A Bluestocking Knits

Booking Through Thursday: Gratitude

An "unofficial" Booking Through Thursday question --

Tell us about the person who gave you a book that became important in your life.

My very first job was at the library where my mom worked, at a small Baptist seminary at the base of the foothills.  I was very young -- I don't know how it was managed, but I guess being a small private school has its advantages! -- and my job was simply to paste in pockets and bookplates, so neither onerous nor critical, requiring only an eye for straight lines and the ability to sit quietly for a few hours, both of which I was pretty good at.  I would find a cart of books to process when I arrived, already cataloged and any dust jackets removed, and I pasted a plate at the upper left of the inside cover -- sometimes it had a note of thanks to a donor typed in -- and a pocket, probably with a date-due slip as well.  I don't remember property-stamping, but presumably that was also part of it.  Sometimes if there was something especially valuable in the dust-jacket blurb, it would have been carefully cut out and included for me to paste inside the end-papers at the back.  I had a stool to sit on at one end of a longish narrow workroom, which was filled on two sides by windows looking out over a little valley and the foothills to the north (very rural-looking, though it was not), so that the afternoons were rarely dull, even if the books themselves were a bit bland and scholarly! 

The library was in a curious sort of building that had the feeling that it might in an earlier life have been a house -- I don't remember the outside at all, but once inside you were in a smallish room with a desk where the students could check out their books.  A pair of short hallways led from this room at right angles to each other -- off of the right-hand one was my mom's office, where she did most of the secretarial work, as well as ordering and receiving all of the books.  (A favorite family story was that when very young my little sister was asked what her mommy did, and she said brightly, "My mommy works at the cemetery opening boxes!")  Across from this office was a small, narrow, and windowless room with the card catalog, and further down the hallway, through a pair of glass-paned French doors, was the reading room, with tables in the middle and bookshelves around the walls.  Along the north hallway was a series of small rooms which is where the rest of the book stacks were -- I always thought this a very appealing way of housing a library, so I suppose it's no wonder that my house now has multiple bookcases in every room and even in the hallway!  I guess I didn't take advantage of the staff discount as much here as I did in later library jobs, but I remember very distinctly that the first book I ever bought with money I had earned myself was during this time, Lucile Morrison's The Lost Queen of Egypt -- this was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with ancient Egypt, and I have to say that though Morrison's scholarship may be quite out-of-date now and her writing perhaps a little old-fashioned, it was wonderfully atmospheric and I still remember entire scenes quite vividly, even though I haven't read the book for years!  (My copy, as it happens, was missing the frontispiece, which I did not realize until some years later, but I hardly noticed the lack of it, contented perhaps with the more authentic-looking line drawings in the text!)

Most of the books at the seminary library, of course, were not anything a child would be interested in, but I remember that my mom borrowed for me one day a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and of course I was hooked.  A great story -- adventure, magic wardrobes, talking animals, and all with a dry humor that clearly appealed to my nascent Anglophilia.  (Am I an Anglophile because I am by nature "English" or am I more "English" because I have for so long been an Anglophile?  Clearly, the latter has had some bearing on the development of my interests and my sense of humor, but I feel certain that the former is the case.)  When my mom came home a week or so later with both Prince Caspian and A Horse and His Boy, she was astonished -- since I was also horse-crazy -- that I didn't immediately dive into "the horse one" first, but of course I knew somehow (how? I wonder now, as I'm sure none of them had dust-jackets -- perhaps the clerk before me had pasted in a list carefully cut out from the blurb?). 

