MarysLibrary

Stop, You're Killing Me!

Pam, from whom I mooched a Donna Leon mystery the other day, reminded me of this wonderful web site for mystery lovers. You can look up books by author's name, character name, awards won, setting of the story, job of the detective, period when the story takes place, and more.

My favorite is the "If you liked . . . then you'll love . . ." feature. If you like Agatha Christie (I do), you might like John Buxton Hilton. Or Nancy Pickard. Or Sara Woods. Or Margaret Yorke.

Go take a look. And thanks, Pam.

Princess Alice

Page 161 Meme

Robin over at A Fondness for Reading has tagged me for the very short Page 161 Meme. The rule is to pick up the book nearest you, turn to page 161, and find the fifth full sentence. Then post it. 

The sentence: "Season generously with salt and pepper."

The book is The Big Book of Easy Suppers by Maryana Vollstedt. The salt and pepper go on Snapper Fillets in Tomato Sauce, which is the recipe featured on page 161.

That wasn't much fun, so let's try another one: 

"For best results tend the plants in a scree of basic rubble or shoehorn them in between rocks and secure with moss on a vertical wall."

This book is The Encyclopedia of Garden Ferns by Sue Olsen and the sentence is from a discussion of propagation of Ceterach from spores.

That was even less fun that the salt and pepper. 

The next closest book is Reading Life: Books for the Ages by Sven Birkerts. Unfortunately, it has only 3 1/2 sentences on page 161's discussion of To the Lighthouse.

There's one more book within reach without my having to get up. The fifth sentence on page 161 is this:

"It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side of life: the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them."

So finally we come to something significant. This is from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and it's from the section where she introduces Selden. Although the character has major weaknesses we are meant to admire much about him, and this eshewing of excess while enjoying beauty does much to define him. It's key to understanding the book.

Thanks again for tagging me, Robin.

Eight Random Things

I've been tapped for the Eight Random Things meme, by Jill at My Individual Take. Thank you, Jill.

Here are eight truly random things about me:

1. I nearly changed my major in college from English to marine biology. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had done it.

2. I was for a time devoted to Ab Fab and have tapes of all the episodes. Don't knock it until you've seen it, sweetie darling.

3. I once had dinner with Margaret Mead, just the two of us.

4. I live for Tillamook ice cream.

5. I can never remember whether the word is sherbet or sherbert.

6. I get unduly annoyed at people who call houses "homes," who don't know the difference between afternoon tea and high tea, and who address a man of the cloth as "Reverend Jones." I.e., I'm a language snob. (But see 5, supra.)

7. I have a teddy bear named Alice who wears real pearls and a tiara and sits on a six-inch pile of Tiffany catalogs, some of them going back 15 years.

8. I don't know a bulldozer from a front-end loader.

A Bulldozer

An orange bulldozer is parked in our driveway. We are the envy of all the little boys in the neighborhood.

Tim from K-2 Landscaping is about to do a little gardening in the back yard using that bulldozer. The "grass" (and I use the term loosely) is coming out, a brick path is going in, and I'm going to have the whole yard in which to plant hostas and ferns. That's about all I'll be planting since, as the photo shows, our yard is shady. Very shady.

Here's a Before photo of the yard.

I'll post an After when K-2 is finished. It will take a while for the plantings I'll be putting in this summer to mature, so I'll post another photo in 10 years.

Teaching Children to Read

Try this little reading comprehension test:

"Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run."

What does that mean?

If you're an American you probably have a good idea. If you're English you probably don't. (And we Americans have no idea what it means to play for the ashes or whatever.)

You can understand perfectly the meaning of the words in that sentence, but unless you know what a bunt is and how it can be used to score a run and a lot of other baseball arcana -- well, you're going to flunk your fourth grade reading comprehension test.

I got this example from E D Hirsch's new book, The Knowledge Deficit. Hirsch's point is that you can teach children for 90 minutes a day (and we do in some schools in the US) to determine the main point of an essay and to make inferences and to list examples and explain structure -- and still discover at the end of the year when the reading comprehension tests are given that students are no better off than they were the year before.

Because you can't understand what you're reading unless you understand what you're reading about. Some folks did a great study. They took a flock of over-achievers in reading and another group of under-achievers in reading who differed only in that they loved baseball and gave them both an essay on baseball to read and answer questions about.

Guess who skunked the opposition? Yup, the kids who love baseball and know the difference between a base on balls and a pop fly got better scores than the supposedly better readers. Because they knew what they were reading about.

The lesson, says Hirsch, is that we should be teaching content-specific material in reading classes in our public schools. We should have a national curriculum that tells us what we will teach schoolkids and when we will teach it. (The Mayflower in the first grade. The Civil Rights Movement in the sixth grade. The Articles of Confederation in sophomore year of high school. Etc.)

