My Reading Diary

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece

2011-11-04T14:28:00.000-07:00

Annabel Pitcher (Kindle Edition Jun 13, 2011)

shortlisted for the Galaxy National Book Awards Children's Book of the Year and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

I laughed and cried almost the entire way through this story. Jamie has just moved from London to the country with his Dad and Jasmine, his teenage sister, and Roger the cat.

After his sister, Rose, died five years ago, the family fell apart. Mum stayed in London with her boyfriend, Dad spends his days in a drunken haze, Jas had dyed her hair pink and taken up with Leo, a pierced and green-haired

Jamie doesn’t miss Rose because he was only four when she died. He hasn’t cried in all that time. He’s far more interested in his cat and in keeping his new friend, Sunya, a secret from his Dad.

There are many blog posts about this book … you can read from Cornflower’s blog here

There is a link to the reading by David Tennant, shortlisted for Audiobook of the Year

Just William

2011-09-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

by Richmal Crompton
first published 1922
Kindle edition April 2009

This is the first of the series and a collection of 38 William Books by
Richmal Crompton

Whether it's a trip to the cinema, babysitting a youngster, being a page boy at a wedding, or running away from home to take a job below stairs, the 11-year old William Brown can always be relied on to create chaos and havoc wherever he goes. This short story collection (the first of 38 books) is a wonderful introduction to a classic character.

Particular stand outs are 'William the Intruder', in which William falls in love with the same girl as his brother Robert, 'The Show', which has the first of many hilarious moments from Mr Brown to round off an excellent story, and the first ever story 'The Outlaws', which sees William forced to look after a baby which he tells the rest of the Outlaws he's kidnapped in order to save face. Of course, things don't go according to plan in any of them, although there are a nice mixture of moments of triumph and despair for the youngster.

This is a blurb from the back cover of Just William:
”No matter how hard William Brown tries, his school uniform always looks tatty and disreputable, he mangles the English language in his speech and writing, and he can never remember any of the rules he's supposed to be following. Along with his gang, the Outlaws, he spends his days contriving schemes to make money, trying to get out of doing schoolwork, musing about the fact that girls are a different species and , he reckons, being generally misunderstood by teachers and all other adults.
William is one of the most self-righteous characters in English fiction, always ready with a convoluted excuse to explain away his misdemeanours and elastic lies that get stretched to breaking point”

At one point his father said, “The only thing that relieves the tedium of going out to dinner is the fact that for a short time one has a rest from William.”

I hope I can find more of the William series, whether on Kindle or in real books. He’s a delight.

My new Kindle

2011-08-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

I do so love my new Kindle. It's only a few months old and already stuffed with books - mostly samples, I haven't bought all of them. I resisted buying a Kindle for a long long time because I'm passionate about the look and feel of real books and paper, and a great supporter of our local library. But one day not long ago, there was a book by Linda Gillard available ONLY on Kindle, and I wanted it. House of Silence was my first book, and it was wonderful. I was hooked, and since then I've read another of hers, Emotional Geology.

There are 81 items in the list, but only five or six of those have I bought. I do like the feature that allows me to 'sample' the books before I decide to buy them.

Some of the most recent acquisitions are: Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernieres, Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton, Collected Stories of Eudora Welty and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.

I read blogs written by friends who review books, and then I want another one. I'm beginning to think I'm greedy and want it all - am I an obsessive compulsive consumer?

I made a padded bag from some scraps in my sewing drawer

I haven't figured out yet when the wireless connection is on, or when is the best time or place to connect. Sometimes I go outside because I've heard or read somewhere that it's best to be away from things like tv or computer. The PDF file with instructions is huge and it takes a bit of time to wander through it. Usually I just try at random times throughout the day or evening - eventually I get a connection.

And the very best thing is that it's so light weight and portable - perfect for reading in bed.

Tinkers

2011-08-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

by Paul Harding

Harper Collins
2009

George Washington Crosbylies dying of cancer in his living room while his family keeps watch. His death provides the framework for the real story, which is about his unsteady relationship with Howard, his father.

At times George is lucid, recalling notable incidents of triumph and tragedy from his life as clearly as a newspaper reporter. Often, though, he slips into prose poems that seem to have little bearing on the story but perfectly reflect the semi-dreaming state of his mind.

"When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up, and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart."

This novel touched me deeply because it brought up the memories of my uneasy love/hate relationship with my own father. As I move more and more toward the end of my life, I reflect often on the past - my place in it and my family relationships. They seem so incredibly important now, and earlier not given the smallest thought.

Breakfast at the Exit Cafe

2011-03-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

Travels through America
Merilyn Simonds/Wayne Grady
Greystone Books 2010

In December 2006, husband and wife Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds decided to take the long way home from Vancouver to Ontario. Anxious to avoid winter driving, and eager to experience America – a nation they knew only from depictions in books and movies – they opted to drive down the Pacific Coast, cross the continent through the southern states, and finish their journey along the eastern seaboard. They set off in their trusty Toyota Echo with “no itinerary, no agenda” – except to make it to the Grand Canyon by Christmas Day and to discover the perfect hash brown.

For Grady, whose forebears were slaves who came to Canada in the 1870s, it becomes a journey through fear of racism and violence into his own family roots in the American Deep South. For Simonds, who grew up a lonely Canadian in the American School of Campinas, Brazil, it becomes a journey into the heart of the ex-pat promised land, the nation of the American Dream.

Part travelogue, part exploration, part mid-winter love story, this is a journey into the heart of the next-door eighbor we thought we knew. There are frequent side trips into fascinating nooks of history, geography and literature.

The Americans they meet along the way - eating in restaurants, manning motel offices, waiting in line for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade - illuminate a country dissolving in the grip of the final years of the Bush administration.

True Home

2010-11-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

Anny Scoones
Touchwood Editions
2010

I love this series - Anny Scoones lives near my home, and I visit often to buy eggs from her heritage chickens and ducks. Duck eggs make the most delicious omelettes.

This is the third in her series about life at Glamorgan, a heritage farm where she raises heritage breeds of chickens and ducks, goats and horses, geese and turkeys. She loves pigs passionately. Two great Gloucester Old Spot sows named Mabel and Matilda each weigh more than seven hundred pounds. The breed is considered extinct in Canada, and she loves to show them off the the Saanichton Fair in the fall.

Many stray and rescued animals come to live - cats and dogs came to live out their days in peace. Bee was an old cat who came from a rescue organization. Anny said, "I'll take an old cat." Older cats never get adopted. The girl who was a volunteer said, "This is Honey Bee. She was found half alive in the gutter downtown. Nobody wants her, and she's ancient - she should live out her final days at a peaceful home. Take her home to die." Winnie was an elegant feral calico rescued from the crazy cat place where the old woman had lived alone with fifty cats Norman was found by a cat rescue society in a back alley in a seedy party of town.

Some come as gifts. Jasmine and Ju-Jube are two of Jake, the Drake's, five immaculate wives - the others are Jemima, Jewel, and Jessica. Jake is afraid of water so is usually filthy. He only ever put his head in the water and never bathed.

I laughed when I read about her joining a yoga class. She had a stiff, sore neck from a fall on the ice during the previous winter. Her pig veterinarian recommended yoga - "she looked fit and calm and healthy - the mayor did yoga, she was my divorce lawyer years ago." And she resisted the whole idea.

the whole idea of having to wear skin-tight pants, which show every lump on your thighs plus a pot-bellied midsection; having to go barefoot, which shows all the thick deformed toenails, overlapping, calloused toes and bunions, and having to lie down on a rubber mat that other people have probably perspired on - the whole thing mad me rather cynical. But I thought if it helped my stiff neck, I'd give it a shot.

I was completely self-conscious. The whole thing for me was totally embarrassing. I lay on my sticky rubber mat in my tight pants, and listened to the instructor. She told us to close our eyes and 'observe our breath' and to forget all thoughts. Lying on my back was killing my neck.

Finallly came some silence, and I realized that silence with people is really uncomfortable to me, but silence in the woods, or silence with my dear old sows or with my cabbages gives me bliss and serenity, a deep contentment. She read a short quote from a Buddhist teacher whose name is Thich Nhat Hanh. He talked about Home and how true home is now. This moment is what is important. This moment is our true home.

That's why I decided to call my third and final book about Glamorgan Farm True Home.

Anny read from this latest book last month at a local cafe. She said this will be the last book about the farm. There are other books to come, and I look forward to whatever comes next.

Risotto with Nettles

2010-09-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

a Memoir with Food

Anna Del Conte
Random House
London 2009

She was born and grew up in Milan. When war came to Italy, her family had to abandon their apartment and the city for the countryside. Peasants still ate well, but life was dangerous.

This is a memoir of a life seen through food - there are recipes and memories of her native land - from lemon granita to wartime risotto with nettles.

I stumbled across this book quite by accident when I was browsing in our local bookshop. The title caught my eye immediately. Nettles have been important in my life on several occasions and in different places. When we were living at the farm on the island, Glen and I picked the young and tender nettles for dinner. Boiled and served with butter and salt and pepper - delicious with small new potatoes. Later in the season, when they' grown older and tougher, I used them as dye material for spinning and weaving. They produced a gorgeous soft, pale green color.

Anna and her family were evacuated in 1942 to Albinea, a village in the foothills of the Apennines. Life was quiet and peaceful for a year. Then they were moved out of Villa Viani and into the villino next door. It was a cramped and more primitive lodging - there was a lavatory but no bathroom and no heating. Once a week they'd put a large zinc tub in the kitchen and pour hot water from jugs to have a proper, all-over wash.

I went to prison twice during the war, once in February 1944, and the second time in the following December.

After the war in 1946, she moved in with her parents in Milan, and in 1949 moved to London - "a culinary wasteland". She married an Englishman, and while bringing up her children, she wrote books which inspired a new generation of cooks.

I'm not sure which I enjoy most - the stories or the recipes - all sounding quite delicious and unusual.

This one's for you, Nan. I'll miss you

Edge of the Taos Desert

2010-09-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

An Escape to Reality

Mabel Dodge Luhan
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque 1937

This is an autobiographical account describing Luhan's first months in New Mexico.

In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving.

She put Taos on the map of the international avant-garde, bringing, among her scores of visitors, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Willa Cather, and Ansel Adams. In prose, paint, poetry, and photography, all of them celebrated her frontier paradise.

I'm reading this again now because we watched a movie this week about Georgia O'Keefe. It was so beautiful, and the caste was magnificent - Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons; Tyne Daly played Mabel Luhan. Seeing again the lush and colorful landscape of New Mexico made me long for the tiny cabin there where I spent one glorious year at Jemez Springs in Northern New Mexico, not far from Taos.

Winter in Taos
first published in 1935
by Haracourt Brace

"Winter in Taos" unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this "new world" she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she's recording her thoughts in a journal. "My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things," she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer. Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. "Winter in Taos" celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the "deep living earth" as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her "mountain."

This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until "'untied are the knots in the heart,' for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties." Born in 1879 to a wealthy Buffalo family, Mabel Dodge Luhan earned fame for herfriendships with American and European artists, writers and intellectuals and for her influential salons held in her Italian villa and Greenwich Village apartments. In 1917, weary of society and wary of a world steeped in war, she set down roots in remote Taos, New Mexico, then publicized the tiny town's inspirational beauty to the world, drawing a steady stream of significant guests to her adobe estate, including artist Georgia O'Keeffe, poet Robinson Jeffers, and authors D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather. Luhan could be difficult, complex and often cruel, yet she was also generous and supportive, establishing a solid reputation as a patron of the arts and as an author of widely read autobiographies. She died in Taos in 1962.

Two Canadian Authors

2010-08-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

February
Lisa Moore
Harper Collins Canada 2009

nominated for the
Scotiabank Giller Prize

In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal, who drowned when in 1982 the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm.

This book caught me at the first paragraph wherein the author describes skate sharpening -

Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener. There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up

It took me right back to my childhood in Toronto where we skated every day after school until dark. I could smell the wet mitts and soggy socks in the tuck shop.

And then on the second page she let her grandson take a quarter to buy a jawbreaker - his mother will be furious. Timmy doesn't eat his vegetables - he lives on macaroni and cheese. They have rules - Helen's daughters all have rules. This sentence grabbed me by the heart and wouldn't let go

The fate of the world can hang on a jawbreaker

The Flying Troutmans
Miriam Toews
Alfred Knoff Canada 2008

Hattie has just been dumped by her Paris boyfriend, her sister Min is going through a particularly dark period, and Min's two kids are not talking or talking way too much.

Hattie returns home to Canada after receiving an SOS call from eleven-year-old Thebes that Min is on the way to a psychiatric ward. She quickly realizes that she is way out of her league and hatches a hare-brained plan to find the kids' long-lost father. They hit the road and head south.

One reviewer, Kevin Sampsell, said:

Who wouldn't want to go on a road trip with Miriam Toews?

