Catholic Bibliophagist

2012-01-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

"Katy was naturally fond of reading. Papa encouraged it, He kept a few books locked up, and then turned her loose in the Library. She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn't get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was going on about her. The little girls to whose houses she went visiting had found this out, and always hid away their story-books when she was expected to tea. If they didn't do this, she was sure to pick one up and plunge in, and then it was no use to call her, or tug at her dress, for she neither saw nor heard anything more, till it was time to go home."

--What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge, 1872.

I always enjoy meeting kindred spirits, even when it's only between the pages of a book.

2012-01-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

unPLANNED by Abby Johnson, 267 pages, Ignatius Press, 2010.

Abby Johnson had invested herself, -- her heart and her career -- in Planned Parenthood because she cared about women in crisis. As a junior at Texas A&M, she was recruited by a Planned Parenthood representative who presented a warm, compassionate image and ignited Abby's idealism by her presentation of Planned Parenthood as an organization that served women in crisis, which protected the rights of women, and which, through its promotion of birth control, was helping to make abortion both rare. That last held some appeal for Abby because her family was pro-life, although she herself had never thought through the arguments on both sides of this issue. But what might also have influenced her decision was a secret she kept hidden from her family and tried never to think about. About a year earlier, pressured by her boy friend, Abby Johnson had had an abortion.

"Today, I wonder if one reason I was so quick, so eager to embrace Jill's presentation about Planned Parenthood -- which I heard just about twelve months after that abortion -- is that it validated my own secret decision to abort. As Jill [the PP representative] spoke, I saw myself as one of the wise and lucky ones who had control over my reproductive rights and utilized my access to safe medical procedures. Jill clearly didn't look down on the decision to abort. She understood the crises women found themselves in."

Abby's sympathy was quickly aroused and she imagined herself helping other women to "exercise their 'rights' and protect their 'access' as they faced their crises."

But her first shift as a volunteer, escorting clients from their cars into the clinic, left her with mixed feelings. On the other side of the fence which surrounded the clinic were a motley group of pro-lifers, and the tension inside the fence made Abby feel as if she were in a war zone. For two weeks she debated whether to return or not. Finally, she decided that her comfort level didn't matter. Inspired by the compassionate image which Planned Parenthood had presented at her school's volunteer fair, and repulsed by a few members of a creepy fringe element among the pro-life protesters, Abby Johnson decided to give it another shot. And from that moment on, her outlook changed. The people on the other side of the fence became the enemy.

"My cause -- helping women in crisis -- was just, I believed, and they were the ones opposing that just cause. So I had to oppose them. With conviction. I wouldn't be rude, I wouldn't shout -- I would even try to be be friendly to this obviously misguided group. I didn't see any reason to be hostile with them. But I would be definite and direct and firm."

And Abby maintained that attitude as she rose through the ranks of Planned Parenthood -- from volunteer, to employee, to director of a clinic. Even though she eventually came to the grudging conclusion that the vast majority of the protestors outside her clinic were as compassionate and concerned about women as she was, she still believed that they were dead wrong ideologically. But then, on the day she was required to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion of a thirteen week old fetus, her whole world turned upside down.

The description of what she saw on the screen is difficult to read. Not because it is gruesomely detailed, but because such simple and plain language emphasizes the starkness of the truth which Abby suddenly grasped: that she was not watching the removal of fetal tissue which feels no pain (a standard line from Planned Parenthood that Abby had repeated to countless clients), but a baby who tried to avoid the doctor's cannula, and struggled when he was pierced and suctioned out of the womb.

Now convinced of the humanity of the fetus, and disillusioned by pressure from Planned Parenthood's headquarters to increase the number of (very profitable) abortions at her facility while cutting back on on low cost or free health services (on which they were losing money), Abby Johnson left her job. Planned Parenthood responded with legal reprisals which were later dropped due to lack of evidence.

At this point, readers of my post are probably divided into two groups. On one side are those who believe that a woman's right to abortion is a positive good -- or at least that access to abortion is a necessity in order to insure the safety, health, and well-being of women in crisis situations. They will view Abby's conversion from pro-choice to pro-life as a betrayal of a benevolent organization and an abandonment of her pro-woman convictions. They are likely to dismiss her book as enemy propaganda.

On the other side are those in the pro-life camp who will welcome this account of her conversion but will wonder how the narrator, who sincerely wanted to help women in crisis, could have been so naive, so gullible about the evil of Planned Parenthood. And they may recoil from her assertion that she and many of her co-workers were "really driven by compassion and tenderness, by motives of truly helping women and making the world a better place."

Both of these groups will benefit from reading unPLANNED because I think that one of the greatest difficulties under which we labor in today's public forum is an automatic tendency to demonize the opposition. But Abby Johnson has experienced the abortion issue from both sides of the divide. She is a sign of contradiction to both camps. As she says in her introductory note:

"My story is not neat and tidy, and it doesn't come wrapped in easy answers. Oh, how we love to vilify our opponents -- from both sides. How easy to assume that those on "our" side are are right and wise and good; how those on "their side" are treacherous and foolish and deceptive. I have found right and good and wisdom on both sides. I have found foolishness and treachery and deception on both sides as well. I have experienced how good intentions can be warped into poor choices no matter what the side.

"But don't slam this book shut because of what I've just said. Read it for that very reason. Read it to understand the surprising hopes and motivations on the "other" side. I was loved from one side onto the other. My hope is that many more thousands will be loved into truth as well. Maybe you will be the one loving someone on the other side of the fence."

As a pro-life reader, I was interested in which types of pro-life protestors solidified Abby Johnson's original pro-choice inclinations. And which pro-life individuals "loved" her into even considering the possible truth of the pro-life position. I also liked reading about the early beginnings of the 40 Days for Life campaign and how its growth contributed to Abby Johnson's amazing conversion.

A Really Weird Summer

2011-08-22T04:13:00.001-07:00

A Really Weird Summer by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

I found this book on the "For Sale" rack at the public library, and I snatched it up because I've loved every other book by this author which I've ever read.

It's a story about four siblings who have been sent to spend the summer with a great aunt and uncle while their parents are working out the details of their divorce. All of the kids are miserable at being removed from their home, friends, and neighborhood. And they are sooo bored. And then certain elements creep into the story which seem to indicate that this will either be a fantasy or a book with supernatural bits. But alas! It all turns out to be merely psychological.

The eldest, Nels, is coping with the pressures of having to parent the younger children while himself grieving over his parents' abandonment. And he's secretly worrying about where and with whom they'll all be living after the summer ends. Unbenownst to his siblings, their father has privately proposed that Nels go to live with him in Alaska after the divorce. Nels doesn't know what he wants to do, and as the summer progresses, withdraws further and further from his brothers and sister. Then he discovers a wonderful secret and a perfect friend. Or has he?

I think the book would have been much improved if it had been more ambiguous about whether Nels' adventures with Alan had really taken place. But to be baldly informed at the very end that it was "all in his head" was deeply disappointing and far too didactic for my taste.

And I was kind of repulsed by the book's "lesson" which was that kids must stick together because adults cannot be depended on for anything. Family identity has shrunk to include kids only. As Nels tells his younger brother on the last page, "All us kids have to to stay together, that's the big thing. We've got to promise each other. If we stick together, then whatever happens outside -- whatever the grown-ups do -- it won't matter so much D'you see? We'll still be us."

Perhaps this was not a surprising conclusion for the children to have come to since their parents had shuttled them off to spend their summer in a holding pattern. (And by the way, I wondered why the children had to be sent away just because their mother was now working. Nels was 12, an age at which I was already looking after my siblings, and their mother had planned that during the school year he'd take care of the other children after they got home from school. So why couldn't they have spent the summer in the security of their own home? I'm sure there were latch-key children back in 1977. I felt that the whole dislocation thing was just a clumsy device by the author to set her characters up for the particular psychological response she had in mind.

May-Every-Day: Update

2011-05-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not doing very well at meeting my self-imposed challenge to blog every day during the month of May. Part of the blame may be attributed to Blogger which has been doing Weird Things to its clientele. And now my modem is malfunctioning. Verizon says that the modem is communicating with them but ignoring my computer. They promised to ship me a new modem, but in the meantime I no longer have Internet access at home.

Yesterday I dragged my laptop to the public library so that I could use their free Wi-Fi to read my backlog of email. Today I brought my computer to Borders (while Fillius spends his gift card) in hopes that I could do a little blogging.

Administrative Details: Since I'm dating my posts as if they were written consecutively, this one is dated May 14th even though it's actually May 24th. And my daily blog posts are split between my two blogs, this one and Quilting Bibliophagist.

Friday Frivolity: The Self Arranging Bookshelf

2011-05-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

I was thumbing through Sunset Magazine the other day during my break at work when I saw something that caused me to squawk in dismay. It was an artsy home decorating article featuring clever storage ideas. I love that sort of thing -- especially when it involves bookshelves. But what raised my ire was the author's suggestion that the client arrange his books by color. How could you find anything with that sort of system? I may not have a degree in library science, but I must have a librarian's soul as evidenced by the fact that in our home library the fiction is arranged by author and title and the nonfiction is arranged by subject. (I have not, however, gone to the lengths of marking their spines with Dewey decimal numbers.)

Nevertheless, I did enjoy this whimsical video featuring a self-arranging bookshelf in which the books sort themselves by color.

For Where Your Treasure Is . . .

2011-05-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

'"Wicked people never have time for reading,' Dewey said. 'It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.'" --The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket.

However much we biblio-geeks might like to think so, people who do not read are not actually wicked. Yet I can't help being charmed by the above quote even though I hold it to be untrue. I think it must have something to do with the all too human tendency to divide the world into "us" vs. "them," whether it's sorcerers vs. muggles, fans vs. mundanes, or readers vs. nonreaders.

Still, people who don't care much for reading never do seem to have time for it. And those of us who do love reading seem to have no trouble squeezing it in. As I often tell my mom, when she marvels at the amount of time I spend reading or quilting, "We all make time for what we love." (Personally, I marvel at how much time she spends working in her garden and sweeping her patio.)

So here's a question for those of you who did not grow up in a family of readers:

Do you feel that your ability to enjoy reading, or just the fact that you spent so much time doing it, was prized or looked down upon by your family?

I'll go first:

When we were young, my brother and I were the only readers in our extended family. And although there was a general feeling that children ought to be outdoors doing something healthy, such as getting hit on the head with volley balls, there was still a grudging admiration for our ability to spend our free time doing something that everyone else perceived as a chore to be done only under duress. As for our immediate family, I think that our love of reading, a love that was not shared by our siblings, was prized because my non-reading parents had a high regard for education. And the fact that I could read quickly was also seen as evidence of a high intelligence, an assumption which was probably responsible for my having had such a good opinion of myself when I was young.

I think that I was also fortunate in that my parents practiced a benign neglect when it came to supervising my reading material. My mother didn't feel qualified to do so, and both parents had the perhaps naive belief that only good books would be found in our public or school libraries. (And perhaps in the '50s that was not far from true.)

So although I was aware of the negative stereotype that readers had in the culture at large, in my family at least I was more than merely tolerated. I may have been an oddity, but I was their oddity, and they were proud of me though probably glad that they themselves were "normal."

On my part, I don't think I looked down on non-readers, but I'm afraid I did feel a tiny bit superior to them -- at least in the sense of being glad I wasn't one of them. To the classmate who announced, as we stood in line for a mandetory pep rally, that there was more to life than books, I replied, "There's more to life with books!" And therein, I think, lies the source of my sneaking sympathy with the quote from Lemony Snicket.

It's so easy to slip into a sense of superiority about personal gifts that are yours through no personal merit. I read voraciously because God made me a reader. That I find time read is hardly a personal virtue, though it is cheering to reflect that when I exercise my gift and do it well, I give glory to God by simply being what he made me to be. Sort of the way that cats or microbes give glory to God just by being cats or microbes.

Yet I also can't help remembering that "much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more," and I am neither a cat nor a microbe.

As a widow making her way through the final years of middle age, it is not surprising that I should have a sharpened sense of mortality and Last Things or I find myself reflecting more often on the question of what I'm supposed to be doing with what I've been given, even the relatively modest gift of being a reader.

***

(Well, I seem to have strayed rather off topic, but I'm still curious about the experiences of other readers who grew up in families of nonreaders. So please comment.)

On The Road With L.M. Montgomery

2011-05-09T21:46:00.000-07:00

This week I've been on an L.M. Montgomery binge, thanks to my recent trip to Ohio.

The most pressing concern I have when traveling is not security restrictions or the high price of airport food or even how to squeeze into a restroom stall with all of my luggage. No, it's how to carry enough reading material for the trip without straining my back.

The last time I flew, I brought my laptop with me figuring that I could download enough e-books to keep me occupied even if the plane got rerouted to Australia. The problem is, there's at least a half hour at the beginning and end of each flight when you're not allowed to use any electronic devices -- not to mention the possibility of being stuck on the runway for extended periods -- which are all times when I'd want to be reading. And as I discovered, a laptop is a bit heavy and clunky, and you have to worry about Things Happening To It. Supposing a patch of turbulence sloshes tomato juice all over my keyboard? Supposing I drop it? And on this particular trip my carry-on included a large gift box with my granddaughter's First Communion dress, a bubble-wrapped icon which my sister had asked me to hand deliver, my purse, and enough food to sustain me through an eight hour journey. No way could I add a lap top without either going over my carry-on limit or hurting myself!

So I decided I'd better take lightweight paperback books, two in my carry-on for the trip there and two in my checked luggage for the trip back. The library where I work sells any donations they can't use, and I was lucky enough to find three of the "Anne" books and a novel by Madeleine L'Engle. (They were only 25 cents each, so I didn't mind buying traveling copies of books I already own in hardcover.) So I read Anne of Avonlea, Anne of Windy Poplars, and Anne's House of Dreams that weekend. By the time I got home, I was on a roll. So I went on to read Anne of the Island and Chronicles of Avonlea.

I don't mind reading books out of order like this when I've read the whole series before. And Montgomery didn't write them in chronological order anyway. Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) is a "sequel" to Anne of the Island (1915) and the events of Anne of Ingleside (1939) take place before Rainbow Valley (1919). I looked them up because I thought that I'd read the rest of the Anne books in publication order so as to get a feel for how Anne's world developed for people who read them as they came out. And while I was on Wikipedia, I discovered that a new edition of Rilla of Ingleside was published in 2010.

This attractive re-issue, edited so ably by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie, restores and corrects the full text of the original Canadian version that was abridged in 1976 removing over 4500 words. Lefebvre and McKenzie have added fresh and intriguing perceptions through the inclusion of scholarly articles on biographical and historical contexts, the origins of the First World War with maps, a detailed glossary and contemporary Canadian women's war poems.

My own copy is a 1985 paperback published by Bantam. Although the copyright page states that, "it contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition," I'm not sure whether the notice refers to an abridged hardcover or not.

In 2009, Viking Canada also published The Blythes Are Quoted, a sequel to Rilla of Ingleside. This was something I had never heard of before. Apparently, it's a mixture of short stories, poems and vignettes. Most of the stories previously appeared in magazines, and Montgomery rewrote them to include cameos of or references to Anne and her family. (Something which, as I recall, she also did in Chronicles of Avonlea.) The poems are attributed to Anne and her son Walter. A significantly abridged version of the book was published in 1974 as The Road to Yesterday which I have never read.

Yes, back in the olden days, we were limited to books we could find in our local libraries and bookstores. But now that I'm living in the "technological vastness of the future," I've ordered both books online. (Hint: it's cheaper to order through Amazon Canada -- even with international shipping.)

Lepanto: The Musical

2011-05-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not really a musical.

It is, however, a sung version of G.K. Chesterton's poem Lepanto, performed and put into the public domain by Maureen O'Brien whose audiobook podcast, Maria Lectrix, features public domain works "for people with catholic tastes." As such, she features fantasy, poetry, science fiction, mystery, adventure, prayer, devotion, and early Christian literature. In other words, all the good stuff.

The battle of Lepanto was fought on October 7, 1571 by a fleet of the Holy League against the main fleet of the Ottoman empire. At that time, Islamic forces controlled the Mediterranean and were threatening to attack Venice and Rome which could have led to the collapse of Christian Europe. Despite overwhelming odds, the European forces, led by Don John of Austria, won a decisive victory. The victory was attributed to the intersession of Our Lady, Pope Pius V having called for the recitation of the rosary for that intention, and October 7th became the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, later known as the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

Chesterton's poem has a marital, drum-beat rhythm which is enhanced by Maureen O'Brien's recording. (I love Chesterton's poetry, but I sometimes stumble over his meter when I read his poems silently.) A copy of the text can be found here, but if you want to buy a copy, I would suggest the annotated edition published by Ignatius Press which has an introduction by Dale Ahlquist, the president of the American Chesterton Society. Besides notes, the book also includes an essay on the historical background of the battle, an account of the battle itself, an essay on the effect of the battle on world history, a bit of literary criticism, and two essays by Chesterton on related subjects. This book, especially when paired with the above recording, would be a good addition to the high school curriculum of Catholic homeschooling families.

(I don't suppose we ever will see Lepanto as a musical, but what about as a Gilbert & Sullivan style operetta?)

May-Every-Day -- A Month's Worth of Posts

2011-05-05T02:02:00.000-07:00

The post for May 5th , "Funny, You Don't Look Catholic," is on my other blog.

For Us, the Living

2011-05-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein.

This is Heinlein's unpublished first novel, written between 1938 and 1939. It was published in 2004 with an introduction by Spider Robinson and an afterward by Robert James. As a novel, it is simply dreadful. But that's because it isn't actually a novel. It's a lecture about a Henleinesque utopia with only the thinnest veneer of fiction to lubricate its passage down the reader's throat.

Some will say that's an accurate description of most of Heinlein's novels, especially the later ones. To which I would reply, "Yes, but For Us, the Living is even more so."

Here's the set-up. On July 12, 1939, Perry Nelson, an engineer, is forced off the road by an oncoming car. Thrown clear from his car toward the beach below, Perry smacks into a rock and loses consciousness. When he comes to, he finds himself in the middle of a snow storm being rescued by a gorgeous woman in a parka. And it's now January 2086. It sounds like the beginning of a decent story -- I don't really mind that the hero's time travel is accomplished pretty much the same way that John Carter got to Mars. But after that there's really no plot.

When not smoking, eating, or ogling his naked hostess (people in 2086 don't wear clothes indoors), our hero spends his time catching up on 150 years of history either by viewing historical recordings or listening as other characters lecture him about how the world has improved since 1939, thanks to changes in the political and economic system. (The economics is explained in exhaustive detail.) Religion has been pretty much stamped out, and behavior is governed by a code of customs which pretty much boils down to citizens being free to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt other citizens. (There is also a strict taboo against breaching personal privacy.)

Naturally, our hero and his hostess, Diana, fall in love and marry, though Perry must first be cured of his primitive sexual jealousy (more lectures!) before they can live happily ever after in a more or less open marriage. Oh, and then he gets to pilot the first rocket launch to orbit the moon and take pictures of its far side. Why? Because it's there. The End.

During the the Golden Age of Science Fiction (which, as we all know, is around 14), I read and enjoyed many of Heinlein's novels. (In fact, I still reread them fondly today.) But they were his early novels, the ones aimed at a largely juvenile audience, in which storytelling was the predominant element and philosophizing was a minor component which, at least to a youngster's mind, added a bit of depth to the author's world-building .

Not so, the later novels, not so! I will always regret that I read Stranger in a Strange Land all the way through. I kept hoping that somehow it would all come right in the end and that the final payoff would make everything else worthwhile. I never made that mistake again. Though I sampled some of his later novels, I never felt obliged to finish them and promptly bailed out at the first sign of heavy-handedness and structural ineptitude.

So why did I read For Us, the Living? Well, I was interested in it as an historical artifact, a sort of archaeological dig into the prehistory of the Heinlein universe. It was fun to see how many elements in this early work turned up in his later novels and short stories: rolling roads; self-lighting cigarettes; alternate forms of marriage; a strong individualism; banishing lawbreakers to "Coventry;" gorgeous, intelligent females who nonetheless obligingly fall for the not overly bright hero; and the wise old man who pontificates on how the universe really works, to name a few.

I had always assumed that the things I disliked about the later novels (such as long didactic screeds on government, religion, philosophy, and sex) were a later development resulting from the author's downhill slide into ill health and a subsequent loss of writing ability. But it seems that Heinlein had them in mind from the beginning, and I assume that they simply didn't make it into his earlier works (especially the juveniles) because of editorial restrictions from his publishers.

So, worth a read if you've read Heinlein in the past and are interested in roots and origins. Otherwise, give it a miss.

May-Every-Day -- A Month's Worth of Posts

2011-05-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

The posts for May 2nd & May 3rd are at my other blog.

May-Every-Day -- A Month's Worth of Posts

2011-05-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've decided to imitate Rebekah at St. Gemma's Art & Needlework: I have recklessly resolved to post every day in May. In her April 30th post Rebekah writes,

So far I've been one spontaneous blogger, posting maybe once or twice a week. Finding things to post about has never been a problem for me; searching and finding the time is where the trouble lies. But I am going to give it my best shot anyway and I have a long list of topics I will be covering.

I wish I could say that I'd been only posting once or twice a week -- or that I had a long list of topics to write about. As my blogging has become more and more sporadic, that portion of my brain that governs writing has become increasingly wizened. I think I need to exercise that mental muscle before it becomes completely atrophied.

The Rules:

1) Because I have two blogs, I'm allowing a post to either one of them to "count" as my post for the day. If you have never visited it, Quilting Bibliophagist is where I write about quilting and other sewing projects.

