing in the U.S. in the 1960s, the punch she provides is more powerful than the one writers might provide after the fact (think John Irving and The Cider House Rules, especially since the abortionist in this book would make a great freshman English compare and contrast subject with Irving's Wilbur Larch).

I can tell you that Hugh's nightmare is typical of many a mystery (The Fugitive springs to mind here) when he finds himself accused of a murder he didn't commit. He makes many, many mistakes in trying to prove he's been framed, and I'm not quite sure why he makes some of the choices he does, but I suppose there wouldn't be much of a plot if he didn't. You could accuse Hughes of creating characters who suffer from being one dimensional, especially her cops, but no more so than many other brilliant authors of the genre. The point of these thrillers is plot, not knowing that the cops and bad guys go home and lovingly care for children or sick parents, thus proving how human and complicated they really are. What's important is how they are interacting with our protagonist and victim(s) to move the plot along. Hughes had a fine grasp of how that should work. One-dimensional characters are also useful when trying to make political points, which Hughes was clearly doing.

Although this book, on many levels, has a very masculine feel to it, one thing I liked about it that clearly distinguishes it from the male likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald was the obligatory "beat up the protagonist" scene. If you're familiar with Chandler, Hammett, or Macdonald, you know perfectly well that Marlowe, Spade, and Archer can be beaten to a pulp (one eye swollen shut, a couple of fractured ribs, even be shot in the ankle or something) and still run 57 blocks, climbing a chain link fence to escape (or to catch) a bad guy. Here, we have a protagonist who gets beaten to a pulp and winds up in bed for a few days. When he does decide to pursue someone he thinks is a murderer, he needs drugs to pump himself up, and we are still reminded, throughout, that he's practically a cripple, wincing in pain with every opportunity. I call that a (feminine) realistic touch.

My one real gripe with the book is one that I often feel like writing a whole blog post about. When one of the Black characters wants to disguise the woman he's with and himself as shiftless and poor, he changes his own accent and asks her "Can you talk southern?" As if you have to be Southern in order to be shiftless and poor, and as if articulate, educated Blacks couldn't be found in the South. Yes, even in 1963, there were articulate, educated Blacks in the South (also articulate, educated Whites). Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, was Southern. The female character's response is even more absurd,

She shrugged. 'I've been told not too well, northern comes through. If I have to speak I'll stay with "Yes, suh: and "No, suh."' (p. 310)

As if some drunk white guy in Phoenix will be able to hear "northern coming through." Judging from what often passes as a Southern accent in Hollywood, I'd say most who aren't born and raised in the South can't hear that.

It's a testament to the book that this Southern stereotyping didn't annoy me as much as it often does. In fact, if you're not Southern, my guess is you won't even notice it when you read the book, and if you are, you may still be like me, ready to read more Hughes. And that's all I'm going to say. You'll have to read the book to find out whether or not he gets The Girl (yes, of course there's a Girl) and goes free to live happily ever after, or the Girl dumps him to go off with the lawyer who can't keep him from being thrown in jail.

Good stuff. Four stars.

Musings on Terror Reading

2011-09-06T12:58:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, Susan at You Can Never Have Too Many Books, asked some good questions recently about why those of us who read horror stories do so. I liked the questions and thought they'd be fun to answer, especially now that I've embarked on the R.I.P. Challenge, so I reached out a bony, skeletal hand over to her site and stole them to post on my own (with answers, of course). Here you go:

1. Why do I read horror/ghost stories?

I suppose one of the obvious answers to this question is that I'm a masochist? I mean, people like my mother and sisters have asked me since I was a teenager, "How can you read that stuff?" Obviously, many people don't enjoy being scared out of their wits, and to tell you the truth, I wouldn't paint myself out to be someone who does, because I'm such a chicken when it comes to so many things, but I can't remember a time when I didn't enjoy stories, books, television shows, and movies that sent shivers up and down my spine.

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was an old Scholastic Paperback called Strange But True. Most of the stories in it were quite forgettable, but there were two that really stood out for me. One was about a ghost ship that was sailing around with a frozen crew. The other was about a frightful man lugging a coffin on his back who later showed up on an elevator that the narrator chose not to take because "Coffin Man" was on it. The elevator malfunctioned, killing everyone on it. (That's how I remember it, anyway. That may not be what really happened. I haven't read the book since I was twelve or so, although I'd like to reread it).

About the same time I discovered that book, I also discovered Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators mystery series (which hardly anyone else has ever heard of). That series was to me what Nancy Drew was to almost every other girl I knew. I think I preferred it, because, like Scooby Doo (speaking of cartoons. I loved cartoons when they took on spooky themes. Anyone remember The Flintstones episode when that Addams Family type family moved in next door? That was my favorite!), these books tended to focus on mysteries that at first seemed to be supernatural in nature. Something ghoul-y-and-ghost-y-ish always spawned the three boys' investigations.

When I got older, I remember scaring myself to death reading The Amityville Horror, and then, of course, moving on to Stephen King. I always found the books scarier than the movies, because, as I'd say after seeing the movie, "That wasn't as scary as I imagined it when I read the book." In other words, I guess my imagination ran wilder while reading than it did while being presented with someone else's interpretation of events. The only exceptions here were the movies The Exorcist and The Shining, both of which pay excellent homage to the books and still scare the crap out of me.

Back in those days, it was very easy to send a chill up my spine while reading. These days, it's much much harder to do so. I read these books and stories now for two reasons: 1. I'm always hoping to come across something that does terrify me, that makes me feel the way I did when I was a kid reading Strange But True and 2. I like to write ghost stories myself, so I read them to see what others have written and for inspiration.

2. Do I like being thrilled?

Yes, I love to be thrilled. I'm a new-adventure-and-roller-coaster kind of gal. Or, at least, I like to think I am. Reality is that I love to be thrilled, unless I'm home all alone, it's late, and I've made the mistake of reading something like a collection of essays about serial killers. I hear a "thump" somewhere in the house (or was it on the front porch?), and then, well, I'm not too keen on being thrilled.

3. Do I like being scared, safely in the comfort of my own home?

Yes, but not when I'm alone. This is a bit of a problem for the sort of thrill-seeker I am, because I rarely ever get scared if I'm not alone. I might have a brief moment of chills up my spine while reading something macabre or thrilling, but all I have to do is go find someone else in another room (someone who's supposed to be there, I mean, not an intruder with a wicked grin and an ax raised above his skeletal face), and I'm fine. If I'm alone? Well, let's just say I've been known to lock doors and dive under covers hoping no one finds me.

4. Do I like the eerie frisson of chill running over my skin when I read a particularly scary line or scene?

Yes, I do like that sort of chill, as long as it doesn't last too long, and as long as it's only being inspired by reading/watching something and not by strange noises echoing throughout my house.

There you have it: I love to be scared out of my wits... maybe... sort of. Are any of the rest of you who read horror/thrillers as ambivalent as I apparently am?

R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge VI

2011-09-03T10:18:00.009-04:00

This blog seems to be dead, I post so rarely on it these days, so why not bring it back from the dead with this very appropriate challenge? I've been reading about Carl's R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge every year since I started this blog (2006. God. Can you believe it? No wonder it's dead. How old is too old for a blog?), but I've never bothered to join it. I didn't feel I needed to, because every October and November, I fill my reading time with tales of mystery, suspense, and the supernatural, and the R.I.P. challenge runs from September 1 through Halloween. September, when we've still got bright sunshiny days with highs in the 80s has always seemed a little too soon for me to focus my reading on the weird and spooky. This year, however, I've changed my mind for three reasons:

1. I joined Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge for the first time this past spring and enjoyed it immensely. Even more impressive, it's a challenge I started and actually managed to finish.

2. Although I used to save all my supernatural reading for October and November, recently I've begun reading throughout the year, which has made me enjoy it more, somehow. Thus, reading ghost stories when it's 84 degrees and sunny outside doesn't seem as odd as it used to. Besides, this time of year, we still get thunderstorms, and everyone knows ghosts and demons abound when the skies are streaked with lightning and the house shakes with thunderous reverberations.

3. Last weekend, we had a hurricane here on the east coast of the U.S. It knocked out our power for 48 hours. You don't realize how very, very dark it is at night until all the power in your neighborhood is gone, you have to take the dog out before going to bed, and there's a cemetery behind your house. It made me realize why Victorians wrote such good ghost stories. When you have very little light, all kinds of sights (and sounds) could easily be mistaken for ghosts. All these thoughts, of course, made me want to pull out some ghost stories and read them.

Carl always kindly provides us with varying levels for his challenges, and I'm going to take on Peril the First, reading these four books (plus one to grow on, because I couldn't resist):

Dark Fantasy: Murder of Angels by Caitlin R. Kiernan. This is one that's been sitting on my shelves forever, bought on a trip to the Delaware shore the first summer we lived in Pennsylvania. It's actually the second in the Silk series, and I haven't read the first (Silk), but I'm hoping that won't matter, because I'm trying to read from my own shelves rather than buying anything new for this challenge. Thanks to Ms. Musings, I discovered Kiernan's Threshold about four years ago, I think, and I've been meaning to read something else by her ever since.

Gothic: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. I've read it, but it was so many, many years ago that I don't remember a thing about it, and I've been meaning to reread it, oh, for about five years now. If I'm going to read something Gothic for the challenge, why not read "the earliest and most influential of the Gothic novels." At least, that's what the back cover copy says. I have an old, old copy of this somewhere, but a few years ago, a friend of mine gave me a nice, shiny, new version published by O.U.P., so I'm going to read it.

Mystery: The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, because not all horror has to be supernatural, and this one promises to be full of human horror. It's a Persephone book that's remained on my shelves unread for ages (Persephone books are so expensive for Americans that when one buys them, she has to save them for special occasions). It's another one that came highly recommended to me by Ms. Musings, so here it is.

Supernatural: The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Pierce edited by Michael Newton. My brother-in-law kindly picked this one up for me at Book Expo America back in 2010. I meant to read it last fall but never got around to it.

(One to Grow On) A Little Bit of Everything: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. I've been listening to the audiobook version of this one. It's a very, very long audiobook (3 parts at Audible.com), and I've been listening to it for over a month now, because I basically only listen when I'm walking or doing house work, neither of which I've done in abundance since I started it. I'm dying for an excuse to write my thoughts on it, but I didn't want to give up reading other titles for the R.I.P. challenge, and, well, you know, I never get around to writing about the books I read unless I have a reason like the mystery book club or a challenge, so I just decided to tack it onto this challenge. I've got something like five more hours of listening, which means I'll probably be done with it this week.

I will also be joining Carl's group read of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, because I've been meaning to read Fragile Things practically since it was published. I don't own it but can easily get it from the library, so I won't have to buy it.

And I'll probably spend a good deal of November reading other spooky fare. It's a month that tends to have superb weather for such reading, and nothing much else to recommend it except my brother's birthday and my second favorite holiday (Halloween, of course, being my favorite) Thanksgiving. I've got tons and tons more on my shelves that I can read. That reminds me that Susan, over at You Can Never Have Too Many Books, recently asked some really interesting questions regarding reading for terror. Since this blog has only just come back to life, I need to keep feeding it, so I plan to address those in my next blog post. Until then, it looks like I've got some reading to do.

Edgar Allan Poe

2011-08-27T10:39:00.001-04:00

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter from Poe: Poetry and Tales. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

(These stories were originally published from 1841-1844.)

I may have mentioned a time or two on this blog that I love Edgar Allan Poe. One of my favorite spots at The University of Virginia is the Edgar Allan Poe room (#13 on the West Range), which is supposedly the dorm room he occupied while a student there. It's glassed off for exhibit, and no one resides in it, except the stuffed raven I love.

I know there are many contemporary critics who love to knock Poe, but I choose to ignore them. I was hooked on him from the moment my sister Forsyth received some over-sized, illustrated "children's classic" version of The Gold-Bug as a gift. I'd received Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, and when I was done with that, despite having loved it, I read Forsyth's book and was horribly jealous (greedy child that I was) that it wasn't mine as well.

All that being said, I've not read everything Poe ever wrote, so I was very happy when the Connecticut mystery book club chose to read three of his stories, two of which I'd read and one of which I'd not. Why it is that of the three C. Auguste Dupin detective stories, I'd read the first,The Murders at the Rue Morgue and the third, The Purloined Letter, but not the second, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, is a mystery in and of itself. Perhaps Dupin would disdain me for chalking it up to bizarre high school and college curricula, coming up with some far more rational explanation, but if I chalk it up to English courses, I can then confidently say it's been about thirty years since I read the two.

That may explain why my brain was quite fuzzy on the details. What I remembered about The Murders in the Rue Morgue was that one of the victims was stuffed up a chimney. That's it, all I seem to have remembered. How I could possibly have forgotten the orangutan ("Ourang-Outang") is completely beyond me, but here's something weird about the way the brain works. I could have sworn that an orangutan features somewhere in a Sherlock Holmes story (I first read Arthur Conan Doyle about the same time I first read Poe). I've reread quite a bit of Sherlock Holmes in the past ten years or so and have yet to encounter an orangutan. Did I completely confuse the two? (Someone in the know, please let me know.)

Then again, the fact that I may have confused Dupin and Holmes leads me to the main point I want to make about these stories, which is that I find, now that I've been reading so many different mystery and detective stories, that the early ones, like those of Poe and Conan Doyle, credited with being the Founding Fathers of the genre, tend to be very matter-of-fact stories meant to highlight the genius of their detectives. Typically, these genius detectives are juxtaposed with earnest, but rather incompetent, policemen. Unlike contemporary authors of the genre who, yes, have genius detectives, but who also might have a setting that features as a character with a psychology almost as complicated as its human characters (Ian Rankin); or whose crime solver's story is so detailed and interesting that the mystery she's solving is almost unimportant (Jacqueline Winspear); or who may be using the genre as a means to express true literary talent (Tana French); here, what's important are the facts, the puzzle presented, and the amazing detective who's smart enough to see what most can't. He spots all the "clews" (when did a "clew" become a "clue"?) no one else has noticed. What the reader most wants to do is to outwit the detective, to pick up on all the clews, and to solve the puzzle just before he does. This reader rarely manages to do so.

I found this matter-of-fact writing style interesting coming from Poe, because I tend to think of his writing as flowery, especially since what I've read most recently of his is his collected poems. Not much poetry is in evidence here, which verifies my claims that Poe was a genius. He could write breath-taking poetry when he so desired, but when plot and puzzle-solving were the important components, he chose to be a little more pedestrian, which is not to say that he was dull or unimaginative, just, well ... prosaic. He may have left behind the flowery language, but he certainly didn't leave behind his own philosophizing, some of which left me with my own, ever-so-flowery response of "huh"? (For a prime example of this, see the beginning of The Murders in the Rue Morgue when Poe presents his theories about the analytical mind.) It's best to read these parts quickly, get through the plot, and then to reread them more slowly for real understanding. It's almost as though reading the story trains the brain to think the way Poe did.

All three of these tales are great fun in an "old-fashioned detective story" way, but of the three, although The Mystery of Marie Rogêt is very interesting in having been based on a true event that occurred in New York City and also includes my favorite quote from the three stories:

'And what are we to think,' I asked, 'of the article in Le Soleil?'

'That it is a pity its inditer was not born a parrot -- in which case he would have been the most illustrious parrot of his race. He has merely repeated the individual items of the already published opinion...' (p. 533)

(have you ever read a better example of a wonderfully disdainful detective?), my favorite, which you can probably tell by the number of times I've mentioned it, is The Murders in the Rue Morgue. What I love about it is that it's so absolutely improbable, absurd really. And yet, while reading it, it all makes perfect, logical sense. (In that regard, it reminds me of one of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.) That, in my book, is what good detective fiction is all about. Now, enough writing. I've got this whole collection of Poe stories to read and a hurricane supposedly on its way. What better weather for reading Poe than that?

Blog Tour: Pietro Grossi's The Break

2011-08-15T11:25:00.004-04:00

Grossi, Pietro. The Break. London: Pushkin Press, 2011. (Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis.)

If, in December 2010, you had told me that I would read a book in 2011 about a pool-obsessed man who laid stone roads for a living and that this book would definitely be on my list of favorites at the end of the year, I probably would have wondered what sort of head injury I was going to suffer in 2011 that so affected my personality and reading habits. Especially since the man doesn't even play the version of billiards that I know. He plays a completely foreign Italian version of the game. Nonetheless, the circumstances, feelings, and, ultimately, life of this man named Dino are anything but foreign.

Pietro Grossi has written a fabulously old-fashioned novel that has a very fresh feel to it. It's short, and he packs a punch, but he does so while giving us endearing characters about whom we care from the get-go. He does so without any 21st-century gimmicks (no alternating between first and third person narrative, no deciding not to use punctuation, no disconnected prose intentionally meant to prove how clever he is, etc.), and the result is, like the beautiful Van Gogh cover (in this instance, yes you can judge a book by its cover. Rarely have I encountered a cover that so effectively illustrates a novel), a masterpiece of literature.

