MarysLibrary

Reading with the Fair Elaine

Yesterday I brought two books with me to read with Elaine, which is unusual. She normally picks the books we will read, and she has, by the way, excellent taste in literature (meaning that I like the same books.)

My contributions were One Cool Friend, by Toni Buzzeo and illustrated by David Small, about a very polite lad who acquires a penguin, called Magellan of course. And Sleep like a Tiger, which is beautifully illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski, but otherwise sort of meh. It's written by Mary Logue. These were runners up to the Caldecott medalist, This Is Not My Hat, by Jon Klassen, which we read a while ago and both loved so much we read it twice.

Other near-misses are Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett and illustrated byJon Klassen (whose book won, see above) which is darling, and Creepy Carrots, by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Peter Brown, which is not. The other runner-up is Green, by Laura Vacarro Seeger, which I have requested from the library but have not yet seen.

Elaine's contributions were Muncha, Muncha, Muncha, by Candace Fleming, about a man with a vegetable garden and three rabbits who sneak in (tipity-tipity-tipity pat) to eat the lettuces and sprouts and carrots. Charming. She also chose an Eric Carle book, Walter the Baker, which is a fanciful take on the invention of the pretzel.

Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister

Farewell, Dorothy Parker (2013) by Ellen Meister is a delightful high-concept, what-if sort of novel. What if Dorothy Parker came back as a ghost and took to mentoring a movie critic who is fearless in her reviews but can't translate that spunk into her personal life?

Violet Epps lets her personal and work life get out of hand. She can't seem to stop her truly awful boyfriend from moving in with her, she is faced with gross insubordination from an employee, and most important, she isn't assertive enough to win custody of her niece, Delaney, whose parents were killed in an auto accident in which she was badly injured. After getting the teenager through the worst of this wrenching crisis, Violet loses temporary custody to the girl's grandparents. Delaney is crushed and regressing.

Lunching at the Algonquin one day, Violet discovers that when the hotel's guest book is opened to the page on which Dorothy Parker signed her name, Mrs Parker's ghost is let free. Violet steals the book.

In a series of sometimes touching and sometimes hilarious scenes, Mrs Parker does a prodigous amount of drinking (though perhaps no more than she did while alive) and advises Violet to be more assertive, not to say aggresive. With the help of her ghostly mentor, Violet convinces the deadbeat boyfriend their affair is over. This leaves her free to date the good-looking and sweet-natured martial arts instructor she has a crush on. But Mrs Parker goes a bit too far and Violet is afraid she has chased him away. Will nothing go right in her life?

Certainly she has a problem in the office with Andi, the new editorial assistant with attitude. While the boss is out of town Andi takes it upon herself to edit Violet's movie review with disastrous results. With her burgeoning assertiveness Violet tells the boss she wants the girl fired. He says she may do that or if she wishes, put her on probation. Violet opts for probation and intends to make the girl's life miserable until she discovers a little something about Andi and a way to get her to cooperate.

Most important is the court battle for custody of Delaney, one of the most charming and realistic teenagers in recent fiction. But when Violet takes her to an Off-Off-Broadway show with mature content Delaney's future is in jeapordy unless Violet can find a way to convince the judge that she is not exposing the child to pornography and that the grandparents are not the right people to nurture her.

Filled with Dorothy Parker's wit and with some touching scenes as Violet tries to help her to move on from her ghostly life, Farewell, Dorothy Parker is among the books I've most enjoyed so far this year.

If you are interested in Mrs Parker be sure to visit the Dorothy Parker Society web site.

 

The Fun Stuff by James Wood

Keith Moon is not one of my favorite people. But James Wood is, so when I borrowed from the library his new book, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, thinking it was essays of literary criticism, which it is, mostly, I read the first essay in the book, the title essay, even though it's about Keith Moon. If you had asked me a week ago who he was I might possibly have been able to bring up "a rock musician," but I might not. What instrument he played and for what group - blank.

Wood explains his fascination with the drummer, Keith Moon, as his adolescent rebellion against classical music. Wood was a student and chorister at Durham Cathedral and studied piano and trumpet along with the usual musicology and harmony and such. But he wanted to play the drums and he was just in time to catch Keith Moon and The Who at their best. And apparently their best was very good indeed. Moon, Wikipedia tells us, was voted in 2011, 35 years after his death, the second best drummer of all time by the readership of Rolling Stone magazine. (I wonder who was # 1.)

