I Did It!

One of my post-retirement activities has been to join the community band that my husband directs. It meets in a town about an hour and a half away, where he also teaches private music lessons at the public school. In the past, I've driven up in the afternoon for the once-a-week rehearsals, but this year I decided to just ride along with him, saving gas money - and making it so I don't have to drive back after dark (the real reason).

But what's a girl to do all day with no car in town? Fortunately for me, this town has an outstanding public library, so I've been bringing my laptop and spending the day catching up on things like my digital scrapbooking and organizing my list of things I'd like to read.

One of the things that has been on my list for a long time is Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer. I've had a hard time finding it, though. Fortunately (again), this library has it! Since today is the last day until January that I will be coming for rehearsal, I decided to take the book off the shelf and see if I could finish reading it during the time I'm at the library while my husband is at lessons.

And I did! I actually would have finished in the morning hours, but he got away early for lunch, so I had to finish the last bit after coming back. It wasn't a little easy-reader chapter book, either; this is a young-adult novel with 265 pages (ok, ok, young-adult books are not difficult, but hey, I still feel accomplished).

The book tells the story of Anne Hathaway, who married William Shakespeare when she was 26 and he was 18. It's about the sort of miserable life Anne had growing up after her mother died of the Black Death when Anne was only 8 and after her father remarried. In the tradition of the wicked stepmother, Anne and her stepmother clash over just about everything. Anne has a few romances that give her a hope of escaping that miserable life - one with a migrant farm hand, one with a reserved schoolmaster, one with her stepmother's nephew (which the stepmother pushed on Anne; Anne didn't choose that one), and finally, the one with Will Shakespeare that had simmered below the surface of all the others. Sadly for Anne, once she did end up married to Will, she didn't get the dream marriage she had hoped for - after only a couple of years, Will was off to London to become the Shakespeare we all know, returning home for only an occasional week or two. I couldn't help thinking how much happier Anne would have been if she had been able to marry the schoolmaster, who was "safe" and "boring," but a genuinely nice guy (he died in another epidemic), instead of the passionate and romantic Will.

One thing that struck me as I read was the limitations women faced during that time period. There's this statement from Anne's best friend:

“I pray God that you will soon find such a man,” Emma said kindly, “for a woman without a husband is no woman at all.”

 And Anne's schoolmaster, when she asks him to help her learn to write, responds:

“Reading can be useful as well as pleasurable, ‘tis true,” Ned allowed. “But what use has a woman for writing?” 

Really glad I wasn't born in the 1500's!

So now my library days are over for a while. I will miss them.

 

A Simple Story with Philosophical Underpinnings

 

I picked this book off our home bookshelves for a couple of reasons: 1) I wanted something that would be a quick read to fill the gap until I was able to get to the library; 2) I used to offer it as an extra-credit assignment in my Persuasion Theory class, and I figured it was time I actually read it. As it turned out, it wasn't quite the quick read I expected because the switch on my bedside lamp gave out, and so I wasn't able to read at bedtime (one disadvantage of physical books). And I will say that although the point related to persuasion was made quickly in the book, I guess it was appropriate for extra credit.

What I was hoping students would take from the book is an understanding of the arbitrary nature of symbols (like words) and the social mechanisms that lead to a symbol becoming an accepted tool for communication. In the book, Nick, a 5th-grader, is inspired by what his teacher, Mrs. Granger, said about the dictionary. After pointing out that the animal we call a "dog" is called by other words in other languages, she said,

"...if all of us in this room decided to call that creature something else, and if everyone else did, too, then that's what it would be called, and one day it would be written in the dictionary that way. We decide what goes in that book." (p. 31)

Nick, ever the practical joker, decides to test her statement by coming up with the word "frindle" to use instead of the word "pen." The rest of the story traces how "frindle" gains acceptance as a symbol, first among the other fifth-graders, then the whole school system, then across the country.

Since this is a children's book (grade level = 5.4), it doesn't go deeply into the philosophy of symbol creation and use. It's kind of neat that this concept is introduced in a kids' book at all. I spent quite a bit of thought in my Ph.D. program and in the college classes I taught talking about the same issue.   

The Odd Couple (of Books)

 I just finished reading a couple of books that, on the surface, have nothing in common. The first is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, the sprawling epic based on the Cain and Abel story. The second is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a parody of conventions in British literature. But as I think about them, it seems to me Cold Comfort Farm could be seen as poking fun of East of Eden - if Gibbons hadn't written her book 20 years before Steinbeck wrote his.

