Stuff and Nonsense | Where I talk about books ...

Wordless Wednesday: Happy Winter-een-mas!

2012-01-25T07:37:00.000-05:00

Happy Winter-een-mas to all, and to all a good game!

'Girls are always happier married, I believe.'

2012-01-24T07:44:00.000-05:00

Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford (Carroll & Graf, 1976)

'Oh dear,' said Paul glomily, 'it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?'

Paul Fotheringay is in a funk. He has written a heartbreaking tragedy which everyone else seems to think is a ripping good comedy and this has made him very, very unhappy. His good friend, Amabelle, suggests he try nonfiction next time, because no-one could possibly misread nonfiction. Cheered, Paul decides to write a biography of the Victorian poetess Lady Maria Bobbins ... but is denied access to her letters and diaries by the current chatelaine of Compton Bobbin. Of course, he goes undercover (thanks again to Amabelle) as Bobby Bobbins' tutor and worms his way into the bosom of the Bobbins. There Paul thinks he falls in love with the lovely Bobbin daughter, Philadelphia, who is also pursued by one of Amabelle's old flames.

Witty and slightly absurd, Christmas Pudding was an extremely satisfactory read and I look forward to picking up Pigeon Pie and Don't Tell Alfred at the next opportunity.

"... We walk away. And the sky turns wrong. And there are bodies everywhere."

2012-01-22T07:47:00.000-05:00

Night School: The Weirn Books, Volume 1 by Svetlana Chmakova (Yen Press, 2009)

Sarah was recently hired as the Night Keeper at Nightschool. A Night Keeper seems to run around the school, up holding school rules and making sure magic doesn't get out of hand. Sara is new at her job and frequently seems nervous or uncertain when interacting with students or staff (some of whom take advantage of that uncertainty).

Sarah has a younger sister named Alex whom she home schools. This seems a little odd -- surely Alex should go to Nightschool -- and I get the sense there's an unhappy back story just waiting to unfold in later volumes. Anyway, while Sarah is away at work, Alex gets in to some mischief in a graveyard. She manages to escape (she can't remember how) and get home. Alex thinks things will be okay as long as Sarah doesn't find out and she bribes her astral companion with cookies to not rat her out.

Then Sarah disappears. Seriously disappears. As if she never existed. Only Alex remembers her. And, of course, this means Alex must go to Nightschool and find out what happened to her sister!

Meanwhile, there are seers and vampires and Hunters all running about doing things that will probably make more sense in later volumes!

Whoosh. Volume 1 just galloped along with fast-and-furious character and plot introduction. I'm not sure who everyone is yet or quite what's going on beside the whole "face the thing I fear/find my sister" storyline, but I'm having a lot of fun. Despite the rushing about and too frequent "hello, new character!" moments, my interest never flagged and I can't wait to get the next volume from my library system.

Nightschool seems a little like Hogwarts meets Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters with some Buffy thrown in for kicks. Really, it's whole lot of fun ... even though I suspect Alex is supposed to make Something Horrible happen later.

"Oh, Grandmother! Your eyes are so shiny!"

2012-01-21T07:46:00.000-05:00

Little Red Riding Hood written & illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman (Holiday House, 1983)

For Christmas, The Husband gave me two children's picture books with illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman -- Hershel and the Hanukkah Demons and Little Red Riding Hood. While Hershel is an old favorite, I didn't remember ever reading Little Red Riding Hood, but looking forward to it as Hyman remains one of my favorite children's illustrators. There are so many books I picked up as a child because of her drawings!

Well, Little Red Riding Hood turned out to be fantastic read. The richly-detailed illustrations are lush and evocative -- the woods off the path are sun-dappled, green and tempting and Grandmother's zinnias practically bloom off the pages. I could look at the illustrations forever, I think, and notice something new in them every time. I was half-way through my third go-round when I finally noticed the half-hidden cat following Little Red Riding Hood through the woods. Little Red Riding Hood makes for a terrific game of I Spy and it's really no wonder it is Caldecott Honor Book.

Hyman's superb retelling is not sanitized, by the way. The wolf does eat Grandmother and the huntsman does kill (and gut) the wolf. However, Hyman's retelling isn't gruesome in its details and the illustrations describe the intent of the scenes, but not the action (the huntsman stands over the sleeping wolf, etc).

A New Home for Chi

2012-01-19T08:24:00.000-05:00

Chi’s Sweet Home: Volume 4 by Kanata Konami (Vertical, 2010)

I swear that, right up until the end, this volume felt like nothing but pure, undiluted kitty-loving fan service. And that's not a bad thing! If Volume 3 left you feeling sad, Volume 4 will have you grinning from the first page!

Chi and the Yamadas move to a pet-friendly apartment where Chi no longer has to live in hiding. In the beginning, while the Yamadas pack everything into boxes, Chi’s attempts to play only get in the way and she suffers an (adorable) misadventure. After the move, everything at the new apartment is strange and Chi is confused and uneasy, but then she figures out how to make everything smell familiar and (sort of) masters the stairs so life is once again peachy-keen.

The chapters where the Yamadas introduce themselves to their new neighbors are my favorite, as every neighbor (and their animal) has a distinct personality and look (in some graphic novels, I have great difficulty telling secondary characters apart -- this is not the case with Chi). I am looking forward to more interactions between Chi and her new neighbors -- especially the snooty-looking purebred, Alice, and the enthusiastic beagle, David.

Wordless Wednesday: A Transparent Partition

2012-01-18T23:13:00.000-05:00

The three central Chagall windows at Fraumünster, Zurich.

"For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass has to be serious and passionate. It is something elevating and exhilarating. It has to live through the perception of light." -- Marc Chagall.

The Poacher & The Governess

2012-01-17T07:59:00.000-05:00

The Kindness of a Rogue by Nancy Butler (Signet, 2004)

Sara Cobb has taken a position as governess at Tregallion House in Cornwall. Her charge is a very spoilt and impetuous miss she had the misfortune of instructing at Miss Bonnet's Improving School. Missing her old job, her friends, and a life she saw some future in, Sara is full of doubts about her new position. Doubts which are certainly not allayed by the cryptic warnings of a roguish stranger...

I enjoyed the "commonness" of our protagonists -- they're just "regular folks" thrown together under extraordinary circumstances. No nobs. No heiresses. Admittedly, Martyn's constant cryptic warnings got to be a bit much! Like Sara, I wanted him to speak plainly or shut up. Unlike Sara, I wasn't in love with him and couldn't be distracted from his annoying "man of mystery" airs by kisses. Much of the mystery hinges on the trafficking of young country women to brothels in London, and some of the dramatic twists that plot line took to its resolution seemed out of tune with the rest of the novel -- although that certainly didn't detract much from my overall enjoyment!

And The Chi Goes On

2012-01-14T08:19:00.000-05:00

Chi’s Sweet Home: Volume 3 by Kanata Konami (Vertical, 2010)

Volume 3 is a little darker and sadder than previous volumes. Still overwhelmingly cute, yes, but sad. In this volume, Chi spends more time with the bear-cat, Blackie, and learns how to do proper cat things like stalk prey, open doors, and steal fried chicken. Despite their differences in age and attitude, the two cats become good friends and Chi is very happy. Alas, the apartment building super finally discovers Blackie's home and his owners are told to chose between their apartment and their cat. They chose their cat and move away, leaving a confused and saddened Chi behind. It's a heart-breaking scene and things only get sadder when the Yamadas decide they must send Chi to live with friends in the country ...

You're all depressed now, aren't you? This volume does have a happy ending! Promise.

Look, a kitty!

Jul Chi by ~LitenDrage on deviantART

SoundCloud, I Think I Love You

2012-01-12T08:02:00.000-05:00

As an audiobook lover I must have been living under a rock for the last few years, because I only just recently discovered the awesomeness that is SoundCloud, and I’m in love with it. I probably would have remained ignorant of it, except that I happened to read Simon Vance's blog where he wrote about #GoingPublic on Twitter. One thing led to another and I somehow ended up on SoundCloud, paging through all the tracts in the Going Public group. There are some real gems here and I strongly suggest you spend some time browsing the group -- Xe Sands reading of Frost's "Home Burial" is an excellent place to start.

Home Burial, by Robert Frost (read by Xe Sands) by Xe Sands

The Audiobook Lovers group, an interesting mix of adult and juvenile books, is also worth browsing. I was pleased to find The Velveteen Rabbit listed as it was one of my favorite children's books, but I'd never heard it read aloud. I spent a delightful 24 minutes listening to Xe Sand (yes, I have a crush) read it and it was really quite wonderful.

The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams (read by Xe Sands) by Xe Sands

And, if you like Penguin Books, Penguin Books UK is on SoundCloud with lots of delicious samples!

Wordless Wednesday: Hedwig, Stealer of Warm

2012-01-11T07:05:00.000-05:00

She hopes I won't notice she's taken my seat.

Marry in Haste, Repent at Leisure?

2012-01-09T07:10:00.000-05:00

Bride of Pendorric by Victoria Holt (Doubleday, 1963)

I shall never forget that September day because it brought the beginning of the real terror which came into my life, and it was at this time that I began to understand how the pleasant picture had changed piece by piece until I was confronted with the cruelest of suspicions and horror.

On the island of Capri, Favel Farrington falls in love with the dashing and mysterious Roc Pendorric. After a whirlwind romance and hasty marriage, Favel's artist father dies unexpectedly and Roc brings her home to his family estate in Cornwall. As Favel accustoms herself to her new home and family, she becomes increasingly suspicious of her husband who is just a little too familiar with the local ladies and a little too elusive about his own past. And then there are all the rumors about the previous Pendorric brides and the bad ends they came to. Does Roc really love Favel? Or did he marry her for other reasons? Is someone out to harm her? Or are those accidents just coincidence?

Bride of Pendorric made for an entertaining read. The mystery elements were quite satisfying with lots of red herrings and murder suspects -- the sexy nurse, slutty town girl, upstart governess, mad twin, etc. I was misled enough by Holt to suspect the wrong character for a very long time and then, suddenly, my eyes were opened and everything came together over a glass of milk. I remember thinking, "Favel! You widgeon! Don't drink the milk!" but it was too late. Favel drank the milk. (Good thing I remembered this was a Gothic romance and that Favel couldn't actually die).

"I'm not hash browns!" cried the latke.

2012-01-07T08:16:00.000-05:00

The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story by Lemony Snicket with illustrations by Lisa Brown (McSweeney's Books, 2007)

It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake.

Birthed screaming from a pan full of hot olive oil, the latke runs screaming through a village, encountering many Christmas decorations along the way. They are all friendly enough, but seem intent on fitting the latke somewhere into the Christmas tradition. The electric lights say the latke's basically a hash brown meant to be served with the Christmas ham, the peppermints thinks someone should write a Christmas carol about it, and the Christmas tree is all about hybridization/cultural appropriation. Is it any wonder the latke can't stop screaming? Happily, it's discovered by people who know exactly why a latke is and what it is for and it lives (a very short term) happily ever after.

This quirky little story does an admirable job teaching that Hanukkah is not a "Jewish Christmas" and remains one of my favorite Hanukkah stories (this is my third winter reading it).

An interview with David Handler (representing Lemony Snicket) and Lisa Brown:

Wordless Wednesday: Amaryllis

2012-01-04T07:34:00.000-05:00

First year forcing an amaryllis bulb. Surprisingly simple.

Doubtfully Dithering Over Dickens

2012-01-02T23:39:00.000-05:00

For Christmas, The Husband gave me a beautifully slip-cased set of clothbound Dickens -- Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities. 2012 is Dickens' two-hundredth anniversary and Penguin is apparently pulling out all the stops. It is truly a lovely set of books ...

