Snoggestions

I'm not usually critical of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books, but I've been thinking about Mr. Ray's "snoggestions" lately.
For those readers who aren't imtimately familiar with the series, Mr. Ray (Betsy's dad) sometimes has particularly good ideas, which he calls "snoggestions". I think that one might involve a visit to the Moorish Cafe - which, I agree, might need to be unpacked at some other time - and Betsy taking a trip somewhere. Point is, they're good ideas, but I can't remember one that doesn't include an expense.
I'm not taking away from Mr. Ray's good ideas, but I'd like to point out that Mrs. Ray never makes a snoggestion in the series. She also doesn't have control of the family's finances, though she usually has some small change to spend.*

* It's worth pointing out that the next generation does better: when Betsy gets married, she comes up with the budget and makes sure they keep it. Because they're younger and just starting out, neither Betsy nor her husband - no spoilers here! - makes snoggestions. Though when her husband earns extra money, he does seem to have more of a say in how that is spent, though I'd chalk that up to it being his windfall. Betsy's extra money that she earns pays for a cleaning woman so she can spend more time writing, by the way; she doesn't buy luxury items as her husband does. To be fair, he earns a lot more extra money than she does. Also, regardless, the budget seems more equitable than the Rays' is.

Atlas Shrugged, and so did I

Here's the thing: I don't like to read books that are all about the main character realizing she was wrong. I hate that, in fact - the reader, and the author, are in on this failure, and then we have to spend time waiting for the character to catch up. In this particular case, Rand seems to be critical of Dagny because she tries to save the railroad. I wouldn't say ambition like that is a besetting sin, myself, so I'm not sure whether I'll finish the book. That - and though I quite like Dagny, I wouldn't swear she's not a Mary Sue.
Funnily enough, I spent a few hours on Saturday alternating between reading Atlas Shrugged and playing The Sims: Hot Date. I'm not into the hot date aspect of it - my characters don't even hug very often - but I like to set goals for myself. ("Today, Phil's going to finish the expansion on his house, make a new friend, and buy new dining room chairs.") I've been playing the Maud Hart Lovelace neighborhood- everyone's named after a Betsy-Tacy character. (I also have a EJO neighborhood,but I digress).

the plot thickens

Finally! Something happened in Clarissa - she was swept away by Lovelace, and her reputation is in bad shape. I can't read it as fast as I'd like, because it's slow deliberate prose, but it has finally gotten interesting.
A while back, I made fun of Cynthia Voigt's deliberate style. Right now, I can't get enough of it; I'm well on my way to reading her entire body of work (except Come a stranger, which I skimmed, and read selectively, even though it's one of my favorites). For some reason, the unlikely self-knowledge of Voigt's characters, and her particular prose style, are exactly what I want to read. Maybe because Clarissa is similarly thorough?

...no intelligent person reads Clarissa...

I'm still working my way through Clarissa, and it's still fascinatingly dull. I was amused by this bit in the introduction (written in 1932): "To-day it is safe to assume that no intelligent person reads Clarissa without previously knowing the plot." It's a bizarre assumption, because the author is not only confusing intelligence with being well-read, but also suggesting that no one would read Clarissa without already knowing the plot. I don't know about you, but sometimes I read books just so I can find out the plot. Strangest of all, he assumes that Clarissa has a plot. I guess you could say it does, but I've read 450 pages, and she's still locked up in her room, not wanting to marry Mr. Solmes, and not admitting that her conditional liking for Lovelace could be anything more than that. Three hundred pages have gone by with no material difference in Clarissa's life!

fascinatingly dull

I've been reading Richardson's Clarissa. I can't say that nothing happens, because a fair amount has happened in these first 80 pages, but it's all the same: Clarissa writing letters to Miss Howe about how her family is set against her, despite her constant virtue. No idea whether I'll stick with it - I've got about 1000 more pages to go. I'm on vacation until 3 September, so anything could happen!

Survey Ship, and other small communities

Last week I went to a used bookstore and bought a Marion Zimmer Bradley book I'd never seen before: Survey Ship. I read it with quite a bit of amusement, because it wasn't very good at all. It's about three men and three women in their first 10 days together on a spaceship. Because it's MZB, the technical details are secondary to the relationships between the characters. These six characters are going to be alone on this ship together for at least nine years, so of course they all jump into quick relationships, with every character getting propositioned at least once. I assumed that Survey Ship was just MZB's attempt to work out the dynamics between men and women that she explored in depth in The Forbidden Tower, so I was amused and chagrined when I looked it up, and realzed that Survey Ship was published three years later.
I finally finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, the first in the reading project I started back in January. I had trouble warming up to The Professor, and because I've been so burned out, I didn't want to use my limited mental resources on a book I wasn't excited about. I'll tackle Tom Brown's Schooldays next.
But first (a tip of the hat to the Chenbot and my current obsession, Big Brother 7), I'm going to go finish reading Among the Free, the last in the Shadow Children series by Haddix.

