Philippa Pearce

Jan3

Author Philippa Pearce died December 21, 2006 after suffering a stroke, at the age of 86. (HT: H2Oboro Blog) She wrote several books for children, including her most famous fantasy Tom’s Midnight Garden. This book is classic British fiction about time travel and the ending of childhood.

The Independent: Obituary for Philippa Pearce

Telegraph: Obituary for Philippa Pearce.

Two articles from Horn Book, one by and one about Philippa Pearce.

Philippa Pearce was born on January 23, 1920. Have you read Tom’s Midnight Garden or her Whitbread prize-winning book, The Battle of Bubble and Squeak? I read Tom’s Midnight Garden a long time ago and remember it fondly if not too clearly. I seem to remember a strange sort of clock that strikes thirteen to signal the onset of magical events, but I may be mixing it up with something else.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 3rd

Jan3

I got busy today and almost forgot to recognize Tolkien’s birthday! We’ve been enjoying the products of Tolkien’s inventive mind around here for many years, and lately has been no exception. Dancer Daughter is in the midst of her yearly re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. We watched Peter Jackson’s interpretation of The Fellowship of the Ring a few nights ago. Yesterday I read Eldest Daughter’s essay on Samwise Gamgee as a Kierkegaardian White Knight of Faith, an essay she wrote for one of her classes at Baylor. And Engineer Husband is reading Fellowship of the Ring out loud at night to some of the younger urchins who haven’t read it yet.

So Tolkien is daily indulgence here, and it’s easy to forget his birthday since we celebrate him and his works every day.

Happy BIrthday, Professor Tolkien!
Thoughts on The Silmarillion
Yesterday Was Tolkien’s Birthday
On Seeing the Movie Version of Return of the King

How Does Something Like This Happen?

Jan3

I’m writing this post two days before Christmas, but I’m saving it until after Christmas because it’s going to sound grinch-y. And picky. But I’m writing it anyway.

Isn’t Hyperion Books a major publisher? Don’t they have editors and staff and people who read their books before they are published to make sure there aren’t any grammatical errors or spelling errors?

I just read one of the books that was nominated for the Cybil Middle Grade Fiction award. This book was a hardcover copy of the book from the library, not an advance reading copy or a review copy. Near the end of the book I read the following: [Character in book] pushed for a marker on the sight of [historical character’s] house..

Yes, “sight.” It’s not a misprint or a typo. I make plenty of those and have no room to talk about other people’s. But where was the editor when this blatant error made it into print?

I know it’s obsessive/compulsive, but the mistake rather spoiled the book for me.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 2nd

Jan2

Philip Freneau, b. 1752. Known as the Poet of the American Revolution, he was a close friend of Madison and of Jefferson. His poetry leaned toward propaganda, first anti-British and then anti- Federalist and supporting the party of his friends Madison and Jefferson. Here’s a few lines from a more personal poetic ode:

If I should quit your arms to-night
And chance to die before ‘t was light,
I would advise you — and you might —
Love again to-morrow. From Song of Thyrsis

William Lyon Phelps, b. 1865, American educator, critic, author and preacher, professor of literature at Yale. “Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation – what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.”
“You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.”

Robert Nathan, American novelist and author of The Bishop’s Wife and Portrait of Jenny, both of which were made into movies in the late 1940’s.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 1st

Jan1

Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767, Irish novelist and children’s author. She met and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott. She also met Byron, and George III read one of her novels and said that he now had a better knowledge of his Irish subjects. Her father, who had four successive wives and twenty-two children (Maria was his second oldest child), insisted on editing and approving many of her books before he would allow them to be published.

Arthur Hugh Clough, b.1819, poet and friend of poet Matthew Arnold. Clough died at the age of thirty-one of malaria, and Arnold wrote the elegy Thyrsis in remembrance of his friend.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night
In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
I feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;
I feel her finger light
Laid pausefully upon life’s headlong train; —
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.

Sir James George Frazer, b. 1854. Scottish student of mythology and comparative religion, author of The Golden Bough. He saw the history of religion in Darwinian terms as “three rising stages of human progress — magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science.” So now you know one source for that bit of nonsense.

E.M. Forster, b. 1879, English novelist and essayist. His most famous novels are Howard’s End, A Room With A View, and A Passage to India. I started reading A Passage to India but didn’t get very far into before giving up. I don’t remember what I disliked about it, but I did dislike it. Can anyone give me a good reason to try again?

J.D. Salinger, b. 1919, American author best known for his book The Catcher in the Rye. No, I’ve never read it.

Connecting the Dots

Jan1

Author Gail Gauthier wrote a couple of weeks ago on her blog: “I like connections. I like finding connections between and among unrelated things. Some people say that I see them where they don’t exist, which isn’t true. They just can’t see them.” She’s been finding connections between the books she’s been reading for the Fantasy Fiction Cybil Award.

Not to be a copycat, but I’ve been finding connections, too. I’ve read about twenty of the books nominated for the Cybil Middle Grade Fiction Award, and I’ve found some odd, dare I say eerie, similarities between several of the books.