            

First, there is the way each book handles its "source material." Both of them stick pretty closely to the work they are following. Steinbeck's story of the twin brothers is a very close replica of the biblical story; at one point, Cal (Cain) basically says, "Am I my brother's keeper?" just as Cain did. The elements are all there - the rejection of Cal's gift, the "murder" of Aron, the follow-up conversation between Cal and his father that determines Cal's future. SPOILER ALERT! Fortunately for Cal, Adam (his father) gives him a chance at a brighter future than Cain got (but maybe that's because Cal had an advocate, Lee, pushing hard for it).

In Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons takes on a lot of the conventions of books like Wuthering Heights (I don't know that's one of the books she had in mind, but I can see how her book uses elements that are in Wuthering Heights). There's the gloomy, brooding physical environment. There's the irrational group of characters - part of a big family - who respond melodramatically and hysterically to circumstances. There's a big mystery and a character who is hidden away in a room in the huge, decaying farmhouse. There is the male character who oozes sexual energy and the innocent, sweet maiden.

The difference, as I see it, is that Steinbeck was taking his source material very seriously. He spends a significant section of the book having Lee explain his study of the Hebrew word timshel, which Lee (and through him, Steinbeck) sees as the key to understanding the Cain and Abel story. It's very scholarly. Gibbons, on the other hand, is laughing at her sources. Early in the story, the main character (Flora) and one of her friends are speculating what the farm will be like, and they agree there will probably be an oversexed guy named Seth. When we get our first introduction to the farm, we meet the brothers who run the farm - Reuben and...Seth. Here's the opening description of Seth:

"...a tall young man whose riding boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge....His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man."

Within a few paragraphs, Seth is undoing another of his buttons. It's pretty funny - you know the type, or at least the stereotype.

A second similarity between the books is the "character haunted by trauma." In East of Eden, Adam Trask is debilitated by the cruel betrayal of his beloved wife. He spends more than a year in a stupor, ignoring his farm and his newborn sons. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Aunt Ada Doom who isolates herself in an upstairs room, only coming down to be with the rest of the family two times a year. For 20 years, she's constantly reminded everyone that she saw "a nasty thing in the woodshed" as a child. Steinbeck's Adam is pathetic; Gibbons' Aunt Ada is ridiculous. 

In each case, there is someone who pulls the character out of their funk. In East of Eden, it is Samuel Hamilton, the good-hearted, philosophical, sort of bumbling Irishman who literally knocks some sense into Adam. In Cold Comfort Farm, it's Flora, the sophisticated, calm, pretty much perfect young Englishwoman who sees through Aunt Ada's hysterics and persuades her flying to Paris is much better than sitting around in a bedroom. Everything Flora puts her hand to succeeds - everything.

I could go on, but you probably get the point. The main difference, I think, is that Steinbeck took it all so seriously. East of Eden is epic, in every sense of the word. Gibbons turns "epic" on its ear and shows us literature doesn't have to take itself so seriously, after all. Which side of the debate do I take? I'll have to get back to you on that....

SPOILER ALERT! One of the ways Gibbons flaunts literary convention is that she refused to give us all the answers to the mysteries in the book. What was the "nasty thing" Aunt Ada saw? We never find out!

A Good Stretch at an Unlikely Time

My husband and I just returned a couple of days ago from a trip of 11 days to New England. He was invited to be the guest conductor for an adult band camp (yes, there is such a thing) in Maine, so we made a vacation of it. Our original plan had been to go into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after the camp, but we changed our minds at the last minute and went west instead of east, to New Hampshire, Vermont and Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The area is beautiful!

We did several hikes over the 11 days, plus visited a couple of historic sites/museums. Although we were busy, I am happy to report that I maintained my reading streak, and actually had a really productive two weeks. During that time, I read three books! Well, more like two and a half, but that's a story for a little later in this post.

#1 - The Airplane Book to Get to Maine

Knowing that we would be flying for about 5 hours plus layover time, I checked out a book for the trip. Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome is a book I saw mentioned on some book blog, and I'm so glad I put it on my list! All I knew was that it was a travelogue story about three friends who sail on the Thames and comment on the countryside and their experiences on the way. What I didn't know is that the book was written in 1889. I also didn't know it would be so funny! It does comment on the countryside along the trip, but Jerome also throws in stories that have nothing to do with the trip but that develop the characters of the three men in the boat (himself included) - and, of course, the dog, Montmorency. You might think something written in the Victorian era would be stuffy, but Jerome makes it a point of puncturing "stuffy."

The book also had some good life observations that I added to my quotes collection, such as the following:

“It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness…Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.” – p. 41-42

#2 - The Book I Picked Up at a Bed and Breakfast Stay

A couple of years ago on a different trip, we stayed at a bed and breakfast house that had books everywhere, even on the windowsills. I took one off a windowsill to pass time in the evening, and since then, I've decided to do that whenever the opportunity presents itself. For this trip, we stayed at the Old Iron Inn in Caribou, Maine (VERY interesting place - the husband of the pair collects old irons. It was also a wonderful B&B). The wife of the pair of owners is a former English major, so she had one wall floor to ceiling with books. Lovely is the Lee by Robert Gibbings doesn't have a cover that really stands out, but it is a thin book, and I thought I might be able to finish it during our stay (more on that in a minute). 