This is another top notch delight in an increasingly brilliant career. The best thing about MT's writing is that it manages to be both cool and heartbreakingly sweet. The dialogue is the best thing out of Canada since the movie "Highway 61" and the characters are complex and deeply felt. I am going to marry this book. We will be registered at Macy's

The Bark of the Dogwood

2010-08-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

This book sat on the bedside table for many months before I finally started to read it. I thought it was about trees and landscaping and architecture and heritage buildings. I bought it because the cover was beautiful and the reference to "dogwood" appealed because that's our provincial flower. In April, our towns and cities and villages have masses of dogwood trees in bloom.

The subtitle was misleading ... I wonder if that was intentional? This is a series of stories written by a transplanted Southerner now living in New York. Writing an article for a magazine assignment, he returns to his roots and examines such delicate topics as race, sexual orientation, family dysfunction, mid-life crisis. He remembers things in his not-too-distant past and especially the most horrific event in his life that had been obscured until now.

I'm re-reading this now because I bought a book about a house this morning. One reviewer compared it to this one. It's hard to put down .... lots of funny bits, humor and horror ... one reviewer said, "not for the faint-hearted".

Mr. Rosenblum's List

2010-07-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

or Friendly Guidance
for the Aspiring Englishman

Natasha Solomons
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
2010

I came very close to not finishing this book because in the early chapters so many sad things happened. I didn't feel like I was ready for that just yet. Now, I’m so very glad I did finish it.

It’s about this German Jew named Jack Rosenblum who keeps a list of the ways he must assimilate to the British Way, particularly after his experiences being detained as an Class A Alien during the Second World War. Eager to never be mistrusted by the British Crown again, he wants the ultimate goal for any Jewish person of the time: being a Jew lucky enough to be given membership to a Golf Club.

Turned down by nearly every Golf Club in his area, he decides to build his own golf course, gaining not only a reputation as the “Mad Jew” of the countryside he dwells in, hell bent on making a golf course he need not be ashamed of being allowed to play on, but he gains friends like Curtis, an old school Dorset fellow who believes in the mysterious Woolly-Pig - a strange creature that is only seen by the truest of Dorset men.

Jack desperately feels the need to belong as an Englishman in England. He's ashamed of being German, and also ashamed of being a Jew. His new religion is the pamphlet he received on arrival to England entitled, "Rules of Being English." He incorporates each rule into his everyday existence.

While, Sadie, on the other hand, was never willing to give up her heritage nor her memories. She doesn't want to forget where they came from or the family they've lost. Sadie loves to bake - it keeps her close to her memories of family who died in the Holocaust. Her special love is the Baumtorte. In one lovely passage, she is teaching her grown daughter, Elizabeth, to make it in hopes that she might remember too.

The two women lugged the tin bath inside to scrub it clean. They counted out the eggs, weighted the butter, flour and sugar and mixed them together. Sadie unfastened her stockings, washed her feet, and climbed into the bath and began to tread the batter slowly between her toes, the mixture oozing creamily.

Taking her time, she blended the ingredients, feeling them grow smooth and slippery beneath her skin. Elizabeth watched as she ladled the buttery mixture into great tins and toasted each layer under the grill. The cake grew tall, sprouting like a sapling ... the sweet scent of baking pervaded the house. The fragrance of Baumtorte was always tinged with sorrow."

Baumtorte means Tree Pie in English. The circular layers of the torte resemble the circles in the trees.

Living in London has driven Jack and Sadie apart. They no longer can remember their early days spent crazily in love. It isn't until moving to the Dorset countryside and Jack's impossible scheme of creating his own golf course that breaks down their barriers and allows each of them to look, REALLY, look at each other. In Dorset, they learn to love again. In the land of woolly pigs, bluebells and jitterbug cider.

In The Times review, they said, “Hilarious and touching … Yes, the movie is already on its way – but please read the delightful novel first.”

The author says the book was inspired by her grandparents, who arrived in England from Berlin in 1936 with almost nothing. On disembarking they were handed a pamphlet titled Useful Advice and Friendly Guidance for All Refugees.

Time was Soft There

2010-07-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

Jeremy Mercer
St.Martin's Press
New York 2005

A young Canadian journalist flees his hometown, Ottawa, for Paris after becoming inadvertently mixed up with some crime figures. He runs out of money and ends up living at Shakespeare & Co., since they have a writer-in-residence program.

The bookstore is filthy and filled with all sorts of odd and possibly violent characters. The owner is possibly the worst businessman ever in the entire world. It’s one of the world's most famous bookshops. The original opened in 1919 and was frequented by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.

It was forced to close in 1941 with the Nazi occupation and complications. In 1951 was reopened under another name and in 1964 it resurrected the original name and became the principal meeting place for beatnik poet notables such as Allen Ginsberg, Wm. S. Burroughs down to Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell.

Down til today the tradition of the bookstore continues and writers of all sorts find their way here, one being Jeremy Mercer. He finds himself in Paris with very little cash and the very real possibility of becoming homeless.

A chance encounter leads him to the bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. Here he finds a temporary home in return for a little work and the requirement of reading books.

”When I'd arrived, Shakespeare & Co. appeared the answer to all my problems. A place to recuperate, time to calculate my next steps, an assortment of lost folk to camouflage my own disenchantments.

”This was the best of Paris. Dreams, like money, can be accounted for in simple terms of deficit and surplus...In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafes...Hope is a most beautiful drug.”

We watched the movie, Julie and Julia last week. There is a scene where Meryl Streep, playing as Julia Child, enters the bookstore. It was summer and lovely, but didn’t mean that much to me. And then a few days later this book fell off the bookshelf at the library and into my hands.

I’ll likely not get to Paris in this lifetime, but this book made me feel like I’d been there.

The Winter Book

2010-07-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

Tove Jansson
Sort of Books
London 2006

I'm reading this wonderful selection of stories for the second time - because it's so very hot here. As Nan said, Mrs,Bale would not like this. People in other parts of the continent would laugh at us. Folks are sweltering in Toronto; there was a major power failure - everyone was using their air conditioning. I grew up in Toronto when not many of us had AC, so I know what it's like. That's why I live here on an island in the Pacific Northwest where it's usually cool and green. We're just not used to this.

Now, isn't the cover of this book just lovely. Makes me feel cooler just to look at it. The stories are not all about winter - the first section is titled Snow. The stories are drawn from youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century.

Tove Jansson is probably best known for the Moomin Books, one of which I wrote about three years ago. it's here if you'd like to look.

Philip Pullman commented "As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last." Tove Jansson died in 2001 at the age of 86. This is a picture of the young Tove

She grew up a bohemian artistic child, a daughter of artists and bohemians; her mother was the famous Finnish/Swedish illustrator and artist Signe Hammarsten; her father, Victor Jansson, was an equally well-known sculptor.

After her mother died, she wrote The Summer Book, the acknowledged adult masterpiece. Ali Smith wrote "the simple, spare story of a very old woman and a very young girl and the adventures, losses and gains that inevitably follow when great age and youth live together on a very small Scandinavian island for the whole of an endlessly lit summer."

Bento Box in the Heartland

2010-07-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

My Japanese Girlhood in
White Bread America

Linda Furiya
Avalon Publishing
2006

Her father arrived in the U.S. from Japan with $29 in his pocket. Her mother left a highly satifying, fulfilling life working in Tokyo and spending the weekends skiing and hiking, to go to the U.S. to get married and become a housewife in a foreign land. Her dad worked two jobs throughout her childhood, one of them "chick sexing" (separating the male and female chickens), and her mom spent much of her time planning how to make Japanese foods and rationing ingredients so they wouldn't run out

Linda Furiya grew up in rural Indiana, in one of the few Asian-American families in her community. She takes us back to her early childhood and describes her unique family upbringing, of which food was central. Her parents felt closer to home (Japan) when they could eat Japanese food; however, this was not easy given the unavailability of fresh Japanese ingredients in rural Indiana in the 1970s. She recalls with the occasions when they would drive into Chicago or Cleveland to procure Japanese ingredients or go to a Japanese restaurant, and how those excursions lifted the whole family's spirits.

Each chapter ends with a recipe, most of which are fairly simple for those unitiated to Japanese cooking. Roasted Pork Tenderloin (Yakibuta), Short-Necked Clams Steamed with Sake, Chestnut Pastry (Kurimanju), Steamed Buns with Meat Filling (Nikuman). I don't much fancy Japanese food - too salty for me, and most dishes contain meat or chicken. But I loved reading this book because it made me remember my three year's living in a Japanese community when I was working in Hawaii.

Her girlhood in the small Indiana Farm community where she grew up ws marked by differences. She was the only Asian in her school, the only girl whose mother packed rice balls and chopsticks in her lunch box, the only one whose parents' idea of a family vacation was loading the station wagon with an oversized cooler and driving across state lines for twelve hours in search of fresh fish.

"Maybe it was the game fishing TV shows on Sunday mornings, with glistening fat fish fighting the line and arcing in the air, but that summer he got the idea in his head that Florida was Mecca. The focus of that summer was to obtain fresh fish. We headed south from the glacier-cut hills and rivers of Indiana, through the rolling horse country of Kentucky, and down through the forests of Tennessee. After spending the night at a Holiday Inn in Georgia, we reached the salty sea breezes and moss-covered banyan trees in Panama City, florida's 'Redneck Riviera.'" Japanese home cooking had become the only daily thread her parents had to their culture... a simply bowl of perfectly steamed rice or ramen noodles in hot broth could do wonders in keeping homesickness at bay.

The Snowman

2010-06-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

Jo Nesbo
translated by Don Bartlett
Random House 2010

Another compelling Scandinavian crime novel - this one takes place in Norway. For me, Jo Nesbo has replaced Henning Mankell, and I intend to read more of his books.

In 1980, a young child is made to wait in the car for his Mother as she says she needs to pop into someones house for 10 minutes. When the Mother returns to the car 40 minutes later (scared, as she is sure that she saw someones face at the window) she finds her child in a state of fear and confusion saying that he “had seen him”. When his mother asks who, he can only reply “The Snowman”.

Twenty-four years later, Oslo Detective Harry Hole is investigating the disappearance of several women who all share the fact of being married with at least one child. He is assigned a new partner, the very pretty but aloof Katrine Bratt, and the two of them set about trying to find the connection between the women who have disappeared and the only thing that seems to connect them all is that there is a snowman at the scene of every disappearance and the women have all vanished every year on the first day of snowfall. Not only that, but Harry feels he is being watched. He received a mysterious note claiming to be from The Snowman and inviting him to find out who he is. Harry and Katrine then find out that a Detective in Bergen, who also appears to have been investigating the case, disappeared 14 years ago and has never been seen since.

As Harry Hole starts to fit all the pieces together, it is clear that there is more to the case than meets the eye. With a smattering of red herrings and mistaken identities you start to suspect everyone who graces the pages of this book. There is, of course, the obligatory nail-biting climax to the book when everything comes together all at once, and the old race-against-the-clock, will he / won’t he make it in time. I love that though; the edge-of-your-seat stuff.

Details of the murders are really quite gruesome. I had to take a break often, but the story won't let me get too far away, and I'm back again soon.

This is the seventh book about Harry Hole. The red herrings, the false roads which all do connect, in a way, just not the way the police want them to, are an amazing road to follow. Twist after turn will have you gasping as they go after who they think is the killer only to find they have suspicions of someone else ... more than once. I really can't convey how cleverly this plot was woven together, with a myriad of clues, characters and evidence Nesbo doesn't miss a step in seamlessly creating an airtight thriller.

The Girl She Used to Be

2010-06-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

by David Cristofano
Thorndike Press 2009

How do you know who you are if you can't reveal who you've been?

Though I have been on this earth for twenty-six years, the last twenty have been one long string of boredom knotted by a few moments of unimaginable terror.

Melody Grace McCartney. Just another name in a long, long line of names - Sandra Clarke, May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, Jane Watkins, Terry Mills, Shelly Jones, Linda Simms... But it's not just another name. It's her very first name.

Melody hasn't been Melody since she was six years old, when her family witnesses a mob hit, and the Feds come to take them away and put them into the Federal Witness Protection Program. She's had to learn new names, new towns, new histories, new job skills. Every time she moves, she has to be someone new. The very family who they were supposedly being protected from assassinated her parents twelve years into the program.

I’ve always wondered about the witness protection program, and I often thought about what happens if you are found? I had no idea how much I would enjoy this book. I had no idea about the other aspects of being in the Witness Protection Program. What kind of life do you really have? Can it be a life at all when you cannot be the person you once were? How is a child impacted by being in this program?

This story is a must read. It is compelling and heart wrenching. I had no idea how Cristofano would end the story, but I was crying buckets by the time it was over. The tears were for me rather than for the story - remembering my homelessness and lack of family, moving from place to place looking for one.

Inside the Whale

2010-05-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

Jennie Rooney
Chatto & Windus
London 2008

This is a sweet, sweet love story, told in alternating short chapters by Stevie (short for Stephanie) and Michael. Funny and sad

It begins on the first Sunday of September in 1939 when the war was announced. After she left school, Stevie spent four years chopping root vegetables in the canteen of the Sun Pat peanut factory.

I had wanted to be a teacher but found myself arranging pale cabbages on trays and chopping carrots into perfect cubes. They made me stand on a wooden box so that my elbows didn't disturb the other women.

War came, and Michael trained carrier pigeons for the Royal Corps of Signals in Cairo

The years roll by, and the alternating stories jump back and forth and on into old age.

