MarysLibrary

Four by Four Meme

I just picked up this meme from Cornflower, who got it from Eat Drink Live. It's fun.

Name four jobs you've held.

1. Newspaper reporter on the Passaic Herald News. My favorite of all the jobs I've had.
2. Bookseller. I was a bookseller at Borders back in the days when Oprah first created her book club. You wouldn't believe the number of new readers that book club brought into the store. I also worked part time for years at the Gilpin House Book Store, where I met Wilhelm.
3. Librarian. At TRW's Washington, DC, facility.
4. Computer programmer. No education, no training, no experience. TRW was wonderful about letting you try whatever you wanted to do. I segued into an editing job after a couple of years, but I did write some successful code and I was the project configuration manager for a while before I went.

Name four places you've lived.

1. Acushnet, Massachusetts. Just outside of New Bedford. The whale ship Acushnet is the one Melville sailed on, out of New Bedford, of course.
2. Paris. Mais oui.
3. Hephzibah, Georgia. Downwind from a paper plant and across the road from a drag racing track. Not the most felicitous place I've lived.
4. Durham, North Carolina. No, wait, Nutley, New Jersey. Alexandria, Virginia. Fort Benning, Georgia. Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Spokane, Washington!

Four places I've been on vacation.

1. The San Juan Islands.
2. Bermuda.
3. Hawaii
4. Cape Cod. You'll notice there's a strong salt water theme here.

Four favorite foods.

1. Ice cream
2. Whipped cream
3. Portugese sweet bread
4. Cod (also scallops, fried clams, lobster, crab, hallibut, etc. See above re salt water theme.)

100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read

I've recently acquired this newly published book by Karl Bridges, a librarian at the University of Vermont: 100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read. For those of us who have read our way through much of the canon this list brings us titles that are not new (all the books Bridges lists were published before 1997) but are new to us.

Some are lesser known novels by authors we already know, like Laurie Colwin and Don DeLillo. Others are books that were once quite popular but have been sort of forgotten, like The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. And many are books we have never heard of by authors we have never heard of.

I checked my database and found that I own four or five of these titles. The library has another 30 or more. I've mooched another 10 or 12 and Gutenberg has posted etexts of some others.

That's enough books for me to read one a week for the next year. With interlibrary loan I can acquire the rest of them as I need them and hope to finish reading all 100 by the end of 2009 if I read them at the rate of one a week, which isn't overly ambitious.

I feel a New Year's Resolution coming on.

Answers to the Math Quiz

1. All 57 Trollope novels are in the Complete Works.

2. The four parts of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time are called Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter The three volumes in each are more loosely representative of the twelve months.

3. The Three Musketeers, One Hundred Years of Solitude, A Tale of Two Cities, Catch 22, The House of the Seven Gables, Three Men in a Boat, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Nine Tailors, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The 39 Steps, Butterfield 8, Seventeen, 1984, A Tale of Two Cities, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, anything by Janet Evanovich, and many more.

4.The eight men going to the graveyard in "Frankie and Johnnie" are the corpse, the preacher, and the pall bearers. The corpse will remain behind.

5. Keats was buried in Rome.

Thanksgiving

Thursday was Thanksgiving, which is a time that always sets me to thinking about what I have to be thankful for. This year the list is long and includes the continued good health of Wilhelm's parents, the recovery of my sister from a scary disease, our ongoing delight in our neighbors and friends here on 22nd Avenue, and our joy at being in Spokane, which really is near nature and near perfect.

I'm also grateful for other things: The Spokane Symphony and the resplendent new Fox, the Civic Theater (where we saw a show yesterday before going to Cyrus O'Leary's for burgers with friends), A Grand Yarn (my local yarn store), Auntie's Bookstore, Huppins (the best place in town to buy a TV or a camera, bar none), Tillamook ice cream, Picabu bistro, and the remarkable Spokane Library, which does more with less money than any other institution in town.

And one particular thing I've been grateful for in recent years is the world of bloggers. Albert Schweitzer said, "Do something for somebody every day for which you do not get paid." So many people post every day about cooking and knitting, their jobs and their families, and especially about the books they are reading, a little gift from them to us every day, and something for us all to be thankful for year round.

Reread Right Away

Some books have to be reread right away . . . you love it so much that you don't want to leave it. -- Susan Sontag

From The Book Lover's Cookbook by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen

Book Lover's Cookbook

Serendipity Day at the library is always fun for me. I wander around and pick books off the shelf almost arbitrarily and take them home to look them over. Usually I find I'm not all that interested in the book about agronomy in subtropical Africa or the latest novel by somebody I've never heard of (and will never hear of again), but sometimes I hit on a treasure.