That was another thing I have to be grateful for from that first job, the Narnia books, of course.  But what prompted this post was the mass-market copy of The Hobbit given to me by the seminary's librarian, bless her, Dr. Genevieve Kelly.  I hope she knew what she was starting, as I'm sure it would have pleased her.  The book is yellowing and a bit brittle now, but still has the dedication inside the front cover, and it is one of my treasures.  I don't remember much about Genevieve, I'm sorry to say -- from what I hear, she was quite an interesting and eccentric person.  She had a beach house (I was sure it was Carpinteria, but my mom says Malibu), which was on a rather run-down and precarious stretch of beach, built out over the rocks so that you went in the front door at street level but once out on the balcony the waves at high tide were crashing underneath your feet.  The house had begun to settle in a rather alarming direction -- towards the water -- and a great crack, perhaps two or three feet wide, had opened all along the front of the house, which necessitated a large plank laid across what Genevieve called "The Abyss" to the front door, and I remember (although my parents forbade us to go near it) thinking it a charming bit of sang-froid!  She had a deep interest in music, and somewhere I have a madrigal she composed, in hand-written score, and my mom tells me that she used to practice her German by reading translated Zane Grey novels.  I do remember that she had very frizzy hair! funny, what sticks in your mind.  She died quite unexpectedly of cancer in 1975, in her late forties.

Amazingly, I just didn't get The Hobbit at first -- I couldn't even get past the first few pages and was nodding off.  I'm embarrassed to say this now, as it has pretty much everything I love -- musical prose, cozy rooms and good food, maps and a bit of magic, brightly-colored waistcoats and gentle English humor -- and I am glad that I had another go at it not long after, for of course I fell in love with the Shire and Tolkien's wonderful stories, and can hardly imagine my life without them now. 

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Thank you, Genevieve.

The Joys of Buying Books on Vacation

There isn't a new Booking Through Thursday question this week, so I'll just make something up -- here are the books I bought in England.  (Looking at the stack like this, I guess I can see why David grew alarmed as the trip went on, but this doesn't even approach that heady fortnight of my youth when I came home with no less than six volumes of Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters! -- in hardcover!)

From Waterstone's in Kensington High Street, the Lucy Worsley book I've already mentioned, Jane Austen at Home.  I got distracted by some library books which of course had to be back before the due date, so I've not finished this yet, but it's no fault of Worsley's.

After having not one but two concierges at the Marriott in Regents Park stare at me in utter mystification when I asked if A to Zeds can still be had, David surprised me with a visit to Stanford's in Covent Garden.  This is a truly wonderful bookshop, possibly the place to go in London for maps and travel books.  I asked the sales clerk, and he said, "Yes, of course!" and showed me a whole shelf of that famous street atlas, which restored my faith in Britain at once.  We could all have spent hours at Stanford's -- I think it's three floors, and we only visited one -- I bought How to Read Castles by Malcolm Hislop, The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs by Tristan Gooley, and the spiral-bound A to Zed.

The only souvenir guidebooks we bought were for Windsor Castle, Ightham Mote, and Bodiam Castle.  Believe it or not, I was actually trying not to buy a lot of books! but I think that Ightham and Bodiam were my two favorites of the Stately-Homes/Castles we visited.

At the New Place bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon, The Shakespeare Circle and Finding Shakespeare's New Place, the latter of which I am especially interested to read, of course being fascinated with Elizabethan houses, not even counting the Shakespeare angle.

It has nothing at all to do with Chartwell, and I'm not really sure why there were so very many cookbooks in the shop there -- maybe Churchill really liked his suppers! -- but that was where I happened upon Sophie Thompson's My Family Kitchen -- and at about a third of the cover price.  I adore Sophie Thompson, and I like to cook, so all three of these together were Fate.

At a narrowboat/information-center/souvenir-shop at Stratford-upon-Avon, I confess I bought a number of little how-to narrowboat books including -- obviously a weakness of mine! -- a cookbook.  Pork fillet and dried-apricot casserole on the first page -- doesn't that sound good?!

The book shop at Sir John Soane's Museum was also a place where I could have spent hours, but the only book I came away with was At Home with the Soanes by Susan Palmer, wh. I haven't had a chance to do more than flip through to see the illustrations, but David has read it and says it's very good.

So some of these books were actually relevant to what we were doing or seeing those three weeks -- the canal how-to books, obviously, and the castles book, and the Shakespeare, certainly -- and some were just serendipitous finds, which I think is a happy outcome altogether!

