labwriter: 2011, thread one

Here's to a great year of reading for everyone!

My profile is here.




You can find me here at my old 2010 thread.

Books read in January 2011

1) Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. 4 stars
2) A Fountain Filled With Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3 stars
3) An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum. 5 stars
4) A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. 4 stars
5) Seeing Mary Plain, by Frances Kiernan. 5 Stars
6) Out of the Deep I Cry, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3.5 stars
7) Walking the Bible, by Bruce Feiler. 4 stars
8) To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 3 stars
9) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. 125th Anniversary Ed. by Fischer and Salamo. 5 stars
10) Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn by Tom Quirk. 4 stars
11) Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell. 4 stars
12) City Room, by Arthur Gelb. 3.5 stars

Welcome back!

Thanks much. This is a great group and I appreciate the work of people here to keep this group alive and well.

Glad to see you joining us again for 2011, Becky! What a great addition to the group you have made!

I wouldn't miss it, Stasia!

Welcome back. I like your goals for this year!

Hi Becky. I just saw your reading goals for 2011. I would also like to spend more time reading but I totally failed in 2010 at spending less time on LT. As the year went on, and even as I started realizing that I spent a HUGE amount of time on LT, I just continued to star new threads and follow them all. So far this seems to be one of those "problems" I've identified but that I don't really want to solve.

One thing I hope to do this year is read some literary correspondence, an idea you first introduced me to. I read some great biographies and memoirs in 2010 that you recommended so I'm looking forward to the correspondence your read in 2011 for some good suggestions.

I also have trouble abandoning books especially if they're supposed to be good. Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize and I only got to about p. 200 (I think it's 500 pages). After that kind of commitment, I feel bad about just giving up.

I look forward to following your reading in 2011. You've definitely expanded my horizons in 2010!

Happy New Year, Becky!
--BJ

We dodged a bullet yesterday--a neighborhood two miles from us was flattened by a tornado. DH and I were both outside and, as usual, going about our business and ignoring the tornado sirens. We lived in Omaha for a couple of years long ago, so we got used to that sort of thing there. Seeing the pictures of the devastation on the news was sobering. Just imagine if everything you own was instantly destroyed. I feel terrible for the people who lost their homes, and I'm very thankful that we did not.

Anywho, here's what I'm currently reading.

Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy, by Frances Kiernan. I read loads of biographies, particularly of people who were central to the Manhattan literary scene in the 1930s. I know way too much about all of these people--heh. The biographer deserves an award for this book. She's done a remarkable job with the material. Yesterday I got to the point in the book where young Mary marries Edmund Wilson, a much older man. For me, this is where Mary's life becomes grotesque. This is her second marriage. She was living with a man she loved when she met Wilson, yet she was quite promiscuous, even to the point of having sex with three different men in one day. Seriously? For some reason, after she went to bed with Edmund Wilson, she convinced herself that she therefore was required to marry him. She was soon pregnant for the first time, and out of the blue she flips into some sort of psychotic state. Who knows what the heck was wrong with her, but she seems to have simply flipped out. I really don't like this woman.

So I'm sitting here reminding myself that one of my reading "goals" for 2011 is not to be so reluctant to abandon a book that I don't like unless there's some particular reason to keep reading it. One of the reasons I'm reading about McCarthy is because her agent was Bernice Baumgarten, one of the savviest agents in NYC in the 1930s--also the wife of novelist James Cozzens, but nobody reads him today so probably no one even knows who he is. Her story is fascinating. If I were an academic, I would seriously consider writing her biography. I think what I'll do is continue this book until I've mined the Baumgarten material, and then I may let it go. Or maybe Mary will get over this crazy patch in her life, who knows.

I try to always be reading at least one NF and one novel. The other book I'm reading is A Fountain Filled with Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, which is the second in a series set in a small upstate New York town. Her continuing main characters are the small-town Chief of Police and a female Episcopal priest. The first one was In the Bleak Midwinter, which I gave 3.5 stars. Maybe it's because I just finished Stieg Larsson's trilogy, but I'm finding this second book of Spencer-Fleming's to be a bit thin. Also, a good bit of the story in this book isn't all that interesting, which is a shame, because her writing is good. It's "good enough" to keep reading, but just barely.

found.starred.

>10 mckait:. You too!

#9: I am so glad you are safe, Becky! I know what devastation a tornado can bring. I hope the families whose houses were destroyed all escaped without bodily injury at least.

Yes, judging from the video of the damage done, we were very, very fortunate that no one was killed. I'm frankly surprised. I remember in Omaha where we lived you could see these things coming because of the long sight line to the horizon. Not so here. If it had come our way, I'm not sure we could have gotten into our basement in time, so I'm surprised everyone was able to get out of harm's way.

Yikes! You just can't outrun (or hide from) a tornado. And they are so unpredictable. Thanks goodness you were spared the devastation.

Happy and SAFE New Year! :)

Scary tornado story! Here I am at last, I'm methodically going through the welcome thread and I have found you at last. I'm making progress!

That description of the tornado sounded pretty scary. I'm glad you're OK.

>7 phebj: Blind Assassin won the Booker Prize and I only got to about p. 200 (I think it's 500 pages).
I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one. I just gave up on Blind Assassin yesterday after having read 300 pages. I had just read another Atwood, Alias Grace, which I flew through and thought I could just fly through this one too. No such luck. I gave up and I am starting the New Year with a new book.

I am glad the tornado missed you. I saw the neighborhood on the news and it looked awful. Tornadoes are really scary, and I did not really think they could hold together in hilly areas like there are throughout Missouri.
--BJ

Thanks billiejean.

>17 mamzel:. I am right there with you with both Blind Assassin and Alias Grace. Couldn't finish the first but loved the second. I did the same thing you did--read AG first and was just sure I would love BA. Oh jeeze, I was loooking forward to BA so much. As Newsday said, it was "The first great novel of the new millennium." I wish I could remember what I disliked about it. Usually when I don't finish a book I leave the marker in it so I'll at least know how far I got, but there's no marker in this one. I find myself having a visceral reaction to the cover, so evidently I really hated this thing. Heh. I simply have no memory of what this book was even about.

The reason I stopped reading Blind Assassin was I just became uninterested in what was going to happen to the characters and I don't think I ever really liked the science fiction story that was being told to the younger sister by her lover, so whenever that part appeared it was an effort to go on reading. I also don't think I really liked the main character that much.

I always felt bad that I didn't like the book more because obviously alot of people loved it. I feel like I may have missed something that made it a great story to other people. This is one of those books I can't make the decision whether to pass on or not. I keep thinking that if I tried again I might like it (but I kind of know that's not going to happen and I should just let it go).

For me, Atwood is so uneven. Loved Alias Grace and The Robber Bride, but I hated, hated, HATED Oryx and Crake and Cat's Eye. Have just made mental note to self to stay far away from BA.

Hi, Becky! I join everybody else in rejoicing that you are safe and sound! I'm super-impressed with your analysis of 2010 and your goals for 2011. Sometimes you and Lucy make me want to grow up.
Not know James Cozzens? I read By Love Possessed, abridged by Readers Digest when I was 12...Didn't understand but about every 5th word, but I stuck with it. I think I was a peculiar child.
I also finished The Blind Assassin and came to some meeting of the minds with her by the end. I think I'm a peculiar adult too.
Happy reading and living in 2011!!!

Hi to all, thanks for visiting. Yes--uneven is a good word for Atwood, I think.

Peggy, you win the prize! By Love Possessed was one of Cozzens' best novels, I think. Jeeze, I used to read all my Mom's abridged Readers Digest books when I was a kid. I think I get tripped up sometimes thinking I read something when I actually read the abridged version. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? I probably have only read the RD version. That's a good memory, though. I used to love it when those things came in the mail, since it was pretty darned rare that my folks bought any books. The library was "just fine," thank you. Heh.

Happy, happy--same to you!

Do you think Atwood is so uneven because she pushes herself out of her comfort zone? Seems like there are quite a few writers like that, you never know ahead of time if you'll like their books because they change and try different things?

>24 sibylline:. Sounds plausible. Maybe it would be a good study for an MFA program paper. It's beyond my ken.

I just deleted a post about my fiction read. I'll try again after I finish the book, assuming that I do.

>24 sibylline:. Is Atwood uneven because she pushes herself out of her comfort zone? Well, I've been moodling that one around today, Sib, and I honestly can't say whether it's true or not for Atwood because I haven't read all that much of her. But someone I think it is true for, someone whose work I've read extensively, is John Iriving. Oh my, that man is so up and down, you hardly ever know in any one book which John Iriving is going to show up. When he's good, he's so good. He's a real, honest-to-God writer, and he's willing to take risks with what he does, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. The World According to Garp was his fourth novel, for heaven's sake, but for that he was an "instant" success. The one I read last year was one of my favorites of his--Last Night in Twisted River. What I find so disturbing (although maybe it's a good sign, who knows?) is that Irving has never won a Pulitzer, while a "writer" like my pendantic friend Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer winner (for A Thousand Acres, are you kidding?). --The politics of prize-winning, which is really rather sad.