2) Because I've started a couple of days late, I'm allowing myself to play catch-up. (So I'm actually posting this May 1st post on the 2nd.) But I'm not going to beat myself up if I miss a couple of posts this weekend because I'm flying east this weekend for a granddaughter's First Communion.

An Easter Carol

2011-04-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

Cheer up, friends and neighbors,

Now it's Eastertide.

Stop from endless labours,

Worries put aside:

Men should rise from sadness,

Evil, folly, strife,

When God's mighty gladness

Brings the earth to life.

Out from snow drifts chilly,

Roused from drowsy hours,

Bluebell wakes, and lily:

God calls up the flowers!

Into life he raises

All the sleeping buds;

Meadows weave his praises,

And the spangled woods.

All his truth and beauty,

All his righteousness,

Are our joy and duty,

Bearing his impress:

Look! the earth waits breathless

After winter's strife:

Easter shows man deathless,

Spring leads death to life.

Ours the more and less is;

But changeless all the days,

God revives and blesses,

Like the sunlight rays.

'All mankind is risen,'

The Easter bells do ring,

While from out their prison

Creep the flowers of spring!

--#147 from the Oxford Book of Carols

This particular song took the children's fancy when they were quite small. They dug it out of the Oxford Book of Carols and, being unable to read music, sang it to the tune of a Christmas carol. In the last line of the second verse, in order to preserve the rhyme, they used to pronounce "splangled wood" as "spangléd wud," a usage which passed into family vocabulary. Fillius gave me a rousing rendition of it as we drove home from Mass this morning, bringing a nostalgic tear to his mother's eye.

Start 'Em Young

2010-12-11T23:25:00.000-08:00

Whether you work in a bookstore, a library, or are simply a parent of small children, if you are familiar with children's literature, you'll be chortling when you read Five Sci-Fi Children's Books by Caldwell Tanner.

Star of Wonder

2010-11-15T07:08:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from Zazzle that they are having a one day sale on greeting cards: 50% off and free shipping! Fillius, my son, is selling his Christmas card there. He did the artwork on his computer and the verse inside is from G.K. Chesterton's The House of Christmas. I think they're rather nice, but I'm his mother so I may be just a teensy bit biased. Here's the link, and the discount code is ZAZZLECARD50. The sale ends at 11:59 PM (Pacific Time) tonight.

Elizabeth Bennet's Email, Etc.

2010-10-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sherwood Smith posted a link to Lizzy Bennet's Inbox this morning. Having just also read Austenbook (Pride & Prejudice via Facebook), I am excessively diverted.

The Hobbit -- Happy Anniversary!

2010-09-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

September 21st was the 73rd anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.

You'd think I would have remembered such an important date. For had The Hobbit not been a financial success, The Lord of the Rings might never have been written. And if it hadn't, the Mythopoeic Society would never have existed. My husband I would never have met; our children would never have existed. (This is beginning to sound like a Twilight Zone episode.) Needless to say, I would never have become acquainted with most of my oldest and closest friends, and the great flowering of fantasy fiction in the late 20th century might not have taken place.

So in belated honor of the day, here is a link to a site with a side by side comparison of the two versions of "Riddles in the Dark," the crucial chapter in The Hobbit in which Biblbo Baggins acquires Gollum's magic ring. (The differences between the two are helpfully marked in blue.)

The Riddle chapter was my first encounter with Tolkien's work. I read it in the early '60s when I was just a kid reading my way through the Azusa public library. It appeared in Just For Fun: Humorous Stories and Poems, edited by Elva Sophronia Smith and Alice Isabel Hazeltine Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company, 1948. Although it was very odd coming into the story in media res (I had no idea what a hobbit was or how Mr. Baggins had gotten into such a tight place), I enjoyed the chapter so much that I tracked down the original book and devoured the whole thing. Of course, I was a bit puzzled by the differences between the version in the anthology and the one in The Hobbit. At the time, I didn't know that Tolkien had made revisions between the first and second editions of The Hobbit in order to make it more consistent with The Lord of the Rings.

By the way, I'm not usually keen on audio recordings of my favorite books because they never match the cadence of my mind's internal voice which I hear when I read. But Nicol Williamson did a skillfully abridged recording of The Hobbit in the '70s which is brilliant. He gives each character a distinct voice with accents from different parts of the British Isles. A friend gave us a copy when our children were young and they never tired of listening to it. Unfortunately, it has never been released on CD, and our cassette copies of the LP degenerated long ago. So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover a recording posted on the Nicol Williamson website.

Finding God in the Everyday

2010-09-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

Why God Matters: How to Recognize Him in Daily Life by Karina Lumbert Fabian & Deacon Steven Lumbert, Tribute Books, 2010.

Long ago I read a book written by a well known Catholic convert* who said that one of the things that most surprised him about becoming a Catholic was that everyday life had become suffused with the supernatural, and that the supernatural was now everyday.

Being a sacramental religion, Catholicism does use ordinary, physical things -- oil, water, bread, wine, the marital embrace -- as conduits for God's life giving grace. And simple, tangible items, such as a humble string of beads or two bits of cloth joined by a cord, can actually become a powerful spiritual weapon or a protective shield. Tempted by demons, guarded by angels, and given an occasional assist by the saints, ordinary life is a deceptively disguised battle-field adventure that rivals any fantasy or science fiction epic.

The problem is, it can look so ordinary. God may whap a few of us upside the head with a spiritual two by four, but the vast majority of us will only come to a radical conversion of mind, heart, and spirit through the small, everyday choices we make in classroom, kitchen, or cubicle.

This idea is the major thrust of Why God Matters: How to Recognize Him in Daily Life. This is not a book about figuring out what to believe -- though both authors had to do that at different points in their lives. (Deacon Steven Lumbert is a convert; Karina Fabian is a cradle Catholic who made a full commitment to the Faith as an adult. ) Instead it's about how God led them to a deeper faith through seemingly ordinary incidents in their everyday lives.

Writing alternate chapters, Lumbert and Fabian recount personal stories with elements as disparate as a Puerto Rican chicken and rice dish, a barefoot stranger at Mass, an unexpected flower delivery, an incense-triggered acid reflux attack, and an armed auto thief who couldn't manage to get his gun out of his pocket. Each is followed by a "Life Lesson" meditating on what the author brought away from the experience, how it contributed to his or her relationship with God, and the possible application it might have to the reader's own life. (I could particularly identify with Fabian's chapter about her disorganized approach to housekeeping and how it paralleled her spiritual life. I have so done that deranged drill sergeant thing to my own kids during the rush to clear things up before guests arrive!)

A related scriptural quotation and an extract from the Catholic Catechism rounds off each chapter. And at the end of the book is a list of resources for further reading which may also be seen here. In the mood for a sample? You can read an excerpt of Chapter 2 on the sidebar of this page.

By the way, Karina Fabian is also the author of Magic, Mensa & Mayhem a fantasy novel about Vern, a dragon detective, and his partner Sister Grace, a high mage of the Faerie Catholic Church, as they shepherd a Faerie contingent to a Mensa convention in the mundane world. Fabian is also the editor of and a contributor to Leaps of Faith, an anthology of Christian science fiction and Infinite Space, Infinite God, a collection of Catholic science fiction stories. (Having read all three of these is what made me interested in reviewing Why God Matters.)

[Disclosure: The publisher sent me a free PDF copy of this book.]

==============

*And my middle-aged brain can't remember his name.

Blog Tour Announcement

2010-09-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, there's a blog tour for Why God Matters: How to Recognize Him in Daily Life by father and daughter team, Steven Lumbert and Karina Lumbert Fabian. Karina is also the author of Magic, Mensa & Mayhem, a fantasy novel, and the editor of (and a contributor to) Leaps of Faith, an anthology of Christian science fiction, and Infinite Space, Infinite God, a collection of Catholic science fiction. (Woo-hoo! How cool is that?) So you can see why I'd have a more than ordinary interest in her new nonfiction title. And that's also why I agreed to write a review for for her blog tour.

You can see the other tour bloggers here. And please come back tomorrow to read my review.

Chinese Fortune Cookie

2010-09-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my mother took my daughter Fillia and me out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Look what came out of one of the fortune cookies! (Had this occurred in a novel, I would have thought it too unbelievable. But real life is not restricted to what is probable.) If the words on this little slip of paper are true, I must live in a house almost completely made of window glass. Except for the bathrooms, I don't think we have a single room without bookcases.

More Catholic Fiction

2010-08-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Only a few days left to enter The Dog Days of Summer Catholic Fiction Giveaway at CatholicMom.com. The deadline is 12:00 midnight Pacific Time. To enter just click on their link above and leave a comment. They have 28 books to give away and will be selecting the winners randomly.

I was surprised to see so many titles, only two of which I had previously read. (They were Bleeder and Awakening, in case you were wondering. And I can recommend both.) So I'm kind of wondering if all of them are Catholic fiction as such or just fiction which Catholic readers like and recommend. Either way I'm looking forward to searching for these titles.

I have a special collection of Catholic fiction housed in a separate bookcase in my bedroom. Since my definition of Catholic fiction is "a work which takes place in a universe in which Catholicism is true," it's a motley collection ranging from Declare by Tim Powers to Catholic Tales for Boys & Girls by Caryll Houselander. And I'm always looking for new books to add. So if you have any titles to recommend (or can tell me anything about the books in the give-away), please speak up in the comments box.

Introducing Youngsters to the Bronte Sisters

2010-08-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

No matter what's going on in my life, I never stop reading. In fact, I may find myself reading more than usual because my need for escape is greater. Unfortunately, writing is not as easy as reading, so blogging becomes sparser as real life becomes more . . . um . . . real. However, I am hoping that everything will soon be under control. (Now, if I can just find the off switch for the trash compactor!)

In the meantime, here's a biblio-themed video featuring the Bronte sisters as action figures:

Catholic Book Sales

2010-08-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Aquinas & More is having an Inventory Reduction Sale right now -- 40% off lots of good stuff! Mostly books, of course, but also some gift items.

Father Dwight Longenecker is having a Summer Book Sale until August 15th -- $5.00 off all of his books (except More Christianity which is being reprinted by Ignatius Press this fall.) I particularly recommend The Gargoyle Code, his take-off on C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. It's much better than anyone else's attempts at this genre. Fr. Longenecker extends Lewis's sketchy world building and gives a good sense of the deception and betrayal that is inevitable among Satan's troops.

Sophia Institute Press could use some business right now. (They recently sent out an email to their mailing list pleading for donations or orders.) Although I'm not usually sympathetic to that sort of appeal, I always like to promote Sophia Institute Press because they are one of the few Catholic publishers that print fiction. And so far, every novel I've ordered from them has been pretty good -- which, sad to say, is not often the case with religious fiction.

A few of the titles I've bought and enjoyed:

Bleeder by John J. Desjarlais. Classics professor Reed Stubblefield retreated to rural Illinois to write a book on Aristole while recovering from a disabling injury. Though religiously skeptical, he makes friends with the local Catholic priest, an Aquinas expert with an excellent library who is reputed to be a stigmatic and a healer. When the priest bleeds to death during the Good Friday liturgy, Stubblefield finds that he's the chief suspect. Can he find the real killer before he himself is arrested or killed?

The Tripods Attack! by John McNichol. A young G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells join forces with Father Brown and a mysterious man known only as "The Doctor" (but not the one you're thinking of) when the Martians invade England in this steam-punk novel for kids.

The Blood-Red Crescent by Henry Garnett. This novel about the Battle of Lepanto, originally published in 1960, is just the sort of thing I loved reading when I was a kid. The protagonist is a sixteen year-old boy from Venice who takes part in the historic naval battle and learns important lessons about manhood from Miguel de Cervantes. Homeschooling parents of boys might use this book as an intro to Chesterton's poem, "Lepanto."

Ignatius Press is having a Summer Super Sale which ends on August 31st with some books marked down as low as $3.00.

I recommend Dayspring by Harry Sylvester, a novel originally published in the 1945 which has been marked down to $5.00 ( a real bargain -- especially since Ignatius paperbacks are signature sewn and printed on very good paper). The book is about Spencer Bain, an anthropologist who is studying the Penitentes, a brotherhood of men in New Mexico who practice severe religious penances. Spencer feigns a conversion to Catholicism in hopes of obtaining first hand observations of them. But he gets much more than he bargained for. This book is a little modern for my taste, but the writing is very good.

I'd also recommend Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by Richard Purtill. Originally published in 1974, this revised edition contains two additional essays on Lewis and some new notes on the Silmarillion in Chapter Six. And it's only $3.00!

It's a Book!

2010-07-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

Video trailers for books -- it's a concept I can't quite wrap my head around. (Yes, I know I'm a bit of a dinosaur.) I haven't seen the book which this one advertises, but I love the sentiment it expresses.

Two Books

2010-06-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

--Kung Fu Monkey

(Shamelessly swiped from Happy Catholic who posted it on her blog last year.)

Jane Austen's History of England

2010-06-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

One thing leads to another on the Internet.

Hoping to improve my English paper piecing technique, I was searching through tutorials when I discovered a link to the British Library which has a number of virtual books one can peruse online.

On their page of most viewed works is a link for Jane Austen's The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st: By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian. (Scroll down the list until you see it.) Originally written when she was a mere slip of a girl,* The History of England is a parody of popular historical writing. It also contains allusions and in-jokes which would have been most fully appreciated by their intended audience -- her family. But the little book is amusing on its own even for modern readers. The illustrations were painted by Austen's older sister Cassandra, to whom she dedicated the work.

Should you find Miss Austen's handwriting difficult to read, do not despair! At the click of a button, a small window will open with that page's text in an easily read font. Or if you prefer, pressing another button will trigger a oral version of the text which is read aloud by a young lady with a delightful voice and appropriate accent.

I was particularly pleased to have found her History of England during my convalescence because of my firmly held belief that "Jane Austen never lets you down." Every time I went to the hospital to have a baby, I took one of her novels with me in the Oxford World Classic editions. (They are conveniently sized hardcovers, smaller than my hand.) Whenever I have been sick, or sad, or sorely tried, I turn to Jane Austen to take me elsewhere. In fact, I even took a copy of Persuasion with me when I went to have my foot surgery, just in case there was a long wait.

As it turned out, mine was the first surgery scheduled for that morning, so there was no waiting at all. But after I was gowned and prepped and waiting on a gurney, I was so incredibly nervous that I was afraid I might dissolve in tears despite the comic antics of the anesthesiologist (whom I suspect of moonlighting as a stand-up comedian). But then I asked my mom to hand me my copy of Persuasion, and as soon as my hand closed around it, a feeling of quiet calmness

spread from my palm through the rest of my body.

As I said, Jane Austen never lets you down.

____________________

*The British Library says she was 13, Wikipedia suggests 15, and volume 6 of The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen (edited by R.W. Chapman) dates the work as having been composed in 1791 when Austen would have been 16.

Seven Quick Takes -- I've Been Sick Edition

2010-05-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

A bit belatedly, I'm joining Jennifer at Conversion Diary in presenting "Seven Quick Takes," a medley of mini-topics, each of which is too slight to support its own blog post.

1) I had foot surgery at the beginning of May. Because my house has stairs, I decided to spend my convalescence next door at my mom's house, and I'd brought my laptop with me hoping to catch up on my blogging. After all, my wireless network extends to my mom's house, and I wouldn't have much else to do, would I? You'd think, wouldn't you, that having had similar surgery on the other foot twelve years ago I would know better! (Note to future self: lying in pain with foot elevated is not conducive to writing.)

2) Previously read Georgette Heyer novels are probably the best sort of books to read after surgery. They are light and undemanding, -- essential qualities for a book intended to distract one from pain and nausea. (Note to self: No fear of ever becoming a drug addict -- everything seems to make me throw up.)

3) Netflix is wonderful resource for light and cheerful movies, and since my new laptop can use their instant play feature, there's no waiting for the US Postal Service to deliver the next disc. However, I still had a DVD of Housewife 49 which had been delivered before the surgery, so I decided to watch it. Big mistake. I'd originally ordered it because I couldn't get a copy of the book on which it was based. The protagonist is a withdrawn and depressed housewife in Britain at the start of World War II. Though her husband had previously discouraged her attempts to become involved with people who might be outside her class, she heeded her doctor's advice to join the Women's Volunteer Services and gradually blossomed into a stronger and more independent person. She also volunteered to write a journal for a British agency which was documenting the lives of ordinary people during the war. Now that I'm feeling better, I still want to read the book. But the movie did nothing to improve my spirits while I was still on my bed of pain. (Note to self: Timing is everything!)

4) Since I cannot drive yet, my mom's been taking me to my weekly followup appointments which means that I can actually look at the scenery along our route. (I did not learn to drive until I was middle-aged, so I still feel like a relatively new driver. I tend to grip the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip of death and fear to let my eyes stray from the road by even a fraction of an inch.) So yesterday I enjoyed being able to look around, but then I noticed a billboard with a blatantly misused apostrophe. Normally, I can hide the fact that I'm a grammar geek. But abused apostrophes make me twitch. Coincidentally, this morning I stumbled across this poster: "How To Use An Apostrophe" which I think ought to be widely distributed as a public service announcement.

5) Okay, as long as we're on grammar peeves, I also love "The Alot is Better Than You at Everything" which my daughter just emailed to me. (Is she trying to tell me something?) It will not improve anyone's grammatical usage, but it could definitely help someone like me develop coping skills.

6) While I was still too weak to sit up and use my 4 lb. laptop, my brother came to show me his new iPad. Kewel! It's so light I could have held it up while lying flat on my back (with my foot elevated) to watch movies and read books. And it comes with an ebook version of Winnie the Pooh! What fun I could have downloading obscure short stories by Louisa May Alcott. (Note to self: Don't be silly. You can do that on your laptop. Besides, you just spent all your money on your foot!)

7) On the bright side: I have no more feet eligible for surgery. I will never have to do this again!

For more Quick Takes, join Jennifer and her posse at today's Conversion Diary.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

2010-05-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

Today is Towel Day. No doubt, the rest of you already know that. (I am always the last person on Earth to know anything.) But on the off chance that you don't, I'll just mention that May 25th is the day on which fans the late Douglas Adams carry about a towel in honor of the author and his work, especially the multitudinous permutations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This is an embarassing admission for a bibliovore, but I have never liked the novels of Douglas Adams. I thought they were over-written and that there were far too many of them. And I just didn't think they were that funny.

However, I thought that the original radio broadcasts were brilliant! (How sad I sometimes feel when reading cranky reviews on Amazon from young people who think that the novels came first and that the radio shows are recent and faulty adaptations.)

I first heard the radio series in the early years of my marriage, possibly on KPFK and probably in the late '70s or early '80s. My husband recorded the two original series (including the bridge episode) on our reel-to-reel recorder from which he later made cassette copies for everyday listening. It must have been a recording of the original broadcast since it includes the Pink Floyd background music which was later cut from the segment where our heroes land on Magrathea. (Copyright problems.)

Over the years, The Hitchhikers's Guide to the Galaxy became an important cultural influence in our family. Our children grew up using phrases such as "You've got to build bypasses!" or "Forty-two?" in everyday conversation -- even though they had never read the book, heard the radio broadcasts, or seen the television series. And when they were not washing their heads at us, they generally considered their parents to be hoopy froods who really knew where their towels were. Until, of course, they got old enough to swipe our cassette tapes and discovered that we weren't actually witty, but merely given to inveterate quotation.

Actually, they may have first encountered Hitchhiker's in our library. For there, in the media and humor section, we had a copy of The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts. Every now and then I reread them and "hear" once again the original voices, music, and sound effects of that long ago broadcast. And they still make me smile.

So despite not liking his novels, I'll raise a glass to Douglas Adams (carefully spreading a towel on my lap in case of spills) and thank him for enriching our family vocabulary. May he rest in peace.

(By the way, the shirt pictured at the beginning of this post can be found at Think Geek.)

When the Universe Paused and Held Its Breath...

2010-04-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

This morning, as I was flipping through The Liturgy of the Hours to find my place in Lauds, my eye fell on the following selection in the Office of Readings. The harrowing of hel l, when Christ descended to the abode of the dead to free the imprisoned souls of the just, is a popular theme in Early and Middle English literature, especially in the mystery plays. I've always found them charming -- a sort of early Catholic fan fiction. In the Creed, we affirm that "he descended into hell" -- but no one knows exactly what it was like. It is a gap which human imagination longs to fill.

I suppose this sermon is much older. In a fictionalized form, it depicts the meeting of Adam, the first man, and Christ, the new Adam.

From an ancient homily on Holy Saturday
(PG 43, 439, 451, 462-463)

The Lord descends into hell

Something strange is happening — there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear. He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He who is both God and the Son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone, ‘My Lord be with you all.’ Christ answered him: ‘And with your spirit.’ He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in Hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I in you; together we form one person and cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the Cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in Paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in Hell. The sword that pierced Me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly Paradise. I will not restore you to that Paradise, but will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The Bridal Chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The Kingdom of Heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.

National Grammar Day

2010-03-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

Today is National Grammar Day, hosted this year by Mignon Fogarty (a.k.a. Grammar Girl). Click here to join in the festivities which include a special Grammar Day song.

Naturally, my favorite part was the links to a grammar noir series written by writer and editor John MacIntyre on his blog, "You Don't Say."

Part I, 2010

Part II, 2010

Part III, 2010

As for myself, I plan to celebrate by curling up with a nice grammar book today. But which one? My trusty copy of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition? (I picked it up at a church rummage sale for only 10 cents and it has given me decades of useful service.) My massive copy of Writing Handbook by Bernard J. Streicher, S.J.? It's my go-to source for when to capitalize religious terms. One of Karen Elizabeth Gordon's slim, light-hearted volumes such as The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. Or perhaps the granddaddy of them all, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. I think that may have been my very first grammar purchase, either at the end of high school or the very beginning of my freshman year at college.

