Archive for the 'Books' Category
March 15, 2010 @ 7:08 pm | Filed under: Books
1) Because he loves me;
2) Because he reads my Facebook page and saw that my old boss left a comment recommending it;
3) Because lately we seem to be going through three loaves a week…
my husband bought me a copy of, yes, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
Looks like it might be time to dust off my old bread blog.
Thanks, honey. I’ll save you an extra-thick slice.
March 14, 2010 @ 7:52 pm | Filed under: Books, Crows
I am loving all these crow book suggestions you are sending me!
Here’s a roundup—
Ms. Mental Multivitamin (whose blog has put me in the path of many an excellent read) chimed in with a couple of titles and a link to her many posts singing the praises of crows:
If you haven’t read it already, check out Crow Planet (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) and (my favorite) Caw of the Wild (Barb Kirpluk).
Longtime Bonny Glen reader Kay recommended Crow Planet, too, so I’m eager to check it out.
LisaE of Shadybrook Acres writes:
There is a great chapter on Silverspot the crow in Wild Animals I Have Known. It made us look at crows in a whole new light.
That’s Ernest Thompson Seton; I think we have a copy around here somewhere.
Have you seen Letters to Anyone and Everyone by Toon Tellegen? We are just working our way through, and last night we read the letter from the Crow to the sparrow. All the letters are delightful, but so far, this is my favorite.
(Click her name to read her full comment, which includes a quote.)
Pam recalls Those Calculating Crows by Ali Wakefield, a picture book about crows who count, adding:
“It doesn’t get a good review and I remember not really enjoying reading it aloud but my boys liked it and it was worth a look in the library.”
(It’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Not all books make good read-alouds.)
Su gives props to good old Slow Joe Crow from Fox in Socks; Penny in Vermont reminded me that Tasha Tudor had pet crows who served as models for drawings in several of her books; and Beth of Bookworm Journal gives a shout-out to Kaw, the pet crow of Taran in the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander.
Do you know Maxine Kumin’s story “Mittens in May” about a boy named Peter Day and the baby crow he saves and raises? It’s a sweet book.
I’m a fan of Kumin’s poetry (especially Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief) but I had no idea she had written any children’s stories. Very excited about this.
And Lori found Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study in a digital format!
In yesterday’s post (a reprint from 2007) I discussed at length a picture book we treasure: Johnny Crow’s Garden by Leslie Brooke. You can see the whole thing, illustrations and all (and what illustrations! ), at Project Gutenberg. (That’s Brooke’s charming Johnny Crow at the top of this post.)
Also, Alice reminded me of one of her family’s favorite crow stories: Jean Craighead George’s The Cry of the Crow.
I cawl that one fine-feathered reading list.
Links to my crow posts:
Cheered by Crows
Fascinating Live and Dead Things
March 12, 2010 @ 9:09 pm | Filed under: Books
(Originally posted in September, 2007)
I first heard about this delightful-indeed book from the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. A Child’s Delight
I loved this little book. Perrin wrote a column on books—”neglected minor masterpieces” is how he described them—for The Washington Post. Not children’s books; that came later. His column, “Rediscoveries,” recommended books Perrin thought everyone should read but which had seemed, for various reasons, to slip under the radar.
Eventually, Perrin shifted his attentions to children’s literature. The Deputy Headmistress elaborates:
Years later he was invited to revisit the topic, only this time, to look at neglected children’s books that deserved greater attention.
He and his editor had some trouble coming up with a list they both agreed on. Perrin came up with a list of 17 books, but the editor rejected eight of them as too well known. The editor, a well read man, didn’t want books that were too famous. The point was to recommend pieces that everybody didn’t
already know.
The story of just how Perrin came up with the final list of books, recounted in the introduction to A Child’s Delight
I had read about two thirds of the books Perrin discusses. Our taste seems to run on similar tracks, for many of his most enthusiastic reviews were of books I get pretty excited about myself. I’ve been tracking down and reading the other books on his list, and I owe him (and the DHM) a debt of thanks: these are indeed books not to be missed.
