Archives

Best Spine-Tinglers

Sep14

I’m still fisking the Penguin list of 100 Best Books. Today we visit those books that make your spine tingle and your heart beat fast.

THE BEST SPINE-TINGLERS (according to the Penguin List)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole I read this book in college, but it must not have tingled my spine too much because I don’t remember a thing about it.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James I cannot tell a lie; I’ve never read any James. My mom wrote a thirty page plus paper on James when she was in graduate school, and I had to type it—back when we used actual typewriters. That experience about cured me of any desire to investigate James’s prose for myself. Maybe someday.

Best Spine-Tinglers (according to Semicolon)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s strange, yes, and classic.

Draculaby Bram Stoker. Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are the staples of horror and tingling spines.

Frankensteinby Mary Shelley.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I’m enjoying this one now.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.

All But Two, I Think

Sep13

Blest With Sons’ Shakespeare Game

Romance. Here is the tale of a married life. All the answers are titles of Shakespeare’s plays.

1. Who were the lovers? Romeo and Juliet
2. What was their courtship like? A Comedy of Errors
3. What did she answer to his proposal? As You Like It
4. What time of month were they married? Twelfth Night
5. Of whom did he buy the ring? The Merchant of Venice
6. Who were the best man and maid of honor? Antony and Cleopatra
7. Who were the ushers? Two Gentlemen of Verona
8. In what kind of place did they live?
9. What was her disposition like? The Tempest
10. What was his chief occupation? The Taming of the Shrew
11. What caused their first quarrel? Much Ado About Nothing
12. What did their courtship prove to be? Love’s Labors Lost
13. What did their married life resemble? A Midsummer Night’s Dream
14. What did they give one another?
15. What did their friends say? All’s Well That Ends Well

Does anyone think you know the two I couldn’t answer? The answers are at Blest With Sons.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born September 13th

Sep13


Carol Kendall, b. 1937. I loved The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall (b. September 13, 1917) when I was a child, and I still remember images and ideas from it. For instance, I’ve always had a desire to paint my front door red or orange or yellow. And I sort of like being different–sometimes just for the sake of difference. The Gammage Cup was published in 1959. The story of five non-conformist Minnipins who become unlikely heroes probably hit a nerve in the non-conformist sixties, but it’s still a great story. The Periods, stodgy old conservatives with names such as Etc. and Geo., are wonderful parodies of those who are still caught up in the forms and have forgotten the meanings. And Muggles, Mingy, Gummy, Walter the Earl, and Curley Green, the Minnipins who don’t quite fit in and who paint their doors colors other than green, are wonderful examples of those pesky artistic/scientific types who live just outside the rules of polite society. One of them, Muggles I think, isn’t consciously a nonconformist nor an artist; she just gets caught up in the adventures of the others and finds out that she, too, has her own desires and dreams and talents.

Today is also the birthday of Else Holmelund Minarik, b. 1920, author of the Little Bear stories for beginning readers. What is your favorite Little Bear story? I really like A Kiss for Little Bear in which Little Bear’s grandmother gets some friends to deliver a kiss to Little Bear. The kiss unfortunately gets “all mixed-up” when a pair of lovestruck skunks keeps exchanging the kiss instead of delivering it, but everything turns out all right in the end. I also like the quote from Little Bear’s grandfather when Little Bear suggests that Grandfather might be tired and need a rest. “Me–tired? How can you make me tired? I’m never tired,” says Grandfather, just before he falls asleep in his lawn chair. Then, there’s the story of how Little Bear visits the moon and comes back in time for supper. Oh, yes, and I love Little Bear’s Friend about Little Bear’s friendship with Emily. Little Bear is about as fun and as profound as Frog and Toad. Who ever said that children’s books were boring or unchallenging? They have to be better than adult books so that we can enjoy reading them over and over again until they’re memorized.

Also born on this date in 1916 was Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. To tell the truth, Dahl is too gross-out icky for my tastes, but lots of kids and adults love his books.

Finally, Mildred Taylor, b. 1943, is the author of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry which won the Newbery Award in 1977. It’s the story of Cassie Logan, a black girl growing up in Mississippi in the 1930′ during the Great Depression.