Uninterested as I am in rock music and Keith Moon, I read every page of this essay eagerly. Wood, like John McPhee, has a knack of making almost anything interesting, and his admiration for Moon makes me think I should look up a Who CD at the library and listen for the things Wood talks about. Apparently Moon was the quintessential out-of-control musician. "It is hard," Wood says, "not to think of Keith Moon's life as a 'perpetual happening'; a gaudy, precarious, self-destructing art installation whose gallery placard simply reads: 'The Rock and Roll Life: Late Twentieth Century.'"

Wood goes on to discuss Marilyn Robinson's books and in particular, Home. He analyzes Cormac McCarthy's The Road. He explires the work of Ian McEwan. And he speaks with authority about some authors of whom I have not heard: Aleksander Hemon, Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, Ismail Kadare.

The essays about authors with whom I'm familiar were first rate: Paul Auster, Richard Yates, W G Sebald, Tolstoy. Particularly crisp and insightful are his comments about Robert Alter's translation of the Pentateuch, the work of George Orwell, the novels of Thomas Hardy, and the criticism of Edmund Wilson. He describes the writing of the last as "... marked by its eighteenth century robustness, by its glinting, pugnacious clarity, by its need to turn analysis into narrative, by its exhaustive and sometimes exhausting scholarship, and by the tense, prosaic music of its sentences." Whew!

Most of these essays were published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books between 2004 and 2011.

Anita Brookner on writing for the Tortoise Market

 

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. 

-- Anita Brookner

 

 

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

This book is known in our house as Our Man in the Willows.

In his Christmas sermon years ago our priest referred to "The Wind in the Willows by Graham Greene." At the end of the pew, a bookish friend, Gary Carter, leaned forward to look at me just as I leaned forward to look at him and for much of the rest of the service we had trouble stifling our giggles.

It is only now that I'm getting around to reading this children's classic (written by Kenneth Grahame) and once again I'm stifling giggles. Mr Toad of Toad Hall is an outrageous, short-cycle bipolar amphibian with an ego unrivaled in literature. His adventures include crashing numerous new cars, which he can afford to buy because he is a very wealthy toad indeed, stealing somebody else's car (twice), disguising himself as a washerwoman, stealing a horse, and eventually joining his friends, Badger, Water Rat, and Mole, to storm Toad Hall, which in his absence has been taken over by the animals from the Wild Wood, ferrets, weasels, and stoats, wicked creatures who have posted lookouts with guns to protect their newly-acquired fortress.

I haven't seen such a book, but I'll bet some scholar has written an academic interpretation of this 1908 story of revolution and restoration, of the foolishness of the governing class, and the importance of solidarity among the proletariat.

But it's much more fun to read it as the story of little animals who are sometimes wise and sometimes not, who work together to rescue one of their own despite his many and egregious character faults, and of course, who "mess about with boats."

Southern Discomfort by Margaret Maron

Recently, and almost entirely by accident, I've been reading books set in rural Virginia and North Carolina. The best of them are this series of mysteries by Margaret Maron, featuring Judge Deborah Knott, a district judge in fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. The first book in the series, Bootlegger's Daughter, swept the prizes the year it was published (1992), but this second book, Southern Discomfort (1993) is to my mind even better. The plot, development of characters, and layers of southern charm are all very well done, especially the charm and the local color.

And the rural area around Durham and Chapel Hill is colorful indeed, with not just Deborah's father, the bootlegger, but a county courthouse and the lawyers and judges who work there, tobacco fields, Baptist churches of differing flavors, and the usual large family gatherings. Sibling rivalry continues although Deborah and her brothers (eight of them, if I recall) are grown and some of them married with families and teen-aged children of their own.

As the book opens Deborah is being sworn in as a judge, followed by a reception with The Marthas, women from a local church, doing the catering. Chapter Two takes us through Deborah's first day as a judge. She does very well, choosing to dismiss a case against the richest woman in town, accused of having white lightening in her cellar. The sheriff found it, it was there all right, but the woman was a nototious teetotaler and a recent widow and it was clear to everyone that she never knew her husband's liquor was in the basement. A couple of other cases will pop up later in the book: DWI, domestic abuse, and driving without a license.

As a campaign promise, Deborah said she would work with the team of women who are, without the help  of any men, putting up a house for a poor family. Deborah needs some tools, which she borrows from her brother, Herman, along with his truck and his daughter. Annie Sue, who is eager to be an electrician like her dad, has proven her skills by rigging a stove burner so that whenever it was turned on or off the front doorbell would ring. "Herman thought it was sort of funny till he went to plug in his razor and the bathroom lights when off and on in rhythmical sequence."

Herman has been feeling poorly and one night when he is taken to the hospital with a presumed heart attack it's discovered that he has been ingesting arsenic for the last week. Who would want him dead? And does this shed any light on the unexpected deaths of the fathers of two of Annie Sue's friends? And just to make it more complicated why are cats and dogs disappearing lately?