I'm very interested in theories of education. After all I went to a college founded in 1840 by Horace Mann himself. And so I found this book very interesting. It has a good deal more to say about what we teach our children and why US test results fall further behind those of the rest of the developed world with each passing grade. All of it in understandable English with a minimum of educationese.

Fascinating stuff.

Reading Life

Sven Birkerts has a new book out, Reading Life: Books for the Ages. If you liked Birkerts' Readings or The Gutenberg Elegies, if you like reading about the responses other people have had to books, you will love this.

After a smoothly written introduction, Birkerts talks about 11 books that were life-changing for him. He returned to these books in later years and as so many of us do when we re-read favorite novels, found the books had changed as he had matured, growing richer and more meaningful.

The books he talks about are:

• J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Knut Hamsun's Pan
• D H Lawrence's Women in Love
• Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
• Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift
• Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
• Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
• Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
• Henry James' The Ambassadors
• Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
• Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid

I had never heard of Hamsun's book or Munro's. I've never read the books by Flaubert, Bellow, and Percy. And I was totally unimpressed with the Salinger, Lawrence, Nabokov, and Ford. The Henry James and Virginia Woolf works are, I believe, among the great novels of the last 150 years, but they didn't change my life in any way when I read them.

Nonetheless, I'm enjoying Birkerts' essays immensely. I can easily understand how they have brought enlightenment, enjoyment, excitement, and other life enhancing experiences to Birkerts and others.

This is another book about books that needs to be on your library shelves.

Kept

D J Taylor, who won the Whitbread for his 2003 biography of Orwell, has written a remarkably authentic-seeming new historical novel called Kept: A Victorian Mystery.

The book has a Trollopean narrator, Dickensian atmospherics, a sensitivity to rural life like that of George Eliot, and a plot that Wilkie Collins would be proud to own. There's a London Megatherium Club, a Carstairs family, a vicar named Josiah Crawley, and allusions to Thackeray, Gissing, Eliot, Edgeworth, Gaskell, and others.

The LC subject headings include Great Britain, Metropolitan Police Office; train robberies; collectors and collecting; mentally ill women; poachers; women domestics; swindlers and swindling; greed; and the all-inclusive City and town life -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction.

This is a humdinger of a novel well deserving of the red star given it by Publisher's Weekly, whose review follows.

This richly textured tour de force from British author Taylor . . . centers on the abduction of disturbed heiress Isabel Ireland, whose husband, Henry, died in a fall from his horse (or a blow to the head) near their estate in Suffolk. Through intriguing letters, diaries and compelling narratives by characters from all levels of 1860s English society, Taylor follows Isabel's determined cousins to remote Easton Hall, where she's being kept by sinister James Dixey, a purported naturalist with initially murky motives. Dixey's henchmen destroy eggs of endangered bird species and maintain vicious dogs that distress his servants, especially precocious Esther Spalding, an endearing young maid who cares for Isabel in the manor's lonely west wing. In squalid, crime-ridden London, police captain McTurk shrewdly links a shady debt collection service and dramatic train robbery to Isabel's abduction. The many facets of this absorbing, multilayered tale come together in an understated but fulfilling resolution.

Ferns

I've ordered The Encyclopedia of Garden Ferns by Sue Olsen. I've had the library's copy for the last month and I'm still engrossed, so I think it's a worthwhile addition to my gardening library.

When the landscapers have finished with our yard some time next week there will be nothing out there except a lace leaf maple and a dwarf lilac. The rest of the garden (formerly known as "lawn") will be a desert of mulch. I'm trying to think of it as a canvas on which I will paint with flowers and ferns, but I keep returning to the picture of a barren wasteland.

The first thing I'm going to do is to put in some large evergreen ferns along the side of our garage to hide the foundation. And in front of those I'll put hostas with blue-shaded leaves. And in there somewhere will be some white astilbes.

Karla has offered me some laurels from her yard and I'll put those along the other side of the yard along the neighbor's garage. In front of those I can put more ferns and hostas, mixed in with fritillaries and helebores.

That's the plan so far. Of course that leaves the rest of the yard with nothing. I'm starting to think about annuals for this year, giving me the winter to come up with a plan. This fall I'll plant lots of spring bulbs. And there you have it.

(Oh, did I mention the yard is all shade all the time?)

Lilac Time

It's lilac time in the Lilac City and I've been wandering around in a fragrant daze for days. Spring fever has hit me badly this year. I'm so far behind on everything I'm just going to throw in the towel.

I'm sweeping my desk clean -- also my inbox and reading pile and everything else -- and starting over. I'm not even going to try to read back blog posts or back issues of the New Yorker or Gourmet. I've even sent back to the library unread all the books I've had out for weeks.

Spring cleaning is underway in Mary's Library. Regular posting will resume soon.