Booking Through Thursday: Format

Being a bit of a technophobe, I can't manage to subscribe to Booking Through Thursday, and so I don't know without actually going to the homepage whether a new question has been posted -- so here I am thinking that there hasn't been a question since December or thereabouts, and there have been five.  So I inadvertently answered one yesterday, and here is the most recent one.

All other things (like weight, cost, and so on) being equal, what’s your favorite format for a book? Hardcover? Paperback? Old? New? First edition? Digital? Audio?

I see the appeal of each of these, to be sure.  For reasons of space, I am amassing a stash of classics on my Kindle (Austen, Dickens, Trollope, etc., as well as more modern things like the Cadfael and Miss Read series as they appear), and I really love some of my audio books (the Wendy Hiller version of All Passion Spent I mentioned yesterday, for one, the Irene Sutcliffe Pride and Prejudice for another).

First editions? not really, the exception being that I am slowly collecting D.E. Stevensons, many of which are first UK editions because for the most part those are more complete and more authentic -- for some reason, her US publishers regularly lopped off whole chapters, and of course (why??) Americanized spelling and certain words us Yanks would doubtless be completely mystified by, such as "neighbour" and "lorry".  (Grrr.)  But for the most part, what is inside the book matters to me more than the imprint.

There is much beauty to be found in an old book, either the sort of universally-acknowledged beauty of morocco and gilt or simply that velvety softness that the edges of the pages get in books of a certain age.  And new books certainly have their beauties, either in some really well-done design or simply in the thought that a new world awaits just inside.

But I find that this question is really difficult to answer!  All kinds of books have their unique appeal, and for both practical and aesthetic reasons -- but I suppose if I had my druthers, I would choose hardcover more often than not, though I suppose that the appeal is as much emotional as it is intellectual!  I like the heft of them, the substantiality, the sense of permanence.

What Are You Reading?

I have a few more vacation posts in the works, but in the meantime here is something about reading, in lieu of a Booking Through Thursday question.

I bought Jane Austen at Home at a Waterstone's we happened to be passing when out sightseeing in London and I needed to sit down for a few minutes.  I did not know about the tempest at the time, but am enjoying the book nevertheless -- Worsley writes easily and well, although she does tend to get a bit informal at times, wh. I find a bit more off-putting in print than I mind in person, certainly for books, but this is a small cavil.  I do appreciate that she is not afraid to call out the recent spate of biographical ("biographical") movies for indeed being as much invention as biography!

(If like me you did not know about it, there have been grumblings about certain parallels between Worsley's book and Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen.  The problem is, of course, that because there is so little known about Austen, there really aren't that many Facts with which to write a biography -- and a great many of them come from the comparatively small number of surviving letters, and from now-famous quips from people like Virginia Woolf about Jane at fifteen "laughing, in her corner, at the world" -- so that, obviously, it is difficult to write about Austen's life without "quoting" previous biographers.  So why write "yet another" book about Jane Austen?  Ah, the fascination is always there! and, like with Austen's novels, one must look for and appreciate the subtleties, which are certainly there.)

Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse series of murder mysteries was recommended to me by a friend -- my public library had two, this Clerk's Tale and the earlier The Reeve's Tale, which I finished the other day before starting this one.  I found Reeve a bit slow getting started, rather dangerously slow in fact and I was tempted to give it up, but once the murders began (!) it certainly gained momentum.  I must admit that I hold Ellis Peters' Cadfael books as my gold-standard for mediaeval mysteries, and so far none I have found can match that, but that is something to strive for.

After visiting Sissinghurst -- which is one of the things I've yet to post about, sorry -- I was interested to read Portrait of a Marriage at last, though I had to go pretty far afield to find a library copy.  I must admit that my first impression of Vita, which as first impressions often do has stuck with me, is that she was a rather alarming person.  As it happens, though, little of this comes through in her writing, which is elegant and full of beauty.  Last summer I read two of her gardening books on my Kindle, and I have loved All Passion Spent for years -- ever since finding an audio version read by Wendy Hiller, who also starred in the excellent television series.  I am still not far into this book -- the mess is just beginning in Harold's and Vita's marriage, and I suspect I'm putting this off a bit in dismay, even though I know what happens.