The book begins and ends at the pool table. In between, we get a story so full of meaning and beautiful prose, it's hard to put down. Luckily, if you plan your reading schedule accordingly (which I didn't), you may not have to, as the novel isn't even 250 pages long. There were times when, despite wanting to read it slowly, to let the prose sink in, I found myself reading the way I often do when reading a thriller. I was practically skipping whole sentences to find out what was going to happen. Then I'd go back and reread them, because, really, you don't want to miss a word of what Grossi has to say. It would be like missing strokes of color in that Van Gogh painting.

You see, Dino has led quite an ordinary life up until now, and his only real excitement comes from playing pool with the man Cirillo, who's taught him since he was a boy. Dino doesn't believe in luck or circumstance, really. He believes in the orderliness, the mathematics even, that can be found by spending your evenings at the billiards table. Then, one day, he takes his eye off the ball, and everything he's ever known begins to fall apart. He becomes one of the two men (the other is his co-worker Saeed), so aptly described by Grossi, who,

...looked at each other for a moment in silence, thinking with some part of themselves that they really belonged in another story, but that this one wasn't too bad after all. (p. 153)

How many times do we feel like that in life, feel like asking, "How did this become my story?" So often, despite what you think you can do, that billiard ball really does have a mind of its own. Your hand slips accidentally, or you become caught up in some stranger's odd story, and you suddenly see the ball rolling somewhere you didn't expect.

Dino would tell you that all he was doing was laying stones to make roads, playing billiards, fantasizing about taking trips with his wife he'd never take. Then, one day, he found himself hiding a guy in a truck and driving him to the border, so the guy could escape prosecution. Grossi's genius is that this is what the story becomes, after seeming like it's going to be the story of a pool player's rise to fame and fortune. Then, just when you think it's going to be all about that man's escape at the border and Dino's role in it, it becomes something else, yet again. I was so sure this was going to be the story of a guy who came from nowhere and won or lost big in some huge pool tournament. I couldn't have been more wrong.

What it is is a real life story, the sort of story that makes your heart ache for the ways in which people misunderstand others, the ways they focus on the wrong sorts of questions, the wrong sets of priorities. Despite all that misunderstanding, the novel provides hope. This hope comes, not so much from what happens, but from the portrayal of the resilience of human beings and their desperate attempts to do what's right and to make meaning of this life. I like to believe in the good of human beings. While so many other contemporary authors seem to be determined to make us see the bad in humans, Grossi helps us to believe in that good.

The hope also comes from realizing we still have authors like Grossi, those who can turn a bunch of typeset pages into a beating heart, full of life and meaning. I'm very grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing such authors, even more grateful that I was asked by them to review this book, and am thrilled that I'm on the blog tour, which means I will soon be interviewing Grossi. Stay tuned for the post in which I try not to sound like a gushing idiot, and he answers my questions.

One I Promised for a Rainy Day

2011-08-13T19:19:00.009-04:00

I first saw this at Ms. Musing's, but it can also be found at some of the other blogs I like to frequent like My Porch and Charlotte's Web. Anyway, I decided to save it for a rainy day, of which we've had something like a grand total of three here in Lancaster County this whole brutal summer. I was beginning to think I was going to have to do it on a non-rainy day, but then I hung up some laundry to dry today and lo and behold! it began to pour, so here you go.

The Sunday Times 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945

The idea for this meme is to note those I've read.

1. Philip Larkin -- not read, but I keep meaning to do so.

2. George Orwell -- read so long ago, for school, and I wasn't into him at the time, so I can't remember a damn thing, except things that have made it into the vernacular.

3. William Golding -- started to, but didn't get very far. Must try again.

4. Ted Hughes -- I've read at him, but never read an entire collection of his.

5. Doris Lessing -- another on the "meaning to read for ages" list. I think I did read something of hers in college, but I don't remember what it was.

6. J. R. R. Tolkien -- had The Hobbit read to me. That counts, right? Even if I wasn't paying a bit of attention.

7. V. S. Naipaul -- yes. Loved him and really ought to read more.

8. Muriel Spark -- yes. I love her, too.

9. Kingsley Amis -- only The Green Man, which I gather is quite different from what he typically writes, but it was great, despite it's "bit too much" ending. I have to admit I've got a bias against him, as he's always struck me as someone who thinks he's superior. Why I pick on him, lord knows, because you could probably say that about a good number of these authors.

10. Angela Carter -- no, but I want to read The Bloody Chamber.

11. C. S. Lewis -- yes. Am I the only person in the world who wasn't in love with the Narnia books when she was a kid? I read them all, faithfully, to see what all the fuss was about and never could.

12. Iris Murdoch -- nope.

13. Salman Rushdie -- nope. And I never planned to do so until I read a recent blog post of Litlove's that was quite convincing. But who am I kidding? I'm sure I never will.

14. Ian Fleming -- oh, how can anyone watch the movies without reading any of the books? (Oh yeah, and I read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, too, when I was a kid. Of course, that was a movie, too...)

15. Jan Morris -- okay, my ignorance is on bright display: I've never even heard of Jan Morris.

16. Roald Dahl -- of course. How could you be a kid raised in the seventies and not read Dahl? I also love his Tales of the Unexpected for adults.

17. Anthony Burgess -- it's probably terribly old-fashioned of me, but I love him.

18. Mervyn Peake -- no, but I'm playing a game with the copy of The Gormanghast Novels which was still on the shelves at our liquidating Borders last time I checked. I'm convinced no one else in Lancaster County will want it and am waiting to see if it lasts until it goes to 50% off (right now, it's at 30%). If it does, I'll buy it.

19. Martin Amis -- no. The poor guy suffers from being associated in my mind with his dad.

20. Anthony Powell -- nope, but plenty of bloggers have convinced me I need to do so.

21. Alan Sillitoe -- who?

22. John LeCarré -- yep, thanks to the CT mystery book club.

23. Penelope Fitzgerald -- nope.

24. Phillipa Pearce -- nope.

25. Barbara Pym -- just seeing her name makes me want to pour a glass of sherry and pick up one of her books.

26. Beryl Bainbridge -- nope.

27. J.G. Ballard -- yet again: no.

28. Alan Garner -- a personal favorite.

29. Alasdar Gray -- nope.

30. John Fowles -- can you believe: no? Neither can I, but there you have it.

31. Derek Wolcott -- tried. Might try again. Might not.

32. Kazuo Ishiguro -- another personal favorite.

33. Anita Brookner -- not until this summer, when I read one book by her, but I will be reading more.

34. A. S. Byatt -- was dying to read her when she came out with Possession, but not dying enough, apparently, because I never did, and I eventually lost all interest.

35. Ian McEwan -- totally overrated, and I can't believe I feel that way and still have read three books by him.

36. Geoffrey Hill -- nope.

37. Hanif Kureishi -- no.

38. Iain Banks -- nope.

39. George Mackay Brown -- nope.

40. A. J. P. Taylor -- nope.

41. Isaiah Berlin -- nope.

42. J. K. Rowling -- how embarrassing that I break all those "nopes" with a "yes" to this one.

43. Philip Pullman -- like him much better than Rowling.

44. Julian Barnes -- I have a reader's crush on the man. Still remember the first time we met: History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. There was no hope for me. I was smitten from the get-go.

45. Colin Thubron -- back to "nope" again.

46. Bruce Chatwin -- should have by now, but I haven't.

47. Alice Oswald -- nope.

48. Benjamin Zephaniah -- who?

49. Rosemary Sutcliff -- finally, another one I've read.

50. Michael Moorcock -- and another one I haven't.

Okay, everyone, please tell me: of those I haven't read, which ones should I? Meanwhile, I can't believe J. K. Rowling made the list. I mean, if she can make it, where's James Herbert?

Mistakes the Publishing Industry Has Made in Recent Years

2011-08-11T13:29:00.005-04:00

1. Assuming for way too long that e-books wouldn't catch on. Then, assuming that they were like paperbacks, charging way too little for them, instead of thinking of them as something that might eventually replace hardcovers and acting accordingly.

2. Forgetting that they have always catered to a tiny market and trying to expand their market in ridiculous ways. Readers are rarities. Publishers have forgotten about us in their greedy efforts to make more money and have tried, unsuccessfully and at great expense, to do things like create hybrid print and digital books in order to cater to nonreaders. People came up with the damnest ideas: "Let's have web sites associated with our books." This is a better idea with the advent of the tablet, but really, back in 2005, did any reader want to get up from a cozy seat by the fire to have to go boot up the computer and look up something on some book's associated web page? I hate print books that refer me to web sites. Or how about: "Let's let the reader create his or her own ending." If I want to create my own ending, I'll write my own beginning as well, thank you. Finally, there's "Let's create series in which readers get a cliff hanger at the end of a book." Cliff hangers are fine for weekly T.V. shows. They're a horrible idea when one has to wait 2 or 3 years for the next book to be published (and they create shoddy writing, because the pressure is just to get the book out, no matter how badly written it might be).

3. Ignoring the midlist. Do I even need to elaborate here? I'll just say that the publishing industry seems to have adopted the mentality of a fifteen-year-old basketball player who thinks he's going to be the next Michael Jordan without having to practice at all, and he's basing all his potential future wealth on this assumption.

4. Putting "book club guides" in the backs of books that feature the sorts of questions that made life-long readers like me hate English classes when they were in high school. It might come as a shock to publishing consultants (do they ever talk to real readers?), but those of us who love to read enough to have formed a book club in order to discuss books with others who also love to read, are quite capable of coming up with our own -- far better and more insightful -- topics for discussion.

5. Speaking of consultants: cutting staff and paying authors less money in order to hire consultants who come up with brilliant ideas for "branding" the company. Books aren't soda or cars or jeans. Readers don't find one brand and stick with it. The authors are the brands. Have you ever heard anyone ask, "Did you read the latest from Random House?" Of course not. And ask your average reader who publishes his or her favorite author. My guess is the reader quite likely won't know. Forget branding the company. Pay the authors to stick around. And keep the editors they love to work with, so there's the possibility they might stick around even when other publishers offer them more money.

6. Hiring CEOs from other industries who aren't biblioholics. What happened to the days of publishing CEOs who could read, write, and run publishing companies? Those are the people who know a little something about their market, and knowing your market is more than half the battle when it comes to staying alive.

7. Worrying more about profit than giving your audience what it wants. I want a good book to read. I want it to be well-written. I want evidence that it's been edited and proofread. In other words, I don't want to read some unoriginal, newest fad based on someone else's odd, once-in-a-lifetime success (wizards! vampires! wizards in love with vampires!) that some unknown author has rushed off in six months. I don't want a book that is chock full of awkward, run-on sentences and typos, just because you, Mr. Publisher, have decided to cut your staff and have shipped all production functions overseas. You know what that sort of book does? It leads me to buy used books, written back when plots were original, and copyeditors and proofreaders were people you, (again) Mr. Publisher, might actually have known, people who possibly even had on-site, full-time jobs inside your building. Losing sales from the likes of me hurts profits, too, you know.

Anyone want to add some more mistakes to the list? I'd be happy to hear them. Meanwhile, I'm heading back to continue reading Pushkin Press's wonderful book The Break, which has an original plot and not a single typo so far (despite being a translation). Thank God for small, independent presses!

A Visit

2011-08-09T13:42:00.003-04:00

This past weekend, we were honored with a visit from Zoë's Mom (ZM) and Zoë. They arrived late Thursday, after getting stuck in traffic (of course. Is it at all possible to go from Fairfield County, CT to Lancaster County, PA without getting stuck in traffic?). Getting stuck in traffic would become a bit of a theme for the weekend, but it really didn't matter, because we had such great company while sitting in a car, moving a mere few inches at a time.

The minute they arrived, it was instant love between Zoë and Clare the dachshund. In fact, I'm pretty sure Zoë would've been perfectly content just to spend the whole weekend doing nothing but playing with Clare. For Clare, I think it was a bit more like those older cousins you used to visit when you were a kid. You loved them, couldn't wait to see them, but you were also a little bit in awe of them and afraid (though you would never admit it), because they were so much bigger than you. It was wonderful for Clare's "mom" and "dad" to have someone around who never tired of playing with her and giving her all the attention she wants so badly.

ZM and I share a mutual love of ice cream, so I had decided that when she next came to visit, we'd go to Franklin Fountain in Philadelphia, an old fashioned soda fountain I'd read about in The New York Times last month. I'm too young to remember the days of such soda fountains, and I've always felt cheated that they've been replaced by fast food franchises (not that ZM and I haven't been known to go in search of the nearest DQ). I like the idea of homemade sodas, ice cream sundaes, and egg creams (although I've never had one of those) served to me by a soda jerk while I'm perched up on a diner-type bar stool. It always makes me think of It's a Wonderful Life, although I always imagine I'm actually in New York City, not small town America, when I visit one. ZM is the kind of friend who didn't think it was at all absurd that we drive to Philly on Friday specifically to visit Franklin Fountain. Zoë, of course, came along for the ride. (Poor Bob was left at home to work, although he did sneak off for a little bit to the Board Game Association's convention, which is held in Lancaster every summer.)

Of course, we did more than just go to the soda fountain (for instance, you know, even though it's tempting, you can't really have nothing but ice cream for lunch, so we stopped off for a slice of pizza first), but I have to tell you it didn't disappoint. It was exactly as I'd imagined: bottles of every sort of soda flavor imaginable, old-fashioned candy and gum for sale, all kinds of ice cream concoctions, and a small bar with bar stools. The wait staff even dresses in outfits straight out of the 1940s.

It was nearly impossible to choose what to order. The banana split sounded good, but like a bit too much. They had specialties with such names as the "volcano" that were tantalizing. I really ought to try an egg cream sometime, but this just didn't seem like the time. I was also tempted by milkshakes and the root beer float. Finally, though, I did what I typically do: after browsing through it all, I ordered a plain old hot fudge sundae. It was superb. I haven't had hot fudge like that in I don't know how long, the sort of deep, dark, chocolate-y hot fudge people seem to have forgotten how to make, whose purpose is to enhance the sugary sweetness of the vanilla ice cream, not to make it more sugary. And you could taste the vanilla beans in the ice cream. On our way out, we decided we had to sample some of the sodas, so we bought one grape and one strawberry to share. They were good, but by then, we were really too full to enjoy them.

After all that decadence, it was on to shopping. ZM and I had had a superb shopping trip about a year and a half ago with Ms. Musings, and we decided to go back to Rittenhouse Square where the three of us had been to look around in Lucky Jeans and whatever else struck our fancy. In typical ZM and Emily fashion, we had a cab take us to Lucky Jeans (after realizing the trolly, which Zoë had really wanted to do would take way too long), only to miss it and to go wandering up the street after the driver let us off, unable to find it (turns out, we'd driven right by it, and he'd dropped us off about two doors up from it). Never mind, it gave us the excuse to go into Barnes and Noble, where Zoë got some teen magazines that kept her occupied while we did things like tried on jeans and shoes (yes, of course, shoes. And, yes, I did buy a pair). Then it was time to head home for the community picnic (and to sit in traffic trying to do so).

My town has a community-wide picnic every summer, and I was so glad ZM and Zoë chose to come the weekend of this big event. The town provides barbecue chicken and corn, and everyone brings side dishes and desserts, enough to feed an army (which is a good thing, because, you know, we hadn't eaten enough all day). The night ends with a huge fireworks display, and the Amish all turn out for the big event, so I thought it would be a fun thing for out-of-town visitors. We introduced Zoë to some of our young friends from church, and they became instant friends, deserting us all to go do things like bug the balloon man and scramble for candy in the candy scramble. Eventually, it got dark, and we all got a little worried when the three kids didn't come back, even more worried when each of them seemed to straggle back alone (we'd thought they were all together). Zoë was the last one to be found, but we did eventually find her, and all was well for the fireworks display.

On Saturday, we headed off to Lititz, the home of Wilbur Chocolates. Wilbur chocolate is better than Hershey's, and they have a wonderful, huge candy store, a must visit if you like candy and ever find yourself in Lancaster County. Lititz is also home to the only independent bookstore in Lancaster County, so Lititz is a dream town for ZM and me, who both like to read while eating candy. You visit Aaron's Books first to buy your book; then go buy yourself some candy at Wilbur; and then go home and read (and get fat eating candy) all afternoon. Inbetween the bookstore and Wilbur, we had to stop and get some lunch. This is where I exhibited how fantastically coordinated I am by dumping my lunch all over the booth and floor before I'd even had one bite. Luckily, they gave me another one at no charge. After Wilbur, we headed home, and sat in traffic, yet again.

Bob and I had a party to attend Saturday afternoon, so we left ZM and Zoë who went off to get pedicures and good things to eat at Kitchen Kettle. We were all happily exhausted by the evening, so we just ordered dinner in and had a lazy evening talking (well, ZM and I did. Bob is always prepping for Sunday morning on Saturday evenings, and Zoë was either reading or playing with Clare most of the time). We hit the hay a little earlier than we had on Thursday and Friday.

