tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5060132658708634812011-11-27T16:23:29.140-08:00"Old volumes shake their vellum heads, and tantalize just so." Emily DickinsonNancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.comBlogger961100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-58335548634056476742011-10-25T17:38:00.000-07:002011-10-25T17:38:47.829-07:00

-- where I am, chances are it's here. Do drop by, and have a pisco sour maybe.

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-87802343092451721832011-07-16T06:24:00.000-07:002011-07-16T06:24:21.003-07:00

... 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 queen

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-26100126973401271322011-05-15T07:11:00.000-07:002011-05-15T07:14:15.885-07:00

Oh, 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, Léonce? 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,

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-14499832618994796342011-05-10T10:02:00.000-07:002011-05-10T10:05:56.961-07:00

This 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!"

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-30845404714154691892011-04-18T07:01:00.000-07:002011-04-18T07:01:34.162-07:00

Very 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 of a

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-55875699318635362482011-03-06T08:34:00.000-08:002011-03-06T08:34:03.109-08:00

The 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-27725360114746038032011-01-30T10:48:00.000-08:002011-01-30T10:49:30.541-08:00

A 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. Even

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-15224346947879069512011-01-04T10:45:00.000-08:002011-01-04T10:45:14.652-08:00

School 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-9808394007843731502010-12-26T08:42:00.000-08:002010-12-26T08:42:16.270-08:00

Let'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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-58404332428069880692010-12-05T10:04:00.000-08:002010-12-05T10:06:07.631-08:00

How 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-56817935782367521462010-11-07T18:59:00.000-08:002010-11-07T18:59:51.014-08:00

The 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 the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-66925638746603636622010-09-14T06:25:00.000-07:002010-09-14T06:25:36.878-07:00

I 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,

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-91186752473694323752010-09-04T06:21:00.000-07:002010-09-04T06:21:46.154-07:00

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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-77050746261685688222010-08-17T06:25:00.000-07:002010-08-17T06:25:30.523-07:00

Is 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-60895099959279961132010-08-09T17:44:00.000-07:002010-08-09T18:56:02.185-07:00

Difficult, 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-12241968099304979012010-08-02T05:40:00.000-07:002010-11-05T20:31:54.330-07:00

What 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 voice

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-20743088226820848552010-07-31T06:15:00.000-07:002010-07-31T06:15:29.730-07:00

From 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 -

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-62521730316458481092010-07-11T05:13:00.000-07:002010-08-02T06:36:32.543-07:00

I 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-60047543580873993232010-07-04T17:06:00.000-07:002010-08-02T18:24:58.618-07:00

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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-65454448694127431002010-06-27T06:43:00.000-07:002010-06-27T11:24:03.486-07:00

"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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-68694858992454780782010-05-28T05:28:00.000-07:002010-07-03T19:49:10.263-07:00

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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-18244732894593437662010-05-17T06:35:00.000-07:002010-05-17T10:17:56.098-07:00

The 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-10904117719700647072010-05-08T17:44:00.000-07:002010-05-09T09:56:10.541-07:00

And they are often gorgeous looking and are run by people who read seven or eight books a month, even if they are working, pregnant, and also garden and bake. (I do, but I'm not and I certainly don't.) There are monthly or yearly Challenges -- read French historical romances, read Tudor historical novels, read art history, read Jean Plaidy, read graphic novels -- and the happy blogrolls on the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-63167189468553898092010-05-07T05:18:00.000-07:002010-05-07T06:41:46.792-07:00

A 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-5145044892733085232010-04-30T08:32:00.000-07:002010-04-30T17:31:33.320-07:00

I 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-19253601109896878002010-04-07T19:09:00.000-07:002010-04-11T12:32:46.725-07:00

What 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

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-2516665567647209792010-03-24T07:22:00.000-07:002010-03-24T19:06:00.477-07:00

It's not great poetry, but it does just what the poet intended.FOR *** No eyes shall see the poems that I write For you; not even yours; but after long Forgetful years have passed on our delight Some hand may chance upon a dusty song Of those fond days when every spoken word Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard Murmured through forests as

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-60100368321169534662010-02-28T07:21:00.000-08:002010-02-28T19:38:56.705-08:00