Book-Spotting #19

Sep12

Steven Riddle on Fiction vs. Nonfiction.

“What I’ve discovered over time is that nonfiction books very rarely present anything like nonfiction. That is, most postmodern nonfiction. When your view of reality is that reality is shaped by the language you use to describe it and by the oppressions, hidden or overt that define it, it would be difficult to present anything in an objective way, because there cannot be any objectivity.
Fiction, on the other hand, shows me the human condition, and because the author lays his cards on the table on way or the other, I can determine whether what is shown is truly reflective of human experience or is shaped by the bias of the author to lead me to an agenda.”

I tend to prefer fiction or nonfiction that’s told like a story, stories from history that I can evaluate in much the same way that I evaluate fiction. In other words, I can say, even if it’s essentially true, I don’t like this story, and I don’t really believe in the truth that is embodied in this nonfiction history. I think the author is trying to “lead me to an agenda.”

Queen Shenaynay’s Desert Island Cookbooks. She lists ten best-of-the-best cookbooks with annotations telling why they’re good and what they’re good for. I’m thinking Christmas gifts for some of my favorite cooks. Nonfiction you can believe in.

Carl V.’s Autumn 2006 RIP Reading Challenge. R.I.P. stands for Readers Imbibing Peril, and you can join in by having a reading goal for the autumn of five books that are “scary, eerie, moody, dripping with atmosphere, gothic, unsettling.” I need to get back to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White anyway.

Ms. Seasonal Soundings is sponsoring The Autumn Reading Challenge. I didn’t take the challenge because I have so many books on The List that I just read whichever one I happen to find handy that suits my mood. Like Stefanie at So Many Books, I’m somewhat ambivalent about book lists. On the one hand, I love book lists because I get new ideas about what to read. I like making lists of my favorites, or my favorites in this or that genre. I like keeping a list of books I want to read because otherwise I forget about books that I am truly attracted to. However, I don’t like being told what to read. I read whatever I’m in the mood to read. I sometimes make myself read a “classic” because I know from experience that I may have to work at it at first, but I also may get valuable insight and education from my perseverance.

Friday’s Center of the Blogosphere

Sep8

Russell Moore writes at Mere Comments on genetic engineering.
“. . . through in vitro fertilization (IVF) parents are able ‘to detect a predisposition to cancers that may or may not develop later in life, and are often treatable if they do.’ Embryos that do show a predisposition to such disorders may be ‘discarded,’ and the couple tries again.”
Ouch! I didn’t realize we had slid this far down the slope. Someone should write a science fiction novel or story about the implications, moral and physical, of a world in which parents choose to have only “perfect” children, and those who do not choose to make that choice are regarded as negligent at best, criminal at worst. Stories have power, maybe the power to wake us up before we slide any farther into playing God with the lives and genes of our children.

Amy of the Humble Musings has a free book to give away to a homeschooling mom.
Susan Wise Bauer is also offering an ARC of her new book, A History of the Ancient World.

Don’t forget about the Saturday Review of Books tomorrow.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Sep7

I sped through this subtly dsytopian novel, not because I wanted it to end, but rather because I wanted to know how it would end. I may not be able to discuss the book as much as I would like to here because there is an element of suspense and mystery that made it that much more intriguing, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t already read the book.

Nevertheless, I can discuss some things that I liked about the novel. The story begins with Kathy H., the first person narrator, telling us that she is thirty-one years old and has been a “carer” for eleven years now, going on twelve. She’s a graduate of a private school called Hailsham, and first part of the book is mostly taken up with Kathy’s memories of her years at Hailsham. (The name of the school kept reminding me of Miss Havisham (Great Expectations), which I assume was unintentional on the part of the author but ironic since the book is mostly about bittersweet and deceptive memories.) As the story progressed, I became more and more curious about what kind of a school Hailsham was (odd), and more and more intrigued by the characters that inhabited the rather artificial environment of this private island of a school. So I was first hooked by the mystery of it all.

