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I got this at a fundraising auction for my library; it’s by a local author who’s also a talented artist. I like to read local books, although “like” usually describes my attitude rather than my actual experience of the works, which have included some of the worst books I’ve ever read (I’m talking about the self-published stuff/vanity press rather than what’s chosen by an actual editor). This was a happy exception. Although it is a “Writers Club Press” book (imprint of iUniverse), Karmazin has been frequently published in little magazines, which is a good sign. Bones isn’t great literature, and a good editor would have helped (not that even “real” publishers seem to employ many of those any more), but it’s a decent workmanlike job and I enjoyed the whole thing.

Jayne Copely works in a small museum. She finds that holding the finger bone of a long-gone shaman brings her back in time to live Eyes-of-Wolf’s life. The experience eventually enables her to make some positive changes in her own life. Eyes-of-Wolf is a sympathetic character and her environment seems very real; Karmazin is especially good at delineating the personalities of the various men and women of the tribes Eyes-of-Wolf encounters. I’m automatically suspicious of outsiders writing about Native American cultures; unless their research skills are impeccable, it’s very easy to make awful mistakes and get away with them. (I don’t know much, but in cursory reading of other books I catch enough tipis in the woods, etc. to indicate that it’s a problem).

Sure enough, I hit what I thought was an absolute howler on page 52 and almost stopped reading. It’s made perfectly clear that the setting is Northeastern PA. There are woods, hills, streams, ponds, etc. Then Eyes-of-Wolf’s father dies…how? A buffalo hunting accident! I was sure there were no bison in this area of the country back then, but apparently I was wrong. Some sources say that there were herds of wood bison (different from the plains bison) in certain parts of Pennsylvania, although others say they were only in Canada. This page convincingly argues that they would have been a variety of plains bison (wood bison are much bigger). A page on the bog turtle indicates that there were buffalo in Snyder County, which isn’t that far from here. So good for you, Margaret, you were probably right and I was wrong, and I learned something cool.

My third post-processing project for Distributed Proofreaders. This was a promotional book encouraging immigrants to the U.S. to settle in Merced, California and raise fruit trees. Half is a detailed travelogue (exactly like today’s Internet trip reports) of the journey from London to Merced and back, passing through different areas of the U.S.; the other half consists of descriptions of the Merced land and services, price lists for various goods, and projections for earnings to be expected from various amounts of starting capital. The trip report is readable, the rest has historic interest, and it’s quite short. A fascinating window on the minutiae of the past. Here’s a paragraph on hotel accommodations in New York:

In my bedroom was a coil of stout Manilla rope screwed into the floor, near a window, so that an escape might be secured in the event of fire. The towels provided are a kind of compromise between a duster and a pocket handkerchief–rather disappointing to one accustomed to his “tub.” New York is great in tram-cars, worked by horses, mules, and electricity, also elevated railways…

In San Francisco, Dowsett praises the Palace Hotel, still in existence today. Years ago I read with incredulity of how practically every male used to chew tobacco and spit everywhere in public; here’s Dowsett’s graphic confirmation:

Of course, as most people know, the (to us) disgusting practice of spitting is common in America; spittoons are universally provided in public and private places. At Merced Court House is this notice: “Gentlemen will not, and others should not spit upon the floors.” Huge spittoons are provided there.

The awful guttural which precedes the constant expectoration of Americans is most trying. It excites in persons near them and who are unaccustomed to it, a sensation of necessity to vomit, as it conveys a fear that your neighbour is about to vomit over you. It is not the excusable expectoration arising from an accumalation in the air passages, but a continuous fusilade of saliva. It is a disgusting practice, and I believe will die out in America as its citizens travel more in the old countries and become used to manners more refined than such a one as this.

“Genial” is Dowsett’s favorite adjective, particularly in describing California’s climate. It’s full of quaint/bizarre little details like this one:

To put in the potatoes a settler would need the help of a labourer, to whom he would have to give one dollar per day and his board, or, if the labourer be a Chinaman, one dollar and a quarter per day without his board.

Was that because Chinese immigrants didn’t want to eat American food, but others did? Or was predjudice such that whites wouldn’t have Asians under the same roof? No explanations here.

A twelve room house cost $3,000 to $4,000. On the other hand, macaroni was 15 cents a pound, not that far off from what it is today.