Unfortunately, I don't know if I really like Dickens. I know, I know. English literature students everywhere ♥ Dickens. Well, I never read Dickens at college -- took a lot of courses focusing on (post)colonial literature and minor American poets and shizzle so I missed being indoctrinated. Tried to read Oliver Twist on my own, but failed miserably as I hated everyone in it. Had much better success with A Christmas Carol, but that's because it was funny. I don't think Hard Times is going to be funny, do you?

Oh my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an ironhanded and a grinding despotism! Oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellow-men! I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!

Oh, a right laugh!

Anyway, as Dickens is supposed to one of The Greatest British Authors of All Time and February seventh is his two-hundredth birthday, it seems like I should give the old fellow a go and see if I can't find more to love than A Christmas Carol. Where should I start, though? Which book is least likely to give me fits? Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, or A Tale of Two Cities?

I'm inclined to start with Hard Times, because ~~it's the thinnest of the lot~~ I believe it was Dickens' response to Gaskell's North and South, but I fear I'll be judging it against North and South the whole time and it won't come off looking very well!

Bandwagon, I'm (Sorta Kinda) On It

2011-12-30T22:00:00.000-05:00

So. I have a Kindle. Not the sexy new Touch or Fire all the hip kids got for Chrismukkah, but the plain old Kindle Keyboard (Wi-Fi). The Husband bought me one just before we went to England in September. You’re thinking that was a sweet and loving gesture, but it was really a self-serving one. The Husband is tired of me shuttling half tons (tonnes) of literature from one continent to another -- and I always return with more than I departed with! Once, I brought so many books home with me that my suitcase weighed too much and we had to pay an extra baggage fee. The Husband has never forgotten this.

Kindle = no tonnage fees.

So, my Kindle Keyboard was pretty sweet and I downloaded a bunch of free books onto it before we left to keep me busy. Everything was ticking along just fine right up until the middle of our holiday, when part of the screensaver stopped going away. Bits of Audubon birds, just sitting there. Grr. While Amazon was great about replacing the device when I returned home, I still had to tote a couple chunksters onto the plane to keep me from climbing the cabin walls. (I like flying. I do not like planes. It's a bit of a problem considering many of the places I'd like to visit require rather long flights. I'm sure the answer is medication, but I'm a control freak and worry what decisions I might make under the influence of something that plays with my brain. Like, I might start chatting with perfect strangers. Nooo).

Anyway, I’ve downloaded tons of free eBooks from Amazon and sites like Baen Free Library. Theoretically, I can also download free Kindle eBooks from my library consortium, but it's a wee bit complicated and I can't be arsed. I know, I know. I'm a librarian. I should be right out front, leading the patrons into A New Age of Reading ... and I am, at work. At work, I will happily show you how to download an eBook using a library computer and then transfer it to your device. At home, I snark and dig my heels in. There are too many steps involved in downloading a library eBook to my Kindle Keyboard. My library experiences should be better, goshdarnittoheck. But, I know, much of it has nothing to do with my library consortium and everything to do with DRM and the publishing industry's ostrich-brained, knee-jerk reaction to change.

/rant

On a happier (?) note, one of my coworker's loaned me a Kindle eBook, Sheila Simonson's A Cousinly Connexion, and that was a pretty interesting experience (also a fun read). As I expected, she had no access to the item while it was loaned to me, but I hadn't expected such a short loan period -- a mere fourteen days! I'm a fast reader, but I can see where someone like The Husband, who reads in fits and starts, might find the loan period rather restrictive. It doesn't even look like I can reloan Kindle eBooks -- Kindle Lending Help says "eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days." Bah.

Wordless Wednesday: Compleat Discworld Mapp

2011-12-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

Do you know the way to Sto-Helit?
I've been away so long. I may go wrong and lose my way.
Do you know the way to Sto-Helit?
I'm going back to find some peace of mind in Sto-Helit.

I bought my parents a couple jigsaw puzzles for Christmas as they're on a puzzle kick and this reminded me that there was a fantastic Discworld jigsaw puzzle in our games cupboard that might be fun to put together with The Husband ... and there went my Christmas vacation! We started the jigsaw late on Dec 25 and finished it very early Dec 27. We didn't work on it nonstop, but still probably frittered ten or so hours away on it.

"Her hair was the sun, her eyes the sky, and her lips were rosy dawn."

2011-12-23T20:34:00.000-05:00

The Bargain Bride by Barbara Metzger (Signet Eclipse, 2009)

He was smiling, the devil, knowing his effect. His confidence gave her the strength to smile back and say, "Yes, now I can go find my own Prince Charming to wed."
"Like hell you can," came a loud voice from the open doorway. "You are marrying Lord Lustful, for good or ill, and not a moment too soon, it seems. And you, sir, unhand my daughter. The wedding ain't taken place yet."

Two scheming men -- one a rich banker, the other a cash-strapped nob -- arrange a betrothal between their two children. The nob will get the cash up front and, when the banker's girl is of age, the nob's younger son will marry her. Yet thirteen years pass and the young couple, well into adulthood, still aren't married! The boy, now Viscount Westfield, has no interest in marrying some countrified miss. Then he sees her again, all pretty and shizzle, and suddenly finds he is the marrying kind, after all. If only Miss Persephone Goldwaite will have him. Her father is quite sure she will. Does Penny have a say in any of this?

The Bargain Bride was a fun distraction from the Christmastide hustle and bustle. It's a rather funny, breezy romance with lots of colorful secondary characters and amusing patter. Not a very deep book and Penny's behavior was definitely predictable (hate him, want him, hate him, love him, etc), but I wasn't look for originality when I picked up The Bargain Bride. I was looking for fun and I got that in spades.

Bits of The Bargain Bride -- particularly the scene where they discover Penny's father has redecorated Westfield's town house and hired servants for them -- reminded me very strongly of scenes from Heyer's A Civil Contract and I'm now tempted to go re-read A Civil Contract. It's one of Heyer's less "traditional" romances and quite my favorite.

More Chi! Squee!

2011-12-22T00:12:00.000-05:00

Chi’s Sweet Home: Volume 2 by Kanata Konami (Vertical, 2010)

The second volume of Chi's Sweet Home is just as sweet, adorable, and squeetastic as the first! The story continues from the first volume -- Chi’s human family continues to cope with the stress of having a rambunctious contraband kitten in the house, Chi gets into mischief exploring her new home, and many squees ensue. The cat-human interactions are adorable and will be perfectly familiar to any cat owner.

Some of my favorite scenes were right at the beginning when Chi discovers new foods. Cabbage is horrible, but pancakes are the bomb. The part where Chi steals Youhei's pancake and, his mother, out of sight in another room, hears the ruckus and tells her son to share? Oh, so cute. And so true. I don't think I've ever introduced my cats to a human food they then didn't take to as if it were crack. (I know, don't feed your cats human food &etc).

Yes, I've used the word "adorable" five times. You're now thoroughly turned off by the cuteness factor and wouldn't touch Chi's Sweet Home with a ten-foot pole. I can't just help it! C'est tres adorable!

Wordless Wednesday: Ornaments

2011-12-21T07:45:00.000-05:00

Some of the ornaments going up on our tree

Wordless Wednesday: Santa

2011-12-07T18:59:00.000-05:00

a cat is found

2011-12-06T21:14:00.001-05:00

Chi’s Sweet Home: Volume 1 by Kanata Konami (Vertical, 2010)

Holy flippin’ fish fingers, Batman! Chi's Sweet Home this is the sweetest, most adorable, squeetastic kitty manga the world has ever seen. I do not know how I managed to miss this series for so long, but now that I have read the first volume, I indeed to read the rest as soon as possible.

Chi’s Sweet Home is the story of a little lost kitten who is found by a young boy and his mother in a park and brought home to stay with them while they locate a home for her. Unfortunately, the family lives in a pet-free apartment complex and they must hide Chi while they search or they will be evicted! Naturally, this leads to a fair amount of shenanigans as Chi, like all small kittens, is full of energy and curiosity.

Although I’m sure this manga is meant for small children, every adult I’ve shared it with has read it with big grins on their faces and I think this would make a great family read – especially for a family with reluctant readers or for family’s already addicted to Simon’s Cat. Many of the situations addressed in Chi’s Sweet Home will be familiar to most cat owners and, therefore, this manga might make a good gift for a first-time cat owner or person thinking about adopting a kitten. Panels read left to right, so readers who aren’t used to manga shouldn’t have a problem following the text. (Frankly, I just think everyone should read this manga. Even if you told me you hated cats and all things Cute, I would still want you to read Chi’s Sweet Home).

There are currently seven volumes out in the United States, with two more slated for 2012 (and probably many more after that as it’s still serialized in Japan). And … there’s an anime for it! Of course there is!

Gothic Challenge: Mistress of Mellyn

2011-12-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt (Doubleday, 1960)

"There are two courses open to a gentlewoman when she finds herself in penurious circumstances," my Aunt Adelaide had said. "One is to marry, and the other to find a post in keeping with her gentility."

Martha Leigh, a gently bred orphan, had been given a crack at the marriage mart and failed to make a success of it. Too proud to live on charity, she becomes a governess to Alvean TreMellyn, a motherless girl with a cool and uncaring papa. Alvean is a handful, but Martha is sure she can rein the girl in and make a success of the situation. Her aloof papa, Connan TreMellyn, intrigues Martha and, while she knows better, she finds herself falling in love with him.

And growing up side-by-side with that love is the terrible suspicion Mrs. TreMellyn did not die in a train accident whilst eloping with a neighbor. No, the more Martha investigates, the more unlikely it seems Alice would ever have done such a thing. So what became of Alice? Does the key lie with Gillyflower, the housekeeper’s fey bastard granddaughter?

Mistress of Mellyn is a compelling read. I was immediately drawn into the mystery surrounding Alice's death and the many little details of daily life at TreMellyn. The mystery builds slowly, but satisfyingly, as Holt fully immerses us in Martha’s world which is full of well-crafted secondary characters that help give the story real depth and flavor -- I was especially fond of the housekeeper, Mrs. Polgrey, with her whiskey-laced cups of Earl Grey.

I must admit to be less fond of Connan TreMellyn. I didn’t doubt Martha’s affection toward him, but I was never really certain of his toward her. The entire time Connan said he was madly falling in love with Martha, he was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor. He doesn’t deny it, nor does he indicate he’s spent those months trying to break off the affair. No, to me, it seemed like Connan decided it would be a good time to remarry, the TreMellyn household liked Martha, the silly thing hadn’t hidden her affection as well as she’d thought, and he did find her both desirable and companionable ... so why not marry the governess? A man could do worse.

Even though the romantic elements of the novel felt a bit false, the novel’s central mystery was very fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed its resolution -- it was just so over the top and so thoroughly gothic!

Fifteen in Fifteen

2011-12-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

I found this quick challenge on Facebook last week and thought it sounded like fun.

What 15 books have you read that will always stick with you?

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Stolen Law by Anne Mason
The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle
Night Watch by Sara Waters
Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery
Sabriel by Garth Nix
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
The Actor and the House Wife by Shannon Hale
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patrica McKillip
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

Not necessarily The Best Books Ever -- just books that, for some reason or other, made a strong impression on me when I read them and have haunted the cob-webby back reaches of my mind ever since, popping out at odd moments to confuse or amuse me.

Every spring when I hear peepers singing in the marsh, I am brought right back to Grass and the terrible discovery of what exactly the bons have been riding in their Hunts. On a less disturbing note, mixed berry pie always makes me think of The Actor and the House Wife and the scene where Becky Jack stays up, baking pies, because the world feels less heavy and hopeless with pie.

Wordless Wednesday: Down on the Farm

2011-11-30T07:08:00.000-05:00

Sheep @ Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts

Wordless Wednesday: Salt Marsh

2011-11-23T07:30:00.000-05:00

Rocky Neck State Park, East Lyme, Connecticut

Tedious Tales

2011-11-18T07:33:00.000-05:00

Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton (Amazon Digital Services, Kindle Edition)

I began reading Tales of Men and Ghosts for the Gothic Challenge, but soon realized it just didn’t qualify -- the stories are packed with melodrama and some psychological horror, but there are no (inhuman) ghoulies, very few ghosties, and nothing I feel could be accurately labeled “Gothic.”