I suppose there is something pathetic about admitting that one enjoys reading grammar books. How much worse it must be to admit to having two shelve's worth of books about words, grammar, and writing. Can we say, "doesn't have a life"? But given my love of reading, is it surprising that words and the use of words are the very breath of life to me?

Administrative Update

2010-02-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

A troll has seriously spammed my comments, so until further notice I have enabled Comment Moderation. It seems to be a somewhat inept troll since all the posts it "commented" on were one or two years old. But it was such a pain to delete them (over a dozen!) that I'd like to prevent any further occurrance.

In a World of Books

2010-02-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

I liked this little walk through a book world:

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

This stop motion film was made for 4th Estate Publisher's 25th anniversary. I don't know anything about this particular publisher or its books, but I loved the image of the little man coming out of a volume and walking through a world of books. (By the way, if you have trouble watching it, be sure to click the HD IS OFF button.)

When I was a little girl, I couldn't help feeling that there was something magically alive about books. That if one could only find the key, one could, like Gumby, slip inside a favorite title and live in its world. Though I suppose it would feel dreadfully Calvinist to live inside a book you'd already read. Everything would seem depressingly preordained. (I recall in Edgar Eager's Time Garden, when the children wrangled a trip into Little Women from the Natterjack, how relieved they were that Beth was home with a cold that day rather than out sledding with Jo and Laurie. They'd felt a bit queasy at the thought of meeting her, knowing that she dies in the second volume.

Or perhaps a book's characters might somehow slip into our world. I still recall a very old cartoon (Was it a Max Fleisher or a Warner Brothers?) which took place in a bookstore. During the night the book characters crept out and frolicked on the shelves. Seemed plausible to me.

7 Quick Takes - Catch All Edition

2010-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Seven Quick Takes hosted by Jennifer at Conversion Diary

1. Seraphic not only finished "Eilidh and the Empty Fame," but she's now posting segments of "Eilidh and the Christmas Spirit." If you were pitching this as a movie it would be "Bertie and Jeeves, only female and in Scotland -- and um, Catholic." Though it seems to me that some of Lady Bramble's relatives could have wandered in from an Evelyn Waugh novel. Both stories are posted here (in reverse order since it's a blog). I really like Catholic fiction that's not what people expect when they see that label.

2. Yesterday, while shelving books in the library, I noticed an unintentionally amusing title: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Compte-Sponville. We aides aren't supposed to pause to read jacket blurbs, so I'm not sure how the author reconciles spirituality with a belief in the existence of nothing beyond the material world. Perhaps, like many people, he equates spirituality with simply being nice. (Reviews on Amazon are mixed.)

3. I had a really weird dream last night, possibly triggered by my visit to the Road to California quilt show on Sunday. Though the details have faded, I distinctly remember that I was in search of dish towels with embroidered redwork designs showing Cthulhu engaged in different chores for each day of the week. You know, wash on Monday; iron on Tuesday; sew on Wednesday; etc. When I was a girl, you could buy Aunt Martha's iron-on embroidery transfers for this sort of thing at Woolworth's. But they featured cute little girls, kittens, or duckies. Not Cthulhu. And the really odd thing is that I don't think I've ever read any Lovecraft.

4. Having recently noticed that Neil Gaiman won the Newbery in 2009 for The Graveyard Book, I decided to give it a go. Ho, hum! An interesting premise -- human baby raised by the ghosts in the local graveyard -- but rather disjointed in execution. Perhaps that is not surprising since the author says that it took him twenty-some years to write the book and that it initially started with what is now chapter four. The Graveyard Book doesn't really begin to act like a novel until near the end.

5. For more timely Newbery excitement, click over to Everyone's a Winner as Peter Sieruta of Collecting Children's Books uses Twitter and a cell phone to help a book seller friend place her orders for the new award winners as they are being announced so that she'll have have copies in stock for the Award Day rush.

I was very glad to help her out. In these uncertain times, independent bookstores -- the kind where they know your name and make personal recommendations -- are having a terrible time competing with the big chains and dot.com dealers. When Awards Day rolls around, everyone --from local libraries to first edition collectors -- calls or drops by my friend's store, trying to find the winning titles. So it was very important that she have these books in stock; her business depended on it.

I also enjoyed reading his reflections on the books that won and those that didn't.

6. Who knew that there was a blog devoted to the Dewey Decimal system? Appropriately, it is called 025.431: The Dewey Blog. Tuesday's entry concerns dark matter and the Milky Way.

The comprehensive (and interdisciplinary) number for dark matter is 523.1126 Dark matter; an example of a work classed there is In Search of Dark Matter.
The comprehensive (and interdisciplinary) number for the Milky Way is 523.113 Milky Way; an example of a work classed there is The Milky Way.
Where should a work about dark matter as part of the Milky Way be classed?

If this is the geeky sort of thing that makes your heart go pitter-pat (and I have to admit that mine does), click here to find the answer and the reasoning behind it. Someday I'll have to write about the fun I had cataloging the library at my previous parish.

7. Have you been to see my other blog, Quilting Bibliophagist? (When I'm not reading, I quilt.)

Don't Go Out Without One

2010-01-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

". . . Laurie led the way from room to room, letting Jo stop to examine whatever struck her fancy; and so at last they came to the library, where she clapped her hands, and pranced, as she always did when especially delighted. It was lined with books, and there were pictures and statues, and distracting little cabinets full of coins and curiosities, and sleepy-hollow chairs, and queer tables, and bronzes;l and best of all, a great open fire-place, with quaint tiles all round it.

"What richness!" sighed Jo, sinking into the depth of a velvet chair, and gazing about her with an air of intense satisfaction. "Theodore Laurence, you ought to be the happiest boy in the world," she added impressively.

"A fellow can't live on books," said Laurie, shaking his head . . ."

--Little Women by L.M. Alcott

Oh, I don't know. A fellow might try.

I remember, when I was in high school, standing in line to enter the gym for one of those mandatory pep rallies which regularly interrupted our alleged education. As usual, I'd brought a book to help me endure the tedium. (I am so not into sports!) Upon seeing me, a girl whom I knew slightly gave a snort of exasperation and said, "You know, there is more to life than books." Without raising my eyes from the page, I replied, "Yes, but there's more to life with a book than without." I'm still pretty much of that opinion. Cosmically speaking, books may not be the most important things in life. But they certainly help you get through the bad bits.

Elidith and the Empty Frame

2009-12-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

Canadian writer Seraphic is on another fiction spree at her current blog, Seraphic Goes to Scotland. It's called "Elidith and the Empty Frame," and has a lovely tone inspired by, but not slavishly imitative of, P.G. Wodehouse. (Think Bertie & Jeeves, only female and in Scotland.)

The sunbeam, hitting me at that particular moment and at that particular angle, had all the force of an atomic bomb. With a shriek, I threw a pillow over my pulsating head. My first thought, of course, was that Edinburgh had been vapourised. But, since cogito ergo sum still seemed to apply, I attempted speech.

“Eilidh?”

“Good morning, Lady Bramble.”

“Are we dead?”

“It would seem not, Lady Bramble.”

“That bright flash did not, in fact, betoken a catastrophic event?”

“Och no, Lady Bramble. It’s a bonny day, aye.”

I had a dekko around the pillow. The girl was clutching a velvet curtain in her hand and looking out upon Moray Place with a pleased expression not unlike that of old Angus Bàn, my grandpapa’s factor, when sitting down to a new-cooked trout.

“It’s bloody early for it to be day,” I said. “It strikes me as rather unfair.”

“But, Lady Bramble, it is nine o’clock.”

That put a different complexion on things. I removed the pillow.

“Good heavens,” I said. “Is it really? Whatever was I up to last night?”

To read all of the chapters, click on the Elidith label at the bottom of chapter 1. Then scroll down. Since they are on a blog, the chapters are in reverse order.

I am following it avidly though I fear that she will break off the narrative at some point -- either because she decides that it has no future, or because she suspects that it does and wants to make us wait until it's published.

BTW, Seraphic has a book coming out this spring from Novalis based on her original blog, Seraphic Single. It's called Seraphic Singles: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life. I plan to pre-order as soon as it shows up on Amazon.

A Little Off-Topic Nepotism

2009-12-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging to bring you a spot of nepotism:

Every year I try to get a new Christmas CD, and this year's is The TJR Christmas Card featuring my brother TJR who plays and sings neo-classic rock. I'm a Medieval/Renaissance girl myself, but I confess to being impressed by the virtuoso fingering my brother displays in these instrumental interpretations of eight traditional Christmas carols. And I was particularly charmed by his original song, "Christmas in California." It's Southern California's reply to "White Christmas," and hearing it will stir feelings of nostalgia in any Californian transplanted to the frigid Midwest or East Coast. The CD is packaged in a cardboard case which doubles as a Christmas card. And if you buy five or more of them from his website they're only $5.00 apiece, making them a reasonably priced and easily mailed gift. Single copies of the disk will soon be available from CD Baby. For now you can download the complete album or individual songs. (By the way, that little snowman at the beginning of my post was done by my son Filius for the cover of the CD.)

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programing.

(Update: There is an expanded version of this post on my quilting blog, Quilting Bibliophagist in which I natter on about music I'll be playing while sewing my Christmas quilt.)

Adopting Needy Books

2009-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I buy books I already own simply because I feel sorry for them. Like stray kittens, they beg to be taken home.

Our library has a little used bookstore which is run by the Friends of the Library. Today I was browsing through their display of Christmas books and discovered a copy of The Father Christmas Letters by J.R.R. Tolkien. It was a paperback and quite new looking. I picked it up, fondly remembering how many times I've read this book, both to myself and to my children. Inside the front cover was an inscription which wrung my heart.

"To our sons and perhaps someday our grandchildren: This is a very precious book. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have. Love, Mom & Dad."

What happened? How did this book end up in the donation box at the library? It shows little sign of having been read. Did the sons not share their parents' taste? Did they become football jocks instead of bibliophibians? Did the boys leave the book behind when they left home? In that case, what happened to the parents? Were they eaten by a rampaging rhinoceros? Surely they would not have discarded this book had they been alive and well.

Moved by anxiety and pity, I paid for the book and took it home. I already have a hardcover copy, but perhaps I can find this paperback copy a good home.

Seven Quick Takes -- Sloooow Day Edition

2009-10-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

Once again I'm joining Jennifer for 7 Quick Takes on Friday.

1. I am sick. Not the flu, thank goodness. But my sinuses are so painful that it hurts to read. Aaaaaargh! Which is worse -- not reading or reading with sore eyeballs? Either way, I guess I should offer it up for the Poor Souls in purgatory. (All Souls Day is just around the corner. Pray early and often!)

2. I love reading children's literature, but I'm not that keen on young adult fiction. I hear that many adults enjoy reading YA, but I don't. The teen years were not a happy period of my life, so I cannot fathom why any adult would want to relive them through fiction -- especially nowadays when most of the titles look so grim, dark, and gloomy. (Some YA fantasy is kind of fun such as Sorcery and Cecelia. But I never really consider books like that to be YA. Although they're marketed as young adult fiction, they aren't awash in adolescent angst.

3. Shelving in the YA section has its own special challenges since our library has set aside that area as a teen only zone with movable floor seating which sometimes makes reaching the shelves a job for a contortionist. And I overhear all kinds of things when I'm working there, everything from what kind of pornographic content is available on cable to whether Arnold Schwarzenegger is French, Australian, or a robot.

4. I guess I'm showing my age. When a patron says he can't find a certain book on the shelf, I always ask if he's already checked the card catalog to ascertain whether the book is in the library or currently checked out. Recently I realized that I'm probably the only aide who says card catalog. Because of course there aren't any cards. It's all on computer and has been in most libraries for quite some time. Old habits die hard.

5. One of the things that most surprised me when I first began to work in libraries is how filthy the books are. I am not, you understand, referring to their contents but to their covers. Like filthy lucre, books pass through many hands and pick up a good deal of grime. You don't notice it when handling a single book. But if you work as a library aide, two hours of shelving will leave your fingers black. I can't bring myself to eat my break-time snack until I've washed my hands at least twice. With everyone getting excited about the upcoming flu season, the city has installed hand sanitizer dispensers at the entrance of the library and near the reference desk. But book don't get cleaned unless they're returned with seriously sticky, icky stuff on their mylar covers. So consider yourselves warned: When using library materials, don't touch your face.

6. Okay, so fiction books get shelved first by author, and then all of the books by a certain author are shelved alphabetically by title. Now I've always been taught that titles that begin with numerals, such as 92 Pacific Boulevard by Debbie Macomber, are shelved as if the numerals had been spelled out. (So this title would be shelved after Mrs. Miracle and before On a Snowy Night.)

When I started work at my current library I made it a point to ask my supervisor about this point just to make sure that this was the shelving protocol they were following. (It was.) But I notice that some of the aides are placing these titles at the beginning of an author's books, even before titles beginning with the letter "A." I think this must be the younger aides who have grown up with computers which always place numbers and symbols before letters in alphabetized listings.

7. For some reason being sick always inspires me to do long neglected household tasks. Yesterday, in between collapsing on my sickbed of pain, I slowly washed my way through a great stack of dirty dishes which had been piling up all week. And washed several loads of towels. Today I am slowly cleaning the stove top, including the burner grates. I don't know why I do this. Maybe my subconscious figures that if I'm feeling lousy anyway, I might as well do housework. After all, when I'm feeling fine there are so many other things I'd much rather do.

Tim Powers & Pirates (& More)

2009-09-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

I can't speak for the entire Catholic blogsphere, but everyone in my own little corner of it (do spheres have corners?) is all a-twitter at the recently confirmed report that Disney has optioned Tim Power's novel, On Stranger Tides, and will be using elements from it in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

I'm always delighted when an author I like encounters good fortune. Especially when it is likely to include tie-in editions of his novels (More people discovering his work -- yay!) and, hopefully, an incentive for his publishers to keep his other novels in print.

As an added bonus, while clicking around on related links, I discovered news of even more interest to a bibliophagist. Earlier this year PS Publishing released Powers: Secret Histories by John Berlyne. Described by the publisher as "a bibliographical cornucopia,"

. . . Secret Histories has been nearly ten years in the making and brings together an astonishing range of Powers ephemera - a huge treat and a remarkable resource for both fans and collectors alike.

As well as a complete, illustrated reference of every Tim Powers book published to date, . . . Secret Histories offers an extraordinary insight into the stories behind the stories, collecting together in a single volume Powers material previously seen only in private collections.

Here - in print for the very first time - you'll find poetry, drawings, research and plotting notes, novel outlines, early drafts, out-takes and an excerpt from the author's unpublished 1974 novel, To Serve in Hell.

Supporting these riches are story notes and commentary by Powers himself and you'll also find articles and essays from collaborators, friends and renowned Powers aficionados . . .

The book was published in three separate editions. The regular signed edition (limited to 1,000 copies) costs £40. The two volume slipcased edition (£195), which includes an unfinished novel which Powers wrote in the early '70s, The Waters Deep, Deep, Deep, has been illustrated by the author. The deluxe edition (£495) also includes a third volume: "a full colour facsimile edition of the original handwritten manuscript of The Anubis Gates, complete with doodles, crossings out, dog-eared corners and even coffee stains! Only twenty-six copies of this facsimile, signed by Powers and individually lettered, will be available . . ."

After adding postage and packing from the U.K., I doubt that even the least expensive of these in within my book budget. But it's nice to know they're out there.

Type Like a Pirate!

2009-09-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, here's a picture of "the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard, so useful for piratical bloggers" which was posted by Mark Lieberman on The Language Log in 2005. (Maybe everyone else on the Internet has already seen it, but it was new to me.)

There's also an amusing discussion of "pirate-speak." Did pirates really did go around saying, "Aaarrrh?" Apparently, Robert Newton's portrayal in the 1950's movie version of Treasure Island is one source of the popular perception that they did.

But in real life, both dialect from the southwest part of England, as well as Maritime Pidgin English, might have played a role in how how pirates spoke. For more details, click here.

(And a HT to Grammar Girl whose newsletter featured the link today.)

P.S. Talk Like a Pirate Day seemed like a good time to resume blogging since I was shanghaied a few months ago by life, the universe, and everything. (Well, mostly responsibilities.) I think I'm back now.

A Library for Juana

2009-05-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Ines by Pat Mora. Illustrated by Beatriz Vidal.

I enjoy shelving in the children's section of the library even though the work itself is physically much harder than in the adult section. I smile when I see that titles which I loved as a child are still being checked out. And it's a pleasure to discover that some of my favorite childhood authors have written books that I've never had the opportunity to read.

I'm also fascinated by how the selection of nonfiction books has changed over the years. I suppose that's partly a reflection of what sort of reports are assigned by the local schools, which in turn are influenced by what topics our society currently deems important (or at least, fashionable).

The biography section seems to have a much wider selection than when I was young. Although I could wish that there were fewer books about media celebrities, I am pleased that the current emphasis on "diversity" has brought young readers biographies whose subjects lived in countries and time periods less commonly featured when I was young.

A Library for Juana is a biography in picture book format about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a literary nun who lived in 17th century Mexico. The book focuses on young Juana's love of books and study. She grew up in the home of her grandfather who had an extensive library, and she learned to read and write at the age of three, following her older sister to school despite having been told that she was too young to attend. She began to write poetry while still a little girl and hoped someday to study at the university in Mexico City because its library housed thousands of books. When told that only men could attend the university, she appeared at dinner the next day wearing boy's clothes. "I'm practicing so I can go to the university in Mexico City when I'm older. . . I want to study about music and plants and stars. I want to write poems."

Eventually, Juana was sent to Mexico City -- first to live with relatives who hired tutors for her, and later at the viceroy's palace as a lady-in-waiting where she continued to read, study, and write. Eventually she entered a convent where, in addition to serving as accountant and librarian, she produced a prodigious literary output in both poetry and prose. Her own personal library became one of the largest in the Americas.

What shines throughout this book is Juana's love of books, reading, and learning. How could I not love it? The illustrations, executed in watercolor and gouache, give the reader a vivid sense of the time and place in which she lived.

Winter Lights

2009-05-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

Winter Lights: A Season in Poems & Quilts by Anna Grossnickle Hines.

One of the the perks of my job as a library aide is discovering unusual picture books. This one caught my eye because the author-illustrator is a quilter.

Winter, and special lights and holidays which brighten the darkest days of the year, is the theme of this book of poems. The author's subjects range from Hanukkah to the Winter Solstice to the fireworks of the Chinese New Year to the farolitos which light the way for Mary and Joseph during Christmas celebrations in the Southwest.

I must admit that I preferred the illustrations to the text because my taste in poetry is rather hobbitish and traditional. But I love these quilts! They simply glow with light thanks to the author's judicious use dark fabrics, as in the Christmas tree quilt on the cover. (See above.)

And the piecing techniques which she has chosen for each quilt are also well suited to the subject of each poem. For example, the twisted log cabin blocks which Hines uses to illustrate "Fireplace" and "One Little Candle" bring unexpected movement to her representation of flickering, dancing flames. The aurora borealis is appropriately suggested by the bargello quilt illustrating "A Sight to See." And there is a happy marriage of both color and technique in the author's use of hand-dyes in her appliqued quilt, "Protest," which illustrates the glow of the setting sun in the winter sky and the soft snowy hills.

I would love to show you what I mean by by posting pictures of the quilts I've just referred to, but I am scrupulously respecting Hines's copyright. Fortunately, you can see what I mean by visiting her website, here. Click on the link, "For Quilters" and then scroll down and click on the third book, Winter Lights, to see how she designed and made each quilt. (Unfortunately, the design of the website prevents me from giving you a direct link to the quilts.) Now that I know that she has two other quilt illustrated books, I plan to look them up at my library.

By the way, one poem in particular resonated in my book lover's soul. It dealt with a furtive pleasure with which I am sure we can all sympathize.

Lights Out

I pull the covers
over my head
and let out a few snores
for good measure . . .
then snap on my flashlight
and open my book.
Now this is
reading for pleasure!

Be sure to look at the accompanying quilt on her website!

In Honor of Mother's Day

2009-05-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

" How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."

--G.K. Chesterton, speaking about motherhood in What's Wrong With the World?

7 Quick Takes - Misc. Edition

2009-02-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

1) As I was shelving in nonfiction I noticed a title on the shelf which spoke volumes to me: Why Women Need Chocolate. I don't actually know anything about this book, but it seems to me that the title states an eternal truth. Women need chocolate. And I've discovered that the craving for it is distinct from the craving for sweets.

Because I'm prediabetic, I cut sweets from my diet about a year ago. And I found that the craving for sugar really does fade after a month or so. Not so with chocolate, not so! When life is stressful there's still nothing like it. But now I've discovered a way to eschew sweets yet still self-medicate: Trader Joe's Belgian Unsweetened Baking Chocolate. No sugar at all and a smooth chocolate taste! It's not at all bitter or harsh. Of course, it probably helps that I've always been a fan of bitter sweet chocolate. (Milk chocolate is for wimps!)

2)Darwin recently wrote about the toy appeal of Amazon's Kindle 2. Though I love the feel of a book in my hand, I have to admit that I have occasionally considered the advantages of a Kindle, most recently on my trip to Texas to visit Fillius Major and his family. I always try to travel light which is not easy to do if you're also worried about running out of reading material during the trip. Books are heavy, and I can't take just one thanks to the current security regulations which require arriving at the airport as much as two hours ahead of flight time -- because I can read through a lot in two hours! And then there's the flight time, and maybe a layover. And what if that doesn't leave me enough reading material for the trip home? Talk about midflight panic! It was this sort of fear that had me standing in an airport book stall, with my carry-on firmly clutched between my feet and my purse dangling from my arm, reading about Dewey (the only palatable selection in the whole store). A Kindle would be so much lighter to carry than a stack books, and I'd never have to worry about running out of something to read.