Sunday morning, it was the Sunday morning rush for church. ZM and Zoë had decided to attend with us (not something we require of our house guests), and it was nice to have the company. Bob did his best to embarrass them by announcing their presence, but the highlight of the morning was, after the service when Bob took off his robe, and Zoë and one of her new-found friends decided to zip themselves up in it. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of that (but I'm happy to have gotten the one above of Zoë reading to Clare. They were reading The Totally Lame Vampire). All too soon (as always), it was time for them to leave. But they had a little better luck with the traffic on the way home.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

2011-08-01T11:30:00.003-04:00

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Vintage, 1993 (1965).

When I was a kid, I somehow managed to confuse and equate Al Capone with Truman Capote (I guess those two last names were similar enough to a child listening in on adult conversation that I never distinguished them). It was years before I discovered that Capote was an author, but by then, the connection in my mind was so strong, I couldn't shake the notion that In Cold Blood was some sort of story about the mob. It makes perfect sense, right? If Truman Capote wasn't Al Capone, then he must have been writing about him.

I, basically, had completely forgotten this case of mistaken identities on my part until I began to read In Cold Blood. When I was in my teens and twenties, I was a frequent visitor to the 364 (true crime) shelves of the libraries I frequented. I always avoided In Cold Blood, because of those mob associations I had with it. Even, once I was working in a library and one of my colleagues told me he was finally reading this classic (if something that was barely 25 years old at the time can be considered a "classic"), and how good it was, I avoided it. I still didn't know much about Capote, and the copy our library owned was old, had no dust jacket, and no cover copy. I couldn't imagine such an "old" book possibly being as exciting as all the new true crime my friends and I passed around, extolling to each other the virtues and scare factors of each new discovery. Funny. I barely remember a single one of those books (except that one Joe McGinnis wrote about the D&D freak who killed his stepfather).

Fast forward 20 years. I've long since seen Tru (great one-man play based on the end of Capote's life); have realized Capote wrote another very famous work, Breakfast at Tiffany's; and have read a number of articles about him, which inspired me to buy some of his works, including In Cold Blood. The movie Capote, which I haven't seen, was a huge hit not too long ago and brought attention to him again. It would be impossible not to know who he is and what In Cold Blood is about, unless you are a complete nonreader or someone who avoids all reviews. Still, I haven't actually read the book.

Litlove suggested we read it together this summer, and we decided to read it in July. That's when I found myself asking the question, "How come I never read this book before?" and was reminded, as though some hypnotist had dredged it up from the depths of my brain, why: I spent the early part of my life thinking it was about something completely different. It's too bad, because the book was so right up my twenty-something alley, you could have found it lying dead there, bullet hole through its head, empty liquor bottle by its side, and I'm quite sure I would have remembered it better than all the others I read.

One night, in November 1959, the community of Holcomb, KS was rocked by the brutal murders of four members of the wholesome Clutter family. With the exception of the fact that Bonnie, the poor wife and mother, suffered from debilitating mental illness that kept her in bed most of the time, they were an "All-American Family," respected and beloved by the members of their community. The father Herb was an ambitious, ethical, disciplined, but, apparently, very likable man whose farm was extremely successful and profitable. Two older daughters had moved out and begun fruitful lives of their own. Nancy, the daughter who, at age 16, still lived at home, was every parent's dream: smart, organized, hard-working, pretty, and the sort who loved her father so much she didn't want to do anything to disappoint him (even to the point of agreeing not to spend so much time with the boy she'd been in love with for four years). The son Kenyon, at age fifteen, was also a very hard worker and what many described as a genius.

If this were fiction, especially in the hands of someone like Ross Macdonald, we would soon have discovered that not all was what it seemed in the Clutter household, that there was a very good reason (well, if there's ever really a "good" reason for murder) these four victims were found bound and shot to death in their home. Perhaps Herb would've proved to be a child-molester involved in some sort of shady dealings. Maybe one of the older sisters, someone who never felt loved by her father, had married a man who didn't love her and who had his sights set on inheriting the family fortune. There might even have been a little sibling incest and some jealous spurned lover. But not here. The family really was pure and innocent (at least, according to Capote's assessment, and why argue with that? He spent six years researching and writing the book). Even the mother's mental illness was far from the "kill-your-family-and-then-shoot-yourself" sort.

Talk about six degrees of separation. These family members were truly victims of less than six degrees of separation. Herb just so happened to have briefly employed a man who happened to meet one of the killers in prison. That killer had befriended the other killer. Believing, based on the testimony of the man who'd worked for Herb and who remained incarcerated, that the Clutter family had a safe full of cash, the two (Dick Hickock and Perry Smith), once out on parole, went in deadly pursuit of that safe and its contents. Capote gives us details of the murder, details of the killers' lives on the run, details of the investigation, and details of the trial and execution of the two men.

Here's what truly surprised me about the book: it terrified me. Me. The one who's read all kinds of true crime accounts. The one who reads and writes ghost stories for fun. The one who's been constantly disappointed by horror movie after horror movie. I didn't even realize I was afraid. The terror sort of sneaked up on me. It wasn't until it was getting close to 10 p.m., and I was engrossed in the book, and Clare the dachshund, who rarely ever barks at anything, suddenly started barking frantically at our back door, that I realized my heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest. Needless to say, I was not too keen on walking the dog before bed that night.

At first, I credited my terror to Capote's writing ability. His attention to detail is remarkable and enviable (floor boards creak, coyotes howl, tumbleweeds scuttle). But, since he alternates between telling us what's going on in Holcomb and what the two murderers are up to, I soon dismissed his writing as the major factor. If you want to terrify me, that's not the way to do it. I need complete mystery and surprise, people lurking in corners when others don't know they're there, bad guys we don't know. Introducing me to the murderers and making them human doesn't typically do it.

I think, ultimately, what got me were two things: one was the setting. I live in a small farming community that sounds quite similar to Holcomb. The other was the whole six degrees of separation factor. It's what got me when I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon -- how easily a family can be randomly targeted by some lunatic or lunatics. If it was that easy in 1959, with no computers, no Internet, no Facebook, think how incredibly easy it is today. If someone really wants to find and kill you, he or she can, and there's not much you can do about it.

It's ironic, really, that I always skipped over this one when browsing the 364 shelves, not only because I was always looking for something this scary, but also because its biggest claim to fame is that it was a pioneering work of the true crime genre. To be a fan of the genre and not to read it is like being a mystery fan and never reading Poe or Conan-Doyle. The copy I have classifies it as nonfiction/literature. Yet, I've also seen it described as the "original nonfiction novel." It seems Capote liked to mix and match genres. The only other works I've read of his are the "fictionalized memoirs" -- short stories that revolve around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays of his youth.

It's been a number of years since I read those holiday memoirs, and although I remember being impressed by them, I don't remember that much about the writing style. Now that I've read In Cold Blood, I'd say that Capote was much more of a nonfiction writer than a novelist. Although the work's been praised for its novelistic approach to the topic, and yes, I did find novelistic aspects, I'd never mistake him for, say, Patricia Highsmith. He's far more matter-of-fact. No matter how sympathetic all the critics claim he made his characters (and, yes, we do learn the whole sad life stories of the two murderers), I never really felt I was getting much more than the facts. He tried to get us inside their heads, wanted us to explore the psychology, but he didn't really succeed. For instance, he certainly made me think quite a lot about what happens when a highly sensitive child like Perry is exposed to brutal abuse time and again in his childhood, but his dots were connected by very faint, broken lines. He gave us a whole town full of people rocked by the murders, hinted at their terror, their sudden mistrust of each other, but he didn't go far enough with it to illuminate it in any original way.

What he did do was provide me with a riveting news story. I would eagerly have been buying each edition of a daily newspaper with articles written by him that followed the case. In fact, he provided the sort of detailed reporting that seems to be long gone from journalism -- less sensational than today, despite the fact that the story was far more sensational than much of what's reported these days.

Am I going to race out and tell everyone I know to read this book? Highly unlikely. Am I extremely glad I read it? Yes. For someone who writes ghost stories and wants to tap into human fears and abnormalities, it's a must read. Will I ever read more Capote in the future? Absolutely. I'm dying to know if his novels have less of a "reporter-ly" feel to them. (And now I'm off to read what Litlove had to say. You should go there, too, if you haven't already.)

Maine By the Numbers: July 4 - July 19, 2011

2011-07-24T13:42:00.003-04:00

Oh, how hard it is every time we go up to Maine to come back, but it is especially hard when I come back to a miserable heat wave in Pennsylvania. And, yes, the heat wave has hit Maine, too, but it's a little different there. For instance, at 7:00 p.m. last night, it was 93 degrees here. In Maine, it was 75 degrees. One good thing about the heat wave, though, is that it's given me an excuse to sit inside (can't risk sun burn and heat stroke, you know) and read such taxing fare as Lisa Jewell.

Despite the heat, I'm settling back in here, now that it will soon be a week since we left, and I'm happy to be back in the Land of the Best Corn Ever, as well as to be able to do things like buy my milk and eggs right off neighboring farms. I'm also looking forward to dinner with friends this evening and (I'm hoping), a "girls' night out" soon. Having just spent two weeks with nothing but the boy, a dachshund, and a cat (BTW, the latter two love Maine as much as we do, it seems), I need a little feminine companionship. I do wish, though, that the girls and I could go to Joe's Smoke Shop in Bar Harbor together (maybe, one day...).

Still, I'm reminiscing about the lovely time we had and thought I'd share some numbers with you:

# of blog posts that successfully posted themselves while I was away: 4. We don't have Internet access in Maine, and I'm no good at using the Blogger app for posting blog posts. I didn't, however, want to leave you, my faithful readers, with nothing to read for 2 weeks, so I scheduled things to post while I was away. Happy to say that it worked.

# of magnificent 4th of July fireworks displays I saw: 1. Bar Harbor shoots them off right over Frenchman Bay, and it was stunning (even when mist began to roll in towards the end. It gave the lights a certain sort of mysterious glow).

# of miles hiked: 33.88. This would have been closer to 50 if I hadn't been quite lazy a good deal of the time.

# of Scorned Woman martinis drunk at Joe's Smoke Shop in Bar Harbor: 3 (not all in one night).

# of blueberry martinis drunk at Joe's Smoke Shop: 1. Then I discovered the Scorned Woman martinis (not for those who can't handle spicy, spicy hot, but Bob and I loved them).

# of books finished: 1. "Only 1?" you very well may be asking. Yes, only one (A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, for those who are curious). You see, just before we left, Bob convinced me to bring George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, which is well over 700 pages long, and I'm a slow reader. It's a book I'd highly recommend reading a. right after reading Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and b. in between long hikes over mountains and through forests.

# of times I went to Beech Hill Organic Farm to buy delicious produce and yogurt: 3

# of fabulous blueberry and chocolate chip pancakes I made by stepping out the door and picking wild blueberries: 12

# of times I planned to go swimming in Long Pond: about 12?

# of times I actually swam in Long Pond: 1. I don't know why I didn't swim more, maybe because I was too busy reading A Game of Thrones.

# of chapters revised and edited in my novel: 3. We're getting there. I hope to have a readable draft by early fall for anyone who's interested in reading it.

# of new novels begun: 1. This was a complete surprise to me. I planned to work on the second draft of the already-written novel and some ghost stories, but one day, I was hiking a trail, and this whole new novel (not related to anything I've written or thought about until then) started demanding my attention, so I sketched it out a bit and even began writing the first chapter.

# of cigars smoked: 2. This is something I only do when on vacation, and I typically smoke the little, thinner, more "feminine" types of cigars like Acids.

# of pink flamingos spotted: countless. It was "flamingo days" in Southwest Harbor (apparently, the guy who invented the plastic pink flamingo is from Southwest Harbor), and we went to the parade.

# of loons spotted: 5.

# of snakes spotted: 2.

# of beaver dams spotted: 1.

# of porcupines spotted: 0. I'm convinced I'll never see a porcupine.

# of moose spotted: 0. I'm convinced moose are just legendary figures, like Big Foot.

# of months till we go back: 3. I think I can survive 3 months without a fix. We'll see...

IABD: The Rules of Engagement

2011-07-16T08:00:00.001-04:00

Brookner, Anita. The Rules of Engagement. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Thanks to Thomas over at My Porch, I am now a huge Anita Brookner fan. Today is Anita Brookner's 83rd birthday, and in honor of her, he has declared it to be International Anita Brookner Day (IABD). He challenged all of us to read one book by Brookner and to post on it today. He also offered some of her books up in a drawing, and I was a lucky winner of The Rules of Engagement. Easy decision, then, as to what I'd read for the challenge.

I had no idea what to expect, but Thomas and I seem to have quite similar tastes in books a good deal of the time (he's a huge Persephone and Virago fan, like I am), so I came to this book thinking I'd probably like it. What I didn't expect was that I'd sit down one afternoon just to read the first 20 or so pages to see what it was like and still be sitting there 130 pages later, all other plans for the afternoon forgotten. In fact, the only reason I put it down at that point was that I was starving and thought it might be a good idea to get a little food in my stomach.

Brookner is the sort of mesmerizing writer I love, one who pulls you into a story gently, so you don't realize what a firm grip she has on you until you are suddenly aware that there's no getting away. This book was a real page-turner, although not in the sense that expression is typically used. It wasn't action-packed or nail-bitingly suspenseful. It just was so incredibly real, and she made you care so much about her characters that you really wanted to know what was going to happen.

Back when I was in my mid-twenties, I remember sadly coming to the conclusion that making friends as an adult was so difficult, that it was very hard to make the sort of friends I'd had in school and college. When you're an adult, you just don't have hours and hours to talk on the phone and to stay up all night solving all the world's problems together. People are more guarded as adults, more afraid of betrayal. It's probably because we've learned from past mistakes and know that not everyone we consider a friend really is one. I remember thinking how rare it was to find someone with whom I clicked the way I seemed to do with people in college.

When Facebook first became all the rage, I was fascinated by the idea of re-connecting with some of the people I'd known in grade school and high school. I wondered if we could pick up where we'd left off after so many years. What I discovered, is that I couldn't. We've all led completely different lives, and it was soon clear to me that we just didn't have that much in common after so many years apart. The fact that we'd gone to school together, had slumber parties with each other, and enjoyed roller skating at the rink on Saturday nights meant nothing at this point in our lives. Maybe, it would, if I didn't live too far away from any of them to get together on any sort of regular basis, to see if we had more in common, but I didn't. Sad to say, I don't pay that much attention to their FB pages anymore.

I'm reminded of that line from The Big Chill, that William Hurt says (to Kevin Klein, I think. It's been quite a while since I've seen that movie), something to the effect of, "We knew each other for a short period a long time ago. You don't know anything about me now." It was a line that appalled me when I saw the movie for the first time, in the midst of my college career, convinced my friends and I would be as close as we all were forever. I now understand it much better than I did back then.

Brookner's book is all about such friendships. Elizabeth and Betsy (interesting that they both have the same name. Elizabeth is definitely the sort who would never have shortened it to the more playful "Betsy," and Betsy is the sort who would) are school friends, the kind who seem to have been drawn to each other, basically, because they didn't really have any other friends. They meet and become friends in the 1950s and both come of age in the sixties, a little shocked and taken by surprise by such things as the feminist movement. Elizabeth retreats in "good girl" fashion, marrying as her parents expect her to do. The man she marries is much older, and she quickly finds herself in the role of bored housewife. Betsy traipses off to Europe and falls in love with a Communist.

Later, they find each other again, two completely different women who've chosen very different paths in life, struggling to remain friends because, well, they've been friends for so long. They do have something in common, though, which is a desire to escape the lives they find themselves living. Although Elizabeth seems like she would be the more naïve of the two, she (who narrates the story) actually seems to be far more perceptive than Betsy, far more aware of the fact that they're trying to escape their lives. Betsy still seems to have the heart of a school girl: eager to be loved, eager to love, wanting others to like her. Nonetheless, Elizabeth isn't as immune to her emotions as she would like us to believe, and, just as it seemed in their schoolgirls days, these two don't really seem to have any other friends but each other.

I won't say anymore about the plot, because, really, half the fun of the book is not knowing what's going to happen. I will say, though, that one of the aspects of this book I really enjoyed was how it made me think about the women's movement when it was young and the effects it had on women who were not quite sure what to do with it. Elizabeth mentions "feminists" time and again, and she seems not quite sure what to make of the new roles being defined for women, while also seeming to feel she's missed out on something by taking a more traditional path. I've never thought that much about how hard it must have been for women who were raised with certain expectations and in certain social classes to be given the freedom they so deserved. Elizabeth's reaction, I'm quite convinced, although secretive and not admirable, was probably quite common. Broken hearts were also, I'm sure, quite common.

I'm certainly eager to read more Brookner now. I'm in luck: she's written so much. Meanwhile, I'd love to introduce her to someone else, so I'm going to pass on this book that was given to me. If you've never read her and would like to give her a try, please leave a comment. I will draw a name on July 21st and send it on to the lucky winner.

Music Monday/Lyric Lundi

2011-07-11T11:37:00.002-04:00

I was fourteen the summer Grease came out. I can't think of a better age to be for the release of that movie. I saw it something like six times in the theater, and my friends and I danced to the album at every party we had. Even when I moved to England later in the year, my friends over there and I danced to it at every party. I was admired then for being able to sing it all with a real American accent. It's summer, what better time to watch it again and to reminisce about those teenage summer nights? Here you go.