The DHM talks in detail about a little picture book called Johnny Crow’s Garden
Another Perrin pick is Millions of Cats
hundreds of cats,
thousands of cats,
millions and billions and trillions of cats—
who all follow him home, which is when things get grisly. But charmingly so.
Perrin gives a very interesting biographical sketch of Wanda Gag, whose personal story was new to me. I’m even more intrigued by her work now.
Those two are picture books, but most of Perrin’s essays are about middle-grade novels. His taste runs toward fantasy, which suits me fine. Some of his choices surprised me because I wouldn’t have thought they were in fact under the radar. Watership Down
As do Noel Streatfeild’s “Shoes” books: Theater Shoes
Perrin’s quite right; if Streatfeild has slipped under your radar, you should treat yourself to a delightful read. Ballet Shoes
But I don’t want to reveal too much. One of the things I appreciate most about Perrin’s reviews is that he is careful not to give away plot surprises.
Even so, I didn’t read more than the first few paragraphs of the essays about books I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading. Perrin sent me running to the library website to see which titles I could track down. The girls and I are just getting into The Children of Green Knowe, which Perrin praises most enthusiastically, and others on my list include T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (I’ve only read White’s The Once and Future King) and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. (I know, I know, I can’t believe I haven’t read it either!)
Perrin’s essays have an E. B. White quality about them: their calm, good-humored simplicity; their elegant prose. I do believe I enjoyed his essay on Diana Wynne Jones’s ripping good tale, Dogsbody
Other gems on Perrin’s list include Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers (much better than the movie), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and my favorite Edith Nesbit novel, The Railway Children.
March 11, 2010 @ 8:26 pm | Filed under: Books, Crows, Family, Nature Study
OK, I am really enchanted by these crows. We had such fun today, watching them at work on a nest in the top of an enormous tree just the other side of our back fence. Our house backs up to an elementary school (I know, ironic) and in the schoolyard quite near the fence is a very large widespread Moreton Bay fig tree. (I think that’s what it is.) One crow went back and forth to the tippy-top carrying twigs, while another perched in a supervisory manner in a nearby eucalyptus.
At intervals we’d see four crows wheeling about between the fig and another clump of very tall eucalyptus trees on the other side of the school. Perhaps there is another nest over there.
They ate up the peanuts we left them—when we weren’t looking. When I was looking, they only made low swoops over the table, eyeing the nuts and uttering baleful remarks to the wind.
In the evening I saw one of the crows inspecting our driveway, stepping deliberately up its length beside the minivan. Probably he knows it is a reliable source of crushed goldfish crackers.
It was a quite interesting day, though we were stuck at home with the remnants of fevers-and-sniffles. A man came to investigate the scrabblings in our attic; he found two dead rats (horrors) and earned Beanie’s forever-friendship by letting the kids look at one. It was repulsive, she told me. I should think so. Rose now says she wants to pursue a career in pest control so she can see more “fascinating dead things.” There is a moral here somewhere, having to do with what happens when you fill up their days with poetry and music and art, I’m sure. Apparently our mental diet has been low in fascinating dead things.
I shall make no attempt to remedy that. They’re on their own.
Plenty of fascinating live things in my flower garden: I did a lot of pruning today, and the middle kids had a grand time stripping leaves off the long canes of cape honeysuckle and then swishing them over one another’s heads and being indignant about how they almost knocked each other’s heads off. Swoosh! Like crows swooping low over the peanuts. I left the butterfly bush lopsided because just when I was poised for the final series of whacks, I realized there was a nice little bower behind the honeysuckle and the butterfly bush, if I stopped where I was. So now there’s a comical view from the patio, and a Secret Hideout in the back. They are stocking it with plenty of canes for knocking off each other’s heads.
