Hilary's Book Blog

I just turned 41 and I’m thinking of the “1” as a Fresh Start. Which means trying to get the decks cleared. Which means putting aside the irrational thoughts of getting “caught up” on my book backlog. Which means another listing of everything I’ve read & haven’t written about—alas, those thoughts are gone. Just the sentence for each didn’t work, but rather than leave them completely bare I will just give a letter grade to each, plus a star for those I’d particularly like to write about—someday…. Alphabetical order this time! (per batch—there will be several):

Atkinson, Kate – Case Histories, 2004 – A-

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell – Hitler Youth: Growing Up In Hitler’s Shadow, 2005 – A- (amazing how many foreshadowings there were of what was to come—reassuring in a way that Germany did not just descend into madness overnight)

Baum, L. Frank – Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, 1908 – B

Berendt, John – The City of Falling Angels, 2005 – A-

Best-Loved Poems in Large Print – ed. Virginia S. Reiser – B. Read while on the elliptical trainer. Lots of good classics, lots of sentimental trash (Edgar A. Guest, urk!)

The Best of Oprah’s What I Know for Sure – 2004? – B+

Helen Dore Boylston, all B/B+
Presumably the orginal “nurse story” books, still enjoyable today. The now-familiar cliches, except for Connie Halliday’s skit as a dignified, wistful cockroach who traces the hospital’s history and mission. That you don’t read every day.
Sue Barton, Senior Nurse – 1937
Sue Barton, Student Nurse – 1936

Burgess, Gelett – Goops and How to Be Them – 1900 – B-

Burnett, Frances Hodgson
Emily Fox-Seton: Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst – , 1901 – B+ (my third on-my-own book for Project Gutenberg)
The Head of the House of Coombe, 1921 – B+

Byng, Georgia – Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of Hypnotism, 2002 – B

Carroll, Ruth and Latrobe – Runaway Pony, Runaway Dog, 1963 – B

Chicago (Eyewitness Travel Guides), 2003 – A

Cohen, Brad, with Lisa Wysocky – Front of the Class: How Tourette Syndrome Made Me the Teacher I Never Had, 2005 – C+

Coolidge, Susan
Clover – 1888 – B+
What Katy Did – 1872 – A
What Katy Did at School – 1873 – B+
What Katy Did Next – 1886 – B+

Curtis, Christopher Paul – Bud, Not Buddy, 1999 – A

Dahl, Roald
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – 1964 – A-
James and the Giant Peach – 1961 – A-

De Angeli, Marguerite – The Door in the Wall, 1949 – B+

Druon, Maurice – Tistou Les Pouces Vertes, 1968 – B+

Duriez, Colin – The C. S. Lewis Chronicles: The Indispensible Biography of the Creator of Narnia Full of Little-Known Facts, Events, and Miscellany, 2005 – D

Estes, Eleanor (ill. Edward Ardizzone), The Witch Family, 1960 – A-

Francis, Dick
Proof, 1985 – B+
Smokescreen, 1972 – B-

Frolic, Billy (as “Ronald Richard Roberts”) – The Ditches of Edison County, 1993 – B+ (quite a good parody!)

Gallagher, Tim – The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, 2005 – A

George, Jean – My Side of the Mountain, 1959 – A-

Gladwell, Malcolm – Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005 – A+

Honey, Elizabeth – Don’t Pat the Wombat, 1996 – B+

Hornby, Nick – A Long Way Down, 2005 – A- (Hornby’s reading a lot like Mil Millington these days!)

Ibbotson, Eva—all A-
Island of the Aunts, 1999
Not Just a Witch, 1989
The Secret of Platform 13, 1994
Which Witch?, 1979

Katz, Jon – The Dogs of Bedlam Farm: An Adventure With Sixteen Sheep, Three Dogs, Two Donkeys, and Me, 2004 – A-

Keller, Beverly – A Small, Elderly Dragon, 1984 – C+

Konigsburg, E.L. – The View from Saturday, 1996 – B

LeGuin, Ursula – The Beginning Place, 1980 – A

Lewis, C.S.
The Great Divorce, 1946 – A-
The Horse and His Boy, 1954 – A-
The Last Battle, 1956 – A-
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950 – A-
The Magician’s Nephew, 1955 – A-
Prince Caspian, 1951 – A-
The Screwtape Letters, 1942 – A-
The Silver Chair, 1953 – A-
Till We Have Faces, 1956 – A-
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952 – A-

McCaffrey, Anne
Dragondrums, 1979 – B+
Dragonsinger, 1977 – A-
Dragonsong, 1976 – A-
Get Off the Dragon, 1977 -B-

Maggin, Elliot S!; both B+. I’m getting rid of these now, though I’ve enjoyed them several times since I was a teen. They make you think about why Superman sticks around on Earth; he comes across as a genuinely nice guy, tortured by his inability to help Lex Luthor grow up into a healthy, honest person. Interesting combination of decent psychological realism with the most detailed and therefore cognitively-dissonant depiction of Supe going everywhere and fixing everything, even the most trivial “problems” (like cat in tree from the movie).
Superman: Last Son of Krypton, 1978
Superman: Miracle Monday

Moehringer, J. R. – The Tender Bar: A Memoir, 2005 – A-

Moore, Judith – Fat Girl: A True Story, 2005 – B-. Very, very depressing.

