MarysLibrary

My Old Blog

The first 10 months of Mary's Library can be found at this address: http://maryslibrary.blogspot.com/

Happy Fourth of July!

Miss Darcy

Peonies

Best Seller List - June 1963

This morning's New York Times printed the books that were on the best seller list forty-five years ago this week. I was surprised at the quality. O'Hara, du Maurier, Salinger, Grass, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Woodham-Smith. This year's list is not nearly so inspiring.

Fiction

1. The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West
2. Elizabeth Appleton by John O'Hara
3. The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier
4. Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II
5. Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell
6. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, by J D Salinger
7. The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
8. The Bedford Incident by Mark Rascovich
9. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
10. Stacy Tower by Robert H K Walter

Nonfiction

1. The Whole Truth and Nothing But by Hedda Hopper and James Brough
2. I Owe Russia $1200 by Bob Hope
3. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
4. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
5. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy by Charles M Schulz
6. Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton
7. O Ye Jigs and Juleps! by Virginia Cary Hudson
8. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree by Arthur H Lewis
9. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith
10. The Ordeal of Power by Emmet John Hughes

Literature Map

This site is what my young friends call awesome. You type in the name of an author you like and a cloud of names appears. These are authors whose style is similar to that of the author whose name you typed.

I of course started with Jane Austen. And they are all there: Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Sayers. And a little further out Robertson Davies, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Tyler, Isabel Allende.

Try it!

Bobbie Wallace

The UCLA Alumni spotlighted a friend of mine in their recent newsletter. She is Bobbie Wallace, whose children's books are among my very favorites.

Before there was J K Rowling or R L Stine, there was award winning children's author Barbara Brooks Wallace '45." . . . [She] has earned the NLAPW Children's Book Award and International Youth Library "Best of the Best" for Claudia (2001), the William Allen White Children's Book Award for Peppermints in the Parlor (1980) and two Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America.

Bobbie studied international development at UCLA, not the most obvious major for a woman who was to become "one of America’s most beloved children’s mystery writers."

“I happened to be born in China,” she says, describing the first of [the] unexpected turns in her life. “My father, after graduating from UC Berkeley, became an actor with the Flying A film company in Santa Barbara, but then decided to sell oil for the lamps of China with SOCONY [Standard Oil Company of New York]. There, on a blind date, he met a nurse, my mother, who had left Russia at 16. At 17, she entered Harvard Medical School of China in Shanghai as a nurse probationer. They eloped in a sampan, . . . Later, in Soochow, they produced my sister, and a year after that, me.”

When things began to get dicey in China in the late 30s Bobbie came to the United States and lived in San Francisco. After graduating from UCLA and working for an advertising agency in Hollywood, Bobbie lived in San Francisco.

“I lived in a boarding house euphemistically called a ‘guest house,’” she says, “a shabby white-pillared mansion. Legend had it that it was once owned by an early fabled family in the sugar trade.”

Wallace’s readers now know the place as Sugar Hill Hall from Peppermints in the Parlor. . . . [which]has been in print continuously since its debut in 1980, was recorded as an audiobook by Angela Lansbury and inspired a musical produced by the Tapestry Theatre Company in Alexandria, Va.

Bobbie's mysteries are my favorites of all her books. She won Edgars for The Twin in the Tavern and Sparrows in the Scullery, and two others, Cousins in the Castle and Ghosts in the Gallery, were nominated for the award.

Voodoo Science

My friend Les mentioned a book in an email this morning, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000) by Robert Park. I immediately asked for a free sample for my Kindle and got to reading.

It's terrific. Park, who is the former head of the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, runs the Washington office of the American Physical Society. His job, in part, is to see to it that congress doesn't pass any legislation repealing the laws of thermodynamics, something they attempted to do in April of 1989. (They were unsuccessful.)

His wit is delightful. He sums up the first of those laws of thermodynamics thus: you never get something for nothing. In other words, you can't win. The second law: you can't even break even.

The book is about 18 years old now, but as you know, the laws of science tend not to change and the capacity of people to believe the impossible tends to grow, and thus the book remains relevant.

Thanks, Les.

Bad News About a Beloved Old Bookstore

Cody's Closed

From this morning's Publisher's Weekly Daily:

Cody’s Books, the one-time iconic Berkeley, Calif. bookstore that has fallen on hard times in recent years, has closed. In an e-mail sent late Friday, Cody’s management said the store “will shut its doors effective June 20.”

Founded in 1956 by Fred and Pat Cody, the store was acquired by Andy Ross in 1977. Ross expanded Cody’s to three locations, but, faced with declining sales, scaled back to one outlet before selling the company to the Japanese distributor and retailer Yohan Inc. in 2005.

Yohan president Hirosho Kagawa said in the e-mail while he was “excited” to save the store from bankruptcy in 2005,” unfortunately, my current business in not strong enough or rich enough to support Cody’s. Of course, the store has been suffering from low sales and the deficit exceeds our ability to service it.”

My sister, the wit

Yesterday I told Sandy I was reading Proust and Balzac.

This morning she wants to know if I'm enjoying my Prozac.

Burning is too good for them

Yesterday's Times Online (London, that is, not New York) has an article that should start your week with either exhilarating agreement or infuriating disgust.

It's a "red mist" list by Rod Liddle, books that once seemed superb and are now found to be hollow. He takes aim particularly at A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (pronounced "Pole," which seems especially to madden Liddle.)

I think Dance is remarkable, endlessly re-readable, and profound. Shows what I know.

Castle Drogo

Wilhelm likes to watch what he calls The High-Def-for-Its-Own-Sake channel and this afternoon he stumbled across a program they were showing about the last castle to be built in England, Castle Drogo. The place was designed by Edward Lutyens and was built in the 1910s and 1920s.

