tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5060132658708634812024-02-07T07:01:52.598-08:00Vellum"Old volumes shake their vellum heads, and tantalize just so." Emily DickinsonNancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.comBlogger95125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-58335548634056476742011-10-25T17:38:00.000-07:002014-01-19T10:38:32.897-08:00In case you're wondering --
-- where I am, chances are it's here. Do drop by, and have a pisco sour maybe.
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-87802343092451721832011-07-16T06:24:00.000-07:002011-07-16T06:24:21.003-07:00Once again ...... I haven't actually stopped reading. Eight weeks of learning how to live a new life, mid-divorce, have rather interfered with my time and attention span.
But I still have my Kindle. I am immersed in a nineteenth-century biography of Marie Antoinette by Charles Duke Yonge, having already read Madame Campan's Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. Why is it that the Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-26100126973401271322011-05-15T07:11:00.000-07:002011-05-15T07:14:15.885-07:00Dinner at Antoine's by Frances Parkinson KeyesOh, dear. I thought the novel was going to be about the famed New Orleans restaurant, or about food in some way. Not so. If you want to find out who murdered the invalid Odile St.-Amant -- was it her estranged husband, LĂ©once? her sister, Caresse, who is also carrying on with him? -- I'm sorry but you will have to read further than I did. Frances Parkinson Keyes has an atrocious ear for dialogue,Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-14499832618994796342011-05-10T10:02:00.000-07:002011-05-10T10:05:56.961-07:00Godfrey of Bouillon, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre by Tom TozerThis was a new experience. I turned on my Kindle -- bless its heart -- and searched the keyword Godfrey, because I had just encountered a lengthy and rather turbid poem of G.K. Chesterton's which sang, in part,
... the voice that shook our palaces -- four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!"Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-30845404714154691892011-04-18T07:01:00.000-07:002011-04-18T07:01:34.162-07:00The Moving Finger by Agatha ChristieVery fun fluff from the mistress of intelligent, if somewhat pedestrian, fluff -- just the thing to devour on a day off, when you have decided to try for the first time that old-fashioned egg-and-mayonnaise treatment supposed to be so good for lustrous hair. This experiment entails a lot of sitting around, with your head swathed in plastic wrap and a towel, so why not read?
It's a tale ofNancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-55875699318635362482011-03-06T08:34:00.000-08:002011-03-06T08:34:03.109-08:00A rare findThe Storm, by Frances Sarah Moore (1951)
To surf the gigantic universe of book review blogs is to wonder at the news and opinions of people who read more than I do. ("Loved it loved it LOVED IT!") To saunter about bookstores and libraries is to gape at the stacks of new fiction. All the fresh stiff books are so impressively thick and gorgeously produced, their jacket paintings, lettering, and Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-27725360114746038032011-01-30T10:48:00.000-08:002011-01-30T10:49:30.541-08:00A Versailles Christmas-tide by Mary Stuart BoydA pleasant little book. I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg without any of its illustrations, to save memory on my Kindle, but that may have been a mistake; judging by the space allotted them, half the point of the memoir seems to have been the pictures. They were drawn by the author's husband A. S. Boyd, whose art appeared in Punch and who himself appeared in the Who's Who of 1900.
Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-15224346947879069512011-01-04T10:45:00.000-08:002011-01-04T10:45:14.652-08:00The Iliad, Book 2School teachers spend their careers warning students against simply summarizing the plot of a book they've been assigned to write about. True enough. You're supposed to reflect on your book, not merely know how it's ordered. But the grandest classics are not like ordinary books. When coping with them, we still have to double check the course of action -- and often we're surprised at what we have Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-9808394007843731502010-12-26T08:42:00.000-08:002010-12-26T08:42:16.270-08:00The Iliad, Book 1Let's all make a pact, a New Year's resolution maybe, to approach the most gigantic classics a little bit at a time. By the chapter, by the "book." I've often grimly determined to do this with lots of things, with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for instance, whose three volumes, I think, could only be managed one paragraph at a time -- but so far I have always lost my nerve. With Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-58404332428069880692010-12-05T10:04:00.000-08:002010-12-05T10:06:07.631-08:00How to Do !t by Elsa MaxwellHow to Do !t -- the cute exclamation point is not a typo -- is subtitled OR The Lively Art of Entertaining, and as you plow delightedly through the first several chapters, you may think that this is the most unique and truly interesting, entertaining, book you've read in years. Carrying on, you may find it turns a bit repetitive, but that is partly because few people anymore need our author's Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-56817935782367521462010-11-07T18:59:00.000-08:002010-11-07T18:59:51.014-08:00I haven't actually stopped readingThe trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:
... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften theNancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-66925638746603636622010-09-14T06:25:00.000-07:002010-09-14T06:25:36.878-07:00The Talisman Ring by Georgette HeyerI salute the lady's research. To have found out that people ate mutton with cucumbers in the late eighteenth century, and that a certain part of a country house's grounds, between the gravel walk and a wicket gate, could be called a "ha ha," indicates a writer with a respect for her task and her readers.
I salute her plotting, really incredibly extravagant, what with all the different servants, Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-91186752473694323752010-09-04T06:21:00.000-07:002014-05-29T05:13:52.394-07:00The Garden, You, and I by Mabel Osgood Wright
This book may not be for everyone -- what book is? -- it may be most useful, and give the greatest pleasure, to today's gardener purely as a technical manual. This despite its being first published in 1906, at which time it was curiously credited only to authoress "Barbara." (It is available for free at our favorite place, Project Gutenberg).