My luck held! This is another older book (written in 1945) that is a collection of short sketches Gibbings wrote about his experiences traveling around the western part of Ireland, especially the coastal islands. It is part nature guide (Gibbings seems to have really liked birds), part Irish history and folklore, and part studies in human nature. As with Jerome's book, there is a sense of humor that I find really delightful. Again, there were some quotes to collect, like this one:

“It seemed to me a happy thought that when all our loves and pains are over and the tired old brain has gone back to earth, perhaps, from the most unmusical of us all, blackbirds may sit in the hollies and sing the spring day through.” – p. 102

I haven't finished this book yet. Yes, it was a thin book, but I didn't want to spend the whole two days we were in Caribou ignoring my husband so I could read! The host told me I could take it, but I didn't feel right about that, so I found a copy online and ordered it so it would be waiting for me when I got home. 

#3 - The Book to Ease the End of the Vacation

It's odd. I'm always ready to get home when a trip is nearly over, but I also miss the freedom and excitement of traveling. I decided a good ol' Victoria Holt novel might be just the ticket to ease the transition back into ordinary life. I selected The Secret Woman, about a governess (of course) who falls in love with a handsome ship's captain who is haunted by scandal and mystery (of course).

You know how a cup of hot soup feels on a cold, drizzly winter day? Warm. Comforting. Satisfying. The Secret Woman was, for me, the literary equivalent of that cup of soup. I know it's not "great literature that will expand and improve my mind," but it's not literary slop, either. Even if they are sort of similar from one book to another, Holt knows how to develop characters. For example, the governess in this story was raised by an aunt who was a dealer in antique furniture, so throughout the book, there are descriptions of furniture, completely on track with what the character would notice. Holt also knows how to drive a plot. I've read enough of her books that I was able to predict where the plot would end up - except I wasn't. I did pick up on which character was going to be the villain, but the mystery resolved in an unexpected (and satisfying) way. 

 So I feel quite happy with where both my body and my mind went over the past two weeks!

 

 

It's Tough Being a Sophomore

 

I've had Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson on my to-read list for a while. I finally got around to it, and I really enjoyed the book. It is about an orphaned young woman who inherits a claim in Montana from a long-lost uncle in 1918. The challenge is that Hattie has less than a year to finish proving up on the claim, meaning she has to build a lot of fence and grow crops when she's never done either. Fortunately for Hattie, she is surrounded by good neighbors. like Perilee and Karl Mueller, Leafie, and Rooster Jim. With their help, she gets the fence finished and brings her crops to harvest. In return, she helps the Muellers with their children (actually saving them from a herd of wild horses) and nurses the family through a bout of Spanish flu. Over the course of the year, she becomes part of the community. It's a nice, feel-good story.

However, this is during World War I, and not everything is feel-good. Karl is a German immigrant, and he faces a great deal of prejudice from some people in town. There is also a young rancher whose ranch borders Hattie's claim and who is the chair of the local patriotic defense group that is responsible for the harassment that Karl and others face. The reader is kept guessing until the very end whether he will become Hattie's love interest or the story's villain. It's a really well-written and enjoyable story that I finished in only three days (of course, it is a young adult novel....).

Since I liked the book so much, I jumped right in to the sequel, Hattie Every After. This story follows Hattie as she leaves Montana for new adventures in San Francisco. Through persistence and good luck, Hattie manages to work her way to the reporting staff of the city's main newspaper, the Chronicle, gaining a couple of kind of unbelievable "scoops" along the way. 

And that "unbelievable" part is where the sequel breaks down for me. A lot of pretty incredible things happened to Hattie in the first book (like the aforementioned incident with the wild horses), but the story is so invested in Hattie, and the reader gets inside her head so thoroughly that you really don't mind. The second book seems kind of rushed and yet also kind of empty. It seemed that there is a much more "tell" rather than "show" approach, and that Hattie just tells how she felt about things rather than letting the reader see through her eyes. A lot of the events are just TOO unbelieveable, really, and the career path that gets Hattie into the newsroom probably would never actually happen. There's also an underdeveloped plot that ends up being of major importance yet is just thrown in here and there throughout the story. To make a long story short, I wasn't really captivated by the sequel, but at least it ended the way I wanted (ha).

You see this pretty often in popular culture, where the first iteration of something is just really, really good and creative and well-executed, only to be followed by a sophomore effort that is forced and trying too hard to re-capture the magic of the original. No doubt about it, it's tough to catch lightning in a bottle twice!