The most interesting thing to me is the worldview when agriculture was still the primary means of earning a living. No matter who you were or what your personality or inclinations, fruit farming would seem like a decent choice of career, or even a way to get rich if you believed every word C.F. Dowsett wrote…

The sequel to Fifty Acres and a Poodle, a great book in the current flood of urbanites-move-to-the-country experiences (which seems to repeat at least once a decade). Laskas can be very funny and sometimes touching; not a particularly original style (reads like many free-paper first-person essays, lots of one-word paragraphs), but enjoyable. Laskas turns forty, her parents have health issues, and suddenly she decides she wants a child of her own (her husband has grown children from a previous marriage), tries infertility treatments and then adopts a little girl from China (another theme in many books and also in the lives of acquaintances). Full of strange, loveable animals (like Sparky, an old beagle who likes to sleep in the road) and strange, loveable people, as any good country tale should be.

There’s now a huge flock (130+) of cherry-headed conures living wild in San Francisco. In 1990, Mark Bittner started to feed the few individuals from whom the rest have descended. He befriended the parrots; he didn’t tame them, because they are still wild and don’t hang out with other people. This book is a fascinating mix of naturalist’s notes and misfit’s diary. Bittner matter-of-factly states “when I turned fourteen I began to recognize that I was different somehow and that I was never going to have a ‘normal’ life.” The parrots obsess him and he spends more and more time with them, subsisting as he always had on odd jobs, squatting, and intense frugality. But only someone obsessed could devote the time necessary to truly become one of the flock, someone whom the birds trust absolutely and who can intimately observe their personalities. He witnesses courtship, mating, breakups, friendships, and lots of power struggles. It’s a fascinating window on a whole social environment much like ours–like any complex social animal’s. Also confirmation of my general impression of parrot behavior: lots of screaming, flinging of food, destruction, and demands for attention. Good behavior for wild birds–not for pets. Yet this flock presumably originated from pet birds who escaped.

Mark’s now wife made a documentary film about Mark and the parrots, and there’s a website where you can read about what’s currently going on with the parrots. Mark says he has thousands of pages of notes to post eventually.

I’m not putting in picture books, and cartoon collections are borderline, but reading Cathy prompts enough thoughts to make an entry. I will never forget Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead) describing Guisewite’s style as “dropping string on the floor and photocopying it.” But the fact that she can’t draw terribly well doesn’t make it a bad strip, because she doesn’t aim beyond what she can execute. In the service of what she’s trying to accomplish, her art is exactly what’s needed. Although in many ways I’m the antithesis of the stereotype of the American woman, and I find most of Cathy’s hangups and insecurities kinda….stupid, still I like the strip. I recognize a lot of people I know in her, and yes, parts of myself too–mostly the family relationships. I acquired most of the collections available in the early 90s, and I wondered whether they would still hold up or whether I might be able to make some shelf room. Well, I still really like this one, which features Cathy getting her dog, Electra. I guess part of what makes Cathy-the-strip so appealing is its obvious autobiographical element–making it sincere where most other mainstream lowest-common-denominator strips like Garfield feel totally calculated. Sure enough, Guiswite had a collie-shepherd cross (which is exactly what Electra looks like!) named Trolley. She said Cathy waited 13 years to get the dog because that’s how long it took her to learn to draw the dog well enough–and the result is pretty cute. I also absolutely love Andrea’s 2-year-old daughter, Zenith, the encapsulation of toddler anarchy and destruction (“EEYAA!”)

Blogger ate this when I wrote it last week :*( but here goes again. My friend Marc Sheaffer, when he was working at Brodart (library supplies etc. company), polled librarians for their favorite books. Here are the top 100. [link updated again 7/1/2018, the list keeps going away!] Tisha was one of the few I’d never heard of (the others are Pillars of the Earth by Follett (not Ken, surely?) and Follow the River by Thom; there are 17 titles I haven’t tried, 7 I’ve started but didn’t finish, and 5 I can’t remember whether I’ve actually read them or not. I love most of the other 68, so it’s a good source for future reading–librarians have great taste!)