A Thousand Acres--artificial. Smiley's work always involves some sort of "trick"--tricking the reader. Bleh. I have to do a yearly rant on Jane Smiley. This is it for this year--whew, got that out of the way, and not even much of a rant at that.

I'm sorry, Becky. I just have to ask.... You don't like Moo or Horse Heaven? I even enjoyed the one about real estate (but can't recall the title - I think that's a lack more in me than in JS). *tiptoeing away very quickly*

Irving is exactly the kind of writer I have in mind -- and it probably is odd he hasn't won a Pulitzer but he isn't the only one to have been left out certainly. I think it's a bit like the Oscars where some years the competition is ferocious, others not so.

Smiley's books fit that changeable mode too -- The Greenlanders is unreadable as was one about Kansas but I loved the three Peggy mentions, the horse one particularly. I know more than I care to about race tracks and race horses (don't worry, I don't bet, it's a complicated connection) and the book is dead on. The last one was not so good, Seven Days in the Hills.

Everyone is allowed to loathe a few writers for no really justifiable reason; I have a few -- I think I've admitted to one, Gail Godwin I have no idea whether she is bad or good, I can't read it. It feels like she just picks up a drawer full of stuff and throws it on the page. I just hate it. She seems to have gone away thank goodness but she was everywhere in the 80's.

#9....I think the Spencer Fleming series is one that gets better and better as they go. She has another due out in April and I can't wait.

I have only read one of Smiley's books, Moo, which I did not care for. Your comments are not inspiring me to pick any more of hers, Becky.

>9 labwriter:, 31: oh, I missed the reference in #9. I've read three of the series and love them. And I'm not a mystery reader normally.

>31 tututhefirst:, 33: Well, I'm sticking with this second one of Spencer-Fleming's, A Fountain Filled With Blood. It's not riveting, but there's a lot in it I like. I love the party scene--remember that one? I think she's a good writer, and I'm glad to hear you think the series gets better, because I have the third one, Out of the Deep I Cry sitting here on my desk. My problem is that I read this thing at night, and it's not keeping me awake, so I'm not getting it read. The Stieg Larsson books kept me up into the wee hours--I couldn't put them down. So I guess this second one of Spencer-Fleming's is in the "put-downable" category, but it's worth finishing.

>29 LizzieD:. Peggy, it's just one of those things. I read through Smiley's entire list of books about 10 years ago (and as I said, I can't remember why), and on the whole, I hate them. I might have laughed a little at Moo, but my overall impression of her is that she ought to stop writing books and take up knitting. I could tell you exactly what I hated about every book--but I would hate doing that too. This year's Smiley rant is going to be short. Heh.

>30 sibylline:. And Sib, every time I can get you going on Gail Godwin, you make me laugh because you hate her so much, one of the things I admire about you--one of the many things, by the way. Where are you these days, anyway. I guess I'm just going to have to follow you on the Cow-Pow group read, about which I will for once have nothing to say.

I'm here, I'm here, I just fell off the face of the earth yesterday, pooped. I adore my bro and his family but they were here for four days. I'm sad when they leave so I usually go into this mad whirl to make the house tidy and erase the signs they were around..... so that is what I did. I even paid the bills.....bleh. But now the new week and the house look pretty good to me.

Just to make you smile, what bothers me THE MOST about GG is that her work is touted as quality contemp fiction.... it's really just decent B-list fiction, thinly disguised soap opera with no richness. Smiley leaves GG in the dust, she researches and she tries to think up interesting niches to delve into.

I'm trying to think about someone else I hate as much. It isn't fair to pick on the poor woman exclusively.

P.S. I love cow-pow

Cow-Pow is good! So I'll ask you learned ladies is that how Powys is pronounced? I don't think I've ever heard anybody say the name.
As for the one I hate, the first name on my list remains George Meredith. I can't get worked up about contemporaries. I suspect that Smiley will disappear but not as soon and completely as Godwin. But there is Meredith - still giving readers the budgets after 100 years!

The Meredith book I have on my shelves is The Egoist. Thank you, thank you, Peggy--now I know I don't have to read it. It would probably not have made my Top 1,000 Books list anyway. Heh. I think one of my professors really liked him, but fortunately he didn't inflict him on us.

I'm here, Becky, late to the party as usual but looking forward to your reading thoughts in the year ahead.

>19 labwriter:, 20. I remember not liking the SF story-within-a-story in Blind Assassin to the point that I just started skipping it! I felt badly about that but it allowed me to get through the book. I kept it on the off chance that I'll go back and read the whole darn thing!

Yep, "uneven" is a great way to describe Atwood. I read her books very cautiously...and skip the ones that have no appeal to me. For those of us reading (or who have read) the Three Pines series by Louise Penny...Margaret Atwood is the source for many of Cranky Ruth's poems.

Just stopping by to say that I like your reading goals for the year...oh, and I'm glad no lives were lost in that tornado - whew!

Lucy, your message about Gail Godwin reminded me of just how powerful LT can be. A few weeks ago when I was in my favorite book store looking for something to buy I came across a Godwin book and for a second I reached out for it to see what it was about. But then I remembered reading what you had had to say somewhere else about Godwin and I snatched my hand back so fast I ought to have gotten a little bit of whiplash!

Of course, I am not the end-all and be-all arbiter of what's good or bad, as thoroughly flattered as I am -- promise me to look and decide for yourself? GG could be just the thing for being snowbound in an airport; she's misplaced, that's my problem, and in some ways that's not her fault really, I suppose but the publishers. I've met people who adore her books and I am very very quiet.

I am a fan of John Irving :)

Impossible to really catch up.. phone .. my cousin

sigh

HAPPY THINGAVERSARY!!!! Hopping around.

Wow, a special day for you, Becky. How many guilt-free books do you get to buy? I hope you've gotten some quality reading time in today.

Happy Thingaversary to you! A whole year!



What book are you buying for yourself in celebration?
Inquiring minds want to know... :)

My brother lives in Crestwood. My SIL posted pics on Facebook of helping to clean a friend's home that was completely ruined by the tornado in Sunset Hills. Luckily no one was hurt, but the photos are really scary. If her friend had been in bed she probably wouldn't have survived - her bedroom is just completely gone. A restaurant we ate in every time we visited (I can't remember the name, but it had a fun deck) was apparently flattened as well. Tornadoes are scary for sure. I'm glad you are okay and Happy Thingaversary.

(Scary, Nancy)
HAPPY THINGAVERSARY, DEAR BECKY!!!
FLOREAS!!!

Hi Becky

I'm simply stopping by to say Happy New Year!

I'm reading your first thread of 2010 and want to say how glad I am that you were not harmed by the tornado. I can only imagine how very scary those things are. My sister lived in Oklahoma and experienced a number of those nasty things!

Back up to message #28 regarding John Irving. You are spot on in your assessment re. his books. A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my top all time favorite books, but The World According to Garp was just to strange for me to handle.

All good wishes for a wonderful year of reading. I'll be following your thread and I'm sure you will greatly contribute to the tbr pile.

Happy Thingaversary, Becky!

Wow, thank you all so much for the good wishes. This has been a great year of reading. I am so happy to have found this place! And this 75 group--the best of the best!

Becky
The group is glad to have found you!

Hi Becky. Congrats from me too. I have been a member for only a little longer than you and have loved and read heaps more great books and my library at home has doubled.
I see I share a common reading interest with many of you, but I probably don't read many American writers. I was thinking I could perhaps ask you and your friends to each nominate a favourite book by an American writer to expand my repertoire.
I have enjoyed Barbara Kingsolver, loved American Rust, The Help and Lori Lansens is a favourite.
I look forward to your suggestions.

Sorry I missed the big thingaversary :)
I have no idea when mine is... summer?
Anyway.. glad you are here.

>54 mckait:, 53. Well, Kath, I pretty much missed it too. I'm quite poor about such things. Lucy reminded me or I wouldn't have remembered.

Hi Helen. So nice to see you here. Wow, you're from New Zealand! A favorite American writer?

For contemporary fiction, I might nominate Annie Proulx. She is sort of an acquired taste in that sometimes she's a bit odd, but she's a good writer. I like her first book of stories set in Wyoming, Close Range, Wyoming Stories. I also like her second novel, Shipping News. That one is set in Nova Scotia.

One of my favorite reads in 2010 was John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River. Sometimes Iriving is one of my favorite writers and other times he writes things that I can't read. Of his other books, I also like A Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules.

Happy reading and hope to see you around the 75 group!

I finished two books last night.

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. This is a book I started last fall when I drove to South Dakota to visit with a group of second cousins. Norris is a poet as well as a Benedictine oblate. This is one of her earlier books, published in 1993. In 2010 I read her newest book, Acedia and Me: Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life. My favorite book of hers is The Cloister Walk. This woman is witty and wise. I simply love her work.

Years ago she moved with her husband from Manhattan to Lemmon, South Dakota to take over the house and land that belonged to her grandparents. She writes of the land and landscape with great perception.

A quote from Dakota: "St. Hilary, a fourth-century bishop (and patron saint against snake bites) once wrote, 'Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.' The magnificent sky above the Plains sometimes seems to sing this truth; angels seem possible in the wind-filled expanse.