This is Jennie Rooney's first novel, and she's published another book that I look forward to reading... The Opposite of Falling hasn't been released here yet, but soon I hope. Toby O'Hara and Ursula Bridgewater meet at Niagara Falls. One of the attractions is a red and blue striped hot air balloon offering rides over the rushing water. The balloon is a day job for Toby ... his night work is to continue to perfect his father's design for a flying machine.

Her metaphors are enchanting ... under the sea inside a whale and then up in the air in a hot air balloon. I probably won't wait for this to come in July ... next stop the Book Depository.

The Golden Collar

2010-04-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't read this book yet. I just picked it up at the library last night. The cover was so beautiful. Published in 1984 by Severn House in London. I'd never heard of Edith Cadell and could not find much about her by googling ... bibliographies, but no biographies

I wonder now if the book will be as wonderful as the cover. This is what I discovered by opening the pages at random

He turned and looked at the garden spread below him, glowing in the late May sunshine. There had been a little rain that morning, and drops still glittered on leaves and petals and gave a sheen to the expanse of smooth lawn ...... beyond was a carpet of white narcissi threaded with purple violets.

hmmmm ... not bad

You know that old saying, "don't judge a book by its cover". How often do you choose a book by its cover?

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

2010-04-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Alan Bradley
Doubleday Canada 2010

Flavia's back ... with all the family and friends from Bishop's Lacey and Environ - Buckshaw, St. Tancred's, Culverhouse Farm, and Gibbet Wood. Aunt Felicity has joined the household as a guest, annoying each and every one in their turn. "Father said, 'she still has all her own teeth --- and she knows how to use 'em.'"

Flavia finds herself untangling two deaths. Rupert Porson, the beloved puppeteer, has had an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity.The death of a child some years before may not have been an accident.

Colorful characters are plentiful, and Flavia sets aside her chemistry experiments and schemes of vengeance against her insufferable big sisters and races about on her trusty bicycle, Gladys, in search of Bishops's Lacey's deadliest secrets. There's Mad Meg who lives in Gibbet Wood, the catatonic woman in the dovecoat, the German pilot obsessed with the Bronte sisters, and Porson's assistant, the charming but erratic Nialla.

Alan Bradley is a genius .. he juggles this mix of oddball characters like a magician. The plot twists and turns, and I truly couldn't guess the final outcome until the very end.

I so look forward now to his next book in the Flavia series A Red Herring without Mustard that he's currently working on now in Malta, where he lives with Shirly and Amadeus and Cleo, his wife and two "calculating" cats.

When Wanderers Cease to Roam

2010-03-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

,

by Vivian Swift
Bloomsbury 2008

A charming illustrated celebration of puttering, doodling, daydreaming, and settling down after years on the road

A delight to read straight way through, or to pick up and browse at any page. The entire text has been hand lettered by the author. The dedication is to Walter Marlin, famous for paving the Royal Mile for King James V in 1532. His last wish was to be buried under the cobblestones of his own road there Marlin's Wynd, and to her mother, Mary Marlin - "thanks for the DNA"

Organized by months, the March chapter is titled March is the Tea Time Month, when life gives you March, make tea. In A Tea Time Memoir, the author describes and illustrates five locations: the famous Bewley's tea room on Grafton Street in Dublin; at the Muffin Man in Kensington, London; an ancient stone walled village on the coast of Brittany, Saint Malo; harps playing Vivaldi at Cafe Tortoni in Buenos Aires; and Wolf's Lane Deli on Long Island.

Fine Just the Way It Is

2010-03-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Wyoming Stories 3
Annie Proulx
Scribner 2008

I love Annie Proulx – her stories are just as good by what they do NOT say as compared to what they DO. The characters are wonderfully drawn and you get a sense of the incredible beauty of the landscape and the harshness of farm life. The characters are so real – flawed just like the rest of us.

We drove by her home in Newfoundland when we were there a few years ago. It’s set far back from the road, so we couldn’t see much. I was told she lives half a year there and the other half in Wyoming.

This collection of short stories is the third in her Wyoming series. They are sad, sad, sad. In the last story, “Tits Up in a Ditch”, Deborah Hicks says, “Every ranch … had a lost boy … boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo mishaps, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and ‘unloaded’ guns.”

Michael Knight of The Wall Street Journal said, “Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.”

The Maine Massacre

2010-01-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Janwillem van de Wetering
G.K. Hall & Co.
Boston, Massachusetts 1979

I first read Van de Wetering’s books many years ago. He is a former Zen monk and wrote two books about his experiences, first as a novice monk in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery The Empty Mirror and again in an American Zen community in New England. A Glimpse of Nothingness. And now, this year, I’ve discovered from a friend that he wrote many mystery novels – the Amsterdam cop series is probably most famous. He volunteered for the Amsterdam Reserve Police, doing uniform duty as a constable, later constable-first-class, and passing sergeant and inspector exams

Het Werkbezoek ("The Working Visit," published as The Maine Massacre), which in its French translation won the Grand Prix Policier, brings the commissaris and de Gier (police officers from Amsterdam) to the Maine woods in winter, where they solve a series of murders and along the way encounter a very intellectual gang of young nihilists and a rich hermit. They find a town full of suspects and a series of shady real estate deals seemingly connected to the death of the commissaris' brother-in-law. He has traveled to assist his sister in the settlement of her affairs so that she might return to her homeland in the Netherlands. Sergeant de Gier, worried about the old man's failing health, follows - on the pretext of studying American police methods.

Possibly because so much of his own life and personality went into his main character, van de Wetering failed to give him a name. In novel after novel he just appears as “de Commissaris”, the Inspector. The inspector’s two underlings, Grijpstra and de Gier, lent their names to about 15 of his novels.

The book is interesting because the characters are real; this one gives a peculiarly Dutch perspective on American culture, which at times is laugh-out-loud funny, like de Gier, in his eternally curious cop mode, wondering why on earth anyone would buy bags of ice.

His background in Zen philosophy really shows, as here where he describes Fox’s answer to a question about “the hermit”.

Jeremy is my local sage. I used to go over to the island and I would ask him questions, but he never answered. He would talk about other things instead, different things altogether. Tell me stories, jokes, anything. But he never seemed to hear what I asked. Then later, maybe the next day, I would think about what he had said and find that he had answered. Very funny, and annoying too. He plays around, and very seriously, once you get a feeling as to what he is doing. But go ahead, you can ask me questions now. I may want to try to imitate Jeremy’s method, but I won’t be as good at it as he is.

I intend to read more of this series now that I’ve found it … one more is on my request list at the library

Coincidentally, while I was reading this, steeped in the icy cold Maine winter, we watched that old movie Cider House Rules, one of my many favorites of John Irving. And I’ve always remembered the line that Michael Caine says each night, “good night you princes of Maine and you kings of New England.”

Beatrix Potter - a Journal

2009-12-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

Oh, what a treasure this book is. I want to hug it to me and carry it to my bed and sleep with it. My early birthday present.

On the end page of the front cover is a letter dated December 10th, 1925, written to an American woman who had asked her for details about how she came to write "The Tale of Peter Rabbit."

The journal begins with an entry dated 1882 "I was sixteen when I decided to start this dairy. I was beginning to feel the peaceful time of childhood was ending and I foresaw changes in my life." There is a family tree with photos of each member as well as photos of her London home and their holiday home in Scotland.

Photos and sketches and paintings and handwritten diary entries fill the pages. Bits and pieces open up to show something new. An envelope contains a two-page letter.

She was married to William Heelis in 1913, and led a "busy, contented life managing my own land (Hill Top Farm) among the mountains and lakes that I have drawn in my books."

An extra surprise is hidden in the endpage of the back cover - a privately printed edition of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit". A small hard cover book about 4" x 5" lifts right out, and there are Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter just as we have always loved them.

My Secret War Diary

2009-11-25T08:19:00.000-08:00

Flossie Albright's History of the Second World War
1939-1945
by Marcia Williams
Candlewick Press

This is a charming childrens' book, and I enjoyed every single page. From the magnificent marbled endpapers in the front to the glossary page at the back. The glossary explained many terms that were previously unknown to me ... like Anderson shelter (an outdoor air-raid shelter) and Morrison shelter (an indoor air-raid shelter).

The scrapbook format and fold-out letters break up the crowded pages with lots of text and drawings.

Letters from Hawaii

2009-11-07T10:56:00.001-08:00

Audio Book 2004
read by McAvoy Layne

McAvoy Layne is a Mark Twain scholar, renowned for his Twain impressions performed throughout the world

This is a collection of letters written by Mark Twain in 1866 when he was sent by the Sacramento Union to the Sandwich Islands (now known as Hawaii). He says "this is the loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean".

He describes his journey out, his impressions of Honolulu and Oahu, the local government (still a monarchy at this time), the economy (particularly whaling and sugar cultivation), the role of the Americans and the British in Hawaii, and the role of the missionaries.

His account of the sailors who survived over 40 days at sea in lifeboats and landed on one of the Hawaiian islands is a highlight. Twain's irreverence for all religious beliefs is in good showing as well

His description of horseback riding in the mountains had me laughing out loud

I’m particularly enjoying listening to these letters on a cold and rainy day in the Pacific Northwest … remembering the three years I lived in Hawaii.

Reading Places

2009-11-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

Do you have a favorite place for reading? a favorite room? a favorite time or position?

I wish I had a big comfy chair and a fireplace and a cat. But I don't. So then, my favorite place is in bed, especially on a cold rainy night ... with lots of pillows and quilts and maybe a cup of tea.

How about a companion? Do you like to read with some one else? a friend? a family member? Sometimes I like to read in the library with lots of other people.

Teaser Tuesdays/The Umbrella Man

2009-11-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read. Open to a random page. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!).

Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The little man carefully removed the red band from his still unlighted cigar. "I never ask you my friend, to bet something you cannot afford. You understand?"

"Then what do I bet?"

"Some small ting you can afford to give away, and if you happen to lose it you would not feel too bad. Right?"

"Such as what?"

"Such as, perhaps, the little finger on your left hand."

pg.59 The Umbrella Man
and Other Stories
by Roald Dahl 1996

Winter Dreams

2009-10-27T09:56:00.001-07:00

Since reading Anne Michaels' Winter Vault, my dreams have been filled with images from those stories of destruction - sand and rocks from Egypt, snow and rocks from Warsaw, and earth and rocks from the Saint Lawrence Seaway. This novel has touched me deeply and will stay with me for a long, long time.

This morning I made a collage of bits and pieces - clips from magazines, corrugated paper, sand paper, black construction paper and white handmade paper.

The Winter Vault

2009-10-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

by Anne Michaels
McClelland & Stewart
2009

This book came to me six months ago in a large box with others I'd ordered. I'd read her first novel Fugitive Pieces several years ago and was very moved by it. And it was adapted into an acclaimed major feature film a few years later.

The books went onto the shelf marked TBR, and I forgot about it until last week when I learned it had been nominated for the Giller Prize. I picked it up a few nights ago and haven't been able to put it down since.

This is a story of love and loss, personal loss and collective loss on a scale that is difficult to imagine. With a poet's intense imagery, Anne Michaels takes us with Jean Shaw and her engineer husband to Nubia as it is about to be inundated by the newly formed Lake Nasser. This experience reminds Jean of the villages that were likewise flooded by the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, several years before. What happens when villages like these, and cities (like Warsaw in WWII) are destroyed? How do people find ways to live and love after such events?

Fascinating and horrifying are the interwoven stories of displacement (whole towns that were displaced when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built in Canada, thousands of Nubian villagers lost their homes and civilization when the Aswan Dam flooded the Nile to form Lake Nassar, people who fled their homes to escape the Nazis.

Avery Escher is an engineer and Jean Shaw a student botanist. They meet in a dry river bed on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Canada, witnessing the construction of the Seaway as it swallowed towns, homes, and lives. Now, at the edge of another world about to be inundated in the name of progress, much of what they most believe in is tested. Avery looking out upon a space his father, also an engineer, created (or destroyed) by diverting a river; Jean, collecting native plant species along the banks in order to save them – and the memory of her mother’s garden.

In 1964, they settle into a houseboat on the Nile just below Abu Simbel. At the time of the building of the Aswam dam, Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling and reconstruction of a sacred temple, a “machine-worshipper” who is nonetheless sensitive to their destructive power. Jean is passionately interested in everything that grows.

I've wept on many pages describing the displacement of thousands, their homes and their culture. But there are as many happy pages. Living in Toronto, Jean went many times to visit Avery's mother in Holland Marsh a short drive from her apartment.

When my father came to work on the seaway, explained Avery. my parents looked for a place to please my mother. She chose the black fields of Holland Marsh. They moved into an old farmhouse and my father built a painting room for her. The house is bright white and sits like a ship on that good, black earth. A canal flows at the end of the garden. The colours and grandeur of the vegetables in the fields can pop open your eyes. After my father died, my mother thought she'd remain only temporarily in that house, but the longer she stayed, the less inclined she was to move. She found work illustrating for a children's press in Toronto. She bought a rowboat and docked it in the canal at the end of the garden.

The isolation suits her ...