Four of the nominees have the word “moon” in the title: Alabama Moon, Georgie’s Moon, Half-Moon Investigations, and That Girl Lucy Moon. In two of those books Moon is the last name of the main character. And in Alabama Moon the boy’s first name is Moon.

Popularity and the transition to junior high/middle school are big preoccupations of the characters in Shug and in That Girl Lucy Moon.

I reviewed Shug by Jenny Han and Rules by Cynthia Lord together in the same post because I found them similar in many ways.

I also reviewed Blue by Joyce Hostetter and Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata together in the same post because both books take place during WW II, both feature a female protagonist who must survive some sort of imprisonment, and other similarities abound.

In both Out of Patience by Brian Meehl and in Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the male protagonist is a resident of a (very) small town/community and must deal with the fact that the town is dying and people are moving out.

Both Penny (Penny From Heaven) and Blue (Blue) have an extended hospital stay. And both girls have families who are terrified of the polio epidemic that is sweeping the country during and after WW 2.

Two of the books I read, Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck and Framed are set in and around a garage/filling station in a small community, and the family in the story is trying to make the garage pay —and failing. Also, both garage families use the word “forecourt” for the gasoline/petrol station part in the front of the garage. But one book takes place in Indiana in 1914, and the other takes place in Wales. So why do both use a word I’ve never heard used to refer to the front of the garage?

Two of the books involve competition in the inner city: Heat is about Little League baseball in NYC, and All of the Above is about building tetrahedrons in ?City.

Heat by Mike Lupica and Alabama Moon both feature a boy who tries to tries to survive on his own after the untimely death of his father. Julia in Julia’s Kitchen tries to make sense of the tragic death of her mother, and Penny in Penny from Heaven tries to figure the secrets surrounding the death of her father. Absent parents and parents who desert their offspring on purpose or by accident abound in other books: All of the Above, Framed, Here Lies the Librarian, That Girl Lucy Moon, Bully-Be-Gone, Desperate Journey, Shug.

Wacky inventors of sci-fi contraptions are major characters in The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen and in Bully-Be-Gone.

And finally, in the most unsettling connection of all, two of the books I read spend a great deal of time and prose describing the nasal excretions of one of the characters in excruciating detail: The Clue of Linoleum Lederhosen and Half-Moon Investigations by Erin Colfer are both full of snot.

Connections or trends? Keep a eye out for more as you read children’s and YA fiction this year.

The finalists for the Cybil awards are now posted at the Cybil blog. Check them out; you might find all kinds of connections and trends.

A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle

Jan1

I have several projects for January; one of them is to read/reread the major works of one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle. Some of you may not know that Ms. L’Engle wrote adult fiction as well as the Newbery-award winning fantasy A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. In fact, all of her books are difficult to confine to one age group or target audience. I think that’s because Ms. L’Engle wrote about her own concerns and didn’t consciously write to a particular audience.

A Winter’s Love was one of her early novels published in 1957, the year of my birth, before the success of A Wrinkle in Time. It was good story to start out my journey through Madeleine L’Engle’s books because it was one of her first novels published and because it takes place just before Christmas. The setting is a Swiss village resort in the Alps; Emily and Courtney Bowen (Courtney is the husband) and their two daughters, Virginia and Connie, are living in a rented chalet. The family is from New York, but Courtney is on a sort of writing sabbatical from teaching classics in a New York university. Sixteen year old Virginia is home for the holidays from her European boarding school, and she has a friend spending the holidays with here, Mimi Oppenheimer.

The action and conflict in the novel are internal, rather than external. Nothing much happens. Emily begins the novel looking out a window at the stars and thinking about her life; she ends the story standing outdoors in the snow looking over the landscape and thinking. Yet, from that beginning to that ending, much has happened inside Emily Bowen. She’s made decisions that will affect her family and her friends for the rest of their lives. The novel is really about a marriage and about the temptation to have an affair or get a divorce when that marriage isn’t working well. Not only is Emily’s marriage not sustaining her; she has very little hope that she can ever communicate with and love her emotionally distant and closed husband, Court. And the Other Man, Abe Fielding, is so open and nurturing and available that Emily can’t help falling in love. She spends the rest of the novel trying to decide what to do about her new love and her old love and her children and ultimately herself.

As far as classification goes, I think this novel, were it to be published today, would be classifed as young adult fiction mostly because of the young adult characters, Virginia and Mimi, Sam, Abe’s son, and Sam’s friend, Beanie. However, the overwhelming theme of the novel is adult: what is the meaning of marriage and how does love grow and change and remain faithful to itself. I don’t think this is Madeleine L’Engle’s best novel, but it is a very creditable effort. She has at least three novels that were published before this one, Ilsa, The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, and I’d like to get those next so that I can read the novels in semi-chronological order. (I’ve already read A Small Rain and maybe And Both Were Young, but I’m planning to re-read them.) Virginia Bowen and Mimi Oppenheimer both appear in later L’Engle novels as minor characters.

The Books I Didn’t Finish in 2006

Dec31

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Grace—Norris I don’t know why I didn’t finish this one; I’d like to try it again. I think there were just too many interruptions.