3) Dewey Decimal Conundrums: The Dangerous Book For Boys is at 031.02 which is right next to the Guinness Book of World's Records. Why is The Daring Book for Girls at 606.7008 right next to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?

4) Yesterday the unthinkable happened: I forgot to take a book with me on my trip to the doctor's office. I surveyed the magazine offerings in the waiting room. The inevitable Sports Illustrated (ugh!), various automobile magazines (zzzzzz), Parents (been there, done that), Golf (the most boring game on the planet), various financial magazines, and Arthritis (don't need that yet!). So that left JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. (I did read one interesting article there in which the author was reminiscing about the lone family doctor who served his tiny hometown and who sparked his desire to enter the medical profession.) But it would have been another good time to have had a Kindle. Except I probably would have forgotten to bring it with me.

5) I've just discovered that one can subscribe to a Spanish Word of the Day at Dictionary.com.

6) I bought a copy of MindFlights, Issue 4 in order to read "Dragonsaint" by D.G.D. Davidson, the proprietor of The Sci Fi Catholic. The author has described his novelette as featuring, "such things as ancient legends, dragons, coffee, attractive women with glasses, dragons, wildland firefighting, dragons, unrequited love, and dragons." I thought the story was a lot of fun and had some interesting world-building. And ya gotta love a dragon who wears a scapular. Why a Catholic dragon? Well, that would be the fault of St. Philomena, a spunky little girl who, after taming her dragon, insists that he be baptized. (After being catechised, of course.) But has the dragon really been converted? Or has he only restrained all these centuries by the power of St. Philomena's cord around his neck?

7) In a previous post, I spoke about mentally mispronouncing words I encountered in my reading which I'd never heard spoken aloud. But I forgot to confess that (despite the title of this blog) I've no idea how to pronounce "bibliophagist"!

Jules Verne and Nellie Bly

2009-02-10T01:15:00.000-08:00

Jules Verne was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, and I was pleased that Fillius came to share my taste for 19th century authors in general and Jules Verne in particular. Lately he has been reading aloud Five Weeks in a Balloon to me while I wash the nightly dishes. I had never read it before because it was not readily available when I was young. (This was back in the Pleistocene, dear children, before one could read obscure works on Project Gutenberg or order them online from used booksellers.

Though his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon already has the hallmarks of Verne's more well known works: a scientifically ingenious apparatus, stalwart comrades, personal bravery, a loyal servant (who also provides comic relief), exotic scenery, and exciting adventure. The story concerns Dr. Ferguson, an Englishman, his faithful servant Joe, and his Scottish friend Kennedy, who have set out in hot-air balloon to cross the continent of Africa. Dr. Ferguson has invented a new apparatus which eliminates the need to either release gas or to drop ballast in order to control the balloon's altitude thus allowing longer balloon voyages than have hitherto been possible. It's a jolly good adventure story.

At various points in their journey, our heroes rescue a Catholic missionary about to be killed by hostile natives, nearly die of thirst while becalmed in a desert, are attacked by condors, are mistaken for gods by credulous natives, and discover a gold deposit from which they are unable to profit since its untold wealth is much too heavy for them to cart away in their balloon. Not to mention the incendiary pigeons! And throughout the novel, the exotic flora and fauna of Africa are breathtakingly described. (Well, I suppose it was breathtaking to the Frenchmen reading the novel when it first came out.) Towards the end, the balloon begins to suffer technical difficulties and sinks lower and lower. Unless Dr. Ferguson can think of a remedy, our heroes will either be permanently stranded in the wilds of Africa, or will fall into the clutches of the fierce horsemen who are currently pursuing them. Whew!

(N.B. Modern readers may be surprised at Kennedy's enthusiasm for shooting big game as well as the author's depiction of non-Europeans as being fierce, primitive, and superstitious. I did not find this to be a problem because when I travel in time, I Expect Things To Be Different.)

As a follow-up to this novel, I am now reading Around the World in Seventy-two Days by Nellie Bly, an American journalist who set out to beat Phileas Fogg at his own game. (Fogg was the hero of Verne's novel, Around the World in Eighty Days.

When Bly originally proposed this stunt to her editor she was turned down.

"It is impossible for you to do it," was the terrible verdict. "In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. . . . so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this."

"Very well," I said angrily, "Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him."

A year later her editor gave her the go-ahead -- but with only one day's notice! Despite his skepticism, she was she able to beat Fogg's travel record, and she was able to shop and pack for the trip in less than a day. This was quite a feat when you consider that when she began shopping for her traveling dress at 11:00 in the morning, it was still just a length of fabric. By 5:00, and two fittings later, it was complete. She confined her baggage to a single piece of hand luggage.

One never knows the capacity of an ordinary hand-satchel until dire necessity compels the exercise of all one's ingenuity to reduce every thing to the smallest possible compass. In mine I was able to pack two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter.
. . . Over my arm I carried a silk waterproof, the only provision I made against rainy weather. After-experience showed me that I had taken too much rather than too little baggage. At every port where I stopped at I could have bought anything from a ready-made dress down . . . .

Well, I found all of these details fascinating. It's the sort of thing a male writer wouldn't have mentioned. I was also interested in reading about the challenges she faced as a woman traveling alone. And I very much enjoyed reading about her brief visit with Jules Verne and his wife as she passed through France. Both of them were very gracious to her despite the language barrier.

Through her translator she asked how he came to write his novel.

"I got it from a newspaper," was his reply. "I took up a copy of Le Siécle one morning, and found in it a discussion and some calculations showing that the journey around the world might be done in eighty days. The idea pleased me, and while thinking it over it struck me that in their calculations they had not called into account the difference in the meridians and I thought what a denouement such a thing would make in a novel, so I went to work to write one. Had it not been for the denouement I don't think that I should ever have written the book."

I'm enjoying Nellie Bly's book, but I wish I had a real copy of it. Like Nellie Bly, I prefer to travel light.

Words, Words, Words

2009-02-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

The biggest disappointment of my childhood was that no one would teach me to read until I went to school. And then, when I finally entered kindergarten, I discovered that I'd still have to wait another year. In those days, kindergarten confined itself to preschool activities such as smearing tempera paint onto newsprint with big clumsy brushes and learning to be away from one's mother for half a day. I felt rather superior to the other children because I knew how to write my name. I'd managed to wrangle that and the alphabet out of my mother. But she was afraid to teach me more for fear she'd do it wrong and ruin my academic career. (What can I say? It was an age of reverence for Experts.) I felt cheated all over again when I went to college and discovered that many of my friends had learned to read long before first grade! In fact, my husband-to-be couldn't even remember learning to read -- that's how young he'd been.

At any rate, I was finally initiated into the mysteries of written language and the monosyllabic world of Dick & Jane. "Look, Spot. Oh, look. Look and see." My parents have a home movie of my two younger brothers unhappily sitting beside me on the couch as I proudly read aloud them from my reader. Every so often they'd try to wriggle off , but I'd pull them back into position telling them, "Just wait -- the good part is coming."

I don't think they stuck around because I have no more memories of reading aloud to anyone except in school. Like most children who love to read and have access to a library, my reading level was soon far above my grade level though my everyday speech did not reflect my reading vocabulary. I had not yet read Anne of Green Gables, but like Anne, I already knew that children who used unusual words were either laughed at or thought uppity. Besides, I didn't even know how to pronounce many of the words I commonly read. After all, I'd never heard anyone say them! I'd been taught sight reading in first grade, so "sounding it out" was not my first response when meeting a new word. And though I later acquired phonics, I was reading too fast and furiously in those days to apply it or to look up the word in a dictionary. Besides, who can ever make heads or tails of those dictionary pronunciation keys?

Consequently, I mentally pronounced "melancholy" as meh-latch-o-lee for quite a long time. And the latter pronunciation still has a more poignant feel to me. And even when I got the vowels right in a new word, I'd usually misplace the accent.

Even now, I still discover long-held mispronunciations. I've always pronounced "victuals" as vik-tchuals. Thanks to Dictionary.com's Word of the Day, I've just discovered that it's actually vit-ulz. How disappointing! I've seen "vittles" in print before which, as it turns out, is a variant spelling, but I'd thought it was a separate word. What a cheat! "Victuals" looks so Latinate, yet sounds so Appalachian. (Actually, it turns out that its original Anglo-French spelling vitaylle was changed by 1523 to conform to its Latin root, victualia. But the pronunciation remains vittle.)

Which is why I love online dictionaries! I click on the little speaker icon and it tells me how to say the word. Sometimes I sit there clicking it over and over, trying to overwrite a mispronunciation from my youth.

(I subscribe to two Word of the Day services, Dictionary.com's and Merriam-Webster.com's. Both include definitions, a little etymology, and examples of the featured word used in a sentence. Dictionary.com provides more example sentences than Merriam-Webster, but both are good.)

Escape From Hell

2009-01-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

Ooooo! Niven & Pournelle's Escape From Hell is coming out on February 17th. It's the sequel to their Inferno. I wonder if I should put it into my Amazon shopping cart.

I always thought that Niven & Pournelle wrote better novels together than either of them did on their own though I can't speak with any authority about their more recent work since I stopped reading them many years ago. And while I can still remember that I liked or disliked this or that title, I can't recall much about them any more. However, I've read Inferno many times, most recently about two years ago while I was also reading Dante. (That was fun!)

Of course, the novel doesn't buy into the whole Catholic concept of hell, sin, and purgatory, but it was a clever concept and a lot of fun. And I'm willing to suspend a fair amount of disbelief in exchange for a light and funny romp. Especially since the main character, Allen Carpenter, was forced by circumstance reexamine his basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything.

Can Niven & Pournelle do it again? Would some of the aspects that intrigued me still be there? Do I want to spend $16.47 (preorder price) to find out?

Actually, it's not just a budgetary matter. Ever since becoming a widow, I've lost much of my book-buying enthusiasm. Part of the fun of building the library was being able to share it with someone. But now I'm alone.

As homeschooling parents we also used to tell ourselves that we were building the library not just for ourselves, but for our children -- so that they would have the joy of discovering strange and wonderful books in the family library as they grew up. But now they're grown, mostly gone, and not likely to come browsing round our shelves.

Eternity seems so close sometimes, and they say that you can't take it with you. As I look around at my wall-to-wall shelves, I begin to think that I probably won't even be able to read all the books I've already got. Is there any point to piling up more?

7 Quick Takes - Library Edition

2009-01-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm joining Jennifer for 7 Quick Takes on Friday:

1) There are some mysteries of human behavior that will probably never be solved. For example, judging by the number of times the topic crops up in the works of Miss Manners, scientists have yet to discover why a sizable number of people are afraid to use the fancy guest towels in their host's bathroom. Similarly, I've yet to figure out why so many patrons of the public library, people who probably leave their towels on the bathroom floor, feel such a compulsion to return books to the library shelves when they have no idea where they belong. These patron-shelved books are easy to spot because they've usually been placed on the shelf either upside down or backwards (i.e. with the pages facing out).

2) This problem is especially acute in the children's section, but I harbor no ill-will against the perpetrators because I'm so glad to see kids using and enjoying the books. However, this past week as I was sitting on the floor reordering a lower shelf that was hopelessly mixed up, a very small Asian boy toddled up to me with a picture book and asked "Where this go?"

"May I put it away for you?" I asked politely, curbing the urge to hug him in gratitude. His eyes widened and a delighted grin split his face as he handed me his book. A little while later he returned with a slightly larger boy in tow who also had a book needing to be shelved. I thanked them gravely.

Oh, mothers, unless your infant prodigy knows the Dewey Decimal system, please teach them that when they've finished looking at a book, they should simply leave it on one of the tables for us to reshelve. It's so much easier for us library aides to put books directly where they belong rather than to have to weed them out of the wrong places while we're trying to shelve other books.

3) One thing that's really struck me while working in the children's section is how much more fantasy there is now than when I was a kid. I seem to recall its being rather rare in those days, so my hunger for fantasy was usually fed with fairy tales, mythology and folk tales. But the shelves are awash with it now, much of it in trilogies or even longer series. Sometimes I have to restrain myself from acting the old curmudgeon, "Ah, you youngsters don't know how easy you have it nowadays . . .

(Historical note: I know that The Hobbit had already been published before I was born, but I don't think I ran into it until at least the 6th or 7th grade -- and that was only by round-about chance. I was reading an anthology of supposedly humorous stories, and the only good selection in it was the riddle chapter from The Hobbit. So naturally I had to track down the complete book. Interestingly, the anthology had the original version of "Riddles In the Dark." The copy of The Hobbit in our local public library had the revised chapter which Tolkien prepared after writing The Lord of the Rings. The Narnia books were also in our library during that period, but I never deigned to read them. Why? I thought the titles sounded stupid. Ah, youth!)

4) It's also interesting to see which authors which I read and enjoyed when I was a kid are still on the shelves. (I'm not talking about big names like Laura Ingalls Wilder or Beverly Cleary. Just favorite authors whose books happened to cross my path when I was young.) I'm pleased to see that Noel Streatfeild's "Shoe" books are still being read. I was not surprised to see at least some Carol Ryrie Brink since she won the Newberry for Caddie Woodlawn. However, they don't have Baby Island which I would dearly love to read again. (I haven't seen a copy in almost forty years!) I am delighted that Mara Daughter of the Nile is still on the shelves, but The Lost Queen of Egypt is not. In fact, getting a used copy online would run me at least a hundred dollars! Sigh.

5) The big excitement at our library lately was the recent discovery that someone was checking out our new books with a stolen library card and selling them on eBay. However, thanks to his invincible ignorance of how libraries work, he was tracked down and caught. The moral is: Don't mess around with librarians. They have powers far beyond those of mortal men! (Even if we don't wear capes and spandex.)

6) Some people might think that a four hour stretch of shelving books would be boring. But I love my job! It allows me to become more closely acquainted with the collection than I might otherwise be. Whenever I see a book that looks interesting, I sneak it onto the bottom shelf of my bookcart so that when I've gone off duty, I can examine it more closely and decide whether I want to check it out. (I am very scrupulous about not reading blurbs while I'm on the clock.) Consequently, my check-outs mirror whatever section I've been assigned that week. Here are a few of the library books I've recently borrowed:

Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel by Richard H. Minear.

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, interviews selected and edited by Karen Wilken. (The interviews are from various sources and date from 1973 to 1999. Includes illos from Gorey's books and copious notes.)

Down a Sunny Dirt Road: An Autobiography by Stan & Jan Berenstain. (The creators of the popular Berenstain Bears books write alternating chapters describing their early lives and fine arts training. I hadn't realized they already had a flourishing career as cartoonists and authors long before they started writing their books about the Bear family. They also describe how, with the sometimes dubious help of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess), they got into the children's book business. )

7) One of the perks of working in the library: you get an advance peek at the donations that come in. Donated books are sold by the Friends of the Library. I bought a stack of nearly new children's books last week for about 25 cents each.

Food or Books?

2009-01-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Just now I am reading Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction by Peter Costello.

In 1848 the young Jules Verne and his friend Edouard Bonamy went to Paris. An impoverished student, Verne struggled to keep his expenses down to 40 sous per day, a budget recommended by his careful father. Between them, the two young men had only one evening suit and one pair of dress shoes. Consequently, they had to take turns going out in the evening to the elegant salons of Mme. de Jomini, Mme. de Mariani and Mme. de Barrere.

But for Verne the real hardship was not having enough money to buy books.

At the beginning of December Jules was telling his father about buying a complete Shakespeare and a set of Scott. He got nervous shudders when he stood outside a bookshop, so great was his desire for books of all kinds. He went through 'all the torture of unsatisfied passion' when he could not buy them. He had been unable to resist the well-bound edition of Shakespeare and had to live on dried prunes for three days. (p. 39)

My goodness -- what utter disregard for the digestive system!

Seraphic Single Rides Again

2009-01-26T00:40:00.000-08:00

Seraphic Single is posting a new novella, The Swiss Guard on her current bog, Seraphic Meets Bridezilla. (Since it's a blog, you'll have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to the first chapter.) I don't know how long she'll be posting chapters. Two of her previous novellas were started on her blog; the finished versions were (and still are) only available through lulu.com.

The first one, The Tragical Tale of Alienus of England is "a tragicomic tale of a pious Catholic Englishman who flees academic Scotland with a witch at his heels." Romance, witchcraft, ancient battles, magic hedgehogs, and the traditional Latin Mass combine in an unlikely mixture that charms the reader.

It's sequel, The Widow of Saint-Pierre, is the story of "An opera singer. A musician. A cop. A composer. A mysterious young widow. They all come together under the roof of a sad blue house in the last remaining French possession in North America: Saint-Pierre et Miquelon." This one has a slower pace, and a mysterious tone. I like the musical imagery.

But what I'd really like to read is Seraphic's first novel which was set in Valhalla. The heroine is a female boxer who has just died. Another important character is Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. And I love the way she portrays the goddess Freya. (She's, like, your best girlfriend ever -- but very, very dangerous.) Alas, that novel has not yet found a publisher, so I haven't been able to read the ending. But I keep hoping, and I'm probably not the only one lighting votive candles.

Time Enough At Last

2009-01-14T01:18:00.000-08:00

The other day I discovered that you can watch old Twilight Zone episodes online. I never saw the series when it was originally broadcast. I was just a kid then, and not only did I have an early bedtime, but I was frightened to death by the theme music and opening credits. (Seriously, I think Rod Serling could have had me cowering under the covers just by reading aloud a shopping list.) Eventually, when I was older and braver, I saw many of the episodes in syndication. Still later, after the invention of the VCR, I was able to catch a good number of the remaining ones thanks to several Twilight Zone marathons on a local channel.

There's one episode that every book lover remembers, "Time Enough At Last," about a hapless bookworm who, surrounded by unsympathetic nonreaders, has little time or opportunity to read the books he loves. Then a nuclear holocaust leaves him all alone with plenty of books and all the time in the world to read them -- or so you'd think. I had to play this for Fillius who had never seen it. I wonder what it's like to see a Twilight Zone episode and not know that there's usually a twist at the end.

By the way, the book cover above is from my copy of The Twilight Zone Companion which we bought in 1982. I never did see all the episodes, so I devoured this book which has a synopsis of every show along with notes on how each episode came to be written, details of the filming, etc. (For you youngsters who grew up in the DVD era, it was sort of like having a super deluxe edition with lots of Special Features.)

What Won't You Read?

2009-01-13T01:30:00.000-08:00

My profile says, "I'll read the back of the cereal box if nothing else is handy," so you might wonder if there's anything I won't read.

In a physical sense, no. If my gaze falls upon a line of print, that baby's read even before I'm aware of having done so. It's that involuntary -- though once I'm aware of what's on the page, I can mentally cross my eyes and block out the rest of it.

But in a voluntary sense -- being a creature of free will and practicing good old fashioned custody of the eyes -- I can and do refrain from reading certain things. Sometimes, it's merely a matter of taste; other times it's a question of integrity. I don't read:

The Uninteresting -- because life is too short to read things that bore you. Like the sports page or auto repair manuals. But dull comic strips are perhaps the greatest offenders because by nature they are supposed to be funny. (I bet Thomas Aquinas has written something about this.) For me, the most boring comic strip in the world is Marmaduke. It has only one joke: The Dog Is Big. But Ziggy is a close second: it has no joke at all. Neither does Love is . . . , though it was never intended to be funny, I guess. (It is, however, very boring.)

Hate Literature -- especially the kind Jack Chick leaves tucked under your windshield wipers. (Okay, so I have read a couple. That's how I know they're hate literature. Though some are merely inept, another reason to give them a miss.)

The Inept -- again, life is too short. Unless the work in question is so bad as to make me giggle.

The Icky -- anything in the horror genre, erotica, pornography, or the depiction of torture . . . that kind of stuff. Also anything with "Precious Moments" illustrations!

What won't you read?

The Twelve Days of Christmas

2009-01-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

I took a walk through the neighborhood the day after Christmas and noticed a forlorn Christmas tree already lying in the gutter, awaiting the trash truck. It reminded me of an email I'd recently received from my daughter who now shares a house with three other girls in the Pacific Northwest. She said she was thankful that we'd brought up our kids with lots of Advent and Christmas traditions in contrast to one of her housemates who reported that all they did on Christmas was open their presents and then stare at each other and feel sort of depressed. In Biblioland we celebrate four weeks of Advent (including the special feasts of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Nicholas) followed by twelve days of Christmas culminating in the feast of The Epiphany.

Naturally, food plays a big role in all these celebrations, as Darwin Catholic describes in A Taste of Christmas. And I'm with him on the tamales! But this year I have not done any Christmas baking or even any tamale making. (I've been diagnosed with prediabetes, and the only way to keep myself from eating as I oughtn't is just not to have the stuff in the house.)

However, I can still enjoy the other taste of Christmas which is traditional in our family -- reading aloud. Starting on Christmas Eve, Fillius and I have been reading Christmas stories or Christmas related selections from much-loved and familiar books. The list varies from year to year. Here is what we read during the twelve days of Christmas, 2008:

"Christmas" from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Little House books have many good Christmas chapters. This one is an an account of an iconic American Christmas. It's got all the elements: preparing handmade gifts, baking special treats for the big day, extended family coming to visit, playing in the snow with cousins, listening to the grownups talk after you've gone to bed, and the excitement of gifts in your stocking. Laura's ecstasy at receiving her special Christmas gift, a rag doll handmade by Ma, still moves me as much as it did when I first read it as a third-grader.