Yeas and Nays January through June 2011

2011-07-09T11:11:00.001-04:00

Every six months, I try to give you my six favorite reads and my six least favorite reads, for a total of twelve books you may want to read (or avoid) yourself. Inevitably, I have many more favorites than I do least favorites, and so I steal slots from least favorites and add them to most favorites, to keep the total at twelve. This time is no exception. I have nine favorites and only three least favorites. Here you go:

YEAS

Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster. One of the best little collections of ghost/horror stories I've read in ages.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Probably the most original mystery I've ever read.

The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit. A go-to comfort read, as enchanting as an adult (maybe even more so, since I marvel at Nesbit's talent) as it was as a child.

Faithful Place by Tana French. French can do no wrong in my book. This one was more Irish family saga than mystery, but still a masterful page-turner. Can't wait for her next.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Oh. My. God. My hope is that one day I will write a blog post on this one, but I want to wait until it will be more than just gushing "great book, great book" over and over.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. This book proves that there are contemporary novelists who can put a fresh spin on English village life and succeed beyond my hopes.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. A perfect fairy tale.

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy. I've loved Conroy for over 25 years now. This book was like getting to sit on his front porch with him and listen to him tell stories. Great fun.

Transformations by Anne Sexton. Fairy tales made more perfect.

NAYS

Jane Austen's Guide to Dating by Lauren Henderson. Not that I needed a guide to dating, but I like Jane Austen. I like Henderson's "tart noir" mysteries featuring Sam Jones, so I thought this might be a fun read. Wrong. Do not combine Henderson and Austen. I couldn't get through it.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Just read Hamlet and be done with it.

University Ghost Story by Nick Dimartino. Chock full of all the clichés I'm terrified haunt my own efforts at writing ghost stories.

Making Way

2011-07-05T13:46:00.001-04:00

I was suffering that Sunday afternoon in the second of the heat waves that have marked late spring and early summer this year in Lancaster County. I'd just settled down to try to move as little as possible when Bob came home from church and announced that we had a problem. Great. Just what I needed: a problem. I was sure it would probably be one that would require my going outside into the midday heat, and I was right. He told me to follow him and led me out the door, across the parking lot, and around to the back of the church where it borders on the cemetery behind it. There, he showed me a box that had eleven little Mallard ducklings in it. They were sharing the box with a shallow tray of water, but they were going nowhere near it, all huddled in the opposite corner.

"The mother laid them in one of the window wells in the memorial garden, and Carol S. found them there," he told me.

Carol is a member of the congregation who was busy cleaning up stuff from our weekly after church reception when she heard peeping in one of the windows down there. Our kitchen is located in the basement of the church, and some of the basement windows are immersed in window wells in the memorial garden upstairs. The memorial garden is in the center of the church and is completely walled in. It can only be entered by two doors, one off the church's narthex and the other off the opposite end of the sanctuary. Carol went up to the memorial garden and found ten ducklings in one window well and one lonely duckling in another.

This was a brilliant place for Mrs. Mallard to lay her eggs, as far as protecting eggs go, since very few predators (barring one little dachshund who's been in there a number of times) could get in. Once the eggs were hatched, though, it proved to be a very bad place, which frantic Mrs. Mallard eventually discovered, because she couldn't lead them out to water. All she could do was fly in and out of the garden, quacking loudly.

Carol's husband (who doesn't attend church, and so, wasn't there) happens to be a birder, so she called him to ask him what to do. He was the one who suggested the box with the tray of water and to bring them to the back of the church where the mother could get them. He said someone probably ought to sit with them and tip them over and out of the box when the mother came along. Carol had to leave, so she showed Bob, which is when he came running to get me. Okay, so desperate ducklings are a priority over Emily's beating the heat. I was instantly ready to do whatever we needed to do to reunite them with their mother. I now completely understood why, as we were walking across the parking lot, Bob had asked me if I saw or heard anything in the sky (not "ducks" but "anything." Well, yes, of course. There are always things in the sky around here).

"What should we do?" Bob asked, while I realized that my answer to his previous question should have been "no." I'd seen and heard no ducks in the sky.

I didn't know how to answer him. I did know, however, that I was beginning to understand the words "sitting duck" in a way I never before had. We had a whole box of "sitting ducks" just waiting to be snatched up by a feral cat or an eagle or a hawk (or some other "anything in the sky"). Finally, my brain quit idling and kicked into action,

"Call the humane society," I said.

We went back inside to do so. I didn't have much hope of Bob actually reaching anyone on a Sunday, but, much to our astonishment, he did. I think Bob's first words were, "Oh, thank God you're there."

The humane society couldn't help, though (they only deal with domesticated animals). They told him to call ORCA (I don't happen to know what that stands for) where he got a woman who was very helpful. She explained that, yes, we did need to go sit with them for protection and wait for Mrs. Mallard to find them, so while Bob changed from his Sunday suit into something more appropriate, I took one of our folding chairs back out into the sweltering heat to "duck sit" the "sitting ducks." By now, they'd discovered the tray of water and had all happily climbed into it (who could blame them in that heat?). I was happy, too, because on the trip across the parking lot, I had definitely heard a quacking duck flying by.

Shortly thereafter, Bob came out to join me. He took one look in the box, and his reaction could've rivaled frantic Mrs. Mallard's in the memorial garden.

"No, no! They're not supposed to be in water. The woman said not to give them any water. They can't shed it and can hyperventilate if their mother isn't here to supervise." (Hyperventilate when it was 90+ degrees? Whatever.) He immediately began picking up ducklings to get them out of the water and got rid of the tray of water altogether.

"Now, what we're supposed to do is pick one up and hold it to make it peep. After a few minutes, we should put it down and pick up another one to make it peep. The mother will hear them peeping and come, so she can lead them to the creek. When she comes, we need to let one follow her and then carry the box of the others down to the creek with them.

He sat down and held a duckling who peeped beautifully. He put it back and picked up another one who also obliged with plenty of peeps. Meanwhile, all the siblings in the box, hearing the distress of those being held, struck up an arousing chorus of peeps themselves. Lots and lots of peeping. It was the sort of noise that should have sent a mother flying. But no. No Mrs. Mallard. I started picking up ducklings myself, so we'd have two peeping soloists backed up by the chorus. Still no Mrs. Mallard.

Finally, I said to Bob,

"I think I'll go look in the memorial garden."

Sure enough. I went into the church and out to the memorial garden where I terrified Mrs. Mallard, whom I surmised had been wandering around, quacking away, dismayed that her brood had seemingly disappeared into thin air. Good thing I frightened her. She flew up and out of the garden, and I went back to Bob and the ducklings.

Mrs. Mallard now came flying around behind the church and in the cemetery. She was quacking away, which was apparently the cue for all the ducklings (obviously safe and sound now that mama was around) to shut up -- not a peep from that box that had supplied the rousing chorus a few moments before. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mallard went wandering off down to one end of the cemetery, still quacking, and completely ignoring us.

We tried following Mrs. Mallard with the box of ducklings after releasing one to her, but she was terrified of us. She half-flew/half-ran off, going back to the wrong end of the cemetery. Again, all the ducklings shut up, and she went quacking around in all the wrong directions, while we stood amongst all the tombstones holding the box with her babies.

Finally, I said to Bob, "Let's go back to where we were sitting and hold up the ducklings one-by-one again, " because I noticed that she kept heading back to that spot. This we did, and she eventually waddled up close to where we were. By now, I'd decided that following her with the whole box again might not work. We began taking one duckling at time out of the box to follow her. We took out three, at which point she decided this was her full brood and proudly began marching them off in the direction of the Pequea Creek. The three others we'd got out of the box scattered, and we began trying to catch them (no easy task. Ducklings run fast!). Bob then said to me,

"I'll catch them. You try taking the box and going after the mother before she gets too far."

so I picked up the box with the remaining ducklings and went racing after the mother. I'm afraid that as soon as I got near her, I just dumped them rather unceremoniously on the grass. They followed the quacks of their mother, though, and were soon off to make a train behind her. By now, Bob had rounded up the other three, who were already beginning to imprint themselves on him, but then they heard mother and took off with the others.

The little family marched through the cemetery and disappeared into the trees at its border. We assume they all made it safely down to the creek. The woman at ORCA had told us to check the next day at the railroad tracks, because if the mother had tried to take them over the tracks behind the cemetery instead of down the road (her two possible routes), the ducklings would probably have gotten stuck, and she'd, once again, be flying around frantically. We checked: no ducklings stuck on the railroad tracks and no frantic mom. Last week, on one of my walks, I came across a mother duck with a family of adolescent ducklings floating around in the creek. I'm pretending that's the family we saved (and, no, I didn't count to see if all eleven of them were still there).

50 Best Contemporary Novelists

2011-06-30T11:48:00.004-04:00

I stole this one from Litlove. It was a bit harder than I'd thought it might be, mainly because I discovered when browsing our shelves, my "books read" list on Goodreads, and my book journals that most of the contemporary works I read are either nonfiction or genre fiction. Apparently, I just don't read many contemporary novels, which probably makes me a very poor judge.

I had a hard time defining some of these when it came to "genre." Much of what others would call genre fiction, I happen to think is quite literary or more "general fiction," so feel free to disagree with my categories. I think I sort of relied on Litlove's definition of literary, which is that these are authors whose novels I'd prefer to read when not tired or distracted.

Many of my choices are based on only having read one novel and/or some short stories by the author. When that's the case, I note which novel, or that I've only read short stories. The short stories are ones that have made me put the authors' novels in my TBR tome or that have led me to buy novels by the author that I have yet to read. I could be wrong about one-novel-only authors, because I know of authors (Audrey Niffennegger and Alice Sebold spring to mind) who would be here if I'd loved the second novels of theirs I read as much as I loved the first.

Litlove's criteria were that an author has to be alive and has to still be writing (I defined the latter very loosely. Basically, if the person has published something fictional in the past 30 years, he/she counts). That means no Harper Lee, sadly, since she doesn't fit that "still writing" category, and no David Markson, who would surely be here if he hadn't died last year.

Literary Fiction

1. Richard Adams

2. Margaret Atwood

3. Russell Banks

4. Kevin Baker (only read Dreamland)

5. Julian Barnes

6. Ray Bradbury

7. Anita Brookner (only read The Rules of Engagement)

8. Susanna Clarke (only read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell)

9. Michael Cunningham (only read The Hours)

10. E.L. Doctorow

11. Jennifer Egan (only read short stories)

12. Jane Hamilton

13. John Irving

14. Kazuo Ishiguro

15. Jeffrey Lent (only read In the Fall)

16. Yann Martel (only read Life of Pi)

17. Marilynne Robinson (only read Gilead)

18. Philip Roth (only read American Pastoral)

19. Jeanette Winterson

General Fiction

20. Sarah Blake

21. Pat Conroy

22. Kaye Gibbons

23. Alice Hoffman

24. Nick Hornby

25. Armistead Maupin

26. Richard Russo

27. Helen Simonson (only read Major Pettigrew's Last Stand)

28. Lee Smith

29. Kathryn Stockett (only read The Help)

30. Amy Tan

31. Anne Tyler

32. Connie Willis (hemmed and hawed about sticking her in "genre." What do others think?)

Genre

33. John Connolly (mystery/horror)

34. Jasper Fforde (mystery)

35. Tana French (mystery)

36. Neil Gaiman (sci fi/fantasy)

37. Jane Green (chick lit)

38. P.D. James (mystery)

39. Lisa Jewell (chick lit)

40. Marian Keyes (chick lit)

41. Stephen King (horror)

42. Ursula K. LeGuin (sci fi/fantasy. Some of her stuff is probably more literary fiction)

43. Philip Pullman (sci fi/fantasy)

44. Terry Pratchett (sci fi/fantasy, but as you may know, I argue he's much more than that)

45. Ian Rankin (mystery)

46. John Sandford (mystery/thriller)

Fiction in Translation

47. Gabriel García Márquez

48. Muriel Barbury (only read The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

49. Mario Vargas Llosa

50. Isabel Allende (only read House of the Spirits)

The Preacher's Wife Preaches

2011-06-29T09:51:00.004-04:00

I'm not particularly comfortable with the word "sin." Bob likes to use the term "broken" to indicate what imperfect creatures we humans are -- given to selfishness and greed, and I like that better. However, there's no getting around the fact that many Christians believe fervently in the notion of sin and that we need to repent and to be forgiven. They also seem to believe that they're the arbiters of who needs to be forgiven for what, as well as which sins are worse than others. I don't have that personal pipeline to God's brain, so I interpret sin as any act that takes us away from God and God's love. Dividing ourselves from others divides us from God, because God is in everybody.

This year, the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) has been in the throes of the issue that has been dividing many mainline Christian denominations in recent years. The national body (based on regional body votes) has recently opted to get rid of the language in our bylaws that prohibited ordination of LGBTs. In the Presbyterian church, all our leaders are ordained (not just ministers). This means that deacons and elders in the churches (lay people), as well as ministers, are, theoretically, no longer going to be judged by their sexual orientation. This is a huge, huge step for the denomination, and believe me, there are many who are very unhappy, many churches who've chosen to leave the PCUSA.

If you interpret sin the way I do, we are to do our best not to hurt any of God's creation (a difficult task, because, basically, almost all life has to kill something in order to survive, but we can try to lessen the damage we do, and we can certainly focus on trying to keep suffering at a minimum, even when we have to kill to eat). Most of us can't live up to that tall order, which is why we've been given grace (but that's a topic for a different sermon from the preacher's wife). It's basically impossible to make it through even one day without hurting someone, but we should try.

When we were first married, I once said to Bob, "Hate the act, not the person committing it." (I'm very good at giving him advice that's difficult for me to follow.) He quotes me all the time, even though that quote was not original to me. You've probably also heard, "Hate the sin, not the sinner." Today, we seem to live in a world in which we do nothing but hate the person instead of the act. Not only do we "hate the sinner," but we decide who is sinning the most, and we punish, through exclusion, those we think are doing so.

The day that I can stand up and say that LGBTs are sinners, purely because they happen to be LGBTs will be the day I can stand up and say that all those over six feet tall are sinners, or all those who have fair skin. We're not sinners because we're born with certain God-given traits. We're sinners because we act in ways that hurt others.

Because we are all broken, we have absolutely no right to decide someone can't be a church leader just because he or she is a "sinner." That would automatically disqualify all of us. I need much better reasoning than that. When I was first chosen to be a deacon at the church we used to attend in Connecticut, I went through an orientation process in which we were taught what holding this position in our church meant. At the time, one of our leaders was stressing how important it is to carefully choose the leaders of the church and how she'd once belonged to a church in which they'd had a very difficult decision to make about someone who'd expressed an interest in becoming a deacon. Finally, she said, they'd had to turn to the Scriptures, and based on what they'd found, had decided this person wasn't fit for the position (of course, she had completely ignored the fact that for hundreds and hundreds of years, the Church turned to Scripture to keep women from being leaders).

I remember thinking at the time, "Well, boy, if you're going to turn to Scripture to make such decisions, then I don't know of a single middle class American who could be a church leader." For instance, not one person sitting around that table had sold everything they had in order to follow Christ, which is exactly what Jesus told us to do. Judging by most of our physiques, we're obviously all eating way more than our share of the food on this planet, rather than taking only what we need and sharing with those who have none, something else Scripture teaches us to do. Just by nature of being middle class Americans, we're all far more privileged than the majority of other humans on the planet. We're part of the world hunger problem, because we all go on living our comfortable lives, choosing to eat whatever we want whenever we want, very concerned about how it looks and tastes. We don't have a clue what it's like to eat whatever comes our way, regardless of taste, because who knows when we might get the chance to eat again. Nonetheless, there are those who will tell you that our "sins" aren't as bad as others' "sins."

One of the most disturbing aspects of our society's judging the sinner is that the judgers, for all intents and purposes, are basically saying, "Okay, if you're open and honest and tell us you're living in a loving, homosexual relationship, then you can't be one of us." (Not much has changed, really, since the days when lepers, who might contaminate the healthy, were sent off to live outside the community. We just have different ways of doing the same thing.) Yet, with the exception of the ways all couples hurt each other when they live together day after day, who are these people hurting? If we're going to go around judging sinners, I'd far prefer to judge the man who serially cheats on his spouse, breaking hearts left and right, over the one who is loving and kind to his life partner.

Those judgers also seem to be saying, "We don't want you if we can tell you're a sinner. However, if you sin, and we don't know about it, well, that's okay." Therefore, a heterosexual leader of the church who beats his wife, or one who beats her children, is okay. A man who discreetly sells drugs to teenagers or who cheats his employees, so he can take home a bigger bonus this year (especially if he's giving plenty of money to the church) is fine. But the woman who lives down the street with her partner and the two crack-addicted babies they adopted, the same one who volunteers at the soup kitchen, isn't.

I (because I don't have that aforementioned pipeline) can't say for a fact, but I'm pretty sure that if Jesus were to come back today, he'd be quite appalled. My guess is that this time his question would be, "Did you not listen to anything I taught you about love and acceptance?"