Things people read today: Jane finished Don’t Know Much About Geography and began the History volume; Rose finished Tuck Everlasting and said she wasn’t sure how she felt about it but wasn’t ready to talk about it yet (I get that, especially with that book); Beanie began The Saturdays; and I finished Charles and Emma, which I greatly enjoyed. Darwin’s personality was not at all as I had envisioned it—I think I’ve imagined him more as a curmudgeonly, uninterruptible sort, very much like the grandfather in Calpurnia Tate. But it seems he was quite a teddy bear of a father, deeply affectionate with his children, so reluctant to spoil their fun by making them stop jumping on the furniture that he’d turn and leave the room rather than tell them to cut it out. And completely adoring of his wife, Emma, respecting her candor and insight even on the very serious questions for which they had quite different answers.
I loved this bit about Charles’s reaction to a wedding present—it begins with a quote from one of his letters:
“My good old friend Herbert sent me a very nice little note, with a massive silver weapon, which he called a Forficula (the Latin for an earwig) and which I thought was to catch hold of soles and flounders.” But Erasmus, who knew these things, told him it was for asparagus.
Hee.
I’m poking around the stacks now, trying to fix upon which of a dozen promising tomes to read next. I’m craving a really absorbing piece of fiction, something I can fall into. There are a good many likely prospects in previous TBR posts on this blog: I still haven’t made time for I Capture the Castle, which so many of you have enthusiastically suggested, and I STILL haven’t gotten to The Elegance of the Hedgehog, nor The Thirteenth Tale, nor the second Mysterious Benedict Society book, nor In This House of Brede…not to mention this whole list of requests from my kids…plus you’ve got me all fired up to read those Patrick O’Brian books you were talking up in the comments the other day. And Girl of the Limberlost, which I did download to my iPod after your fervent recommendations.
I suppose I might get more reading done if there weren’t so many interesting things happening in my backyard.
Here’s how Beanie settles the problem:
(Speaking of books I mean to read.)
March 7, 2010 @ 4:43 pm | Filed under: Books, Nature Study
“Charles could entertain himself for hours just by thinking, or by observing birds, or watching sticks and leaves float down a stream. He made notes as he watched the birds, writing down what they did, how they behaved. And like many young boys, he was a collector. He collected shells, seals, coins, and minerals. He studied them and organized them in kind—in the tradition of natural historians.”
—from Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
This passage about the young Charles Darwin made me think at once of Callie Vee, the spunky young naturalist who won our hearts in The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. And that got me thinking in turn about other literary naturalists we love. The impetuous, angry-eyed Dan comes to mind, Jo’s “firebrand” from Little Men. And of course there is Dickon from The Secret Garden: an unschooled naturalist to be sure, a student of nature by way of being a friend to every growing thing. Who else? I know I’m forgetting some favorites.
Sam from My Side of the Mountain? He’s more a survivalist than a naturalist, though certainly a student of nature. Anne Shirley’s beloved teacher, Miss Stacy, gets her pupils out collecting samples for nature study—Miss Stacy has long struck me as a sort of Charlotte Mason-style educator. The timing would be about right, but I have no idea whether Miss Mason’s principles traveled across the Atlantic to eastern Canada.
I thought it might be fun to collect some quotes about these literary naturalists; I’ll start off with a few below and if you have suggestions, please chime in!
Here’s Miss Calpurnia Tate, discovering the joys of recording nature observations in her Notebook-with-a-capital-N:
Before I went to bed that night, I took a can full of oats from the stable and dribbled them along the drive. I wrote in the Notebook, How many cardinals will we have next year, with not enough to eat? Remember to count.
I next wrote in my Notebook that we had two different kinds of grasshoppers that summer. We had the usual quick little emerald ones decorated all over with black speckles. And then there were huge bright yellow ones, twice as big, and torpid, so waxy and fat that they bowed down the grasses when they landed. I had never seen these before. I polled everyone in the house (except Grandfather) to find out where these odd yellow specimens had come from, but nobody could tell me.