Such a treasure is The Book Lover's Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature and the Passages that Feature Them, by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen.

Recipes range from tea cakes (mentioned in The Great Gatsby) and oatmeal cookies (apparently that was the kind of cookie envisioned in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie) to Mr Casaubon's Chicken Noodle Soup (from Middlemarch) to pork roast with cabbage (served by Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

There is so much food in literature. The book offers a recipe for oysters (mentioned in "The Walrus and the Carpenter"), fried green tomatoes (featured at the Whistle Stop Cafe), strawberry fudge (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), liniment cake (Anne of Green Gables), tarts ("Mr and Mrs Dove," by Katherine Mansfield and Jane Eyre), punch (Pride and Prejudice), onion soup (Les Miserables), and . . . and . . . and . . .

Along with quotations from the books that inspired these recipes are quotations about books and reading, all of them inspiring. I haven't made anything from these recipes, but the book is so readable I don't need to use it in that way to enjoy it.

"My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel, because the meals get very crummy." -- Ann Tyler

Perused

I borrow a lot of books from the library that I just want to take a look at and don't plan to read in full, so they go back without making it to my list of the books I've "read." One of these is Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, compiled and edited by Jules Chametzky, et al.

I spent a couple of hours reading some two dozen of the hundreds of entries in this outstanding 1,221-page collection that covers the years 1654 to the present and includes lyrics to classic American songs, Jewish humor, drama, excerpts from novels, poetry -- the works.

I started with the piece by Irving Howe on Sholom Aleichem, a short story by Anna Yezierska, and the introductions to the essay by Paul Goodman and the short story and essay by Philip Roth. These are authors I've become interested in lately, in part because of the lecture series on Jewish American Literature I've been going to at my local library.

I read a section of the diary of Mordecai Sheftall from 1778 describing the capture of the Revolutionary Georgia military unit of which he was a part by British soldiers. I read some poetry by Joseph Rolnik and Yunge aesthetics with whom he was associated.

I read some of the letters in "A Bintl Briv," a collection of letters to the editors of the Yiddish daily Forverts. They are much more entertaining than the Bintel Blog that is the contemporary English-language version of this feature. I read all of the Jewish jokes, which were hilariously funny. We discussed Jewish humor at the first of our Jewish Literature lectures, but the essense of this genre escapes analysis.

Finally I read part of the except from Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City. I had to tear myself away from it. I'm a great admirer of Kazin's literary criticism and now I see I'm going to have to read his memoirs and other writings as well.

Cynthia Ozick, Harold Roth, Tillie Olsen, everybody is here. This book would make a good Christmas present. Or Hanukkah present. Or a present for any other occasion.

New York Times 100 Best Books of 2007

The New York Times has announced it's list of best books for 2007. The list will be published in the 2 December issue of the newspaper.

A Short Math Quiz for English Majors

1. Anthony Trollope wrote 57 novels. How many are included in the Complete Works?

2. Anthony Powell's multi-volume work, A Dance to the Music of Time has four sections with three volumes each. What do those four parts and their volumes represent?

3. Name four novels with a number in the title.

4. In the song, "Frankie and Johnnie," the lyrics go: "eight men are goin' to the graveyard, but only seven are a'comin' back." Explain

5. If Keats was born in October of 1795 and died in February 1821, where was he buried?

Lottery

Everybody loves Lottery, by Patricia Wood. And in theory I should love it, too. I have been a fan of "Flowers for Algernon" since I taught it back in the 1960s and I loved the movie, Forrest Gump. Lottery is based on a similar premise. The story is told by a man who is only a single IQ point above what is commonly described as "mentally retarded."

This character, Perry Crandall, wins the Washington State lottery. His sudden acquisition of $12 million brings his despicable family, who have ignored him since his beloved grandmother died, flocking around to try to get their hands on some of this money. His friends, his real friends, benefit from his good fortune, but only because he chooses to be generous to them, as they have been to him in the past within their much less expansive means.

A sweet story that we are warned in the blurb will be a sad one at times, Lottery is the sort of book I should be raving about. That isn't happening. I don't know why. If I figure it out I'll let you know. Meanwhile, I'm going to stop reading at page 84 and return to War and Peace.

Oh, by the way, the author, who lives on a sailboat moored in Hawaii, was inspired to write this novel when her father won the lottery. One wonders how much of the greed and sleaze described in this novel is based on real life experience.