The Windhover

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

What Am I Reading?

Sharon over at Ex Libris posted a clever little meme the other day. It works like this:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book. I know you were thinking about it. Just pick up whatever is closest.

Here are my results:

“Do you believe him?”

Guastafeste helped himself to another olive and toyed with it between his fingers.

“I’m not sure. We had to conduct the interview through an interpreter.”

It’s from a very good mystery, The Rainaldi Quartet, by Paul Adam, in which a luthier helps his policeman friend track down the killer of one of the members of their string quartet (now a string trio I suppose.) The trail leads them into the convoluted world of instrument making and the collecting of historic violins.

Attention les amis de Nothomb

Attention Amelie Nothomb fans. Information has just reached me that Nothomb's latest novel, Journal d'hirondelle (a swallow’s diary), is # 2 on the best seller list in France. Is there an English translation in our future?

Brrrrrrrr

Did you know that it’s the blue line on your thermostat that controls the heat and that the red controls the air conditioning? How much sense does that make? Red-heat; blue-cold. So logical. So wrong.

I decided yesterday that we didn’t need two lines moving back and forth as we changed the setting on the thermostat so I moved the blue line all the way to the left and put the red one up a bit from around 65 to 68. It’s getting down into the low 30s at night and I figured we needed a little more heat in the house.

It was 36 when I got up at 5:30 this morning. Inside! – No, actually that was outside. It just felt like 36 inside (still does.) It was 58 inside. Wilhelm, who isn’t normally allowed to touch the thermostat decided to step in. Fortunately, because I would have had that red line up to 90 and we would still have had no heat and I would still have had no idea why not.

Good thing he has a sense of humor.

New from Publishers Weekly

Lots of interesting books will be on the shelves in the coming weeks.

I don't reead Alice Hoffman but those who do are devoted. Her new novel, Incantation, set during the Spanish Inquisition, will be published this month.

Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games is still in galleys but it’s getting a lot of attention from discerning reviewers. Be on the lookout for it in January.

On the 23rd of this month Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story will be released. It got a starred review in PW, so if you’re a Stephen King fan you’re in for a treat.

And those of us who loved Devil in the White City should rush out to our local independent bookstore on the 24th for Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, which also got a starred review. This book, like his last, weaves the stories of two men, Guglielmo Marconi and the infamous Dr H H Crippen.

On the 25th Robert B Parker’s 34th Spenser mystery, Hundred Dollar Baby will be out.

Roddy Doyle will have a new book on bookstore shelves in January, Paula Spencer. It features the return of the heroine of Doyle’s 1996 novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, now sober and worried that her daughter is following in her footsteps.


Whitbread award-winner Rachel Cusk has a new book to be published in January, Arlington Park. It gets a starred review.

There also new books by Colm Toibin, Dana Stabenow, and Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, and Stephanie Barron coming, the first two in January and the last two in November and December.

I’m looking forward to a nonfiction title that got a starred review this week: Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. It’s obviously inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and according to PW, it's just as good.

Tea (SD) and Ice Cream

Wilhelm has been in Tea, South Dakota (that's the town logo on the left) for a few days and I've been scrambling to get my EZ Percentage System raglan sweater sleeve finished in time for my class tomorrow. So there hasn't been a lot of posting to Mary's Library lately.

Soon Wilhelm will report on the results of the jackhammering that Jason has been doing today and I'll tell you about the new books announced in Publisher's Weekly yesterday.

Meanwhile, here is some sage advice from Thornton Wilder: "[don't] inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate."

The World's 500 Greatest Books

Today I want to tell you about a book I found about 20 years ago by Philip Ward called A Lifetime’s Reading: The World’s 500 Greatest Books (New York: Stein and Day, 1983.)

It’s divided into 50 years and it starts with Alice in Wonderland and finishes with Immanuel Kant. I’ve been reading some of the books from two years at a time and will start on Year 47 in January.

The 500 books part is misleading because under a single title he will sometimes include many books. Under Dickens, Pickwick Papers, for example, he includes all of Dickens’ novels. And he sometimes suggests you go see a ballet or an opera or listen to particular music or visit an art museum or read some history as you read a particular book.