I gave the book 4 stars

A Fountain Filled with Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. This is the second book in a crime/mystery series with main characters a small town police chief and a female Episcopal priest, set in upstate New York. I've been assured by people here at LT that the series gets better as it progresses. In that case, I'm willing to bet that this is Spencer-Fleming's weakest effort. Don't get me wrong, she's a good writer and I like both the characters, particularly Claire, the E priest. As an Episcopalian myself, I've known more than a few women priests, and Spencer-Fleming does a good job with this character, even though Claire spends more time running around "solving" crime that she does working at her day job. I have been a little bit put off in both the first book and in this one by a few implausible plot twists. However, I'm willing to go along with her because her writing really is good. I gave the first one 3.5 stars; I gave this one 3 stars.

Her third in the series is Out of the Deep I Cry (all of her titles come from hymns). I have it sitting here on my desk, but it's going to sit in the queue for awhile.

My new fiction read is going to be Huckleberry Finn. I've read this a couple of times; probably the last time was ten or fifteen years ago when I was in school. The edition I'm reading is my favorite, a Centennial Facsimile Edition put out by Harper & Row. This has the illustrations and font of the original text.

Along with this, since I have this book on my shelf, I'll be dipping into Tom Quirk's collection of essays on the book: Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn. Quirk is someone I know, a professor at the U of Missouri, Columbia, so I don't think these essays are going to be simply a collection of politically correct rants.

Another book that I'll probably also read along with the others is a book I haven't read but has sat on my shelf since its publication in 1993: Was Huck Black: Mark Twain and African American Voices, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. I have no idea if this book is any good or not, but since I haven't read it, I guess this would be the time.

For NF I'm still plowing through the Mary McCarthy biog: Seeing Mary Plain by Frances Kiernan. I'm making OK progress on the thing, reading at least one chapter a day. Even so, I'm going to be at this one awhile.

I also want to read How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom. I wanted to read it in 2010 but didn't get to it.

Bye for now. Hope your Tuesday is a good one.

Great ambitions, Becky! I've considered the Bloom book too, but I also find him annoying. My academic allergy kicking in, I guess, scratch scratch. There is actually a book called How To Read Like an Academicthat I stumbled across somewhere. I'd rather be skewered by a cave troll.

I'm so glad that you're rereading *Huck,* Becky! I love it and -despite MT's preference- often taught it. A memorable experience from my teaching career came when I was talking about *Huck Finn* and did that spooner thing. Oh yes. In front of the whole class....

>58 sibylline:. I guess I didn't realize you were allergic to academics. I'm just thinking, that being a Sarah Lawrence grad, I would certainly hope you had some good experiences with some professors?! What do you find annoying about Bloom? I know that many people share your annoyance, but what is yours, specifically? Is it what he has to say? His tone? Both? Is it because he's a "non-feminist blowhard"? One of my favorite books is his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

>60 labwriter:. It's good to hear you taught this in your classes, Peggy. Willa Cather said she read Huck Finn every year. My.

I've signed on to several "What we're reading" threads here at the 75 group. In the interest of trying to keep a book going for every one of these threads that I've joined, my next book in the "Religion" category is A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. It's a small book, and while Lewis is very readable, his writing is also very deep. This book is in response to the death of his much-loved wife.

Oh, it's the attitude, I guess. He's smart, I'll grant you that. And makes some good (even great) points. I should look at the Shakespeare book, of course, but I haven't. I'll be happily reading and then he'll say something I find arrogant and then I'm all annoyed. It's annoyance, mind you. A lesser thing.

I had several extraordinary professors at SLC but they were all refreshingly 'different' from the usual -- small quirky colleges attract quirky people who want to do their thing and all of them were utterly passionate about their subjects without exception -- all of them were real teachers too, you never had some class where the prof lectured and the seminars were run by the grad students..... none of that hierarchical nonsense. They taught almost exclusively in seminar-format and you sat down with your prof alone weekly to discuss what you were doing for your 'contract' independent project. The kind of academic I am thinking of you couldn't pay to be that intimate, accountable or exposed to their students. Of course of course there are wonderful exceptions.

>62 sibylline:. OK, annoyance might be a "lesser thing" to you, but you have to know that people here hang on your words. They respect your opinion. I respect your opinion. So if you say that Bloom annoys you, that may be enough to keep some people away from him. At least I'd like to see you give some examples of why he annoys you. You only say he says something you find arrogant, and then you are annoyed.

I once had to have "immediate" dental care on the day before Thanksgiving. The guy manning the office was the boy-dentist whom I always tried to avoid, but on that day I had no choice--he was it. The next week when I saw my regular dentist, he asked me how I liked Boy Wonder. "Well, he did an OK job, but he was so arrogant", I said. He looked at me and smiled and said, "Well, I think I probably was too." And then I smiled at him and said, "Yeah, me too."

OK, so Bloom is arrogant sometimes. What, he should be a shrinking violet? This is a man who has thought deeply about literature and reading--and I would also guess that he's "utterly passionate" about what he teaches. Passionate people are probably sometimes arrogant. I'm thankful he's taken the time to share his knowledge. I don't mean to be argumentative here about your comment, because I think a lot of people agree with you. But, I'm just saying, it would be good to keep in mind that not everyone has been fortunate enough to partake of the kind of pricey education that people like Bloom at Yale (and your "real teachers" at Sarah Lawrence) offer in the academy. So...I read his books, and I'm quite thankful that the man has taken the time to write these things.

I love and respect you, Lucy, which is why I'm not willing to let you get away with a drive-by shooting of Bloom.

Are your feet scorched, Lucy? LOL
Becky is holding them to the proverbial fire!

" people here hang on your words"
Very true... but no pressure, Lucy!
we "love and respect you, Lucy"
Also, very true!

ROFL... you two are as funny as you are smart!
Love to read your threads.
I'm gonna be veeerrry careful what I say though! ;-)
(not really... not in my nature :P)

Thank you for letting me off Becky, although you probably shouldn't...... the fact is I developed my bias during the seventies and early eighties when I did things like religiously read The New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review.... kind of the way you follow the news, I guess. I have never read a whole book by Bloom, only articles, though quite a few. You will see he is not listed here in my library because of that. I can't properly give you examples, it's no more than an impression now.

My impression from back then was of someone who...... felt entitled to pronounce and be the arbiter of everything, etcetera. He could simply dismiss with a wave of his hand, all kinds of writers, genres, schools of thought as being beneath notice, unworthy, not worth bothering with; and he seemed so elitist it bothered me even when he said beautiful insightful things, I wished he would just stick with Yeats or whoever and leave the rest be.

On the personal side, my father was an august academic, very remote, very apt to pronounce. He also always always had to be right, had to correct you, had to dominate any conversation ..... it's been too long, but maybe I was reacting unconsciously? I should revisit, and I will.

And to any of you out there who might hang on my pronouncements, heaven forbid, the thought makes me break out in a sweat. PLEASE, I BEG OF YOU always look for yourself and make up your own minds!

>65 sibylline:. But Bloom isn't a book REVIEWER--he's a book CRITIC. That's a distinction that must be made. Book reviews tend to follow the agenda of the newspaper or magazine where they appear. Book reviewers tend to be logrollers--their object is to sell books. Irita Van Doren, who was the editor of the New York Herald Tribune "Books" for 40 years or more, was of the opinion that there was "always" something good that could/should be said about a book. That's a reviewer's point of view. Harold Bloom isn't reviewing books in his role as a critic (which is not to say he's never written a book review). He's a literary critic, and in that role his job is to analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of literature. Much the same way a bridge builder's job is to build a bridge. Or would you have a bridge builder taking a poll to see how people felt about the efficacy of his design?

The critic's JOB is to say, "This is good, and here's why; this is bad, and here's why." IMO the absence of or timidity about taking a stand about something is a fallout of political correctness--it's become out of bounds to evaluate anything, to stand up and say, "This is crap" or "This is excellent." Too often our young people are not being taught to do that in the schools (or at home)--that piece of critical thinking is missing in the educational system. We desperately need people like Harold Bloom and his strong voice saying, "THIS is worthwhile."

Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? It goes right to the heart of the question: What is excellence?

Thanks Becky, I have Owen Meany and Twisted River on my TBR shelves so will give them priority. I forgot Annie Proulx, I have read The Shipping News a long time ago but purchased it very cheaply last year so might do a reread of that as I loved her quirky characters.

Becky, I love coming to your thread and seeing the discussions. I learn so much!

I enjoy Bloom's books myself just for the reasons you mention - he tells me why something is worth reading and why I should make the effort to do so.

ditto 68! now.. off to work!

I picked up another book that's been on my desk a long time, started in 2010, that I'd like to finish soon: An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum. This also contains letters she wrote from the detainment camp located in the Netherlands, Westerbork. Etty has been described as the adult version of Anne Frank. Although I wish she had given more explicit details about what was actually happening in her diary, even so this is an incredible document.

Unintentional pun there, an 'interrupted' read.... I remember you were reading that awhile ago.