Morey, Walt – Gentle Ben, 1965 – A-

Nelson, O. T. – The Girl Who Owned a City, 1975 – B- I adored this book as a kid, lost the author and title, and later re-discovered it through a bio of Ayn Rand. Some of the Randite attitudes are a turn-off now; it’s the emphasis on competence and independence that got me then.

Niven, Larry and Jerry Pournelle – Lucifer’s Hammer, 1977 – B+

O’Brien, Robert C. – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM, 1971 – A-

Reichl, Ruth – Garlic and Sapphires, 2005 – A- (I couldn’t put it down, stayed up until 2am finishing it!)

Richards, Laura E. – Captain January, 1902 – B

Rothman, Rodney – Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement, 2005 – A-

Rowling, J. K. – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2005 – B+

Salten, Felix – Bambi, 1929 (translated by Whittaker Chambers) – A-

Schwenke, Karl – In a Pig’s Eye, 1985 – B

White, E.B. – Stuart Little, 1945 – B+

Wisner, Franz – Honeymoon with My Brother, 2005 – A-

Yates, Dornford – Berry and Co., 1921 – B-

I was browsing the library shelves looking for titles to consider for our proposed parent-child book club (inspired by Deconstructing Penguins). I checked these out not because I’d consider them for that (in fact we’ve chosen Christopher Paul Curtis’ wonderful Bud, Not Buddy for the first meeting), but just because I was curious about them (familiar author/unfamiliar work, or, in the case of the dragon book, a genre I like).

Michievous Meg – Astrid Lindgren, 1962.

I was a big Pippi Longstocking fan as a kid, although I don’t think Lindgren is a great writer (unlike Tove Jansson). This is a cute collection of stories about Meg getting herself into hot water, sometimes dragging her little sister Betsy along. Meg floats Betsy off in a boiler to be Moses in the rushes, uses an umbrella to parachute off the roof, skates too far and gets them lost, and stars in a shameless rip-off of the story “Charles” by Shirley Jackson (the classic tale wherein a child tells hair-raising stories of the awful boy who causes so much trouble at school, ending with the parent meeting the teacher and discovering that the awful child does not exist and their own offspring is the trouble-maker).

McBroom’s Almanac: Containing Truthful Accounts of Amazing Happenings on McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm, to which are added Astounding World Records, Infallible Weather Signs & Predictions, Useful Advice (Fully Guaranteed), Miraculous Inventions & Sundry Jollifications – Sid Fleischman, 1984.

I’m a big fan of the McBroom family (“Willjillhesterchesterpeterpollytimtommarylarryandlittleclarinda!”) and their forty-acre farm, which is only one acre in extent, but forty acres deep–hence the incredibly fertile soil that grows giant vegetables in minutes. This isn’t really a McBroom book, even though it has a few stories about the McBrooms versus their rival, Heck Jones; rather it’s a hodge-podge of one-liners, tall tales, silly proverbs, etc.—viz. the subtitle. Some samples:

Rowdy storms, cold and gruff;
A week of Feb. is quite enough.

FARM TIP
It’s poor advice to plant potatoes in the dark of the moon. Better to plant
them in the garden.

PRAIRIE WILDLIFE
The Shlunk
This is a shy little animal with big feet and pink whiskers. Shlunks come out of their burrows only one day a year, on April 31. They are impossible to track because they walk single file and eat each other’s footprints. The last one walks backwards.

Unfortunately it’s illustrated by Walter Lorraine, one of the few children’s book artists I really dislike.

Dick Francis is/was one of my favorite writers; not that I think he’s one of the greats (like Ursula LeGuin), but there’s something about his writing that I couldn’t get enough of at one point, so I collected everything he wrote. I still enjoy his horse-world-centered mysteries, but some of the appeal is fading with age. Somehow I misplaced my copy of In the Frame, so I hadn’t read it on my last Francis kick. Though it’s an above-average Francis, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. The main character is a painter of horse portraits who uncovers the typical Francis horse-crook ring through Australian galleries selling fake Munnings canvases. Like many mysteries, part of the appeal is vicariously enjoying the research and travel the author got to do.