While I generally enjoy Edith Wharton’s short stories, this collection could not hold my attention. The first five stories were interesting and I do recommend them, but everything after “Full Circle” was a real struggle to get through as I found those stories consistently tedious and frequently anticlimactic.

“The Bolted Door” -- Suicidal playwright keeps telling people he’s a murderer, but no-one believes him. Eventually goes mad trying to prove his guilt. Or, was everyone else right? Was he always mad and never a murderer?

“His Father’s Son” -- A young man, raised to experience every pleasure and social nicety his father missed, deludes himself into believing he is not his father’s son. No, he is the son of the great pianist, Fortune Dolbrowski. He has the letters to prove it. Except, they aren’t his mother’s letters.

“The Daunt Diana” -- An impoverished art collector finds his heart’s desire, but cannot afford her. He eventually comes into money and acquires the collection in which she resides, but complete happiness eludes him. He sells the collection off. And buys it back, piece by piece.

“The Debt” -- Family of an esteemed scientist is outraged when his protégée starts dismantling their father’s theories and puts forth his own.

“Full Circle” -- Successful novelist hires a failed novelist to answer his fan mail. Out of guilt, successful novelist starts writing letters to himself to keep failed novelist employed, but he’s not the only one writing fake letters.

“The Legend” -- Family takes in a homeless man a friend thinks might be an intellectual genius who died years ago. Just so happens that family hosting homeless man is headed by scholar renowned for his interpretations of genius's work. Didn’t actually get to the end of this story, because all the talk of Pellerin and Pellerinism made me feel like I was back in college, trying to slog my way through Atlas Shrugged.

“The Eyes” -- (1st ghost story) Over cigars after dinner, a man tells his friends about having been haunted by a pair of eyes at various points in his life. Was he really haunted by eyes? Were they a Dorian Grey type motif, showing the man's depravity of soul? Or was the man, in a round-about-fashion, just trying to tell his newest protege he was no good and no longer wanted?

“The Blond Beast” -- Millner becomes secretary to a tycoon, befriends the son, becomes entangled in some immoral business shenanigans, possibly betrays the son for the father, refuses his thirty pieces of silver, quits his job. (It took me three attempts to get through this story and I hated every character in it).

“Afterward” – (2nd ghost story) American couple purchase an antiquated, atmospheric English country house which, they are told, is inhabited by a mysterious ghost they won’t know they’ve seen until well afterward. And that is precisely what happens.

“The Letters” -- Lizzie is swept up in a passionate (but chaste) affair with her pupil’s father. Then the wife dies, he goes away, and Lizzie sends him letters, but never hears from him. Then, one day, there he is. She marries him and learns a hard truth about marriage.

In a word: blarg.

Wordless Wednesday: Stained Glass Window

2011-11-16T07:42:00.000-05:00

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Like her sisters, the only passion she had ever known was for Mannerling.”

2011-11-14T17:16:00.000-05:00

The Banishment, Daughters of Mannerling: Book 1 by Marion Chesney (St. Martin’s Press, 1995)

Isabella Beverley expected her first London Season to be her last. Surely, after a whirlwind of social occasions at which she was destined to be seen as a diamond of the first water, a suitable gentleman would propose to her and they would live happily ever after at her family estate, Mannerling. Unfortunately, Isabella received no offer as all her talk of Mannerling and nothing but Mannerling made her a bore. Returning home in shame and confusion, she finds not all is as it should be.

Dear Papa has gambled away Mannerling to that odious bachelor, Mr. Judd. The proud Beverleys – Papa, Mama, and all six daughters – must move into a cramped house with shared bedrooms, worn carpets, few servants, and a decided lack of Society. Their new life is a complete disaster and the only thing that improves it the friendship of their neighbor, Mrs. Kennedy, aunt of the Irish Viscount Fitzpatrick.

While Mrs. Kennedy teaches the girls much-needed housekeeping skills, Isabella learns something about simple civility and human kindness while enjoying the friendship of Viscount Fitzpatrick … but she still flirts with Mr. Judd in expectation she can snare him, marry him, and thus regain Mannerling for her family. There’s much humiliation and disgraceful behavior before Isabella accepts her heart lies no longer with Mannerling, but with Fitzpatrick.

The Banishment was a pleasing, if predictable, romp. Isabella was a pretty well-fleshed character and I enjoyed watching her struggle to transform from a haughty and proud Miss into a good-hearted woman. I also liked how Chesney treated Mannerling as if it were an actual character in the novel and I visualized it as kind of malevolently self-interested Pemberley.

There are five more novels in the series -- one for each sister -- but I think I’ll stop here. I presume the other books follow a similar story -- snobby, Mannerling-obsessed girl realizes there is more to life and finds love where she didn’t expect to -- and that’s a good story, but I don’t think I need to read five versions of it.

Loose Screws & Runaways

2011-11-11T08:55:00.000-05:00

Scandal Broth by Marian Devon (Ballantine, 1987)

Recently arrived from Belgium, Miss Antonia Thorpe is astonished when a madman bursts into her uncle's library and unhappily demands her hand in marriage. Understandably, Antonia rejects his suit only to discover the gentlemen had been meant to propose to her cousin, Rosamund. Blamed by her uncle for destroying his family's future happiness, Antonia runs away to her grandmother in London ... and smack into that bedlamite, the Honorable Fitzhugh Denholm.

Scandal Broth is a quick bit of fun. The characters are amusing, if not always well-fleshed, and the story gallops along from one near-disaster to the next. Toplofty Lady Thirkell was my favorite character and I kept visualizing her as a very feisty Barbara Flynn (among other roles, she played the Honourable Mrs Jamieson in Cranford and Emily Forsyte in the Forsyte Saga) in a purple silk turban with ostrich plumes.

More Fun Than a Basketful of Puppies

2011-11-09T07:42:00.000-05:00

The Earl and the Heiress by Barbara Metzger (Walker and Company, 1982)

Having recently inherited a house in Mayfair, Noelle Armstrong has brought her siblings to London to give them a bit of polish and, maybe, help them find suitable spouses. Being poor and countrified, they work hard to fit seamlessly into Society. They are aided in this both by the skillful sale of several highly-desirable puppies to the “right sort” of people and by an unexpected friendship with the Earl of Wrenthe.

Ostensibly, the Earl assists the Armstrongs’s entrance into polite society out of respect for their late father, but it quickly becomes clear he has an eye for one of the Armstrong girls. Noelle is sure he is interested in her beautiful younger sister, Ferne, and encourages the match, but it is not Ferne he is smitten with.

“Pretty?” The Earl put the letter down and thought about it a moment. “No, I wouldn’t say she was pretty at all. Too milk-and-water a phrase. Stunning, I’d say, or radiant, certainly prickly and exasperating, but definitely not pretty.”
“Miss Fern?” James asked in disbelief.
“Ferne? Who was talking about Ferne? She’s pretty enough, I suppose, if you like beautiful widgeons.”

Before reading The Earl and The Heiress, I read Metzger’s The Diamond Key and let me just say there is a huge difference in quality between the two novels. The Earl and The Heiress, her second novel, is much better -- less frothy and contrived; more Heyer-esque overall. And I enjoyed The Diamond Key (her 30th novel?!), you know, but The Earl and The Heiress is something I would actually buy to re-read if it were still in print.

That's No Moon! That's a Motif!

2011-11-07T08:02:00.000-05:00

Winter Moon by Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, and C.E. Murphy (Luna, 2005)

A collection of three romantic fantasies --“Winter Moon” (Lackey), “The Heart of the Moon” (Lee), and “Banshee Cries” (Murphy) -- all linked by the moon. I picked this collection up for Lackey’s story, which I had heard was linked with her Five Hundred Kingdoms series. While, yes, the story is set in the same world as the Five Hundred Kingdoms it bears none of the trappings -- no Tradition, no Fairy Godmothers.

“Moontide”
Summoned back to her family’s Sea Keep after years in fosterage with the King's sister, Moira supposes her father plans to use her in a marriage alliance. Instead, she finds herself neck deep skulduggery and must make some hard decisions. Duty to her father and treason to her king? Duty to her King and betrayal of her father? Duty to her lands and hang the rest? In trying times such as these, a lady might heed the advice of a fool ...

My feelings toward this story are mixed. Our protagonists are sympathetic, the setting is certainly interesting, and Lackey writes with a very engaging style. However, the romance seems shoehorned in merely to make a significant plot twist palatable. Also, the enemy is so clearly Fantasy Arab Bad Guy that I was embarrassed for Lackey.

“Heart of the Moon”
Clirando, a warrior wounded by betrayal, suffers under a terrible curse. When she's sent to the Isle of the Moon for the celebration of Moon Month she finds herself on a very personal, spiritual journey with a stranger. As they travel to the heart of the Isle, they work through their issues and fall in love.

Not a bad read -- the nod to Odysseus and the island of Circe was quite welcome -- but the use of symbolism and metaphor felt heavy-handed.

I can’t talk about Murphy’s “Banshee Cries” as I did not read it. (Nothing against Murphy, of course. I just wasn’t in the mood).

Gothic Challenge: The Lord of the Far Island

2011-11-05T09:06:00.000-04:00

The Lord of the Far Island by Victoria Holt (Doubleday, 1975)

I could hear the whispering voices and my eyes were fixed on the door. It was slowly opening and there came to me the terrible realization that doom was just on the other side of the door.

Ellen Kellaway, orphaned at young age and sent to live with wealthy distant cousins, has reached adulthood and knows that her future will be vastly different from her young cousin’s. No teas, no balls, no opera for Ellen. No, soon Ellen will be sent into service as a governess or companion. Or, perhaps not ...

To her astonishment, her childhood friend, the handsome younger son of a very rich family, asks for Ellen’s hand in marriage. Oh, the bliss! The joy! The sense of triumph! The relief! And then tragedy strikes ... six days before their wedding, her fiancé commits suicide.

Overwhelmed by disbelief and grief, Ellen accepts an invitation from her hitherto unknown guardian to visit her father’s estate, Kellaways Island, off the coast of Cornwall. There Ellen begins to fall in love with her guardian despite suspecting he is up to no good. Long buried family secrets come to light, murder is attempted, and bad dreams come true.

Lord of the Far Island is a delicious Gothic romance. The plot twists work well, Ellen is a sympathetic heroine -- although, I must admit I wished she could have fallen in love with someone less creepy and manipulative. Jago is the classic dark, brooding, mesmerizing, antihero all Gothic romances need, but he just wasn't my cup of tea.

Regardless, I still had so much fun reading Lord of the Far Island that it made me feel a little less cranky about being without power, phone, and Internet for five days. This is the first Victoria Holt novel I’ve ever read and I look forward to reading many more.

Gothic Challenge: Closed on Account of Rabies

2011-11-03T08:04:00.000-04:00

Closed on Account of Rabies: Poems & Tales of Edgar Allan Poe written by Edgar Allan Poe & read by various (Mercury Records, 1997)

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

I enjoyed Stories of the Macabre so much that I went looking through my library consortium’s catalog to see what other recordings might be available to me. As soon as I saw the title, Closed on Account of Rabies, I knew I had to give it a listen. I mean, doesn’t it look deliciously disturbing?

The audiobook collects fourteen of Poe’s stories and poems. Some have been set to song and all have accompanying atmospheric background music/sounds. I found the background music distracting as it frequently overwhelmed the performer -- too loud and/or too pronounced. Iggy Pop, Christopher Walken, and Gabriel Byrne performed excellent renditions of Poe's most famous horror stories, but I enjoyed them less than Ralph Cosham's on Stories of the Macabre, because the background music was so darn distracting.