February 2002An English lady, "Mrs. Arthur Webster," writes in 1919 a book about the French Revolution which depicts everything as a German-inspired criminal conspiracy. This is the first book I have ever encountered which has no publication information except the date. It must have been "privately printed." It's an extraordinary book. Because she tells the story as a conspiracy led by, and

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-37185839731195268222010-02-21T07:35:00.000-08:002010-02-21T08:22:36.954-08:00

May, 2000Very interesting; I would never have imagined bull fighting was so complex. His interpolations about war and death were not much to the point, and his views on writing seemed totally purposeless. Occasionally he unbent and wrote a few sentences that seemed to come directly from the heart: "If you ever bolt with someone, go to Ronda," was the first.However, the one salient characteristic

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-38304645027093765582010-02-12T06:12:00.000-08:002010-02-12T18:25:08.111-08:00

We all have our little things we're interested in. For some people, it's dinosaurs.I happened to read -- or, honestly, skim through -- John Noble Wilford's The Riddle of the Dinosaur at about the same time I was also glancing through a beautiful coffee table book called Universe: A Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos by Nicolas Cheetham. The lesson I couldn't help but pull from both

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-42563185328930645992010-01-27T05:31:00.000-08:002010-02-07T15:30:36.720-08:00

One really can't review great poetry. One can only enjoy it. In high school, Pope was a ridiculous chore; now he's delightful."Soft yielding minds to Water glide away,And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea."But why does Ariel abandon the job of protecting Belinda right in the middle of the story?"Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art,An earthly Lover lurking at her heart.Amazed, confused,

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-33058022422426813482010-01-16T17:58:00.000-08:002010-03-24T19:07:43.985-07:00

From Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'facts.' They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-81406636653944346592010-01-10T06:50:00.000-08:002010-01-13T04:59:21.186-08:00

It beggars the imagination to know that four of the most epochal figures of the ancient world -- can there be a lot of epochal figures even in one part of an epoch? -- all were exact contemporaries, met each other, and that three of the four enjoyed the most intimate alliances, and had children. They were Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and the Octavian who later became the emperor

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-24648402171972436092009-12-13T05:00:00.000-08:002009-12-13T10:21:15.101-08:00

How often do you get a chance to read a novel set on the island of Corfu? If only libraries and bookstores, with all their so clever Dewey decimal systems and alphabetical orders, would arrange novels like this: all those set in Corfu, for example, or all those set in T'ang China, or all those that happen to have as a main character some extremely important person (now nearly forgotten) of a

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-67882051618451560042009-11-28T06:05:00.000-08:002010-02-21T08:20:38.923-08:00

July, 2001Massive and superior, of course, but still not exactly what I was looking for. I want the story, not a synopsis of its economic causes and psychic effects. Still, what a fund of knowledge he had. There is also this quote from a man once "well-known," one Luigi Cornaro:"...how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am ... in my eighty-third year I have written a most amusing comedy." What

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-75129817593373392802009-11-15T17:55:00.000-08:002010-02-21T08:21:21.230-08:00

July, 1999Idyllic childhood on an Irish family farm; backbreaking work, plenty of fresh air, surprisingly sentimental care of farm animals. Yet, a depressing place for any adults, especially men, who happen not to want to be farmers. Lone bachelors living in their parents' homes, who simply die one summer. No fuss, no doctors.Here the last vestiges of day to day medievalism die out in Ireland

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-52503251143177802022009-10-30T05:08:00.000-07:002009-10-30T06:25:34.123-07:00

Who would have thought a man could write a dull book about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa? He's repetitive, he's flailing -- from the pepper trade to Darwin to plate tectonics to the 19th century telegraph system to Muslim-Dutch tensions in Java to personal recollections and shop talk about his summer in Greenland in the 1960s -- he's breathlessly anxious to assure us the explosion was

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-85317210564270238632009-10-25T07:07:00.000-07:002009-10-25T10:24:49.152-07:00

This is my second go-round with Tom Jones. Of course it's splendid; I understand it's splendid. What modern writer, for example, has the brains to accomplish this? --Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragrant bed,

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-32197227252324001362009-09-23T07:02:00.000-07:002009-09-23T07:39:05.385-07:00

I think pre-formatted, blank page book review journals may have been more in vogue ten or twelve years ago than they are now. Is it the kind of thing worth dipping into, or will what you see just make you cringe?July 1997 (I distinctly remember I wrote this while sitting in the backyard on a hot day. Four toddlers played in a wading pool while the baby slept nearby.)Desiree by Annemarie Selinko (