When one of the girls is found in the partially completed house having been attacked and her would--be rapist is found dead nearby, hit in the head with Deborah's hammer, things really heat up. An exhumation follows.

Deborah is able to solve the puzzle of the disappearing house pets (and make sure it doesn't happen again) but she is stumped at who could be poisoning her brother and why. A video of the reception after her robing may give her an answer.

There is a liqueur called Southern Comfort from which Maron has taken her title. Originally made in 1874 in New Orleans, it is composed of neutral spirits, spices, and whiskey flavoring. Not whiskey (except in one special line) but whiskey flavoring. It is one of the ingredients in an Alabama Slammer.

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani

When I was in college I drove to school every day in my 1955 Buick Dynaflow. These trips were almost entirely uneventful. But one morning when it had snowed heavily overnight I slid into a snowbank on Main Street in front of the Braleys' house. Arthur came out and helped shovel me out and I was on my way. No big deal. But when I got home that evening, my mother was waiting at the door to see if I'd been hurt or if there had been any damage to the car. How did she know it had happened? Six or eight people had phoned her that day to ask about it. That's how it is in a small town. Everybody knows your news before you do.

Big Stone Gap, a real place in the Blue Ridge Mountains of far southwestern Virginia, is a town like that, or it was in 1978 when Adriana Trigiani's novel takes place. Ave Maria Mulligan is the town pharmacist like her father before her and at 35, she is considered the town spinster. She has a reasonably full life, directing the town's summer drama production (named for The Trail of the Linesome Pine, the 1908 book by John Fox), delivering prescriptions to shut-ins, reading books from the bookmobile, chatting with her friend Iva Lou, and hanging out with her best friend, Theodore Tipton, band director at the high school .

But she isn't happy. She would like to have a man of her own. She is confused by a letter left to be read after her mother's death telling her a surprising family secret. She is rejected by the man she thinks she is in love with. And a campagin visit to Big Stone Gap by Senate candidate John Warner, accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, provides only a short period of excitement before Ave's life settles back into its boring routine.

Everybody in town knows about her family secret almost before she does and her friendship with Theodore is well and truly chewed over by everyone in town. Ave longs to visit Italy, her mother's country of birth, where she has aunts and cousins and other relatives. She wants to get married - at least until she gets a couple of unexpected proposals when she finds she doesn't really want to get married after all.

The book is full of small but interesting (to the people in town and to the reader who soon begins to feel like one of them) plot twists. The residents of the town are very nicely described and many of them change in one way or another during the course of the story. Ave in particular struggles, trying to figure out who she is, who she wants to be, and how to get there.

I knew about this book, which was published in 2000, but I wasn't interested in reading it until I read a review of Milk Glass Moon, posted recently by Les at Prairie Horizons. That novel is the third in the series and I came away from the review wanting to read it, but these books must be read in order so I started with this one. It was interesting to see that Les and some others who left reviews on Goodreads had trouble getting into the story. I was delighted from the first page, in particular because of the voice of the narrator, Ave Maria:

This will be a good weekend for reading. I picked up a dozen of Vernie Crabtree's killer chocolate chip cookies at the French Club bake sale yesterday. (I don't know what she puts in them, but they're chewy and crisp;y at the same time.) Those, a pot of coffee, and a good book are all I will need for the rainy weekend rolling in. It's early September in our mountains, so it's warm during the day, but tonight will bring a cool mist to remind us that fall is right around the corner.

The Wise County Bookmobile is one of the most beautiful sights in the world to me. When I see it lumbering down the mountain road like a tank, then turning wide and easing onto Shawnee Avenue, I flag it down like an old friend. I've waited on this corner every Friday since I can remember.

How can that beginning not draw you into the life of the narrator? I wanted to visit that bookmobile and have the driver, Iva Lou Wade, recommend some new books to me. And I'd dearly love to taste those chocolate chip cookies. This is a book that is heart-warming and familiar without being at all sentimental. Give it a try.

And the Buick? It threw a rod or something and was towed off to the junk yard. I dearly wish I still had it today. Mine did not have whitewalls.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

It must have been in the late 1950s when I read The Moonstone. I remember little about it except that there was water (a pond, I thought - actually it's the ocean), a gem (the moonstone of the title is not a moonstone; it's a diamond) stolen from an Indian statue; a team of Brahmins who are trying to reclaim the stone, and the mysterious disappearance of the diamond early in the book.