I reason that it's still useful because I reason Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-77050746261685688222010-08-17T06:25:00.000-07:002010-08-17T06:25:30.523-07:00Glory Road by Bruce CattonIs it permissible to scribble brief notes about a book I haven't quite finished yet, but that is overdue at the library? A few things strike me:
I doubt there can ever again be American historians of the Civil War working at the same level as men like Bruce Catton or his Southern counterpart, Shelby Foote. They were both of exactly the right generation to have grown up with boyhood memories of Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-60895099959279961132010-08-09T17:44:00.000-07:002010-08-09T18:56:02.185-07:00Twelfth NightDifficult, of course. It will require a second reading even to begin to get the plot straight, even though it is "only" a comedy.
The prime difficulty is that for the bulk of the story, we follow "the lighter people," the non-noble characters, as they play three successive tricks on one another: first a steward, Malvolio, finds a forged letter that deceives him into behaving pompously Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-12241968099304979012010-08-02T05:40:00.000-07:002010-11-05T20:31:54.330-07:00Two ghost storiesWhat makes a ghost frightening? That it is more alive than we are.
From The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Brad Leithauser (1994), come these two to start a collection. First is Ann Bridge's marvelous "The Buick Saloon," originally published in 1936. An exotic setting -- the foreign Legation in Peking in the 1930s -- a dumpy little diplomatic wife who hears a disembodied female Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-20743088226820848552010-07-31T06:15:00.000-07:002010-07-31T06:15:29.730-07:00The Bostonians by Henry JamesFrom my "Book Lover's Journal," January 2002
Most excellent. Surprised the feminist movement survived it. However, if it was a "failure" when it first came out, I can see why: it all hinges on the character of Olive Chancellor, and there is no reason for her to be as she is, at least no explanation -- though perhaps that is James' point. She is like Iago, totally rational and totally malicious -Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-62521730316458481092010-07-11T05:13:00.000-07:002010-08-02T06:36:32.543-07:00The Long Secret by Louise FitzhughI have re-read with pleasure, in the course of a few hot summer nights, this classic book from my childhood and classic of modern children's literature. I always liked The Long Secret even better than its precursor and companion story, Harriet the Spy, because I could relate to Harriet's and her friends' summertime adventures more than I could to their school days in swanky Manhattan. Being (and Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-60047543580873993232010-07-04T17:06:00.000-07:002010-08-02T18:24:58.618-07:00Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (Marie Annette Beauchamp)The introduction to this book is almost as interesting as the book itself, for it explains, briefly and lucidly, the life and works of our authoress, and why she happened to have two names. The lady was born in Australia Marie Annette Beauchamp, and was a cousin of the more famous, New Zealand born writer Katharine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Reared in England, where she "was Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-65454448694127431002010-06-27T06:43:00.000-07:002010-06-27T11:24:03.486-07:00About Orchids: a Chat by Frederick Boyle"If every human being should do what he can to promote the general happiness, it would be downright wicked to leave one's fellow-men under the influence of hallucinations that debar them from the most charming of quiet pleasures."The quiet pleasure, that is, of growing orchids. The "hallucination" to be cured is that they are difficult to grow. I could have sworn, somewhere in the very early Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-68694858992454780782010-05-28T05:28:00.000-07:002010-07-03T19:49:10.263-07:00The Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1790); Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1676)Two English ladies, living two generations apart, travel half the world in pursuance of their husbands' careers. Lady Mary made a circuit from London through the Low Countries to Austria to Hungary to the Ottoman capital, and from there via the Mediterranean to north Africa, Italy, and thence to Paris and then home; all this over the course of about two years, 1716-1718, while her husband Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-18244732894593437662010-05-17T06:35:00.000-07:002010-05-17T10:17:56.098-07:00Typhoon by Joseph ConradThe sea story. The fo'c'sle and the mizzenmast, the bosun and the 'tween-decks. The storm.I have tremendous respect for Joseph Conrad, even though I never could finish Lord Jim. I understand that Conrad muscled himself into being a gorgeous stylist of English prose, and an utterly natural recorder of English dialogue, despite not knowing the language until he was twenty (he was born a Polish Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-63167189468553898092010-05-07T05:18:00.000-07:002010-05-07T06:41:46.792-07:00Human Accomplishment by Charles MurrayA book about what made the greatest works of art and discoveries in science come to be, and why; and why these came to be where and when they did, and at the hands they did. A book, at the end, about whether or not human accomplishment is actually declining, whether or not it is true, as Keats -- Keats! -- lamented, "the count of mighty Poets is made up, the scroll is folded by the Muses ... the Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-5145044892733085232010-04-30T08:32:00.000-07:002010-04-30T17:31:33.320-07:00A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles DickensI have a friend who loves Dickens, loves him with a new and mature fervor. "Some characters are horrible people, some are so wonderful ... and yet in the end, there's always hope. Goodness." Perhaps I should try him again.March 1999The story might be excellent, in other hands, but Dickens is always Dickens. He is neither funny nor feeling; Sydney Carton, grown man weeping into his pillow because Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-19253601109896878002010-04-07T19:09:00.000-07:002010-04-11T12:32:46.725-07:00Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia by W. Somerset MaughamWhat does it mean to travel? And isn't it fun reading a book on a Kindle?Yes, it is fun, if I may answer the second question first. A travel book published by Somerset Maugham in 1905 is the sort of thing you might chance upon in an old library or a used book sale, or you might know about it if you are a student of Maugham. Still, the chances of such serendipity are slim, if you go about your Nancyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0