That said, oh, you haven’t heard "The Raven" until you’ve heard it performed by Christopher Walken! (Just ignore the guitar).

Instant Rake, Just Add Mistress & Stir

2011-11-01T10:45:00.000-04:00

Snowdrops and Scandalbroth by Barbara Metzger (Fawcett, 1997)

Handsome Courtney Choate, Viscount Chase, cannot find a wife. Oh, Courtney almost had a wife – but she turned out not to be nearly as virtuous (or virginal) as he and he broke it off with her. Outraged, his jilted love let it be known around Town that Courtney Choate is “somewhat wanting as a man.” Now all the fine misses and their mamas cut him. How will he find a bride?

Fake a mistress! He hires Miss Kathlyn Partland, an impoverished gentlewoman, to pose as Kitty Parke, his beautiful bit o’ muslin. Paraded around town on his arm, Kitty is a sensation and all the men of London vie for her attentions.

Which annoys Courtney quite a bit as he’s falling in love with Kathlyn.

To them it was all a game. Well, Kitty was no pawn. She was under contract to him, by Jupiter. And when Courtney was done playacting his rake’s role, she was not going to be handed around from man to man like a horse on the block at Tattersall’s. He wasn’t sacrificing her virtue to protect his own.
On the other hand, a chap didn’t call out a close friend for staring at his mistress’s bosom. Hell and damnation!

A frothy bit of fun perfect for a dreary autumn afternoon.

Gothic Reading Challenge: Stories of the Macabre

2011-10-30T08:25:00.000-04:00

Stories of the Macabre written by Edgar Allan Poe & read by Ralph Cosham (Commuters Library, 2002)

"For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul."

I’ve been listening to Ralph Cosham read Richard Adams’s Watership Down and he’s doing such a bang-up job that I started looking for other works read by him. Poe’s Stories of the Macabre seemed a good place to start -- being short and appropriately seasonal.

Stories of the Macabre comprises six of Poe's classic horror stories and two of his poems:

“The Bells” -- Oh, those bells! They’ll drive you mad, they will.
“The Cask of Amontillado” -- Man takes revenge upon a friend who has insulted him by bricking said friend up in a wall.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” -- Man kills his landlord who has a blind eye, because the eye is driving him crazy. Police investigate, madness ensues.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” -- Out of friendship, Man visits a crumbling house beset by madness and disease. Someone gets buried alive.
“The Raven” -- Man is visited by a raven while mourning the loss of his beloved Lenore. Man descends into madness.
“The Black Cat” -- Alcoholic Man sinks into depravity, commits murder, and is haunted by Basement Cat.
“Berenice” -- Man, affianced to his cousin, becomes inappropriately fixated on her teeth and removes them from her corpse (which, it turns out, is not actually corpse).
“The Man That Was Used Up” -- Man meets the famous Brevet Brigadier General, who is more than the sum of his parts. Or is he? (Not a horror story, actually, but a satire)

Cosham’s superb reading is full of enthusiasm and emotion -- there is absolutely no doubting the wild madness or cold, calculating, wickedness that possesses our protagonists. Indeed, the mad little laugh he gives during “The Tell-Tale Heart” sent chills down my spine and the calm, rational tone he uses while reading “The Black Cat” made my flesh crawl.

And, on a mostly related note, I give you a scene from Edgar Allan Pooh's "The Tell-Tale Heart:"

"...his mouth plundered hers."

2011-10-28T07:47:00.000-04:00

A Proper Companion by Candice Hern (Amazon Digital Services, Kindle Edition)

Emily Townsend, an impoverished gentlewoman, serves as a paid companion to the sarcastic and meddlesome Dowager Countess of Bradleigh. The countess is extremely distressed to learn her grandson, Robert, the current Earl of Bradleigh, is affianced to a young lady with a dreadful, toad-eating mama. Lady Bradleigh would rather see him marry Emily than this chit -- but how to convince him of that and, worse, how to break the engagement without impugning anyone’s honor?

A pleasant, if predictable, read with likeable characters and a few genuinely funny bits. A Proper Companion didn’t leave me desperate to raid my public library for more by Hern, but I didn’t regret the time spent with it, either.

Wordless Wednesday: Halloween Home

2011-10-26T07:30:00.000-04:00

Marvellous Maid Manga: Shirley, Volume 1

2011-10-25T07:45:00.000-04:00

Shirley, Volume 1 by Kaoru Mori (CMX Manga, 2008)

A compilation of short stories about housemaids in Victorian England. Mori apologies a lot for the quality of her art -- she was just starting out when she drew these stories and the illustrations supposedly show more enthusiasm than skill, but I thought they were just fine. I just wish the stories had been longer and that there were more of them!

My favorite story would have to be the first part of Shirley's story -- "Chapter One: The Beginning" -- where she is taken on as a housemaid by an overworked cafe owner. It's a very sweet, simple story and I was utterly charmed by the characters. I also quite enjoyed "Me and Nellie and One Afternoon" and "Mary Banks," but my enjoyment was marred by their brevity. Perhaps, one day, they might be spun out into longer stories?

“I say you are a very nice man, Lord Ingall, for a rake.”

2011-10-23T07:45:00.000-04:00

The Diamond Key by Barbara Metzger (Signet Regency Romance, 2003)

Lady Victoria Keyes, the belle of the London Season, is being measured for a new gown when the dressmaker’s catches fire. Trapped, she vows she’ll marry the man who rescues her and “settle for a country cottage, a cradle to rock, and a caring husband.” Of course, the man who rescues her is no mere fireman! No, indeed! She is rescued by Wynn, the disreputable Viscount Ingall, recently returned to England after having been banished from Society six years before for (allegedly) killed another toff in a duel over a woman.

While Wynn is happy to play the gentleman and rescue Torrie from impending doom, he’s already up to his badly-tied neck cloth in troubles of his own. No need to add marriage to the mix, but why don’t they be friends? Friends! Of course, he falls in love. She falls in love. There are misunderstandings. A dash of disaster. And then Happily Ever After.

The Diamond Key is a fluffy bit of fun. While the story does at times feels contrived and hurried along, Metzger’s protagonists are amusing ones and her many secondary characters seem fully fleshed. There’s a lot of humor to the story with just enough derring-do to keep it from being too sweet. Speaking of sweet, there is no sex in The Diamond Key. While one of the secondary characters is a barque of frailty, another character is clearly bedding her husband’s valet, and many female characters are enciente, none of the characters have sex on page. It’s a refreshing change and I, for one, look forward to more sexless Regency romances.

Mad for Manwha: Bride of the Water God Vol 1 & 2

2011-10-21T07:54:00.000-04:00

While at ConnectiCon 2011, I picked up the first two volumes of Bride of the Water God, a Korean sunjeong manhwa, by Mi-Kyung Yun. I'd never read any manhwa -- didn't even know Korean comics were available in English in the United States -- but I'm always willing to try something new.

Bride of the Water God, Volume 1 by Mi-Kyung Yun (Dark Horse Comics, 2007)

Soah is sacrificed by her village as a Bride of the Water God, Habaek, in hope that he will end the terrible draught that afflicts them. She is put out to sea and eventually finds herself in the lands of the gods where she discovers that her groom is no terrible monster but a little boy. A seriously adorable, "oh don't you just want to tousle his hair!" squeetastic little boy. Unfortunately, Habaek is also very rude and temperamental.

While getting to know her husband, Soah meets many of the other gods that inhabit the land, we learn a secret about the Water God which is not revealed to Soah, a possible future love triangle is hinted at, and Habaek's mother comes to visit.

Bride of the Water God, Volume 2 by Mi-Kyung Yun (Dark Horse Comics, 2007)

Soah's life becomes more complicated as she tries to figure out the link between Habaek and his "older cousin," Mui, and can't seem to accept the obvious answer. Also, we learn an important secret about Soah, Habaek is poisoned with an aphrodisiac which causes him to mistake Soah for his first mortal bride, Nakbin, and the other gods pop in and out, scheming amongst themselves and manipulating Soah as if she were a pawn in a very complicated game.

I flew through these two volumes and immediately ordered the next three -- there are eight volumes out, with the ninth released later this month and the tenth in January. I can't wait to see where this series goes. There's plenty to like as each volume has been packed with intrigue, romance, and overtones of classic stories like "Eros and Psyche" and "Tristan and Iseult."

Even if the story weren't good, I could happily read Bride of the Water God just for the gorgeous illustrations. Seriously, the art is fantastic -- the amount of detail given to the backgrounds and costumes is stunning, each character is visually distinctive (I sometimes have a hard time telling characters apart in B&W comics, but not with Bride), and the books, in general, are just packaged in an appealing way. They're fun to read and also look like something I wouldn't be embarrassed to press on reluctant readers.

Graphically Challenged

2011-10-20T07:11:00.000-04:00

Last week, after I posted about how we lack shelf space to accommodate our multitudinous manga/GN collection, I was struck by the embarrassing realization that I have only read about two-thirds of the manga/GNs we own. Some of it's a series problem -- I start reading a series and, even after I fall behind, keep purchasing the new volumes for "someday." Some of it is very much an author problem -- I'll buy anything if it has Gail Simone or Alison Bechdel's name on it. But, mostly, it's a magpie problem --- we snap up whatever looks interesting, because who knows when or where we might see it again.

So these things are bought, brought into our home, and shelved. I have every intention of reading them, but am easily distracted by all the books I see at work. That new manga can wait, I tell myself, while I read this doorstop Booklist thinks is the bomb. And then I never do read that new manga!

To catch up with our collection, I've decided to read at least one manga/GN a week until I run out (and with my birthday and Christmas coming, I guess I won't run out anytime soon!). Yes, it's a reading challenge. Yes, I've been a miserable failure at my other 2011 reading challenges, but this is a personal challenge and the books are a mere six feet from my reading chair -- I might actually stick to it.

Also, to tidy my blog a bit, I've condensed the "manga," "manhwa," and "graphic novel" labels down into one label -- "comic books." I reckon if you're interested in one of those things, you'll be interested in the others, so why not group them together?

Wordless Wednesday: Single-Stream Recycling

2011-10-19T07:18:00.000-04:00

Yay for single-stream recycling & my brand new bin!

“Miss Jones,” he whispered aloud, “you’re a damned nuisance.”

2011-10-17T07:39:00.000-04:00

Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage by Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's, 2011)

Jilly Jones ran away from a bad marriage and started a new life running a bookshop on Dreare Street -- a foggy, depressing corner of Regency London the locals say is cursed. Her business is struggling and matters are not helped by the unending drunken parties thrown by her immediate neighbor, Captain Stephen Arrow, fresh out of the Royal Navy and looking to kick up his heels.

Captain Arrow's distant family comes to visit and to escape the attention of a machinating mama, he pretends to have an understanding with Jilly. Soon Arrow realizes he wants more than a pretend relationship. Unfortunately, Jilly's husband turns up ...

Overall, a silly read. Enjoyable if you can suspend your disbelief and accept the characters and situation as they are. I struggled with that as many of the plot twists (and their outcomes) were immediately obvious -- I knew who owned everyone's leases before the matter of the leases even came up! And it seemed clear there would have to be something dodgy about Jilly's marriage in order to free her up for Arrow. I wanted her husband die or be packed off to Australia or something suitably dramatic, but knew that Cloudy was not that kind of book.

I think that's my biggest quibble with this romance -- it kept building up to what could have been extremely dramatic moments and fell flat each time.

(Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage is the third in Keiran's "The Impossible Bachelors" series).

More Books Than Space (or Sense?)