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-31444113184496097752009-08-31T05:21:00.000-07:002009-08-31T06:44:36.337-07:00

Wildly dull. So much so that I wonder at the awareness of the author. At some point, doesn't a writer step back from his work and think, "my God, this is going to bore people to death"? We all write dull things occasionally; editors help correct that propensity, usually. The wonder is that this got published even with an editor's help.Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-56372349832772202842009-08-09T08:11:00.000-07:002009-08-09T11:48:16.410-07:00

Writing biographies of medieval queens has to be tricky. We know these women led interesting lives, sometimes hideously so. Yet if the author dutifully chronicles only the lady's life, he ends up telling us how she traveled from this manor to that, or gave that gift or this to some monastery, poor man, or relative. If, instead, he chronicles the grand events of the day, he ends up telling us of

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-77393468686339762272009-07-03T05:33:00.000-07:002009-07-03T17:49:52.730-07:00

The release of Star Trek this spring, and my own reconnection with the old Star Trek TV show from the 1960s, prompted me lately to wander the stacks of the local public library, browsing for science fiction books. I almost never read them otherwise. Correction: I never read them. Growing up, my older brother owned bookshelves of the genre, but I could never build an appreciation for it. I recall

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-56673715083076010692009-06-21T04:38:00.000-07:002009-06-22T05:30:42.198-07:00

This opening volume of Irving's biography takes us from Columbus' birth to a climactic point during his second voyage to the New World, when, as the result of what can inadequately be described as overwork, Columbus collapsed and his crew "spread their sails to the east wind and bore him back, in a state of complete insensibility, to the harbor of Isabella" (a Caribbean port).There are two

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-85909525458881348032009-06-01T17:33:00.000-07:002009-06-02T06:56:22.702-07:00

This long letter comes in volume 9 of the Harvard Classics' Five foot shelf of books, first published in 1909. My local public library's own 1965 edition of the collection gets pride of place in an endcap by itself, facing the atrium with its indoor tree and fountain -- very classical -- but alas, somebody long ago absconded with Volume 2 (Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) and volume 8 (Greek

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Once, in a bookstore, I found a copy of the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and read on the back jacket flap the statement that Mark Twain considered this his best book. That's a surprise, and in the reading lists they assign and laud, it's clear college professors and other authorities don't agree with Twain's self-analysis. But I do believe I enjoyed this more than I ever enjoyed Tom

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-21741851322149103732009-04-20T08:11:00.000-07:002009-04-20T11:32:47.093-07:00

The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-83916635754252268732009-04-11T09:30:00.000-07:002009-04-11T11:52:36.084-07:00

I do, occasionally, take up brand new books. I like those nice, crackly new mylar covers, and the feel of new paper and the look of clean bright typeface. I like, who does not, the possibility of fresh discovery, something good of today. And I remember finding and liking new books when I browsed the library shelves at the age of ten or twelve or a little more. Have I since become snarkily

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-13015797072471300072009-03-31T08:06:00.000-07:002009-03-31T11:35:22.409-07:00

Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six years of his life, from 1768 to his death in 1774. The monarch was succeeded by his grandson, the unfortunate King Louis XVI, who for a variety of reasons not

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-2898300633749468942009-03-15T08:13:00.000-07:002009-03-15T18:06:55.941-07:00

It may have been a help or a hindrance to have seen Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V years before reading, to give it its long title, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The film is interlarded with specially created flashback-style scenes lifted from this latter play, so that the viewer of all the action leading up to the battle of Agincourt, involving all those kings and dukes, can

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-52496144017850298012009-03-15T07:11:00.000-07:002009-03-15T08:09:20.844-07:00

I had hopes of enjoying this book. As I flip through it now, it still looks interesting and erudite. I am glad to learn that dreams and visions were popular subjects of Florentine art, "where the great fresco cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drew chiefly on the Golden Legend of Jacopo della Voragine and the life of Saint Francis." I am glad to know also that perspective in

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-48900714684170981102009-03-03T05:42:00.000-08:002009-03-03T18:35:34.614-08:00

