Mary's Library

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz, who died yesterday at the age of 94, was the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, 1988. He wrote 50 novels, his most famous being the Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957.)


These books describe daily life in a traditional Egyptian family and how they react to unsettling change over three generations, from 1905 when Egypt was occupied by the British, through the middle of the 20th century.


The tyrannical father is unwilling to adapt to the increasingly modern world that encroaches on the old ways he has known all his life. The women become restive in their secluded world. One son becomes violent as he is caught up in the political turmoil of the struggle for Egyptian freedom while the idealistic younger son becomes an introspective academic.


“It is in the grandsons . . . that we see modern Egypt emerging. [One] becomes a communist activist, while his brother . . . becomes a Muslim fundamentalist – both working for what they believe will be a better world.” The third grandson, a man of “suave charm and sensual nature, launches a promising political career.”

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Kristen


This is a photo of our god-daughter on a visit to Santa Barbara.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Breaking Blue

“Fresh on a job that promised not only a guaranteed salary of twenty-seven dollars a week but clean clothes as well, Bill Parsons was given a leather strap, brass knuckles, an oak billy club, and a six-chamber, five-inch-barreled, 38-caliber Smith & Wesson, and was introduced to the routine of a lawman in a town staggered by the sixth year of the Great Depression.”

“During the early part of Bill Parson’s career, crime [in Spokane] was tolerated so long as it was the right kind of crime. Bootlegging. Cathouses. Gambling. Wife-beating. Gun-running. No harm there . . .”

The Lady of the Lake reminded me the other day of a book I read back in 1995 called Breaking Blue (1992.) Written by NY Times correspondent Timothy Egan, it’s the engrossing story of a 1935 murder in the town of Newport, WA.

“A rancher’s son, born when followers of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce still dreamed of driving homesteaders from the ponderosa pine forests and alfalfa fields of the inland Pacific Northwest, . . . Bill Parsons had seen the length of the twentieth century . . .

“He started in police work at a time when bootleggers and Chinese numbers rackets could provide a patrolman with a healthy income on the side, and he got out just before crack dealers and the state lottery commission made a mockery of the Depression-era enforcement routine.”

In 1989 Tony Bamonte was asking questions.

“Bamonte was pursuing a master’s degree at Gonzaga University, the old Jesuit college that was built on the banks of the Spokane River at a time when most of the people who lived near its shores were native Spokane or Coeur d’Alene Indians.”

His thesis was a history of the sheriffs of Pend Oreille County. He was the current sheriff and the murder from 54 years before was still unsolved, an open case sitting on his desk.

The clues in this murder mystery led to the bedside of the now-dying Parsons, so Bamonte called the former Spokane police chief and asked for an interview. He wanted to know about the Newport Creamery murder.

“That same week in September 1989, there had been a story in the paper about drug gang members from Los Angeles moving to the Northwest; they would kill one another over the color of somebody’s hat, the story said. Imagine. But Parsons now recalled a day when one man would shoot another over a few pounds of stolen butter.”

Egan’s book is still in print and available at Barnes & Noble.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Laptops


"Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well." -- Missy Dizick
-- From
Cats Me If You Can

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Reading Like a Writer

I don’t know whether it’s the arrival of cool fall-like back-to-school weather or the arrival in the mail yesterday of Francine Prose’s new book, but I am disposed this morning to prioritize my reading (again) and get some of the clutter off my reading list.

The book, which was a surprise because it isn't scheduled for publication until November, is Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Like Them. Publishers Weekly gives it a starred review and suggests it should be on the shelf next to E M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. I agree.

To read like a writer, Prose tells us, is to slow down and pay attention; to look carefully at paragraphs, sentences, and words; to detect the author's meaning from the carefully chosen elements of his writing. This is, of course, what those of us lucky enough to escape from the English Department before the advent of the “isms” learned to call “close reading.” Instead of being taught to criticize the author first and read him later, we spent class time prying out the details of a work – details that tell us a good deal more than does squinting through a narrow window called “feminism” or “deconstructionism.”