2011-10-15T09:45:00.000-04:00

Nonreaderly types, visiting our home, are frequently impressed by the number of bookcases we possess. I, however, am not impressed as all our bookcases are overflowing. Normally, I would start weeding out some of our books, but the worst offenders are the bookcases in our living room where the graphic novels and manga live. We do not wish to part with any of those. Yes, I could weed some of the "regular" books and split the manga/GNs between the living room and library (nonreaderly people would call it the "den"), but that upsets my sense of organization. Like must dwell with like, you know.

One of our living room bookcases is full of music CDs and I strongly begrudge them the space they take up. I keep thinking about digitizing all our CDs, boxing them up, and moving them to the basement. Alas, we own many CDs and when I look at them ...

I can think of more satisfying ways to spend my time!

But. There’s no space on the manga/GN shelves and we keep buying more and more of them, so something has to be done soon before we suffer a literary explosion of epic proportions!

Not shown: 8 freshly purchased manhwa and GN

Perhaps we could surround the fireplace with built-in bookcases? Yes! Surround the fireplace with bookcases, get rid of our current television and cabinet, lower the mantel, hang a flat screen over it, rearrange the chairs, and *bingo* tons of book space. And I bet we could then put a bookcase on the wall the television cabinet currently occupies ...

If only, hey? If only.

Looking for a Little Romance

2011-10-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I attended the free Booklist webinar, “Ready for Romance? New Novels and Hot Trends.” It was a fun webinar led by knowledgeable people and I came away with a tidy list of books to borrow from my library system as soon as possible. Unfortunately, a bunch of them won’t be published until 2012, but I did manage to get my hands on a few:

Wickedly Charming by Kristine Grayson

Lord & Lady Spy by Shana Glen

The Dragon & The Pearl by Jeannie Lin

Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage by Kieran Kramer

Lord & Lady Spy cover irks me a little -- where are her underskirts & stockings?

No pic of Wickedly Charming because it's an e-book.

When I read romance, it’s usually the historical kind. I blame my allegiance to historical romance on all those Barbara Metzger and Harlequin Historicals I read as a highly impressionable twelve-year-old. I’d like to read more widely, but my success rate with non-historicals is low unless I’m reading someone like Jennifer Crusie or Rachel Gibson.

Help me, O Internetz. What’s non-historical romance might I like? I don’t want:

Aliens
Paranormal
Religion
Sheikhs
Sports
Violent sex
Westerns

Unless the book is also really, really (intentionally) funny.

Wordless Wednesday: Mill Pond

2011-10-12T07:09:00.000-04:00

Mill pond @ Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts

Day 30: Favorite Coffee Table Book

2011-10-10T08:12:00.000-04:00

For a long time now, I've dreamed of growing a Shakespeare garden planted with flowers and herbs from the works of William Shakespeare -- poppies, pansies, primroses, violets, carnations, cowslips, roses, rosemary, rue, daffodils, irises, columbine, marigolds, etc. Alas, creating such a garden takes more energy, time, and money than currently available to me so I make do with the fabulous coffee table book, Shakespeare's Flowers by Frances Owens.

Shakespeare's Flowers consists of not much more than single or double page spreads of beautifully photographed flowers accompanied by a relevant Shakespearean quotations. "Nay, by my faith, I think you are more withholding to the night than to fern seed for your walking invisible" from Henry IV, Part I next to an exquisite closeup of a tightly coiled fiddlehead fern, for example. It's all beautifully put together and I can't see anyone not oohing and ahhing.

Day 29: Book You’re Currently Reading

2011-10-09T11:55:00.000-04:00

Today, I am reading Mercedes Lackey's One Good Knight, the second fantasy novel in the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, following The Fairy Godmother. If you're at all familiar with fairy tale cliches (referred to in these novels as The Tradition), you won't need to have read The Fairy Godmother to understand what's supposed to happen in One Good Knight -- there's a Princess, the daughter of a Wicked Queen, who is supposed to be sacrificed to a Dragon, but is rescued by a Champion, etc.

I say "supposed to" as the Five Hundred Kingdom novels are all fractured fairy tales and The Tradition is frequently undermined or manipulated by characters who won't accept their particular Happy Ending.

Day 28: Last Book You Read

2011-10-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

The last book I read was Kady Cross's The Strange Case of Finley Jayne, a free ebook downloaded off Amazon. This is a prequel to Cross's The Steampunk Chronicles and, if it is anything to go by, the entire series must be pretty fantastic.

Finley isn't your average Victorian miss -- stronger than humanly possible, she sometimes feels possessed by a dark force that drives her to do bad or imprudent things. This, of course, has made it a bit hard to keep hold down respectable jobs and she is surprised to get an offer from a wealthy upperclass woman to become her daughter's paid companion. The woman is concerned as her daughter has recently become engaged to a man who may not harbor the best of intentions toward his intended.

The Strange Case of Finley Jayne is a highly entertaining combination of steamworks and Society, pretty dresses and mad science, frothy romance and bloody-minded murder.

Day 27: Favorite Fiction Book

2011-10-07T22:30:00.001-04:00

Wouldn’t this be a repeat of “Day 1: What is your favorite book?” A repeat doesn’t sound very interesting so how about I talk about my favorite manga, instead?

The manga series, Emma by Kaoru Mori, follows the adventures of a young orphaned Victorian housemaid who falls in love with the eldest son of a very starchy upper class family. It's a fantastic story (think Upstairs, Downstairs with a heavy dose of Dickens and Bronte) told extremely well with such detailed and historically accurate illustrations that I could spend many happy hours just looking at the pictures.

Emma has been made into an anime and you can watch the first season on YouTube. It's a lot of fun!

(Was stricken with horror tonight to discover I had never purchased the final volume -- Volume 10 -- and it is out of print. They're all out of print. The publisher, CMX, was owned by DC and DC closed CMX down in 2010, because it wasn't a big enough money maker. Well, mother flippin' fish sticks, DC! How much of my money do you want?)

Day 26: Favorite Nonfiction Book

2011-10-06T22:38:00.000-04:00

Well, I’m very fond of Pillsbury's Slow Cooker Recipes. When it was first published, I borrowed it from my library so much it might as well have been out on permanent loan to me! As this really wasn’t fair to other library users, I eventually did the right thing and bought myself a copy.

While I've bought or borrowed tons of cookbooks since then, Slow Cooker Recipes remains one of my favorites. Its recipes are fairly pedestrian and that's fine by me. While I love looking at newer, trendier slow cooker books that utilize more exotic ingredients and additional cooking methods, they're not books I really want to cook from. To me, slow cooking is a time saver and I should have to do as little prep work as possible before turning on my slow cooker -- I don't want to do any precooking and I should never find myself driving around town in a mad quest for a difficult-to-find ingredient. The dishes that come out of my slow cooker don't need to be fancy or particularly photogenic, they just need to taste good and be ready when I want to eat. Pillsbury's Slow Cooker Recipes gives me that.

My copy of Slow Cooker Recipes is seven years old now, but I still cook from it regularly and I expect to keep cooking from it until it falls apart.

Bit of Me: Burning Down The House

2011-10-05T18:52:00.000-04:00

What childhood toy, blanket, stuffed animal, etc. do you still have and cherish?

This is Hug Me, my childhood teddy bear. As far as I can recall, my godmother bought him for me from the Avon catalog when I was eight or so. I did not really like him that much at first as I thought he smelt a bit funny, but he was soft and squashy and pretty darn handsome with that plaid bow tie! Hug Me grew on me to the point that I felt I couldn’t sleep without him.

Around the time I was given Hug Me, I was also given a clip-on reading lamp that I attached to my bed’s headboard. I was already a voracious reader by then and many nights, after my parents had told me to go to bed, I would sneakily prop Hug Me up against the lamp to mask the light as I switched it on. In this way, I could get in a few more hours reading before my parents came to bed!

One night, as usual, I propped Hug Me up against the lamp, switched it on, and, craftily sliding a book out from under my pillow, I began to read ... the next thing I knew, I was waking up to a terrible burning smell! I must have been asleep for a couple hours and Hug Me’s fur had started to melt and burn where he rested against the lamp. I shut off the lamp, but there was no undoing the damage to Hug Me.

And no way to hide it from my parents! They were angry, of course, and there was a lot of shouting about responsibility and not burning the house down, but they didn’t punish me as I expected to be punished – my bear, lamp, and books taken away forever!

Burnt-smelling and disfigured, Hug Me became even more important to me. No longer a gleeful conspirator, but an unfortunate victim of my crimes, I fussed over him constantly. He had to be tucked in or propped up against my pillow just so and he never went near that lamp again!

I outgrew Hug Me in time and he was relegated to the top of my bookshelves, but I never could bear to part with him. Today, he lives on a shelf in my sewing room and I occasionally give him a nod as I do my mad dash workday “where did the wrinkles come from?!” ironing, but we seem to get on fine without each other. Besides, he has Surgery Bear (the bear who kept me company during my long hospitalization the summer I was nineteen) and Godiva Bear (given to me by The Husband and, therefore, too important to part with even though we have no real relationship)!

[I’m waaaay behind on A Bit of Me(Me) questions (the last one I did was in April!!!) but I saw Sept 24’s question and knew I had to answer it!]

Day 25: Favorite Book You Read in School

2011-10-05T08:08:00.000-04:00

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

I really liked The Scarlet Letter, but I’d read it on my own and enjoyed it long before we were assigned it in Sophomore English. Sophomore English had ways of ruining perfectly good novels – I still can’t look at The Great Gatsby with anything less than loathing even though I know my reaction has very little to do with the novel and everything to do with my high school English department’s teaching style. There were things we needed to learn and Love of Literature was not one of them

But I digress. Fifteen-year-old me thought The Scarlet Letter was terribly, tragically beautiful. I read it twice through for my own pleasure and was ecstatic when it was assigned in class. Even the essay I had to write about symbolism and meaning in The Scarlet Letter did not kill my liking of it.

Day 24: Book That Contains Your Favorite Scene

2011-10-04T20:48:00.000-04:00

"Sing the starlight song," Almanzo asked, and Laura sang again, softly,

"In the starlight, in the starlight,
At the daylight's dewy close,
When the nightingale is singing
His last love song to the rose;
In the calm clear night of summer
When the breezes softly play,
From the glitter of our dwelling
We will softly steal away.
Where the silv'ry waters murmur
By the margin of the sea,
In the starlight, in the starlight,
We will wander gay and free."

Again silence came and was unbroken while Barnum of his own accord turned north toward the house. Then Laura said, "I've sung for you, now I'll give you a penny for your thoughts."
"I was wondering ..." Almanzo paused. Then he picked up Laura's hand that shone white in the starlight, and his sun-browned hand closed
gently over it. He had never done that before. "Your hand is so small," he said. Another pause. Then quickly, "I was wondering if you would like an engagement ring."
"That would depend on who offered it to me," Laura told him.
"If I should?" Almanzo asked.
"Then it would depend on the ring," Laura answered and drew her hand away. (These Happy Golden Years, Chapter 23)

It might not look like much if you haven’t read the Little House books, but trust me when I say this is one swoon-worthy scene. For years now, Almanzo had been courting Laura but she had been so frustratingly naïve about the whole thing -- during her first teaching job, he comes way out into the sticks in the dead of a bitter winter to fetch her home every weekend and she excuses his behavior as a favor to her Pa!

Err, no, Laura. No.

Cherry Jones does a brilliant job reading this scene in the audio version of These Happy Golden Years – there’s hesitancy to Almanzo’s voice and a hitch in Laura’s that really brings it home.

(Oh, I know, I am hopelessly off track with this challenge and today is much closer to being “Day 42” than it is “Day 24,” but what can I say? I am a bad, bad blogger).

Day 23: Book You Tell People You’ve Read, But Haven’t (Or Haven’t Actually Finished)

2011-09-28T08:06:00.000-04:00

It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.   Above all -- we were wet.