About ten years ago, Commentary published an article on the demise of the secondary source intellectual. It was too bad, the author wrote, that standards in the publishing world had become not so much very professional, as so very professorial. Nowadays, anyone with a book to write on some topic or other, anyone who wanted a prayer of being taken seriously, had first to do what historians looking

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-49931287751396960072009-02-21T07:00:00.000-08:002009-02-21T18:10:15.108-08:00

When I was younger and foolisher, I read quite a bit of P.G. Wodehouse, mostly the Jeeves and Drones Club stories, and then reached a point -- and this is the "foolisher" part -- at which I felt I had read enough of him. His stories can be laugh-out-loud funny, and his prose is exquisite, but he was, I determined, altogether very silly. In my earnestness I decided that one more convoluted plot

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-2637942193870419772009-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:002009-01-25T10:53:09.769-08:00

I think three months -- or was it four? -- to slog through a 681-page book on antiquity's epochal change from paganism to Christianity, which has sat on my shelves for twenty years and whose author may have long since died for all I know, is all right, isn't it? And did I say that right?Robin Lane Fox's aims in Pagans and Christians are staggeringly ambitious, and are set out right there on the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-47148019273399219172008-12-19T07:00:00.000-08:002008-12-19T07:00:00.097-08:00

Boring, cold, confusing, voiceless. Either the author is out of her depth, or I am. "He had honestly forgotten whether a horror is a greater shock than an anti-climax." Say what? And the detective is burdened with a tragic on-site love affair, philosophically correctly described, but unfelt. No go.

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-48096143570891798192008-12-14T07:09:00.000-08:002008-12-14T10:36:55.975-08:00

Now this is history. Keep, for the moment, kings and battles and social movements. Give me a hideous murder among the very hautest of the haute monde of Paris, on the morning of August 18th, 1847, and give it to me in the word-painting of a professional type who seems to have vanished from today's bookshelves. Stanley Loomis begins: "Only forty years separated the reign of Louis-Philippe from the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-19427101044258522802008-12-11T06:37:00.000-08:002008-12-11T11:00:31.535-08:00

The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is one of those gigantic classics that you fear to approach. Who is this author, and what is he about? His book was the foundation of upper-class education from at least the Renaissance forward, it seems; I have elusive memories of reading that this queen or that, this general or that one, found his ambitions stirred by an adolescence spent with a solitary

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-52510029497731280602008-11-30T07:00:00.000-08:002008-12-16T16:50:46.931-08:00

This is one of those tempting, plain, and slightly grubby tomes tucked in among its fellows, both the shiny-new and the well thumbed, on the local library's mystery shelves. Reinforced library binding, imprinted with a groovy, green-amber-brown Greek key design; pages as soft as velvet with age and use; no jacket, no blurbs, no summary. Chapter 1: "The Black Tower of Dunnoch. I saw it first at

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-62020016451735462002008-11-20T05:25:00.000-08:002008-11-21T12:46:52.292-08:00

When modern Western women complain about long-standing sexism in society, I sometimes want to lift a dubious eyebrow, and then glance meaningfully at something like Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in London -- apparently by the family firm, S.O. Beeton -- in 1861. A sexist society, a woman trapped in a sexist society, does not just vomit out an achievement like this.I

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-13155003890267992652008-11-08T07:11:00.000-08:002008-12-16T16:50:46.932-08:00

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest IndianaNorah Lofts was one of an impressive cohort of English women novelists who seemed to reach their prolific prime in the middle of the twentieth century, and who remain delightful, intelligent escape reading today. Mary Stewart was another, along with Angela Thirkell, Miss Read, and of course Agatha Christie. They were born early enough to be

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-76183262297947486502008-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:002008-12-16T16:50:46.933-08:00

I came to this novel with somewhat of a handicap, namely the vague memory of having read that Christie did something remarkable and startling with the set-up of this, her first (so I had thought) published mystery. So I was on the alert for a twist, for the orchestration of a twist, beginning perhaps rather early in the story. You might say I had read the spoiler.And as I got about halfway

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-48147253047624705542008-10-15T07:03:00.000-07:002008-10-15T20:05:26.171-07:00

In order to begin to understand this story, it helps to have seen the television drama I, Claudius. That way, you can picture the actor who played Claudius' lifelong friend, the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa, and so you can at least place the heroine of this novel, Berenice, into a family, as Herod Agrippa's daughter.The setting of this historical romance is therefore already unusual, as historical