This is where I lived the first nine years of my life ... the canal ran just behind our property. I was forbidden to go there alone, but of course I did.

Then, later in the houseboat in Egypt, when Jean was pregnant, she talked to the child inside her.

A child is like a fate; one's future and one's past. All the stories Jean told the child insider her as they walked by the river under the depthless sky ... and the child took in nothing but the sweet sound of her mother's voice, a world entire. There was nothing Jean did not speak of those first months of pregnancy. She told her about Canadian snow and Canadian apples, about Egyptian boats, about techniques of grafting, topiary and espalier. She told the child of her first weeks with Avery, and how Jean's mother made animal shapes in the soapy water of Jean's bath, and about Jean's father, who read to her on the train. Everything was described, with wonder and longing, to the child inside her. The breeze from the river was different from the wind that came across the desert and they met in the potent space of the riverbank.

Anne Michaels is also the author of three highly praised award-winning poetry collections, The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond, and most recently, Skin Divers. She lives in Toronto.

Teaser Tuesdays/The Earth Hums in B Flat

2009-10-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read.
Open to a random page.
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!).
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Catrin kneels down on the grass and sniffs hard at the rabbit hole 'D'you think it's the White Rabbit, Gwenni?'

We lay ourselves down on the grass and the dandelions with me in the middle. Catrin holds my hand. 'Just in case we have to go after it in a hurry.'

pg.28 The Earth Hums in B Flat
by Mari Strachan

This lovely book came to my attention from Elaine who wrote a wonderful review.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

2009-09-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

Tales of Growing up Groovy and Clueless

Susan Jane Gilman
Warner Books 2005

"When I was little, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen." An uncool white kid in a tough Puerto Rican neighborhood twirling around in her tutu.

So begins this collection of Gilman's stories about struggling to get a life and a clue, and engaging in some spectaculary demented behavior along the way.

Her parents were hippies but all she wanted to do was wear a tutu- and she did- to school!!

” I was the child who bragged and lied in Show and Tell to distinguish myself from the hordes of crying and pee-crazy 5-year-olds in Kindergarten. I admit I lied not to be difficult but to be special. I conjured and fantasized on what I wanted to be when I grow up. I wanted to be a doctor, a ballerina, a social worker, a fireman and a nun. All the while feigning nonchalance when the girls in my class also had grander ambitions. I even firmly believed that we’d all be riding flying saucers by the year 2000 just like in the Jetsons.”

Susan Jane Gilman was raised in Upper West Manhattan in the 1970’s, before it became gentrified. Her family was pretty laid back and “groovy” - her grandmother claimed to be a Communist and her mother signed the whole family up for Transcendental Meditation. Throughout it all, Susie retained an active imagination and developed a sense of humor. Her family motto was, “Reality is for people with no imagination.” This is her memoir. It starts in her pre-school years and ends when she moved to Geneva shortly after her marriage

When I saw the little blond scowling girl dressed in a tutu, tiara, fairy wings, striped stockings, and combat boots (and of course carrying a “magic” star wand) I was hooked

Frank McCourt said, 'thank you, O Lord, for sending us Susan Gilman's tales', and Laurie Notaro said, "If you don't absolutely love this book, you are simply dead inside." A bit extreme maybe, but then Laurie was always extreme. I didn’t absolutely love this book, but it was a good read, amusing, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

As always, Jack

2009-09-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

a Wartime Love Story

by Emma Sweeney

Little, Brown & Company

2002

Funny how this book just jumped off the shelf at me. I was walking out of the library, and there it was on the ‘staff picks’ shelf. The name “Jack” caught me because he was a lost love from long ago.

And after I’d just finished reading The Shoebox Bible. Here comes another story of remembrance found on pieces of paper.

This is a beautiful and sweet biography about the author's father whom she never got to meet. Her mother and father met at the end of World War II and got married when he returned home. Over the next ten years, they had four sons, and the author's mother was pregnant with a daughter when his plane was lost at sea. After her mother died, she found a bunch of love letters written to her from her father and this is how she finally got to know him.

Emma Sweeney, the author, was that daughter. She is now a New York literary agent and gardening book author. In the last chapter, she writes:

My father met my mother at the tail end of a year and a half spent in navy flight training at the base near Coronado, California, where she lived. The year was 1945. They had known each other for only eleven days when he left with his flight squadron to report to Hawaii as part of the military's effort to stabilize the Pacific after World War II. Over a period of seven months, he wrote the forty-five letters I found in her drawer.

Pat Conroy, author of Beach Music and Prince of Tides, said, "As Always, Jack is one of the great loves stories of our time. By the time I finished reading these letters, Jack Sweeney had taught me much about humor and longing and almost everything about love."

The Shoebox Bible

2009-09-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Alan Bradley
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.2006

"To all mothers everywhere - and especially mine"

On the floor of her bedroom, he played on rainy days, grating toy cars and trucks endlessly back and forth across the patterned linoleum; beneath her dresser, the fire hall; under her bed, the police station and the hoosegow; and in her closet, the service station and garage, Free air.

It was here he found a well-worn cardboard shoebox beneath a floorboard. "It was an ordinary large, square shoebox - one that might originally have contained galoshes. On one end was a label printed in blue script:"

Clarke's Shoe Shop - for Finer Footwear
King Street, Phone 536W

It was a cold, dark winter day during the Second World War. Inside the box he found cigarette packages, soup can labels, handbills, calendars, paper bags, pie boxes – any scrap of paper upon which his mother could copy out snippets of Scripture.

His father left to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, and he grew up in a small southern Ontario town with his mother and two sisters and Jeremiah, his pet turtle that lived in a galvanized washtub.

In the early part of the book, I skipped past the long and tedious quotations from the Bible, but there were many snippets of happy memory from my own childhood growing up in southern Ontario about the same time. Cellars (we call them basements here), galoshes, Eaton's and Simpson's mail-order catalogs, scraping curly shavings of frost from the window, Sweet Caporal cigarette packs.

There are many photographs throughout and wonderful pen-and-ink sketches by Bill Slavin. It’s a beautiful and loving memoir, dedicated to his mother

Alan Bradley

2009-08-23T09:34:00.001-07:00

We listened this morning to Alan Bradley being interviewed on CBC Radio. He talked about his books and especially about the Buckshaw Chronicles, the adventures of Flavia deLuce, an 11-year-old aspiring chemist. I wrote about the first of the trilogy in April this year The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and have been waiting eagerly for the next one.

Well, the good news is here. The second book, Tied Up in Strings is coming in March 2010.

Born in Toronto, he lives now in Kelowna with his wife and two calculating cats. I'm off to the library first thing tomorrow to pick up his non-fiction book, The Shoebox Bible.

Purple Hibiscus

2009-07-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Thomas Allen & Son 2003

"That's a hibiscus, isn't it, Aunty?" Jaja asked, staring at a plant close to the barbed wire fencing. "I didn't know there were purple hibiscuses."

This is a harsh story, almost unbearable at first, but beautifully written.

Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her brother, Jaja, are brought up by an overly strict father in a wealthy Nigerian household. They and their mother are physically abused. Both children live in terror of not achieving the “best-in-class” on school exams because they know the beatings that will follow. There are other forms of torture and cruelty that I won’t describe here.

As things fell apart in the family, the children were allowed to go stay with their aunt in a nearby city. The Aunt and her family were a loving counterpoint to the father's repressive violence. While the children were with the aunt, Jaja was able to explore gardening. He was the one that planted the purple hibiscus in his family's yard when they returned home.

I can't explain why I kept reading this book … it was so unbearably cruel, but I kept coming back to it time and again. I didn't take it back to the library. It was in my book bag to be returned, but it kept calling to me. I'd pull it out and read some more. The purple hibiscus flowers kept turning up, rather like a beacon of hope.

Eventually, I was glad I finished the book because there are some more positive experiences with her Aunt and family and friends, and with her grandfather.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

2009-06-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

Flannery O’Connor
Harvest Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
1976

I was first attracted to this book by the title and by the cover.

There are ten short stories here – twisted, sparse, dark, gloomy, funny, dramatic, Southern, angry, sexy, possibly racist, unforgiving, brooding and scary.

Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic, which made her a bit of an outsider in the Evangelical Protestant South. She believed in God, but not so much in people. She wrote about ugly, ugly things in such a way that they are completely beautiful. And usually heartbreaking. She painted her characters with exquisite detail,

Someone said she made the south seem even creepier than it already was

Before the Frost

2009-06-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

Henning Mankell
translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg
Vintage Canada 2002

Wallander’s daughter, Linda, has just graduated from the police academy and is awaiting her starting position on the local police force in Ystad. They find themselves forced to confront a group of extremists bent on punishing the world's sinners, a group of religious fanatics led by an ex-member of Jim Jones’ congregation in Guyana – one who escaped the mass murders and suicide. The intricate story is deftly told, and the pacing of the action is such that you hate to put the book down – even to go to sleep!

The father/daughter relationship here is quite fascinating, and we learn about Kurt’s moods and temper and weaknesses. She's always ragging him about his bad eating habits and his ever-increasing weight - about his sex life, or lack thereof. There's also a small glimpse into the life of Kurt's ex-wife, Mona. I enjoyed looking into the lives of many of the characters, their lives outside the job. Not just the regular mystery stories I’ve read, I’m looking now for more.

Now I want to visit Sweden. I know so little about that part of the world - I didn't even know there was a bridge between Denmark and Sweden - back to the atlas

Cold Comfort Farm

2009-05-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

by Stella Gibbons
The Folio Society
London 1977

I've tried to read this book three or four times and always give up. It just doesn't appeal to me, and then I wonder what's wrong with me. So many of my bookish friends have high praise

I watched two of the movies or TV miniseries. The earlier one with Alistair Sim in 1971 with C, and we left in the middle of it. We giggled and laughed about it for years after, and called it the Pig Movie. She said she'd never let me choose another movie. Later I watched the 1996 version with Kate Beckinsale and Stephen Fry - same result, gave up part way through.

I borrowed the book from the library several times because this 1971 edition is so beautiful. The cover is dark green cloth with a design of vines and leaves. The water colour illustrations by Quentin Blake are quite gorgeous, fascinating and funny.

Here, Seth has been left to tend the breakfast meal.

In the large kitchen, which occupied most of the middle of the house, a sullen fire burned, the smoke of which wavered up the blackened walls and over the deal table, darkened by age and dirt, which was roughly set for a meal. A snood full of coars porridge hung over the fire, and standing with one arm resting upon the high mantel, looking moodily down into the heaving contents of the snood, was a tall young man whose riding-boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge.

What the heck is a snood?

Wallander's First Case

2009-05-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

Wallander's First Case is the first of five short stories in Henning Mankell's The Pyramid. I came to read this book (my first by Mankell) after watching the PBS miniseries starring Kenneth Branagh that Nan at Hill Farm reviewed on her blog. You can listen to a fantastic interview with Henning Mankell in Toronto.

These five short mysteries take us back to the beginning and trace chronologically Wallander's growth from a rookie cop into a young father and then a middle-aged divorce.

In 1969, Kurt Wallander was twenty-one years of age, a young policeman, barely an adult, on his first homicide case. His next-door neighbor is dead, seemingly by his own hand. He is still a uniformed police officer in Malmo, tired of walking the streets. With a transfer to Criminal Investigation pending, his future boss encourages his involvement in the investigation. Once involved in a case, he can’t let go until he finds the answer. In this, his first case, he even calls in sick to do more investigating.

There are two problems in his personal life - one with Mona, his girlfriend who is impatient with the interference of his work. And he has issues with his father, an artist who painted the same landscape over and over. The elder Wallander strongly disapproves of his son's decision to join the police force, and frequently derides him for it.

His father has bought a house in Loderup and is moving after 19 years in this house where Wallander had grown up. Anxious that his childhood home was going to be torn down, he thought, "I am sentimental. Perhaps that's why I like opera. The questions is, can you be a good police officer if you have a tendency toward sentimentality?"

So now I've watched two episodes of the PBS series and look forward to the third next week. Apparently there is another series planned as well.

The Red Leather Diary Revisited

2009-05-13T10:20:00.001-07:00

In the May 2009 issue of Shambhala Sun, Lily Koppel writes about her meetings with the author of the diary, Florence Wolfson Howitt. They first met at Florence's home in Connecticut and later in Florida.

Lily discovered the diary in a dumpster in Manhattan in 2003. The journal painted a picture of 1930's New York - horseback riding in Central Park, summer excursions to the Catskills, and an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress, Eva Le Gallienne. Florence began writing the day she received the diary on her fourteenth birthday in 1929. Its nearly 2,000 entries, written in ink that is now faded, captured the passions and ambitions of an intensely creative young woman.

I first wrote about this book on January 6, 2009. At that time I expressed my uncertainty as to the truth of the story. So here now is another look at Lily and Florence. There is a terrific audio interview with Lily and Rod Meade Sperry, one of the magazine's editors, here

I found the connection to Buddhism a bit labored, but interesting. Now I intend to go back and finish reading the diary. I gave up on it about two-thirds of the way through.

The House of Dolls

2009-05-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

Barbara Comyns
Thorndike Press 1991

“Amy Doll, are you telling me that all those old girls upstairs are tarts?”