(Callie’s quest to find out becomes the catalyst of a real relationship with her grandfather, himself an ardent naturalist, who has heretofore been only an intimidating and distant presence in her life. When no one else in her family has insight—nor interest, for that matter—in the grasshopper mystery, young Calpurnia gathers her courage and approaches the “dragon” in his den—er, laboratory. He dismisses her with a directive to figure it out herself, and when she does, all by herself, Grandfather emerges from his busy thoughts enough to take a fresh look at this girl-child he’d scarcely noticed until now—”as if I were a new species he’d never seen before.” From that point on, life will never be the same for Callie Vee.)
Now here’s Anne, infected by Miss Stacy’s enthusiasm for nature study:
“Mrs. Lynde says it made her blood run cold to see the boys climbing to the very tops of those big trees on Bell’s hill after crows’ nests last Friday,” said Marilla. “I wonder at Miss Stacy for encouraging it.”
“But we wanted a crow’s nest for nature study,” explained Anne. “That was on our field afternoon. Field afternoons are splendid, Marilla. And Miss Stacy explains everything so beautifully. We have to write compositions on our field afternoons and I write the best ones.”
—from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
And here’s Dan, opening up to Mrs. Jo about his interest in the wild world:
“Where did you learn so much about these things?”
“I always liked ‘em, but didn’t know much till Mr. Hyde told me.”
“Who was Mr. Hyde?”
“Oh, he was a man who lived round in the woods studying these things I don’t know what you call him and wrote about frogs, and fishes, and so on. He stayed at Page’s, and used to want me to go and help him, and it was great fun, ’cause he told me ever so much, and was uncommon jolly and wise. Hope I’ll see him again sometime.”
“I hope you will,” said Mrs. Jo, for Dan’s face had brightened up, and he was so interested in the matter that he forgot his usual taciturnity.
“Why, he could make birds come to him, and rabbits and squirrels didn’t mind him any more than if he was a tree. Did you ever tickle a lizard with a straw?” asked Dan, eagerly.
“No, but I should like to try it.”
“Well, I’ve done it, and it’s so funny to see ‘em turn over and stretch out, they like it so much. Mr. Hyde used to do it; and he’d make snakes listen to him while he whistled, and he knew just when certain flowers would blow, and bees wouldn’t sting him, and he’d tell the wonderfullest things about fish and flies, and the Indians and the rocks.”
—from Little Men by Louisa May Alcott
Here’s Mary Lennox meeting Dickon for the first time:
The robin listened a few seconds, intently, and then answered quite as if he were replying to a question.
“Aye, he’s a friend o’ yours,” chuckled Dickon.
“Do you think he is?” cried Mary eagerly. She did so want to know. “Do you think he really likes me?”
“He wouldn’t come near thee if he didn’t,” answered Dickon. “Birds is rare choosers an’ a robin can flout a body worse than a man. See, he’s making up to thee now. ‘Cannot tha’ see a chap?’ he’s sayin’.”
And it really seemed as if it must be true. He so sidled and twittered and tilted as he hopped on his bush.
“Do you understand everything birds say?” said Mary.
Dickon’s grin spread until he seemed all wide, red, curving mouth, and he rubbed his rough head.
“I think I do, and they think I do,” he said. “I’ve lived on th’ moor with ’em so long. I’ve watched ’em break shell an’ come out an’ fledge an’ learn to fly an’ begin to sing, till I think I’m one of ’em. Sometimes I think p’raps I’m a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an’ I don’t know it.”
—from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Whom else shall we include?
Related posts:
“Some breezy open wherein it seemeth always afternoon”
“A little egg lay on a leaf”
“At first I could only hear people sounds…”
March 5, 2010 @ 11:39 am | Filed under: Books, Family, Snippets
I’ve been writing the occasional “snippets” post for years, when I had a bunch of shortish things to say. But Conversion Diary Jen’s “7 Quick Takes” meme (now in its 71st edition) is much nicer—so pleasantly organized and a nice spirit of camaraderie about it—and I always enjoy reading the quick takes posts on other people’s blogs. I don’t know that I’ll pull it off every Friday, but now and then might be fun.
