MarysLibrary

Recollection

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.  

-- Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Reading

".....reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you're not there anymore. It's better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal."

--  Mary Karr 'Paris Review' interview Winter 2009

(Thank you Cynthia.)

The Newbery

On Saturday I predicted to my friend Karla that the winner of this year's Newbery was going to be When You Find Me.I had the title wrong but I had the right book. However, I had so little confidence in my prediction I didn't bother posting about it. Darn. Well, if you doubt me, you can get an affidavit from Karla.

The winner is When You Reach Meby Rebecca Stead. And a fine book it is and good reading for adults as well as children.

The Caldecot went to The Lion & the Mouseby Jerry Pinkney.

Civilisation

In spite of the slow conversion of progressive ideas into the fact of history, the Dark Ages have a way of coming back. Civilisation -- the world of affection and reason and freedom and justice -- is a luxury which must be fought for, as dangerous to possess as an oil-field or an unlucky diamond. - Cyril Connolly

Paganini's Ghost

Paul Adam published a wonderful mystery a couple of years back called The Rainaldi Quartet. It was about a luthier (violin maker) and his pal, the policeman, in Cremona. A murder took place and like so much else in Cremona it was deeply interwoven with violins.

Once again in Paganini's Ghost a murder is thought to be interwoven with the violin that Paganini played, The Canon, known for its loud sound, and with a miniture gold and gem encrusted violin that may have been Paganini's at one time.

Adam's books are full of amusing and enlightening information about music and playing and the characters are charming, good at what they do, and sometimes wily in solving the murders that are the center of the plot.

I'm looking forward eagerly to Adam's next violin mystery.

US Figure Skating Championships

I spent the morning at the Spokane Arena at the US Figure Skating Championships. They are being held in Spokane again this year and they will decide who goes to the Olympics in Vancouver next month.

My friend Jennifer won two tickets and invited me to go with her. This morning was the junior men's event, which was just about our speed. We were in the second row, right down on the ice, and it was really exciting. 

Remember this name: Max Aaron. He was spectacularly good, enough so that even Jennifer and I could tell he was a star.

But to be perfectly honest the biggest treat was the Zamboni machine.

What I've Been Doing . . .

. . . instead of reading.

I'm knitting an afghan for Wilhelm. This is one of the three narrow panels. There are two wide panels, twice the width of this one.

I'm using Manos del Uruguay, 100% wool. My local yarn store, A Grand Yarn, lent me the wires to block it with. Click on the photo to see it more clearly.

The Checklist Manifesto

Atul Gawande is a surgeon specializing in endocrine oncology, a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and a writer for the New Yorker magazine. But he found time a while back to take on a WHO committee that was trying to find simple, inexpensive ways to improve the outcome of surgery in developing countries. He reports on this project in his new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

That's a pretty big assignment but hospitals around the world achieved startling results. In the eight hospitals taking part in the initial study major complications for surgical patients fell by 36 percent, deaths fell 47 percent. The results were so stunning that University of Washington Medical Center recommended that this process be used in all Washington State hospitals, and it is.

The magic procedure? A checklist. A short checklist to be gone over in the operating room before the patient is given anesthesia, before making the first incision, and before finishing the operation.

It wasn't easy to create this checklist. Gawande spent a good deal of time looking at the checklists used by people building high-rise buildings and by aircraft pilots. He interviewed the man at Boeing in charge of The Checklist Factory, where checklists for all Boeing aircraft are created, tested, polished, retested, and finally issued to owners of Boeing planes. And after similarly testing and polishing the surgery checklist it was used in hospitals ranging from an isolated facility in Tanzania which is inaccessible by road for part of the year, a hospital in New Delhi with an average of 3 million patients a year (and seven anesthetists), and the London hospital where Prince William was born.

Anyone who has followed Gawande's articles in the New Yorkerknows how clear and lively his writing is and when he has something to as exciting as this checklist project to talk about he excels. Highly recommended.

How to look 10 lbs lighter in a photograph

Find out how here.

Too Much Money

The late Dominick Dunne was a fine man. Having come to grief early in his Hollywood career, he pulled himself together and make a spectacular comeback by doing what he thought was right and just, telling the stories of people who we poorly served by the American justice system.

His daughter was murdered in 1982. The man who killed her, John Thomas Sweeney, served less than 4 years for manslaughter despite his history of abusing women. (Sweeney subsequently changed his name to John Maura and purportedly works as a chef in the Pacific Northwest.) Dunne refused to become obsessed with this man and instead turned to writing about situations where justice was influenced by money and fame.

I've recently read Dunne's two novels about New York society in which he circulated for the last 30 years of his life. He knew everyone and everyone's secrets and he wrote a monthly diary for Vanity Fair about the goings on in the society set. These two novels are about high society scandal with the major players thinly disguised. (If Harry Soverign, talk show host, isn't Larry King I'll give up my subscription to Vanity Fair.)

People Like Us, which is the better book, was published in 1988, and bears much resenblance to Anthony Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now, a story about a wealthy man making his way into London society much as Elias Renthal rises in New York society in Dunne's novel. Too Much Money, which was just published in 2009, continues the stories of many of the figures in the first novel. Both are entertaining and for me at least, entirely satisfying.