There was a recording of Vita playing in one of the Tower turret-rooms at Sissinghurst, and I was surprised to hear that her voice sounded nothing at all like the picture I had of her in my head --

Back to "Booking Through Thursday," on Friday

Booking Through Thursday asks this week,

"What’s your guilty pleasure, reading-wise?"

Well, it has been a very long time since I took part in the BTT meme -- so long that "meme" actually has a different meaning than it did then.  Good heavens!  (It used to have, of course, more the "activity" part of Wikipedia's definition, questions that would get passed along from blogger to blogger (or the platform's equivalent), whereas now my fourteen-year-old rolls her eyes when I use the word in that sense, since to her it means something like the infamous "what are those?" video.  This makes me feel quite decrepit.  Sheesh, it was only, what, less than ten years ago!  But I digress.)  I got distracted from the regular Thursday question, and skipped a few, then I fell out of the habit, then ... who knows?  But I thought of it again this morning, and it's still going on -- hurray, Deb! -- so I'll try to get back into taking part regularly.

Guilty pleasures?  I'm afraid that reading itself has been my guilty pleasure the last few years.  I should be doing housework, gardening, exercising, spending quality time with my rapidly-growing-independent children, etc. etc. etc., and however much I laugh and say, "oh, goodness, yes, I'd rather be reading than doing housework any day!" it still does make me feel guilty when I do.  Just this morning, I was lingering over breakfast and The Return of the King -- Merry is wandering around an evening camp of the Rohirrim feeling useless, and lonely without Pippin -- instead of addressing Christmas cards or starting a load of laundry or picking out yet more of that dratted false garlic from our so-called garden, with the excuse that I was still sitting at the breakfast table and that means I'm still having breakfast, right?!

But I have the feeling that this wasn't quite what the question meant, so --

When I had lots of time to read whatever I liked, and thus the luxury to "waste" time on guilty pleasures, I think that Barbara Michaels was one of my chief purveyors of such.  I know she isn't as trashy as some -- well, not by a long shot! -- but I have given up sticking with a badly-written book, so my definition of "trash" is now more along the lines of the plotline or degree of melodrama!  Michaels wrote well, of course, and had an excellent ear for dialogue, so her books are unquestionably intelligent and readable -- it's just perhaps the glee with which she spins off reams of gothic suspense and supernatural elements and romance and glamorous international settings (or murky domestic ones!) that makes her books so enjoyable and yet so firmly in the "guilty pleasures" category!

Would You Lie?

From last week's Booking Through Thursday --

Two-thirds of Brits have lied about reading books they haven’t. Have you? Why? What book?

Oh dear, oh dear.  I'm afraid I don't see the purpose of lying about what I've read.  To impress people?  Far more likely to be thoroughly mortified by being caught out when someone asks "What about that glass paperweight, eh?"

Here's part of the original article from Reuters:

The study, carried out on the World Book Day website in January and February, surveyed 1,342 members of the public.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42 percent)

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31)

3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25)

4. The Bible (24)

5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16)

6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15)

7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14)

8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9)

9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6)

10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6)

I admit that I have read none of these except, as it happens, 1984, which I was forced to do in high school.  This, along with Animal Farm, may have been the beginning of my dislike for post-apocalyptic totalitarian-world science fiction.  To be honest, though, what I have read of Orwell as an adult -- Keep the Aspidistra Flying and his essay "Why I Write", for instance -- intrigue me for his writing style.  (No, really, I just read him for the prose.)

I have read parts of the Bible, but not the whole thing.  Have never even heard of The Selfish Gene! that's embarrassing.

Booking Through Thursday: Recent Sadness

Booking Through Thursday asks this week: What’s the saddest book you’ve read recently?