I never actually finished reading Frank McCourt's Angela’s Ashes even though I told a few people I worked with that I had. I didn’t like Angela’s Ashes all that much – just wasn’t my cup of tea – but I told my coworkers I had read it and found it good, because I didn’t want to hear them go on and on about how Angela’s Ashes was The Best Book Ever Written and how Everyone Loves It and how I must be reading it wrong if I didn’t like it. Easier to lie than to face their censure!

Day 22: Book You Plan to Read Next

2011-09-27T09:04:00.000-04:00

I'm planning on reading May Stewart's Touch Not the Cat which was recently mentioned in the Guardian's Books Blog in the post "Remembering Forgotten Favorites." I've never read any of Mary Stewart's novels, but one of my coworkers adores Stewart and keeps telling me I should read her since she is the mother of romantic suspense.

In Touch Not the Cat, a young woman returns to her family's failing estate after the death of her father. While at the estate, she tries to discover both the meaning behind her father's puzzling deathbed warning and the identity of her unseen psychic lover.

Woo. I'm hoping it's Nancy Drew meets Sookie Stackhouse, but that's probably too much to ask.

Penguins Can't Fly ... Can They?

2011-09-27T08:53:00.000-04:00

Learning to Fly written and illustrated by Sebastian Meschenmoser (Kane/Miller, 2005).

Last winter, I found a penguin.

He told me he'd been flying.
But ... penguins can't fly.

He knew that.
But, penguins are birds, and birds fly, so ...

Learning to Fly is a sweet story about a penguin who wants to fly like the other birds. At first, he does okay but then he meets other birds who remind him he can't fly and, in believing them, crashes to the ground. He meets a man who takes him home and promises to help him fly. All their attempts fail spectacularly, of course, And then, one day, they see a colony of penguins flying overhead ...

Perhaps the truth isn't what other people say about you, it's what you know about yourself.

One of the children's librarians interlibrary loaned Learning to Fly for story hour and it has been making its way around the library ever since. If you love amusing and/or adorable picture books or have a soft spot for all things penguins, you'll like this picture book a lot.

Day 21: Favorite Picture Book From Childhood

2011-09-26T07:11:00.000-04:00

Oh, that's easy! Without a doubt, Little Mouse on the Prairie (A Serendipity Book) by Stephen Cosgrove with illustrations by Robin James. It's a sweet story about a very busy, unsmiling mouse named Tweezle who never has time to frolic and play like the other silly field mice. Come winter, Tweezle is snug (if a bit lonely) in her well-prepared home while the care-fee and unprepared mice shiver in the cold. After some pleading, she takes the silly mice in and everyone learns an Important Lesson.

I loved this picture book so much – Tweezle was so adorably cranky and James’ illustrations really brought the story to life!

Day 20: Book You’ve Read the Most Number of Times

2011-09-25T14:11:00.000-04:00

Well, I've read Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, and Little Town on the Prairie more times than I can count. Most of my re-readings, of course, occurred in my childhood or teen years -- as an adult, I don’t really re-read much since there are just too many new books fighting for my attention. If I keep re-reading Jane Eyre, how will I ever get to Diana Abu Jaber's new novel, Birds of Paradise?

Day 18: Book You’re Most Embarrassed to Say You Like

2011-09-24T13:00:00.000-04:00

Liking Janine Cross’s The Dragon Temple Saga series (Touched by Venom et al) embarrasses the heck out of me. The series is very good with a compelling protagonist -- spunky young slave girl living in a brutal patriarchal society grows up to be a counter-cultural revolutionary. What’s not to like? What's to be embarrassed by ?

Oh, I don’t know ... maybe by the sex with dragons whose venom is a powerful hallucinogen?

Over the months, I'd unwittingly immunized myself to gastrointestinal upset through my ever more potent mixtures of venom; drinking venom full-strength now caused little discomfort. But within weeks, I became habituated to the potency of full-strength venom, craved something stronger, thought of a dragon's tongue between my thighs and how such an invasion, upon the delicate tissues of my womb, might fulfill my need, take me to that peak that consumption of an old bull's venom could no longer take me.

You can’t see me, but believe me when I say I’m blushing furiously right now and I don’t know why! I’ve read a lot of graphic humanoid-on-humanoid sex scenes in my day and not been embarrassed by them. And it’s not even as if the human-dragon sex scenes are badly written!

Bestiality -- my last literary taboo?

(Apparently, I'm so embarrassed by these books that I forgot to post this and went straight to Day 19! Whoops!)

Day 19: Book That Turned You On

2011-09-24T07:28:00.000-04:00

Jane Eyre. Really. I was twelve and full of inarticulate longings and there was Jane. And Helen. And Miss Temple. And Mr. Rochester. Even now, I cannot revisit Jane Eyre without getting tangled up in a decades old snarl of sexual longing. Is it any wonder it remains my favorite novel?

Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, -- all energy, decision, will, -- were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, -- that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Day 17: Shortest Book You’ve Read

2011-09-22T07:14:00.000-04:00

I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head. 

At 103 pages, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is the shortest novel I’ve read as an adult. For such a short, simple story it deals in some very heavy themes and packs one heck of an emotional wallop. I think I’ve cried every time I’ve read it.

Day 16: Longest Book You’ve Read

2011-09-21T17:12:00.000-04:00

Randy shuffles, which is no way to dance beautifully but does rule out snapping his partner's metatarsals. Amy is essentially no better at this than he is, but she has a better attitude. By the time they get to the end of the first dance, Randy has at least reached the point where his face is no longer burning, and has gone for some thirty seconds without having to apologize for anything, and sixty seconds without asking his partner whether she will be needing medical attention.

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is probably the longest hardcover novel I've read. It's difficult to say as I went through a period where I read a lot of epic chunksters and it's possible a volume from Otherland, Song of Ice and Fire, The Saga of Recluce, or the Wheel of Time is longer but I can't be bothered to go find out. Anyway, at almost a thousand pages, Cryptonomicon is long. And (disturbingly) fun, of course.

Wordless Wednesday: Tomato Harvest

2011-09-21T07:21:00.000-04:00

That's pretty much the end of my tomatoes & tomatillos.

Day 15: First “Chapter Book” You Can Remember Reading As A Child

2011-09-20T22:21:00.002-04:00

One of the first chapter books I remember reading is The Borrowers by Mary Norton. I thought Arrietty Clock was fantastic and I loved the idea of a cozy house under the floorboards with soup simmering in a silver thimble on a fireplace of made out of a cogwheel and brass funnel.

Homily was proud of her sitting-room: the walls had been papered with scraps of old letters out of waste-paper baskets, and Homily had arranged the handwriting sideways in vertical stripes which ran from floor to ceiling. On the walls, repeated in various colors, hung several portraits of Queen Victoria as a girl; these were postage stamps, borrowed by Pod some years ago from the stamp-box on the desk in the morning-room. There was a lacquer trinket-box, padded inside and with the lid open, which they used as a settle, and that useful stand-by -- a chest of drawers made of match boxes. There was a round table with a red velvet cloth, which Pod had made from the wooden bottom of a pill-box supported on the carved pedestal of a knight from the chess set ...The knight itself -- its bust, so to speak -- stood on a column in the corner, where it looked very fine, and lent that air to the room which only statuary can give.

I remember taking some of my dollhouse furniture outside and making a little “Borrower’s house” in a split tree trunk and populated it with Strawberry Shortcake dolls, but it wasn’t the same.

I was really tickled to see Studio Ghibli has made an animated film, Arrietty, based on Norton's novel:

Alas, it will not be available in the United States until February 2012.

Day 14: Book Whose Main Character You Want to Marry

2011-09-19T07:16:00.000-04:00

Don't want to marry any of 'em -- no matter how smart/hot/awesome they are -- as, to me, the qualities that make them great protagonists wouldn't make them great spouses. Great short-term lovers, maybe, but not spouses. Can't think of even one protagonist -- no, not even Anne Shirley -- with whom I could have a long marriage which would not involve broken crockery and shoutiness. Or separate holidays.

I'm just not a romantic person -- my idea of marriage runs along very practical, comfortable lines. Hmm. I guess I could marry Charlotte Lucas? Not a protagonist, of course, but an excellent person nonetheless.

Day 13: Book Whose Main Character is Most Like You

2011-09-18T07:32:00.000-04:00

As a chronic worrier, I completely identify with Wemberly of Wemberly Worried -- a little mouse who worries about everything all the time.

Wemberly worried about everything.
Big things, little things, and things in between.
Wemberly worried in the morning.
She worried at night.
And she worried throughout the day.

Day 12: Book That is Most Like Your Life

2011-09-17T06:27:00.000-04:00

Oh, this is a hard one. I can't think of a book that is most like my life because my life is pretty average and unexciting. In the books I read, even the most average contemporary woman loses her averageness by becoming entangled in secret plots or supernatural shenanigans or by being swept up by Tall, Dark, and Superior. This is unlikely to happen to me. Disappointing, really.

Fuck Yeah English Major Armadillo sums it up pretty well:

Day 11: Book From Your Favorite Author

2011-09-16T09:23:00.000-04:00

There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshiped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles.

They are the small gods-the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.

Because what they lack is belief.

A handful, though, go on to greater things. Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes a minute or two to build a small cairn of stones in general thanks to whatever spirits might be around the place. Or a peculiarly shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an isolated stone. Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods.

Often it stops there. But sometimes it goes further. More rocks are added, more stones are raised, a temple is built on the site where the tree once stood. The god grows in strength, the belief of its worshipers raising it upwards like a thousand tons of rocket fuel. For a very few, the sky's the limit.

And, sometimes, not even that.

From Small Gods -- one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett.

Wordless Wednesday: Holiday Snaps

2011-09-14T07:47:00.000-04:00

Book Loot from Abroad

2011-09-13T11:19:00.000-04:00

I know I've fallen behind with the 30 Day Book Challenge and you are all terribly disappointed in me, but ohmyflippingfishsticks am I ever too jet-lagged to write intelligibly about anything!

So, instead, I give you a picture of the books I brought back from abroad!

I read A Rural Affair on the return flight and enjoyed it very much. Two of Catherine Alliott's earlier novels, The Wedding Day and A Crowded Marriage, are available through my library system and I hope to be reading them soon.

Day 10: Book That Changed Your Life

2011-09-10T06:58:00.000-04:00

I feel I should pick some ponderous philosophical work or something classically Literary -- something like Plato's Republic or Tolstoy's War and Peace. Something that gives me real literary credit. Instead, I'm going to go with The Mice of Nibbling Village by Margaret Greaves (illustrations by Jane Pinkney -- do click the link!).

This is the first book I remember my mother ever giving me. I would have been eight when my mother gave it to me -- either for Christmas or my birthday -- and I remember the clever poems and richly detailed illustrations of Victorian-esque mice completely enchanted me.

When other mice are sound asleep.
Belinda leaves her home to creep
Into the human house above.
A clever mouse! She learned to love
Reading when she was very small.
That cat had chased her down the hall,
Where she had fled behind a shelf
Of story-books. She found herself
Stuck tight, with nothing else to do
But eat the dictionary through!
So, stuffed with words, she found that she
Could read the stories easily.
Now, by the guttering candle's light,
Belinda Bookery reads all night.

The Mice of Nibbling Village was the first book that really felt it belonged to me and the first book that completely sucked me in -- is it any wonder I fell in love with it? And all that, of course, set me firmly on the path to becoming a reader and lover of books. If my mother hadn't given me that book, where might my life have gone, instead?

Day 9: Book That Makes You Sick

2011-09-09T06:57:00.009-04:00

Filth made me sick. This was unexpected as, in my college days, I was a great fan of Irvine Welsh and devoured Trainspotting, The Acid House, Maribou Stork Nightmares, and Ecstasy with nary a qualm.

Alas, Filth put me off Welsh forevermore. This story of a sex-obsessed, misogynistic, corrupt copper whose intestines had been colonized by a talkative tapeworm just made my skin crawl. I couldn't read more than a few pages at a time without wanting to throw up and I only managed to read, maybe, a third of the novel before I gave up on it.