“Well, not exactly tarts, Doris, but they have gentlemen friends who pay them.”

Trouble is brewing at Amy Doll’s rooming house. Her four ‘golden girl’ boarders, near retirement, have embarked upon a new profession. Well, new to them anyway. In order to supplement their income, the four women traded in their girdles and afternoon tea for tight pants and drink, and began to dabble in the world’s oldest profession. Amy is timid and young and recently widowed, and now a reluctant ‘madam’.

Bertha Jago (she called herself Berti) is a woman of sixty-four, exceptionally tall and bamboo thin, appearing to have no hips, bottom or breasts

Ivy Rope is the youngest of Amy’s ladies – a widow who worked in a haberdashery and woolshop in the nearby Goucester Road

Evelyn Hunter-Smith is a country rector’s daughter (with blue-rinsed hair) and inclined to be a poor man’s edition of Berti. They had a similar build except that Evelyn was not quite as tall and she had a bust, which she considered her best feature. Both were addicted to tight trousers and drink and both had cropped heads

The Senora, as they called her, was in fact a senorita, in spite of her matronly figure. Augustina Puig had been living in the Dolls’ house for over eight years. Amy had never inquired what this magnificent Spanish woman was doing in a Walham Green horse meat shop or wondered who she came to leave her country. Her husband had brought her home one evening when he was engaged in decorating the horsemeat shop. “She’d fit nicely into the big room at the top,’ he said, ‘and the money she brings will pay for Hetty’s schooling.

This book is quite delightful – one long chuckle from beginning to end. Occasionally a great guffaw.

“Berti skimmed in, kissing the Greek on both cheeks, and spun round like a top in front of Ivy and Evelyn. She appeared to have a pair of dehydrated moths on her eyes. ‘Do you like them, dears? False eyelashes. I found them at the back of one of the drawers, must be at least ten years old, but very alluring.’ She fluttered the dehydrated moths over her almost-closed eyes.

“’ Can you see with them?’ Ivy asked bleakly. ‘Not very well, but as long as I can see my drink, that’s all that matters.’ Evelyn was still staring. ‘How have you fixed them?’ she enquired. ‘Actually with glue. There wasn’t anything else. It stings a bit. Do you think they look all right?’

A Partisan's Daughter

2009-05-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

by Louis de Bernieres
Alfred A. Knopf Canada 2008

'Le mariage bourgeois a mis notre pays en pantoufles,

et bientot aux portes de la mort.'

Albert Camus, La Chute

This is the story of Christopher and Roza. Christopher is a bored pharmaceutical salesman in London who suddenly decides to do something different. He is plagued with a wife at home who has become indifferent to him and to the world. He refers to her as, “a great loaf of white bread.” Roza is a Yugoslavian refugee whose father was a partisan during the war, and decides that it might be fun to dress up like a street walker and see what happens.

This is London in the early 1970s. Chris is a man in classic midlife crisis. His marriage is loveless, and his salesman job more or less meaningless. When Chris meets Roza, a woman he mistakes for a prostitute, he falls into a kind of obsession that sees him returning again and again to listen to stories from her past that she uses to keep him coming back. Thus starts a non-sexual relationship that is akin to the story of Scherezade. They meet regularly and Chris becomes more and more enamoured with her.

Burnt Shadows

2009-05-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

Kamila Shamsie

Bloomsbury Publishing 2009

9 August 1945, Nagasaki, Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.

In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.

This wonderful story follows Hiroko from Nagasaki to Delhi to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and finally to New York and back to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. Salman Rushdie said of Kamila Shamsie, "a writer of immense ambition and strength."

This book came to me as a winner of the book draw given by Lynne at DoveGreyReader, where you can find a full review. Thank you so much Lynne and to Bloomsbury as well.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

2009-04-30T12:09:00.001-07:00

Jamie Ford
Ballantine Books
New York 2009

Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. The old Seattle landmark was a place he'd visited twice in his lifetime. First when he was only twelve years old, way back in 1942 - "the war years" he liked to call them. Even then the old bachelor hotel had stood as a gateway between Seattle's Chinatown and Nihonmachi, Japantown. Two outposts of an old-world conflict where Chinese and Japanese immigrants rarely spoke to one another, while their American-born children often played in the streets together.

It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s

This is the story of Henry Lee (a Chinese American) through transitions in time between the 1940s and 1986 in Seattle. At the Japanese internment camp in Idaho, the young Henry gets a job as a server in the kitchen, and is able to visit his sweetheart, Keiko. In Seattle, in 1986, the older Henry begins to know his grown son, Marty. Henry was a widower now, and it was lonely ... there was an "Ethel-shaped hole" in his life without her.

The Panama Hotel is central to the story throughout. The new owner allows Henry and Marty to search in the dusty basement for belongings of Keiko's family ... particulary for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

2009-04-16T13:20:00.000-07:00

Alan Bradley
Doubleday Canada 2009

A series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. For eleven-year-old Flavia, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak.

This is the first in a series that Bradley has planned - The Buckshaw Chronicles. I will be on the edge of my seat waiting for the second

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is set in the summer of 1950, following Flavia de Luce as she attempts to solve the mystery of the man who was found dead in her family's cucumber patch in the early hours of the morning

Flavia possesses a love of chemistry, a passion for poisons in particular, a bicycle named Gladys, and a talent for deductive reasoning. (Could our Flavia somehow be the adolescent female version of Sherlock Holmes?)

A Taste of Heaven and Earth

2009-04-07T07:43:00.000-07:00

A Zen Approach to Cooking and Eating

by Bettina Vitell
Harper Collins 1993

I wrote about this in my other blog My Zen Diary. There are great vegetarian recipes here, but also short stories and contemplative essays precede each section: soups, pasta and grains, curries, Mexican tastes, Sushi ideas, Pizzas and Vegetable Tarts, Vegetable Dishes, Salads, Sauces and salad dressings, breakfast ideas, and deserts. Beautiful ink drawings grace most pages.

Bettina's professional experience includes acting as the tenzo (chief cook) at a monastery and creating The Beat'n Path Cafe, one of New York City's first natural foods restaurants. She lives in San Francisco now where she teaches cooking.

Living Color

2009-03-30T11:08:00.001-07:00

Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore

This is a postcard I bought when I was at the coffee shop in Taos. Then, in the bookstore, I found the book.

Living Color

- A Writer Paints Her World

by Natalie Goldberg

"I realized nothing I have ever created held the light the way a leaf did or caught the shadow in a white room. No painting I've done matched the peace I've felt at twilight or the feeling of loss I've experienced at bleached high noon in New Mexico. But I wasn't going to let that stop me. I was crazy about the wrong color sky and the heart-sinking beckoning of headlights on old cars. I painted for that terrible overused word that a writer should never utter: love. For that reason, I kept trying to catch up to the picture just ahead of me in my mind and before me on the porch."

One of my favorite authors and Buddhist friends writes about her life and illustrates it 'in living color'. Here is a tiny excerpt to give the flavor "I noticed that the blue of my paints wasn't blue enough to get the intensity of that New Mexico sky. I painted the sky red instead." Tender stories of family and friends ... the paintings of her father are extraordinary.

After knowing Natalie as a writer, author, and teacher ... Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones, Long Quiet Highway and The Great Failure, I was happy to discover her paintings and life stories. The colors, oh the colors, a purple adobe house in Hopi Land, blue and green skyscrapers in New York City, a blue adobe house in Santa Fe.

There's a chapter devoted to her grandfather and a series of paintings of trucks.

If you own this book now, you probably shouldn't lend it. You may never get it back again.

In the Land of the Midnight Sun

2009-03-22T10:01:00.001-07:00

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold

This book belonged to my father. I found it recently while cleaning out the storage closet. It's a gorgeous 1911 edition ... thick creamy pages and decal edges.

Robert Service was born in England, raised in Scotland, farmed in Duncan, British Columbia, banked in Victoria, drifted in California, wrote in Whitehorse, married in Paris, hid in Vancouver, died in Brittany and was buried in Monte Carlo. He dedicated this book to "C.M." I wonder who that was.

In San Francisco, he drank in seedy bars, got into street fights and was virtually in the gutter. Desperate for money, he took a labouring job that required him to move to Los Angeles, only to find that he was a strikebreaker. That didn't bother him, but the back-breaking work on a tunnel and the danger he faced to life and limb made him quit. He drifted from job to job as a dishwasher, a sandwich-board man and an orange picker. An ad he had put in the paper seemed to be his answer - a resident handyman was required in a high-class establishment. Eagerly, he took the job and moved in. It was a brothel.

After more wandering in Mexico, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado, he returned to Vancouver Island, having been away for 18 months. He prospered in Victoria. While working at the Canadian Bank of Commerce, he was leafing through the bank's ledger one day and spotted the name of a customer - Sam McGee. Perfect! Using the name of the unsuspecting gentleman, he published the ballad that, along with several others, propelled him to fame and fortune.

He served as an ambulance driver in the First World War, then settled in France.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, he became a wanted man by the Nazis for mocking Hitler, but managed to escape to Vancouver in 1940 with his wife, Germaine, whom he had married in Paris in 1913.

His biographer, Enid Mallory, wrote, "Words were his lifelong passion ... he could make them dance, shiver with cold or choke with loneliness and despair ... but they danced their best on the wide white stage of the Canadian North."

Isabel's Daughter

2009-03-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Judith Ryan Hendricks writes of the southwest, particularly New Mexico - of food and cooking, kitchens and corn, and the dusty smell of dried chiles. This story of a foundling's search for her mother is her third, preceded by Bread Alone and The Bakers' Apprentice

“The first time I saw my mother was the night she died. The second time was at a party in Santa Fe.”

Avery James spent the first 13 years of her life in a foundling home in Alamitos Colorado, near the New Mexican border. Her best friend was Esperanza Verdug – a round person with long gray braid, snapping dark eyes, smooth brown arms, and a gold front tooth. The cook at Carson. Not a housemother or a teacher or a nurse. No degree in psychology or social work or early childhood eduction. No counseling credentials. If the truth be told, she couldn’t read or write, and her English sometimes sent me into fits of laughter.

But of all the Carson staff, it was Esperanza who always seemed to be wading through a river of kids. They’d hang on her arms, grab at her skirts, cling to her legs. She was the one who tied shoelaces, wiped runny noses, smuggled bizochitos into the library.

After Esperanza died, Avery ran away to Florales where she finds a rural haven provided by an eccentric old woman called Cassie, a curandera, or healer, who teaches her how to concoct remedies from wild plants. She lived with Cassie for many years, until the old woman died, helping in the garden and with the cooking.

Eventually she finds her way to Santa Fe and the famed art colonies. Working for a trendy caterer, she sees the portrait of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to her in the home of a client. Avery's search for her mother is revealed in flashbacks.

When she was living with Cassie, she was bitten by a rattlesnake. Recovering in hospital- "When they stuck needles in my arm I knew it should hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I remember Cassies’ face hovering over me in a blue cloud, then her hand on my forehead.

"It was still dark, and I wondered what time it was. I started to call for a nurse, but the sound died in my throat. A woman was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a black dress with white sleeves. The multicolored beads on her dress caught the dim light from the hall and made it sparkle. She had long black hair and her face was shadows. I figures she was an angel, and that seeing her meant I was going to die. Except I didn’t think angels wore black, so maybe she was a bad angel and I was going to Hell for not believing. I stared harder, trying to see her face, but I couldn’t. She just stood there like she was watching me.

"All at once I know, and the knowing made the hair rise up all over my head.

"She was my mother."

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell

2009-03-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest, my home ground. It's very very funny, and I enjoyed it thoroughly ... listened to it as an audiobook. The author describes people and places so well that I thought I could see them and hear them.

When her husband is offered a post at a small university, Maye Roberts is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. She's a freelance writer, and works at home, so making new friends is quite a challenge.

Spaulding is a quintessential college hippie town, laid-back and full of quirky characters. The town is founded on a sewer pipe manufacturing company, though it's been closed for years now. The big annual event is the Sewer Pipe Festival, complete with the crowning of a queen. This is a recycling, no-meat-eating town, and Maye resorts to telling lies to find friends. This, she reflects, is earning her places in the different degrees of hell. There's an intermediate hell where one is forced to live out eternity in Wal-Mart "the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers jostled, pushed and rubbed against her to secure the cheapest things hellishly possible, while their children, also known as demi-demons, cried, screamed, and begged for hell's cuisine, corn dogs and Mountain Dew."

After narrow escapes from a coven of witches, a cult of vegetarians (she loves a good steak) and an alcoholic who humiliates her on a friend-date, she decides to enter the town's Sewer Pipe Queen pageant in hopes this will help her attract friends.

Eudora

2009-03-01T12:37:00.001-08:00

Nan at Letters from a Hill Farm said she would devote the month of April to reading Eudora Welty. I have a treasured copy of "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty" that I bring out from time to time to re-read some favorites. Her vision is sweet by nature, and she writes with a fine, pure, and gentle voice about the American South. This year will be her 100th birthday

I posted an entry in My Reading Diary a few years ago, and mentioned her connection to the email system that bears her name

The Birth of Eudora

Originally developed as a freeware product by Internet pioneer Steve Dorner in 1988, Eudora broke new ground by combining the best attributes of various emerging email technologies. The program did not spring from a traditional center of high-tech innovation such as the Silicon Valley, but rather, from a college campus in the nation's heartland.