Prose tells of a high school assignment to circle every word relating to eyes, light, darkness, and vision in Oedipus and Lear and to write an essay about what she concluded. She found hundreds of references to sight and blindness, knowledge and ignorance, truth and lies, making the blinding of the characters at the climax more powerful and compelling.

Reading Like a Writer makes me want to read that way again, but applying the technique to chick lit and undistinguished murder mysteries is not gratifying. I need to get back to belles-lettres, to books with literary merit, to the canon.

Prose appends a list of “Books to Be Read Immediately,” which includes Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as well as the more predictable Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Also on her list is Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker longlist title.


Reading Like a Writer is available from Barnes & Noble.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Your Dreams

I'm tired of following my dreams. I'm just gonna find out where they're goin' and hook up with them later.
--Mitch Hedberg

From Purls Are a Girl’s Best Friend.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Update on Happiness

I’ve finished reading Daniel Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness, and I now know his secret for achieving happiness: surrogation.

When we make decisions about our future Gilbert encourages us to observe people at random who have done the thing we are contemplating and to use that information in making our own decisions.

We have a lot of objections to this way of running our lives, particularly to the randomness of the observation. This is because we think we’re different. Psychologists tell us we aren’t. Many more than 50% of people polled rate themselves as well above average, whether the question is about our penmanship or our decision making. Ninety six percent of us think we are above-average drivers.

So look around you. Are richer people happier? Are parents of teenagers glowing with the deep and lasting joy of childrearing? Are blondes having more fun?

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

An Afternoon at the Lake

Some friends invited us to spend this afternoon at their lake place about 50 miles north of Spokane. What a peaceful and restorative place a mountain lake can be on a summer afternoon.

We watched the setting sun light the tops of the clouds, which were reflected in the darkening lake. The trout were jumping for bugs, and the cormorant and the grebe and the kingfisher were diving for the trout.

The red-breasted nuthatches were vying with a chipmunk at the bird feeder and the mosquitoes were non-existent.

Heaven.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

English Cities and Small Towns

I’ve stumbled on another fine book. This is a slim little volume, published in 1947 and for some reason retained by the Spokane Library for all these years since it acquired the book, apparently at about the time it was published.

It’s John Betjeman’s English Cities and Small Towns. It’s only 48 pages long and it’s subject is the simple appreciation of English places, an appreciation that Betjeman tells us he didn’t really acquire until he was away from England for a time during the war. (Absence, fonder heart, etc.)

The author tells us how to go about enjoying a town when we are a new visitor. Go immediately to the stationer and look at the post cards. You may discover something not well known but of great interest, like a folly in a local park, or an old church that has not been “restored” during the Victorian era to the point of unrecognizability.

He tells us what guide books to read, what architects’ names to look for, where the old alleys and streets are likely to be, how to appreciate churches and chapels from various periods. Walk down the alleys or mews behind the main street, he advises. The backs of the buildings will tell you about their origins and history.

He describes his delight with Whitby Church, the local museum at Scarborough, Market Hill in Sudbury. There are lots of line drawings and some colored plates of 18th or 19th century views.

And heading the first chapter is a quote from George Cragbe’s “The Borough,” which I suppose is the source of the title of Susan Hill’s first Simon Serrailler novel, The Various Haunts of Men:

Cities and towns, the various haunts of men
Require the pencil; they defy the pen:
Could he, who sung so well the Grecian fleet,
So well have sung of alley, lane or street?
Can measured lines these various buildings show,
The Town Hall Turning, or the Prospect Row?
Can I the seats of wealth and want explore
And lengthen out my lays from door to door?

Monday, August 14, 2006

Willkommen, Wilhelm

I have enticed Wilhelm to become co-blogger on Mary’s Library. He doesn’t read as much as I do, but what he reads is unlike what I read, so he will probably talk about different books and will have a different slant on them. He will also blog on non-book subjects.

Be on the lookout for his inaugural post later today or tomorrow.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Stumbling on Happiness

I’ve stumbled on a delightful book by a Harvard psychologist called Daniel Gilbert. The book, Stumbling on Happiness (2006), is a combination of psychology and philosophy and is remarkably entertaining.

Gilbert says that we think we know what we want, but we’re often mistaken. We predict how we will feel when things go wrong based on a combination of obvious common sense and carefully thought out assumptions. And we are usually wrong.