A Christmas Card for Mr. McFizz by Obren Bokich. Mr. McFizz, a fussy little ground squirrel is appalled when the Griswolds, a family of packrats, move into the hollow tree next to his tidy little burrow. He watches with increasing annoyance as the collection of clutter in their front yard grows larger and larger. Yet despite their messy ways, the Griswolds have many friends. Mr. McFizz, perhaps because he's always so busy cleaning, has none. Most of the time this doesn't bother him much. But as Christmas approaches he becomes melancholy because he never receives any Christmas cards. When the Griswolds' mailbox overflows with them, poor Mr. McFizz goes completely off his head and hatches a plot to squelch their simple happiness. How he has a change of heart and reconciles with his neighbors is one of the better examples of the "learning the true meaning of Chrismas" genre. (I especially liked that even after the reconcilation, Mr. McFizz still dislikes his neighbor's clutter. That seemed a realistic touch.)

"Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves" in Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. I love reading about shy Matthew's valiant attempts to buy a new dress for Anne who, because of Marilla's notions of squelching vanity in children, has never had a pretty, fashionable dress like the other girls -- one with puffed sleeves! (It's hard to believe that there are people who haven't read the Anne books before, but if you're among them, check out the Lucy Maud Montgomery Reading Challenge at Reading to Know.)

Spirit Child: A Story of the Nativity translated from the Aztec by John Bierhorst. This story was composed in the sixteenth century by Fray Bernardino Saghagún with the assistance of Aztec poets. The basic story comes from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but it also combines elements from medieval legends and traditional Aztec lore. The style in which the story unfolds is very much in the Aztec tradition. Some portions, such as the angels' song to the shepherds even use Aztec figures of speech. This aspect of the book is reinforced by Barbara Cooney's beautiful illustrations. (I love her depiction of the archangel Gabriel with his green feathered wings and jaguar skin garment.) A beautiful and reverent retelling of the birth of Christ.

The Church Mice At Christmas by Graham Oakley. We're big fans of Oakley's Church Mice books. They take place in the English village of Wortlethorpe where all of the mice in the community have taken up residence in the local Anglican church where, in exchange for sundry chores such as polishing the brasses, the vicar gives them a safe haven in which to live and a weekly allowance of cheese. This book recounts their attempt to acquire the funds for "A real Christmas party with paper hats and crackers and games and things." The problem is that parties cost money, and they're all as poor as, well, church mice. When their attempt to raffle off Sampson (the church cat) is unsuccessful, they attempt to earn money by Christmas caroling, having "spent the whole morning practising their scales and the whole afternoon sorting out the pronunciation of Wenceslas." But their diminutive size is against them, and an inadvertent run-in with the local constabulary results in a mad chase through a toy store. Various other attempts to scrounge up the party fixings fail until Arthur and Humphry, the leaders of the church mice, inadvertently perform a public service which rewards the mice with the party of their dreams -- "In fact it [the party] was so good that they were all ill for three days after it . . . ." My kids always enjoyed poring over Oakley's illustrations which have a lot of humorous detail.

"Godmother's Magic" and "Dumpling Speaks Her Mind" in Family Sabatical by Carol Ryrie Brink. Though better known for her pioneer novels Caddie Woodlawn and Magical Melons, Brink wrote many other novels which were among my childhood favorites and which I read aloud to my own children when they were small. Family Sabatical is about a midwestern American family which spends six months in France while their father, a history professor, is researching a book. The children's discovery of French culture and their attempts to celebrate such American holidays as Halloween and Thanksgiving are very funny. In the first of these Christmas chapters, I loved the description of their visit to Notre Dame on Christmas Eve. This non-Catholic family had never been in such a large church before "nor one so sweetly mysterious. Very quietly they walked all around in it, feeling its strangeness, which was at the same time a kind of warm familiarity." Far back in the candlelit church they discover a life-sized creche. "The children stood and looked at it for a long time, and suddenly this was more like Christmas Eve than any Christmas Eve that they had ever known before." The second chapter is about the family's celebration of Christmas the next morning and about the healing one member of the family experiences when she discovers that home is not a place as such; it's wherever your family is.

"Welcome Yule" by Jan Mark in An Oxford Book of Christmas Stories edited by Dan Pepper. This collection, which I checked out of the library, was a real disappointment. Published in the 1980s, the stories in this collection are mostly grim and gritty, often having very little to do with Christmas. "Welcome Yule" was a delightful exception. The new vicar, who has the personality of an enthusiastic steam roller has organized carol singing on the evening of the feast of St. Thomas despite the strange reluctance of the villagers to go out singing on that date. Their objection? That's the night that the "Waits" always sing. And no one wants to offend them. Who are the Waits? No one in the parish wants to explain it to the Vicar. So no one shows up at the scheduled time except the family of the narrator whose father had been shanghaied into playing a portable harmonium for this gig. Everyone else is hiding behind closed doors. The Vicar, already annoyed, is especially exasperated when they glimpse another group singing curiously antique carols. When he stomps off to confront them, he gets rather more than he bargained for.

The Story of the Three Kings by John of Hildesheim, retold by Margaret B. Freeman. "Of the three worshipful Kings all the world is full of praise from the rising of the sun to its down-going, and what these three Kings did at the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ is written oft in many books and places but what they did after is peradventure to many men unknown." So begins this best seller of the Middle Ages. At the time this book was written, the Magi were among the best loved saints in Christendom. But the author, a Carmelite friar, was the first to gather together the many legends of Balthasar, Melchior and Jaspar into one book. Margaret Freeman based her retelling on a Middle English text of 1399 and managed to preserve the flavor of the original. What I love about this book is that everything is full of meaning. For example, part of the gold which Melchior offered to the Christ Child was thirty gilt pennies. And these same thirty pennies were owned by anyone who was anybody throughout history. They were made by Thara, the father of Abraham. Then Abraham used them to buy a burial ground for himself and his family. Joseph was sold into Egypt for these same gilt pennies; later they were used to buy spices in Saba for Jacob's burial. These self-same pennies were later brought to King Solomon by the Queen of Saba. And after Jerusalem was destroyed, they were brought to the land of Arabia of which Melchior was king. Our Lady lost the thirty pennies during the flight to Egypt. They were later found by a shepherd who had an incurable disease. The shepherd was cured by Christ who recognized the pennies and told the sheherd to offer them to the temple. And wouldn't you know, it was those same thirty pennies with which the temple priests paid Judas to betray Our Lord. Whew! I also love the charming and colorful detail of these stories. For instance, when the star first arose it had in it the form and likeness of a young child and a sign of the cross above him. Out of the star came a voice saying, "Unto us is born this day the King and Lord that folk have long sought. Go then and seek him and do him worship." Not historically accurate, but who cares? In a way, it's early fan fiction!

I Syng of a Mayden

2008-12-25T07:43:00.000-08:00

I first read this Middle English lyric over thirty years ago when I was taking a class in Medieval literature. I've always loved it and thought I would share it with you today. Merry Christmas!

I syng of a mayden
That is makeles;
King of alle kynges
To here sone she ches.

He cam also stylle
Ther his moder was
As dew in aprylle,
That fallyt on the gras.

He cam also stylle
To his moderes bowr
As dew in aprille
That fallyt on the flour.

He cam also stylle
Ther his moder lay
As dew in aprille,
That fallyt on the spray.

Moder and mayden
Was never non but sche;
Wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

I sing of a maiden
Who is matchless/mate-less;
The king of all kings for her son she chose.

He came as still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falls on the grass.

He came as still
To his mother's bower
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.

He came as still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falls on the spray (branch or twig).

Maiden and mother
None was but she;
Well may such a lady
God's mother be.

[Original from A Middle English Anthology, edited by Ann S. Haskell. The modern English "translation" is mine. I read this poem over thirty years ago in a Medieval literature class I took in college.]

Library Kid Lit: 2 of 3

2008-12-23T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter

Subtitled A True Story from Iraq, this picture book recounts the amazing story of one librarian's attempt to save her library's collection from the ravages of war.

Alia Muhammad Bake, the librarian of Basra, is worried because she fears that her library's collection will soon become a casualty of war. She begs the governor for permission to move the books to a safer place, but he refuses. So every night she secretly fills her car with books and takes them home for safekeeping. When war reaches the city she enlists the help of the restaurant owner next door. Together, with other local people, they sneak the library's books into the restaurant. The library burns to the ground, but the books remain safely hidden. When the war moves to another location, all thirty thousand books are secretly removed to private homes until some future day when peace will return and a new library can be built.

This story is very sparely written. We don't know who is fighting or what they're fighting about. Or why the governor refuses to let Alia move the books to safer place. War is portrayed merely as a force, a roaming "beast." Politics as such don't really come into the story.

The focus of the narrative is the preservation of the books, some new -- some very old, which as a collection is "more precious . . . than mountains of gold." Although The Librarian of Basra will not be noted for its literary style, the rescue of the Basra's Central Library by Alia Muhammad Baker will inspire every bibliophile.

Library Kid Lit: 1 of 3

2008-12-20T08:20:00.000-08:00

Though only a lowly aide, I really enjoy my new job at the public library. My only duty is to shelve books, which probably strikes most people as incredibly boring. But one of my few innate talents is being able to effortlessly put Dewey decimal numbers in order, so this is an easy, stress free job for me. And I stumble across so many interesting titles I might not otherwise discover.

This is particularly true when shelving children's picture books. Since I no longer have young children of my own, I haven't kept up with new titles. Now I'm discovering lots that I might like to buy for my grandchildren. (Naturally, I don't flip though enticing picture books while I'm on the job. I just set them on the bottom shelf of my book cart and check them out when I go off duty. Just so you know.)

Recently I came across three titles which caught my eye because they had to do with libraries. The first one was The Boy Who Was Raised by Librarians by Carla Morris. Isn't that an evocative title? The opening words are, "Melvin lived in the Livingston Public Library. Well . . . he didn't really live there. He just spent lots and lots of time there."

The book follows Melvin's library adventures from the days when he was so small he was barely able to peep over the top of the check-out counter. Every day he stops on his way home from school to visit the library, and he always makes sure to visit the reference librarians whom he loves because, "Whatever he was interested in, they were interested in too." And honestly, they are the most wonderful librarians in the world.

Whether Melvin's interested in snakes, bugs, or baseball cards, his three librarian friends are ready and eager to help him track down and organize information because, "That's how librarians are. They just can't help it." (I particularly liked the segment in which the librarians help Melvin practice for his part in his second grade class play. He's been cast as the Enormous Eggplant. While two of the librarians teach Melvin to memorize his lines and project his voice, the third reads aloud to him from Organic Gardening magazine "to help him find his motivation.")

Through the years Melvin attends all of the library's special programs. When he's in high school he even gets a part time job there. All three librarians proudly attend his graduation and miss him when he goes away to college, though he keeps in touch with them by letter and email.

And then, many years later, a new little boy comes into the Livingston Public Library where he is greeted by the same three librarians -- plus Livingston's newest librarian: Melvin himself!

Although some of the Amazon reviewers criticized this book for being unrealistic (i.e. that you'd never find that level of staffing or service in the children's department of any public library), I liked the book and I thought that although the portrayal of the librarians may have been a bit idealized, it did in fact capture the spirit that animates good librarians -- not just an interest in books and reading, but in gathering, organizing, and using information. And in helping others to do so. As the three librarians explain, after helping Melvin retrieve, identify, classify and catalog the inhabitants of his bug collection which escaped while he was in the library:

"That's how we are," explained Leeola.
"When we see chaos...," began Betty.
"...we organize and catalog," finished Marge. "It's in our nature."

Agents in the fight against entropy and chaos -- what a noble calling! In a small way, I share in it as I put away books, read the shelves, and reshelve the many books which kids have helpfully shoved backwards into the wrong places.

7 Quick Takes Friday

2008-12-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

Every Friday Jennifer at Conversion Diary has been posting "7 Quick Takes" in which she blogs about about seven topics too slight to support individual posts of their own. Though I seem to have trouble posting even one topic (however slight) per week, I thought I would give "7 Quick Takes" a try. (I'd planned to add to this blog post all week long, but actually it's taken me more than a week to compose it.)

1) You see all kinds of odd things in the library. A couple of days ago, at the end of my shift, I noticed a pair of false teeth on one of the library tables. I can only assume that the old fellow ambling towards the magazines had just slipped his teeth out in order to get more comfortable. He must certainly feel at home in our library.

2)And you hear all kinds of things in the children's section of the library. As I was shelving picture books I overheard two very small children chatting as they played with the toys in the game corner. "That lady is my babysitter," the little girl explained to her companion. "My real mommy is in jail because she does drugs." Okay.

3) Mysteries are a genre in which I am not very well read because I've never been able to fathom the appeal of a story which requires that someone be murdered as a precondition of the action. However, now that I'm shelving at the public library, and a wider variety of books is passing through my hands, I've checked out a couple of them just to try. (I'd like to like them. They usually have such interesting titles.) My most recent attempt was Ash Wednesday by Ralph McInerny, a "Father Dowling Mystery."

I pulled it off the shelf because I'd previously read an article by McInerny, "On Being a Catholic Writer," and I was curious to see how he'd handle Catholicism in one of his own novels. I was further intrigued because, according to the dust jacket, the story involved an ethical question concerning life support and euthanasia.

But I was distinctly underwhelmed. To be honest, I had trouble keeping the characters straight. And Father Dowling was off-screen most of the time, so I really never got a feel for him. But since this novel is one of a series, perhaps it was written for an audience who already knows all of the continuing characters and doesn't require much in the way of characterization. Personally, I felt the book was pretty thin.

4) Actually, I do enjoy some mysteries -- older stuff such as Sherlock Holmes or G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. And I also like Dorothy Sayers' books because they are actual novels which just happen to be mysteries. This past week I've also been enjoying a book of short stories, English Country House Murders edited by Thomas Godfrey. But again, the collection included a lot of older authors such as Wilkie Collins whose Woman in White I devoured a couple of years ago. And I really enjoyed the female protagonist in Baroness Orczy's "The Fordwych Castle Mystery." I'd never been able to get into her The Scarlet Pimpernel, so this delightful short story was a pleasant surprise.

5) I've just read Matilda by Roal Dahl. I'd recently seen the movie which I enjoyed very much. (Naturally -- since the young protagonist is a voracious reader! How often do you see that in a major motion picture?) So I decided to try the book. Ho-hum. The movie was better -- which is not my usual response to a movie vs. book comparison. I had the same reaction to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I much preferred the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory which was delightfully zany, magical and bizarre. The book seemed flat by comparison.

Perhaps I should try reading The Witches (and watching the movie) to see if the pattern holds.

Why is Dahl so popular?

6) We got a catalog in the mail which had many book-related gift items. One of them was a Christmas tree ornament with the inscription, "She is too fond of books, and it has addled her brain." The quotation was attributed to Louisa May Alcott, but I have my doubts. It doesn't much sound like her. I've read all of Alcott's novels many times* and probably all of her short stories (including obscure ones such as "A Free Bed" which was printed as a chapbook by Friends of the Brigham Young University Library in 1978). But I do not remember this quote at all. Can anyone tell me if it is indeed Alcott, and if so, where it appears? I will admit that I've only read her letters and journals once since I don't own copies. Might it be in there? Or is the company that sells this item just faking everyone out?

*Well, now that I think of it, I've only read Moods once because I don't actually own a copy of it.

7) A rather more charming, book related gift would be either the Bibliovore or Bibliophibian tee shirts. I'd be tempted to buy them were I not so cheap. But library aides aren't allowed to wear tee shirts with pictures, slogans or logos, so I can't even justify their purchase as work related.

Saint Nicholas: A Saint for Everyman

2008-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas. All the children are now gone and grown, no little shoes were lined up at the front door last night waiting to be filled with chocolate coins and other traditional treats. However Fillius and I still maintain the family tradition of reading aloud from The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas by Bernarda Bryson. Usually we skip around in the book, hitting all of our favorites during the octave of the feast. But this year I decided to start reading at the very beginning of the book and to work our way through to the end. So last night, the vigil of the feast, I began by reading the opening words of the book:

"Here is the story of Saint Nicolas, Bishop of Myra, patron saint of mariners, moneylenders, thieves and children; protector of travelers, turners, dyers, coopers, boatmen, bootmakers, sawyers, seedmen, mercers, merchants, Greeks, cities, Jews, packers, spinsters, pirates, Russians, pickpockets, haberdashers, children, fishermen, pilgrims, pilgrims, prisoners, parish clerks, sailors and unwedded maids; defender of the Faith and maker of many true miracles." He really is the patron saint of everybody! (I love illustrations in this book. The one on the facing page shows a crowd of little figures -- examples of all the many groups of which St. Nicolas is a patron. But what is a centaur doing among them? I haven't quite figured that one out.)

The first story tells about the birth of Saint Nicolas and how the nurses who sought to bathe the infant saint were completely freaked out when he stood upright in the bath and spoke to them in Greek. Convinced that he was possessed by the devil, they fled the house. Then he grieved his mother by refusing to nurse on Tuesday or Friday.

"Oh my dear child, what is this curse that has fallen upon us? Am I made of poison that you refuse to take my milk?"

To her great surprise the baby replied to her, speaking clearly, 'Oh Mother, ' he said, 'do you not know that today is Friday and is a fasting day, and that Tuesdays are fasting days also, when the good and pious take no food?" Then the mother was full of joy, for she saw that the child would grow up to be a holy man, perhaps even a Saint, and that he was in no way possessed by the devil.

If you were not around to read it last year, you might like to click here to read one of the later stories in the book, "How Saint Nicolas Met and Overcame the Goddess Diana."

Or you could read this Irish story about St. Nicolas from from another book: The Real St. Nicholas: Tales of Generosity and Hope From Around the World, by Louise Carus.

Nicolas certainly did get around!

Advent Calendar for Little Bibliophiles

2008-12-01T00:23:00.000-08:00

One of the things I like about my parish is that every so often they'll permit Catholic booksellers to display their wares outside the church for people to browse through after Mass. This makes Catholic Bibliophagist very happy because no matter how many mail order catalogs she receives in the mail, there is nothing like flipping through an actual copy of a book to help her decide whether or not to buy it. (This is especially true for children's books. Sometimes a nicely illustrated picture book is spoiled by a really lame rhyming text.)

Here is a picture of an Advent calendar which I bought for my grandchildren who already show signs of becoming bibliophibians. Inside are twenty-four tiny books (1.5 " x 1.5" -- Ooo, so cute!), one for each day before Christmas starting on December 1st. Each features a Bible story, prayer or song and has a gold cord attached so that they can also serve as Christmas tree ornaments.

I didn't want to rip the shrink wrap off before mailing it, so I haven't actually read the text. (Please don't let it be lame!) But it's got an imprimatur, so there's a sporting chance that at least the content will be okay.

B16: My Kind of Guy!

2008-11-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

I was charmed to read this news story about the Vatican's new bookstore.They dedicated it to Pope Benedict XVI who is not only a prolific author, but a real book lover as well. He has a personal library of 20,000 books.

When he was elected in 2005, a custom-fitted, private library was added to the papal apartments which was undergoing an extreme makeover to bring the plumbing and electrical systems up to code and to provide a more permanent solution to its leaky roof. (Large drums had been strategically placed above the false ceilings to catch drips.)

It was "Extreme Makeover: Vatican Edition." And while the pope didn't whoop or jump up and down at the unveiling, he made it clear he was pleased with the results.

"I can only admire the things you've done, like these beautiful floors," he told the more than 200 architects, engineers and workers involved in the remodeling project.

"I really like my new library, with that antique ceiling. For me it's like being surrounded by friends, now that there are books on the shelf," he said.

"Surrounded by friends. . . " That's how I feel as I sit in my own library. When I moved to this new house, I was so happy that I was able to dedicate one whole room as a library. I'm glad that Benedict didn't have to leave any of his books stored in boxes either.

Book Friends

2008-11-06T06:20:00.000-08:00

"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet gracious discourse of my book-friends."
--Helen Keller

Library Books

2008-11-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

Whenever I mention to my mom that Fillius and I plan to visit the local public library, she shakes her head in disbelief. Why, she wonders, should anyone owning as many books as we do, need to visit a public library? I suppose it's because I don't actually own every book in the world. (It just seems that way.) And because there are books I want to read that I don't necessarily want (or need) to own.

I'm going to visit my daughter on Friday, so I'm checking my stack of library books to see which ones need to go back before I leave. I thought it might be interesting to list the titles I've got checked out at the moment to see what a Catholic reader with catholic tastes has been reading.

Hearts and Hand: The Influence of Women & Quilts on American Society by Pat Ferrero et al. (The author's mildly feminist outlook kept bumping into things, but it was a generally good history of women, their quilts, and the political and reform movements that they supported.)

Where Books Fall Open: A Reader's Anthology of Wit and Passion edited and illustrated by Bascove. (Lovely paintings, but the selections were not as interesting as I'd hoped, thoughI did get a few good book-related quotes for my collection.)

Ramona's World by Beverly Cleary. (Published in 1999, and I'd somehow missed reading it. Wow! Cleary's still got it.)

Beverly Cleary by Jennifer Peltak. (In the "Who Wrote That?" series of biographies for young readers. Pretty good, though heavily based on Cleary's two volume autobiography.)

Healthy Crockery Cookery by Mable Hoffman.

When Babies Read: A Practical Guide to Help Young Children With Hyperlexia, Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism by Audra Jensen. (I checked out this book because I was curious about hyperlexia.)