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-55316057198567762912008-10-08T16:37:00.000-07:002008-10-08T18:16:08.474-07:00

"A novel of Marie Antoinette," this book is subtitled, and although she is not quite a main character, the scenes centering on the imprisoned Queen of France are the most vivid and interesting of the tale. I have tried Dumas before, and have unfortunately found, in The Three Musketeers for example, that his endless action, his swordfight-on-every-page style, is not to my taste. He seems to have

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-72083661130881292782008-10-05T11:29:00.000-07:002008-10-05T11:45:00.297-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaThomas Costain was a prolific Canadian journalist and editor of the mid-twentieth century who, at the age of 57, published his first historical novel, and from then on became a prolific historical novelist. You are more than likely to encounter one of his books, or an anthology edited by him, in any library or at a used book sale. The Silver

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-82129015060855202332008-09-11T06:49:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:29:25.351-07:00

The first thing to arrest the eye is the title: the Mutiny of the Bounty. Not Mutiny on the Bounty, as the movies made of this event are called. The difference in prepositions might seem meaningless, but the two words do create two different images in the mind. A mutiny on a ship calls up pictures of men arguing, having it out as equals in a public place. A mutiny of a ship suggests the entire

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-12538977333021337472008-09-01T19:13:00.000-07:002008-12-16T16:50:46.934-08:00

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest IndianaThe definition of originality has been said to be, not that you create something new, but that you create something that cannot be imitated. Raymond Chandler did this when he wrote his four Philip Marlowe detective novels, beginning with The Big Sleep (1939). Here we meet Marlowe, the solitary, hard-drinking, tough-talking private eye working

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-65577039438915795322008-08-15T07:54:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:30:00.672-07:00

A book published in 2000 would not seem to qualify as "an old volume shaking its vellum head, and tantalizing just so," but then, time does march on. The book is already eight years old, and ended up recently in my library's book sale, Withdrawn stamped on its title page. Having only been checked out nine times in seven years, and not at all for the most recent three years running, is grounds for

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-64559067804304295202008-07-27T07:32:00.000-07:002008-07-27T10:05:58.220-07:00

Lin Yutang was a prolific and popular author of the mid-20th century, writing in both Chinese and English, based, it seems, sometimes in Shanghai where he founded and edited newspapers, and sometimes in New York, where he ruminated on modern life and published many "a John Day book" with the firm of Reynal & Hitchcock. Somehow, one imagines Lin (who liked being incorrectly called "Mr. Yutang"

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-50338794064294426852008-07-09T06:25:00.000-07:002008-07-09T06:53:13.119-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaThe Diary opens on a quiet November morning in an English village around 1930. The lady -- whose name we never learn -- is chronicling her attempts to "plant the indoor bulbs" despite interruptions from children, servants, and the officious local peeress, Lady Boxe, who is always ready to drop by with unsolicited advice.For the next year, we

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-82049681575770949382008-06-26T06:52:00.000-07:002010-08-04T16:20:52.104-07:00

Romance fiction is a billion-dollar-a-year plus industry; over one-quarter of all books sold in the United States are romance novels. Although the romance publishing market seems to be uniquely open to novice writers -- the one market left whose writers need not have a marketable persona themselves, so long as they produce -- there are strict guidelines for drafting a sample of the genre. A

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-23554156390460058452008-06-22T17:44:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:30:34.788-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana, 2007It seems appropriate this summer, while we all either marvel at or are revolted by the return of the 17-year cicadas, to dip into a classic of nature writing that is all about bugs. The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre (translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, compiled by Edwin Way Teale), is the kind of book to be dipped into, not read

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-46664843682609962952008-06-17T07:10:00.000-07:002008-06-17T08:24:04.895-07:00

I read The Confessions laboring under two handicaps, or compelling Rousseau to labor under them, which I suppose was not fair to him at all. To begin with, I approached it already having read Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals some years ago. Johnson began his study of the influence of secular, usually politically passionate and liberal modern intellectuals with Rousseau, in a chapter entitled "An