Research has shown that our satisfaction with our decisions is greater when we make an unbreakable commitment than when we have a chance to opt out. We are better able to cope when things go seriously wrong than when we face less disastrous problems. We remain happy about something longer when we can’t explain it than when we know how and why it happened.

Complicating the situation is the fact that we decide what to do next based on our past and what we remember, alas, isn’t always what actually happened, as numerous psychological experiments have shown.

So what are we to do? How can we make the best decisions? Unfortunately, I haven’t read the last two chapters and so I can’t tell you what the author recommends. But it may not really matter, for in the introduction he has warned us that in these last chapters, “I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.”

Friday, August 11, 2006

The Plebicitarian Presidency

I had to make a decision this morning whether to return to the library or keep and read Bruce Ackerman’s book, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy (2006.) I decided to keep it.

The book addresses an interesting development in US history. In the 1801 election, Thomas Jefferson and his Republican party had won the popular vote. But the electoral college was split down the middle. So the decision was thrown into the House.(If this sounds familiar it’s because we still have the electoral college, whose vote is not always for the guy who won the plebiscite.)

The Federalists controlled the House and after 35 ballots there was still no president. If the Federalists had put their man, Aaron Burr (yes, that Aaron Burr), into the presidency, anti-Federalists state militias were prepared to march on the capital.

A compromise was reached, Jefferson became president, and thus began the two-party system in this country and the strong presidency with claims of a mandate for broad change.

The Federalists withered away to be replaced by the Whigs, who withered away to be replaced in 1854 by the Republican Party. Meanwhile Jefferson’s Republicans became first the Republican Democrats and eventually the Democratic Party we know today.

Fascinating stuff.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Princess Priscilla


Sarah mentioned a book this morning that I haven’t read. I hadn’t even heard of it before today. It’s Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905.)

Sarah is reading it on line, so I decided to do the same. I found it at online-literature.com.

The print there is small, so I copied the first chapter into a temporary Word file and blew up the type face to a readable size. And I’m finding it surprisingly easy to read this way. I’d rather be reading from paper, but the book is not easy to come by and in lieu of a paper volume this is fine.

I’ve only read the first chapter, but so far the book is quintessential von Arnim, which means delightful.

“Priscilla wanted to run away. This, I believe, is considered an awful thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody's wife. If it were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she would surely have gone.”

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

The Morland Dynasty



My Cynthia Harrod-Eagles collection turned up the other day. They had been on the shelves in my library in Virginia and where the packers had put them was anybody’s guess. Under a pile of office supplies and some CDs, it turns out.

This is a series of 29 or so books about a fictional family in Yorkshire, starting in 1434 and continuing through the early 20th century. Harrod-Eagles packs a lot of history into each volume. Reading these novels is a painless way to learn to learn about Lancaster and York, to remember the date of the Battle of Bosworth Field, and to get a feel for the lives of prosperous merchants in the 15th century.

The first three books in the series are The Founding (1980), The Dark Rose (1981), and The Princeling (1981.)


It used to be difficult to get these books in the US, but I find that Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble now sell them. Do your self a favor and buy the first volume. You will find it’s very difficult to stop reading once you meet the Morlands and the world they lived in.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Too Many Books?


Do you find the temptation to begin reading yet another book irresistible, even though you're reading 25 or 30 of them already? Join the club.

There's a charming essay in today's NY Times by Joe Queenan in which he addresses this very probem. If it really is a problem.

Says Queenan: "Starting books always makes me feel that a long-awaited voyage has already begun; that while it may take five years to finish Boswell’s Life of Johnson or Remembrance of Things Past, these are no longer dimly envisioned projects like learning to play the accordion or fly a helicopter, but in some way a real part of my life. Other people say, 'One of these days, I’m finally going to get to Ulysses.' Well, I’ve already gotten to Ulysses. I’ve been getting to Ulysses for the past 25 years."

"Why I Can't Stop Starting Books" made me laugh. Check it out.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

What I'm Reading

I'm Currently Reading:

Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) by Colson Whithead. This thin novel seems to be about a guy who works at an advertising agency. His eponymous slogan for Apex bandages seems to be the apex of his life’s work. I’ll let you know about this one when I’ve finished reading it.