I have to bow out of the other discussion as it's giving me sweaty palms.
Bloom's pieces were essays, not reviews, just to be clear. I can't discuss reading and impressions from 35 years ago, it isn't sensible or productive.

I'm re-reading Huckleberry Finn, and there's an interesting discussion about a new edition of the book, The New South edition, if anyone is interested, over on this thread

Because of the discussion, I decided to get the 2003 Scholarly Edition, edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo with the late Walter Blair, U of California P, 2003. Actually, I guess its official title is the 2003 University of California Press edition. I bought the hardbound edition, since sometimes the paperback editions of these kinds of books leave some things out. It cost me a pretty penny, but I think it's worth it, all things considered.

OK, so that was my Thingaversary book.

>71 sibylline:. No problem, I'll drop it. Just to be clear, I'm not meaning to be contentious or to make people feel uncomfortable. I thought we were having a pretty good discussion, but perhaps that's not the intent of this forum and instead I should stick to my own thoughts about my own thoughts. So these next comments are that--simply quotes I found and notes I made when reading Bloom this morning--nothing more.

This next stuff on my thread comes from How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale, Professor of English at NYU, and former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He's written something like 20 books. His most recent book, published in 2010 in his 80th year, is Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems. He is quite aware of the point of view about himself that's been expressed here, and he has a lovely deprecating sense of humor about it, IMO, calling himself "a pretty tired old monster."

From the "How To" book, and then I'll leave Bloom for today:

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

Bloom's poetry book, in which he turns to the subject of death, is an anthology of last poems by 100 poets--or "poems that most profoundly contemplate 'lastness.'" It's scheduled for publication in September of 2011.

Correction: The hardbound edition is already out. The paperback edition is scheduled for release in 2011.

Fascinating comments on the distinction between book reviewing and being a critic, Becky! But I'm curious about where you would put blogs on that continuum? A number, of course, are financially motivated but many others are put together by people passionate about reading but not necessarily critical readers -- or, at least, not trying to claim the status of an arbiter of taste and "worth" in literature. I would put myself in that category, perhaps -- although I've spent my professional life in journalism, the handful of published reviews have NEVER been written with an aim to push a particular book (what the book publisher's intent may have been in giving it to me to review was probably quite different, of course...) but rather to share thoughts about a book. I don't aspire to be a Bloom-like pundit -- the mere idea terrifies me. One other thought: having worked for newspapers, etc. I am certain that the editors really don't care if readers buy the books they review. They want to engage the readers -- absolutely. Maybe individual reviewers get hooked on their power. Certainly, advertising salespeople want publishers to be happy with reviews. But if reviewers were really "logrollers", we'd never see negative reviews. And I do -- plenty of them. Anticipating your next question -- why do even those negative reviews usually have something positive to say? Well, because editors are thinking about their readers, they don't want to waste space on saying "this is utter cr*p". They'd rather use it to say "Hey, this is nothing more than brain candy, but it will distract you after your hip replacement." Or, "This is the latest book by a well-regarded author who appears to be falling short of what he's done in the past." Etcetera...

May have to give Spencer-Fleming a second shot. I bogged down halfway through her first book, and I'm not sure why.

>75 Chatterbox:. Good points, Suzanne. Blogs? Maybe they're a horse of a different color, and it simply depends on the individual blogger as to where they fall on the review-to-critique continuum.

I'll defer to your ideas about why newspapers print reviews. I don't read newspapers anymore--none--so my opinion about what they're doing is only about as up-to-date as Irita Van Doren--ha.

I got bogged down in the first Spencer-Fleming book as well, and I'm pretty sure I know why. Despite her decent writing, I was bored with her story. It happened with the second book too, but I finished them both. Now why I finished them, I'm not completely sure.

>76 labwriter:. Ah, I just had this thought. So maybe the object of the review in the newspapers is not so much to sell a particular book, but rather to sell newspapers??

Continuing with Seeing Mary Plain, the biography of Mary McCarthy.

I'm about one-third of the way through. Frances Kiernan has written a brilliant biography of a troubled, difficult, brilliant woman. This thing is knocking my socks off, and although though I know quite a bit about her circle and this period, I'm reading this biography not with a dictionary, but with the internet.

#77 -- well, actually to sell ads. But to do that, the paper needs to be in front of eyeballs, hence the need to sell papers. So if readers think reviews are bad/biased, and that's why they get the paper, they'll stop buying it, and the dominos will start to tumble. Newspaper economics, the first lesson endeth here... :-)

>76 labwriter:: Blogs? Maybe they're a horse of a different color, and it simply depends on the individual blogger as to where they fall on the review-to-critique continuum. Speaking as a book blogger, I think you're right. There are many different types of book bloggers out there, bringing different backgrounds and perspectives that inform their writing, and different motivations for doing so.

If you take your definition, that a reviewer is out to sell books, yes there are some bloggers who are compensated for their reviews. Many are not (I'm one of the latter), and I try to conform to your definition of a critic by saying (to use your words), "This is good, and here's why; this is bad, and here's why." BTW the reviews posted on my blog are identical to the ones I post here.

>77 labwriter:: So maybe the object of the review in the newspapers is not so much to sell a particular book, but rather to sell newspapers??
I definitely think so, and think sometimes reviewers/critics/whatever-they-are will write a review trying to provoke a reaction and thereby sell more papers (or generate more ad revenue).

How about this. Paid reviewers (and I mean reviewers, not critics) have an agenda of some kind. It might be no more than just to get assigned more reviews. If the newspaper paying me to write a review doesn't like my review, then they probably won't give me more work. Thus I'm going to (consciously or unconsciously) "go to school" on the kinds of reviews they publish and make mine at least somewhat like the ones I see there. Or am I wrong? Call me cynical if you want to, but it's not meant so much as a cynical observation as it is just--how the world works. Anyway, my original point was this: the kinds of things that Harold Bloom writes about books are from the point of view of the literary critic, not the reviewer. And people are free to believe or discount either one--or both.

I don't think we can so easily dismiss the logrolling that writers do for one another--you review my book, sometime I'll review yours; you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Lots of book reviews in magazines and newspapers are written by writers who have written something in the same genre. Ditto with the little blurbs that appear on the back of the book cover. It's just a part of publishing, and it's been going on forever.

I got through about 100 pages of the Mary McCarthy biog today. I'm really loving this book. It has the same sort of feel to it as another one I read a couple of years ago: A Dash of Daring by Penelope Rowlands, a biog about Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper's Bazaar for over 30 years. Interestingly, like Mary McCarthy, Carmel was also Irish. This was a HUGE biography of a fascinating woman, much like the McCarthy book. In both of them, the biographers take the time to put the women into the context of their times.

This is a note I stuck into my Carmel Snow book. She used to go to Paris about four times a year for the Paris fashion shows. While there she lived on "martinis, French pastries, and Vitamin B injections." She was a very difficult, slightly mad personality, but nevertheless I ended up feeling like I would love to go out to lunch with the woman. I feel the same way about Mary McCarthy.

I am going to jump back into this reviewing issue again... *she said warily*

I'm an author, and I'm a journalist. I'm a freelance author, to be specific. I don't review books, but the people I know who do do so as part of their freelance gigs, really do focus on what the book is and whether they like it. To the extent they look at what is already being published, it's to get a sense of the style, the kinds of things they are expected to address (a Financial Times review is different from one in the NY Times, which is different entirely from the NY Review of Books.) I think (based on knowing reviewers and and knowing freelance journalism v. well indeed and knowing a heck of a lot of editors) that what ANY journalist does is try to tailor the nature of the review to what the editor looks for, but not the content. If a reviewer delivers something well-written, articulate, that accurately reflects the nature and content of the book (i.e. where readers don't complain the next day that the reviewer thought they were reviewing a book about the Revolutionary War that was actually about the Civil War, or where the reviewer recklessly disclosed spoilers), is the right length, the right style/tone -- they really don't care what's in it. They want lively, thoughtful, intelligent reviews; something they don't have to labor over to make it publishable.

Yes, I do think you're cynical -- but that's not the issue. I worry that you're not basing that cynicism on a knowledge of what the world of journalism is actually like, but on what you believe it might be like. Please don't take that the wrong way; it's simply that I have lived within that world for a quarter of a century and DO know. I'm not wearing rose-colored specs here, either; there are plenty of flaws with reviewers, including many who get lots of repeat assignments. I know my publisher groaned when they realized who was reviewing my book for the NY Times; apparently this person is known for not really thinking too much about what he reviews. It was not a good review. In contrast, the Washington Post gushed about the book and put it on its list of best non-fiction of 2010. Did the reviewers have agendas? Perhaps. But I don't think those were agendas set by the publications. It's more likely to have been someone who doesn't like a particular kind of writing, or structure, or... And probably among the people who read the book, there were some who agreed with the NY Times and wished they had never read it, and others who agreed with the Post and were delighted they had.

One final note -- a reviewer who makes their reviews too much like other stuff in the paper is going to find himself/herself unemployed rather rapidly. Editors DO want distinct voices. Eons ago (in the mid 1990s) I tried my hand at writing some reviews for the paper I worked for at the time, and the editor kindly explained that I didn't seem to have developed a clear enough "voice" of my own. So what I was doing WRONG, and the reason I didn't get any of them published or go down that alley professionally, was because I wasn't doing what you believe many reviewers ARE doing.