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-82070661282299296702008-06-11T09:02:00.000-07:002008-06-11T09:21:23.001-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaShe captures it indeed. I Capture the Castle is the journal of young Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her eccentric family in an old and dilapidated castle (only rented, and the rent much overdue) in Depression-era England. Her father is a once-famed novelist now suffering from his twelfth year of writer's block; her stepmother is the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-29757958408379912032008-06-07T06:13:00.000-07:002008-06-17T08:24:47.468-07:00

I've been tagged! as bloggers say excitedly when this happens to them.By sheer luck, Sucharita Sarkar at Why Not Blog It Out was good enough to invite me to play a blog tag game, involving literature, just when I am reading -- no joke -- Rousseau's Confessions. So for the purposes of the game, I can seem much more intellectual than I would if she had tagged me last weekend, when I took it into my

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-34974790408124976652008-05-28T06:58:00.001-07:002008-11-01T10:31:31.508-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaRobert Payne's The Splendor of Greece takes the armchair traveler back nearly fifty years to a time when writers of travel books came to their subjects with different intentions than their modern counterparts seem to do. Modern books recounting the adventures of an eager pilgrim in Paris, or romantic rural Spain or hidden and lovely Portugal,

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-80529722988610420102008-05-24T06:10:00.000-07:002008-05-24T06:31:44.178-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaA few small facts stand out in this great biography of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman -- he really was given the first name Tecumseh by his parents, he married his foster sister, he did indeed say "War is all hell" in a speech in Ohio in 1880 -- but at the close of its last page, the reader is left with one question. What is it that

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-44080806008078162892008-05-20T05:50:00.000-07:002008-05-20T06:18:23.596-07:00

This beautiful thick book with its ecru-lace artwork on the jacket is going to look lovely on your parlor table, beside a roaring fireplace with, preferably, the snow falling outside. It amounts, really, to a seventh Jane Austen novel, being a long, lovingly detailed chronicle of her family life, her visits, and her relations' adventures in colonial India or revolutionary France. Jane writes her

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-57481383697024697842008-05-14T07:26:00.000-07:002008-05-19T07:57:17.619-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaAttorney Paul "Polly" Biegler knows from day one that his client, army Lieutenant Lawrence Manion, has shot and killed hotel owner Barney Quill hardly an hour after Quill raped and beat Manion's wife. There is no mystery about that, and Biegler is not a detective. The mystery in Anatomy of a Murder lies, for the reader, in watching Biegler

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-18470357215938548402008-05-10T07:16:00.000-07:002010-04-11T12:40:44.336-07:00

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaThis Agatha Christie Mallowan is indeed the Agatha Christie of billion-selling, mystery novel fame. Married to the British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she was, in her other life, Lady Mallowan, assistant and recorder of his work in the Near East. In Come, Tell Me How You Lived -- "this meandering chronicle," she puts it -- she describes

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-25163490945910388402008-05-08T12:12:00.000-07:002008-05-08T12:21:06.768-07:00

Queen Christina of Sweden was one of the extraordinary personalities of seventeenth century Europe. The daughter of the hero King Gustavus Adolphus, champion of Protestant freedom, she made up her mind apparently in her late teens not only to abdicate the throne of Sweden as soon as she decently could, but also to convert to Catholicism and live at Rome into the bargain. Everyone was agog.What a

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Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaAn early episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show has Rob giving Laura a huge, ornate necklace once belonging to the Empress Carlotta. Laura is appalled, but copes politely with Rob's awful taste. There is a kernel of history in this episode, which it seems the show's writers expected an early 1960s audience to grasp.The Cactus Throne is an excellent

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-47074647511761619462008-04-13T13:19:00.000-07:002008-04-13T09:44:28.378-07:00

Fear of Flying was the deeply naughty, wink-wink book of the 1970s. Characters in television sitcoms who mentioned a fear of flying were advised to bring the book along on the plane, so as to escape their phobia. I finally borrowed the book from the library, thirty-five years after its publication, and found as I read it that quite a lot of it seemed familiar. We must have had a copy at home when

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-81646741744801652102008-04-07T07:11:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:32:54.117-07:00

Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaCatholic, imperial Spain was the superpower of the Western world in the 1570s and 1580s, and that was reason enough for Sir Francis Drake, doughty English Protestant, to sail around the world robbing Spanish ships and attacking far-flung colonial Spanish towns at will. Religious niceties aside, it would be a little as if, in the middle of the

