MarysLibrary

The Girl in a Blue Dress

If the world is flat, as they are constantly telling us, why is it I can't get my hands on a book that has just made it to the Booker Longlist? The only book on the list that I'm really dying to read is Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress. (Well, maybe I'd read Joseph O'Neill's Netherland if it showed up on my doorstep.)

Girl in a Blue Dress is - if one goes along with the reasoning - one of the 13 most important books published in the UK in the last year. And getting a copy in the US is a struggle.

I can wait for amazon.com to release it. On 15 December! I can order it from amazon.co.uk, where it will be released on 15 August. But the cost of shipping is measured in megapounds. Or I can buy the sole copy listed on abe.com, from Germany of all places, and pay megamarks.

Well, it's probably a sour book anyhow. I'll just re-read Bleak House.

Duncan Garden

The most recent newsletter of the Friends of Manito had a plea for people to help with weeding in Duncan Garden, which is suffering this year from a plague of bittercress. So I went over to the park with my garden gloves and my weeding tool and volunteered.

I spent about an hour this morning weeding the triangle of purple lobelia and dusty miller in the middle of the back of the above picture just to the left of the fountain. At the rate I'm going there will be snow on the ground before I finish that one bed.

The garden is large and the weeds are many. Any volunteers?

How Fiction Works

James Wood's just-published book, How Fiction Works, has arrived and I'm almost finished reading it already. It is described as being in the tradition of E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and so it is, only better. I recently re-read Forster's book, which was published in 1927, and that book is every bit as perceptive as I remembered it. But Wood is more so.

Says he: "In this book I try to ask some of the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognize a brilliant use of detail in fiction? What is point of view and how does it work? What is imaginative sympathy? Why does fiction move us?"

Wood answers his own questions in clear, readable prose, and offers insights into works as diverse as War and Peace and Make Way for Ducklings.

Highly recommended.

William Cullen Bryant

So live that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

-- from Thanatopsis

The Belles of St Trinian's

Last night we watched the old Alastair Sim movie, The Belles of St Trinian's. St Trinian's is a school for young ladies located in Barsetshire - one of the students is named Crawley. But one could hardly get farther in spirit from Trollope's beloved but fictional county than St Trinians. The school motto is flagrante delicto.

There are five St Trinian's movies, based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle. Four of the films were done in the 50s and 60s. The first two star the inimitable Alastair Sim but all include Joyce Grenfell and George Cole (Flash Harry), two superb supporting characters.

I know this because I checked the Internet Movie Database where I learned that a new Trinian's movie was made in 2007 with Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Stephen Fry, Nathanial Parker, and others. I'm on the lookout for that. Alas, it has not yet been released in the US.

In the movie we watched last night, the first of the series, filmed in 1954, the plot revolves around a prize-winning Arabian horse that the father of one of the girls is running in a race nearby. The headmistress has put all of the school funds on him, but her brother's money is on another horse.

The sixth form, led by Miss Flitton's niece, Arabella, is out to steal the Arabian horse so that her father's horse (Miss Flitton's brother's horse) will win. But before they can steal it, the Arabian horse goes missing, soon to be found in the fourth form dormitory. They have preemptively stolen the horse to protect it. The sixth form promptly barricades the hall to prevent the horse from leaving the building. Meanwhile the local Barsetshire constabulary has sent an undercover officer to look into things, Miss Ruby Gates, played by Joyce Grenfell with great aplomb.

And so it goes. Don't miss this exemplary demonstration of British wit and charm.

Journey Toward Justice

I haven't read this book, Journey Toward Justice by Dennis Fritz. But judging from the John Grisham book on the same subject it should be intriguing.

Fritz was arrested in 1987 in Ada, OK, along with a man named Ron Williamson, for a murder they didn't commit. The entire law enforcement community was sure they were guilty even though evidence was almost totally lacking. So they made some up.

Grisham's book, The Innocent Man, concentrated on Williamson. This book is by the second falsely accused and convicted man, who also spent more than 10 years in jail trying to convince the world of his innocence. He must be a remarkable man to have recovered from his experience. He now works with The Innocence Project, a group that goes to bat for the wrongfully convicted often using DNA evidence.

Migraine

When the scientists finish curing cancer and the common cold, I hope they tackle migraines.

Nice To Come Home To

It may have been the attractive cover, or maybe somebody put me on to this book because it has one of the great cat/human relationships of all time, but for some no longer remembered reason I borrowed Rebecca Flowers' Nice To Come Home To from the library. I started it with the Nancy Pearl Rule of 50 in mind but I swept past page 50 with all sails set.

This first novel appeals to me in many ways. It's nicely written - women's fiction rather than chic lit. Most of the characters are a combination of charming, infuriating, clueless, and in the midst of change. And the neighborhood of Adams Morgan in Washington, DC, is so well described and so important to the plot that it is almost a character itself.

In a one-two punch our heroine loses her job and her boyfriend on the same day. The latter is the best portrayed hypochondriac since Meg Ryan's Baltimore boyfriend in Sleepless in Seattle and she is well rid of him. Just because it annoys him, the man's cat is off to the pound where its life is measured in days. Our heroine is well rid of him - as her friends tell her.

She commiserates with the owner of the cafe on the corner, who has his own relationship difficulties. Her sister, who is raising a child alone, is not as helpful as Prudence would like, and when her sister meets a too-good-to-be-true beau and has problems of her own to cope with she becomes an additional burden.

Time (or rather money) is running out. To make ends meet Prudence takes a job in a friend's upscale dress shop, which she loves and is good at but which seems rather a comedown after her high-powered but now long gone career. Where should she go from here?

I await eagerly the next novel by Rebecca Flowers.

Happy Fourth of July!

Miss Darcy