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter by "The Waiter." (Based on the blog of the same name. I really enjoyed this one.)

Noche Buena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories edited by Nicolas Kanellos (Pretty good!)

The Illuminated Alphabet: An Inspirational Introduction to Creating Decorative Calligraphy by Patricia Seligman. Calligraphy by Timothy Noad. (This book is simply gorgeous! I wish this book had been around when I was young and struggling to do calligraphy and illumination on my own.)

Everyday Dress 1650 - 1900 by Elizabeth Ewing. (About ordinary clothing as opposed to "fashion." Lots of good pictures.)

Sister Anne's Hands by Marybeth Lorbiecki, illustrated by K. Wendy Popp. (This is a lovely picture book. Set in the very early 1960s, the narrator is a seven year old girl describing an incident that took place the year her class was taught by Sister Anne, the first black teacher at the local parochial school. The illustrations are lovely and have a very period feel to them. The only quibble I have is that the text opens, "The summer I turned seven, flowers had power, peace signs were in, and we watched the Ed Sulivan Show every Sunday night." But "flower power" was a slogan from the late 60s and early 70s and the illustrations and story situation seem to be of the early 60s. But what do I know? I was there, but I had my nose in a book.)

The Thought That Counts: A First Hand Account of One Teenager's Experience With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Jared Douglas Kant. (Besides speaking to young people with OCD, I think this book would be helpful for anyone trying to understand and live with a family member who has this disorder.)

California Demon by Julie Kenner. (Billed as "the secret life of a demon-hunting soccer mom," this was a fun read which I previously wrote about here.)

The Corporal Works of Murder by Sister Carol Anne O'Marie. (I seldom read mysteries, but this one caught my eye as I was shelving at the library. I wondered how the author was going to handle her protagonist, an middle-aged modern nun in San Francisco. Not bad, though I guessed the identity of the murderer early on.)

Well, I'll return some of these when I go to work today. Then I have to find some good books to take with me on the plane. If I traveled a lot (and had big bucks) I would certainly be tempted to buy a Kindle. I always worry about running out of things to read when I'm away from home. But now that I'm getting older, it's getting harder to lug around a big stack of books.

My Election Post

2008-11-03T07:11:00.000-08:00

One of the things I found most difficult about coming of age during the '60s and '70s was the political intensity of everyone around me. Not to mention, the political righteousness. I don't mean the righteousness felt by a partisan for his particular cause, but the righteous belief that politics was man's highest endeavor and would bring about the millennium and an end to all social ills. Had my own thought been a little more coherent in those days, I probably would have been muttering "Put not your faith in princes," and "If you'd put that much energy into being excellent to one another, you wouldn't need politics." This passage from Little Women about Meg's response to politics pretty much summed up my feelings about it when I was in high school, and it still resonates with me today.

When John came down at last . . . he was agreeably surprised to find Meg placidly trimming a bonnet, and to be greeted with the request to read something about the election, if he was not too tired. . . . He read a long debate with the most amiable readiness and then explained in his most lucid manner, while Meg tried to look interested, to ask intelligent questions, and keep her thoughts from wandering from the state of the nation to the state of her bonnet. In her secret soul, however, she decided that politics were as bad as mathematics, and that the mission of politicians seemed to be calling each other names; but she kept these feminine ideas to herself, and when John paused shook her head, and said with what she thought diplomatic ambiguity:

"Well I really don't see what we are coming to."

I myself am one of the most apolitical persons on the planet which is why you'll never find an explicitly political post on Catholic Bibliophagist. In fact, I'm not registered for either political party. Like Treebeard, "I am not altogether on anybody's side because no one is altogether on my side, if you understand me . . ." Treebeard meant that no one cared about the forest the way he did. In my own case, neither political party entirely represents my position as a Catholic. (I think that's what frustrated journalists about JPII. They want to peg everyone as a either member of the left or the right, but they couldn't fit him into either box.)

I vote conscientiously in every election, but unless there's a moral issue involved, I find it hard to get excited or even interested in politics. However, most people don't share my impassivity as evidenced by this amusing story told by Jennifer at Conversion Diary:

. . . I heard about the most clever [Halloween] costume ever: a friend's nephew dressed in a t-shirt that said POLLSTER, and then carried an Obama bag and a McCain bag, and people could choose which one they put candy in. He evidently got a really impressive haul of candy from people who expressed their emotions about this election by dumping handfuls of goodies into their candidate's bag.

Smart kid!

All Souls Day

2008-11-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

A soul, a soul, a soul cake
 Please, good missus, a soul cake
 An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry
 Any good thing to make us all merry
 One for Peter, two for Paul
 Three for Him who made us all

God Bless the master of this house, the mistress also
And all the little children who 'round your table grow
Likewise your men and maidens, your cattle and your store
And all that dwells within your gates
 we wish you ten times more

A soul, a soul, a soul cake...

The lanes are very dirty and my shoes are very thin
I've got a little pocket to put a penny in
If you haven't got a penny, a ha' penny will do
If you haven't got a ha' penny, then God bless you

A soul, a soul, a soul cake
 Please, good missus, a soul cake
 An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry
 Any good thing to make us all merry
 One for Peter, two for Paul
 Three for Him who made us all

(A traditional song by that prolific chap, Annon.)

All Saints Day

2008-11-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a seasonal video which was brought to my attention by Jennifer's Favorite Links.

Halloween Reading

2008-10-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

At left is one of Fillius's Halloween pumpkins. This is actually last year's vegetal creation. This year's is currently in progress and probably won't be ready for a photo until evening -- because you just can't rush good art. Fillius does not restrict himself to pumpkins; last year his Jack-o-Lanterns were made out of potatoes in honor of the Irish side of the family.

Today I'm wearing my WWAKD tee shirt, so I'm officially in costume. The tee shirt and my skirt are both black, so we're all very seasonal around here.

This morning I was reading a post written by Fr. Dwight Longenecker (former Anglican clergyman, now a Catholic priest) after one of his children asked him if witches were real.

In my experience witches are very real indeed. I've never met one with green skin, a pointed nose with a wart on the end, nor have I seen them fly on a broom or heard them cackle like a demented crow. However, when I was an Anglican priest in England I served in a parish that was home to a witches coven, and not just any witches coven . . .

There was a negative feeling in the town and a string of unexplained tragedies and scandals within the church community. As a priest I was called out to a surprising number of low level hauntings, psychic disturbances and disturbed personalities. Once I learned who actually lived in the parish I was concerned. I was also concerned that the other clergy in the town simply laughed at the King of the Witches and dismissed the whole thing as so much nonsense.

Read Witches and Wizards to find out which weapon he and his friends decided to employ and how the conflict was resolved.

On a lighter note, while shelving books at the library this week, I chanced upon California Demon by Julie Kenner. I was in the mood for a frivolous book, so I checked it out. (That's one of the interesting things about being a library aide -- I get a chance to have look at how the other half reads. For instance, I had no idea that Danielle Steele wrote so many books!) California Demon is one in a series of novels about Kate Connor, retired demon hunter who's spent the last 14 years in the equally demanding profession of suburban housewife and stay at home mother.

However, as she explains at the beginning of the novel, "I'd been drawn back into active duty after a demon attacked me in my kitchen, setting off a whole chain of events which (as you can probably guess) pitted the forces of good against the forces of evil in one final, cataclysmic battle." (That's a reference to the previous novel, I presume.) After the dust settled, she found herself back on active duty as a Level Four Demon Hunter unbeknownst to anyone except her best friend, Laura who has her own amazing super powers. (". . . she's the woman who'd successfully returned outfits to Nordstrom despite the huge 75-percent Off, No-Return, Clearance-Final Sale signs plastered all over the store.")

So far, it's been a fun read, and I'm hoping that the light, humorous tone is an indication that it won't get too icky for me. As you may have guessed, I don't read books (or watch movies) in the horror genre. My life has had enough scariness in the past ten years that I've never felt the need to go in search of more as a form of amusement. So I don't really know whether or not some of Kenner's story elements are showing her individual creativity or just her ability to make good use of the genre's conventions.

For instance, in Kate Connor's world incorporeal demons usually can't do much except enviously watch human beings. They long to be human, and occasionally a demon will manage to hijack the body of a living person. But possession is pretty rare. Usually the best a demon can do is to reanimate the body of a person who's just died. So all those amazing stories you hear about people who die on the operating table and then come back to life; people who are trapped underwater for ten minutes but live to tell the tale; and those who walk away from a horrendous auto accident despite a massive blow to the head are not tales of miraculous survival, but the result of very determined demons.

I found that an interesting bit because I'd just read something similar in an entirely different sort of book, The Darkness Did Not by William Biersach. It's the second in a series of novels about Father John Baptist, a former cop turned Catholic priest in a Los Angeles very much like the real one. Father Baptist is on the outs with his bishop because he kept a low profile while in the seminary and only showed his true colors after ordination. He's an orthodox, traditional Catholic who, now that he is a priest, is committed to offering only the traditional Latin Mass.

In retaliation, his superiors put him on extended leave. But Father Baptist cashes in his pension from the police department and buys a tiny run down church, St. Philomena's, which the diocese had decided to close down and sell off. As it's his private property, he is free to offer the Latin Mass there and he's soon ministering to an unofficial parish of "rad-trad" Catholics including the arthritic Martin Feeny who plays Watson to Father Baptist's Holmes.

As in Biersach's previous book, the police department asks for Father Baptist's help in solving a murder case which has occult overtones. This time a serial killer is preying on beautiful young women who had previously shown an interest in the subject of vampires. The police are skittish because each murder victim was almost completely drained of blood, and there were no marks on the bodies except a curious neck wound. Is the murderer really a vampire?

For that matter, what is a vampire? In Biersach's novel, vampirism is the lowest form of demon possession because the demon merely takes possession of a corpse. But it's a hellish thing for all that.

As Father Baptist explains, "The vampire is an unholy amalgam of demon and dead flesh -- evil spirit and coarse matter, if you will -- which is the satanic mockery of the Incarnation in which the Son of God took on human flesh." The demon's reanimation of dead flesh is also a mockery of Christ's resurrection. And isn't that the jealous sort of thing that demons would do? Because Satan himself can't come up with anything original; he can only imitate and distort. Suddenly, because the author began to show a way in which the topic might fit into a Catholic worldview, vampirism became a story element I could take more seriously, and for the characters (in my mind at least) the stakes suddenly became higher. At this point, if it had been a movie, I probably would have been shouting, "Hey, guys! Don't go anywhere without your scapulars!" And I would have been serious, not sarcastic, because the universe of this novel is the same universe I live in -- one in which sacramentals are an incredible conduit of grace.

It's only fair for me to mention that Biersach has a writing style that will annoy many readers. The narrator, Martin Feeny, has a florid style of writing which doesn't bother me as much as it ought to, probably because I'm such a big fan of Victorian novels and children's books. But he also has other stylistic quirks that drive me up the wall. One, which was more frequent in the first novel, is his tendency to attribute volumes of meaning to Father Baptist's glance, followed by a terse remark. An example:

He stared upon us with penetrating eyes that seemed to whisper determined but fearfully, "Considering all that has happened, gentlemen, and is soon to transpire, do you really expect me to offer any comfort other than the same sufferings for which I admonished you to prepare?" But all he said was, "Nearly there."

In the previous novel he did this sort of thing over and over and over. It's not as frequent in this book, but I still shudder each time I encounter it. And accents are not his forte. He has an Eastern Rite bishop who talks just like Yoda! And the ethnic accents of other minor characters are just embarrassing.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book despite its limitations. For one thing, I enjoyed the Catholic geekery, though the author does get a little too self-indulgent at times. After all those segments with Monsignor Havermeyer practicing the rubrics for the Latin Mass (he's a former modernist priest who has seen the error of his ways), he should have had an important, Latin speaking role to play in the final confrontation. But no. As much as the author may have enjoyed writing some of the geekier segments, they ought to have been pruned if they were not significant to the plot.

Unlike some reviewers, I didn't mind the long liturgical descriptions. In fact, I loved the author's description of Benediction -- especially the part where Martin, despite the sublimity of the liturgy, finds himself becoming hopelessly distracted. The way his mind was jumping from subject to subject, despite his best efforts, was all too familiar. And I loved the Knights Tumblar, a Chestertonian group of men in evening dress, who gad about town drinking champagne when they're not kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament in all night prayer vigils. They are Father Baptist's back-up troops and true knights.

Well, I started this post early in the morning, and now it's so late that it will soon be All Saints Day. So while I still can, I will wish you a Happy Halloween and will close with one of the quotations which C.S. Lewis placed just before the preface of The Screwtape Letters:

"The devill . . . the prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked." -- Thomas More

Ah, so that's the problem . . .

2008-10-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

"Sir, he hath not fed of the dainties that are bred of a book; he hath not eat paper as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts."

--William Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost

Moving Day -- Moving Books

2008-10-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two years since I moved into my current house, and there are still boxes I've yet to unpack. Fortunately, none of them contain books. (Moving tip: always unpack the most important items first.) So why can't I find my copy of A Girl From Yamhill? I know I have a hardcover copy. Somewhere.

If you ever decide to move yourself and your library to a new house, here is some essential advice.

Beverly Cleary -- Who Knew?

2008-10-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Beverly Cleary ever since I was a kid, so I thought I was well acquainted with her oeuvre. But I never knew that she had written Leave it to Beaver tie-in novels.

But Peter D. Sieruta of Collecting Children's Books spilled the beans in his post, Leave it to Beverly which is written in the form of a dialog between Wally and Beaver Cleaver. I'd never heard of these three novelizations, Leave it to Beaver, Here's Beaver, and Beaver and Wally. Apparently Cleary didn't talk about them much, and Sieruta says that the only reference to them that he's found was in Beverly Cleary by Pat Pflieger, published in 1991.

"These books...have little of Cleary in them: they lack her air of easy confidence, and she seems uncomfortable with Beaver's 'gee-whiz' style of thinking and speaking that is so different from her own Henry Huggins. In novels that are almost collections of short stories, television episodes are expanded or altered or combined to emphasize family and growing up."

Sieruta currently works as a cataloger of children's books for a university (what a dream job!) and writes about my favorite genre in a way that is both personal and personable. I've put him on my list of Blogs to Check Every Day.

The first of his posts I stumbled across was this one which has pictures of his Newberry collection. As you know, I'm a sucker for photos of other peoples' libraries. But then I began to nose around his archives and discovered so many favorite posts that I'll have to limit myself to just three links.

Colorblind Writing is about making assumptions about an author's ethnicity based on the protagonists in his books, something which was probably more likely to happen before the appearance of the Internet where information about an author is just a click or two away.

Hornbooks and Battledores is a fun post about these forerunners of the primer, though I was surprised that the author hadn't previously known that hornbooks were actually covered by a thin layer of horn.

Library Lesson, one of my favorite posts, captures the school culture I remember from my own childhood, particularly the experience of being accused by an adult in authority of a misdeed of which one was innocent.

Which sort of brings me back to Beverly Cleary. One of the things she does so well is to portray her characters' experiences from a child's point of view. When you read her books, you really do see things through a child's eyes. They rang true when I first read them in the '50s; they rang true when I read her later books to my own children in the '80s. And they still ring true today as I discovered last week when I read Ramona's World which was published in 1999. That title, which had previously escaped me, was brought to my attention in Beverly Cleary by Jennifer Peltak, a title in the "Who Wrote That" series. It was heavily based on Cleary's two memoirs, A Girl From Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. I discovered it when I was emptying the bookdrop at the public library where I now work and checked it out because I was curious how the author would present Cleary's life to present day children. On the whole, she did a pretty good job of telling her audience what I would have most wanted to know about Beverly Cleary when I was a child: how did she come to write all those books? Because when I was a little girl, Beverly Cleary was the person I wanted to be when I grew up.

And I still remember the light bulb moment of my childhood when I realized that my other favorite author, Louisa May Alcott, was the Beverly Cleary of the 19th century. Like Cleary, Alcott's characters spoke a life-like idiom which her readers identified with.* In the books of both authors, universal themes were clothed in the characters' ordinary experiences and seasoned with a good deal of humor.

Alas, I never did grow up to write stories about ordinary boys and girls. And eventually fantasy became my favorite subgenre both for reading and writing. But even in fantasy, I still feel that the most successful books are grounded in the ordinary and have at least a dash of humor.

=======

*Did you know that some of the grammar and slang in Little Women was cleaned up between the first and second editions?

Update: Here's the link to the first edition republished by Norton Critical Editions.

Perelandra: The Opera

2008-10-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Oxford C.S. Lewis Society and the Donald Swann Estate are planning a production of the opera Perelandra by Donald Swann . The libretto was written by David Marsh. This opera was originally presented in 1964.

Although most people probably remember Swann for the comic and satirical songs which he and his partner Michael Flanders wrote in the 1950s and '60s, it should not be forgotten that he also composed The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle in which he set seven poems of J.R.R. Tolkien to music.

With His Usual Extravagance . . .

2008-10-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

On His Books

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

--Hilaire Belloc, Epigrams

Sucked Into a Book

2008-10-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

I guess this is what you'd call a music video? I sort of missed out on this whole concept since I've never been into popular music and had dropped out of popular culture by the time they appeared on the scene.

But I saw this on somebody's blog and its image of being pulled into a book was one which evoked instant sympathy.

When I was young I had a poster with an image from Ballentine's paperback edition of The Fellowship of Ring and the caption, "Come to Middle-Earth!" Although Tolkien never never liked those illustrations (especially the emu), I always thought them evocative. The poster hung on a closet door, and there were times when I quite believed that someday I'd open that door and find myself in Hobbiton.

(By the way, apparently this video is someone's altered version of the original. I looked up the original and it's not as enjoyable. Disclaimer: I know nothing about the original song or the group which produced the video. Though I watched the original, I suffer from an inability to distinguish most sung lyrics, so I'm not even sure what that song was about.)

Working Out at the Library

2008-10-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Hooray! I just got a part time job at one of the local public libraries. I don't mind that I'm just a lowly aide whose only duties consist of shelving books. Giving me a job in a library is like inviting a kid to run a candy store. But my librarian muscles are out of shape. My upper thighs are sore from squatting down to put books on the lowest shelves and then standing back up again. But I'm only working three days a week, so my legs will have a few days to recover before their next workout. (Now if only turning pages could somehow tighten the tummy muscles.)

Truth & Fiction

2008-10-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

All good books have one thing in common -- they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you have read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever.

--Ernest Hemingway

(I don't like Hemingway's books, but I think he got this bit right.)

Reading and Memory

2008-10-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

Katherine Langrish has an interesting post on how rereading certain books transports her back into her own past:

“The Tale of Mr Tod”. . . . I’m about six years old, sitting on a hard-wearing blue hall carpet, leaning against a polished cedarwood chest which my father brought back from Burma before I was born. Sunlight slants across the hall. My two dolls, the one with curly fair hair, the one with long brown hair, and my panda bear are lined up on the floor beside me. I am teaching school, and reading aloud to them this most exciting story, full of natural violence and terror.

I've had that experience too. Rereading Little House in the Big Woods triggers memories of the school library at Holy Trinity School in Virginia. I'm a new student, and this is the first school library I can remember ever having seen. The room seems enormous. The faint autumn sunlight slants down through tall windows. I feel shy and almost paralyzed -- so many books! Am I really allowed to choose one? Can I actually take it home with me? I can still see the shelf with the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. What riches! There are so many of them.

Interestingly, I sometimes find myself transported back to the age I was when I first read a book. That certainly happens with the Little House books unless I consciously rear my adult head in order to admire the transparency of the author's style.

What's even odder is the way that the certain actions will bring back the memory of certain books which I happened to be reading while performing similar actions in the past. For instance, I was reading through The Science Fiction Hall of Fame last year when I was also taking a clothing construction class. While sewing in the class room one day, I was idly thinking about a particularly tedious short story in that volume which I had just read. So now, every time I set in a sleeve, that particular story pops back into my head. Last week, as I was sewing down some bias tape around the armholes of the summer dresses I was making for my granddaughters, I could not shut out the memory of Jerry's Charge Account, a book I read in junior high. Why that particular book? I have no idea.

Madeline and the Cats of Rome

2008-10-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

What do I like about this new Madeline book written and illustrated by John Bemelmans Marciano? (Marciano is the grandson of Ludwig Bemelmans, the author of the original Madeline books.)

Well, I like the title; it's evocative and promises a good story. I like the cover. It is the most successful of Marciano's attempts to reproduce his grandfather's artistic style. And I have to give him points for his meticulous preparation. According to an AP article,

Marciano meticulously practiced Ludwig's line techniques, tracking down which pen nibs he preferred. First, Marciano blew up drawings from some of Ludwig's originals and sketched them in pencil, then placed clear velum on top and worked in pen and ink over and over again.
'I went over his lines less for the style than actually wanting to learn what his literal strokes were," he said. "How long they were. I was almost meditating over what he did. When I was ready to actually do the book I threw all that stuff away and just kind of went with it."

But however well Marciano has captured the mechanics of his predecessor's style, I think that there is still a tad less life in his artwork, perhaps because it is so studied.

Where the book really fails is in the text. Rhymed narrative is extremely hard to do, and Marciano's is just lame. The original Madeline books were never very easy to read aloud because of the way the text scans, but a skilled reader, with care, can pull off a smooth reading. I would never want to read aloud Madeline and the Cats of Rome. Marciano's syntax is annoying, his rhythm limps, and many of his rhymes are a real stretch. I am definitely not buying this for the granddaughters even though they are big fans of the original Madeline.