I expected this would be a heartwarming tale, but verging on sentimental/romanticized/whitewashed. Nothing of the sort. Heartwarming, yes, but very candid about the difficulties and especially the racism of the Alaskan frontier. Since it was written in the 70s, even though it’s set in the 20s, it has a level of frankness that would be unusual earlier. Anne (called “Tisha” (Teacher) by one of her students) sees the good and the bad in the people around her and is not corrosively bitter about it. And there’s a happy ending–eventually–which since it’s supposedly a true story (seems to be confirmed by witnesses), is especially gratifying. The one weird thing to me is that since Anne herself was 1/4 Native American, and she didn’t make a point of concealing it, I would have expected that to be an issue discussed one way or the other.

The jacket blurb says that Specht “is now working on a sequel to Tisha,” which he never did. Anne Hobbs Purdy wrote another book, Dark Boundary, which I’ll see if I can track down. I wonder how much of the voice is Specht and how much Anne herself; he gets all the credit on the jacket but the Library of Congress record has her as primary author, as do other sources I’ve found on the Internet. Anyway, it’s a terrific, absorbing book, and Anne is a brave and admirable character.

Although, like most self-help authors, he has his moments of self-promotion, and some Chicken-Soup-like sentiment, I think Carlson is wise and well worth reading. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff deserved its success, and this one is good too. Alas, when I read a book like this I think “Yes, what good advice, I should try to keep that in mind,” but within a few weeks I don’t remember anything specific at all. Mostly because self-help books hardly ever have any new ideas in them; but it’s still valuable to hear all the good old advice in new words. At least I think and hope it is. So reading chapters entitled “Treat others as if they were going to die–tonight” is good for me. If I ever get to the point in my life where I actually take notes and reflect on self-help books as I read them, Carlson’s are books I will go back to.

The only really new/unique ideas I remember coming across in self-help books are those in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, specifically the techniques of recognizing the imagined physical properties of ideas/memories (where you “see” them, how crisp the pictures are, how loud the sound) and adjusting them for desired effects (for example, make a scary idea less real by projecting it on a screen, then shrinking the picture and lowering the volume, etc.) But trying out those techniques never had much effect in my actual life. Flylady, and to a lesser extent Judith Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out, are the only self-help methods that have really made a difference to my day-to-day life.

I liked Isaac’s Storm well enough–a good, workman-like job. This book is about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which I had never heard of until a few years ago, when I bought a huge portfolio of photos of it at the Blueberry Festival book sale. I was fascinated by the scale and grandeur of the temporary buildings. So I was eager to learn more about it, and this book was moderately satisfying on that score. It’s a bizarre combination of biography, social study, and true crime, all fairly well-done but inevitably a little disjointed. And very few photos, which is really too bad. The best part is the description of building the first Ferris Wheel, invented specifically for the fair by George W. G. Ferris (although Larson’s coy concealment of his name until the last minute, so that we don’t know ahead of time what the great centerpiece of the Fair will be, gets quite annoying). What an astounding feat to pull off perfectly on the first try! Some of the other proposals (the idea was to rival Eiffel’s tower) are amusing:

Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.”

I’m about a dozen books behind… I initially thought of ending every post with “This is probably the last post ever” (instead of the kiss-of-death “I’m going to have more time for this blog soon!”) Maybe I should start doing that now. We’ll see.

I’m hooked on these now–no warm-up here, I enjoyed it from the start. In this volume they travel to India–great descriptive passages. Stephen Maturin becomes a more & more sympathetic character, and his unrequited love for Diana Villiers (what a fool she is!) is heart-wrenching. Jack Aubrey takes command of yet another ship, and we get to watch his instant loyalty and love for it, as well as his ability to bring the crew together. Lots of good subtext about leadership. My favorite part: Maturin’s difficult recovery from a fever turns the corner after he finds a new species of land tortoise. There’s a great bit also about a sloth he brings on board, which sleeps in the rigging.

Some things in this book made me laugh really hard–notably the product warning labels, some of which I’d seen before but I still like. Collapsible stroller: “Remove child before folding.” Good collections of stupid products, stupid things people have said, stupid tax-writeoffs, etc. and lots of good corporate stupidity and stupid greed. Unfortunately, nothing is documented and quite a few anecdotes reek of urban legend or distortion. As a kid I used to read my grandmother’s Reader’s Digests cover to cover, and I particularly liked Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece awards, which were lauded by RD. Only as an adult did I learn that Proxmire typically misrepresented the scientific studies he reviled. I get the impression these authors take the same liberties, selectively playing up some aspects for their humor or “outrageousness.” Does that matter in a humor book? If it’s presented as fact, yes it does.