Two for the Price of One

2011-06-24T22:34:00.010-04:00

Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time. New York: Scribner, 1995.

(The book was originally published in 1951.)

Bob: What's that you're reading?

Emily: The Daughter of Time. It's this month's book for the Connecticut mystery book club.

Bob: Have you ever read it?

Emily: No.

Bob: Oh, it's a great book! It's one of the best mysteries ever written. Such a wonderful premise, a convalescent solving a hundreds-year-old mystery.

Bob's not the first person I know to feel thus. I can't tell you how many people have recommended this book to me over the past 20+ or so years. He may not be right about its being one of the best mysteries ever written. He and I are not the fairest judges of that, since "mystery" is a very small piece of each of our "genres most read" pies. But he's absolutely right about the premise being a wonderful one.

If "mystery" takes up a small piece of my pie, then "historical fiction" takes up a tiny sliver. That's probably why I've been meaning to read this one for so long but have never gotten around to it until now. I mistakenly thought it was set in 15th-century England. Blink, and the fluttering of your lashes might accidentally blow away the "mystery cum historical fiction" thread resting on top of my pie. Despite recommendations from those who've never failed me, I wasn't keen on reading something from that genre. My readers' advisors know better than I, and I should've locked my noisy biases in a soundproof closet and listened to said advisors instead.

The book, which is not set in Medieval England, is superb. It's actually set in mid-20th-century England, where our "hero" Inspector Alan Grant is in the hospital, recuperating from a bad fall. Not only is the premise a good one, but Tey had a great sense of humor, and it's very funny in places. You can see what I mean from this description of how Grant landed in a hospital bed:

Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget [one of the nurses who attends him and who, despite her diminutive size, has no problem, apparently, tossing about mattresses and maneuvering the injured bodies of men who are, like Grant, 6'+ tall] and The Amazon [his other nurse, taken to heavy breathing at the slightest exertion] because he had fallen through a trap door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. (12)

Grant lies in his hospital bed, his sharp mind used to being put to work solving crimes, with nothing better to do than to stare at the ceiling and to try to forget his humiliation. He's disdainful of the books kind souls have brought him to read and is the sort of patient you can easily imagine is driving the poor nurses nuts. That is, until his friend Marta decides to give him something to do.

Marta determines that he needs to spend his time solving some sort of old, unsolved mystery, some classic event that has always posed a puzzle. The next time she visits, she brings an envelope stuffed with copies of portraits. Grant becomes fixated on Richard III, England's notorious murderer, long assumed to have killed his two young nephews in order to grab the throne.

Grant can't see a murderer in the portrait he's given, and so he begins his intellectual quest to discover what he can about the man and the murders of the young Princes Richard and Edward (interestingly enough, bearing the names of their uncle and his brother who fathered them). He starts with standard history texts -- not the least bit enlightening -- and moves on to other works. Eventually, he pairs up with a young American friend of Marta's, and, together, they dig deeper and deeper to see what they can find.

Tey's novel is fascinating on so many levels. First of all, I (like most of the book's characters) only had vague recollections of the story of the two princes, although I do know that by the time I was learning about them, they were more of a mystery than they seem to have been to the characters in Tey's book. It seems to have been a commonly accepted notion in her day that the hunch-backed Richard III (so popularized by Shakespeare) smothered the boys, who were imprisoned in The Tower. I seem to recall being presented with an unsolved disappearance that may or may not have been a murder instigated by their uncle. Reading the book, I wondered how much of an influence Tey had had on the story. She was certainly no Shakespeare, but still, Shakespeare proves how easily history can be influenced by popular culture.

That leads me to the whole subject of history and fiction. What Grant discovers, of course, is that "history" can be written by those who would prefer the masses to believe a fiction. Tey points out, for comparison to the history of Richard III, other "historic events" people have taken as gospel that have proven themselves to be grossly exaggerated and false. She also points out how reluctant people are to accept challenges to these inaccuracies when they are raised, noting that they're more likely to blame the contemporary messenger digging up evidence rather than the messenger who may have had something to gain by garbling the account in the first place back when the event occurred.

I also couldn't help thinking about the whole weird concept of royalty and family. I know it's been addressed since the beginning of time, but imagine having the power to execute your brother or sister. You get mad; you kill your brother. Anyone else in your kingdom would be hanged or beheaded for murder, but you can get away with that old, proverbial murder. Despite my life-long fascination with family dynamics and psychology, I'd never really considered all the implications of that (another whole blog post in and of itself) until reading this book.

I do have one, very minor, complaint to launch against this excellent read and its writer. As is so often the case when English writers try to portray Americans (especially back in pre-television/Internet, etc. days), Grant's American partner in crime-solving's dialogue is a little off kilter. For instance, at one point, he (Carradine) says,

"Goldarn it, what did I do with it? Here we are." (p. 118)

Okay, maybe I know nothing about 1951. Maybe Americans really did say "goldarn it" all the time back then. I find it hard to believe, however. I happen to have read plenty of American novels written around that time, and I don't think I've ever come across a character who said, "Goldarn it." Perhaps, I've heard it uttered in some play or movie from that era, written by someone trying to portray an ignorant and/or naïve Southerner or Kansan in some sort of exaggerated fashion that's completely inaccurate, but certainly no "blue blood" Northeasterner, which Carradine was, would use such language. He also (again, unless times have changed dramatically since 1951, and maybe they have) wouldn't quickly have gone from "goldarn it" to,

"The sainted More makes me sick at the stomach but I'll listen." (p. 119)

He surely would have told us,

"The sainted More makes me sick to my stomach but I'll listen." (He also would've stuck a comma in before the conjunction, being properly American bred and educated, but he's being polite and adhering to the consistency of British rules of grammar in this British publication, so we'll leave him alone.)

But you've heard me complain before about Americans trying to write England and the English trying to write America. I'm very hard to please when it comes to that, and it's truly a minor irritation in this otherwise flawless story. I'm so very glad I finally read this one (thank you, John, for choosing it). If you've been meaning to get around to it yourself, I promise you won't be disappointed when you do.

I missed posting on last month's mystery book choice, so here it is as well:

Grafton, Sue. T is for Trespass. New York: G.P. Putnam, 2007.

A near-eternity ago, when Sue Grafton had only written something like six books, I read the first two. I liked them well enough, but I wasn't as in to the mystery genre back then, feeling it was enough that I'd already committed myself to reading every Linda Barnes mystery as she published it (she was less prolific. Even so, I eventually abandoned her as well), and so I didn't continue with the series. I've been meaning to pick her back up for years, so I was very happy when this one was chosen for the CT mystery book club.

What made it even better was that I started reading this one while I was in California. Grafton's Kinsey Millhone lives and works in Santa Teresa, which is a very thinly disguised Santa Barbara. Since I happened to be in Santa Barbara, I was easily able to imagine much of what Kinsey describes in her telling of the story.

This is the tale of a true sociopath who happens to move into Kinsey's neighborhood to provide nursing care for its resident grouchy old man. Kinsey suspects something isn't quite right from the get-go, and, of course, her instincts prove her to be correct. By the time she figures out what's happening, the reader is already well aware of the psychotic qualities of the home care nurse, because interspersed with Kinsey's first-person accounts are third-person accounts that give us this creepy sociopath's story. This could have been an awkward technique, could have made the book seem disjointed, but Grafton did it well, and it worked for me.

This was a good, solid mystery/thriller (although not of the whodunit sort, since we know who the "bad guy" is from the get-go). Typically, I prefer mysteries in which I'm trying to figure out the puzzle of who killed The Body, but I really liked this one. That's a credit to Grafton's writing and the endearing character she's created in Kinsey (I like my private investigators to be endearing. I also like female p.i.'s, because they tend to be so outnumbered by males in the genre).

One thing I found interesting is that Grafton chose to set the book in 1987. That's around the same time I read those first two books, and it's a clever ploy on her part (I'm assuming here that all her books are set back in time), because she doesn't have to worry about aging Kinsey as the years go by, or keeping her forever young, even though she's been around since the 1980s, the way so many other mystery writers do. However, doing so can lead to problems. Grafton is good (an excellent writer, really), but I'm pretty sure there were a few mistakes in which Kinsey makes references to things that didn't exist in 1987. It wasn't enough to distract me, though. In fact, I can't even remember exactly what they were.

I know I say this about almost every author we read for the book club, but I must read more in the series. I really might this time, though, as I have an ARC for S is for Silence, and I just picked up at a book swap party O is for Outlaw and P is for Peril. I'm planning on doing something really weird: reading them backwards. Anyone have copies of Q and R they'd like to give me?

Final Once Upon a Challenge Post

2011-06-21T07:59:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. London: Bigelow, Smith, & Co., 1909.

Well, would you look at that? I actually managed to complete a challenge on time. This is the final book I read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge. I went on Quest the Third to be completed by June 22 (five books plus this play). Onto my review:

As far as fairy tales go? Perfection. I have nothing more to say.

Once Upon A Time Challenge Post V

2011-06-20T10:42:00.005-04:00

Carroll, Lewis. Notes by Martin Gardner. The Annotated Alice: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Signet, 1963.

In his Introduction to this, now classic in its own right, edition of Carroll's two classic children's stories, Gardner quotes G.K. Chesterton (writing in 1932, Carroll's 100th birthday year):

'Poor, poor, little Alice!' bemoaned G.K. 'She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others. Alice is now not only a schoolgirl but a schoolmistress. The holiday is over, and [Charles] Dodgson [a.k.a. Lewis Carroll] is again a don. There will be lots and lots of examination papers with questions like, (1) What do you know of the following: mimsy, gimble, haddocks' eyes, treacle-wells, beautiful soup? (2) Record all the moves in the chess game in Through the Looking Glass and give diagram. (3) Outline the practical policy of the White Knight for dealing with the social problem of green whiskers. (4) Distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.' (i.)

(One more reason to admire) Chesterton, I'm sure, back when he wrote that, thought he was being facetious -- although not completely so. He was right about the Alice books becoming part of the canon of children's literature, and, as such, being turned into something completely disagreeable, instead of the great fun that they are. Thank God I was never forced to study Carroll's masterpieces when I was in school, never had to endure their ruination in that way. Sad to say, Chesterton probably got it absolutely right with his facetious questions (I can see unimaginative teachers of today reading that Introduction and jotting them down for their own exams), judging from the types of textbook and quiz questions I remember destroying the likes of Saki, Mark Twain, and Charlotte Brontë when I was in school. I'm almost tempted to do an online search for "Lewis Carroll's Alice and study questions," but I'm afraid the results would be too depressing.

Now, having said all that, I will say that reading this annotated edition with all its wonderful notes and explanations, which some might argue add a prosaic element that puts a damper on the poetic whimsy (and I wouldn't necessarily disagree), actually made the works even more fun for me. True, it might be more enjoyable just to read "Jabberwocky" without all the definitions and explanations, to puzzle out one's own meaning. True, also, that some of the notes on the logic actually confused me (someone whose only success ever, as far as standardized testing is concerned, was on the old logic section of the GRE) more than Lewis's characters did. And, of course, to read so often in the notes about all of Carroll's "child-friends" can't help but add a certain sort of creepiness to the tales for 21st-century readers. No matter how innocent Gardner (and many more recent scholars) would have us believe Charles Dodgson was, that he was a product of his era, fascinated with little girls and their beauty, not lusting after them in Humbert-Humbert fashion, I'm sorry, but befriending only young girls (not boys) and wanting to sketch and photograph them nude just doesn't sit well with this reader.

Still, Gardner's notes add a certain charm and fascination in and of themselves (especially now that they're 50+ years -- the hardcover edition of the book was originally published in 1960 -- old, a bit antiquated in their own right). He definitely helps to clarify some concepts, and he defines many words that would be completely lost on contemporary readers (especially American ones). Also, it's interesting to note how much more has evolved in our culture since Gardner decided to help enlighten us. It's hard, for instance, for someone my age, who doesn't remember an era when Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," the anthem to drug use, didn't exist, to accept the fact that Gardner couldn't have noted it when addressing works influenced by Alice, because it would be seven years before its release, and it would be another eleven years before the release of the anti-drug Y.A. classic based on lyrics from the song, Go Ask Alice.

What I remember about this book from my childhood (for some reason, with the exception of some illustrated Disney versions, the hardcover of this annotated edition is the only one of the original I think we had in the house when I was a child. I can remember just skipping all the "annoying notes" when I read it as a child. When I was in high school -- an "adult" reader now -- I read it notes and all for the first time) was that I preferred Through the Looking Glass to Alice in Wonderland. I hate to say it, but there was a part of me that thought Alice was a bit silly, particularly so when in Wonderland.

Reading the two this go-round, I still prefer Looking Glass. I don't know if it's because Wonderland has become a story that is practically a cliché at this point, with the Queen of Hearts constantly yelling "Off with his/her head!" and the grinning Cheshire Cat, whereas Looking Glass ("Jabberwocky" and all) is still quite fresh or if it's more than that. I suspect the latter. Looking Glass is more complicated and clever. This isn't to say that Wonderland isn't chock full of brilliant wordplay and nonsense (boy, do I love wordplay, and Carroll was certainly a Master, someone to bow down to in his ability to arrange and rearrange words and their meanings to tickle the funny bone. Don't tell me math and English don't mix. This mathematician proved, without a doubt, that the two walk around beautifully, hand-in-hand), but (just like the little girl Alice Liddell, by the time the second book was published), Looking Glass's wordplay and nonsense seems a little more mature, so does the way the story plays with logic. You need look no further than the games featured in each: the characters in Wonderland are playing croquet, a fairly straightforward game. Those inside the looking glass play chess, a far more sophisticated pastime. Then again, my preference, then and now, may have nothing to do with maturity and sophistication. Perhaps I just prefer an imaginary world (a dreamland, if you will) entered through a mirror (and all that that entails) to one entered falling down a rabbit hole.

I didn't find Alice silly this go-round, the way I found her as a child. Actually, I like the brave way she stands up to the crazy characters and the way she defends herself and her understanding of concepts, even when she's completely confused. I also found there are certain characters I'd forgotten whom I just adored this go-round, like the Dormouse (probably envy on my part more than anything else, because there have been many nights in my life when I so wished I could "sleep when I breathe") and the Gryphon (how on earth could I have forgotten the Gryphon?) -- so perfect in being so much like all those annoying people in life who pooh-pooh and disdain our precious obsessions.

I was happy to have read this book so soon after reading the Terry Pratchett I also read for this challenge. Pratchett owes much to Carroll, both writing parody and satire with a healthy dose of nonsense, while playing with math, logic, and science. I couldn't help wondering what "The Annotated Collected Works of Terry Pratchett" might look like (besides, of course, taking up more room on the bookshelf than the old Encyclopaedia Britannica used to do). I am sure there is much when I read Pratchett that goes over my head, just as there would be much in the Alice books that would do so without Gardner's helpful notes. And speaking of influences, I also couldn't help thinking it's about time for another read of The Phantom Tollbooth, a modern classic that certainly owes much to Alice. This year marks its 50th anniversary, definitely a good year to read it.

Another thing I noted while reading this book is how influenced my childhood was not only by the Alice stories, but also by the illustrations. When I was a child, we had an oversized coloring book full of John Tenniel's Alice illustrations. My mother, once my older sisters had colored them (I think I was too young at the time to have colored them well enough, although I do remember coloring), mounted and shellacked some of them and hung them on our bedroom walls and also in the kitchen, if I remember correctly. I especially remember the one of the White Knight (I'm not sure why. Maybe he hung in my bedroom, or maybe, like Alice, he just impressed me most). His style, even if I'd never seen the Alice illustrations, would have been extremely familiar to me nonetheless, as we also had large collections of old Punch cartoons in our house growing up, many of which were his.

I'll end by saying I had fantastic dreams on the nights when I read this book right before falling asleep. Carroll certainly seemed to have a direct connection to the Land of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod (despite the fact it didn't yet exist when he was writing). Of course, a good Jungian would tell you that he just knew exactly how to tap into the collective unconscious. I prefer to think of it as another land, a Wonderland, full of disappearing cats, disagreeable queens, and Humpty Dumpty himself. I wouldn't want to live there, but it's a great place to visit.

Once Upon a Time Challenge Post IV

2011-06-19T22:44:00.006-04:00

Turgeon, Carolyn. Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009.

This one had so much imaginative promise, and I'd read some positive blog posts at some point. I should have at least liked it, if not loved it. But no. I was to experience no happily ever after, no infatuation even. I flat out just didn't like it.

It probably didn't help matters much that I read the Grimm brothers' "Cinderella" just before I read this. Did you know there is no fairy godmother in that version? There is no pumpkin coach. There are no footmen. Nothing happens at midnight. In fact, the slipper isn't even glass. It's golden.

Okay, this wouldn't really be a problem in and of itself. After all, the Walt Disney retelling of the Cinderella story is probably as much of a legend (if not more so) to us 21st-century Americans as the Grimms' version was to 19th-century Europeans. A novel that's the story of a fairy godmother who only showed up in the old tale recently (relatively speaking) could still have been brilliant -- especially a beautiful fairy who made the mistake of falling in love with the prince herself and who's been banished to New York City, where she is now an elderly woman working in a second-hand bookstore.