The Great Mystery

2008-10-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

"I see scores of people every day, and most of what makes them who they are remains a mystery. And I love a good mystery. Like Philip Marlowe, I love figuring out people's stories.

". . . I understood early that there was something magical in the power of words. To me, words were like incantations that could conjure fantastic worlds in the mind and take me to places I had never been. I devoured books, hunted words in dictionaries, and was a library junkie by the time I was eight. I read Star Wars before I saw it in the movies and devoured all of Ian Fleming's books by the time I was thirteen. I picked up most of what I know about grammar and usage by osmosis. I also had two great English teachers in high school. They taught me that reading literature could teach you about the 'universal human experience.' Maybe you'll never hunt another man through the jungle, my teachers told me. Maybe you won't climb Mount Kilimanjaro or watch a bullfight in the afternoon -- you don't have to. The word's a big place. You can't do or be everything, nor should you. Life is bigger than any one man. But when you read about other people's lives, when you read their stories, you catch a glimpse of a world bigger than your own. You may never travel a hundred miles from where you were born, but if you read stories, you'll get to see the entire world. You'll enter into the Great Mystery." (p. 188-189.)

-- "The Waiter" in Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

Shocking!

2008-09-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend I traveled to Texas to visit Fillius Major, Perfect Daughter-in-Law, and all the grandchildren. Fillius Minor and I stayed in a nearby hotel which had a computer in the lobby for the use of guests. So I decided to quickly log on to my blog. Imagine my surprise when a warning window popped up to inform me that Catholic Bibliophagist was a site with adult or mature content! So now I am racking my brains to figure out what could have triggered their filter.

Did I Expect Angels?

2008-09-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Did I Expect Angels? by Kathryn Maughan, iUniverse, Inc., 2007, 172 p. (ISBN: 978-0595402595)

Don't let the weird cover put you off. Had I originally seen it in a bookstore, the vehemence of those scratch-out lines would have aroused such a negative reaction that I never would have picked up this novel. Fortunately, I first met it online. And after sampling some excerpts on the author's website, I knew I'd want to read the rest of book.

The story of Did I Expect Angels? is told by two protagonists, Jennifer and Henry. Though widely disparate in age, background, and economic status, both have experienced loss and crushing grief. Unexpectedly, their lives and stories intersect.

Jennifer is a young, grief-stricken widow who cannot seem to recover from the unexpected death of her husband Jack. Despite the help of her loving mother-in-law and the support of her friends and colleagues, Jennifer cannot stop her downwards spiral into clinical depression, a condition for which she had been treated in an earlier period of her life. But now she refuses treatment -- refuses even to acknowledge her condition. So when she finally recognizes the extent to which her self-absorption has blinded her to her daughter's needs, her anguish becomes unbearable, and she makes a grim decision which she intends to be an unalterable. But she didn't take Henry into account.

Henry, a slight acquaintance, is an elderly greeter at the local discount mega-store. He emigrated from Costa Rica forty years ago. He has known poverty, hardship, betrayal, and loss. But with the help of his own unexpected "angel," he has passed through them to a serenity which Jennifer can scarcely grasp. He recognizes the depths of her devastation and decides that the time has come to tell Jennifer his story.

Their stories intertwine in a series of flashbacks inter cut with the immediate present until . . . Well, it's hard for me to write as much as I'd like to about this novel without lapsing into spoilers. I'll only say that this is a story of faith that will not repulse a secular readership.

This is not a Catholic novel, nor even an explicitly Christian one. (If I had to guess the religious affiliation of Jennifer and Jack, I’d have to peg them as some plain-vanilla, nondenominational, Protestants. Or perhaps Unitarians. ) Yet the author has placed them in a universe that is compatible with a Catholic worldview which, to me at least, gives a stronger sense of reality to the novel.

For each of us, as a member of the mystical body of Christ, is linked to every other member, lifting them up or pulling them down by our actions. In that sense, we are all angels at one time or another to those whose lives we touch or who touch ours. And the more I thought about this novel, the more "angels" I began to see in it -- including characters who are unaware of their angelic roles. Even Jennifer herself might be said to have briefly been an angel, when she finally says some things that really need to be said to her sister.

Yet this novel also has a subtle supernatural aspect. At least I think so. Who is that mysterious, yet strangely familiar, man whom Jennifer glimpses in the prologue -- an incident which is reprised near the end of the book? Yes, there is an active human angel who intervenes in Jennifer's affairs, but without the man in the green sweater, would he have made contact with her in time?

Unlike many self-published books, Did I Expect Angels? is very well written, having benefited from a long gestation and multiple rewrites. The story of how it came to be written and published is itself an interesting story which can be found here,

One of the things that I most enjoyed about the novel is that the stories of the two protagonists are recounted in their own distinctive voices. I particularly liked Henry's segments. In the novel he's described as having "a strong Spanish accent . . . untouched by forty years of speaking English." The author does not write his narration in dialect, but she captures the cadence of a native Spanish speaker who would naturally be mixing little Spanish phrases into his English, an English which would be unconsciously superimposed onto his native Spanish grammar.

Maughan described her technique to me:

I initially wrote much of Henry's part in Spanish, and then had my mother (a Spanish professor) correct it. She noted a few things, like false conditional: in English, we can say "I would go to the store a lot when I was young," but in Spanish they don't do that. This made me realize that he would have problems with "would" and "could" and "should" and the related tenses. So after the corrections I translated it very literally. I didn't do this with his entire portion, just about 15 pages of it. Once I had done that, I was into the rhythm enough myself that I could "hear" him speaking and compose in his voice.

This process gives an incredible feeling of authenticity to Henry's segments. Though Hispanic, I am not myself a native Spanish speaker. But I have studied the language, and I have enough experience of the sort of English spoken by some of my older relatives to realize that Maughan did a very good job. (Okay, so I'm a language and writing geek! Yes, I got excited when I realized that bits of Henry's English phrasing indicate that he is thinking in the subjunctive, a tense that is common in Spanish but almost extinct in English.)

You can sample the voices of the two main characters by reading the excerpts posted here and here. Then perhaps, like me, you too will be eager to read the rest of this book which is conveniently available from Amazon.com

Coming Attractions

2008-09-24T02:28:00.001-07:00

I'll be posting a review of Did I Expect Angels? by Kathryn Maughan on Saturday, September 27 as part of her book tour.

Other reviews in the pipeline are The Word Made Fresh by Meredith Gould and Danny Gospel by David Athey.

(Why am I telling you this? Accountability!)

Reading About Alzheimer's Disease

2008-09-23T21:37:00.000-07:00

As may have been apparent, my previous post was cut and pasted from my other blog, Quilting Bibliophagist. Just to get things back on topic, I thought I'd briefly write about the books I've been reading on the topic of Alzheimer's disease and memory loss.

The first one is The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for Persons with Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss in Later Life by Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins. As might be gathered from its lengthy title, this is the comprehensive book that covers everything you might possibly need to know about caring for a person with dementia. Whether you need general information about getting medical help or specific information about particular problems relating to the daily care of the patient or the the varied behavior problems he may present, this is the book to go to. It's clearly and competently written and I strongly recommend it.

The second is Alzheimer's Early Stages by Daniel Kuhn. The first part of the book focuses on the possible causes of Alzheimer's, its early symptoms, and the most recent progress in its treatment. Parts 2 and 3, which deal with caring for the patient and caring for yourself, have a less clinical and more human tone than The 36-Hour Day. For instance, one chapter deals with the different ways that patients with Alzheimer's experience the disease. (Would you believe that there are actually five books written by people who had Alzheimer's?) This chapter has helped me to both sympathize and empathize with my aunt.

Despite being a voracious reader, I found it difficult to read either of these books for very long at a stretch. It wasn't the writing; it was the subject matter. However, I devoured Carved In Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.

The author is a journalist who began to wonder what was happening to her mind. She felt vague and foggy. She'd barely crossed thethreshold into middle age, but she was losing her edge. She could no longer mentally keep track of her busy calendar. And as a journalist, she was more than a little disconcerted when the precise words she needed for a story began to elude her, and her thoughts became so evanescent that they evaporated even as she picked up a pencil to record them. Then she became aware that many of her friends andcolleagues were suffering from the same problem . Some of them were scared. (One woman, a person whom the author had always considered one of the sharpest people she knew, even quit her job because she could no longer bear the strain of trying to appear as mentally alert as hertwenty-something colleagues.)

The author decided to focus her journalistic skills on the problem. Was middle-aged memory loss normal? Could it be reversed?

(I myself am 56, and I've seriously considered having a T-shirt made with, "Brain Like A Sieve" lettered on the front of it. So I have a personal interest in the author's quest.)

What she discovered is that what we experience in middle age is not simply loss of memory. There is also a change in the speed and manner with which we process information. Yes, menopause really does make you stupider. And (in her case) blows to the head earlier in life will affect your memory years many later. Poor diet can starve your brain; an improved diet and sophisticated supplements may improve your mental abilities but will require an awful lot of prep time. She also tested the effect of both physical and mental exercises. She even tried out a number of drugs reputed to enhance memory, but with varied levels of success. (That part was kind of scary.) Her conclusions are more personal than scientific, but I found her book to be a fascinating read. (I just hope I can remember where I put the book before it's due back at the library!)

World Alzheimer's Day, September 21

2008-09-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

The phone rang while I was cooking dinner tonight.

"How do I get Helen's phone number?" The abrupt inquiry was not prefaced by any greeting or introduction, but I recognized my aunt's voice.

"You want to call your sister?" I asked, stalling for time.

"How do I get her number?" Her voice is insistent, but not yet angry.

Well, I don't have it, Aunty. But my Mom does. I can get it for you." Then I casually add, "Why do you want to call her?" Meanwhile my mind is racing. Aunt Helen is a long distance call. Can we afford the expense? Would talking with her sister cheer my aunt, or is Aunt Dora likely to spout angry abuse today, leaving poor Aunt Helen in tears?

"I want her to bring back my car! I'm leaving tomorrow and I need my car."

My aunt has Alzheimer's Disease. The hours between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. are her personal witching hour. She's been living in a guest home for the past four years, and has been unable to drive for even longer. But every afternoon she gets restless and decides to go home. Sometimes she packs her belongings and strips the linen from her bed. She demands her car -- which she no longer owns. When it isn't forthcoming, she assumes that the attendants at the guest home have stolen it.

"Oh, Aunt Helen doesn't have your car, Aunty."

"Then who does?"

"You asked your cousin Peter to take care of it because you can't drive right now."

"Well, I hope he's being careful with it!"

"Oh, I'm sure he is."

Actually, Peter owns the car. He took over the payments for us when my Aunt had to enter the home. But my aunt has forgotten about that, and it comforts her to think that her beloved car is being carefully maintained for her until she's well enough to drive again.

Because she really doesn't know where she is or why she's there. Sometimes she thinks she's in a hotel. Other times she believes she's in a hospital recovering from an illness, and that soon she'll be able to do without the walker or wheel chair.

"I'm going to be leaving tomorrow," she reminds me.

"Oh, really?" I say respectfully. "I was planning to visit you tomorrow. I hope you'll still be there when I come." (Actually, I visit her most days, usually during her restless period. It calms her and distracts her from her plans to escape. But I wasn't able to make it today.)

"Well, that's nice."

"I'll see you tomorrow then."

"All right," she says graciously. She hangs up, and I wonder how long she'll remain mollified. I hope that she hasn't given the caregivers too hard a time today. I regret not having squeezed in a visit.

In a recent blog post, Ami Simms wrote,

This Sunday, September 21, 2008, is World Alzheimer’s Day. It is a day to remember the 26.6 million people worldwide who have this vile disease that will eventually rob them of the ability to remember and to reason. It will take from them every skill they ever learned and every relationship they ever held dear.

Having a relative with Alzheimer's is like watching a beloved quilt deteriorate. It's as if the connecting threads which hold the quilt together have begun to unravel. The seams begin to come apart. A lifetime's worth of elaborate quilting begins to disappear as the threads snap and small bits begin to work loose from the body of the quilt.

We've all seen antique quilts where certain bits of fabric have simply rotted away, usually as a result of corrosive dyes. For an Alzheimer's patient, patches of one's mental landscape are also disintegrating as a result of this corrosive disease.

Ami Simms, who also founded the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative, designed a Virtual Quilt Patch in honor of her mother who has been battling Alzheimer's for seven years. She's invited all of us quilting bloggers to make a similar patch in honor of our afflicted friends and relatives, and has asked us to share how this disease has touched our lives. She's also asked that we link to her Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative which raises money for Alzheimer's research. (Since January 2006 they have raised more than $157,000, one quilt at a time.)

I never know what to expect when I go to visit my Aunt Dora. Most of the time she knows who I am, though sometimes she thinks I'm one of her sisters. During one unsettling visit to the hospital, she lost all sense of time and place. She thought I was one of the nurses, that her father was still alive, and that the hospital was located in her old childhood neighborhood.

We chat together during our afternoon visits. I try to calm her anger or sooth her paranoia, depending on what mood is uppermost that day. I bring her little treats or take her out for coffee in an effort to cheer or distract her. As the threads of her mind continue to unravel, I know that someday even these efforts will be unavailing. I try not to look too far into the future because if Altzheimer's has taught me anything, it's to live in the present -- just one day at a time.

Woopa, Woopa!

2008-09-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Mythcon 40 will be held on July 17 - 20, 2009 at UCLA! That means it's local and I can attend! For me driving into Westwood is about as scary as marching to Mordor, but I have a whole year to get up my courage up and as long as I don't have to make the drive at night, I think I can do it.

About a year ago I attended my first Mythcon in over 20 years and found it to be as much fun in late middle age as it was in the days of my youth.

This year's Author Guest of Honor is James A. Owen who wrote Here There Be Dragons and The Search for the Red Dragon. The Scholar Guest of Honor is Dianna Pavlac Glyer who won the 2008 Scholarship Award for The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. (I've been meaning to read the latter for over a year!)

You can register for Mythcon here. Price for Mythopoeic Society members is currently $55.00; $65.00 for nonmembers. It will increase on September 15 and again in February.

Sartorius has a nice description of Mythcon past and present here.

And with curiously appropriate timing, Sheldon has a Christopher Tolkien related strip here.

Dickens and a Digression

2008-08-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

I love library book sales. You never know what you'll find. When our kids were young, we all looked forward to the annual book sale at the Santa Monica public library. To a certain extent, I always felt bad when I discovered great finds among the children's books which the library had discarded. I didn't hesitate to snap them up, but I was sorry that future borrowers would miss out on them. Ah, well! The library's loss was our gain. And of course, books donated to the library booksale by the community were guilt-free.

One year we found a complete set of an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia. We didn't need it ourselves, since my husband had bought a new set in the 1970s when he was still a bachelor with discretionary income to fling about. (He was also working at a bookstore in those days and was allowed an employee discount even on special orders. Hence, nearly all of our gorgeous art books were bought during that period.) But we bought this older set on the grounds that it needed a good home. And as it turned out, we were scheduled to attend a Catholic homeschooling event shortly afterwards where we found a family that was happy to adopt it. (The fact that it was an older edition was a plus in their eyes.)

At that same sale we found this copy of The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens. I'd been a Dickens fan ever since the sixth grade when I first read A Christmas Carol, but I'd never heard of this work before. That was not, perhaps, surprising. Dickens wrote this little book for his own children and refused to allow it to be published while he lived. The introduction to this edition quotes a letter written by Georgina Hogarth, his sister-in-law:

I am sorry to say it is never to be published . . . He wrote it years ago, when his elder children were quite little. It is about sixteen short chapters, chiefly adapted from St. Luke's Gospel, most beautiful, most touching, most simple as such a narrative should be. He never would have it printed, and I used to read it to the little boys in MS. before they were old enough to read writing themselves . . . I asked Charles if he did not think it would be well for him to have it printed, at all events for private circulation . . . . He said he would look over the MS. and take a week or two to consider. At the end of the time he gave it back to me and said he had decided never to publish it, or even to have it privately printed. He said I might make a copy of it for ... any one of his children, but for no one else, and he also begged that we would never even hand the MS., or a copy of it, to any one to take out of the house, so there is no doubt about his strong feeling on the subject, and we must obey it. . . .

The book remained a family secret for 85 years until the last of Dickens' children, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, bequeathed permission for its publication should his family so desire. It was published, first serially and then in book form, in the mid 1930s. My copy has illustrations by Rachel Taft-Dixon.

There are plenty of copies to be found online these days including editions that have been published since I bought my used copy so many years ago. You can also read it online or download it as a PDF.

So how is it as a book? Believe it or not, I hadn't sat down and read all the way through it until quite recently. My kids were not the right age for it when I bought it, so I shelved it with the rest of Dickens, and it sat there until just the other day when I was between novels and needed something to read with my lunch.

Well, it was interesting to read such a private work. It has a familial charm which is endearing. "You never saw a locust," Dickens writes as an aside to his description of John the Baptist, "because they belong to that country near Jerusalem, which is a great way off. So do camels, but I think you have seen a camel. At all events, they are brought over here, sometimes; and if you would like to see one, I will show you one." (I like to imagine Dickens and his children watching camels together.)

Dickens' interest in social issues relating to the poor are apparent here in his reminders to his young readers that heaven was made for the poor as well for the rich, and that "God makes no difference between those who wear good clothes and those who go barefoot and in rags. . . Never be proud or unkind, my dears to any poor man, woman, or child."

The homeschoolers to whom we'd given the encyclopedia rather envied us our possession of The Life of Our Lord. They belonged to that class of homeschoolers who assume that an old book, published before the current moral rot had set in, is automatically a safer choice for their children's instruction. But every age has pockets of rot.

Personally, I would not have read this book to my children as part of their religious formation. It's not the Victorian language. Rather, it's Dickens' de-emphasis of the divinity of Christ.

Although he based his retelling mostly on the Gospel of Luke, Dickens skipped the Annunciation, and therefore the whole Son of God bit, along with the Virgin Birth and Joseph's position as foster father of Christ. Perhaps he simply felt a Victorian reticence towards bringing up birth and paternity with very young children. If so, I'll forgive him the omission. Sorta.

But in his account, when the angels appear to the shepherds, they say, "There is a child born to-day in the city of Bethlehem near here, who will grow up to be so good that God will love Him as His own Son; [Emphasis mine.] and He will teach men to love one another, and not to quarrel and hurt one another; and His name will be Jesus Christ; and people will put that name in their prayers, because they will know God loves it, and will know that they should love it too."

Eeek! Isn't this Adoptionism, the heresy teaching that Jesus was born a mere human being and only became divine later in life after being adopted as God's son as a sort of reward for his goodness and niceness? Beep! Beep! Danger, Will Robinson!

I was also a bit concerned that when the wise men show up, they are not seeking "a newborn king of the Jews," as in Matthew's gospel, but "a child . . . who will live to be a man whom all people will love." Eeeuuuw! This is a Jesus who sounds too much like a Hallmark greeting card to me. And I think a sure way to kill any young child's interest in the story of Christ is to wimpify it -- pulling out all of the mythic elements or the hard, weird, and edgy bits. (Oddly enough, Dickens does retain the slaughter of the Innocents, though it is unclear why Herod would have perceived this sort of Jesus as a threat.)

However, the book becomes less iffy as it gos on, and I will give Dickens points for including the Crucifixion -- unlike the DRE* at one of our former parishes who chose "The Metamorphosis of Caterpillars into Butterflies" as the Palm Sunday lesson for the children who were attending her religious ed class while their parents were at the 9:00 Mass.

Why, butterflies, you might ask? Her theory was that someday, somewhere, these children would hear the story of Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection.** And then, a light bulb would go off in their heads, and they'd remember the story of the butterfly! And it would be such a meaningful experience. (This was also the woman who, in a staff meeting, spoke glowingly about the profound religious experience to be had while peeling the paper off crayons. Where do parishes find these people?)

All I could say was, "Not with my kid, lady! They're attending the Palm Sunday liturgy with me, and assimilating the story of Christ's Passion up close and personal."
==============
*Director of Religious Education

**On the History Channel perhaps?

Bless me, Father...

2008-08-14T01:45:00.000-07:00

I laughed out loud when I read D.G. Davidson's post, Making a Good Confession (Sci Fi Catholic Style). Selecting a Sci Fi priest as your regular confessor can make confessing your Sci Fi sins so much simpler.

On a Tear With Charlotte, or One Book Leads To Another

2008-08-11T00:22:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of Charlotte Bronte lately.

It all started in April when I had to drive my mother to the emergency room. The previous day she had attended a birthday picnic, hosted by one of my cousins, where most of the attendees contracted food poisoning. My mother, who is 78 years old, was so ill she had to go to the hospital. I drove her there, and since one never knows how long a visit to the emergency room will take, I made sure to bring a book.

I wanted something dependable and small, so I grabbed my Oxford World's Classics edition of Jane Eyre. At 3.5" x 6", it's smaller than most paperbacks and fits nicely in my skirt pocket. I've read Jane Eyre many times before, but it never fails to engross me. Judy Abbot, the protagonist of Daddy-Long-Legs, summed it up for me when she described her first reading of this novel, ". . . as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena and sets fire to bed curtains and tears up wedding veils and bites -- it's melodrama of the purest, but just the same, you read and read and read." And so I did.

My mother was in the hospital for several days, so I spent a good deal of time there too. And whenever she was dozing or undergoing tests, I buried myself in Jane because, as we all know, time moves slowly in a hospital, but reading is a hyperspatial by-pass through tedium.