Eudora was developed by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois, where Mosaic was also eventually developed. Dorner was a computer programmer working on TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) applications and servers for the computer science department on the Urbana-Champaign campus. This was his first exposure to Internet protocols, chiefly file transfer protocol (ftp) and telnet, before he moved on to developing "ph" for Net directories.

After growing bored with building directories, Dorner turned his attention to email. Although electronic messaging was still in its infancy, Dorner realized that an elegant email system could greatly enhance and facilitate communications among students and faculty on campus.

The Name

After working on the new email program for a year, Dorner was ready to release it for free to the Internet community at large. The working name was UIUCMail, which Dorner realized was a tongue twister. Then he remembered a short story written by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) titled "Why I Live at the P.O." It's a story about a woman who decides to live at the post office where she works rather than put up with her family at home any longer. Dorner was processing so much email at the time that he felt like he lived at the post office, and his program used a "post office" protocol to fetch mail, so he saw a metaphorical connection. Since the programming and naming took place a decade ahead of the phenomenal growth of the Internet, Dorner hadn't anticipated Eudora would eventually be used by more than 20 million people.

Naming the program after a living author could have become awkward for Dorner and any future licensees. Fortunately, Ms. Welty was flattered and amused by the allusion to her and her work.

I love this anecdote about Eudora Welty and the email system ... it's the same one I've been using for many years now

A short story writer and novelist, Eudora Welty wrote poignantly about the men and women of her native American South, the traditions and changes that influenced their lives, the intricacies of their relationships and their difficulties and failures in understanding themselves and communicating with each other, passed away on July 23, 2001.

Miss Welty and other Southern writers of her generation such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams and Robert Penn Warren, were key figures in the movement that created a Southern literary renaissance during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and made Southern writing a dominant force in 20th century American literature.

The Red Leather Diary

2009-01-06T11:35:00.001-08:00

Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal

Lily Koppel
Harper Collins 2008

In 2003, Lily Koppel discovered Florence Wolfson’s diary in a Manhattan dumpster. She located Florence in Florida and surprised her with this artifact from her past. Lily said, “I have some old things belonging to you that I picked up at 98 Riverside Drive, and I thought you might want them.”

As a teenager, Florence had kept the diary from 1929 to 1934. Lily wrote a piece for The New York Times based on this 72-year-old relic, provoking enough interest to be turned into a book. Florence writes in a forward to the book, “It has added zest to my life and brought back some of the passion of my youth and made me feel more alive than I have in years.”

Because this was written in a novelistic way, I found it hard to decide if it was fact or fiction. Either way, it is a fascinating re-creation of the romance and glitter, sophistication and promise, of 1930s New York. She was obsessed with the state of her soul and her appearance, and I probably wouldn’t have liked Florence at all.

In June 2008, one reviewer said that she had seen them on the Today show. Maybe it’s true, maybe not, nevertheless, a good read and the black-and-white photos add lots of interest.

Florence as a sixteen-year-old college sophomore in May 1931

No I don't want to join a book club

2008-11-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

- Virginia Ironside 2006, Penguin Books

This diary is what happens when grumpy old women meet Bridget Jones. Too young to get whisked away by a Stannah Stairlift or to enjoy the luxury of a walk-in bath (but not so much that she doesn’t enjoy comfortable shoes), Marie is, all the same, getting on in years – and she’s thrilled about it! She’s a bit preoccupied about whether to give up sex – “ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’ – but there are compensations, like falling in love all over again – but this time with her baby grandson, Gene.

When friends suggest she join a book club as she turns sixty, she says, “Book club people always seem to have to wade through Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or, groan, The God of Small Things. They feel they’ve forever got to poke their brain with a pointed stick to keep it working. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t. And anyway, I don’t want to be young and stimulated any more. I want to start doing old things, not young things.”

Pouncer is her close companion. He’s a cat. After her bunion operation, she’s wearing two great blue flip-flops and her feet are covered in bandages. "Pouncer took one look and arched his back and spat at them. I think he thought I’d brought home two new strange pets. To Sainsbury’s to buy some fish, and some special food they do that Pouncer likes. At least he liked it last week. It’s funny with cats."

At her birthday party, Lucy asks, “do you feel any different?” Marie says, “yes, I do. I feel absolutely marvelous. It’s clear now that I was born to be sixty. And to be honest, I can’t wait to be seventy.”

Maciej, her Polish cleaning man, is falling in love with her French boarder, Michelle, who doesn’t or won’t speak much English. Her friend Penny, the hypochondriac, thinks she has VD now, and soon to have AIDS. Long discussions about condoms continue. Archie, an old boyfriend, is still attractive …. Hmmmm.

Her best and longest friends are a gay couple. Hughie is dying with AIDS. He’s quite philosophical and in good humour about death. “Getting rather past my sell-by date, I’m afraid.” James is quite falling apart and can’t comprehend what life would be like without him.

Too Young to Fight

2008-11-11T09:21:00.000-08:00

Memories of our Youth during World War II

Stoddart Publishing 1999
compiled by Priscilla Galloway

A collection from some of Canada's best-loved writers of children's literature. The contributors were children and teenagers during World War II.

Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan writes of experiences with her family at the detention camp in Slocan, British Columbia. Taken from their home in Vancouver to "relocation" camps in the interior of the province. Rounded up as "enemies", Japanese Canadians from up and down B.C. were housed temporarily inside the horticultural barns at Hastings Park in Vancouver before being sent to the camps.

"When we first arrived, we didn't have enough food. All that first morning, Mama, Tim, and I waddled through the forest on our haunches, like three ducks, picking dandelion leaves. Then back home at our newspaper-lined hut, Mama burnt sticks, making ashes, then ash water, in which she soaked the leaves overnight to get the bitterness out of them."

Roch Carrier describes rationing. "To control the consumption of gasoline, sugar, butter, meat, and flour, the government issued coupons to present to the merchants. Without coupons it was impossible to buy those goods."

I remember a bit of this ... collecting stuff to take to school ... drippings from cooking fatty meats were collected in tin cans. We joked about bringing our "fat cans" to school. My mum canned summer fruits without sugar. I think she tried saccharine. It was horrid, and we didn't eat it.

There are stories from eleven writers here. At this time each year in mid November, we read them again and remember.

Resistance

2008-10-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

The Maquis, the Nazi resistance network, moves Jews, Allied Soldiers and fleeing Belgian soldiers to France and freedom. In November 1993 a “special ceremony inaugurates a monument in remembrance of an aeroplane fallen down on 1943 December 30th at the Heights near our village.”

The story begins in December 1943, when an American B-17 bomber is downed, and Claire becomes the caretaker of its pilot, Ted Brice. They fall in love … haunted by war, their love seems impossible, making it all the more precious.

This is not just fiction, but based on realities of many villages across Europe and the horror of it all is almost unbearable. There is love in the hole of hell itself

A movie made in 2003 stars the lovely Julia Ormond (of Sabrina and Legends of the Fall) as Claire and Bill Paxton (of Big Love) as Ted

Tara at Books and Cooks is giving away three copies of Testimony, Anita Shreve’s latest novel, just released. You can enter the draw to be made on October 28 by leaving a comment on her post. She asks that you mention your favorite of Shreve’s books. This is mine.

Infusions of Healing

2008-09-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

In San Antonio we went to hear Frances Evans talk about Folk Medicine, Mexican-American Herbal Remedies. She told us about mal d'ojo and skunk oil, moldy bread (penicillin) and milagros, spider webs to stop bleeding, sugar and honey for bed sores, garlic for high blood pressure, vinegar and brown paper for sprains and burns. Beans from the mesquite tree, steeped to make tea, for an upset stomach, mud for an insect sting. The early Sears catalogs advertisied opium and cures for addiction.

This is one of the books she recommended. Joie Davidow describes hundreds of plants and their uses, how to prepare them, where and when to find them. Early chapters tell five hundred years of history, from the arrival in 1519 of Hernando Cortes at Vera Cruz up to the present day. My ears perked up at this because I lived for three years on Cortes Island in British Columbia. The island was named in 1792 during the expedition of Galiano and Valdes, presumably after Hernando Cortes.

Today, almost everyone in Mexico uses the traditional herbal remedies to some extent. The old medicines have never fallen of of use. Urban Mexicans use both ancient herbs and modern pharmaceuticals.

In south Texas many botanicas sell traditional herbs. Like their wandering Aztec ancestors, Mexican Americans are resourcesful people, learning to make use of whatever is available

Que magicas infusiones
de indios herbolarios
de mi patria, entre mis letras
el bechizo derramaron?

What are these magical infusions
of the Indian herbalists of my homeland,
that spill enchantment
over my pages?
- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695)

Smoking Poppy

2008-07-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

Graham Joyce has given us an update of a familiar tale (Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

When a divorced, middle aged electrician hears that his precociously intelligent daughter has been arrested in Thailand for drug-trafficking, he sets out with his drinking mate, an overweight fruit and vegetable seller and his son, a laconic born-again Christian, determined to bring her home. It's a journey during which he will be dogged by drug dealers, thugs of the worst kind, sorcerers and spirits.

My New Cookbook

2008-06-30T10:50:00.001-07:00

I saw this book in the window of a used bookstore while wandering around one afternoon. The bright cover attracted me. Glancing through the table of contents and a few pages of recipes, I knew I had to have it.

There are quick and nutritious recipes, and easy - most take under 30 minutes to prepare. A vegetarian or vegan diet, utilizing plant protein, creates less of a demand on the world's resources and encourages a lifestyle that is compassionate toward Earth and all its inhabitants.

On Thursday evening, June 19, 2008, in Johnstown, PA, at the 34th Annual Vegetarian Summerfest of the North American Vegetarian Society, Joanne Stepaniak was elected to the Vegetarian Hall of Fame. She is the author of many books. This one, Table for Two, was published in 1996. She emphasizes compassion towards everyone, including meat-eaters.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

2008-05-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

Finding and reading this wonderful old classic was pure joy. I'd seen the movie many years ago, but not read the book.

First published over 50 years ago, Betty Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir ... her frank writing about life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society.

Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. The opening line is this: “Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York”. Can you imagine that? Well, I guess the world was much different in the summer of 1912.

It's a simple story of a family in crisis. Johnny, the father, drinks too much and can't hold a job but is the light and life of the family. Katie, the mother, loves her family ferociously, but has been embittered by the strain that Johnny and their perpetual state of poverty places upon her. The story truly belongs to Francie and Neely, the two children, who survive by staying together, inventing stories and games for each other, and finding joy in their meager surroundings.

There is magic and heartbreak, heroics and cowardice, beauty and hideousness. It describes what it was like to be a poor child in Brooklyn in 1908.

The Mermaid Chair

2008-03-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

Not such a great book, but I so loved the movie ... it was filmed just a few miles up the road from where I'm living now ... Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island ... gorgeous scenery and a young monk who was very nice to look at. There's a great line at the monastery - "the monks shuffled off in various degrees of huff."

I enjoyed her other book, The Secret Life of Bees. and hope to see a movie soon from this one ... just recently heard that it's in the making

The Watermelon King

2008-03-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

We watched Big Fish last night ... again ... one of my favorite movies. Wonderful, magical characters and wonderful actors ... Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, Ewan MacGregor, Billy Crudup, Helena Bonham Carter, and that beautiful French woman who won an Oscar this year for playing Edith Piaf.

So I remembered another book by Daniel Wallace that I read last year ... The Watermelon King. Susan Shreve called it "a marvelous combination of Chaucer and Roald Dahl." Such humor and humanity in this story of a young man in search of his identity. His genius has produced a tale both outrageous and heartbreaking. I hope to find more of his mystery and magic.

Elle

2008-01-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

Douglas Glover has written the story of a French girl who went to Canada, gave birth to a fish, turned into a bear and fell in love with a famous author. Based on a little-known incident from Canadian history, Elle chronicles the adventures of Sieur de Roberval's wayward 19-year-old niece who was set ashore in 1542 (during Jacques Cartier's ill-fated third and last attempt to colonize Canada) as a punishment for lasciviousness, along with her old nurse and tennis-playing lover.

A lusty Rabelaisian riff on the discovery of the New World that has been described as a "mad creation myth dreamed by a French Eve." Elle is a libidinous 16th-century society belle turned Robinson Crusoe ... she takes on the Canadian winter with little more than a tennis racket (for whacking sea birds over the head) and a trunk full of ball gowns ... and survives.

Newfoundland

2007-11-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

A few years ago we spent ten days in Newfoundland, and I fell in love ... with the place and with the people, even the weather. We had happy days, hiking and meeting local people. On a bus ride up to see the old Basque whaling ships museum at Red Bay in Labrador, we passed briefly across one corner of Quebec and boarded a car ferry across the Strait of Belle Isle.

A bus tour took us up north to L'Anse Aux Meadows and the Viking Village heritage park On the way, we passed Annie Proulx's house at Straitsview. (note to the Grammar Police - how do you make possessive words that end with 'x'?)

