Hilary's Book Blog

We owned these as a single paperback, and I remember at least Dragon Fish being one of the stories my father dictated onto his reel-to-reel tape deck for us to have as bedtime stories when he was out. (Appropriate to remember around Father’s Day–thanks, Daddy!) What led me to dig them up was a quote from Wolf Totem that I forgot to transcribe:

Westerners eat with a knife and fork, devour rare beef, consume cheese and butter. That is why they have kept a lot of their primitive, animal nature, much more so than agricultural peoples.

That reminded me of the “ew, you smell like butter!” idea from The Water-Buffalo Children, which was one of the few memories I had of this book–I vaguely remembered it was Pearl Buck, but the the other vivid images were of Alice’s mother making her warm milk and toast and an egg to welcome her home, and of the heavy jade dragon fish. I had forgotten Da Lobo, the cranky water-buffalo, and the fact that Lan-may and Alice, who meet and find the dragon fish, both run away from home because they are tired of boys. A lot of cliches, but still enjoyable stories.

Apparently I haven’t yet written about The Little House in the Fairy Wood, a lost favorite from childhood that I rediscovered thanks to the wonderful Loganberry Books “Stump the Bookseller” and subsequently digitized for Project Gutenberg. Since then I’ve been fascinated by Ethel Cook Eliot, especially since we moved to Northampton MA, where she lived most of her life. I have a long-standing vague project to write up something about her–so many interesting connections! Diane Arbus, the Little Theater movement, Northampton natural history, Sylvia Plath– and I’ve tracked down as many as her works as I can find (and afford). This one started turning up in searches fairly recently, to my surprise since I thought I knew of all her titles, it’s dated 1923 (same as Wind Boy), and I can’t find any evidence of the original publication details. This copy is new, published by Raven Rocks Press, who also re-issued The Wind Boy and The House Above the Trees – and wow, looking at their website, there’s also a bunch of interesting connections there and I could go right down the rabbit hole. But stopping at the edge for now–this was quite disappointing compared to LHFW and her other work. It reads like it may have been written much earlier, possibly as free-standing stories. It still has charm and originality, and the physical book is very nice, with color plates by Eliot’s sister-in-law which were presumably executed in the 20s, and pen and ink illustrations by another relative (granddaughter?). Best of all, there’s a photo and author bio that adds to my picture of her. Tantalizing!

I picked up a paperback copy printed by Airmont Publishing Co., who gave the copyright as 1965–I didn’t realize until finding it on Project Gutenberg how old it actually is. Wikipedia calls it “one of the most successful children’s stories ever published,” and  since that’s my wheelhouse, I was surprised never to have heard of it. It’s a good evocation of Elizabethan theater, with Thomas Heywood and Ben Johnson featured much more heavily than Shakespeare, who shows up at the very end as a sort of living saint everyone loves. Young Nick Atwood, the protagonist, is kidnapped for his angelic voice (“Well sung, Master Skylark… thou hast a very fortune in thy throat!”) and spends the book trying to get home to mother. The “villain,” Gaston Carew, is surprisingly complex, and the ending is thoroughly heartwarming, including Johnson’s toast “to all kind hearts!” and Michael Drayton quoting “Jack shall have Jill/Nought shall go ill,” to which Shakespeare replies: “It is a good place to end.”

A cotton candy book – pleasant, nicely-designed (cute spot illustrations), but insubstantial. I was already sold on hygge from various media sources, and this did add hyggelige (adjective) and hyggekrog (cozy nook) to my vocabulary. I also really like that hygge can be felt year-round (summer has its own particular kind), and that Hans Christian Andersen made the oldest-known woven paper heart in 1860.

The June book for the Nature and Environment book club–I think it’s the first novel we’ve read. I had already read a lot about honeybees and their fascinating behavior, like queen piping and balling, so I loved encountering those behaviors from the “inside.” I wasn’t 100% convinced by the voice, but it felt like Paull got as close as possible, with some great ways of depicting non-human communication (vibrations in the comb, data transmission through antenna contact and pheromones). Watership Down is the closest comparison, although I wouldn’t call it a great novel in the same way–more of a novelty/experiment.