I think what critics are doing goes beyond just saying "it's good/bad; here's why". They are setting a book in a broader cultural context, relating it to others of its kind, and trying to show why it advances (or fails to advance) a particular kind of writing, an approach to narrative/character development, etc. or even a trend in a particular sub-genre. In other words, their mission is more complex.

Incidentally, in my own reviews, I try to steer clear of "good"/"bad" judgments; while there are some books that are unequivocally bad and others that I believe are tremendous contributions to literature, I believe most encounters with books are inherently subjective. Is there one "absolute" standard? That's something I've thought a lot about. I certainly have my own, but what I love in books is something others won't respond to at all. So if I say a book is "bad" and people avoid it, am I really performing a service to anyone? I can say I didn't enjoy it, and why that is the case. But I'll also note that if you're the kind of reader who has to find the main character sympathetic or someone with whom you identify, this isn't a book for you. To me, that is irrelevant. But just because I think it SHOULD be irrelevant doesn't mean that someone is wrong for disagreeing with me. I can't impose my taste on others. A critic will want to -- which is part of the fun of reading someone like Bloom, who has decided judgments on the merit/value of some kinds of books, and deciding on what points you differ or agree. But someone who doesn't like to debate books at that level of granularity is going to find it extraordinarily frustrating to read a critic rather than a reviewer.

I appreciate the passion you bring to your subject. And I did invite you to call me cynical, and you did, so that's fine. I guess if I actually read a newspaper (and yes, I used to--when I was a kid I had "black elbows" from reading the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post from front to back, every day), then I would have more to say about "reviews." Or what I would have to say would be more informed, how about that? Incidently, I think you took my "it's good/bad; here's why" a bit too literally.

As for your last sentence, I doubt that very many people actually read critics. My whole point in this discussion, my original point, way back at #66, which seems to have gotten lost, was that Bloom is writing as a literary critic, not a reviewer, and the two shouldn't be confused.

He's also writing as an educator, a role that I appreciate in him very much. More from How to Read and Why.

Bloom would agree with the "subjective" aspect of reading: "you cannot evade bringing yourself to the act of reading."

It's interesting to note, as I read through Bloom's sections on reading novels, where I actually agree with Bloom without having to be talked into it. (That may not make any sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to me.) I see that he speaks highly of Bleak House, which was one of my great favorite reads when I was pursuing my lit degrees. Esther Summerson is the first-person narrator in that one, although Dickens "doesn't always remember to let her do her job"--ha. His favorite Jane Austen is Persuasion; second is Emma. I think Emma, because of Emma Woodhouse, is my favorite Austen. Bloom says this about reading Austen: "Like Johnson, though far more implicitly, Austen urges us to clear our mind of 'cant.' 'Cant,' in the Johnsonian sense, means platitudes, pious expressions, group-think. Austen had no use for it, and neither should we. Those who now read Austen "politically" are not reading her at all." --Which is probably exactly the sort of strong, declarative statement that twists people up about Bloom, which is what I like about him.

How about this quote from Bloom--"Rereading old books . . . is the highest form of literary pleasure, and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings." Willa Cather said she read Huckleberry Finn every year. I started the book for a reread last night--maybe the fourth time? I don't know. Huck's narrative voice has to be just about one of the most brilliant voices in literature. To teach this as some sort of gradeschool children's book, as evidently some schools do (or alternately, some gradeschools "ban" the book) is actually painful for me to think about. Anywho, off to read more of Huck Finn.

Last night I finished another book, started in late summer of 2010: An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum (also post #70).

She had such an amazing spirit, it's simply unimaginable. She waited in Westerbork to be taken by cattle train to Poland, knowing that no one ever returned from there. Yet through every unthinkable obscenity she experienced, she remained what she wanted to be, "the heart of the camp."

I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in any way discouraged. I continue to grow from day to day, even with the likelihood of destruction staring me in the face.

Her last letter was a postcard, which she threw from the cattle car taking her to Auschwitz, where she died. Someone found the postcard and mailed it: "We left the camp singing."

I was bearing in mind your point about Bloom's writing -- which I admit I don't read much, mostly because those are the kinds of pseudo-epiphanies that I enjoy experiencing, in however minor a way, on my own when I battle my way through my thinking about a book! -- in my response, at least in the background. I think that may be one reason why I tend to read fewer critics now; after my experience doing intensive English lit in high school (we had a very driven teacher, and it was early in the Intl. Bacc program), I shied away first from reading "serious" books and later, from reading critics. I realized that I wanted a less mediated experience than reading a critic. Because I'm a chronic over-thinker, I know that reading Jane Austen will cause me to think on multiple layers, one after the other. I'm no Bloom, but perhaps when we read good books (as distinct from brain candy) our brains function similarly. But I also like the thrill of discovery; the palpable "click" that takes place when an idea about a book in its deeper context slides into place in a coherent form in my brain. When I read a critic, I get that person's "click", which can also be great. It's just not MY click! LOL! That said, I do love Virginia Woolf's essays; I've been going back to them since my brother and SIL bought me vol. 3 for Xmas.

Have you read Johnson? His loathing for cant is one of the reasons I love his writing/thoughts. I read one biography of him last year, and want to read another this year as he seems to have struggled between a longing to be part of the established order and a recognition that he would never be fully accepted -- his academic career, his late-life doctorate, his pension, his patrons. And while he despised cant, at the same time he was or became an Establishment figure of sorts -- an interesting contradiction. Also must read something about Hester Piozzi; what a different world she inhabited from Mary McCarthy?!?!

I think of Bloom more as a teacher than a critic. That's how I use his work (and of course at this point, "Bloom" is just a metaphor--think "Woolf" if you'd rather). The "aha's" that I get with him at my elbow are no less mine, just because he's there walking along beside me. Plus, as often as not, I find myself arguing with him (or Woolf, etc.), and I like that.

Years ago, probably around 1980, I read a biography of Johnson, Samuel Johnson, A Biography by John Wain. I fell in love with Wain's writing, so I probably missed a lot that was Johnson. I need to read that one again. I think the only thing I've "read" of Johnson's is his dictionary--Johnson's Dictionary. I enjoy thumbing through his definitions--hilarious. "Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." What biography of him have you read or plan to read?

Johnson was a marvel. I've read the whole James Boswell bio (I am a former Boswell freak) but not the Wain on Johnson about which I have always heard huge praise. Hmmm. Maybe I need to go poke around and see if I can rustle up a 1 cent copy. There's been new stuff on Boz too that I've ignored. The Wain came out just as my obsession was, uh, waning.

That's nice, B, 'walking along beside me."

From what I remember, and as I said I read the thing about 30 years ago, so the fact that I remember is significant, the Wain biography was really something special. If you can find a copy you should snag it, even if it sits on your shelf for a couple of years.

Huckleberry Finn is on hold while I wait for the 125th anniversary edition--the 2003 University of California Press edition. I think that should come today. Here's what the U of C Press website says about it:

The text of this new scholarly edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the first ever to be based on Mark Twain's complete, original manuscript—including its first 665 pages, which had been lost for over a hundred years when they turned up in 1990 in a Los Angeles attic. The text has been thoroughly re-edited using this manuscript, restoring thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation which had been corrupted by Mark Twain's typist, typesetters, and proofreaders. It includes all of the 174 first edition illustrations by Edward Windsor Kemble, which the author called "most rattling good."

This was the book I bought for my "thingaversary."

So I'm continuing on with Bloom, How to Read and Why, jumping around in my reading, but planning to get through most of it that way. Somewhere on one of my shelves is another book of his that really twists people up, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. I think that's going on my "soon to be read" list. I did my master's thesis on aspects of the canon--why some writers are "in" and some are "out." If you think "excellence" gets a writer into the established canon, well, I'm sorry to tell you, think again. It's all politics, baby. And--ahem--that's not cynicism talking, that's just fact. And unlike newspaper/magazine reviewing, this is a subject I know something about.

Let's see, what else? Well, Frances Kiernan's biog of Mary McCarthy is my daily companion. When I'm finished with this thing, I need to contact Kiernan and tell her how much I loved her book. It's now the 1950s and Mary is married to a very strange fellow named Bowden Broadwater (no, you can't make it up). Her second husband, Edmund Wilson, was 15 years her senior; "Bowdie," as she called him, her third husband, is 8 years her junior. Here's something that someone who knew them both said about him:

He was an odd choice for Mary, but he was charming. He was like a beautiful English boy. Like Christopher Robin grown up to age 28. His coloring was so blond--sort of like the Duke of Windsor's. He had very English looks. A very elongated slender figure. Very graceful. And of course he had his suits made for him at Brooks Brothers. The suits fit like a glove. And always three pieces.

Bowden seldom held a paying job. He did for Mary what a lot of wives do for writer-husbands--took care of things around the house, took care of her son by Wilson when the little boy was living with them, etc. I'm of the opinion that everybody needs a wife--ha.