So Much Fascinating History So Close to Home

 

I live in a state that borders the Mississippi River. I've crossed the river several times traveling to and fro on family trips. I probably will cross it again at some point, maybe multiple times. But I will never look at it the way I did before reading Lee Sandlin's history of the river during the antebellum period in this country - Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild.

This was a fascinating book. I know a history class can't cover everything that happens, but there were several major events in this book that I'd never heard of (or only vaguely). For example, there's an account of the wreck of the steamboat Sultana - the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. I'd heard the name before, but had no idea how awful it was. Sandlin does a good job conveying the horror. There's information about the New Madrid earthquake, as well as the siege of Vicksburg that was a key to the Union victory in the Civil War. One thing that struck me as I was reading was how the river was at the heart of some of the major events in the country's history.

But one thing I really appreciated was learning about some things I'd never heard of. There was an interesting chapter about New Orleans and the slave auctions, including prices ("girls" for sexual uses were the most expensive slaves, costing up to $5,000). One of the chapters that was especially eye-opening was about a multi-year scare over a possible slave revolt that resulted from what was basically a scam to sell a book. The unfounded fears the book started snowballed into a purge of anyone, black or white, who was even remotely rumored to know something about a revolt. Sometimes just being asked questions was enough to get someone lynched, whether there was any basis to the suspicion. One of the stories Sandlin told was of a slave owner who was ordered to flog one of his slaves who was accused (falsely) of being involved with the (nonexistent) revolt. The owner refused. The "investigators" said they would flog the slave owner instead. So he began to beat the slave, but he wasn't hitting the slave hard enough to suit the "investigators." They hung both men. Some things about that whole incident sounded pretty contemporary; as Sandlin observed, "One reason people were so quick to believe in the Murrell excitement was that they were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news" (p. 232).

Overall, this was a great read - full of interesting information and written in a compelling style. I thought it was kind of funny, though, that the last chapter fell kind of flat compared to the rest of the book. That seemed fitting, though, because after the Civil War, government engineers began to tame the river through dredging and levees, and railroads began to carry a lot of the people and goods that once depended on the water "highway." The Big River was no longer wild and no longer as big a deal.

I Wish I Knew Her in Real Life

 

I've "met" a lot of interesting characters through my reading over the years. Some of them are cherished "friends." But I "met" a character this summer who is especially memorable, one I wish I could spend time with for real - Corrag, the tiny young woman awaiting her death as an accused witch in Susan Fletcher's novel.

The book is set in late 17th-century England and Scotland. Corrag comes from a family with a history of being executed for witchcraft - both her grandmother (drowning) and her mother (hanging) were put to death. Corrag herself spends the whole novel in a Scottish jail waiting for the winter snows to thaw, when it will be dry enough for her to be burned at the stake. It's pretty poignant to read the passages where she hears the drip, drip of the thawing snow and ice, and knows the end of her life is coming nearer and nearer.

How did she get in this situation? We find out her full life story from an Irish minister who has come to interview her in his quest to get information about the massacre of the Macdonald clan in the Glencoe valley. Charles Leslie, a Jacobite, is there for proof that Protestant King William had a hand in the massacre, which he hopes will help with the Jacobite resistance and restore King James, a Catholic, to the throne. What he gets is much more.

Bit by bit, through Leslie's daily visits with Corrag, we get to know her - the lonely girl living with her outcast mother on the edge of a village, the fugitive who rides "north and west" to escape the men who are coming to arrest her mother, the hermit who finds peace in a hut she built herself on a mountain above Glencoe, the healer who earns trust and makes friends in the Macdonald clan, the courageous sentry who warns the clan of the danger they are facing, the accused witch. She's clearly a political prisoner, and this story made me think of how many women were accused and executed just because they were "different." 

Corrag is definitely different. She is gentle and forgiving, even taking healing herbs to the soldiers who are occupying the homes of the Macdonalds. What I really, really liked about her was how much she appreciates and celebrates her connection with the natural world. Here are a couple of quotes I copied from the book that are favorites:

"When did pennies make a person truly rich? Folk seem to fill their lives with favours or a title or two—as if these are the things which matter, like happiness lies in a coin or two. Like the natural world and our place in it is worth far less than a stuffed purse….”

"But what I say to myself when I see a mountain or a starry sky, or any natural thing which feels too much to bear, is what made this, made me, too. I am as special. We are made by the same thing…Call it God, if you wish. Call it chance, or nature—it does not matter.”

And this one really sealed the deal:

"Some things are hard, even if they are right. Even if you know they are the proper, decent way….It was kindness. And kindness is worth showing."

I chose this book just because it was about the Glencoe Massacre, and my husband and I had been to Glencoe a year or so ago. What I got was much more than just history - I got a new "friend" for my mental cocktail party. And what a sweet one she is.