Archive for January, 2013
January 5, 2013 @ 6:07 pm | Filed under:
Links 
As you may know, I share links to interesting things I’ve read on the web in the “Caught My Eye” section of my sidebar. This is the feed of my Diigo account, where I do most of my link-collecting online. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll have seen many of these posts there already, but for those of you who read Bonny Glen via RSS or email, and who do not spend much time on FB, here are some of the articles I’ve found thoughtprovoking, lovely, or entertaining this past week.
• How would you expect Arthur Conan Doyle to sound? : Maud Newton (quoting Elizabeth Jane Howard).
“Anything writers ever say about writing can only apply to them, as you have to find your own way of doing things. And it’s a strange business. Years ago Kingsley [Amis] and I tried to write a section of each other’s novel. He’d usually write quite quickly with lots of laughing at his own jokes. I’d write slowly and would bite my nails a lot. But when we swapped over, I started laughing and he started biting his nails.”
• On Advice To Kids | Carrie Frye / The Awl.
“…that phone call felt like it contained the most important advice I received in 2012: That sometimes not only you, but every other single person you might look to, has absolutely no idea what to do. No one. If you’re past a certain age, there is no authority to whom you can go caterwauling when things go wrong. I would have anticipated this would frighten me, but it doesn’t; I find it reassuring. It makes you feel gentler about the world, about other people’s imperfections, about the degree to which a hurt may or may not have been intended.”
• Better Boundaries, With Muriel Spark | Maud Newton / The Awl.
“I can’t decide whether it’s more narcissistic or more fair-mindedly self-critical to compare oneself to cretinous novel characters, but I do it all the time, and the negative example of Hector Bartlett is something I increasingly reflect on now when I’m thinking of posting my opinion on some subject or considering whether to take an assignment. I think: Is this something I really care about? Am I actually informed about this, or do I have enough time and interest to become genuinely informed about it? Do I have, if not yet a clear picture of exactly what I want to say, a conviction that I have something to say?”
• Mother Bird – bulk section rockstar.
“So I kind of got sick of all the trash we throw away, even though a lot of it’s recycling, right? So I did a crazy thing and took a torn sheet and made it into a stack of drawstring bags and got myself a washable crayon and went to the store with the most bulk stuff I could find. And got my green on.”
(more…)
January 4, 2013 @ 8:32 pm | Filed under:
Books This time of year, my book gluttony swells to impossible dimensions—everyone sharing their last year’s reading lists, all the Best Of lists floating around. Stop looking, I tell myself: stop until you’ve finished even half, even a tenth of the books you’ve already got queued in the TBR stacks. It’s no use my vowing to acquire no new books until I’ve read all (or a tenth) of the ones I have waiting here in these crowded quarters—I’m too greedy, too eager to read them all, all, all.
Books make billionaires of all of us—such a wealth of stories left to read; we’re all rich in this way, even the most dogged bookworms. There are always millions of stories left to read. We’ll never spend all this splendid capital, none of us.
When I make lists of the books I Absolutely Intend to Read in the Near Future, I never do. Not until years later when I’ve drawn up Yet Another List full of entirely different titles. So I won’t make a list right now, despite the persistent urge to do exactly that. This year I’m reading with complete abandon, no plan, no agenda, no sense of obligation. I’ve got at least half a dozen books going this very minute. And that’s not counting read-alouds (and read-alongs) I’ve got in the works, or planned, with kids.