Subtitle: “Origin and History of the region. Illustrations and descriptive text of this vacation-land of Pennsylvania.”

Eagles Mere is less than two hours from here. The name itself fascinated me initially, and my first visit gave the impression of a magical, romantic place away from everyday life. Alas, a subsequent visit revealed that there’s not much “there” there for a day visit, unless you love browsing little shops (a little goes a long way for me). But this book (which I checked out from the library basement when we were weeding the collection) reveals that there used to be more, especially for residents and long-term visitors. The hiking trails must still be there, and the “lake on top of a hill” is still beautiful. There’s lovely architecture as well, although a number of hotels described in this book have since burned or been torn down. The book is full of beautiful black-and-white photographs, on surprisingly nice paper (considering it was wartime). This type of old guidebook/souvenir/coffee table book has a relaxed and uncommercial feel compared to its tightly-marketed equivalents today. The McFarlands skip leisurely from topic to topic; they are sometimes conversational or anectodal, sometimes didactic and tedious. They basically toss in everything they know or could find: descriptions of all the Eagles Mere hotels, an analysis of the lake water (“pH: 6.2. Amorphous matter: Considerable.”), a poem about Joe Pye weed.

Just found the whole thing online! Yay Penn State!

Conversations with Capote – Laurence Grobel, 1985
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences – Truman Capote, 1965

Jonathan played a Capote type in a play this summer (Southern Fried Murder), so I dug up my Conversations with Capote, which I remembered enjoying for its snarkiness (the same way I enjoy Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion). I did read the whole thing but am promptly getting rid of it. Capote comes across as a really miserable man, nasty because he’s unhappy and unhappy because he’s nasty. His huge ego and his vicious put-downs both seem to come from bottomless insecurity—or maybe it’s just because he’s stoned out of his gourd all the time. Sad, sad, sad.

However, I’d never read In Cold Blood, widely considered a masterpiece. Capote certainly writes clearly and well, and I can see that it was a groundbreaking work at the time (it’s been described as “the first non-fiction novel”). But some works of art, important because they were seminal, can be unremarkable divorced from their context, and that’s how In Cold Blood struck me. To its credit, the book doesn’t have the prurience that often taints true crime, and it’s well-structured. But a masterpiece? Where’s the sense of larger context, the transcendence that can imbue a story of this scope? It didn’t make me think or feel as much as the great non-fiction writers of today do in a brief essay. Sorry, Truman!

David Hahn was a bright kid, fascinated with chemistry, who fell in love with the romance of radioactivity. Unaided and unguided, he recreated the 20th century’s discoveries and mistakes, handling the dangerous substances he got his hands on with the cavalier approach of his heroes, the Curies. The Curies, of course, didn’t know any better; David chose not to take the risks seriously—but he was a teenager, after all. Silverstein tells the story exactly right, letting events unspool with the perfect amount of background, context, and suspense. He uses a book which fascinated David, The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (1960), as a lens to examine the hubris of mid-20th century technology. David raised himself as a throwback to the era when we thought pills could substitute for food and the only problem with nuclear energy was how cheap it would be. The saddest aspect is the many adults who failed David by not recognizing or encouraging his special gifts—especially his father, an engineer who saw David’s chemistry experiments as “a breakdown in discipline” and instead pressured him to become an Eagle Scout. As a result, David’s incredible resourcefulness and persistence were devoted to acquiring—legally or illegally—quantities of antique clocks, smoke detectors, and lantern mantles so he could extract enough thorium and americium to build a working reactor. A mind-boggling and wonderful read.

The medical mystery/doctor’s experiences genre is a favorite of mine. This exemplar comes from one of the New Yorker‘s stable of medical professionals who also write extremely well (where do they find them, I wonder? did Berton Roueché start a special school?) The most striking story is from the prologue: Groopman’s own experience of insisting on surgery so his lower-back problem could be “fixed” quickly. Refusing to listen to doctors who advised rest and “tincture of time,” he shopped around until he found surgeons to operate. As a result, the poor guy to this day has severe physical limitations (the reason he was so impatient originally was because he was in training for the Boston Marathon, so I can identify, but now he can’t run at all…) but also a refreshing humility about medicine and doctors. A number of the stories reflect on the advantages that wealth, connections, and education bestow on people who question their “first opinion” treatments. Like Atul Gawande’s Complications (although not quite as brilliantly), Second Opinions vividly shows that while skilled and intuitive physicians can do remarkable things, as a species we’re still holding a guttering candle in the darkness.