Sometimes you just come across things accidentally at the library or bookstore that you pick up and think, "that sounds interesting".  I don't know why it caught my eye at the public library, but a month or so ago I came home with Cliffs of Despair by Tom Hunt, about the cliffs of Beachy Head in the south of England and the people who go there to commit suicide.  The author, an American whose brother-in-low shot himself, felt drawn to the cliffs in an attempt to understand not only why people kill themselves, but why Beachy Head?  What is it about the place that draws people there?  He interviews families of victims, taxi drivers who have unwittingly taken suicides to the spot, rescue workers, and coroners, acknowledging that he might seem something of an ambulance-chaser, this American come to ask such deeply personal questions, and so he takes care to remain gently unjudgmental throughout. Cliffs of Despair is certainly not a self-help book, either for those tempted by suicide or for families touched by it, nor does it even answer many questions.  Some questions have no answers.  But it does leave one somehow with a profound feeling of sympathy towards those who, for whatever reason, have found themselves on the edge of Beachy Head and either turned away or took the last, fatal step.

Booking Through Thursday: Just Wild About Harry

be sorted @ nimbo.net

Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?  I read the first two books when I was working at a high school library, and thought I should see what all of the fuss was about.  (Can you imagine a time when there was only one copy of The Sorcerer's Stone on the library shelf?  Not that long ago, either.)  To be honest, I thought they were okay -- not brilliant, but a fairly entertaining diversion.  Actually, I wasn't impressed by the first one, but read it again along The Chamber of Secrets when I realized that my husband was besotted with them, somewhere around the eleventh reading of the then-four-volume series!  I thought a bit better of them on second reading.

David is flying off to Florida on Sunday morning, and plans to snatch up a copy of the new one on his way to the airport, as it were -- he tells me he will also be taking the next few Aubrey/Maturins in the series.  (His favorite HP characters are the Weasley twins.)

If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties? If you’re not going to read it, why not?  I'm more interested in the series since I've gotten this far, but I can certainly wait until David gets home to read the new one! and I can't even think, realistically, of who it would have to be for me to stay up past midnight to see!  (The Queen, perhaps, but then I don't think she'd be up past midnight, either.)

I would, however, be tempted to dress up as a character for a Halloween bash.  Professor Trelawney, I think ....!

And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?  Putting myself in an author's position, I think that Rowling would have a hard time killing off a character that means so much to her, although I understand how the requirements of a storyline might compel one to do so.  If she does, I suspect that it would be something in the line of Gandalf's transformation into something more powerful, greater than he had been before. 

And yes, as you can see, I've "been sorted", into Ravenclaw House.  I suspect that the Sorting Hat would have had rather a time making its decision, wondering whether to put me with the other duffers into Hufflepuff!  David, as you may remember, would be in Gryffindor.

For more answers to this week's Booking Through Thursday question, visit here.

Booking Through Thursday: Encore

Booking Through Thursday asks this week,

Almost everyone can name at least one author that you would love just ONE more book from. Either because they’re dead, not being published any more, not writing more, not producing new work for whatever reason . . . or they’ve aged and aren’t writing to their old standards any more . . . For whatever reason, there just hasn’t been anything new (or worth reading) of theirs and isn’t likely to be.

If you could have just ONE more book from an author you love . . . a book that would be as good any of their best (while we’re dreaming) . . . something that would round out a series, or finish their last work, or just be something NEW . . . Who would the author be, and why? Jane Austen? Shakespeare? Laurie Colwin? Kurt Vonnegut?

David asked me last night, "Where are your mystery books?" and I pointed to a shelf in the living room.  He was gone for some moments, then came back with not a mystery but Master and Commander, the first in the novels by Patrick O'Brian chronicling the adventures of Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin in the early 19th-century English navy, and basis for the brilliantly atmospheric if somewhat hodge-podge movie of the same name.  We sat together for a while, David reading and I knitting, but I kept glancing over at his book, and before long put my knitting away and picked up The Nutmeg of Consolation, fourteenth in the series.  Why I've left it so long, I can't say -- it's been two years at least since I read the previous book.  What was I thinking?