Mankato and Deep Valley

I went to a wedding about 10 days ago, and afterward I roadtripped for a few days. I went to Mankato, MN, to see the town and reconcile it with my mental picture of Maud Hart Lovelace's Deep Valley. I didn't have a map of Mankato, except a small one in Sharla Whalen's Betsy-Tacy Companion, so I spent a few hours getting lost in Mankato as I tried to get from place to place. It was frustrating at the time, but it helped me learn Mankato's geography more thoroughly. So tonight, when I was re-reading Emily of Deep Valley, I could picture the action much more clearly. Emily of DV is one of my least favorite Lovelace books; her depression is so convincing that it makes for sad reading. I'm really sticking with it for glimpses of the class of 1910, which I find more interesting. I brought the high school Betsy books to Mankato with me, and now I'm finishing off the series.
I haven't written much lately, because I still have the three jobs (one official, two unofficial, until they can be filled). Of course I'm getting support from co-workers, but I'm still very, very tired. I've re-read a lot of Betty Neels books in the last few months.
Have I read anything new? Hmmm. I read, and enjoyed, Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. I didn't expect to like it at all, and I never would have read it if it hadn't been assigned for book club. I liked a teen book called Absolutely, positively not; it made me laugh out loud. I just started a book called Island to Abbey, all about Elsie J. Oxenham's work. I'd thought about visiting Cleeve Abbey next year, but the photos in Ray and Waring's book might make that unnecessary.

"the rest is silence" redux

So - when I titled my last entry "the rest is Silence", I was thinking of Hair and punning on Wintercombe's heroine, Silence. I'd forgotten that "the rest is silence" are Hamlet's last words. Belle's effective use of the phrase in Wintercombe inspired me to look it up.
I'm reading (or re-reading, in some cases) Poe's short stories for a book club tomorrow. Although the excess verbiage is occasionally irritating, I get sucked into each story.

my new reading project

I've started a project for the new year (the "Girlsown re-read", I've been calling it). I collect girls' school stories, mostly from Britain. I have a lot of them - over 300. So this year I decided to re-read all of them (which adds up to roughly one per day) chronologically by the date of publication. I'm limiting myself to books I actually own, so there will be some gaps in my reading. I'll miss some seminal works, but by the end of the year I'll have read a lot of school stories, and should have some new ideas about the development of the genre.
The problem is, my first book is The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte. I've never read it before, and I'm finding it slow going. I suspect it would be easier if I weren't sick - I went home from work early today, and everything! Some sort of stomach bug or food poisoning, because I'm nauseated all the time.
So instead of reading The Professor, I've been catching up on Donna Simpson regencies. One of them, The Duke and Mrs. Douglas, included a lesbian character. It was well handled, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this in a Regency romance.
Over Christmas, I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for a book club. It has symbolism that is heavy and obvious, perfect for freshmen in high school. I never felt any connection to the characters, which is a bad sign. Anna Quindlen wrote the introduction to this edition. I was irritated to read her comparison of Tree to Little Women and the Betsy-Tacy series, because she dismissed Alcott and Lovelace as light fluffy stuff. Better that than overly-symbolic, cold prose, I'd say. This wouldn't bug me so much, except that (1) Lovelace wasn't trying to create Great Literature, so it's a straw man argument and (2) Quindlen has written in praise of the Betsy-Tacy books in the past. If she feels they're so markedly inferior to Tree, she shouldn't have bothered.

a ripping good read

I just finished Caroline the Second by Elinor Brent-Dyer. I hadn't been impressed by the first book in the pair (A Thrilling Term at Janeways), but I thought Caroline was astonishingly good, given the author. The characters were believable, there weren't any OTT events, and it was well-told. Brent-Dyer even managed a trick that is hard to pull off: she alluded to events that had happened in the five years between the two books without making them feel forced or unnecessary. They came across as ordinary conversation. Carolinewould have read oddly if the characters never alluded to past events, unless they'd been covered in the first book, so I'm glad this worked. Caroline didn't feature any scenes with the slang-using vicar of the first book (who would have described it as "a ripping good read", no doubt).
The frustrating flip-side to this is that Brent-Dyer proved in Caroline that she could create a compelling plot without resorting to girls falling off cliffsides, and could talk about characters in pervious books without being really obvious about it. Apparently, she could do subtle work - she just didn't bother, for whatever reason.
I've been reading Howard's End for a bookclub, too. It's such a lovely book. I haven't read it for about 15 years or so, and I daresay my perspective has changed a lot since then. So I look forward to discussing it, and assessing my reaction to the book now. I'm supposed to read Number the Stars for a kids' book club, too, but I'm not as enthusiastic about that. ell, I don't mind reading the book, but I don't feel prepared to discuss the Holocaust with children. Maybe if time permits, I'll re-read Darkness over Denmark, as extra preparation.