One last book that I started last night: Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses, by Bruce Feiler. This is a book I sent to my son when he was in Baghdad, and it was one of the 100 or so I sent him that came back. Most of them stayed there as part of a sort of lending library that they set up for themselves, which was exactly what I was hoping would happen. This looked interesting to me, and I wanted to read it last year but didn't get to it. So far it's very good. The author, Bruce Feiler, has a very engaging narrative voice. Right now we're visiting Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey.

ed. to fix the touchstone

I own both of the Bloom books you mentioned, Becky. I read them eons ago, so it is probably time for re-reads.

Walking the Bible, by Bruce Feiler, published 2001. I'm not very far into this book, but far enough to know that I really like it. In fact, I've abandoned the reading I'm "supposed" to be doing for a writing project so that I can read this book--at least for an hour or so.

Bruce Feiler--he was 36 years old when this was published, just to put him into a generational context. He's also a fifth-generation American Jew from the South. Somehow he met a "charming, charismatic figure, Avner," and convinced (paid, but so what?) him to go with him on this jouney. Avner--1967 to 1982--the region's chief archeologist and preserver of antiquities; a "populizer" of biblical history; one of Israel's most eloquent spokesmen on life in the ancient world, a tutor of prospective Israeli and Palestinian guides.

Feiler and Avner frequently stop for a question/answer thing that is not only illuminating but entertaining. I'm hoping they do this throughout the book. Here's an example.

They were in Harran, one of the world's earliest settled communities. Abraham was in Harran when God spoke to him. Feiler says these were words he read for his Bar Mitzvah: "Go forth from your native land and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you."

Feiler: Why are those words so famous?
Avner: Because they're the beginning of everything. Of monotheism, of creating the Jewish people. Leaving this place is leaving behind the old faith, the old pattern of life, the fertility--for a new start.
Feiler: So why did he do it?
Avner: The Bible doesn't say. As far as the text is concerned, God says to do it, so Abraham goes.
Feiler: But he had never heard of God before. He didn't know who or what God was. He didn't see God. And suddenly, this voice says 'Go,' and he goes.
Avner: The concept in the Bible is that the voice was such a powerful thing that Abraham had no doubts. He had faith.
Feiler: So what would have been the biggest change from the world he left to the world where he was going?"
Avner: The biggest difference would be leaving an area that was the core of civilization to a place that was just emerging. It was not the heart of everything.
Feiler: But because he went, it became the heart of everything.
Avner: And that's the point. Abraham begins a new cycle. All through the Bible, the text follows a pattern of creation followed by destruction, followed by re-creation. . . . Abraham marks the start of a new cycle, one that will continue throughout the Five Books of Moses.
Avner: Do you want to know the real difference between here and the Promised Land?

. . . and on they go. This, plus good travel literature--entertaining and absorbing.

Oh hooray, my 125th Anniversary Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library): 125th Anniversary Edition was just delivered to my door. Excellent. "The Mark Twain Project looms over the landscape of literary scholarship like Mount Everest."

This was a pricey book, but it includes all the original illustrations, maps, explanatory notes, a glossary, an explanation of the revisions made from the mss that have been found, manuscript facsimiles, reference, and notes on the text. I am in hog heaven with this edition. I'll try to link the touchstone to the right book.

93.. sounds great!

#92: I read that one a couple of years back and enjoyed it. I hope you continue to do so, Becky.

#93: Congrats on finally getting the book!

I imagine you are hip-deep in the Mississippi enjoying your beautiful new book.

It's snowing here. What else is new? Lentil soup? (Sort of from the Moosewood only I put in a bit of extra veg stuff that was hanging about, a leek and so on).

Hi Lucy,

I have a time-intensive project that's going to keep me away from LT for awhile, since I don't seem to have the discipline to do "just a little" LT. However, I'll continue lurking and enjoying, I'm sure, the conversations here as much as ever. Happy reading.

Happy project, Becky. Get it done so that you can come back soon. I love to talk about Huck.

I hope everything goes well with your project, Becky, and that we will see you around soon on a regular basis again.

Hi Becky!
Waiting with bated breath... will we find out what the project is?
Whether or no... I'll be waitin for ya...

Thank you Peggy, Stasia, and Claudia.

I'm reading and enjoying all of your threads, just not posting.

Claudia, no, I don't talk about it because it's too easy to talk it away. Better just to shut up and write--haha.

Good luck with your project, Becky. Glad to see you still posting on LT.

Hope that your muse is generous... :)

Oh! A writing project... very cool. I have no idea what that is like. Sounds like pure torture to me. :P But, we readers need you writers! So....
Go, Becky!!!

Today I finished the Frances Kiernan biog of Mary McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain, published in 2000. It's probably in the top five of all biographies I've ever read. There's a wrenching feeling when you come to the end a biography of someone you've become so involved with, as I did in this McCarthy biog--you don't want to let the person go. Although I can't say I really like Mary, I very much admire her. And her biographer as well. 5-stars.

Glad to see you back in the mix, Becky. Glad you liked the MMcC!

Becky, I WL'd Seeing Mary Plain after seeing your 5 star rating and then went to Paperback Book Swap to see if they had it and they did! So a copy will soon be on its way to me.

Peggy, I'm so glad you got me to try PBS. I'm merrily sending out books and getting them in the mail. I actually love wrapping things so getting the books ready to ship has been part of the fun.

Glad to see you here and glad you loved the Mary McCarthy bio!

Adding Seeing Mary Plain to the BlackHole. Thanks for another great recommendation, Becky!

This group is exhausting. You go away for one day and your thread ends up on page 4. Heh. I'm watching a PBS production about Mark Twain to go along with reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The man was pure genius. It's beyond disturbing to think that the New South "new and improved" Edition will be taught in the schools. Better that it isn't taught at all.

Last night I read one of my favorite parts of the book, wherein Huck is impressed by the poetry of a young girl, Emmeline Grangerford: "If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it she would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular. . . ."

Maybe the New South Edition would also like to remove all of Huck's "ain'ts" as grammatically incorrect.

Oh I just so love this book. Huck is telling us about Col. Grangerford, who, as Huck says, is a "gentleman, you see. . . .every day of his life he put on a clean shirt" and his linen suit was "so white it hurt your eyes."

Catching up here... *puff puff puff*

I read the David Nokes bio of Samuel Johnson around this time last year, and loved it. I still have Samuel Johnson: the Struggle sitting here and waiting for me to read it... The Nokes book was borrowed, so got jumped to the front of the queue and then I wasn't ready to go back and read the other one just yet.

One of the prizes of my library was a gift from an ex-bf: two volumes of Johnson's "Rambler", published around 1825. Lovely editions and great to dip into. Some of the first things I'd grab in the event of a fire (touch wood!)

--- and they had rooms without beds in them too!
I'm with you, Becky. I love and adore *AHF*! I was just remembering the Emmeline Grangerford passage awhile ago, but I messed up and called her a Shepherdson!
And I agree that a white-wash job is an abomination. In my classes we counted the n-words (209, I think), and a very red-necked white boy remarked at the end of book, "I never want to hear the word again." Bingo.

Oh, thanks. I've heard good things about the Meyers biog of Johnson. I'll put it on my list.

Ah, Peggy, you are very wise.

Well, Shepherdson, Grangerford--they probably shared a lot of DNA. Heh. Yes--rooms without beds. Twain was funny, but deep. And never once do you feel him hanging over your shoulder, making sure you "get" what he's saying.

Becky, I'm a Huckleberry fan, too. I'm so glad that we'll be reading it in the American Realism class I'm taking at Missouri State. It will be like visiting an old friend.

I wonder why so many people are less than enamored with this book? And I'm talking about the ones who don't object to the 'ain'ts' and the 'n' word. Any ideas?

Hi Donna. I think a lot of people just have never been exposed to the book, for a variety of reasons. Using my own experience, studying literature at the university about 10 years ago or so, I can tell you that Huckleberry Finn wasn't taught in any of the American lit classes that I took, and I took quite a few, considering my emphasis for my master's degree was American lit. No Huck Finn, at a Missouri University. Go figure. If my experience matches other peoples', then it would seem that Huck Finn is maybe being taught instead in the high schools or even earlier. Or maybe not at all. Additionally, when you look here at LT, using just this 75 group as an example, there seems to be a real bias towards "anything but American" literature. That pov will probabaly get me into trouble, and of course there are exceptions all over the place, but it does seem to me that American lit is not exactly the first thing that people reach for.

Hmmmm....now that you mention it, my kids all read Huck Finn in early high school. At that age, the only "cool" response is to turn your nose up at whatever is presented. So glad I don't have to be one of the cool kids anymore.

I can't remember, did you read Finn with the Missouri Readers group? If not, you might be interested in taking a look at Huck's daddy, but only if you have a strong stomach.

I think you're spot on, Becky. Nobody mentioned *AHF* while I was doing English at Carolina either. Feminists object because there are no significant female characters - so how can it be universal?
My mother says that she read it in the fifth grade (5th grade???!!!??? It's really quite a dark book) and dismissed it as a children's story. She doesn't remember Pap Finn's DT's or Buck's death, so I wonder whether she might not have read *Tom Sawyer* instead.
I haven't picked up on the "anything but American" bias here, but then, I'm pretty dim, and I read Americans like crazy!