It's getting really fucking itchy and I shift my weight on to one buttock and claw at my arse through my shiny black flannels. She's ... I need a proper fucking laundry service, that's what I need. It's no good. I stick it out until I get to the High Street where I stop the car at Hunter Square and go into the public bogs. This needs a good claw. I whip everything down and remove the dampness from around my arse with toilet paper. Then I scratch like fuck but it stings as the grease from the bacon roll, I realize, is still under my nails. I claw and claw feeling a delicious liberation as the wound tears and pulsates. I see the blood on my fingers. I wedge some toilet paper between the cheeks of my arse in order to stop them from rubbing together and creating the friction which causes the tissue to itch. My balls are not too bad. I go back up without bothering to wash my hands.

And so on and so forth with bits about coons and hoors and cunts and fuckin muppets thrown in for good measure.

Day 8: Book That Scares You

2011-09-08T06:57:00.000-04:00

Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House scared the bejeesus out of me. I like scary stories with subtle, crafty horrors, because those qualities make them seem much more terrible and far creepier then something with werewolves or midnight graveyards and Shirley Jackson is so very, very good at that.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

And, of course, many of Jackson’s short stories are excellent. “The Possibility of Evil” is a favorite – full of small town nastiness and terrible tyranny by a neat, Respectable old lady.

The town where she lived had to be kept clean and sweet, but people everywhere were lustful and evil and degraded, and needed to be watched; the world was so large, and there was only one Strangeworth left in it.

Day 7: Book That You Can Quote/Recite

2011-09-07T06:55:00.000-04:00

I can't actually quote any books. I can quote bits of poems and plays I've read, but no passages from proper novels. Not surprising, the bits I remember are usually poems from L.M. Montgomery's Anne books or Shel Silverstein.

I can also quote a fair amount of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- as, I presume, can most liberal arts college graduates everywhere!

Day 6: Favorite Young Adult Book

2011-09-06T06:55:00.000-04:00

I absolutely ♥ Patricia McKillip's The Changeling Sea. It's a slender fantasy -- a mere 153 pages -- about a young tavern maid who hexes the sea after it takes her parents and ends up summoning a brooding prince, a mysterious sea monster, and an odd sort of wizard. It's sad, funny, romantic fantasy -- just the sort of thing I would have gobbled up in middle school.

Mare said fiercely, “Girl, you take one more step, I will throw a bucket at you. You come upstairs with us and tell the story properly from one end to the other. You can’t just go and leave us here with a jumble like that: sea-women, secret sons, princes wandering into your house at night giving you black pearls....”

...
"It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.” He leaned over Peri, impelled by some mysterious impulse, kissed her gently. “I’ve been wanting to do that for some time,” he told her. “But you always had one king’s son or another at hand.”
Like him, she was flushed under her untidy hair. “Well,” she said, “now I don’t.”
“Now you don’t.” He watched her, smiling but uncertain. Then, still uncertain, he sat down beside her mother to help her clean shrimp. Peri’s eyes strayed to the window. But the magician’s lean, nut-brown face, constantly hovering between magic and laughter, came between her and the darkening sea. After a while, watching him instead, she began to smile.

Oh, Internets, I how I ♥-ed The Changeling Sea! I read it over and over again and used my best purple-inked pen to transcribe vast chunks of it into a notebook. I had pretty strong crushes on Peri, Kir, and Lyo for years and I'm still pretty sure I would marry this novel if I could.

Day 5: Book You Wish You Could Live In

2011-09-05T06:54:00.000-04:00

Ever since I first read it, I've wanted to live in Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. I'm a sucker for her homey, rural descriptions even though I know she has, in many ways, dressed poverty up in pretty ribbons:

Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid and dew-sleeked; dewdrops beaded the gossamer webs, and the children's feet left long, dark trails on the dewy turf. There were night scents of wheat-straw and flowers and moist earth on the air and the sky was fleeced with pink clouds.

For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields stood 'ripe unto harvest.' It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year. The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure color; the moors in the purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

Awed, yet uplifted by the silence and clean-washed loveliness of the dawn, the children would pass along the narrow field paths with rustling wheat on each side. Or Laura would make little dashes into the corn for poppies, or pull trails of the lesser bindweed with its pink-striped trumpets, like clean cotton frocks, to trim her hat and girdle her waist, while Edmund would stump on, red-faced with indignation at her carelessness in making trails in the standing corn.

(Lark Rise to Candleford is actually a collection of three books -- Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green -- and is a "gently" fictionalized version of Thompson's childhood. There's a BBC program inspired by the books, but I haven't been able to watch more than the pilot as that Lark Rise seems just too clean and tidy -- theme park Olde Tyme Lark Rise, if you will, with none of the descriptive loveliness I found in the books).

Oh, to be in England now that September's there

2011-09-04T08:40:00.000-04:00

What a wondrous place this was -- crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.

...
All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.
— Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)

Yes, I’m in England. Finally.

Day 4: Book That Makes You Cry

2011-09-04T06:53:00.000-04:00

Charlotte’s Web made me cry. Still makes me cry.

"Good-bye!" she whispered. Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her front legs at him.
She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that has visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

Excuse me while I go sob into a pillow ...

Day 3: Book That Makes You Laugh Out Loud

2011-09-03T06:52:00.001-04:00

Even though I've read it three times now, Helen Fieldings' Bridget Jones's Diary still makes me laugh out loud. In light of yesterday's big Wuthering Heights reveal, I give you a quote that never fails to make me chuckle:

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Also this one:

I don't know why she didn't just come out with it and say, "Darling, do shag Mark Darcy over the turkey curry, won't you? He's very rich."

And this one:

Oh my God. Just took lid off casserole to remove carcasses. Soup is bright blue.

(If you think Bridget Jones's Diary is funny, then you might also like Jane Green's Jemima J).

Day 2: Least Favorite Book

2011-09-02T06:50:00.014-04:00

Least favorite book? A book I vehemently disliked and still resent the time I spent on it? Why that would have to be Wuthering Heights!

I. Hate. Wuthering Heights.

I know many readers who simply adore Wuthering Heights. They see it as an intense romance between two ill-fated lovers, one of whom is a darkly brooding Byronic hero.

But, it's not. It is an awful novel full of awful people doing awful things out of selfishness and spite and the only good thing that ever came out of it was this lolcat:

Day 1: Favorite Book

2011-09-01T06:49:00.014-04:00

My favorite book? The book I instantly loved as a child and have returned to again and again as an adult, never tiring of its characters or story?The book I love so much that I can't discuss it in a coherent way beyond "this is my favorite book and it is very good and you must read it?" I think the answer is obvious, don't you?

It's Anne of Green Gables, of course. (Sorry, Long Winter, but you remain a close second). I own three editions of Anne of Green Gables -- the Bantam Starfire edition I was given as a child, Oxford UP's The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, and McClelland & Stewart's anniversary reprint of the 1908 edition. Which one do I keep re-reading? My dog-earred childhood paperback, of course!

"I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?" she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice. "I'm very glad to see you. I was beginning to be afraid you weren't coming for me and I was imagining all the things that might have happened to prevent you. I had made up my mind that if you didn't come for me to-night I'd go down the track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn't be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don't you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn't you? And I was quite sure you would come for me in the morning, if you didn't to-night."

Matthew had taken the scrawny little hand awkwardly in his; then and there he decided what to do. He could not tell this child with the glowing eyes that there had been a mistake; he would take her home and let Marilla do that. She couldn't be left at Bright River anyhow, no matter what mistake had been made, so all questions and explanations might as well be deferred until he was safely back at Green Gables.

30 Day Book Challenge

2011-08-31T06:47:00.001-04:00

The 30 Day Book Challenge has been going around my little corner of Facebook for a while now and I thought I might give it a try here in order to get myself back to book blogging more regularly. If you want, you can play along in the comments ...

Day 1: Favorite book
Day 2: Least favorite book
Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud
Day 4: Book that makes you cry
Day 5: Book you wish you could live in
Day 6: Favorite young adult book
Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite
Day 8: Book that scares you
Day 9: Book that makes you sick
Day 10: Book that changed your life
Day 11: Book from your favorite author
Day 12: Book that is most like your life
Day 13: Book whose main character is most like you
Day 14: Book whose main character you want to marry
Day 15: First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child
Day 16: Longest book you’ve read
Day 17: Shortest book you’ve read
Day 18: Book you’re most embarrassed to say you like
Day 19: Book that turned you on
Day 20: Book you’ve read the most number of times
Day 21: Favorite picture book from childhood
Day 22: Book you plan to read next
Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
Day 24: Book that contains your favorite scene
Day 25: Favorite book you read in school
Day 26: Favorite nonfiction book
Day 27: Favorite fiction book
Day 28: Last book you read
Day 29: Book you’re currently reading
Day 30: Favorite coffee table book

I'll be starting this challenge tomorrow, September 1.

Wordless Wednesday: Somewhere, Lancashire

2011-08-31T03:23:00.000-04:00

(This time next week!)

[Knowledgable people tell me I took this in the gardens of Haigh Country Park, Wigan, Lancs.]

Wordless Wednesday: Blackpool Central Pier

2011-08-24T03:58:00.000-04:00

(One more Wednesday and I'm there).

Wordless Wednesday: Budgies!

2011-08-17T07:59:00.000-04:00

Wordless Wednesday: Sunset in Blackpool

2011-08-10T07:00:00.004-04:00

(Cannot wait to go on vacation, you know!)

"Do no let her."

2011-08-06T06:00:00.015-04:00

The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry (Gallery Books, 2011)

Panic, panic, can't panic. Think of food. Think of sugar. I am a sugar cube in cold water. I won't dissolve. Precise edges. Made up of tiny, regular, secure parts. If the water were hotter I would worry, but it's cold. I stay together. Precise. Clean. Surrounded, but whole.

Okay. I need to cook. It'll calm me down.

Ginny's parents have died in a car crash and her sister, Amanda, wants/expects to put their family home up for sale. Shy, quirky Ginny is ill prepared to deal with her parents' death, let alone the probable loss of the only home she has ever known. Seeking comfort and a world she understands, Ginny retreats to the kitchen where, using recipes handwritten by those now dead, she not only creates memorable dishes, but also summons the spirits of the dead. These summonings eventually help Ginny to come to grips with her family's past and build her own future.

I don't have to move into Amanda's house to be present in her family. Even though I'm not there physically all the time, I want them to have something that says, I'm out here. I'm okay. I love you. I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.

As we all know, I love foodie novels and The Kitchen Daughter is no exception. If you loved the magical realism of foodie lit like Like Water for Chocolate or Crescent, I think you'll really enjoy The Kitchen Daughter. I devoured this book in one sitting and then I read it again, slowly and savoringly, over the course of a week. Even now, days after finishing it, I crave more of Ginny's story. The Kitchen Daughter is one of the few novels I've read this year that demands a sequel. Or a movie. A movie would be acceptable!

"And there he kept her very well."

2011-08-02T06:00:00.014-04:00

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer (NYRB Classics, 2011)

At the point where I learned what I was fighting, loving, I knew that I was bound, in the end, to lose. I dispensed with the formalities of tenderness, pity, the ceremonial flattery that should go before disciplined massacre. I fought, I suppose, like a woman, uttering distracting cries, making false moves, hitting below the belt. I was incapable of giving up, and unable to escape. But I was no match for Jake. He went on loving me even after I was beaten, propped up with my wound wide open, emptied of memory or hope.

Mrs. Armitage (we never learn her personal name) has lots of kids, but she isn't really mother to any of them as the lifestyle she maintains with her current husband (number four, which is a bit of a big deal in 1950s England) means there are layers of carers between herself and the children. I get the feeling she resents those layers, but doesn't see away through them. This is the life her husband has built and it's supposed to be the life she wants. Maybe, having another baby would make things better? She does enjoy being pregnant. But does she enjoy being pregnant because it is the only time she feels in control of herself and at the center of things?