The owner, Julius Drewe, liked gadgets and that was a perfect time to wow the world with the modern installations in his new house. Turbines in the river to generate electricity, modern showers with multiple shower heads in the seven bathrooms, telephones in nearly every room, and a central vacuum cleaner system.

Gertrude Jekyll did the gardens, of course.

Bibliochaise

You can learn more about this fantastic piece of furniture and about some other clever bookcases here.

Aging

"Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed."  -- Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, Temporary Kings

It's raining, it's pouring . . .

Karla and Ginger are dressed for it. I passed.

The Sage of Baltimore

"Democracy," said H.L. Mencken, "is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

The Innocent Man

I was at the library the other day, walking by the New Nonfiction section when I spotted the name "John Grisham." What was John Grisham doing in the nonfiction section?

Well, somehow I missed hearing about it, but he wrote a nonfiction book published back in 2006 called The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. The small town is Ada, Oklahoma, and the innocent man was Ron Williamson. He and a friend, Dennis Fritz, were arrested five years after the murder of a young woman in Ada and they were tried and found guilty. Williamson was given the death penalty.

Grisham, who is a lawyer, became interested in their story and although he doesn't normally write nonfiction he just couldn't resist. He did more and more research about these innocent men who were railroaded by the police department and the county prosecutor and he discovered that truth can be much stranger than fiction.

After years in jail, on death row for Williamson, who came within five days of being executed, the Innocence Project in New York became interested in their case and DNA testing proved that they were not guilty of the murder and identified the man who was.

The book is unputdownable. Grisham says in the acknowledgements that there were so many twists and turns in this story he could have written 5,000 pages. Instead he wrote 360 pages of crisp, concise prose that tells a whopper of a story.

The Rough Guide to Classic Novels

I've always loved books about books. One of the best of the recent arrivals is The Rough Guide to Classic Novels (2008) by Simon Mason which arrived today.

This book, unlike some others such as 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006) by Peter Ackroyd and Peter Boxall, is not prescriptive. It doesn't suggest that these are the world's only classic novels or even that you should be reading classics rather than other sorts of books. It even puts in a good word for Mills and Boon and Harlequin.

Many of the books listed as classic herein are obvious - War and Peace (1865) by Leo Tolstoy, for example, is on everyone's list. But Mason adds at the end of each classic book he describes a section called "Where to Go Next." And he does not direct the reader of War and Peace to Anna Karenena (1877) as you might expect, although he does often send the reader on to another book by the same author - for the reader of Anna Karenina he recommends The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) for example.

But for the reader who loved War and Peace he suggests Before the Storm (1878) by Theodor Fontane, in which Napoleon's soldiers, retreating from Moscow, arrive in Berlin. For the lover of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) by Marguerite Yourcenar he suggests I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves. If you liked The Good Soldier Svejk (1921-23) by Jaroslav Hasek, he sends you to Karel Capek's War With the Newts (1936.)

Mason is, as am I, very fond of the work of Eca de Quieros. He mentions The Mais (1888), The Relic (1887), and Cousin Basillio (1878), the last of which he recommends to the reader who liked Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894), which I did, very much. Did you enjoy Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818)? Then you should read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817.) Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) leads you on to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952.) If you liked A Month in the Country (1980) by J L Carr, you might also like The Collected Stories (1976) of William Trevor.

Jonathan Wild (1743) by Henry Fielding brings to mind Captain Singleton (1720) by Daniel Defoe. Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov suggests Eugene Onegin (1833) by Alexander Pushkin. The Red and the Black (1830) by Stendhal suggests Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant.

There are many classics here that you have probably never heard of like That Bringas Woman (1884) and Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) by Benito Perez Galdos. I happen to have read the latter and loved it. I have a vague recollection of having read something about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) and Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami. I know I have never heard of Weep Not, Child (1964) by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o or Broken April (1982) by Ismail Kadare, or The Provost (1822) or The Annals of the Parish (1821) although I've heard of the author of these novels, John Galt.

This is a superb book for someone who reads broadly and deeply. Unlike most such books it frequently suggests books you may not know or have heard about. There are lots of treasures out there, many of them listed in here.

The Knight of the Woeful Countenance

We have just returned from an afternoon at the Civic Theater where we saw a spectacular performance of "Man of La Mancha." It was outstanding in every way, sets, costumes, casting, acting, singing, choreography, everything.

I saw "Man of La Mancha" on Broadway shortly after it opened and my reaction was decidedly ho-hum. (Of course I had just seen "Cabaret" shortly after IT opened and anything at all would have been a letdown after Joel Grey and Jill Hayworth.)

Today's performance, in Spokane, was better than Broadway. I was stunned.

There's nothing like live theater.

Reading List Update

Books I've read since last update:

• Careless in Red by Elizabeth George (2008) 1024 pages (read on Kindle ***)
• Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer (2003) 655 pages (read ***)
• Death and the Oxford Box by Veronica Stallwood (1993) (read **)
• Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac (1836) (read on Kindle **)

Walla Walla, Wine, and Wind

We are planning a trip soon to Walla Walla to visit the many wineries thereabouts. Yesterday's New York Times popped up with a fine article about wine growing in Walla Walla and has further whet our interest.

We play to stay in the Marcus Whitman Hotel, a fine old Walla Walla institution. And I'm hoping we can drive out to see the Stateline Wind Project in Umatilla County, Oregon, which will soon be the largest wind farm in the world.

I apologize for the long absence from my blog. I've had a terrible bout with a cold/the flu/bronchitis/pneumonia/plague/whatever. I'm much better now.