Then, I began to realize what an interesting narrator Kathy D. was. She sees the world, not in black and white, but in subtle nuances and unspoken communiques and bits of seemingly unrelated information that add up to a unified theory. She’s part psychologist and part counselor and a bit of a healer. Yet, she’s naive, restricted in her understanding by her sheltered upbringing. And she never sees the complete picture of the world she lives in; she’s trapped inside her world and can’t see a way out. I think that’s what the title “never let me go” means, that for Kathy and her friends there is no escape from the fate that has been pre-planned for them. The question that haunted me throughout the whole novel was, “Why don’t they run away? Why don’t they escape?” But Kathy and her schoolmates never even conceive of the idea of a permanent escape from their destiny, maybe a short reprieve, but no escape.

I hope I haven’t given away too much of the plot of this compelling story. It’s the second book that I’ve completed in my R.I.P. challenge list, and it may join the Hall of Fame in my 100 Best Fiction Books of All Time.

Highly recommended.

Other thoughts on Never Let Me Go:

Mental Multivitamin: Never Let Me Go Is Not a Christmas Book.

Pages Turned: A Few Thoughts on Books Recently Read.

Shane Richmond: Never Let Me Go.

RIP: Never Let Me Go by Michelle.

The English Assassin.

If you’ve read Never Let Me Go and have some thoughts you’d like to share in an audio format, go here to find how to become a part of Renee’s podcast on the novel.

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl

Sep7

Last night I finished reading this “literary mystery” by Harvard graduate and Dante scholar Matthew Pearl. Coincidentally, today while I was driving my taxi-van, I heard an interview on NPR with Matthew Pearl. The interview dealt mostly with Pearl’s most recently published book, The Poe Shadow, but it was interesting to hear him speak about his writing just after having read one of his books. And the interviewer called Pearl “the inventor of the literary mystery.” Inventor? What about the author, the name escapes me, of the mystery series featuring Jane Austen as a detective? What about Poe himself? I don’t think Mr. Pearl can lay claim to having invented the genre, but he did write a halfway decent example of it.

I only give it halfway good marks because of two flaws, both of which may have more to do with personal taste than literary merit. First of all, the book is much too nasty and gory for me; I prefer my murders Agatha Christie-style, a neat bonk on the head or a bit of poison, off-stage preferably. The Dante Club murderer is, well to put it mildly, rather fond of Dante’s Inferno, to the point that he attempts to copy Dante’s style and methods in subjecting his victims, literally and literarily, to the tortures of hell. IF you think Dante’s Inferno is violent and bloodthirsty, wait until you read about the victims of Dante’s nefarious punishments in plain prose. So, I could have skipped the maggots and the burnt flesh.

The other flaw is harder to write about. The main characters in the novel are poets and Bostonians, Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr., James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Did all authors back in the 1800’s have three names?) The three, along with publisher J.T. Fields and historian George Washington Greene, are members of the Dante Club, a group of men who are dedicated to helping Longfellow produce an American translation of Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy. Apparently, from the historical note at the end of the book, up to this point we’re still in the realm of fact. Longfellow did, in fact, translate Dante into English with the help of the friends he recruited to help him. Or maybe they volunteered. As portrayed in the book, the men are obsessed with Dante. They live and breathe Dante. They have most of Dante’s poetry memorized, in Italian and in their own English translation. They believe that an American translation of Dante will just about save the world and put all things to right, if they can just get this unknown murderer to stop copying Dante’s literary tortures in real life so that they can actually get back to the job of translating and finish it up.

I’m willing, for the sake of discussion, to suspend disbelief while reading, but after I finished the book, I just couldn’t keep it up. Could anyone, even artistic types who arguably have a screw loose somewhere, have quite this much faith in Dante? One of the club members even preaches sermons using, not the Bible, but rather Dante as text and illustration. Dante, in this book, becomes Holy Writ. I just can’t believe it, but on the other hand, it makes a pretty good story.

So, basic plot: Some famous scholarly types are working on a translation of the Most Important Book Ever Written. Some other guys are trying to discourage them and keep the translation from ever being published because they believe it will have a bad effect on the masses who read it. In the meantime, someone starts murdering people using particularly foul and revolting methods that are gleaned from the pages of a translation that is yet to be published. The famous scholarly types must stop the murders, both for the sake of the intended victims and for the sake of their sacred translation.