Nan in New England and I were talking about Newfoundland in comments at Rare Birds ... about books and movies, so I'm listing a few here.

The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
There's not likely to be anyone who hasn't read this book or seen the movie ... both wonderful.

The Divine Ryans – Wayne Johnston – also a movie with Pete Postelthwaite and Mary Walsh

Draper Doyle's life in Newfoundland, circa mid-1960s, is as constrained as it is colorful. Cooped up in one house with various family oddballs, he views the world from the bottom rungs of the ladder.

Kit’s Law – Donna Morrisey

In a harsh Newfoundland outport, 14-year-old Kit tells the story of Lizzy, the steadfast grandmother, and crazy red-haired Josie, the mother. With its partridgeberry patches, moose stew, and endless cups of tea, this is quintessential Newfoundland.

Downhill Chance also by Donna Morrissey

An old-fashioned yarn of love, despair, and family secrets against the backdrop of World War II in pre-Confederation Newfoundland. Morrissey, has been called "a twentieth-century Brontë sister".

The Wreckage – Michael Crummy – early 1940s

Mercedes Parsons is only 16 when she meets and falls in love with hard-drinking Wish Furey. The problem here is that Wish is a Catholic, and for the Protestants of Newfoundland's north shore, Romanism is akin to devil worship

Trading in Memories

2007-11-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Travels Through a Scavenger's Favorite Places

Barbara Hodgson has written about visiting markets, bookstores, cemeteries and courtyards, looking for cast-offs and curiosities "to reveal rich and intimate insights into people, places, and times past." They end up as collages and art pieces in her books and journals. Her introduction is called "Travels in Bric-a-Brac". I've only read the first few pages and can't wait to dive into the rest.

She writes of her travels and scavenging adventures in London, Brussels, Paris, Naples, Budapest, Istanbul, Damascus, Aswan, Marrakech, Tangier, Shanghai, Stanley, Los Angeles, Portland, and Vancouver (her home).

"I have no use for shops where every image is sequestered in a gift frame, where every scrap has been examined for its monetary value; I'm not understood at those places. The streets and anarchic markets that resemble my brain - that's where I go."

In northwest London, she visits Kensal Green Cemetery, established in 1832. "Although Kensal Green has its true celebrities - Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and William Makepeace Thackeray - few people aside from mourners or joggers go there."

Above are souvenir offerings from Kensal Green - shards of blue-and-white pottery and specimens from huge patches of weeds.

Monique in Vancouver mentioned this book to me in her comment to Sointula. She sent me a review copy, and I'm so very pleased. I'd previously read two of Barbara Hodgson's books so I knew right away this would be another favorite. Her design and collages are so beautiful and inspiring. Thank you, Monique.

Rare Birds

2007-11-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

I came to read this book after seeing the movie. Edward Riche has set his two novels on the east coast of Newfoundland. He writes with humor, and it is clear he loves this island.

Dave Purcell (played by William Hurt in the movie) used to work for the Newfoundland fisheries department, but now is proud owner of and chef extraordinaire at The Auk, a fine dining establishment just outside St. John's. Unfortunately, life is not going well for him. He’s drinking his way through his finest wines so the bankers won't get them when they foreclose.

Dave’s closest neighbor comes to the rescue with what he considers an ingenious foolproof idea to invent a rare bird sighting … hoping to have birders flock into the area, thereby filling the restaurant.

Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail said “Uproarious … Rare Birds is a farce that is particularly Newfoundland in its sense of humour, at once slapstick and satire … Comedy is replacing cod as the number one export of the Atlantic provinces.”

The House at Otowi Bridge

2007-11-09T22:23:00.000-08:00

Peggy Pond Church was a native New Mexican and lived at Los Alamos for twenty years. She wrote this story about her friend Edith Warner.

I read this book after reading “Changing Light” because of a strong interest in the geographical location and the time of the 40's and the Manhattan Project. It’s now the weekend of Remembrance Day in November 2007 … seems an appropriate time to remember the thousands killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Set in the region near Taos in the time of transition of Los Alamos from an isolated boys' school to a nuclear weapons lab. It's the story of Edith Warner and her life near Los Alamos during the thirties and forties. Peggy Pond Church wrote the story that Edith was unable to finish. She made an attempt, but after the first few pages it sounded to her like the standard adventure: “White woman moves West. Lives among Indians.” Better nothing than that, she thought, and gave it up. Besides the unfinished manuscript and the handful of Christmas letters, a few typed pages of her journal are all Edith felt willing to leave behind in writing.

“This is the story of a house,” her manuscript begins, “a house that stood for many years beside a bridge between two worlds.” It stood, too, in the shadow of Los Alamos, the mushrooming shadow of violent change. More than the story of a house, it is the story of a woman who made an oasis of serenity and beauty in a world that seemed to grow more threatening. Edith died in 1951, the sound of the river was with her to the end.

Her house became a kind of sanctuary for the scientists from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the tense years before Hiroshima. When the new bridge brought the road to Los Alamos so close to the house that life there could no longer be endured, some of those men worked side by side with the Indians of San Ildefonso to build a new house for Edith and Tilano.

She made the little house at Otowi (the place where the river makes a noise) into a tea room where she served a thin slice of lemon in the tea with a spicy clove and chocolate cake that was to become a tradition.

Sointula by Bill Gaston

2007-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

On a tiny island just off the northernwestern tip of Vancouver Island is a fishing village named Sointula -- a Finnish word meaning 'place of harmony'. It was settled by Finnish immigrants in 1901, seeking an island utopia.

In his fifth novel, Gaston gives us equal parts light and dark, compassion and irony, the story of a modern-day female Don Quixote, who is joined on her quest by a would-be travel writer, an awkward, profane, funny and unforgettable Sancho Panza

Changing Light

2007-08-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

I was drawn to this book because it's set in northern New Mexico where I lived for one glorious year in the Jemez Mountains. Nora Gallagher writes about Eleanor, a painter, and Theo, a Czechoslovakian scientist, who has fled from his job at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

There is another book now that I want to read - The House at Otowi Bridge is the story of Edith Warner, who lived for more than twenty years as a neighbor to the Indians of San Ildefonso Pueblo, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II.

She opened a tearoom in her adobe home that became a haven for neighboring nuclear scientists and Indians alike.

GoodReads

2007-08-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

I found this tricky widget at my other book list ... hmmm ... wondering if it will change here as the other list changes

The Lollipop Shoes

2007-08-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

V'la l'bon vent, v'la l'joli vent,
V'la l'bon vent, ma mie m'appelle.
V'la l'bon vent, v'la l'joli vent,
V'la l'bon vent, ma mie m'attend

When the north wind calls again, Vianne leaves Lansquenet and establishes a chocolate shop in Montmartre, where she encounters another dark force ... a mysterious new arrival who stirs up trouble much darker than the convention and respectability of the traditional religious contingency she ran from.

"Tak-tak-tak went the lollipop shoes and stopped right in front of the chocolaterie." Zozie wears fabulous, luminous high-heeled shoes in lipstick, candy-cane, lollipop red - a bright red coat, coffee-cream hair tied back with a scarf, bells on her print dress, and a jingling charm-bracelet around her wrist.

In this sequel to Chocolat, Vianne is known now as Yanne Charbonneau. Anouk, a pre-teen with latent supernatural talent, is called Annie, and Rosette is a four-year-old charmer.

Another culinary fairy tale from Joanne Harris. Allusions to Aztec gods and goddesses, consultation with the tarot cards. Magic, romance, and identity theft ... who could resist? Not me. I look for Johnny Depp on every page. Many trips to the French-English dictionary to look up words and phrases ... cantrip, pantoufle, couverture.

“Zozie is the mirror that shows us what we want to see. Our hopes; our hates; our vanities.”

Sleepless Nights

2007-08-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Hardwick writes of the inner life of an American woman, an imaginative reflection on the past and present. A novel about remembering, part fact and part fiction, intertwined so that I'm not sure which is which.

Kentucky to New York, to Boston, to Maine and to Europe. On the train from Montreal to Kingston ... all recorded in letters

In a squalid nursing home, a broken old woman remembers, "if only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember."

"The old pages of the days and weeks are splattered with the dark-brown rings of coffee cups and I find myself gratefully dissolved in the grounds."

Hogwarts at Shawnigan

2007-08-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Driving up to the lake last week, we stopped at Shawnigan Lake School to have a look about. Good grief and Great Goblins. I thought I'd disapparated and landed at Hogwarts

My Latin is quite rusty, but I think this says something about hands and work and strength.This is a private residential school that sits on vast acres of beautifully landscaped property and buildings. Students come from around the world ... about 430 of them. It took us a good two hours to walk about, to enjoy the grounds and look into the buildings. I expected to see Harry or Hermione just around every corner.

I thought I spotted Nearly Headless Nick in the dining hall, but when I turned around he'd disappeared.

Later that evening I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was a good read, but not my favorite of the series. I admired how she tied all the bits and pieces together, but the epilogue was a bit of overkill.

The Adventures of Goodnight & Loving

2007-07-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

by Leslie Thomas

"Dedicated to Paul Gauguin and other men who have run away

and discovered the consequences"

Thrown out by his wife, George Goodnight (a lawyer for a London newspaper) sets out on a hilarious round of aimless travel, taking him to Cherbourg, Paris, Rome, India, Darwin, Alice Springs, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Manila, Los Angeles, Texas and New York City. He sells his stamp collection piecemeal to fund his exploits and calling himself Oliver Loving. Occasional short-term employment is sometimes required to pay for food or lodging or ticket to somewhere else. He is frequently in trouble with the law (spent one Christmas in prison).

This is one of the goofiest novels I've ever read, and loved every minute of it. I came to know about Leslie Thomas after watching the "Last Detective" series on public television, in which Detective Constable Davies shares his weekly adventures with Mod, a longtime friend and sometimes housemate, and a giant dog. His nickname is "Dangerous Davies", a tongue-in-cheek reference by his coworkers.

This is the second of his novels that I've read so far ... the first was Dangerous by Moonlight. Recuperating from an injury, Davies is hired to investigate a murder of 15 years before ... more outlandish adventures

Tove Jansson and the Moomin Books

2007-07-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

After reading The Summer Book and The Winter Book, I went immediately to look up the Moomin Books. And what a wonderful discovery this has been ... thanks to Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book for recommending this Finnish writer and illustrator. The Moomin stories have been translated into 35 languages. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen medal in 1966.

The characters who live in Moominland are entirely charming. Besides Moominpappa and Moominmamma and Moomintroll, there are Thingamy and Bob, Misabel and Hemulen, Too-ticky and Sniff, Snufkin and Groke, Little My and Snork Maiden who has taken a fancy to Moomintroll..

Moomins generally sleep through the winter, but one January morning, Moomintroll woke to find the valley covered in strange white-stuff. Little My is awake too and having a wonderful time sledding on Moominmamma's tea tray.

a new Reading Journal

2007-07-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

I made a new journal because the old one was full

Nothing to Declare

2007-07-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

2007-07-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

After two years of starting and stopping, I finally finished this book. I'm still not sure why it didn't grab my interest completely, but I suspect it might have been about the size of the book. Apart from the number of pages, the physical dimensions were awkward and uncomfortable.

Two magicians are attempting to restore English magic in the age of Napoleon. Mr. Norrell, a reclusive, mistrustful bookworm, reveals that he is capable of producing magic and becomes the toast of London society, while an impetuous young aristocrat named Jonathan Strange tumbles into the practice, too, and finds himself quickly mastering it.

With the onset of Harry Potter mania and release of the last book of the series, I'm returning to magic and fantasy. I wonder if Jonathan Strange will be made into a movie. Looking forward to seeing Phillip Pulman's The Golden Compass and Neil Gaiman's Stardust, both to be released this year.

Found Today in a Library Book

2007-06-23T10:18:00.001-07:00

Reading a Leslie Thomas book after having watched the Dangerous Davies series "The Last Detective" on public television

Inside the front cover, I found this poem written by Janice James

More Than Words

2007-05-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

Illustrated Letters by Liza Kirwin

Today, when personal communication more than likely travels through the ether, and the postman is relegated to delivering bills and junk mail, this epistolary art might serve a purpose.

In the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a collection of illustrated letters that are autobiographical works of art. Those included in this book consititute some of the true gems. John Graham wrote in 1958, "letter writing is probably the most beautiful manifestation in human relations, in fact, it is its finest residue."

Writing to wives, lovers, friends, patrons, clients, and confidants, letters date back to 1813. The most recent1982. Short ones, long ones, humorous and poignant. Lovely handwriting and each has some sort of illustration ... some are stick figures, others elaborate watercolor paintings, or pen-and-ink drawings. One is typewritten on one of those very old manual typewriters. Charming vignettes, caricatures, portraits, and landscapes, revealing the joys and successes, loves and longings, triumphs and frustrations of the authors' personal lives.

In the back of the book is a section with verbatim transcriptions, preserving the exact spelling and punctuation of the originals. As you might imagine, some of the handwriting is not easy to decipher.

In 1912, caricaturist Alfred Frueh writes from Scotland, "an I hae in mind to gay to dancin's chool and learn how to highland fling but I hae me doots whither I kin larn it."

