MarysLibrary

The Improbable Libraries

The Improbable Libraries in this little book are those that display clever design (Kansas City with it's book-lined facade), are located in unusual places (the airport in Amsterdam), or move about (the library that travels by elephant in rural Asia and the burro libraries of South America." The pictures are lovely, but because of the small size of the book they are not at their best. The text is just basic explanation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this tour through the world's most unusual and in some cases most useful libraries.

Middlemarch meets Wuthering Heights

Grey Wethers by Vita Sackville-West is a mix of Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights crossed with Far From the Madding Crowd and A Room with a View and has some characters who would have fit nicely into Rebecca and Cold Comfort Farm.

It's a novel filled with not very good descriptions of the wild downs around the small town in which the daughter of a gentleman falls in love with a working man with a peculiar mother who never comes downstairs and a brother who is "simple" but wily. This love can't be allowed, so when an older gentleman (50-something) meets the girl (19) and wants to marry her, well . . .

But the lovers cannot be denied and so one snowy night they disappear together onto the downs during the blizzard. 

Grey Wethers was published in 1923 and was not particularly popular, certainly not compared to Sackville-West's other novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent. I've been reading the new Matthew Dennison biography of the author and wanted to read all of her fiction, but as Grey Wethers was never reprinted and apparently no one has bothered to put it in digital form and it is scarce and therefore expensive. The librarians at the Spokane Public Library got it for me on interlibrary loan and I thank them.

Wethers (the word means sheep) are sarcen stones.

Satin Island - is it Booker material?

Because Tom McCarthy's Satin Island is on the Booker longlist I borrowed it from the library, and despite finding it puzzling and uninspiring and the temptation to toss it aside, I finished reading it. The book must have some value or the smart people on the Booker prize panel would not have chosen it out of the millions of books published in English in the last year. But I don't see what they saw.

Good-bye Deborah Knott

Kaye Barley at the Meanderings and Muses blog has posted an essay by Margaret Maron explaining why she is finishing off her Deborah Knott mystery series with the just-published 20th book, Long Upon the Land.

I'm  sorry to see the series end. Maron has, since the first book in the series, Bootlegger's Daughter, been one of my favorite mystery writers. I lived for a few years in the 60s in North Carolina where the stories are set and this woman can make me smell the cured tobacco leaves and feel the humidity (and the chiggers) like no other North Carolina writer.  

It may be time to start again at the beginning and re-read these marvelous stories of life in a big, loving family, living on the land, making one's way in a fast-changing world, and enjoying the myriad attractions of a state that has it all from the ocean to the mountains, agriculture to manufacturing, rich history, beautiful music, and some of the best universities in the country.

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt  gets three and a half stars out of five. It is unusual and charming and will appeal to a lot of readers. Caroline Preston's novel cleverly tells the story of Frankie Pratt in pictures and a little bit of text. Mostly the reader understands what is happening by looking at memorabilia from the years of Frankie's life from her high school graduation in 1920 through the satisfactory ending: ticket stubs, menus, scraps of cloth, post cards, and photos. Very easy to read. It hit the spot for me.