Bark of the Bog Owl—Rogers I just couldn’t get interested in this children’s fantasy.

Child from the Sea—Goudge Again, I couldn’t get interested.

Christianity for Modern Pagans—Kreeft I dipped into this one here and there in a rather desultory manner. I’ll make a better attempt this next year.

Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—Eggers And I probably won’t ever read it. Too crude, rude and socially unacceptable.

Lonesome Dove—McMurtry Same song, second verse. I thought it might get better, but it just got worse.

Moby Dick–Melville A I’ll get back to Melville again someday.

Ragtime—Doctorow Crude and not my cuppa tea.

Silence—Shukasu Endo I had to return it to the library. I’ll get it again and finish it.

Story—McKee I skimmed through parts of this how-to-write book.

Either my attention span is getting shorter (hope not) or I’m a lot more willing to give up on a book, maybe come back to it later, than I used to be. I think I’ve decided that at my age I’m never going to be able to read all the books that interest me anyway. So why waste time and energy on one that doesn’t capture my imagination? Unless I’ve been told by people I trust that there’s something there worth working at, I don’t read books anymore that I don’t like within a chapter or two.

So many books, so little time.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born December 30th

Dec30


Rudyard Kipling, b. 1865, d. January 18, 1936.

Kipling was wildly popular in his time; he’s now condemned as a moralist, a racist, and and imperialist. Nevertheless, his poetry and his stories are a delight, even if it’s sometimes necessary to suspend one’s cultural assumptions and attitudes. Eldest Daughter took a Victorian fantasty class last semester, and the class read Puck of Pook’s Hill, a tale of Puck, the Last of the Little People, who takes two children, Dan and Una, on a journey through a fantastical version of ancint British history. They hear stories from Puck and see the adventures of Picts and Danes, knights and Romans, and other more fairy-like folk.

THe following poem is from the book Puck of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling:

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever AEneas began.
Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,
When Brut was an outlaw man.
Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town
(From which was London born);
Witness hereby the ancientry
Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard-mould,
He breedeth a mighty bow.
Alder for shoes do wise men choose,
And beech for cups also.
But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,
And your shoes are clean outworn,
Back ye must speed for all that ye need,
To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade:
But whether a lad be sober or sad,
Or mellow with ale from the horn,
He will take no wrong when he lieth along
‘Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But–we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth-
Good news for cattle and corn–
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn):
England shall bide till Judgment Tide,
By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

In the story Puck swears “by Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.” If I were going to swear an oath by anything, I would enjoy that one. I do like the Victorians and Edwardians. There’s something solid and comforting and indestructible about even the most doubting and wavering of the Victorians, not that Kipling falls into the latter category. I’m sure that Tolkien and Lewis read their Kipling and were influenced by him. Doesn’t the tree poem remind you of Tolkien’s love of trees?

If you can get your hands on a copy, I would recommend a romp through Puck of Pook’s Hill. In the same class on Victorian fantasy, Eldest Daughter also enjoyed Thackeray’s The Ring and the Rose, also worth searching out.

Complete Collection of Poems by Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling’s Birthday, December 2004: “When Earth’s Picture Is Painted.”

Poetry Friday: You by Edgar Guest

Dec29

You are the fellow that has to decide
Whether you’ll do it or toss it aside.
You are the fellow who makes up your mind
Whether you’ll lead or will linger behind
Whether you’ll try for the goal that’s afar
Or just be contented to stay where you are.
Take it or leave it. Here’s something to do!
Just think it over — It’s all up to you!

What do you wish? To be known as a shirk,
Known as a good man who’s willing to work,
Scorned for a loafer or praised by your chief,
Rich man or poor man or beggar or thief?
Eager or earnest or dull through the day,
Honest or crooked? It’s you who must say!
You must decide in the face of the test
Whether you’ll shirk it or give it your best.

Nobody here will compel you to rise;
No one will force you to open your eyes;
No one will answer for you yes or no,
Whether to stay there or whether to go.
Life is a game, but it’s you who must say,
Whether as cheat or as sportsman you’ll play.
Fate may betray you, but you settle first
Whether to live to your best or your worst.

So, whatever it is you are wanting to be,
Remember, to fashion the choice you are free.
Kindly or selfish, or gentle or strong,
Keeping the right way or taking the wrong,
Careless of honor or guarding your pride,
All these are questions which you must decide.
Yours the selection, whichever you do;
The thing men call character’s all up to you!

The poetry of Edgar Guest is out of fashion in our sophisticated age; it’s unambiguous, unsubtle, too moralizing, not enough vivid images and fine-drawn metaphors and understated suggestions. Guest’s too preachy for lots of people, but sometimes I find that I need, even enjoy, the bracing, cold slap of a challenge put into plain terms that can’t be misinterpreted or evaded.

No, I don’t actually believe that it’s all up to me. But I do believe that it’s a good idea to act as if it were. “Life is a game, but it’s you who must say whether as cheat or as sportsman you’ll play.”

Take it or leave it.