Frida Kahlo writes to Emmy Lou Packard in 1940, thanking her for taking such good care of her former husband Diego Revera. Joseph Linden Smith writes to his little brother, instructing him to take the two dollars from under the arm (through a slit on the page) and give it to their father. There are far too many to list here, but some are Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Rockwell Kent, Fyonel Feininger, John Sloan, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Dorothea Tanning, Gio Ponto, and Andy Warhol ... all are endlessly fascinating

In 1963 Paul Suttman wrote to his friends about changing accommodations in Italy. He writes from the bottom of a wine glass, drunk on the pleasures of Italy, and reports that his traveling companion fell off a scooter and broke her collar bone. He settled in a rustic farmhouse near Imprunetta, south of Florence, in the Chianti region of Tuscany

Here is one of my attempts at illustrated letters ... during a road trip through the wine country of Oregon. The grapes are made with thumb prints in walnut ink

The Time in Between

2007-05-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

In the Vietnam village where her father disappeared 29 years ago, Ada sits on a bench and watches the young boys circle the streets on their Hondas. Many years ago, in a cabin (caboose) on a mountain road in British Columbia where she lived with her father, he talked about the hum of bicycles on the Vietnamese streets ... a constant whirring he said like the sound of birds taking off. She did not hear that now, only hawkers and honking horns and a child laughing.

She'd returned now with her brother to search for him on the streets of Danang. They meet people, both expat and Vietnamese, and begin to see how in 30 years the country has subsumed the effects of the horrible war. She begins an affair with an older Vietnamese artist who also knew her father. The story of her father is also the story of this country.

Touching on themes of cultural differences and the weight of history in Vietnam, David Bergen examines the ghosts that remain 30 years after the end of that period ... a companion piece to Graham Greene's 1955 work The Quiet American.

Persepolis

2007-05-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Mariane Satrapi's story tells and illustrates her childhood in Iran. Born into a wealthy and secular Iranian family, she witnessed some of the most bitter years of her country's recent history. Social madness, teenage martyrs, political and religious disputes, torture in the Shah's prisons.

This is a graphic novel and very slow reading. So much to look at and take in. With humor, Satrapi does the important work of humanizing history. She wants to join the demonstrations but is not allowed, so she and her friends invent games in the garden. Trying out different hats, she talks to God and asks him, "don't you think I look like Che Guevara?" and then, "maybe I'll be better as Fidel Castro." The next frames show her looking under tables and knocking on doors. Then a heart-breaking frame of her in bed, tears streaming down, she says, "God, where are you?"

One of the worst things for her about the fundamentalists is that they curb her budding taste for Western fashion.

The Knitting Sutra

2007-05-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

Susan Gordon Lydon has written a lovely book subtitled Craft as a Spiritual Practice. After knitting a turquoise chenille sweater to help a broken bone in her arm "knit", she searched for a perfect silver button and a medicine man for her arm.

On a Navajo reservation, she met a community of women who live by the proceeds of their craft in a unified cycle of livelihood, art, and spirituality.

Laborare et orare

Work is prayer

Many members of Simon's group of bookaholics are also knitters. Most mornings I enjoy browsing (with coffee and sunshine) their pages that tell about their reading and their knitting.

Home

2007-05-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

We go to Anny's heritage farm every week for eggs ... most wonderful eggs, warm from the nest and in all shapes, sizes and colors. Anny raises heritage chickens ... Naked Necks from Hungary (the rooster of the flock is Mr. Pasternak); Barred Rocks and Polish Crested "like the Queen Mother with plumed hats that hang in long strands over their elegant faces"; Buff Orpingtons from England and Araucanas from South America. The little Bantam hen is a Silkie and looks like a white ball of fluff.

In 2004 Anny wrote a charming book subtitled "Tales of a Heritage Farm". She writes about her life on Glamorgan Farm on Vancouver Island. Anny Scoones is a community activist, a heritage preservationist, a farmer, a writer, a friend to writers, and the daughter of two of Canada's best loved artists. There are delightful sketches in watercolor and in charcoal by her parents, Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak.

Merlin, the goat; Mabel and Matilda, the Gloucester Old Spots pigs; Duke, the old Appaloosa and Valnah, the young strong Russian Bashkir Curly horse whose ancestors came from Siberia roam happily about the farm.

The front meadow is gardened by a group of six mentally and physically challenged adults. With the help of a horticultural therapist they formed a co-operative and called themselves the Healthy Harvest. They gather up Duke and Valnah's droppings and dig them into their organic garden beds. David is one of the most dedicated gardeners. When asked by a tourist from England in a Tilley hat and sensible shoes, "What conditions do these extraordinary fruits prefer?", he answered, "What I know about these fruits is that they do best in the years that wearing long pants makes you feel uncomfortable."

And a couple years later, Anny wrote Home and Away. More orphans adopted from the SPCA ... Norton, a huge white animal with brown patches and Ralph, a dim-witted chocolate Labrador and a mutt named Grizzly, later changed to Fidel.

In the dedication "for Mikki" and friends at the SPCA, who will receive a portion of the royalties and another portion for the Saanich Peninsula Hospice. Glamorgan Farm is bequeathed to North Saanich as a Heritage park.

Folk Medicine in Texas

2007-05-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

In San Antonio, we met Frances Evans, who told us about some fascinating folk remedies from early times. Some of them are still known and used today. My grandmother in Ontario taught us about mud on insect stings and spider webs to stop bleeding. In very early Sears catalogs, opium was offered as a cure for addiction.

Infusions of Healing is one of the books that Frances recommended. Joie Davidow writes and illustrates a delightful collection of Mexican-American Herbal Remedies. She gives the common names, the botanical names, and the Nahuatl (Aztec) name; descriptions of the plant, where it grows, the parts used, and the properties, and its uses.

The Caliph's House

2007-05-03T08:57:00.000-07:00

When Tahir Shah, his pregnant wife and their small daughter move from England to Morocco, where he'd vacationed as a child, he enters a realm of "invisible spirits and their parallel world." Shah buys the Caliph's House, once a palatial compound, now heavy with algae, cobwebs and termites. Unoccupied for a decade, the place harbors a willful jinni (invisible spirit), who Shah, the rational Westerner, reluctantly grasps must be exorcised by traditional means. As Shah remodels the haunted house, he encounters a cast of entertaining, sometimes bizarre characters. Three retainers, whose lives are governed by the jinni, have attached themselves to the property. Confounding craftsmen plague but eventually beautify the house. Intriguing servants come and go, notably Zohra, whose imaginary friend, a 100-foot tall jinni, lives on her shoulder. A "gangster neighbor and his trophy wife" conspire to acquire the Caliph's House, and a countess remembers Shah's grandfather and his secrets. Passers-through offer eccentricity (Kenny, visiting 15 cities on five continents where Casablanca is playing; Pete, a convert to Islam, seeking "a world without America").

Reconstructing the house immerses Shah in Moroccan everyday life. He has to deal with plagues of rats, swarms of bees, and the ever-threatening prospect of organized crime. Shah's picture of Moroccan society, its deeply held Islamic faith, its primitive superstition, and its raucous economy makes for endlessly fascinating reading. Particularly telling is his encounter with the realities of Ramadan, which seems to bring out both the best and worst in people's characters

Middlesex

2007-04-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

From the first page, I was completely mesmerized by this story of a Greek American family, spanning 80 years from a fateful incestuous union in 1920's Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit. I had seen the movie The Virgin Suicides, but not read the book, so this was my first knowledge of the work of Jeffrey Eugenides.

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

Cal Stephanides, a 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, a seeming girl. His grandparents each carried a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. Its expression may go underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. This is a strange unsettling story with generous amounts of humor and an aching adolescent love story.

Cal says "In the end, it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and Death. And love, and what love bequeaths to us before we're born."

Q's Legacy

2007-04-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

Helene Hanff discovered Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch at the Philadelphia Public Library when she was 18. When she ran out of money and had to leave college, she took her education into her own hands.

She was impressed with his credentials and the simplicity and clarity of his writing. Reading ON THE ART OF WRITING, she says, "In the first chapter he threw so many marvelous quotes at me ... from Walton's ANGLER and Newman's IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY and Milton's PARADISE LOST ... that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them before going on to Q's second lecture." And so it went. From PARADISE LOST to the New Testament to ... ad infinitum.

When Q died, she felt as though she'd lost a friend. And sets out to buy the books he taught her to love. In the Out-of-Print books column of the Saturday Review, she found an ad: "Marks & Co., Antiquarian Bookseller, 84 Charing Cross Road, London." And so began her long correspondence and friendship with Frank Doel and the staff at Marks & Co.

Nine Gates

2007-04-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

Entering the Mind of Poetry
Where the voice of the natural and the voice of the poet meet

Jane Hirshfield has written nine essays geared toward the creative writing student, which I'm not. I bought the book because I loved the beautiful cover and the translations of classical Japanese verse, particularly those of Komachi, Shikibu and Ryokan, and the influence of Zen Buddhism

I was drawn to the poems and the poets rather than to the "talking about poetry".

She describes herself to the late poet, Richard Hugo, whom she did not know: "I don't write much about America, or even people. I'd often enough rather talk to horses."

Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday. "Like Mark Twain, he used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?" from the New York Times

His experience in the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945 was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval.

I'll be re-reading some of his books soon - Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions.

John Steinbeck

2007-04-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading John Steinbeck recently - Sweet Thursday, Cannery Row, The Long Valley, Tortilla Flat, The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

The last chapter of Travels with Charley broke my heart. The images he presents to us of the first integration of schools in New Orleans - the tiny black girl, the military guards, and the cheerleaders ... oh, the cheerleaders. As I write these words, the tears are spilling over still.

I thought I'd read them all, but then was surprised to discover one I'd not ... The Moon is Down

I've been reading an extraordinary number of novels about war recently ... Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels was the current selection for our book club ... from Poland in WWII to Greece to Toronto. Resistance by Anita Shreve, the Maquis in 1943 move Jews to France and freedom. And another recent re-read, Too Young to Fight. Priscilla Galloway compiled a book of recollections from Canada's best-known writers. The contributors were children and teenagers during WWII

Helene Hanff

2007-04-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

I've read all of her books and own most of them. This one is my favorite ... and the movie is wonderful ... Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins, and a very young Judi Dench

Daniel Wallace

2007-04-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

Wallace wrote The Big Fish, one of my favorite movies. I found the book in our library and looked for others he had written

Barbara Hodgson

2007-04-14T12:25:00.000-07:00

In the exotic world of Morocco, Lydia writes daily in her journal ... later, when she disappears, Chris takes up her diary to record his search for her

A clever murder mystery, an acute study of human nature ... and a dark, sly fairy-tale quest

a local author

2007-04-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

Eudora Welty

2007-04-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I love this anecdote about Eudora Welty and the email system ... it's the same one I've been using for many years now

Garbo Laughs

2007-03-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

I was so charmed by the first book that I read written by Elizabeth Hay ... A Student of Weather ... that I looked for another. She writes a lot about weather, as who wouldn't, living in Ottawa.

Garbo Laughs is the story of a family whose members are best able to express their love and disappointment through the films of the past.

In Ottawa, Harriet Browning is the center of a small group who call themselves The Friday Night Movie Club: her son, Kenny, obsessed with Sinatra, watches classic movies to forget his troubles at school; her daughter, Jane, on the brink of adolescence, longs for the glamorous life; her neighbor and friend Dinah, a sometime journalist, named for Dinah Shore. Lew, Harriet's realist husband, is left out of this loop, and escapes by way of business trips to South America. The arrival of Harriet's aunt Leah, the trouble-making widow of a Hollywood screenwriter, and her stepson Jack, a lazy, fast-talking writer, leads to shifts in affections and allegiances. Illness brings an end to the movie-watching, in true Hollywood weepy fashion

Harriet's son Kenny keeps a "gangster's outfit" available for watching movies and visiting his mother's friends. He seems to have no friends of his own. His fascination with movies easily matches that of his mother.

Alberto Manguel

2007-02-17T15:36:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary - a Year of Favourite Books I started my own reading diary. He kept a year-long record of the connections between the books we love and the lives we lead by revisiting a book each month. Delighted to discover that some of his favorites were the same as mine.

Drawn from Memory

2007-02-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

In this autobiography, E.H. Shepard describes his Victoria childhood in St. John's Wood in the 1880's. Shephard illustrated Winnie the Pooh, Now We are Six and others by A.A. Milne ... also Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Manguel says, "The Wind in the Willows" is all about home".

The Great Failure

2007-02-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

Natalie Goldberg writes of her 'unexpected path to truth', her relationships with her father and with her teacher, Katagiri Roshi. Looking back now some years after their deaths, she remembers her father's word:

"You're here and then you're not. Don't worry about it. It's not a big deal."

The Wisdom of Solitude

2007-02-10T18:52:00.000-08:00

Jane Dobisz is the guiding teacher of the Cambridge Zen Center in Massachusetts. She has practiced in various traditions of Buddhism for twenty-five years. Inspired by her Korean Zen master's discipline of long, solitary retreats, she strikes out to a lone cabin in the countryside of New England.

One Hundred Days - three months - alone in the wilderness and cold. In the middle of January, the ground is covered in a foot of snow.