The problem, uneven writing notwithstanding (and I should be the last to complain about uneven writing, since my writing often resembles a dirt road just after the winter thaw. Nonetheless, I complain, blaming the editor, of course, not Turgeon. Turgeon is capable of writing beautiful prose. She just needed someone to come along and smooth some of the bumps that crept in from time to time), was that, throughout most of the book, I didn't find Lil, our fairy godmother, the least bit sympathetic. She becomes much more so at the end, but by then, it's way too late. Again, that could've been fine. I've read plenty of books I've enjoyed whose characters were unsympathetic. The problem is that I suspected Lil wasn't meant to be unsympathetic. If I'd suspected that, I could have gone with it, but I'm pretty sure the author wanted us to sympathize with her, and I just couldn't.

I did sympathize with other characters, like Veronica, the young woman Lil meets and believes has been sent for her redemption. In fact, I loved Veronica. I'd like to read a whole book about Veronica, who could've stepped right out of the pages of a Francesca Lia Block novel. The book was too much Lil and not enough Veronica.

Having said all this, I will note that I'm really glad I didn't abandon the book. I was sorely tempted to do so, and if I hadn't chosen to read it for the Once Upon a Time challenge, I'm sure I would have. Had I not read it to the end, you'd be reading here about how so much of the book didn't make sense, how I thought Turgeon was being purposefully elusive to give the book a dreamy quality and how she'd failed, filling her story with too many question marks that kept the rational mind hopping and that drowned out the dreamy, magical-thinking mind. The ending -- a shocker that I didn't see coming at all -- definitely explained everything and verified that Turgeon does, indeed, have a wonderful imagination. She's also extremely clever. She just didn't meld the two well enough in this book.

Really, the book should have worked for me. I'm sad that it didn't. I'd love to know what others think of it.

Once Upon a Time Challenge Post III

2011-06-15T10:18:00.005-04:00

Pratchett, Terry. Mort. New York: HarperTorch, 2008. (The book was originally published in 1987)

(Just in case you didn't catch this from the title of my post, this is another one that I read for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, which is quickly drawing to a close, and I've got two more books to finish.)

People generally define what Terry Pratchett writes as fantasy, and, really, that makes sense. After all, his books take place in an imaginary world, a planet known as Discworld. It's a flat planet that balances atop four elephants who travel through space, balanced themselves atop a giant turtle. What could be more fantastic than that? The planet is inhabited by wizards, witches, dragons, etc. Such characters living in such a place certainly sounds like fantasy. Perhaps fantasy in the hands of Bugs Bunny, but fantasy nonetheless.

I'm going to argue, though, that saying Pratchett writes fantasy is like saying Jonathan Swift wrote fantasy. Let's face it: Gulliver certainly traveled to places that don't exist, dealing with such fantastic elements as tiny people, but critics don't tend to describe Swift as one of fantasy's founding fathers. No, he's known for being a great satirist and father of one of English language's best parodies. I'm inclined to say that Pratchett is England's greatest living satirist, writing fabulous parodies. He's also bucket loads of fun.

Pratchett is a relatively recent discovery for me, so I haven't made too many trips to Discworld yet, but I'm eager to explore all it has to offer. Happily, I have lots to look forward to, as he's been a prolific writer. (I say "been" because, sadly, he is suffering from early-onset Alzheimers, so who knows how much he'll be able to produce in the coming years?). I'm sure he's not everyone's cup of tea, because a reader has to be willing to trust him when he does things like provide scientific explanations that are too difficult to follow. He also likes to litter his novels with footnotes, which I know some people hate (and I understand that, having read a novel or two that embraced this technique, taking it way too seriously), but he's the master of the appropriately placed (and often hilarious) footnote. Also, they're footnotes, not endnotes: no having to flip to the back of the book.

He creates wacky plots in order to skewer everything from science to religion to politics. Mostly, however, he's focused on just plain skewering human nature, sometimes blatantly, sometimes so subtlety, you can't blink or you might miss something brilliant. I have yet to read a book of his that didn't make me laugh out loud at least once.

This one, the fourth Discworld novel he wrote (and the first of those to feature Death as a main character), is no exception. The "Mort" of the title is a young man whose father decides it's about time for him to become an apprentice. Who better for a young man named Mort to apprentice to than Death himself? The trouble is, Mort's just a little too human for the job and can't quite embrace his duties fully. Soon we find he's done something that just might change history -- and not for the better, no matter how it might seem, judging from the characters involved. Luckily, history seems to be a little more flexible than we tend to assume it is (well, when written by the "right" sorts of historians, that is. Pratchett would probably note today that Sarah Palin's "history," for instance, seems to be quite flexible) on our own planet. So, for that matter, is Death, who proves he can sometimes be a bit flexible (and also feel a bit sorry for himself).

But that's all I'm going to tell you, except that this is classic Pratchett. If you've never read him, this would be a great place to start. If you have read him, but haven't read this one, you won't be disappointed.

Music Monday/Lyric Lundi

2011-06-13T17:19:00.000-04:00

It's been ages since I had a Music Monday post. Maybe it's time to bring back the tradition now that it's summer. The summers of my youth have a soundtrack (it's vinyl, not an eight-track tape, because I had a record player) that features these catchy summer tunes that we listened to over and over again on long summer afternoons playing Crazy Eights or Monopoly, or at slumber parties, dancing while trying to stay up all night. They feature such artists in my very young days as Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, Simon and Garfunkel, and Three Dog Night. When I began to get a little older, these were replaced with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Queen, David Bowie, and The Police.

Every so often, a new song comes along right around this time of year that takes me back to those days of riding around in a car with the windows down waiting for the big song of the summer to come on. When it came on, you'd blast the radio (which never shook the streets the way car stereos do today when people blast them), and sing along, and anyone driving by would know how cool you were. You never really had to wait very long for this exciting moment, even where I lived. One of our three favorite pop stations would be playing it at least once an hour. Sometimes, if you got really, really lucky, you'd hear it on one station and then switch to another one in time to catch it again, before going home to listen to it over and over on the record player. You know what kind of song I mean. It's the one that the cutest couple on American Bandstand announced they liked because it "has a good beat, and you can dance to it."

This summer, that song is by Foster the People. I first heard about them on NPR (sixteen-year-old me can't believe that, these days, you can hear about such cool bands on NPR). They played "Pumped Up Kicks," and there I was, tempted to roll down the window, blast the radio, and sing at the top of my lungs. Oh, and sixteen-year-old me, if she'd seen this video, would have thought these guys were so-o-o-o cute! (Actually, 47-year-old me thinks they're cute, too, but in a very different way.)

Forget that the lyrics completely contradict the happy sound of the music. Crank it up, everybody, and let's hit the dance floor.

Once Upon a Time Challenge Post II

2011-06-09T11:41:00.000-04:00

Selected tales from: Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob. Stern, James, ed. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. New York: Pantheon, 1976, 1944.

Sexton, Anne. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

I hadn't planned to read Anne Sexton's Transformations for the Once Upon a Time Challenge. I was just interested in reading something by her because I never had. When I got this book (the only Anne Sexton on the shelf at the library the day I was there, grabbed by me without really looking at it, because I had not had much change for the parking meter out front and had very little time for browsing), I discovered it was perfect for the challenge. As Kurt Vonnegut tells us in his wonderful Foreword, Sexton, in this collection, was, "...retelling many of the Grimms' fairy tales in poetry." (p. ix)

I had planned, possibly, to read The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, but it's a huge work, and I've discovered it's a bit like reading The Bible: fascinating, but a little goes a long way. It's best to read it slowly, throughout a year, say, than to try to read it all at once. So instead, after reading half a dozen or so in order, I decided, for the purposes of this challenge, just to read the seventeen tales on which Sexton based her poems.

Most of her poems are based on tales with which we're all familiar: Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, etc. However, there were some here, like Iron Hans and The White Snake with which I was not so familiar. The poet's retelling of these tales are anything but magical (that is, if you ignore her magical abilities with imagery and choosing and putting together words). Just as many of the original stories are very dark, so are Sexton's. Her updated versions mimic the old in that they do dance around the issues. She doesn't come right out and say, "I'm talking about feminism here," anymore than the brothers Grimm announced, "We're talking about sex here." She doesn't tell you she's talking about the abuse of women, the abuse of children, about how all those on the margins of society are ignored or silenced. She doesn't have to: you know she's talking about all that and more.

She's also talking about pain, anger, confusion, and, sometimes, a lack of redemption. No, you are not always going to be rescued. And, as a matter of fact, sometimes when your knight in shining armor does appear, he is even worse than what you suffered before he came along. These are disturbing poems but powerful ones. Sexton wanted her readers to think, and, I suspect, to understand her pain (she suffered from mental illness herself and could be considered one of those on the margins of her society). She succeeded in making this reader do so.

Reading the fairy tales was interesting, too. Sexton was right. So many of the tales are about women who had to give up things in order to be deserving of men (or as punishment for daring to flirt with men they shouldn't have): their hands, their voices, their hair, their fun. In fairness to these age-old tales, men often had to sacrifice and are punished in awful ways, too. Typically, though, those are male animals or peasants. Rarely do kings and princes sacrifice, and bad kings and princes are often rewarded in ways that only the most saintly of the female characters are. Also, that "reward" depends on your idea of "happily ever after".

I like Sexton's wry take on the standard fairy tale ending, epitomized here in the final lines of her The White Snake,

So, of course,
they were placed in a box
and painted identically blue
and thus passed their days
living happily ever after --
a kind of coffin,
a kind of blue funk,
Is it not? (p. 15)

Wow, huh? If you like that, you're bound to like this exemplary collection.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (TBR Challenge Book 9)

2011-06-08T11:32:00.000-04:00

Wroblewski, David. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. New York: Ecco. 2008.

I wonder if anyone even remembers that I came up with a TBR challenge and then extended it when I found I couldn't keep to it. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't remember, but I'm here to tell you today that I'm slowly, but surely, still reading books from the list. I'm trying to make some sense of this one, so I thought I'd get my post up on it, even though I have plenty of others waiting for posts.

You see, I was ever so disappointed with this book, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly why. It isn't that Wroblewski can't write. Write he most definitely can. It isn't that it was boring or that I lost interest or that the characters just didn't seem believable or real. All those ingredients were there. I hope that the problem isn't that I'm such a stickler when it comes to editorial detail that I couldn't get past the fact that Edgar's birthday couldn't possibly have been in the month and year noted (I won't tell you why, in case you haven't read the book, but suffice it to say that the events leading up to his birth would've made it impossible). I mean, I would hope I'd be able to forgive an author (and his editor) for such an error (especially since I've asked others who've read the book, and none of them noticed that error) or at least embrace the notion of poetic license, miraculously-short-full-term pregnancies and all.

I'm pretty sure I would have if other aspects of the book hadn't bothered me, but once I realized I wasn't loving the book, like all mistaken loves that turn out to be mere infatuations, that small flaw grew all out of proportion. By the time I finished the book and was trying to figure out why I hadn't liked it more than I did, I was all too eager to think, "I should've known from the beginning I wasn't gonna like it. After all, Edgar's birth date was impossible."

Let's pretend, though, that I'm not quite so superficial. That might help us to see that my real problem with the book has nothing to do with birth dates. My real problem is the whole Hamlet connection. That's what just really didn't work for me. I'm realizing that it's not really that I'm such a stickler for detail; it's that I seem to desire extremes. The Hamlet theme here was neither subtle enough (come on, did the names really have to be so obvious?) nor faithful enough to the original (Ophelia was not named Ophelia or anything that sounded like Ophelia. But, then, when I figured out who Ophelia was, my reaction again was, "Oh, come on. Please!" That doesn't mean, however, the lump wasn't in my throat when "Hamlet" discovers she's dead).

I almost felt as if Wroblewski had been writing this great, imaginative story and suddenly found himself thinking, "Uh-oh. This is too much like Hamlet. What am I gonna do about that? Hmmm, well, let's just make it a reworking of Hamlet while throwing in some original twists and turns to make it a little more subtle." I know that's not what he did. It's obvious by the end that he studied Hamlet inside out and backwards, but the connections he chose to make and those he chose not to make just didn't work for me.

Still, I finished the book, and I didn't have to do that. After all, we all know that everyone dies in Hamlet, which means I could pretty much figure out how this book would end. The fact I read it to the bitter end says something. I can't quite dismiss the book or say I didn't like it. All I can do is repeat myself: I was ever so disappointed.

I Promise to Stop This Nonsense and Write a Real Post Soon

2011-06-03T17:44:00.006-04:00

I mean, it's ridiculous to be doing nothing but posting pictures of shoes when I've got so much other stuff to post. Still, nothing makes my heart go pitter pat quite as much as a nice pair of shoes, and Jimmy Choo (because, you know, we not-by-choice unemployed gals can skip right off and buy a pair of Jimmy Choos anytime we like) sends me these emails I'm drawn to the way most men are drawn to Victoria Secret catalogues. These emails prove that, well, I spoke too hastily in my last post: some shoe designers out there do have a clue, and I could never compete with them.

Today happened to be a "pre-fall" email (yes, four days after Memorial Day, and it's already time to look at fall shoes. One can never be too prepared, you know), and I thought, "Well, I won't be at all interested in this." I don't know about where you are, but, although it's absolutely beautiful today, we just suffered through a brutal heat wave that left me so miserable and lethargic, I found myself wondering if I'd ever again have the desire to soak in a hot bath.

Oh, how wrong could I be about my interest level? I took one look and could feel the little nip in the air. Is it any wonder when you compare the offerings in my last post to what's below that I so much prefer the cool breezes of fall over the sweltering summer heat? Look at the difference between what I can put on my feet. Actually, that first pair could be worn in the summer, surely?

Seriously?

2011-05-31T10:39:00.004-04:00

I mean seriously?! Maybe I ought to be a shoe designer when I grow up since, quite obviously, the world seems to be full of designers who haven't a clue what they're doing. I'd fit right in.

Ah-yeah! California 2011 (Part Three)

2011-05-22T16:40:00.019-04:00

Gary is the older brother I wanted and never had. Life is funny that way. When you're a kid, you never think you will eventually have a life in which people step in and become second mothers and fathers (or maybe surrogate mothers and fathers, if one or the other was MIA, or your biological parents weren't so hot) or the twin sister you never had (I wanted one of those, too). No, even when you're lucky enough to have a younger brother who is the. best. brother. ever. (yes, I dare you to argue that point with me. How many sisters can honestly say their brothers were their best friends growing up?), we wish we had an older brother (and a twin sister). Of course, I never envisioned an older brother who would do things like drag me up the stairs by my hair (like a friend of mine's older brother did when we were in elementary school) or step on my hand with a thick-heeled boot when I refused to give him a cigarette (like one of my teenage friend's older brother did. I was surprised he didn't break any bones and very impressed that her only response was a calm, "you bastard"). No, my older brother (besides bringing cute friends over to the house. Isn't that the main reason girls want older brothers?) would share great books with me, teach me all kinds of cool stuff, tease me but never stoop to cruelty, and be protective (but not overly so) of me. It's best to wait for that sort of brother to come along outside the nuclear family unit. When we arrived at his house, after another beautiful and easy drive (I imagine, like everywhere, one can take a long drive in California that isn't beautiful, but based on my experiences, I haven't yet found that drive), he reminded me that it had been two years since we've seen each other. Nonetheless, we easily picked up right where we'd left off, as if we still see each other every day.

He gave us a tour of his fabulous house, which is open and airy -- all white walls and hardwood floors. I like the way his house is arranged. An open kitchen/dining/living room area divides the master bedroom suite from the three rooms on the other side of the house (he's turned them into a guest room, a magnificent library with three walls of built-in bookshelves and comfy leather couches, and a computer room). The views front and back are wonderful. Morro Bay's best feature is Morro Rock, which rises up off the beach in a startling way, and it can be seen beyond Gary's garden (someone needs to tear down his neighbor's house, so he'd have an even better view of it).
In the back yard, he's got wild flowers and hills (in Maine, those would be called "mountains," but in California, they're merely "hills"). Apparently, the cows practically walk on his patio when they come up to graze, but I must have scared them away with my Lancaster County cow smell, because they never appeared while we were there.
Back in 2008, Mom and I had driven down from Monterey to Big Sur and eaten lunch at Sierra Mar, the restaurant at the Post Ranch Inn (an inn where one can only stay if she's won the lottery jackpot but where, if one has planned, she can eat an extravagant lunch for the price of dinner for four at most restaurants in New York City). Gary was the one who'd told us about this place, so I asked him how long a drive it was to Big Sur. He told me two hours, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable day trip to me, so we decided that's where we'd go on Wednesday. We made plans for Mom and me to go to San Simeon on Thursday to see Hearst Castle and to stop at Piedras Blancas beach, which is basically owned by elephant seals (truth be told, I could easily have spent two days just watching elephant seals -- in fact, it's a good thing I don't have a house that overlooks a beach like that. I'd never get anything done -- but I'm not one who likes to impose my idiosyncrasies on others in large doses -- small doses are fine). We dined that night on a delicious dinner made by Gary of a large salad with chicken, fresh bread, and sweet strawberries (ingredients bought at his local farmer's market, which I'd have the pleasure of visiting later). I slept like a baby in that perfect setting.