Her husband doesn't want more children and finally cajoles her into an abortion and sterilization. Mrs Armitage goes along with his desires, because she loves him and wants to keep her marriage together when it is obvious another pregnancy will wreck it. Of course, Mrs Armitage is understandably destroyed when she discovers her husband has been having an affair with a young married actress he works with and has gotten her pregnant. Is it any surprise she ends up hiding out from her husband and children in their glass tower of a country house?

While I couldn't stop reading The Pumpkin Eater, I can't say I enjoyed it overmuch. There are darkly funny bits and some of the language is quite lyrical, but it's still a brutal story with sort of drab inevitability to it. Long before the children laid siege to the tower, I knew Mrs. Armitage would be conquered and reclaimed and that life would go on as before for her, sans fecundity.

It's Like Candy

2011-07-29T21:00:00.001-04:00

Size 12 is Not Fat by Meg Cabot (William Morrow, 2005)

Every time I see you
I get a Sugar Rush
You're like candy
You give me a Sugar Rush
Don't tell me to stay on my diet
You have simply got to try it
Sugar Rush

Heather Wells used to be minor rock star, a tween sensation at sixteen. Then she lost her recording contract when she asked to record her own songs (dismissed by her label as "angry girl rocker shit"), lost her cheating rocker boyfriend to an up-and-coming sensation, and lost all her money to her mother who fled the country with it!

Thirteen years later, looking to build a life for herself that has nothing to do with her rock star past, Heather becomes one of New York College's assistant residence hall directors (free classes, natch). When her residents start dying in ways the police dismiss as mere college hijinks gone terribly wrong, Heather knows it must be murder and that it's up to her to discover the killer's identity before more girls die.

Size Twelve is Not Fat is fun, chatty, cute, and pretty darn ridiculous. I grinned the entire time I read it -- even when I was rolling my eye's at Heather's obsession with her hunky private investigator landlord (who just happens to be her ex-fiance's brother!) or the repetitive jokes.

I enjoyed it enough that I know I'll read the sequels, but not so much that I'd press this book on other readers. I guess I'm trying to say it's a fun and ridiculous read, but not an exactly memorable one. I finished Size Twelve is Not Fat two days ago and it's already fading from my memory, leaving nothing but a warm, fuzzy glow behind. And that's fine, you know.

Wordless Wednesday: Hovering Hummer

2011-07-27T00:34:00.000-04:00

Squee!

Wordless Wednesday: Cool, Calm, Green

2011-07-21T11:14:00.001-04:00

In the sunken garden @ Hill-Stead in Farmington, CT.

Brazilian Cooking @ the Library

2011-07-19T13:00:00.000-04:00

Earlier in the month, I attended a Chefs & Books talk at the Farmington Libraries on Leticia Moreinos Schwartz's The Brazilian Kitchen. I didn't know much about Brazilian cuisine, but as I expect it will become trendy soon -- what with the upcoming Olympics and World Cup and all -- I thought now would be a good time to educate myself. Besides, who am I to pass up a chance to learn about food?

Chef Leticia's talk was really educational. Being wholly ignorant, I was interested to learn that Brazilian cookery owes a debt to indigenous Indian, Portuguese, African, and even Lebanese cooking. Just like everywhere really, there are distinct regionalisms to Brazilian cookery and food you encounter in Buenos Aires may not resemble food found in the heart of the Amazon. Chef Leticia passed around samples of pão de queijo (twee cheese buns) and coconut brigadeiros (soft, fragrant bonbons) and that was it, I knew I had to try Brazilian cooking.

I put a hold on The Brazilian Kitchen as soon as I arrive at work the next day. A copy came in for me last week and I just can't stop looking at it! Admittedly, some of the recipes are for foods I am not brave enough to try cooking at home -- I would happily eat them in a restaurant (where are you hiding, Connecticut's Brazilian restaurants?), but cook them? Never. This has nothing to do with recipe complexity as Chef Leticia has written them in a very clear, approachable way. It's just that I'm afraid of frying. Anything that involves heating a dutch oven with oil is a no-go for me. But, please, someone try the acarajé (black-eyed pea fritters) and tell me how awesome they turned out!

Amusingly, two of the dishes I'm most interested in trying are eggy, comfort foods. One, "Egg Stuffed Baked Potato" (Batatas Recheadas com Ovo), is basically a twice baked-potato stuffed topped with an egg, covered in cream and Parmesan cheese, and baked until delicious. Can't you just imagine breaking the perfect yolk and seeing all that delicious golden goo ooze all over the potato? Yum! The other recipe, "Quail Eggs with Ketchup Sauce" (Ovos de Codorna com Molho Rôse), I freely admit to wanting because it seems like a souped a version of an old childhood favorite -- soft scrambled eggs with ketchup. Except, of course, these are soft-boiled quail eggs arrange in a little puddle of sauce made from mayonnaise, crème fraiche, heavy cream, lime juice, tomato paste, and ketchup. It's elegant comfort food.

"It's a whole new world of pretty ..."

2011-07-14T18:06:00.004-04:00

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (Scholastic, 2011)

Through the left-side windows, they can see the strange, verdant land taking shape, growing bigger as they descend. It's beautiful. They will land safely, no matter the sudden near-vertical descent. They're sure of it. After all, these are can-do girls from a nation built upon dreams. And what is the ear-splitting scream of metal against metal, the choking smoke, the sensation of falling through a surprisingly uncaring sky, against such unshakable dreams?

A plane carrying Miss Teen Dream pageant contestants crash lands on a seemingly deserted island. All the adults and many of the beauty queens are dead or missing. Those who remain must find a way to survive and, in doing so, will sample hallucinogenic berries, uncover nefarious corporate plots, and discover their true selves.

I really, really enjoyed Beauty Queens. So much so that it's hard for me to write about it without blabbing the whole story. It's clever, funny, and subversive. Also campy, overly dramatic, and ridiculous. Frankly, it reminded me of Christopher Moore's more subversively ridiculous books (and I'm a big Moore fan, so take that as the compliment it is).

Our heroines are, for the most part, are well crafted -- they're not "just" beauty queens, but "real" girls with desires, dreams, and personality that must be constantly suppressed in order to become Miss Teen Dream. It was great to see them gradually shed their beauty queen personas and become strong, capable, independent women capable of overcoming Corporation machinations trough the skillful application of eyelash curlers and straightening irons.

   Mary Lou wiped fruit juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. "Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they are."
   Adina gazed out at the expanse of unknowable ocean. "Maybe."
   There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping.
   They were becoming.
   They were.

The commercials and snippets of television programming scattered through the novel are also a hoot -- especially "A Word from Your Sponsor" after some desert island lovin' goes on --

The Corporation would like to apologize for the proceeding pages. Of course, it's not right for girls to behave this way. Sexuality is not meant to be this way -- an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.

Taken out of context, the quote may seem kind-of preachy and over the top (well, okay, the entire novel is pretty over the top) but have you looked at girl's/women's magazines lately? It's all sexshamebuybuybuy! (If it weren't for the recipes, I wouldn't subscribe ...)

Wordless Wednesday: Flutter by, Butterfly

2011-07-13T23:54:00.000-04:00

Wordless Wednesday: "A Mose is a Mose, / A rose is a rose."

2011-07-06T01:01:00.000-04:00

"A rose is a rose is a rose is a roses,
A rose is what Moses supposes his toes is,
It couldn't be a Lilly or a taffy-daffy- dilly,
It's got to be a rose cause it rhymes with Mose."

Lot of rain here, you know, so Singing in the Rain is always on my mind.

Happy People, Everywhere

2011-07-05T01:01:00.002-04:00

One Thing Leading to Another and Other Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Viking, 1984)

A collection of short stories, many interlinked by recurring characters. The first four short stories feature Mr. Edom, the proprietor of the Abbey Antique Galleries, and his invaluable assistant Mr. Collins. Mr. Edom is always very proper -- properly dressed, properly polite, properly careful. His young colleague is less so, but there is hope for him. The two characters are well drawn, their adventures well written, and their regular customers were just a hoot. I could quite easily imagine these stories being filmed as a BBC or Masterpiece theater miniseries -- just a quiet, low-key period drama. It probably didn't help that I kept visualizing young Peter Davison (aka Tristan Farnon) as Mr. Collins.

The other stories are a mix of unhappy household dramas and fairy stories. I found the human stories to be much more compelling than the fairy stories which seemed too much like history lessons dressed up in fairy togs. The Vicar's wife sees more than she wants to, Miss Logie can't stop pushing culinary boundaries, Evie might very well be a poltergeist ... the fairy play at politics on a scale that didn't move me nearly as much as the small human dramas did.

Anyway, One Thing Leading to Another and Other Stories can be pretty dark stuff, but there's a bitter (biting?) edge of humor to a lot of it and I thought the collection made for a good read overall.

Library Loot Gone Feral

2011-06-30T01:01:00.007-04:00

My library loot fetish is getting out of hand (again). I have too many items checked out (again) and I can't see reading them all before they come due (but I don't want to return them yet, either, in case I suddenly find time to read them). I keep meaning to read or listen to them (really!), but my household and garden to-do lists are rather demanding (shuttup, giant mulch pile!) and there are several little personal projects I've been working on that also cut in to my reading time ...

If I could just clear my gardening backlog and if my house would stay tidy for more than 3 hours (seriously, clutter respawns in 3 hrs), then I might just get through my library loot in (something like) a timely fashion.

Chime by Franny Billingsley
Designated Fat Girl by Jennifer Joyner
Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast: 250 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Any Time of Day by Martha Stewart Living
Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette
High on the Hog: a Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica Harris
Kill Shakespeare: Vol. 1, A Sea of Troubles by Conor McCreery
Play It Cool [CD] by Lea DeLaria
The Brazilian Kitchen: 100 Classic and Contemporary Recipes for the Home Cook by Leticia Moreinos Schwartz
The Fat Studies Reader by Esther Rothblum
The Little Stranger [audiobook] by Sarah Waters
The Live Smoke Sessions [CD] by Lea DeLaria
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The View from Lazy Point: a Natural Year in an Unnatural World by Carl Safina
The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure
Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook

Bibliophile, restrain thyself?

Wordless Wednesday: Swallowtail Caterpillar

2011-06-29T01:01:00.008-04:00

"All the time he was changing like some dreadful caterpillar pretending to be a twig."

2011-06-26T21:10:00.000-04:00

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings by Penelope Mortimer (McGraw-Hill, 1961)

Originally published in The New Yorker, these stories offer a window into the lives of "ordinary" people you might mistake for your neighbors or, but for the grace of god, yourself -- families with too many children, unhappy women with ogre-ish husbands, mad/bad girls, men who realize they've outlived their dreams, and bitterly average people who fantasize about knowing celebrities (and then are horrified by how perfectly dreadful those celebrities turn out to be).

Reading these stories, I'd frequently feel a great sense of relief as I reached the end of one -- as if I had escaped from something terrible -- and yet I couldn't stop myself from going on to the next. They're well-written, expertly crafted stories. While you can't go wrong reading them, you might want to lock your liquor cabinet and hide your knives before you sit down with Saturday Lunch with the Brownings. (If you like Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier's short stories, you'll probably eat these up with a spoon).

What a relief, he thought, as he started up the engine. My God -- it was almost a prayer -- what a relief. The car shot around the gravel crescent, headed towards home. He looked back once, gripped with a moment's uneasiness. The blur in an upstairs window might possibly have been a child, but the cry thrown out to him was soundless and hardly misted the glass. He drove on, vindicated. In a vaguely disquieting way he was no longer lonely. People would say he had done the right thing, and as for Patricia ... Everything passes, he told himself, settling more comfortably in his seat. Everything passes.