I forgot to say in my previous Anne LaBastille post that I’m re-reading these books because a library patron requested them through interlibrary loan, so I’m piggy-backing on his requests (except for book #1, which I own). I’d never even heard of book #3 until I looked up LaBastille’s works for the patron. It’s self-published, and this copy is signed (I guess she sells most copies of her more recent books directly, according to a chapter in this one about her publishing and book-selling ventures entitled “An Ol’ Book Peddler.”) Black Bear Lake is getting more crowded, technology has taken over more of her life, and this time around, though there is a new dog, there’s no new romance. Life is harder, as LaBastille shows by sharing details of her frazzled freelancing business, health concerns, and, sadly, harassment for her outspoken environmental views. Two chapters entitled “Anatomy of an Eco-Catastrophe” tell of increasing conflict at Black Bear Lake between the “small boaters” like Anne and “big boaters” who want to roar around on the lake with huge motors that threaten the peace of the lake and bother the loons. The book ends before a final resolution (the town was possibly going to hold more hearings about new regulations)–I hope the small boaters won…. According to this article in a Cornell alumni magazine, Woodswoman IIII (*) came out in 2003, so I’ll try to track that down for my patron and myself.

(*) In the first version of this post, I added “sic” and wondered why she didn’t use IV originally, but Jonathan (who kindly reads these entries for typos, bad grammar, infelicity, lack of clarity, and factual/logical errors–thank you j-hay!) told me he’d heard that superstitious Romans preferred IIII because they didn’t like to use the first letters of Jupiter’s name. In attempting to confirm that I found this facinating page.

Woodswoman (1976) and Beyond Black Bear Lake (1987)

As a teenager I fantasized about being Woodswoman–I was going to have a pickup truck and a German Shepherd named Wolfgang, and go live in the woods in a self-built cabin. LaBastille’s first memoir of living solo and spartan in the Adirondacks gives enough detail to make the romance believable and enough magic to make the practicalities enchanting. It’s still an enthralling read, although part of that is the nostalgia factor–the book is a little more disjointed than I remembered, and I’m not quite as infatuated with Anne-as-person as I was back then–but these are minor quibbles. The abundance of photos is a plus, and a rarity this early (they’re studded throughout the text, too, not bunched in that annoying center section you have to keep flipping back and forth to reference). I owned and re-read Woodswoman many times. I must have read Beyond Black Bear Lake at some point, because its description of acid rain killing Adirondack lakes has stuck with me (I thought it was in Woodswoman, but in that book Black Bear Lake is still pristine, and ecological concerns are distant). Same with the need to put dye packets in septic tanks to make sure they’re not contaminating the lake. In this follow-up, LaBastille builds “Thoreau II” to get even further away from civilization, so it’s got the same satisfactory construction narrative as the first book. There’s also a new romance and a new dog–it really is Woodswoman mark II. I may not think quite as much of LaBastille’s writing style as I once did, but I still deeply admire her and her lifestyle. These are classics of outdoors literature.

My co-worker and friend Mary Beth told me about this book, and we’re planning on starting a parent-child book group at the library, inspired by the Goldstones. They describe starting such a book group in Connecticut, and detail their method for analyzing books: “books are like puzzles–the author’s ideas are hidden, and it is up to all of us to figure them out.” They started with Mr. Popper’s Penguins–hence the title–and then moved on to many other classics. (Personally I found MPP quite dull when I read it as an adult, so maybe I should re-read it!)

Their approach entails a number of steps. One of the first is to find the protagonist and antagonist of the story by analyzing the characters (they use the Greek meanings, where the protagonist is the one who advances the action (not necessarily the “hero”) and the antagonist is the one who seeks to hold back the action (not necessarily the villain)). Then they ask one to identify their version of the “climax” of the story, when the struggle between the protagonist and antagonist reaches a peak (usually not near the end, but rather 2/3 of the way through). The primary goal is to get to the point where you can determine what the book “is really about.” The final step is to evaluate how well the author succeeded. Mary Beth and I both read primarily for story, so it’s been interesting for us to analyze books together using this system. The Goldbergs are very sure of themselves; while they acknowledge that there can be multiple interpretations, they give very convincing reasons for choosing the protagonist/antagonist/message of each book they analyze, which MB and I found rather intimidating. For example, they conclude that The Call of the Wild is about the relationship between bosses and workers (Buck’s owners, good and bad, effectively oppress Buck by making him go against his nature).

Deconstructing Penguins was a very exciting book to read–I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting despite having other things I needed to do! Unfortunately, the authors’ judgement disappointed me greatly in the appendix, where they gratuituously dismiss Harry Potter as just a “good read” as opposed to one that lends itself to critical analysis–this after promoting Edward Eager’s Half-Magic as one of their deep, significant books. I love Eager and I think Half-Magic is a wonderful book, but Rowling has way more going on thematically than Eager and E. Nesbit (Eager’s primary inspiration) put together!