1. You know one reason I haven’t done a Quick Takes post before? It’s the glitch in my blog layout that won’t let me center properly. I think when I center images, they are centered on the whole page—but the main text column sits a bit to the right of center because of the blue ribbon. So the visual effect is that centered images appear off-center, and this drives me crazy. And every time I thought about participating in Quick Takes, I got hung up by the off-kilteredness of the button. Yes, I know I could simply omit the button. But…but…nope, can’t do it. Ah well, I am decidedly off kilter myself, so I don’t know why I should expect anything different from my blog.)
2. Earlier this week Beanie looked up from a Percy Jackson book to ask what an eclair is. It’s my duty as a homeschooler to show her firsthand, right? You know I’m all about the hands-on learning.
3. Even earlier than that this week, we went to Balboa Park with my parents and 13-year-old niece as a last outing before they departed for home (Colorado) that afternoon. Visited the science museum and had lunch at the Japanese tea house. The rice bowls there are huge and delicious. Later we saw a man in hipwaders in the lily pond. Beanie worried about the snapping turtles. Have I mentioned how much I adore Balboa Park? And also visits from my family.
4. I knew my kids were looking up pillbugs online, but I didn’t see their search term until later: “roly poly food.” I guffawed. (If you’re wondering: “decayed vegetable matter,” they informed me. Which explains why they were harvesting bits of my baby lettuces and leaving them out to decay.) Alice says an old potato makes excellent roly-poly food too. Turns out she is practically an expert on the subject. Many talents, that woman.
5. New favorite iPod Touch app: Words with Friends, a Scrabble-like game. My teenager is a formidable opponent.
6. Speaking of the teenager, here are some books I’ve seen her reading recently:
• HONEY, MUD, MAGGOTS & OTHER MEDICAL MARVELS (a tome from my Martha-book reference shelf)
• DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE UNIVERSE by Kenneth C. Davis
• ENDER’S GAME by Orson Scott Card
• DAVID COPPERFIELD
• MUSASHI #9 (a manga title)
• the latest issues of MUSE and ODYSSEY
• THE HOMESCHOOL LIBERATION LEAGUE (a Semicolon recommendation)
• CHARLES AND EMMA: THE DARWINS’ LEAP OF FAITH by Deborah Heiligman. (I’m reading the latter now myself, and it’s got me working on a post about my favorite literary naturalists—so far I’ve got Dan from JO’S BOYS, Calpurnia Tate, and of course Dickon of THE SECRET GARDEN.)
7. And to finish off, a mini-photoessay about my little bird-lover.
Admiring the dear finches at the feeder. They fill her with wonder and delight and…
…an irresistible urge to practice karate kicks. “To scare them away,” she tells me, aiming another fierce kick their direction and shouting “HI-YAH!”
More quick takes at Conversion Diary.
March 1, 2010 @ 6:52 am | Filed under: Books
The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope.
Is there anything more promising than a novel that opens with a young person traveling to a mysterious ancestral home for the first time? The Secret Garden, The Children of Green Knowe, The Little White Horse; even, if you stretch it a little, Emily of New Moon. Delicious books with perfectly delicious beginnings.
The Sherwood Ring is a book of this sort, and it’s one of the deliciousest. The very moment Jane finished reading it, she was imploring me to begin, and I’m glad I heeded her plea. What a fabulous book: mystery, romance, humor, history. Most wonderful wonderful, out of all hooping.
Seventeen-year-old Peggy’s father has died and she’s been sent to live with her curmudgeonly uncle in upstate New York, at a (you guessed it) mysterious ancestral home called, delightfully and evocatively, Rest-and-Be-Thankful. Uncle Enos’s passion and lifelong obsession is Revolutionary War-era history; he has spent his life preserving the late-eighteenth-century aura and custom of the huge family home in which George Washington himself was reputed to have spent a night.