Read it if you have a strong stomach, a strong interest in Dante, and/or a high tolerance for unlikely fictional occurences mixed with lots of literary commentary. Actually, the literary commentary personal application of Dante, from the point of view of Lowell, Holmes, and Longfellow, made up some of the best parts of the book. I’m still planning to read The Poe Shadow since no one will be inflicting Dante’s hellish tortures on anyone in that book, I assume. No pit and pendulum or hearts beating under the floor either, I hope.

Oh, by the way, The Dante Club was the first of my five R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) books.

Side note: did you know that Longfellow’s first wife died of complications following childbirth, and his second wife died on July 9, 1861, when she accidentally set her dress on fire and was fatally burned despite Longfellow’s efforts to save her which resulted in his own severe injuries? I didn’t know about that sad story. Pearl refers to this tragedy in his book which is set a few years later in 1865 or 1866. Read a brief biography of Longfellow here.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born September 6th

Sep6

Jane Addams, b. 1860. Founder of Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, and author of the autobiographical Twenty Years at Hull House. I don’t have a copy of Miss Addams’ Twenty Years, but I do have a book that I picked up at a used book sale called The Mother’s Book, published in 1919, that contains writing by Jane Addams and other authors of her same ilk and persuasion. The book is a mixture of excellent advice on child training and hopelesssly idealistic or condescending nonsense. For example, from an article by William Byron Forbush, Why Home Is Better Than Kindergarten:

There are some distinct advantages in the home-school for small children.
The mother excells the teacher in both knowledge and interest. She may not be familliar with child-study and she does not talk scientifically about the child, but she knows and loves “her” child.
Home life is real, while kindergarten can necessarily only imitate real life.

The author goes on to advocate homeschooling as the best way to educate children up to at least age seven.

On the other hand, another author in the same book tells mothers:

Baby’s training must be begun from the first day. He should not be rocked to sleep, trotted, or walked the floor with, nor allowed to suck his thumb or pacifer. All of these habits will soon have to be broken, so why begin them?
In modern maternity hospitals a crying baby is placed in the center of a large, soft, and comfortable bed and left alone to cry itself to sleep. Very distressing to the mother and the neighbors; but the little one soon finds its true level, will give up the habit of crying, and not wait for the bottle or the bribe of a lump of sugar.

Who knew that the Ezzos studied early twentieth century social work manuals for their parenting advice?

Felix Salten (Siegmund Salzmann), b. 1869. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, but his family moved to Vienna, Austria when he was only a baby. He started writing because he worked in an insurance office, and he was bored. His most famous book was, of course, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, published in Austria in 1923. It was published in the U.S. in 1928, translated into English by none other than Whittaker Chambers, twenty years before the Alger Hiss affair made him (in)famous. The Nazis banned Bambi in 1936, and when the Germans implemented their Anchluss with Austria, Salten fled to Switzerland. (Felix Salten was Jewish.) The German novelist Thomas Mann showed Salten’s book Bambi to Walt Disney, and the movie of the same name came five years later in 1942, during World War II.

Catez’s Famous Meme

Sep5

Main Street, Houston, Texas



1. What do you like most about where you live?
I like being able to go and see so many things: the children’s museum, the zoo, the space center, libraries, plays, concerts.

2. Is there anything strange about where you live?
Hot isn’t strange, I suppose. Cowboy hats and boots aren’t really strange, are they? Here’s my post on things quintessentially Texan. See if you think any of these things are strange.

3. What’s one of your all-time favourite music albums, and why?
I tend to have favorite songs, not favorite albums. I really like the soundtrack album from Fellowship of the Ring. Maybe that’s my favorite.

4. Did you have a passion for something as a kid that you still have now? (If not – what is one of your passions now?)
Reading. I’ve always loved to read, ever since I learned to read at age six.

5. What do you like most about having a blog?
I like to think that someone somewhere is reading something I wrote. It’s just fun to communicate like this with all sorts of people all over the world.

Thanks, Catez.