I enjoy writing about books I’m in the thick of more than writing about them after I’ve finished. By then I’m on to the next tome, and that’s where my thoughts are. I had heaps of things to say about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last month, five pages in, but when I’d finished, I wanted to sit quietly with it for a bit. Scott got on earful on our walk that first morning—how amused/amazed I was at Muriel Spark’s skill, her curious repetitions of phrase in describing the girls of Miss Brodie’s set: Rose, who was famous for sex; Sandy with her little eyes. In anyone less masterful, this intrusive technique would have been annoying at best, groanworthy at worst, but Spark’s control of language is exquisite and precise. I tried to explain to Scott how manipulated I felt, not in a negative sense (though that word nearly always carries a negative connotation) but in the sense of being subtly directed to form certain impressions of the characters, as an accomplished rider might invisibly direct a horse with gentle pressures and nudges. And there’s Miss Brodie nudging and directing her girls, shaping their minds toward her preferred vision—Spark’s structure is brilliant; “She’s Miss-Brodying me!” I told Scott. And then gradually, gradually, you’re allowed to step back and think your own thoughts, alongside mutinous, insightful Sandy with her little eyes. I know Sandy is insightful because Miss Brodie said so. Oh, Muriel Spark, you wicked genius you. Please manipulate the world in such a way that I might have a week alone with your body of work, won’t you?
Facebook friends have seen this photo already but it so perfectly captures our day I had to put it here too. Today at the park, a woman was making balloon swords for no particular reason except to put smiles on kids’ faces. The fierce glee of Rilla, chasing a pack of boys she didn’t know with her fearsome pink sword, was a sight to behold. Huck preferred to scale the castle walls and brandish his weapon from the heights. Wonderboy didn’t want a balloon, he just wanted to hang out with me in the bards’ corner and talk about the epic battle. Rilla declared herself the victor, though I’m not sure her army of foes agreed.
January 2, 2013 @ 8:52 pm | Filed under:
Books 
My 2012 booklist is still incomplete…I didn’t log as faithfully this year as in years past. It was a strange reading year for me…lots of old favorites revisited, lots of memoir, and an unusually low total number of books read, even allowing for entries I haven’t remembered yet.
Notable reads:
The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
That enthralling collection of gardening letters between Elizabeth Lawrence and Katharine S. White, editing by Emily Herring Wilson, which makes me want to take up old-fashioned letter-writing again; not necessarily the pen-and-paper kind, since I so loathe writing by hand, but the kind of long newsy epistles I used to exchange with a few friends, ages ago. And probably it was the Lawrence/White correspondence that put me in the mood to revisit 84 Charing Cross Road (yet again) and, more recently, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
This year I greatly enjoyed The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling by Quinn Cummings and Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, & the Mystery of Making Things Up by Barbara Feinberg. Bringing Up Bebe was fun and made me want a total redo on introducing food to my offspring. Speaking of food, I salivated through American Terroir and found myself craving oysters, sourwood honey, and maple syrup—and once again recommending a Rowan Jacobsen work to everyone who happened to cross my path.
I revisited some old favorites: Wise Child, Rilla of Ingleside, Linnets and Valerians, Possession, The Blue Castle, All Creatures Great and Small.
Rilla’s favorite read-aloud of the year was Brambly Hedge, which occupied much of our fall.
I ought to link to posts I wrote on some of these books, but I don’t have time right now. Maybe later?
I’m a bit off my game—ordinarily, New Year’s Day posts gallop out of my fingertips even before I’ve cleared the New Year’s Eve sleep out of my eyes. This year, my head’s in seventeen places at once. A family member is ill, a friend’s baby is in the hospital, some other things are afoot. But our Christmas, here at home, was lovely: mellow, merry, and messy—which is possibly the most succinct description of our family dynamic I’ve ever managed.
A highlight of the week (for Beanie, Jane, and me) was singing in a choir at the Sea World Christmas show on Sunday night. A friend of ours is the choir director at a parish in downtown San Diego, and his group was invited to perform in Shamu’s Christmas. He extended the invitation to our homeschooling circle, and thus it was that my girls and I found ourselves decked in blue robes, singing Silent Night and Joy to the World while orcas fountained out of the water behind us. And then in front of us. None of my pictures (from the rehearsal, sans orcas) came out, but it would take a magical photographer to capture the wonder of the moment. An unforgettable experience.
Last night was paninis, gingerbread men, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a perfect celebration.
Today is pub day for Inch and Roly and the Very Small Hiding Place, which feels like an auspicious start to the year.
Happy New Year, my friends. I hope your holidays were filled with magic.