Not only is Rest-and-Be-Thankful rich in history, it has ghosts. At least, that’s what Peggy’s father tells her shortly before his death: family ghosts that not everyone can see.
“It’s not being able to see them himself that gets under [Enos's] skin,” he tells Peggy. “Well, if I were a ghost I don’t know that I’d bother appearing to Enos either; but he seems to think that being the head of the family ought to have given him some sort of priority, and—the truth is, Peggy, if they do happen to get after you, it might be a good idea not to mention it. He’d never forgive you.”
Fortunately for Peggy, the ghosts do “get after her.” Hopelessly lost on the longish hike from train station to family estate, Peggy encounters a curiously dressed young woman on horseback, wrapped in a long red hooded cape—a surprising choice for a May afternoon, one might think. A greater surprise still will come later that day, when Peggy discovers a portrait of the same red-caped girl painted in 1773 by the great American artist John Singleton Copley.
This ghostly horsewoman points Peggy toward the correct fork in the road and promises that she’ll run into someone who can show her the rest of the way to Rest-and-Be-Thankful. And indeed Peggy does: a handsome young Englishman, a visiting scholar named Pat Thorne, is pulled over with car troubles on his way to see—who else?—Uncle Enos. He too is a historian, and he’s looking for information about a diary one of his ancestors was supposed to have written hundreds of years ago.
If Peggy is surprised at the gruff and dismissive manner in which her uncle greets her upon her arrival to her new home, she is even more surprised at his uncivil reaction to Pat Thorne’s arrival. “I have nothing whatsoever to say to you,” he glowers. “You will leave this house at once.” Pat, taken aback, politely retreats, but he’ll be back.
These are only the beginnings of the mysterious happenings that befall Peggy at Rest-and-Be-Thankful. Why, she hasn’t even met the dashing Continental Army officer yet, a genteel and amiable sort (I told you we quote that a lot!) who has quite a story to spin for her. And so begins the tale-within-a-tale, the high drama of the young officer’s long and eventful quest for a British officer-slash-guerrilla, a wily and charismatic underground agent whose schemes for disrupting supply lines and raiding storehouses are causing General Washington’s army no end of frustration, and may well turn the tide of the war in favor of the redcoats. This harrowing story is revealed to Peggy gradually, humorously, grippingly, by those ancestors of hers who actually lived the experience. And it seems that the more Peggy learns, the more mystery there is to puzzle out—especially regarding Uncle Enos’s apparent hatred of Pat Thorne.
Despite the abundance of ghosts, The Sherwood Ring is not at all creepy or terrifying. It’s a mystery, not a horror story. And a darn good mystery it is, with twists in all the right places.
February 15, 2010 @ 1:15 pm | Filed under: Betsy-Tacy, Books
You won’t want to miss this event tomorrow TODAY, Tuesday the 16th:
Get out your party dresses! Wellesley Booksmith and the Betsy-Tacy Society are brightening up February break with An Edwardian Tea Party in celebration of HarperCollins’ reissue of the classic Betsy-Tacy series of children’s books by Maud Hart Lovelace. Set at the turn of the 20th century, these beloved books chronicle the adventures of Betsy Ray and her best friend Tacy Kelly as they grow from little girls to young women.
Teatime starts at 2pm. More details at the link above. Wish I could join you!