I got up early the next morning, grabbed Gary's copy of Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn and settled down in the library to read (at some point, I got up to spend some time staring out the living room window, contemplating the gorgeous view, and then went back to reading). Eventually, Mom got up, and we enjoyed a breakfast of boiled eggs and buttered sour dough toast (kindly bought by Gary at my request. If any of you ever plans to have me as an overnight guest, that's basically my favorite simple breakfast). Shortly thereafter, we set off for Big Sur.

We didn't get too far before Gary began to worry that the road might be closed due to washouts over the winter. We stopped in Cambria, and, while there, he called to have his fears confirmed, which meant a much longer, and less scenic drive. At this point, he offered skipping the whole thing, but by then, I was bound and determined to get back to Big Sur, a little piece of heaven on earth (I mean, how often do I get there?). Thus, I have only myself to blame for the fact that I was completely exhausted by the time we got home that night (so exhausted, in fact, that I readily agreed to Gary's idea of just having snacks for dinner).

It was so worth the exhaustion, though. Yes, the drive was long and involved some of those winding, curving roads along cliffs that can easily spook me (when they don't remind me of Bugs Bunny cartoons), but Sierra Mar was as wonderful as I remember, and the views from the restaurant are stunning. See what a gorgeous day we had and what I mean about that Pacific blue?
Basically, you eat your lunch on the side of a cliff looking out over all that blue. The only disappointment was the martini Gary and I each ordered. The restaurant was out of Bombay Sapphire gin (who ever heard of such a thing? Especially in a restaurant where you basically spend $30 just to sit down?), and instead of going with my instincts, which was to order the Beefeater, I (always so impressionable) decided to try the organic gin, also offered, once Gary decided to order it. I should have just tasted his. I don't know what those organic producers are growing, but it seemed more like licorice than juniper berries.
We lingered over lunch and then walked down and around The Post Ranch Inn's property. You can look either at the mountains or the sea (my favorite kind of place. Must be all that Scottish blood in me). Then we stopped at Nepenthe to do a little gift shopping. I bought a few things for Bob, as well as some bath salts for myself.

On the way home, we stopped off in Carmel. Okay, if I lived in Carmel and had tons of money, I might easily learn to love shopping. There are so many wonderful shops lining the streets, and not your typical "mall in the village" -- no Limited or Gap in sight. They even had a lovely-looking lingerie store. If we had not been with a male host who was kind enough to indulge things like the wool shop (where Mom bought me a stunning red wool jacket) and a pet store, it would have been my first stop. Once shopping is done in Carmel, one can go get an ice cream (Mom and me) or a lemonade (Gary) and then walk down to the beach to wade in the water. Yet again, I slept like a baby that night, sweet dreams and all.

Thursday morning, we had a change of plans. Mom decided she was very tired and not feeling quite right, so I suggested maybe she needed another day of rest, sleeping and reading. I didn't particularly want to go to San Simeon without her, so my plan was to skip that and just go see the elephant seals. Gary, who had had no interest in going to San Simeon, agreed to join me for the seals (in fact, he agreed to drive). First, the three of us had breakfast at a place he likes, a sort of upscale diner. Feeling particularly adventuresome (oh, who am I kidding? I'm always adventuresome when it comes to food), I ordered the fried green tomato eggs benedict, which may sound a little odd but isn't at all once it hits the taste buds. I loved it.

More clear skies and warm temperatures accompanied us on our drive to the elephant seal beach, and then we were there. Oh my! Gary had promised seals, and he didn't disappoint. There's a long boardwalk above the beach where gawking humans can stand and stare out over the beach that seems to be more seal than sand. Some of them bounce around and spar in the water, but this time of year (as I discovered from reading the signs and talking to a park ranger), they're molting and mostly just lie around and sleep.

Many of them line up by the water's edge, looking like gigantic sardines without their tin boundaries. Others station themselves farther up the beach, either in sardine fashion or solo. Occasionally, they will use their flippers to toss sand up onto their backs.

I was mesmerized (which is probably why I took a total of 24 pictures on the entire trip and got home to discover that 6 of them are of elephant seals). Yes, they've turned sleeping into an enviable art form, but sometimes they get up and drag themselves down to the water to cool off, or up the beach to a different spot (I guess when the riffraff comes to shore and moves into the neighborhood), or they just roll over. It's hard to describe the sounds they make. A cross between a howler monkey and a lion's roar with a little bit of growling and barking dog thrown in is the best I can do, based on other animal sounds I've heard.

Eventually, it was time to drag ourselves away and have some lunch. This we did at Ragged Point, sitting outside, looking down on their gardens. On the way home, we stopped off in Cambria, where I discovered a little wine shop that offered tastings. I'd been in California for a whole week and had yet to taste wine, so I decided this would be a good place to do so. The wine was, for the most part, good, and I bought a bottle for Bob. This was where I proceeded to think I'd lost my camera (because, I, Ms. Epitome of Oh-So-Calm and Efficient, can't be with Gary without having some sort of "crisis"). I'm not a big picture-taker (which you may have guessed by now), and this probably wouldn't have been so devastating if I hadn't just taken all those pictures of the seals. Somehow (I guess because I was in California), I managed not to have a complete meltdown, and, eventually, I discovered it was just tucked away in his car in a place that wasn't obvious.

Back to Morro Bay and Gary's farmers' market -- this one, your standard outdoor market. They had everything you can imagine, even little pesto pizzas and raw milk (which I'm used to buying right off Amish farms here in Lancaster County). I bought some cherries for myself, and my thoughts turned, yet again, to thinking maybe I could live in California. (What is it about good farmers' markets that make me think I could live in a place? Maybe it's the fact that I seem to live in the farmers' market capital of the world right now).

We headed back to the house where Mom had, indeed, had a very relaxing time. She'd immersed herself in Gary's biography of James Thurber and was sitting outside on the patio, reading, when we got home. Shortly thereafter, Gary fixed me a gin and lemonade, which went straight to my head (I guess because it was on top of the wine). Sad to say, that did not stop me from having another one. By the time we headed out to dinner, I really was way too relaxed and tipsy, which, sad to say again, did not stop me from tasting more wine before dinner or drinking it with dinner. That's the most I've drunk, I think, since the last time I had mint juleps with Ms. Musings back in 2007. Needless to say, I don't remember much about that evening, but Mom promises me I didn't embarrass myself. What's a vacation, though, without one good night of letting your hair down and drinking too much (especially less than a month after you've lost your job)?

Because I was on vacation (or because Gary's house is magic. I can't decide which), I slept fine and had no hangover when we got up at 5:00 the next morning to drive back to L.A. Not only is that the most I've drunk since 2007, but it's the most I've ever drunk without suffering a hangover. Gary was up to see us off, and I was quite sad as we drove down the drive that it seemed, a mere minute before, we'd driven up for the first time. I'm sure I will drive up it again, some day, but who knows when?

After an uneventful drive back to LAX, we said "goodbye" to sunny California, as we boarded our plane and headed east. We were welcomed home at midnight by an exhausted Bob, waiting up for us, who was extremely glad to see us. Accompanying him were an overwhelmingly exuberant puppy, and a cat who was, not exactly exuberant, but who showed, in his own way, that he was happy I had returned.

That's it for the California saga. Now we can get back to books (TBR challenge and Once Upon a Time challenge updates, as well as last month's CT mystery book club read, coming soon). But before we do, tell me: who wants to head west with me next time?

Ah-yeah! California 2011 (Part Two)

2011-05-20T22:19:00.013-04:00

(This post will likely make more sense if you read this one first. Also, for some reason, I took no pictures during this leg of the trip. You'll just have to use your imaginations.)

When I told people I was going out to California, those who've been to the places I mentioned I'd be visiting informed me that I probably wouldn't like L.A. much, especially Hollywood, described as "dirty" by most, but that I would love Santa Barbara. I had proven such prognostications wrong on my first afternoon in the city (after all, I'm a City Mouse at heart). Dirty? I didn't see it. Besides, what's "dirty" when you're familiar with both New York and Philadelphia? I found Hollywood fascinating and was thrilled to be traveling along streets I've heard of all my life: Hollywood Blvd., Santa Monica Blvd., Rodeo Dr. Despite the fact I know very little about movies and Hollywood, I was able to make plenty of "big screen" connections.

I wasn't exactly skeptical, then, about Santa Barbara, but I wasn't exactly convinced I wouldn't love it, either, as we headed up 101, hugging the magnificent coastline -- does anything get bluer than the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean on a bright, sunny day? -- before heading inland for a while to feast our eyes on hills that provide so many shades of green they could easily rival Crayola's largest box of crayons. (I love the bright yellow flowers of the wild mustard that grows there in contrast to the greens and browns.) The truth of the matter is that I fell somewhere in between loving it and hating it. If someone were to offer me an all-expenses paid visit back to the town, I wouldn't turn it down. However, I don't have any overwhelming desire to return, nor did I spend any time thinking about what it might be like to live there.

Two factors put a bit of a bad taste in our mouths before we'd arrived in town. The first was that, before I got laid off, I had planned work-related meetings with colleagues out there. The second was that we had also planned that, while I was working, Mom would have a little "reunion" of sorts with Kathy and another college friend of theirs. On our last trip to California together, when I was attending a conference up at Asilomar near Monterey, my mother had taken the bus down to Santa Barbara to meet these two, and they'd had a marvelous time. We'd rebooked into the same hotel where they'd stayed, one within walking distance of both downtown and the beach. Needless to say, I would not be having any work meetings. Kathy had been unable to make the trip to Santa Barbara, which was why she had come up to L.A. to visit instead. My mother's other friend, for complicated reasons we still don't quite understand (although both Danny and I have written imaginative stories in our heads at this point) couldn't join us at the last minute. Mom was quite sad about that. All these women are nearing 80, and my mom (rightly) feels a need to seize each chance she gets to see them.

The scenic drive, however, boosted out spirits, and we were quite cheerful by the time we arrived at our hotel. I actually decided it was nice that I'd get to have Sunday through Tuesday alone with Mom. We planned just to enjoy the beach and to do some shopping, and to, otherwise, be quite lazy. I loved our hotel room, which had a real little kitchenette, complete with gas stove. If I hadn't already decided to be lazy, I might have made a trip to the market up the street and bought something to make for dinner. But, well, I'd already decided to be lazy. Besides, during most of this trip, I had a hankering for seafood (especially oysters on the half shell, for some reason, most of which, I discovered, were shipped out there from places like Maine. Not exactly sustainable eating, but oh well, I was on vacation where I was being lazy and doing environmental damage), and since Bob doesn't like seafood, I don't cook it much. I prefer to have others cook it (or prepare it, in the case of raw oysters) for me.

Mom and I settled into our room and then headed out on foot to a restaurant that was recommended by the hotel clerk who told us it was "only three blocks away." I forget that in most places, "blocks" are a tad bit longer than they are in New York where you can count on one city block being 1/20 of a mile (well, if you're walking between numbered streets, that is. If you're walking between numbered avenues, they're twice as long, but I'm typically walking between streets). I think that in Santa Barbara, the blocks are about a mile long, and they disappear into the harbor (then again, maybe we just got a little lost). Needless to say, it took us quite some time to find the restaurant, and we were starving by the time we got there and had to endure the unhappy news that it would be "about a 25-minute wait." What to do in such situations but head to the bar for a martini (me) or a glass of wine (Mom)?

The bar was downstairs and practically empty but quiet compared to the very noisy restaurant. There, we saw splashed across a huge T.V. screen the news that Osama Bin Laden had been captured. The volume was not turned up, though, nor was the closed caption feature turned on, and the CNN scroll didn't make sense. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something like, "Osama Bin Laden captured. Killed as body on way to Indian Ocean." We couldn't quite believe it, so my mother asked the bar tender. He was a bit of an obnoxious young punk who answered my mother's, "Is this true? They found Bin Laden?" with a shrug of his shoulders and a "yes," begrudgingly sliding our drinks to us. When we'd walked in, he'd told us to hurry, because it was "last call," which I was pretty sure was his idea of a joke, because it wasn't even 8:00 yet. (I later realized, when some other young man came in who looked like he was going to replace our surly server, that maybe he'd meant last call for his shift.) I suppose if Mom and I had been two giggling, scantily-dressed young women, like the ones who came in and sat at the other end of the bar, he might have been more forthcoming, or at least might have shown off for us the way he did for them, tossing around liquor bottles, mixers, and aluminum tumblers, throwing them in the air and catching them behind his back.

We were called back to the restaurant before we'd finished our drinks and headed back up the stairs to a lovely little table outside with a view of the harbor. Here I proceeded to make the big mistake of ignoring my desire for oysters on the half shell and instead ordering the combination raw plate which claimed to be a sampling of raw shell fish but really turned out to be mostly a huge seafood salad with a token oyster and a token clam or two here and there on the side. Luckily, I'd also ordered the clam chowder, which was delicious, and I learned a lesson: stick to the real thing when you see it on the menu instead of being conned by a "sampler" that promises more, which I did throughout the rest of the trip.

We could hear seals barking in the harbor (our waitress was as blasé about them as our bar tender had been about Bin Laden), and I so badly wanted to see one. It was too dark, though, and they didn't come up onto the pier the way I've seen them do in San Francisco, so I soon gave up, and we finished our food and headed back to the hotel, proceeding to get hopelessly lost. This we found extremely amusing and had to stop several times, nearly collapsing on the sidewalk in gales of laughter. Finally, some other tourists we met along the way took pity on us and told us to follow them back to their hotel where we asked the clerk for directions. He gave us a map, and it seemed we were almost there, so we declined the ride the other tourists offered us in their car, and finally found our way back.

The next morning, I was determined to do two things. The first was to replace the contact lens I'd dropped down the sink at Danny's. The second was to do some laundry, because I'd noticed that the hotel had a washer and dryer for its guests (I like being able to wash clothes while on vacation, even when I've packed plenty and have no real need to do so). Replacing the contact lens ended up being a breeze. The first optometrist I called produced a receptionist who was extremely kind and told me she'd gladly replace it for nothing, sympathizing that it would be horrible not to be able to see while on vacation. A phone call to my optometrist in Pennsylvania, a fax with my prescription, a short drive to the office to pick it up, and I soon had replaced my glasses with my contacts (although I hate the way I look in glasses, this was not solely a vanity. I see much better with contacts than I ever have with glasses).

I'd dragged Mom away from all the news about Osama Bin Laden to accompany me on that little expedition (call me un-American, but I was not as riveted by this news as everyone else seemed to be. I was glad he was caught, and I hope it means a little more peace in the world, but I doubt it. I certainly didn't need hours and hours of information and analysis, nor was I too keen on footage of Americans all around the country celebrating the way those in the Middle East had after 9/11), and she was perfectly content to get back to it, while I went about getting a load of laundry in the washer. I then spent a lovely, lazy morning on the bed, reading Kendall's book. When the wash was done, we lunched on some leftovers and then headed out on foot to walk to the center of town for a little shopping. Before we'd even gone one block, though, my mother realized she was really too tired to do this (she's still so young at heart, I often forget she's 79 years old, and we'd had that long, long walk the previous evening). She turned back, and, map in hand, I headed off to the center of town alone.

Did I mention I'm not the best when it comes to reading maps? And that this was a particularly bad map? And that (which you should have gathered from my previous night's adventure) I have a terrible sense of direction? By some miracle, I managed to find the center of town, but it wasn't easy, and I found myself walking through some pretty "iffy" areas, thinking how glad I was that it was daylight, while also thinking that plenty of women have been raped in broad daylight when there are so many abandoned buildings just waiting to be used to obscure such activity.

Once in town, I realized that I didn't really want to go shopping (since we all know I don't really like to shop unless I'm accompanied by certain people like my mother). What I really wanted was a pedicure (something I really do like to the point I'd practically drag Bob to have one with me). I was sure I'd easily be able to find a salon. I did. It was a fancy, "organic" spa (I'm into organic, but, ummm, aren't things like sea weed and mud naturally organic?). I could feel smoothness wrap itself around my body like plastic over hot wax as I walked up to the receptionist who proceeded to completely ignore me in favor of someone on the phone (call me old-fashioned, but I hate that. Customers who've bothered to enter an establishment in person ought always to come first. In fact, people ought to bow down to us, especially when we've just risked life and limb, hiking through Santa Barbara's seedier neighborhoods to get there). Finally, she got off the phone, and I asked if it would be possible to get a pedicure. Obviously, I looked like one of the Beverly Hillbillies, because, despite the fact the place looked and sounded completely empty to me, she was terribly sorry, but they were completely booked through the afternoon. Thank God, really. A pedicure in that place probably would have cost me more than my airline ticket from Philadelphia and back.