The story is told by a series of narrators who speak of what they know first-hand, starting with Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder's steward/butler, a wily old man, deeply loyal to the Verinder family, much respected by the family and the other servants, and by the detective, Sergeant Cuff, who is called in to help find the diamond.

The second narrator, a poor relation, Miss Clack, is as smug and self-focused as any character I've seen since Bruce in The Little Ottleys. (She capitalizes Me in her narrative.) She is a hypocritical evangelical who can rationalize her selfish behavior no matter how bizarre and is insensitive to the people she is attempting to proselytize. Fortunately, most of the time she is also hilarious.

We also hear from the hero of the story, Franklin Blake, and from the family solicitor, the village doctor's assistant, a world traveler (who bears a good deal of resemblance to Richard Burton), and Sgt Cuff. Each has a piece to add to the puzzle but it is only at the very end that we are able to see the entire picture. Meanwhile there are half a dozen dramatic discoveries that re-route the plot in unlikely directions.

Wilkie Collins wrote some 30 novels and twice that many short stories. The Moonstone belongs to the genre called sensation novels, which were popular in the mid-to-late Victorian era, as do some of Collins' other well-known novels like The Woman in White and Armadale. The exciting plot elements in these novels make them hard to put down and their clever denouments make them satisfying to the casual reader. Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens and the complex plots are reminiscent of Dickens' novels.

The plot of The Moonstone hinges in part on the opiate, laudanum, a drug which Collins began taking at about the time he was writing The Moonstone (1868) and to which he was addicted for the last years of his life.

Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage

Here's the set up. Moses LoBeau lives in Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, with her "parents," Miss Lana and the Colonel. She washed up in Tupelo 11 years ago during a hurricane and she is looking for her "upstream mother" - she figures if she came floating downstream her birth mother must be upstream somewhere.

One of her schemes to find her upstream mother is to put notes in bottles and have people from Tupelo drop them into the Neuse River when they visit Goldsboro or Raleigh. Since it's on the Neuse and near the coast I put Tupelo around the location of New Bern.

Mo's name was Lobo until she started school. Miss Lana decided she needed a name with a bit more class so she changed it to LoBeau with the accent on the end rather than at the beginning. Mo's best friend is Dale Earnhardt Johnson (his dad names his children after famous people) and the story begins as Mo calls into Dale's window at 6:30 in the morning to wake him up. Miss Lana is gone and the Colonel isn't up to cooking so she has to open the Colonel's cafe this morning and she needs help from Dale.

Since Mo and Dale aren't allowed to use the stove, they have to be a little creative with the menu. No coffee, but the beverage special is Mountain Dew. No bacon and eggs, so the special is a peanut butter and banana sandwich, on Wonder bread, hand-squished or fluffy, with or without crust.

As Mo and Dale hustle to fill the orders of the regulars, Mayor Little, Jesse (whose boat is missing, something Dale may know a bit too much about), Grandmother Miss Lacy Thornton, and Reverend Thompson and his son, Thessalonians, a stranger in a dust-colored Impala drives into the parking lot.

It's Detective Joe Starr from Winston-Salem, on his way to solve a murder in Wilmington. But it isn't long before Jesse turns up dead and the detective has work to do in Tupelo Landing.

If you have read Because of Winn-Dixie you will recognize the tone of Three Times Lucky, very southern, charming, full of wit, and with a good solid plot to carry you along.

 

Reading with the Fair Elaine

At last I got to read with the Fair Elaine again today. First I was in the hospital and then I wasn't allowed out of the house (physical therapists don't hesitate to tell you what you may and what you may not do), and then there was ice. I was going to brave it last week until Wilhelm slipped and fell and I figured I'd better not risk it.

But today is sunny and the road and sidewalks are clear. I was three houses away when the door opened and Elaine yelled, "Hello!!" What a treat to see her again.

So what did we read? We read The Red Boat by Hannah Cumming. It was good, but not great.

Count the Sheep to Sleep by Philippa Rae and illustrated by Stephanie Rohr was much better. We both loved it. The book starts out with 10 sheep but they are doing various dangerous things and between losing a wheel from a skateboard and landing in a lion's den, slowly, the number of sheep declines.

But our very favorite, the best book of the week was Toads on Toast by Linda Bailey, illustrated by Colin Jack. In this story a fox, who fancies himself a gourmet cook, buys a lot of cookbooks telling him how to cook toads. When he goes to the pond and captures a bag full of baby toads and prepares to make Toads on Toast, Mamma Toad offers to teach him how to make Toad in the Hole instead. (This is the Toad in the Hole that is also called Egg in the Basket and involves an egg and not sausages.) A delightful story with equally delightfull illustrations.