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (2005) by Lauren Willig. More English spies are saving the day in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, this time during the Napoleonic period.

Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau (re-reading.) It’s just as good as I remembered.

Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter (2006) by Blaize Clement. Here we go again. This is a cat-themed mystery about a former police officer who is now a cat-sitter in an upscale key off the coast of Sarasota. How can you resist a mystery in which the corpse is found face-down in the cat’s water dish?


I’m Still Reading:

The Prime Minister (re-reading)

Passion

Deerbrooke


I’ve Recently Finished Reading:

***** Death at La Fenice

**** The Din in the Head, essays by Cynthia Ozick. She is at her ascerbic best in these musings on 20th century novelists and why we read them.

**** Sweet Poison (2001) by David Roberts. This is a real find. It’s the first in a series of mysteries that take place in the 1930s, starring Lord Edward Corinth and Verity Browne. I got started with these because I was so attracted to the covers.

** The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal It’s not great literature but the temperature was 105 and it was perfect for that sort of day.


I’ve Abandoned:

* Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life (2005) by Michael Dirda

-* A Love Affair (1984) by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney


Waiting To Be Read:

The Ladies' Paradise (1883) by Emile Zola. We are considering this for future reading on the not-trollope group.

Shadows at the Fair by Lea Wait (2002) I picked this up at the library yesterday because it’s the first in a series. It’s about an antique dealer.

The Butcher of Beverly Hills (2005) by Jennifer Colt. The attraction of this book is the hot pink, fuchsia, and orange cover. And it’s the first in a mystery series.

The Bronte Project (2005) by Jennifer Vandever. This book appeals because it has “Bronte” in the title.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Miss Woodhouse and Henry James




Back in the middle of May I reported that Miss Woodhouse had pulled a volume of Henry James off the shelves in the bedroom. That volume contained his early novels, including The Americans and The Europeans. I was never able to get her to tell me what she was looking for.

Well, she's done it again, this time with the volume contraining the novels from 1896 to 1899, including The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age.

Once again I appeal to my readers. Why is the cat pulling these volumes of Henry James novels off the shelf? What is it that she wants to read?

Thursday, August 03, 2006

A Five Star Mystery

Yesterday I picked up a copy of Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice (1992) while we were in Barnes & Noble. This is the first of the Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series by Donna Leon. And although I have half a dozen other books in the works it was all that was to hand when I had a few free minutes as I waited for Wilhelm to emerge from Pet-Smart with some cat food so I began reading it.

And that was it for the rest of yesterday and this morning. What a fine book this is. Not just a good mystery, but a good book.

La Fenice is the most famous opera house in Venice and the book opens there as the orchestra returns to the pit before the last act of Traviata. The hall grows quiet, someone drops something, someone coughs. Everyone awaits the conductor.

But he doesn’t appear. Murmurs are heard from the pit, the balcony, the orchestra. And then the house manager stumbles on stage and announces that the conductor will not be able to continue and will be replaced by someone else.

Oh, and is there a doctor in the house.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I tell you the great maestro has been found dead in his dressing room, apparently of cyanide poisoning. And so the chase begins.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Today's Acquisitions

I was in Barnes & Noble today and picked up a few treasures.

On the remainder table was Jane Smiley's Good Faith, which I snapped up at a mere $5. In mysteries I found a couple of Donna Leon's Guido Brunelli mysteries, Death at La Fenice and Death in a Strange Country. I also got the second in the Laurie R King Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women.

And since I expect the not-trollope group is going to be reading ZolaI bought a copy of Germinal, a book I've heard described as Zola's masterpiece.

At home the mail had brought the Zola novel that Jan in the trollope group recommended to the not-trollope group: The Ladies' Paradise.

Also waiting for me was Michael Innes' Inspector Appleby mystery, The Daffodil Affair. There was a novel I ordered the other day for Wilhelm, Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blachman, purportedly the first blog novel.

The Golden Age

"The poet, Randall Jarrell, quipped that thepeople who lived in the golden age probably went around complaining how yellow everything was."
- Michael Dirda, Book by Book