Ward also has a trick of listing the works of an author, like Plato (right after Alice), then saying something like this: “The Classical Greek of Plato is so majestic and clear that it merits any amount of effort in the learning. Luckily there is an abundance of good grammars and dictionaries, such as Wilding’s Greek for Beginners . . .” He does the same thing with the Old Testament (R K Harrison’s Teach Yourself Hebrew.) And this is on page 2, so you have another 49+ years to go!


Nonetheless it’s excellent and includes a great deal of literature from non-English speaking countries, especially the East. The list of titles is online but the book has a short discussion of each title and lots of the references I have mentioned and it’s worth getting your hands on a copy.

And thank you Pamela for sparking this idea and sending me the online address.

What I'm Reading

I’ve finished Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor, Anthony Trollope’s Cousin Henry, Zola’s Pot Luck, and Ruth apRoberts’ The Moral Trollope.

After that heavy reading I deserve a break, so I picked up the first in Caroline Graham's Inspector Barnaby series, The Killings at Badger’s Drift. Last night Wilhelm and I watched an episode of Midsomer Murders on DVD from Netflix, which is what inspired me to read Graham’s mystery. I have a serious crush on John Nettles.

We are, as Wilhelm has told you, having some work done on our 1923 bungalow and as we discussed with the folks from Integrity Remodeling what we were going to do with the deck in back the suggestion was made that we simply rip it out. A circa-1970 deck on a house like ours just doesn’t do.

So Jason ripped it out and he found beneath a brick patio, probably put there at the time the house was built. What a find! I’ve begun dreaming of the landscaping I’m going to do next spring in our much changed back yard, and to that end I've been reading (well, mostly looking at the pictures in) Outside the Bungalow by Paul Duchscherer and Douglas Keister.

Besides hundreds of pictures of plants and trees, walks and patios, seats and arbors, the book explains what materials were most often used in bungalow gardens and walkways (wood, concrete, and brick) and what plants were popular in early 20th century gardens. There are hundreds of plants listed and organized by zone, sun conditions, soil type, and more.

When I get through having fun with these books I’m going to begin reading the next selection for my trollope group, The Duke'sChildren, and for my not-trollope reading group, Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, which is a sort of sequel to Pot Luck.

Transcendentalism and Chocolate

This week’s Publishers Weekly has some ads and announcements that make me want to hustle to the bookstore. Among the more interesting ones:

Susan Cheever’s new book, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, about which PW says: “she keenly analyzes the positive and negative ways they influenced one another's ideas and beliefs and the literature that came out of "this sudden outbreak of genius.” I plan to read that one.

The photo on the cover is of Lava, the dog about which Jay Kopelman writes in From Baghdad, With Love. Dog books seem to be all the thing lately, but I’m not reading them. (The cats wouldn’t like it.)

Gene Wilder has written a novel, My French Whore (to be published in March 2007.) It’s about a 30-year old train conductor in Milwaukee who enlists in WW I. He speaks excellent German so when he deserts and makes his way to the German lines he is treated as a hero. Sounds promising, but I think I’ll wait for the movie.

A novel about the Jamestown colony called The Weight of Smoke by George Robert Minkoff interests me, just because I’m eager to read a story in which Pocahontas plays a starring role. Unfortunately, PW calls it “a noble but unsuccessful effort.” Too bad. It should have been a fine book.

The most interesting book reviewed in this issue is Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers by Amy Stewart, the author of the prize-winning book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. I’ll have to ask Sarah if either of these is assigned reading in her horticulture class.

And the most significant book, The Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate. I’m particularly intrigued by this one because the co-author is John Scharffenberger of the justly famous Sharffen Berger company. That one comes out in November and gets a red star from PW. Irresistible.

McPhee

A new book has arrived, John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers (2006.) I’ve been a McPhee fan since I read Encounters with the Archdruid in the New Yorker back in about 1971. If John McPhee wants to write it I want to read it. That includes the collection of geological books, Annals of the Former World.

Uncommon Carriers, like so many, perhaps all, of McPhee’s works was published originally in the New Yorker magazine, where I first read about the Mississippi pilots and truck drivers who are described in this latest McPhee book.

I’d recommend almost any of McPhee’s works, but I especially like Oranges, La Place de la Concord Suisse, A Sense of Where You Are, and A Roomful of Hovings. Most of his books are still in print.

Just Wait

Everything's funny if you just wait long enough. - W K Drew