Misleading subtitle: “A Romp Through Literature for Writers and Readers.” More accurate: “A Random Assortment of Selections from Barnaby’s Favorite Books, Plays, and Movies for No Particular Audience or Purpose.” I didn’t not-enjoy reading it and I finished it, but the interstitial text is mostly a waste because it’s mostly narration and anecdotes rather than the help to writers it’s trying to be. A compilation that actually contrasted different kinds of scene approaches might actually be useful; this isn’t that.

If I hadn’t read so many books on writing, I might have gotten more out of this. A very quick read–short, pithy sentences like strings of aphorisms–which I’ll barely remember tomorrow. I liked the chapter epigraphs, excellent quotations from various writers, most of which were new to me. And this:

And don’t expect–even in fiction–for written things to be true just because they happened. This is no excuse. They have to happen on the page. With rhythm. With style. With a fierce honesty that is true to experience, not to fact.

All writing is imagination. It creates out of dust. Even what they choose to call nonfiction.

Re-read for the umpteenth time. I go back to these at least every few years, always with enjoyment and various types of annoyance. New or salient thoughts this time around:

• Why oh why did idiotic HarperCollins choose to re-order the series chronologically rather than by publication date? It ruins Lewis’ internal references and makes no sense. I feel sorry for kids today reading them in the wrong order.
• As a writer, I’m always trying to pick up on exactly how Lewis manages to be so freaking economical with words and scenes and still have huge story impact. He is one of the best at making the reader fill in gaps. Notice how little we know about anybody’s physical appearance, although the wonderful Pauline Baynes illustrations fill that in. He does rely heavily on his imaginary creatures having middle-class English lives—Mr. Tumnus with his afternoon tea and crumpets, etc.
• Christian apologetics fascinate me—I find so much to disagree with!—and the particular flaw I noticed this time is how in The Last Battle, the animals are taken in by the fake Aslan specifically because of the whole “he’s not a tame lion”/Abraham-and-Isaac dynamic. Lewis has it both ways—we know Aslan would never command cutting down the Talking Trees, but we’re not supposed to recognize that means we have independent moral judgement.

I joined a bunch of book clubs as soon as we moved to Northampton – the Forbes Library has oodles – and it’s weird to pick up this blog again with a title from one of them, the Great Books group (which I coordinate). The meeting is tonight, so we haven’t discussed it yet, and maybe in future I’ll wait until after (unless this is the last post ever!) I’d heard so much praise of this novel about Gettysburg that my expectations were probably too high. In some ways it feels like a tour-de-force, but it kind of feels too one-note, too tightly focused on the battle, to be a great novel. I’ve been to the National Military Park twice, once in conjunction with Susquehanna County Reads The Red Badge of Courage and once independently, and I do wish I’d read this as well ahead of time–it would really make it come to life.

I flag a bunch of passages for book club; some on themes I want to discuss, but here are a few I’d like to remember:

• Lee’s heart disease: “The great cold message had come in the spring… that endless, breathless, inconsolable alarm: there is not much time, beware, prepare.”
• Longstreet: “‘Honor without intelligence is a disaster.'”
• Chamberlain on Little Round Top, morning of July 3: “…the odor of death was very slight, just that one pale yellow scent, a memory in the silent air. The odor of coffee was stronger.”
• “Lee said, ‘Well, we have left nothing undone. It is all in the hand of God.’
  Longstreet thought: it isn’t God that is sending those men up that hill. But he said nothing.”
• Pickett’s Charge ending: “there was no line anymore, just men moving forward at different speeds, stopping to fire, stopping to die, drifting back like leaves blown from the fire ahead.”
• Chamberlain: “In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.”