And did you see that Betsy Ray and Joe Willard were included this list of Best Literary Couples? You know, I just finished rereading Betsy and Joe (yes, again) and I have to say that is one of the most satisfying resolutions to a stumbling-blocked romance ever. “After Commencement, the World—with Betsy!” :::sigh:::
February 9, 2010 @ 8:51 pm | Filed under: Books
Ha, Tuesday morning. The title’s as far as I got before the howling hordes awoke. Tuesday night now, after an afternoon of pounding rain. Rilla kept asking me to be her blanket. I was happy to oblige, because this meant snuggling on the couch while the baby napped and I finished a book I picked up yesterday and could not put down. I’ll write a proper review later. For now I am still too caught up in it to be articulate. It was a review copy of Kathryn Erskine’s remarkable middle-grade novel, Mockingbird. This is one we’re going to be hearing lots about, I predict. Wow. It’s about a ten-year-old girl with Asperger’s Syndrome. Her older brother has just been killed in a school shooting. It’s told in first person, through Caitlin’s eyes. Told incredibly well, in a way that makes you see how bewildering people’s emotional reactions can be. Caitlin’s flat honesty, her bluntness and literalness, keep sort of smacking people (her father, teachers, classmates) with truth, in a way that gradually helps them climb out of their terrible pain toward healing. Shoot. I’m talking about it clumsily because I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I will, though. It will be published in April, and I hope lots of you will read it and come back here to talk about it.
Jane just finished a book she really loved—my friend Sarah recommended it last week and our library fortuitously had a copy. Sarah, you nailed it; it was totally up Jane’s alley. The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists by Peter Laufer. And my fellow iPod Touch enthusiasts will be amused to hear that Jane found it useful to look up various butterfly species on the Touch as she read.
A book Scott enjoyed recently—enough to suggest I add it to my pile, too—was Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. Sheffield revisits the mix tapes of his past—what songs he included, and what their significance was in his life at the time, and who the tapes were for, and what these old compilations evoke for him now. Makes me want to dig up the tapes of the radio show Scott DJ’d in college. Left of the Dial, it was called, after the Replacements song. And now I’ve got “Skyway” in my head. So here, it can be in yours too.
February 7, 2010 @ 8:32 pm | Filed under: Books
The home page of this website (the “My Website” tab above) seems to have gone temporarily bananas—instead of my usual welcome message, it’s channeling the text of the Carney’s House Party post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Anyone happen to notice when this started? I can’t remember when I last clicked on the home page. Hmm.
I have no idea what the problem is, but I’ve written my Swank web genius and I am sure she’ll fix me up in no time. UPDATE: Yup, problem solved. Thanks, Emily!
Speaking of Carney, I’ve been perusing her yet again as I work on my foreword for the reissue, and I got curious about the novel everyone in this book seems to be reading: Queed. Isobel (Carney’s rich Eastern roomie at Vassar) reads it on the train en route to Deep Valley, and Carney is proud that her father has recently read the novel as well and is able to converse about it with Isobel. And then the day they all go to Sam Hutchinson’s house for swimming and lunch, one of Sam’s relatives is reading it. His mother, I think? Well, I looked it up and I find at Gutenberg a text by Henry Sydnor Harrison, published in 1911—the year during which Carney’s House Party takes place.
So Queed is the book everyone was reading in 1911. Have any of you read it? Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about Harrison: Tennessee native, Columbia graduate, wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly under the pen name of Henry Second. Queed was his first novel.
I must say the frontispiece of the Gutenberg text had me at hello:
MR. QUEED, YOU ARE AFFLICTED WITH A FATAL MALADY. YOUR COSMOS IS PURE EGO.
Anxious looking chap, isn’t he? The novel’s opening paragraph contains the word “behemothian.” Twice. No wonder everyone between New York and Minnesota is reading this thing. I’m going to have to read far enough to discern whether the tone is ironic or sincere. If it’s sincere, it’s unbearable. I’m betting on ironic, though, or at least wry. I mean:
“The dog was of the breed which are said to come trotting into Alpine monasteries of a winter’s night with fat American travelers in their mouths, frozen stiff. He was extremely large for his age, whatever that was. On the other hand, the girl was small for her age, which was twenty-four next month; not so much short, you understand, for she was of a reasonable height, as of a dainty slimness, a certain exquisite reticence of the flesh.”
A certain exquisite reticence of the flesh? Tennessee native or not, Harrison has a voice right out of Monty Python.
. Over the winter I’d...