Becky, I hope you do not mind, but I am reading The Delight of Great Books and since the author discusses Huck Finn, I thought I would quote one of his paragraphs, which I think is pertinent to your discussion here:

"There are novelists who believe that humdrum experience, the typical daily round of all of us, is the proper material for fiction, and that the novelists, by bearing down hard on it, may bring out the grain of significance under the well-worn surface. Another kind of artist portrays the average life remorselessly, to show that it is even less significant than it seems. He is the satirist, and he shows himself frequently in American literature today, a strong critic of narrowness and meanness, especially as observed in village life. A third kind of storyteller, with perhaps the same dislike of what is familiar and trite, turns resolutely to fresh material, to the unusual event; he looks, as we say, for an escape from the world which shuts him in. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain is all three kinds of storyteller at once."

Great discussion, gorgeous quote Stasia.

Thanks for the quotation, Stasia.

I am glad you liked the quote, ladies.

Hooray for LT. For days and days I've been looking through my cookbooks, trying to find the recipe for the good white bean soup I made sometime last fall. I haven't been able to find it ANYWHERE. Then I remembered that I had been blathering on here on my thread about food and soup sometime around Thanksgiving, so I went back to November's thread in the 2010 75 group, and sure enough, there it was, recipe included. What threw me was that it's called "Yankee Bean Soup," and for some goofy reason that's how they listed it in the index instead of listing "Soup, Navy Beans" or whatever. Oh joy.

I'm here to report that I've started reading City Room by Arthur Gelb, who began working for The New York Times in 1944 as a copyboy when he was 22 years old. He's a very engaging writer, and reading about the days back when they used a typewriter, a sheet of copy paper, Eberhard pencils, paste, and copyboys to get out the paper is really a joy. Does anyone believe in reincarnation? I swear when I read about the smell of the still-warm ink on the paper and the way it stained the cuffs of his shirt, I'm pretty sure I've been there, too.

OK, so now it's time to go to the store to buy the ingredients for that soup so I can make it tomorrow morning. Happy reading everyone.

My first newspaper job was using an early computer; my second took me right back to manual typewriters and marking up wire service copy with my pencil so that it could be typeset!! (And this was the mid-80s...) The manual typewriters were brutal in winter, because cold fingers are much less precise...

Becky

ditto what Suz said. My first job at Lehigh University entailed writing proposals for a technology center that assisted small business centers in obtaining state funded grants. We were ever so proud that our office had the first computers at Lehigh. They were dual floopy disk monstrosities that required a program disk in one drive and a document disk in another.

I'll never forget writing and spending hours under the stress of deadline only to have moved my chair on the carpet and zap, the entire document was gone!

In the early days of the student newspaper and yearbook, we cut and pasted all articles on boards....

What a long way we've come!

Thanks for the quote Stasia. Mark Twain is one the greatest writers that ever lived!

Well, I'll probably just sound like an old curmudgeon, but there are days when I would love to have my old IBM Selectric back again. I loved typing on that thing. Wow, I thought I was so cool!



Don was a programmer in 1982, so that's when we got our first PC. Hilarious. Yes, it's simply amazing how far we've come.

I remember IBM Selectric's fondly too!

When we moved into our house in NY in 1989, my husband got a loaner cell phone from work (because the NY phone company was on strike and we didn't have a phone for a while) and it was the size of a small suitcase. It always amazes me how small they've become. That's one thing I always notice in "old" movies or TV shows--the size of the cell phones.

>126 labwriter: While we don't have the exact color and model pictured, I think we probably have one or two of those old typewriters still hanging around our library. They aren't in use. We do have one Daisy Wheel typewriter that is occasionally used.

#126 Those Selectric typewriters were wonderful! I remember staying after work to type my resume on one over and over again until I finally got it just right, then taking that to a print shop to have copies made. It was so much better than the semi-automatic portable I had at home (electric keys and manual return). (That was when I graduated from college and the company where I was working part-time while in school knew I was looking for a full-time job - just in case anyone was worried about me using company resources to look for another job.)

I once had a Daisy Wheel printer. Chunk, chunk, chunk.

---and I did all my college papers on an office Remington and was going to put the picture here but chickened out because it's late and I'll have to learn.....

I have a Selectric somewhere, I guess in the storage unit. I think it is a sort of dull brownish color..... I had about five typewriters of various kinds and winnowed it down. I have one manual and one electric now. I'm remembering the little hum...... it always seemed to be cheerfully waiting for me to get on with it.

Hi! I'm getting a new project started to get together great recommendations for books by themes. I've called it Books By Themes (BBT) and your suggestions are most welcome! Here's the link.

I just finished the third in the series by Julia Spencer-Fleming: Out of the Deep I Cry. I decided to hang in there with this author despite some disappointment with her first two efforts, and I'm glad I did. In this book, S-F fixes what I complained about in the other two books: she gives the reader an engaging story. The other elements from the first two that I like of hers are all found in this book as well: good characters, believable dialogue, and the backdrop of a setting that puts all of it into an entertaining context.

I gave the book 3.5 stars, and here's why: while I believe that S-F has the talent for bigger things, I think that with this series she's boxed herself into something smaller than her talent. If I compare her to someone sort of similar, like the Sue Grafton alphabet mystery series, I come away thinking that Grafton is writing up to her talent, whereas Spencer-Fleming could write bigger. However, I'm glad I found this series, and I'll continue on with the next one, To Darkness and to Death. The knock on this one, BTW, is that the main characters are somewhat sidelined. Uh-oh.

Why did I read this book? (Someone here at LT does this for all of her books and I thought I would do the same.) I use mystery-thrillers to relax. I try to read them only at night when I'm too tired to concentrate well enough to read my more "serious" books. However, I take relaxing seriously, as well as entertainment reading, so for me this category of reading is by no means "secondary" or slight.

I love that idea also -- the Why did I read this book -- I think it's incredibly helpful for the comment readers, for insight into.... where the reader's mind was/is, how that might relate to where their own minds are. Sounds as though Julia S-F is getting better at her craft???

Hi Sib.

Sounds as though Julia S-F is getting better at her craft???

Yes, although even with book one she was an obviously gifted writer, for all the reasons I previously mentioned. She just seemed to get herself into a somewhat uninteresting storyline labyrinth in the first two books, and with the third she did much better.

>136 labwriter:: interesting perspective on J S-F. I have read the first three books and enjoyed them all, but liked the third one the most. I'm curious about your thoughts on the first two: can you say more about the "uninteresting story labyrinth" and what was different for you in the third book?

>137 lauralkeet:. Hi Laura.

It might be because I had just finished, back to back, book two and three of Stieg Larsson's books, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. The Hornet's Nest, particularly, I found to be un-put-downable, reading until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. several nights in a row. With the first and second Julia S-F books, despite her good dialogue, interesting characters, and nicely-drawn setting, I found myself getting bogged down in the middle of the stories with the first two books and even falling asleep. I just wasn't that interested in her storylines. With book three, I thought she improved the story by leaps and bounds over the first two.

Ah now I understand. I haven't read the "Girl with" books but saw the film of the first one. I agree they are much more gripping. S-F is more cozy.

Yes, but I don't give even "cozy" mysteries a pass for being dull. I find some of her "action scenes" improbable and hard to follow--like the helecopter crash in the second book. That scene was endless. I'm sure that to write the scene realistically, she would need to have all of that detail in her head; but to put all of it onto the page made for a tedious read. I think that was also the same book that had them running around in the warehouse or whatever it was. Yawn. That went on too long too. That's just me.

I hope S-F will back off on some of her action writing and go for more character development in the next book. Mild spoiler alert. It was starting to seem more than a little improbable that Claire could live in this small town for over a year and not have met the police chief's wife. Finally that happened, and it was about time.

>140 labwriter:. P.S. And where is Spencer-Fleming going with this adulterous relationship between Claire the Episcopal priest and Russ the married police chief? I can go along with this only so far. I guess S-F's point is maybe to humanize the priest, but really. I'm not sure that priest-adultery-as-subplot really works for me.

>141 labwriter:: ha ha ha, I know it's totally inappropriate, but I like that part.

I did enjoy the meeting between Claire and the wife, who it turns out is much closer to a Marilyn Monroe type than Claire might have wished. S-F really got me on that description--now she needs to take it somewhere in the next book, I hope. Are you planning to read #4? I'm waiting for it to come in the mail from that used online bookstore whose name evidently can't be mentioned here--ha.

I'm making progress on Arthur Gelb's City Room, the story of The New York Times as Gelb lived it, beginning as a copyboy in 1944 and working his way up to managing editor. I'm "all the way" up to page 100 and the year 1945--one year in 100 pages. Gelb's account is fascinating for anyone interested in how newspapers, and of course particularly The New York Times, did their business c.1944--and in a couple of decades before that, since essentially so much was unchanged from the 1920s and 1930s as of the mid-1940s.