Never was a gossip girl...

I'm totally lying about the title. I love gossip. I love reality shows - though I watched one on MTV tonight (something about this terrible teen who spent $200,000 on a Sweet-16 party) that made me feel dirty. This girl was awful, though oddly reminiscent of someone I went to high school with. I like work gossip, and family gossip, and even the Gossip Girl series. But this week, too much gossip has made me tired. As I mentioned last year, August is the season for tempers to flare. They did so today, dramatically, on a listserv I'm on. I'm tired and depressed by this. In a world where the Administration is pursuing unwise political paths here in the U.S., and it seems that the world is going to hell in a handbasket (made at Wal-Mart, natch), I hate to have one of my safe havens become a quarrelling ground. Not saying there weren't good reasons - just saying I'm tired.
I'm still reading Anna Karenina. Anna's motives are becoming more clear, though I still find them tiresome. I'm amused by Levin, and laughed out loud at some bits when his brother came to visit (not Nikolai - Sergei, I think his name is). the last book I finished was Dorita Fairlie Bruce's Dimsie Carries On, which wasn't the best DFB I've ever read.

"the *Phan*-tom of the O-per-a is here"

"...the Phantom of the Opera is here inside my mind" - thanks to my friend Gina, who has been playing the CD almost incessantly this last week. And not the superior Michael Crawford version, either; this new version from the film is more melodramatic than the Broadway version. Zut alors! I didn't think such a thing was possible.
Anyway, the blasted Phantom won't leave my mind, so I couldn't come up with a subject line. Perhaps the Phantom isn't inappropriate, though, because I really wanted to talk about Anna Karenina, which I am still reading. I was enjoying it, but now poor Anna is stricken with shame at her adultery, and - yawn. Seriously, it hadn't occurred to her that she'd be ashamed? And somehow, sex and having some sort of formal relationship was shameful, but being in love with a man she's not married to wasn't? This is such a Lawrencian (is that a word?) view of things - that sex is some sort of Supreme Act - and it makes me cranky. I hope the book provides more explanation for Anna's behavior - if it was going to make her so unhappy, why did she do it? Some would say that that is a classically sad, Russian view of love: "she knew it would make her unhappy, but she had to do it anyway! Ah (kissing fingers), what artistry!" But I'm not Russian, and I'm not patient with Anna Karenina, though I enjoy the rest of Anna Karenina.
For fun reading, I just finished The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold. I read a review that said that Ijada was no Ista (it's a good review; if you like Bujold's books, look here: http://www.sfreviews.net/hallowedhunt.html), and I fully agree. So today I started re-reading Paladin of Souls.
One last thing about books: check out today's Overdue strip at http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20050821 . I don't know why, but Merv's comment that "they sound well-rounded" makes me grin every time I think of it. And good heavens, if you haven't read Ender's Game, why are you waiting? Yes, I mean you. All of you!

classic lit-tra-ture

I've been reading several old books lately - books written before 1940. Over the weekend I read parts of Elinor Brent-Dyer's A Thrilling Term at Janeways, Baroness Orzcy's Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. As many witty people have pointed out before, A Thrilling Term... doesn't even come close to living up to the title. I get tired of girls' adventure stories that feature the girls finding treasure hidden during the dissolution of the monasteries; one would think the Tudors didn't benefit at all from this. This book had treasure - but not just any treasure. No, these were original Benvenuto Cellini pieces - half a dozen of them, I believe. The Way of the Pimpernel was almost realistic, by contrast.
I'm reading Anna Karenina for a book club, and I had set myself a quota, so many pages each day. To my astonishment, I found myself enjoying the book, and far exceeding my quota. I was never very fond of Dostoevsky, though I've read Crime and Punishment a few times, and the short Tolstoy pieces I'd read hadn't made me want to tackle Anna. Of course, this is like saying, "Well, I didn't like Dickens, so I assumed I wouldn't like Austen." Ridiculous! But I'd never thought about it that way before.
I've been listening to a lot of books on tape lately - I just finished listening to Ballet Shoes, which I enjoyed, and am halfway though listening to a good version of Lady Susan (mentioned Austen in the paragraph above reminded me of this). I've heard people complain about Harriet Walter's voice before (particularly when she played Harriet Vane), but I don't mind it. I'm less charmed by Elizabeth Sastre's voice - she's not in Lady Susan, but she's reading the Streatfeild books (I've moved on to Dancing Shoes - I didn't dislike her voice that much). Sastre's voice is a little twee for my taste, but I can't get Streatfeild books on tape any other way.