It's a funny thing about downtown Santa Barbara. Although it sports a number of tattoo parlors and a sandwich shop on almost every corner, it seems, it doesn't have many salons. Eventually, though, I found a nail salon, the sort of place I'm used to with teenage girls getting speckled blue and black nails and Asian women applying the fancy artwork. I paid for the "full treatment", massage and everything (reasoning that the cost of this probably would've paid for one nail in the other place; thus, I was obviously saving, not spending money). I, and my whitish-pink toenails, left the salon very happy. What is it about a good pedicure that can give one such confidence? I now felt emboldened to find a better, safer way back to the hotel. I studied the map, figured out the best route, and made it back without a hitch.

That evening, we met one of my former colleagues for drinks at a lovely café right on the beach. The weather continued to be as perfect as it had been since our plane landed (clear blue skies, temperatures in the upper seventies), which means the ocean was as blue as ever, as we sat looking out over it. I sipped a margarita (what else does one drink on a beach?) and had a wonderful time discussing all the "ins" and "outs" of publishing (I should be bored with that topic by now, but I never am) with this smart young woman. I was worried Mom might be bored, but she enjoyed listening to us and "learning" so much, as she put it. (She also made me feel good later by telling me how impressed she was by how competent I sounded. That was nice to hear, having recently been laid off, which, no matter what, makes a person feel extremely incompetent). After the margarita, I decided to have (my favorite) an absolutely delicious hot dog, cooked to perfection, juicy without being too greasy served on a nicely toasted, perfect (not so huge, the hot dog got lost. Not so small, the hot dog fell out) bun. This hot dog connoisseur was extremely pleased.

We had another leisurely morning our last day in Santa Barbara. We were meeting another group of former colleagues of mine for lunch and had decided, before that, to head to K-Mart. I wanted a hat, which I'd forgotten to pack and a razor, which I'd also forgotten to pack. Wouldn't you know it? K-Mart, which usually has tons of great hats, had no good hats. I half-heartedly made do with what seemed like the best they had. Meanwhile, they did have some great shoes (1 pair bought) and flip flops (1 pair bought) and skirts (1 bought). Yes, I did go all the way to Santa Barbara to shop at K-Mart (of all places!).

We had another delicious lunch (mushroom and quiche salad) at a little landmark café (what is it about publishing sorts and cafés?) with my colleagues and another great publishing discussion before talk turned to such things as the royal wedding. They all seemed a little shell-shocked, understandably so, given that 21 of their colleagues had recently lost their jobs. I'm hoping everything ends up well for them (which, in my book, means they all find fabulous, rewarding jobs elsewhere and get the recognition they each deserve).

Afterwards, I can't remember exactly why, we went to a drugstore, and, to my surprise, found a perfect hat. This meant going back to K-Mart to return the unsatisfactory one I'd bought. That deed done, we climbed back into the car, and I called my friend Gary to tell him we were hitting the road up the coast to his place in Morro Bay.

Ah-Yeah! California 2011 (Part One)

2011-05-12T10:31:00.000-04:00

I just returned from an eight-day trip to California. Actually, I didn't just return. I returned last Friday, but you know, returning from vacation was so terribly draining that I had to spend two days being a total slug, sleeping and reading. Oh, and discovering a cool comic book store I never knew existed in Lancaster in order to get a free comic book on free comic book day (Richie Rich for those of you who are curious. I must go back to that store, but that's a subject for another blog post). Then I had other stuff to catch up on, and it's taken me four days to finish this blog post.

Anyway, back to California. Many of you know that if you enjoy reading my blog, you have my friend Danny to thank for its existence. He was my biggest influence when it came to taking the plunge into the blogosphere (nearly 5 years ago now. Egad!). Danny lives in Los Angeles (which you know if you read his blog. If you don't, why don't you? It's not to be missed), and it had been way too long since I'd last seen him, so I decided to start my western journey in a city I'd never been to see Danny and his family.

My traveling companion was my mother, who moved to L.A. as a teenager and went to Scripps College in Claremont before her family moved to San Francisco. This was the third mother-daughter trip to California she and I have taken. The older my father gets, the less he likes to travel, and he (like so many east coast snobs who've never been there) thinks he hates California and has no desire to go. The older my mother gets, the less she likes to travel alone, so I make the huge sacrifice of being her traveling companion on excursions to California.

I must say, if you are gong to visit L.A. for the first time, you can't pick better hosts than Danny and his wife Kendall. First of all they live in an extraordinarily cool house in the West Adams neighborhood.

The house is so cool that it was once a setting for a movie and has been featured on HGTV. I can't really do it justice by trying to describe it (not the least reason being that I know absolutely nothing about architecture nor how to describe decorative details and types of wood). Suffice it to say that it's a rambling bungalow built in 1909 with inlaid wood floors, built-in details like bookcases and benches to die for, a tiled-tapestried-muraled finished basement with a grand fireplace, and they have been slowly but surely restoring it to its era. Oh, and did I mention the books? Kendall is an autodidact. Not only that, but she inherited her grandmother's books, and Danny has just a few books of his own. This house definitely rivals my own when it comes to books. I felt right at home.

Danny picked us up at the airport in the Chevy Cruze he'd been loaned specifically for our visit. He has this rather cool gig with GM that involves driving their cars and writing blog posts about them. The Cruze wasn't exactly the car he'd had in mind for our visit (GM having leant him such things as a Corvette in the past), but they had arrived at his house that morning in a Cadillac with standard transmission (if you're thinking, "Cadillac with a stick shift? Umm...didn't Cadillac practically invent automatic transmissions so that wealthy Americans would never have to bother with something so farm-boyish and tractor-like as shifting gears?" you're not alone. Those were my exact thoughts, along with thinking it was somewhat ironic that GM might loan out an automatic Corvette, while offering a standard Cadillac). Anyway, Danny, like many a good late-20th-century Chicagoan who didn't learn to drive until he moved to L.A., doesn't drive stick shift. The Cadillac was taken back, and he was given the Cruze in its place. It proved to be a perfectly fine chariot, but might have been more so for someone who was mechanically inclined enough to figure out how to adjust the passenger seat in order to keep from feeling as though she was going to be propelled through the windshield.

We left the airport and headed to Danny's house. There, I got to meet Kendall for the first time (Danny and I were both telecommuting colleagues who met each other infrequently at company gatherings until we were both laid off from that company. I'd never met his wife) and their two-year-old Charlie.

I was thrilled to meet both, as Danny writes about Kendall on his blog, and some of you may remember how I feel about meeting my male friends' wives. I just knew I'd love her, and I was right (as did my mother. We're convinced we must somehow be related). I'd lived through Danny's blog posts about Charlie's nightmare premature birth and five months in the NICU, and it was such a treat to meet this happy, healthy baby who you can tell is going to grow up to be extremely kind and wise. Charlie has recently learned to say, instead of "yeah" when you ask him if he wants something or wants to do something, "ah-yeah." So, for instance, when we asked him if he wanted to climb aboard his rocking horse, he replied, "Ah-yeah." It's much more expressive, don't you think?

We got the tour of the house and also met Henry and Emma, the two wonderful dogs Danny and Kendall have adopted. Soon afterwards, it was time to go off to dinner at El Cholo, the oldest Mexican restaurant in L.A. (I have not had the guts to step on a scale since returning from this trip). We started with what I'm pretty sure was the best guacamole I've ever had, and the meal just continued to get better from there. We returned home, happy but exhausted, and definitely ready for bed. I tried to coerce Emma and Henry into sleeping with me, but they preferred their own huge mattress nicely laid out for them at the end of the hall.

The next day began with a trip to the farmer's market (which my mother remembered from her days living in L.A.). It's an indoor market (something L.A. has in common with Lancaster, which made me realize I really ought to frequent Lancaster's more often) and breakfast at Du-Par's, a lovely retro diner. I had a delicious plate of eggs and sausage, and Danny let us taste his French toast, which he declares the best he's had. I have to agree: thick bread that is cooked to crispy perfection on the outside while being wonderfully soggy on the inside. That trip to the farmer's market was when I began to suspect that, despite its lack of real seasons, I maybe could live in L.A. (I can't seem to visit anyplace on earth without wondering what it might be like to live there, a curse I've had since I was a child). What a magnificent place to shop for produce, meat, and baked goods, and I was envious that Danny does the majority of his shopping there. Charlie accompanied us on this morning excursion, happily strapped to his father's chest and stomach, when he wasn't happily sitting at the restaurant, throwing sugar packets on the floor (never underestimate the joy of engaging in such activities).

The big treat that day was the Turner Classics Film festival in Hollywood. Danny had asked if we might not be interested in seeing The Parent Trap. Would we! First of all (although I may have), I don't remember ever seeing it on the big screen, and what better big screen is there than the Egyptian Theatre? Secondly, Hayley Mills (who doesn't love Hayley Mills?) was going to be there. She was lovely. Leonard Maltin (someone else I was thrilled to see) interviewed her before the film. One of the most interesting things we learned was that she basically, because she was shipped back off to her English girls' boarding school, had no idea what a big star she was. The only inkling was the fan mail she received.

When the movie ended, we decided to go find the house where my mother and her family had lived. We were extremely disappointed to discover that it has been torn down and replaced with a monstrosity that, although it is a house, looks like an office building. I had so been hoping to knock on the door and get a look inside, but there was no point. Meanwhile, my mother had been describing her life as the daughter of the British Consul General to Danny who would later find all kinds of archival material for us online that filled in some gaps in memory. Then it was time to take my mother to visit her friend Kathy.

Kathy's brother lives in their parents' house in the Los Feliz neighborhood, and Kathy was up visiting him in order to see my mother (they went to college together). This was another fabulous house that I am at a loss to describe, but this photo of Danny and me on the front stoop gives you an idea of the neighborhood.
We had a great time touring it and learning its history. Being the movie ignorant person that I am, all the old stars associated with it went over my head, but Danny knew them, and I am not so ignorant as not to be able to imagine the grand parties held in the huge living room and out back where there, of course, is a swimming pool and an area that, at one time, was a badminton court. They also have an orange, a lemon, and a kumquat tree (off of which I had the best kumquat I've ever tasted. Sour enough, but not too sour as those on the east coast often are).

Danny and I left my mother to spend the night with Kathy and went to meet Kendall and Charlie at Kendall's mother's house. Kendall's mother is Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey whose best known novel is A Woman of Independent Means (a novel I have yet to read, but it's now been moved to page 1 of the TBR tome). I was hoping to meet Betsy, but she was off speaking at the L.A. book festival, so that wasn't to be this trip (nor was I to meet Danny's sixteen-year-old daughter Leah who was at her mom's for the weekend). We'd thought we'd go swimming, but it was really too chilly for that by the time we got there, so we just enjoyed talking and playing with Charlie and eating pizza before heading home to fall into bed again.

Our final day in L.A. was another terrific one. Danny, Charlie, and I got up early (I a little too early, as in my half-awake state, I proceeded to drop one of my contact lenses down the drain. I've worn contacts for 25 years and, although I've feared doing that since the day I got them, I never actually had until that morning). We went off for another delicious breakfast of boiled eggs and assorted breads, this time at a wonderful little Belgian import whose name I don't recall. Coffee was served the way I love it in those cups that are more like little bowls, with no handles, so you wrap your hands around them -- a great way to warm up cold hands when you need to do so. We had planned to go hiking (actually, we'd planned to do that on Saturday, too) but never got around to it before it was time to go pick up Kathy and my mother, so Danny could chauffeur us all to the Getty Museum.

Oh! What a marvelous place the Getty is! Kathy and I took the garden tour -- the garden was designed to be a painting in and of itself, and it certainly doesn't disappoint. I particularly loved the azalea maze, which blossoms in winter. Even without blossoms, it was a wonderful labyrinth of green. I'd love to see it in winter, though.
Then we went inside to look at some of the paintings (yes, I did what I always do -- boring me -- and located the Impressionists) before meeting back up with my mother for a fascinating demonstration on Parisian fashion of the eighteenth century. The fashion designer had a live model who was stunning and looked as though she'd just stepped out of an engraving. Guess what I liked the most. The shoes! (I know, I was quite the boring old me that day.) I would love to have a pair. They looked like mini-upholstered half boots with buckles made out of a beautiful floral pink and green satin cloth.

All-too-soon, it was time for Danny (who, poor boy, was up against deadlines for some freelance writing and editing projects and was still kind enough to put his life on hold to play tour guide and chauffeur) to pick us up. He took Kathy back to her brother's and then drove us to the airport to pick up the Toyota Camry that would be our wheels for the next six days. We sadly left the Hailey-Miller clan, each of our bags now carrying an autographed copy of Kendall's book, and we also had picked up a brand new exclamation for everything "Ah-yeah!" We took to the freeway and headed north to Santa Barbara.

Laid Off Part II

2011-04-24T17:36:00.002-04:00

This time I...

...will finish the second draft of my novel.

...will write some more ghost stories.

...will submit stuff for publication over and over and over again, knowing full well it will probably all be rejected but knowing I'll never know unless I try.

...will not take the first job that comes along (especially when those who know both me and the company warn me that I won't be happy).

...will not let the pull of a steady second income be more important than a rewarding life.

...will do more volunteer work in new, unexplored areas that might lead to a more rewarding life.

...will write more letters (hope all my sadly forgotten pen pals are reading this).

...will try to come to grips with the fact that the good old days of publishing, when brilliant people who were readers and writers themselves actually ran the companies, are gone.

...will admit that the likes of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Wallace Stegner would probably never be published in today's world, and I will think hard about how to start a revolution to turn that around, because I would hate it if 100 years from now, the only books left to represent the early 21st-century are by Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark, and Danielle Steel.

...will do all the things I'm always saying I will do and never have time, like exploring hiking trails in Pennsylvania, visiting museums in Philadelphia, going to Pittsburgh, etc.

...will read more books (of course!).

...will watch more movies.

...will cook and bake more.

Sounds like it's going to be a pretty good life, huh? Please keep reminding me of that for the days when it's not Easter, I'm not surrounded by loving friends and family members, the sun isn't shining, and the flowers aren't blossoming.

...

Once Upon a Time Challenge Book One

2011-04-17T16:44:00.002-04:00

Shulman, Polly. The Grimm Legacy. New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 2010.

(This entry is cross-posted and adapted at Pequea Valley Reader's Blog.)

It's tempting to complain about this book, because it's not terribly well written. I decided that for me to do so, though, might be a bit unfair, because a: I don't read tons that's written for today's young adult audience (and maybe this is very well-written compared to most of what's out there) and b. I am very picky about fantasy, don't read much of it, and when I do, it tends to be things like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. To compare any writer (y.a. or not, but especially y.a.) to that poetic genius and truly gifted storyteller would be unfair. Still, even if short, "sound-bite-ish" writing is all the rage for 21st-century y.a. literature; and even if this book had been a real-life take on suburban teen living, fantasy and Lord Dunsany the last things on my mind while reading it, I probably would have wished I'd had the manuscript to edit before it was published and could (kindly) have suggested that Shulman work on the areas that seemed a bit choppy to me and to rewrite some of the dialogue to make it a little less stilted.

But forget the, at times, choppy writing and stilted dialogue. It's easy to do once you get lost in the pages of this book, because it's so wonderfully imaginative (thus, despite temptation, my inability to do anything but say I truly liked it). Elizabeth Rew, our heroine, is someone to whom it's easy to relate (and probably doubly so for the intended teen audience): an awkward teenager attending a new school and still missing her dead mother. School isn't much fun. She's had to abandon the dance classes she enjoys, because her father has a new, larger family to support, and she's feeling the need to earn a little money of her own, especially after she finds herself giving away her sneakers to a homeless woman. When her favorite teacher suggests she apply for a job at a special library, she agrees to do so, having no idea what to expect.

Soon, enough, she discovers exactly how special this library is. It lends out objects, not books -- all kinds of objects. As if that isn't cool enough, the library is also home to a very special collection: magic objects from Grimm's fairy tales. I liked the fact that these objects were stored in an area known as "the cage," because once upon a time, I worked in a large public library that had a "cage" of its own, basically an area down in the basement that was locked off by a "cage" of chain-link doors and that wasn't open to the public for browsing (nothing magical in that one, though, unless you consider archival material magical). Imagine a place that houses such artifacts as the mirror from Snow White, flying carpets, and the twelve dancing princess's slippers. As you might have guessed, this special collection leads to a big, magical adventure (and, like many a good fairy tale, a little romance).

One of the things I loved about this book were all the little nods to classic fairy tales. Elizabeth has two, older, annoying, stepsisters. Her stepmother isn't wicked, but she's not exactly nice to Elizabeth (and does seem to think of her as a built-in maid). Characters in the novel eat gingerbread. Some of them are princes and princesses. It also takes its cue from some of the scarier tales from the brothers Grimm, adding a nice touch of light, spine-tingling, suspense. How do I know it's taking a cue from the Grimm's brothers? The book made me pull our copy of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales from our shelves (a book, I discovered, that has gathered quite a bit of dust -- unfortunately, not of the fairy sort). I bet it makes everyone who reads it want to refer to that, and what's more magical than a book that leads the reader to other great books? Unless it's a book that not only leads readers to other great books, but that also happens to end on this side of "happily ever after," and is maybe all the more gratifying for doing so.

Give it to your 12-14-year-old daughter/niece/granddaughter/friend. She'll love it.