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-52016499589606758922008-04-06T08:12:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:33:32.459-07:00

Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaThis is the best untangling of the subject that I have ever read. Hibbert follows the days, literally, that were the set pieces of the era, the days that got ordinary people out into the streets, and have remained vivid in books and movies ever since. This approach helps the reader to grasp a narrative that is otherwise mind-bogglingly complex

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Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana"The truth is simple," a member of my defunct book club once said concerning the theme of this novel. A Room with a View is considered only social comedy, but that member was right – its theme is the rather serious one of how simple the truth can be in our lives. Young Lucy Honeychurch meets two men during her travels in Italy, where she gads

Nancy Yoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04851990325188858710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-506013265870863481.post-56954284173188453782008-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:002008-11-01T10:34:04.372-07:00

Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaThose of us who enter a library or bookstore only to rush to the fiction or biography sections may be astonished to learn that whole shelves in these places are set aside for science. (It’s the 500s in the Dewey decimal system.) Once having taken the plunge, though, a little browsing will lead the liberal arts major to something meant for him:

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Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaThe East India Company represents, in its 300 or so pages, the summarizing of a huge swath of history that the general reader would never have reason to know, unless he stumbled upon this book or one like it. For almost three centuries, however, from the time of the Company’s founding in the very last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign up

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Originally published in the Times of Northwest IndianaThirty-six years ago, when Betty Askwith sat down to write about two prominent English families, they were perhaps fading from memory but not as obscure as they have become now. The Stracheys had produced Lytton Strachey, famous for his irreverent book Eminent Victorians; the Bensons, a family headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, were all

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaStuart Lake’s biography is taken from two years’ worth of interviews with Wyatt Earp, frontier marshal, himself. Since the book came out in 1931, at first this doesn’t seem to compute. Who can imagine lawman and gunslinger Earp, stalking down dusty Old West streets amid rolling tumbleweed, living into the Jazz Age? But in fact, he did; born in

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There is no reason to look at a book of lavish photographs of jewelry except pure pleasure. This book, published by Taplinger in 1968, shows the Queen of England in her prime -- not that the present is not also her prime, she being quite the formidable lady -- as a smiling and apparently very happy matron in her early forties. And why should she not be happy, at least in all these photographs

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaIn her bestselling novels published in the 1950s and ‘60s, Mary Renault recaptured, in lilting and simple prose, the world of ancient Greece, re-telling the myths of gods and heroes and the histories of kings and queens. In The Bull From The Sea she writes in the voice of Theseus, the Athenian prince whose adventures included slaying the

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’ first novel, starts out well. A middle-aged bachelor, Mr. Pickwick, and his three friends, Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Tupman, and Mr. Winkle, travel about England in the 1830s, observing people and customs in order to report back to their quasi-scientific gentlemen’s club. The four friends are delightful nincompoops, and

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaIt’s impossible to pass up a title like Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar, especially when the first two lines alone make the book worth its 50 cent, castoff price: " ‘Tom, your new atomic sports car is absolutely dreamy!’ said Phyllis Newton. Eighteen-year-old Tom Swift Jr. grinned at the pretty, dark haired girl ...." Tom Swift is the

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaMaster and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s series of sixteen Aubrey-Maturin novels, that is, novels set in the British Royal Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s whose main characters are Captain Jack Aubrey and medical officer Dr. Stephen Maturin. Aubrey is the gallant, diamond-in-the-rough type, fearless and good, if somewhat

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana More than fifty years after its first publication, the title Auntie Mame might only conjure up memories of Rosalind Russell on screen, exclaiming to some meek soul that "life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" Indeed they are, at least compared to the wonderful Mame Dennis. In the novel the narrator, a suburban

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Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest IndianaA Gardener’s Year is one of those books that libraries tend to discard because it has not been checked out in twenty-four years. And it is one of those books that tends not to be checked out because, perhaps, the library patron browsing the gardening shelf takes it down to look at it and sees a collection of short, almost abrupt essays, not

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I look for old books, the kind with the sea-green and sky-blue and brick-red re-enforced library bindings, as thick as plywood and maybe with a design of triangles or cross hatchings on them, done in white. No dust jacket, no gushing reviews on the back. Maybe a date or a near-defunct publishing company on the title page -- Little, Brown, 1951, 1931, whatever -- and the old pages are as soft as

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