MarysLibrary

How Old Is Mary's Library?

It is the anniversary of my first blog post back in 2006, so Mary's Library is 12 years old. So many years . . . so many books . . . so many new friends. 

The War I Finally Won

About this time each year I try to predict the winners of the Newbery and Caldecott medals. I've had a pretty good track record in the past.

I hope I'm right this year about the Newbery because The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is everything a children's book ought to be. A previous novel about the  same characters, The War that Saved My Life, was a Newbery Honor Book in 2016.

This review from The New York Times by Laurel Snyder agrees with me.

Twelfth Night

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

  Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
 
  All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

        --  T S Eliot

Christmas: A Biography is fascinating but alas biased and inaccurate

Judith Flanders has written some excellent books about the Victorian house and the Victorian city and so I looked forward eagerly to Christmas: A Biography. Unfortunately, although there is a lot of information about the origins and development of various Christmas customs, much of what she writes is for me not entirely believable.

A short synopsis: Olde English (and German and Scandinavian) Christmas traditions are neither as old as we have been led to believe, nor do they or the holiday itself have strong connections to Christianity. In the last 200 years the holiday has been taken over entirely by greedy Capitalists.

I suspect Flanders lives in that elite Progressive bubble we hear so much about. She knows no Christians and sees very little Christian activity around her and assumes that there is and has been very little of either anywhere at any time. 

I have always believed the details in Flanders' books. Then I read in this book that the Christmas season is "the precipitating factor in an annual peak in divorce rates, or the period when domestic violence rises by a third." How an annual divorce rate can be tied to a season I'm not certain. The rise in violence after football games has been thoroughly debunked, although there are those who continue to believe it in the face of significant evidence to the contrary, and this makes me very skeptical of the Christmas violence theory. Her mention of Thanksgiving falling on November 31st in 1939 finished off any credibility she had left.

Blogger Elaine of Random Jottings is going on a cruise. Check the link on the left to get there. This will be an exciting adventure.