sunt lacrimae rerum

I've been re-reading Antonia Forest's books about the Marlow family. Seriously, she's one of the best children's authors ever. Her plots are interesting and organic (things tend to go to their logical conclusions), the characters feel real and her command of the language is almost unparalleled. Even The Thuggery Affair, with its tremendously dated slang, says more interesting and true things about humankind than many a Newbery winner. I was bowled over (no pun intended) by The Cricket Term again yesterday. Of course, I'd appreciate Forest's writing even if I didn't care for the characters, and I'd enjoy the Murder Must Advertise references and the well-described cricket matches, but really, I love everything about this book. It's one of my top ten favorites, ever. The Attic Term and Run Away Home (the two books that follow) aren't as good, but they're still perfectly fine reads. I'm looking forward to the day that Forest is re-discovered by children's literature enthusiasts in the U.S., both because I want to talk to people about the books and because I got there first .
While I was at my parents' house last week, I curled up in their formal and rarely-used living room and read The Scarlet Pimpernel in great gulps. It was such an unexpectedly fun read! If you haven't read it, please do. I liked it, and I'm not even a fan of adventure stories.
BTW, if anyone can provide a better translation of sunt lacrimae rerum than "there are tears of things", I'd love to see it.

book clubs revisited

Quick blog before my dinner break ends:
Just finished a book club meeting - a kids' one, for Trumpet of the Swan. I'm almost done with tomorrow's Book Club book, The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I've read it before, and it's a quick read.
I've been showing everyone the hilarious Unshelved strips that start here: http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20050404 . I liked these so much that I literally bought the t-shirt.
"Book Club is the toughest thing there is."

Could it be true?

I just saw on http://www.illyria.com/vnbooks/ellenemersonwhite.html that Ellen Emerson White is supposed to have not one, but two new books out this fall. One would be a sequel to All Emergencies, Ring Super, and one would be another book about Meg Powers (the website says the title will be The Queen Lives On, but who knows?). Please, let there be advance copies, and let me get my mitts on one!
I've done one of this week's book clubs (for Shakespeare Stealer), and I am still trying to force myself through The Bell Jar. The cross-dressing in Shakespeare Stealer caused some interesting (if possibly inappropriate) discussion among the elementary school set.
I'm on the reference desk tonight, and a kid just asked me for the book-length version of "Cask of Amontillado". His friend has it, he explained to me.

2 book clubs this week

I'm in two book clubs: the classics one (see a few posts ago) and one for kids, which I attend every other month so I can lead the discussion. These meet on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and I haven't read either book yet. I tore myself away from Dame Frevisse (see last blog entry) for long enough to start Tuesday's book, The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood. It's proving to be a quick read, thankfully. For Wednesday, I have to read The Bell Jar. Not looking forward to that - I think I'm too old for it.
In general, I think there are certain authors - Plath, Kerouac, Salinger - that can only be read for a few years of one's life. For me - for most people, I'd guess - that time was between the ages of 18 and 23. I'm not 23 anymore, so I'm not looking forward to Plath. I want her to get a grip, and be thankful for what she does have.
I guess "when you grow old, your heart dies". I told a high-schooler that last year, with a nonchalant deadpanned indifference, and he was appalled; he had no idea I was quoting Breakfast Club.
And speaking of medieval people taking holy orders, I came to work today and found the fourth Pagan book by Catherine Jinks (Pagan's Scribe) on my desk. Yippee! That'll be a good palliative (in its lesser-used sense of something that soothes but not heals) to the inevitable letdown when I finish the Dame Frevisse series. I'll re-read them all, so as to appreciate Pagan's Scribe more.

what on earth is a classic?

Last week I went to the inaugural meeting of a new classics bookclub. The mediator and I had chosen three books as possible first books: Sense and Sensibility, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Bell Jar. They're different in style and content, and I hoped the disparate titles would spark a discussion about what types of book we'd like to read.
Yup, that's what happened. Lots of discussion, to little point. Between the people who want to read the Greeks and don't consider 20th-C literature classic (it's too new), the people who wouldn't mind reading poetry, and the people who think a "modern classic" like The Bell Jar is Jim-dandy, there was plenty to talk about. One woman wanted to talk about the Scottish classics, the English classics, maybe even the Welsh - I'm an Anglophile, and even I was startled by the narrow focus.
Next month each member is supposed to bring a book that she wants the group to read. No idea what I'll bring - maybe Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Given the number of Anglophiles, maybe I should consider Things Fall Apart or some other non-Western classic. Any suggestions?