Frequently, when I read a novel like Jane Eyre, I'm so wrapped up in the story that I pay scant attention to the author's technique. But this time I was more aware of how Bronte achieves her effects. I was particularly struck by her use of present tense narrative when the heroine is facing an important turning point. It gives the reader a sense of immediacy, but also conveys the character's feeling of mental distance or dislocation -- that numbing daze when Everything Has Just Become Too Much and one feels cut off from both the future and the past. When Jane narrates in the traditional past tense, you have in the back of your mind the assurance that she has survived her adventures and is looking back on them. But when she switches to present tense you are with her right at that moment, dazed and uncertain.

Well, my mom recovered and returned home. So did I, still reading Jane Eyre. And when I finished I was in the mood for more Bronte. So I checked out Villette from the public library (which I had never read before) and then reread The Professor as a chaser.

I decided I'd like to know a bit more about Bronte so I looked her up in the Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. According to the latter, "her novels are marked by anti-Catholicism." Jane Eyre doesn't really show any signs of it. (Just the bit about her creepy, selfish cousin becoming a nun.) I originally read The Professor many, many years ago and didn't recall much anti-Catholic sentiment -- no more than you'd expect from any British author of that time period. As a bit of a lark, I decided to mark the most egregious anti-Catholic sentiments with Post-it notes.

I think that the examples in The Professor simply reflect the English dislike and distrust of foreigners and foreign ways. Of course the natives of Belgium are dull and stupid. Of course the French are sly and devious. So what else can you expect from Catholics? They haven't had the moral advantages of being upright English Protestants. (As I read the book, the refrain Song of Patriotic Prejudice by Flanders & Swann rang through my mind: "The English, the English, the English are best: I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!"

But the anti-Catholicism in Villette is downright virulent.

Religous issues aside, Villette is a real downer that should not be read by anyone having even the slightest tendency to depression. The heroine is lonely, hopeless, starved for affection, suffers from apparent visitations of the spectre of a murdered nun, has the meanest, most devious boss in the world, and teaches horrid school girls. During the summer vacation she goes through a period of clinical depression that is almost psychotic. The author allows her a brief moment of happiness when she is finally allowed to fall in love with a professor who teaches at her school. But no sooner has she accepted his proposal than his scheming (Catholic) relatives who oppose the marriage, have finagled him into traveling overseas to take care of business concerns, separating the lovers for several years. And then the author whips up an ocean storm to drown him on his return. Actually, at the request of her father, Bronte rewrote the ending to make it just slightly more ambiguous than her original version. If Pollyanna read this revised version she might, just possibly, come away with the impression that the hero could have survived the waves and would yet turn up. But I doubt it. In Villette Bronte has drawn a heroine who has schooled herself to reject hope, and has placed her in circumstances which vindicate that rejection.

By contrast, The Professor was a light hearted romp -- though it is a sedate novel compared to Jane Eyre. It was interesting to discover that Bronte wrote it before Jane Eyre. She wanted to portray a realistic hero in a novel that did not indulge in romantic excess. Alas, no publisher would take it, having instead "a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrilling -- the strange, startling, and harrowing . . . ."* So she went off and wrote Jane Eyre, and it was commercial success.

One thing which the two novels have in common is that the hero is first attracted to and falls in love with the heroine's mind. Both heroines are intelligent, and captivate their beloveds with their pert wit. Both are described at times as a vexing fairy or elf. And both preserve a special companionship with their husbands after marriage. In The Professor, Frances teaches in her own school. And she requires her husband to also teach there an hour a day because, as she says, "people who are only in each other's company for amusement, never really like each other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as those who work together, and perhaps suffer together." Jane also works with her husband. She becomes Mr. Rochester's eyes, seeing for him, reading for him, and generally being his right hand. And talking with each other all day long -- ah, what bliss! And how I miss it -- since my late husband and I, like the Rochesters, could say that "to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking."

As a girl I loved the descriptions of these two marriages. Perhaps they gave me hope that I too would someday find romance -- I was certain no one would ever marry me for my looks!

Instead of reading Shirley, I detoured into Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Fascinating. (But I won't talk about it now. This post is already too long.) And then I felt the need to read one of Gaskell's novels. Mary Barton is the only one in our public library, so I'm working my way through that right now.

===============
*from Bronte's introduction to The Professor.

Heinlein Juveniles Revisited

2008-08-10T00:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not allowed to eat chocolate anymore, so during stressful periods I find myself rereading favorite books from my youth. Not surprisingly, during the past two years I've worked my way through most of Robert Heinlein's early books. So I appreciated John C. Wright's timing in posting a list of his reviews of RAH's juvenile works at the end of his post, The Horrible Earths of Heinlein's Juveniles.

Citizen of the Galaxy is one I haven't reread yet, but now I intend to based on his review:

. . . The book is the best of the coming of age books because coming of age is about maturity, which is, the process of learning self-command. Self-command is a paradox, because the philosopher can be perfectly free even when chained up or reduced to beggary, because he is free in his soul, which no outside despot can touch. And yet self-command demands sacrifice and toil and self-sacrifice above even what restrictive customs or the iron laws of military service compel.

The book is about status, what it means in society, what a person has to do to get it, and what unscrupulous people will do to keep it. Part of the maturing process is learning what status is, and how to earn it, and, yes, how to dispense with it when need be, lest it possess you.

This book is about honor. It is about paying your debts, especially spiritual debts, despite strong personal interest and inclination. The almost mystical reverence and respect all the admirable characters pay to the concept of honoring the wishes of the dead, honoring the humanity of a slaveboy who seems to have lost his, honoring customs one does not understand, honoring the service to which one belongs, honoring one's father, honoring one's conscience .... the book is one long meditation on the meaning of freedom and obligation, slavery and license.

My Dream House

2008-07-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

"Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves; whenever we left, the new owners would rip them out. Other people's walls looked naked to me. Ours weren't flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff."
--Anne Fadiman, "My Ancestral Castles" in Ex Libris.

I wouldn't have minded moving into a house recently vacated by the Fadimans! As you can see, I too have "mosaic" walls. But not, alas, built in bookshelves.

Biblio-furniture

2008-06-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

People visiting our home are immediately struck by its dominant decorating motif: books, books, and more books. Their reactions usually divide them into two camps -- the delighted and the appalled. I wonder what the latter would think if even my furniture coordinated with my passion for books?

Big Cozy Books makes book-themed furniture for libraries and schools. I'd love to own furniture shaped like giant books, pencils, and erasers. Actually, one of the local public libraries has some of their products. But I've been too shy to actually sit on it. I'm sure the staff would look askance at a middle-aged woman sprawling out to read in the children's section.

While you're at it, also take a look at Bookshelf, a blog devoted solely to, well, bookshelves. I was particularly charmed by these shelves that not only hold books, but look quite willing help you move them from room to room. (Not that I'd actually buy them for my own house -- my criteria for bookcases is that they be strong and able to pack the greatest number of books in the least amount of linear wall space.)

Do Plants Have Souls?

2008-06-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

So, would you rather read Thomas Aquinas or watch a science fiction B-movie?

Can't decide? Now you can do both at once thanks to this post at The B-Movie Catechism.

A Second Look at YA

2008-06-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

Sartorias recently hosted an interesting discussion at Oached Pish about YA fiction. Apparently, YA fiction is booming and is being read by adults as well as young people. Sartorias asked, "If you read YA, tell me what you read, and why."

The reasons varied. Some people like coming of age stories. Some prefer YA's shorter length or find it easier to read because the stories tend to be more focused and to include less description or other digressive elements. A few prefer YA because they don't care for the graphic sex scenes that can be common in genre fiction for adults. (Though I think YA today is less "safe" in that respect than it was when I was young.) And some felt that YA was just better written and more interesting than most fiction published for adults.

I found this discussion interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I've always been one for reading outside of my age group. Ever since I was young, if it was printed I'd have a go at it -- regardless of the target audience. Popular Science, Boy Scout magazines, my mom's parenting magazines, anything I could get my little hands on. (Okay, I really was too young for Moby Dick though the bits about cutting up whales were kind of interesting.)

But as I got older, I was never embarrassed to go down the age group ladder. A new Dr. Seuss title? I'm checking it out! A new Beverly Cleary? I'm on it! I think my parents might have been embarrassed, or perhaps just puzzled. "But you're a good reader!" they'd say. "You shouldn't be reading children's books. You could go on the adult side of the library."

The problem was that I'd already been there. And the books in the general fiction area seemed pretty uninteresting. Judging from their novels, it seemed that adults were only interested in sex and money. Boring! (I realize now that I was probably just unlucky in my selections. Or perhaps literature as such was filed under its Dewey Decimal classification.) In the meantime, there were loads of new books in the children's and YA sections and I had yet to read them all.

I gave up reading YA in the mid-seventies when it became depressing and problem oriented. Suddenly, it seemed like every new book was relentlessly hammering out a universe of hopelessness: drugs, divorce, depression, disease, and doom. Disfunctional families were now the norm, and adults were presented as uniformly incompetent and untrustworthy. It's not that I wanted books that were all sweetness and light, but it seemed to me that growing up could hardly be worthwhile, given such nihilistic worldview. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the universe was actually better than it was being painted.

Since many of the commenters on Sartorias's blog mentioned liking YA because it was hopeful, optimistic, and interesting, it might be time for a second look. I decided to take down author and title recommendations and see if I could find a few of them at our local public library. Many of the ones I wanted were not available, but I got these:

The New Policeman by Kate Thompson
The Stones Are Hatching by Geraldine McCaughrean
The Book of Changes by Tim Wynne-Jones (This was an accidental grab as I was intending to get any book by Diana Wynne Jones, and the author's first name was not on the spine.)
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Feel free to put further recommendations in the comments box. Our library is closing for the summer for remodeling, but they'll let you check out 50 books to tide you over until they reopen in September. So this might be a good time to borrow a massive chunk of YA.

Stuff Catholics Like

2008-05-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Normally I just add links to my blog roll without comments. But I would like to point out the addition of Stuff Catholics Like.

This blog is about stuff Catholics like. Some of the stuff, like felt banners, Catholics shouldn't like but do for reasons they will have to explain to God.

The purpose of this blog is to take a light-hearted look at Catholic things in a way that can be educational to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. If you tend to be easily “hurt” or “offended”, this is a good place to get over it.

Among the people writing for it are Curt Jester, Ironic Catholic and Maureen Martin -- so despite being informational, it endears itself to me with its bizarre sense of humor. So click on over and read about the many kinds of stuff Catholics like such as sex (Surprised?), clapping in church (Ick!), Rome ("When someone says “home of the whore of Babylon” Catholics get warm fuzzies."), and relics (Oooo! Mummified hands!)

Ooooo! I Want One!

2008-05-15T00:53:00.000-07:00

Is there anything that Catholic Bibliophagist would like more than a new bookcase? How about a bookcase that swings open to reveal a hidden passageway? HT to Jennifer for the link to HiddenPassageway.com . Check out their gallery of products. Although you can conceal your secrets behind fireplaces, paintings, or even have your pool table rise up from under the floor, the most common option seems to be bookcases.

Brideshead Revisited -- Again

2008-05-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Since my husband's death two years ago, I've lived a relatively sequestered life. I haven't subscribed to a newspaper, watched television, or perused news magazines except in doctors' waiting rooms. But I do haunt the Catholic blogsphere, and sooner or later everything I really want to know about turns up there.

According to Amy Welborn at Charlotte Was Both, the trailer for the new Brideshead Revisited movie is out. You can read her opinion of it in her post, Teddy Bears Optional. Her criticism, aside from poor casting, is that the movie appears to be a heated power struggle between Charles Ryder and Lady Marchmain. And that's not what the book is about. As one of her commenters, Fr. Steve, puts it

. . . at the heart of Waugh’s book was Charles Ryder’s relationship with God, in regards to which his relationships with the Marchmains were expressions of his resistance to God, and ultimate reconciliation with God. The richness of Waugh’s insights is that they are powerful insights into the theological as well as the interpersonal. Charles Ryder is being remade in a crucible of both transcendent and immanent realities. One might say that the most interesting character in Waugh’s novel is actually God, whose presence permeates every scene, and yet never speaks a word directly, prefering to use secondary causes to effect Charles conversion.

My own criticism of the trailer is that it strongly implies that Sebastian is homosexually in love with Charles and that Lady Marchmain is forcing Julia to marry Rex -- neither of which is true in novel. And if that's what the movie is about, then it's just not the story that Waugh wrote.

The problem is, if you gut its religious aspect, Brideshead the novel is not unlike the chapel at Brideshead after it's been decommissioned. (The description is Cordelia's.)

[The priest] took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

I suspect that this would be the key difficulty with with any dramatization of Brideshead Revisited: if you suppress the essential heart of Bridehead, it will, like the chapel sans the Eucharist, be merely "an oddly decorated room." And the decorations are indeed odd.

However, I suppose it's not fair to premataurely judge even this movie by its trailer since, through the judicious selection of music and clips, trailers can be crafted to appeal to any demographic without reflecting their movie's actual content -- as is ably and amusingly demonstrated by Scary Mary, a recut trailer of Disney's Mary Poppins.

A Problem That Doesn't Need a Solution

2008-05-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

"My grandmother Janet said to me, 'If you don't stop reading all these books, you're going to be overeducated. I think you should go to college.'"
--Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact.

Where is Edward Gorey?

2008-04-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a fairly organized bibliophagist. Most of the books in my library are shelved by catagory. Biography is on the north wall. Literature is on the south wall. Science, philosophy and history are on the island of bookcases in the middle of the room as are the science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks. But where is Edward Gorey?

I would like to reread Amphigorey and Amphigorey Too. But where could I have shelved them?

Religion is on the west wall. Books about art and the practical arts are on the east wall. So are the books about holidays, education, etiquette, and media -- as are my collections of humor, Victoriana, and the life and works of Dr. Samuel Johnson. That's also where you'll find a shelf of Very Tall Books such as The Lorsch Gospels and The Times Atlas of the World. But where is Edward Gorey?

I know where he used to be in my old house -- upstairs on the narrow metal bookcase with other tall, illustrated books. But all the rickety metal bookcases were left behind when I moved. Where is poor Edward Gorey now?

Foreign language, the English language, reference books and books about literature are in the living room. But not Edward Gorey. He's not on the Tolkien & Lewis shelf. He's not among the housekeeping books. He's not in the kitchen with the cookbooks. And he's certainly not on the low birch bookcase in the dining room where I keep tiny books like the Loeb Library and the Oxford World Classics.

He's not upstairs with my Catholic fiction and my Victorian kid lit. He's not down in the Library Annex where I keep the children's books, the quilting books, the encyclopediae, the hardcover science fiction and the overflow hardcover science. And he's not on the hand finished alder bookcase which houses the tall, pretty books (mostly art and astronomy) along with my husband's collection of books about Oxford and the works of Patrick O'Brien.

Where, oh where is Edward Gorey?

I feel like a frustrated dragon searching through my hoard for a misplaced bit of treasure.

Well, it must be somewhere. In the meantime, I will have to settle for this charming take-off: The Trouble With Tribbles as if written by Edward Gorey.

Shakespearean Baseball

2008-04-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

It's so easy to assume that a person who shares one of your passionate interests also shares your other likes and dislikes. I try to keep in mind that this is not so. Nevertheless, I'm still floored each time I discover that an online quilting friend, for instance, is also an avid fisherman. I am less surprised when my bookish friends do not share my tastes in literature.

I can accept the fact that some of my fellow Tolkien fans do not also share my love of Anthony Trollope. Or that I will probably never share the intense love that my daughter has for T.S. Eliot, though our reading tastes are otherwise similar. And I can also appreciate the zest with which some of my biblio-friends approach fields which have little appeal to me such as statistics, or mathematics, or political science. But I was totally flabbergasted when I discovered that an old bookish friend, now living in another part of the country, had become an avid baseball fan when my back was turned. Baseball?

I don't actually hate sports -- as long as I don't have to play them or watch them. Or hear them. My brother, an otherwise sane bibilophagist, is a rabid sports fan. He had sports broadcasts playing All Day Long when we were teens, and it drove me up the wall. Though I was not yet sure whether I had a vocation to the married state, I was certain that I would never, ever even remotely consider marrying a man who who displayed any interest in sports whatsoever. Even now, the sound of sports on radio or TV causes me to twitch a little. But perhaps if those broadcasts had been a little more literary, things might have been different.

Biting the Long Tail That Feeds You

2008-03-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

I love shopping at Amazon.com. Given a choice between it and most other online retailers, I'll go for the Big A every time. But a new Amazon policy has the blogsphere abuzz and may change my shopping habits will I or nill I. According to Publisher's Weekly:

BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, is making an offer that most publishers would like to refuse, but don’t feel they can. According to talks with several pod houses, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled.

One of the things I like about Amazon, indeed about the Internet in general, is that it's now so much easier for book lovers to find obscure books that just aren't carried by the average chain bookstore. And POD (Print On Demand) has made it possible for authors whose books appeal to a market too small to interest conventional printers, to get their works into print and, eventually, into my hot little hands.

Why should POD publishers and their authors be upset by Amazon's new policy? Well, apparently Booksurge is more expensive, harder to use, and produces a lower quality product than many of its POD publishers and their distribution is more limited than their major competitor, Lighting Source, which is owned by Ingrim.

There are a bunch of articles on this topic here.

HT to Sartorias who first brought the situation to my attention.

Daddy-Long-Legs

2008-03-30T01:18:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, for no discernible reason, I got to thinking about Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. So I took it with me the next morning when I went to sit with my dad while my mother went to Mass. (My father had just been released from the hospital after having suffered another stroke. The physical therapists didn't want him to be home alone yet.) It's a small book bound in navy blue cloth which, according to the penciled price on the fly-leaf, I bought for fifty cents. It's one of my Woolworth books and therefore very dear to me.

We moved to Azusa when I was in the sixth grade. In those more innocent days my mom wasn't afraid to let me walk all by myself to the local shopping center which was about a mile and a half away. I loved the freedom of those solitary expeditions, especially browsing at Woolworth's where the merchandise was within my means and ranged from live goldfish and turtles to tiny Whitman Samplers and the sort of jewelry that children buy as gifts for their mothers.

On one of my visits to Woolworth's I discovered an enormous pile of used, hardcover books. For me, this was like stumbling upon El Dorado. You have to understand that there were no bookstores in our immediate area. (This was long before chains like Borders or Barnes & Noble.) My only source of books was the Scholastic Book Club at school which only offered paperbacks. But here, piled in profusion, were real books, i.e. hardcover books with the authority of age, official books such as might be found on the shelves of a real library.

And, mirabile dictu, I could buy them and take them home! But how long would that pile of books be there? And how many of them could I buy, with my carefully hoarded, minuscule allowance, before they disappeared?

I don't remember how many books I ended up buying, but I made many trips to Woolworth's and spent hours sifting through that pile as I weighed the merits of one book against another. I know I got my copy of Tom Sawyer there and my copy of Jane Eyre. And I'm pretty sure that's where I got my Robinson Crusoe. (Only 25 cents! Though that was a whole week's allowance at the time.)

But getting back to Daddy-Long-Legs. . .

Eighteen year old Judy Abbot, an inmate of the John Grier Home, receives the astonishing news that one of the institution's trustees has offered to pay for her college education based on a humorous (and somewhat irreverent) composition which she wrote for her high school English class. Her beneficiary wishes to remain completely anonymous and in return asks only that she write him a monthly letter describing the progress of her studies and the details of her daily life. He intends her to become a writer, and "he thinks nothing so fosters facility in literary expression as letter-writing." The only thing Judy knows about her benefactor is that he is very tall, so she dubs him "Daddy-Long-Legs." The novel consists of her letters to him written throughout her four years of college and the summer after graduation. By the end of the novel, Judy has published her first book, found true love, and discovered the identity of Daddy-Long-Legs.

When I originally read the book, I was fascinated by the author's description of college life and by Judy's efforts to become a writer. In later rereadings I found it interesting to compare her experiences at a women's college circa 1912 with my own in 1970. But what struck me this time was how much of Judy's education took place outside the classroom and how successfully she followed Mark Twain's dictum that one should never allow one's schooling to interfere with one's education.

As a freshman, she is very conscious of her status as an escapee of the John Grier Home and her diligent attempts to "pass" as an ordinary girl are both funny and poignant.

You know, Daddy, it isn't the work that is going to be hard in college. It's the play. Half the time I don't know what the girls are talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling.

Part of her "language" difficulties consists of a lack of cultural literacy.

You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself. The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of. For example:

I never read "Mother Goose" or "David Copperfield" or "Ivanhoe" or "Cinderella" or "Blue Beard" or "Robinson Crusoe" or "Jane Eyre" or "Alice in Wonderland" or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn't know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn't know that R.L.S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady. I had never seen a picture of the "Mona Lisa" and (it's true but you won't believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it's fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an "engaged" on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch and light the brass student lamp at my elbow and read and read and read. One book isn't enough. I have four going at once. [N.B. A girl after my own heart!] Just now they're Tennyson's poems and "Vanity Fair" and Kipling's "Plain Tales" and -- don't laugh -- "Little Women." I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on "Little Women." I haven't told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is talking about!

In fact, in her first semester she ends up flunking both mathematics and Latin prose in her autodidactic efforts to catch up to the other girls.

I'm sorry if you're disappointed, but otherwise I don't care a bit because I've learned such a of things not mentioned in the catalogue. I've read seventeen novels and bushels of poetry -- really necessary novels like "Vanity Fair" and "Richard Feverel" and "Alice in Wonderland." Also Emmerson's " Essays" and Lockhart's "Life of Scott" and the first volume of Gibbon's "Roman Empire" and half of Benvenuto Cellini's "Life" -- wasn't he entertaining? He used to saunter out and casually kill a man before breakfast.

So you see, Daddy, I'm much more intelligent than if I'd just stuck to Latin.

Amen!