I was rewarded nearly at once by this, as the marooned sailors take a respite, from their hard work of building a schooner from the wreckage of their frigate, in a game of cricket:

"What Stephen did not fully appreciate was the degree of pleasure that Jack took in this particular ceremony.  As a captain Aubrey was exceedingly worried by the shortage of food and marine stores, particularly cordage, by the near absence of powder, and by the coming total absence of arrack and tobacco; but as a cricketer he knew that close concentration was necessary on any pitch, above all on one like this, which more closely resembled a stretch of white concrete than any Christian meadow, and when he came in second wicket down, the yeoman of the sheets having been bowled by the sergeant of the Marines for a creditable sixteen, he took centre and looked about him with an eager, piercing, predatory eye, tapping the block-hole with his bat, wholly taken up with the matter at hand." (p.11)

A masterful paragraph.  It conveys something of Jack's charisma as a leader, his dedication to his men, his attention to detail (when it concerns his ship, at least) and his sportsmanship and raw energy, with a nice touch of humor, and also something of Stephen's obtuseness when it comes to cricket (shadowed by his even greater denseness when confronted with naval terminology, which despite knowing umpteen languages and impossibly arcane minutiae of medical and zoological terminology, not to mention having spent by this time some dozen years at sea with Jack, remains a blank to him).  And it is of course, bar the opening line, all one sentence.

("Nutmeg of Consolation" is an honorific carried by the Sultan of Pulo Prabang (in the South China Sea), who features in the previous book, whose title is borrowed by Jack to christen his newest vessel, "a tight, sweet, newly-coppered, broad-buttocked little ship, a solace to any man's heart" (p.80).)

Patrick O'Brian died, alas, in 2000, and I am reading the fourteenth book in a series of twenty (twenty-one, if you count the one unfinished at his death), but even though I can console myself with the thought that I can certainly read the whole canon over again from the beginning once I've finished, there is a certain wistfulness that there are no more to be had.  One of the things I appreciate most about these novels is that despite the nearly-interminable amount of naval jargon, it isn't really necessary to know much of it.  One can infer from context that a topgallants are a kind of sail, and so on -- and more information can be found at The Gunroom and the aptly-named Guide for the Perplexed, or in any number of O'Brian lexicons -- and quite a lot is explained to Stephen as things go along! -- but even lubbers such as myself can simply enjoy such passages as this, "Royal masts were sent up and their sails were set upon them, very fine and delicate canvas too; and since the wind, a good steady topgallant breeze, was now abaft the beam, studdingsails too made their charming appearance, four on the weather side of the foremast and two on the main, with a crowd of staysails; spritsail and spritsail topsail, of course, with all the jibs that would stand, a noble array.  Presently skysails flashed out above the royals, and all hands watched the water rise high at the bows, sink to the copper abaft the forechains and then race hissing along her side, leaving a broad wake behind, stretching straight and true to the west by south" (p.110), which creates a fine picture in the mind's eye but does not hinder the storyline if rigging is a mystery.

Well, I could go on, but this post is quite long enough already, I suspect!  Suffice it to say that I recommend these books highly as brilliant and entertaining historical novels, with great depth of characterization and elegant prose.  Cracking good reads, too.  Give you joy, as Stephen Maturin might say, if you've yet to discover them!

Booking Through Thursday: Bookless

Booking Through Thursday has a new home and a new button --

This week, BTT asks about inspiration.

It happens even to the best readers from time to time… you close the cover on the book you’re reading and discover, to your horror, that there’s nothing else to read. Either there’s nothing in the house, or nothing you’re in the mood for. Just, nothing that “clicks.” What do you do?? How do you get the reading wheels turning again?

After I finished reading Linda Lear's excellent biography Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature a few weeks ago, I already had Judith Levine's Not Buying It in hand, thanks to Elizabeth of "A Mingled Yarn", who wrote a few weeks ago about the book, intriguing me enough to search out a copy -- that was easy enough!  Sometimes, all it takes to inspire me is a trip to the library, especially when I see a favorite author on the New Book shelf -- I came home with Claire Tomalin's book on Thomas Hardy the other day, and am looking forward to starting it this weekend.

Like with knitting, or with most things, really, I don't like to read when I'm not in the mood -- makes it seem like work, that way.  There are usually enough other things to either distract me for a while or keep me busy until the inspiration does come!