Oh, I loved Selectrics!!! I never owned one, but always coveted one!! I earned $$ throughout college by typing term papers (now, there's a job that doesn't exist any more...) and whenever I could borrow an office with a Selectric I was a very happy bunny indeed.

I did the same thing--typed papers for $$ in college. That was back in the 1970s when I was going to school to become an R.N. I had a reputation for better-than-average typing skills, not a usual thing for a lot of my classmates, for some reason, so I turned a pretty decent profit. You might be surprised: if notes on the bulletin boards are any indication, today's students will pay good money to have someone format their papers for them.

>143 labwriter:: Becky, yes, I have books 4-6 on my shelves, received via Paperbackswap. I rarely read mysteries, and tend to pick up one of these after a run of heavy/serious books. So I'm not sure when I'll get to it but definitely plan to read the rest of the series.

Is it just me?

Stopping by -- can't comment not having read any S-F or Larsson (sp?) yet...... since my fun reading tends to be spacy ...... ha ha.

Is it just you what??? I can't figure out that context.

My other, non-electric typewriter is a gray Smith Corona. I wrote all my college papers on that..... judging from how the few that I saved look I should have hired someone!!! But that was out of the question at the time.

It was really cool when they came up with the correction button where it backed up, you type the wrong letter, then type over the whitened space! Before that I had the pencil shaped eraser with the brush on one end.

I think that was before my time--heh.

#144: The Gelb book is of interest to me. Too bad the local library does not have it.

I'm continuing to make progress in one of my other books, Walking the Bible, by Bruce Feiler. Here's the quote of the day from what I've been reading this afternoon.

Waking up in a bedouin tent in the middle of Jordan, twenty miles from the nearest electrical outlet, one hundred miles from the nearest traffic jam, is not as peaceful as it might seem. A goat with a cowbell nibbles on the tent. A camel trips over a guy wire. A handful of shepherd girls, none older than twelve, slip on their sandals and black homemade shawls and chirp with their moms who are packing them lunch. Their brothers snap pieces of wormword and begin heating the pudgy kettle, which soon emits a growl that seems far more treacherous than tempting. A baby wails. I stick my head out from under my blanket and look at my watch. It's just after 4:00. The monks in Saint Catherine's are still in their beds. The bedouin of Petra are well into their day.

This has been a fascinating, thought-provoking, and entertaining read. My favorite part has been what he has had to say about the desert, which I will probably quote later.

what an interesting thread. I'm glad I caught up.

Hi Judy! Thanks for visiting.

This is for anyone thinking about downsizing their lives--in whatever way that might mean. When I was reading the first Stieg Larsson book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was intrigued by the very small (500 sq. feet or so) houses that Larsson had people living in, and I decided that this must be a Swedish thing or something. So it was interesting in my current read, Walking the Bible to run across a discussion of David Ben-Gurion and his wooden bungalow that was prefabricated in Sweden.

Ben-Gurion was 67 years old when he resigned as prime minister of Israel and moved his wife, his life, and five thousand books to a small bungalow in Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, where he went to work as a sheep farmer.

(quoting from Walking) "His wooden bungalow, prefabricated in Sweden and preserved today as a museum, was a mere 810 square feet, with two bedrooms--one for him and one for his wife, who hated being there--a living room, a small kitchen, a bathroom, and an office. . . . which was twice as big as the two bedrooms and kitchen put together {it would have had to be to hold 5,000 books!}." I guess there's just something about paring down to a small space that appeals to me. I think you would find out pretty quickly what's really important to you in your life.

Quote from this morning's reading from Walking the Bible. The author, Bruce Feiler, was speaking to Israel Hershkovitz, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Tel Aviv University who now studies ancient skeletons. He invited Feiler into his laboratory, which was lined from floor to ceiling with hundreds of skulls from the ancient world. (Good grief!) This is what he told Feiler, which caught my interest because of my own work on my family tree: "We know now that genes have the ability to store ancestral memories. And these can survive for hundreds of years." The more I study my own family's history, the more connected I feel and the more I want to know about them. It's interesting to think that maybe there is some sort of "ancestral memory" at work here.

>156 labwriter:: Becky, I like those thoughts about living in a cozy house. My favorite room in my way-too-big abode is the smallest room (other than a powder room) in the house. It houses 2/3 of my books in its built-in bookcases. There is one comfy chair (for me!), my music collection, some family pictures and memorabilia...and that's it. I spend most of my free time in my snuggery with my books. I think I could live quite largely in an 800-square-foot house as long as I had my quiet space. DH might have to have his own bungalow next door so he could have his TV on 24/7!

I'm enjoying your comments on Walking the Bible very much. I own that one and Abraham by the same author. Maybe this will be the year I get to them.

Hi Donna. Thanks for visiting.

So Feiler is wrapping this thing up. I have about 10 pages to go.

When I set out on this trip, I basically believed there was a unified notion of God and that I either shared it or didn't. This journey would plant me squarely in that spot, or it wouldn't. What I didn't expect is that the journey would do something else entirely. First, it showed me that there is no single place, no such thing as an accepted notion of God. If anything, admitting that I didn't know what God was, but that I was consumed by doubt and fascination on the matter, brought me into line with a rich theological tradition.

Whoo-hoo. I finally finished one of the books I'm reading, Walking the Bible. It was a great book, highly recommended if you can get around his goofy food similes. 4 stars.

Why I read this book
One of my goals for 2011 was to get back to reading about religion, religious history, religion and biography, bible study, etc. I also enjoy travel writing, so I thought that this would be a good combination of bible study and travel writing. It was, and for the most part I found what I was hoping to find in this book.

On the topic of living in small spaces, I had to laugh. 800 square feet would be a step up for me, although my 720 are considered a large one bedroom apartment in New York. I'd love about twice the space, with room for guests and perhaps some sort of crafts. But no more than that for two people. My main goal this year, aside from redecorating my space, is to downside some of the things in it. My stereo equipment, for instance, is old and huge compared to some of the shelf systems today. Paring down size makes the space I have seem much more luxurious, or at least I hope it will!

I suspect 500 square feet per person might be a good rule of thumb, at least for adults.

"I suspect 500 square feet per person might be a good rule of thumb, at least for adults." I suspect you're right, Judy. I'm not sure though, how Ben-Gurion managed all those books even if he had them all over his 810 square feet. In fact, I'd love to see a picture!
ETA: And so, I went looking for one. Since I'm not quite sure yet how to post a picture and since the one I chose has "this image may be copyrighted" on it, I'll just give you the website. Thanks, Google.

Hubby and I have a 900 square foot apartment, and we are contemplating adding a baby into the mix (and staying here!) This has brought on a lot of downsizing.

Sometimes it's hard to get rid of things, but most of the time I find it addictive and strangely satisfying.
The hardest part is that he and I disagree on what we think is necessary to keep, lol!

I forget what country IKEA is from. I love that store. I know it's from somewhere in Europe, where people tend to live in smaller spaces. There's all kinds of neat space saving ideas in their catalogs.

I agree - as long as I have a small space I can escape to for some peace and quiet once in a while, I'll be happy...

800 square feet is big by NY standards! I'm v. lucky to have slightly more than that, although not optimally arranged. (A big kitchen, which I don't need, but nowhere to put a washer and dryer.)

The only thing I would struggle with are the books!! With good closets and storage space, all else is possible, especially when my music can just go on my computer! I do like the idea of being able to put bookshelves all the way up to the ceiling, but I couldn't do that in my (rented) apartment.

One piece of furniture that I covet is a bed with under-bed drawers, and a storage headboard. I do shove stuff under my bed but it tends to get lost and disorganized.

IKEA is Swedish, angela.

Our new house is about 1100 usable living space but it's kind of tricky -- we have no basement and the eaves on the 2nd floor are steeply pitched right to the floor in some areas, which limits usage (forces creativity)..... people think it's 'huge' however because there are almost no walls anywhere and the first floor ceiling is very very high, twelvish or so - the 'engine room' and downstairs bathroom and one guest room have doors and can each be closed off for privacy, and one little tiny bathroom upstairs, but that's it. The open plan and high ceiling create a 'feeling' of space and it makes you realize how much space gets wasted on corridors, walls etc. etc. We've made privacy with heavy curtains and it is amazing how well it works....

I am so with you Suzanne about the under bed storage! We really need that since there are virtually no closets (more opportunity for creativity...).

Of course if a bunch of girls are having a sleep over....... nowhere to hide!

that house sounds lovely. I grew up in a conventional house that had been expanded, and my folks arranged the furniture to allow a lot of open floor space, where we usually sprawled anyway. With high ceilings, it would be cool in summer, but is it a problem in the New England winters?

Some years ago I bought myself a platform bed with four huge drawers underneath. Very handy for stuff that you don't go after every day (the two drawers near the headboard can't open too far unless I move the side tables.) If I were buying a bed nowadays, I would look at the storage beds that hinge at the headboard end and open like a clamshell.

We have another week left in January. I guess I'll do sort of a roundup of my current reads, mainly for myself, since I'm feeling sort of scattered as I look at the piles of books around me.

I'm still reading Huckleberry Finn. I'm at Chapt. XXVI. I'm struck by how funny the book is and also by how fast it reads. I spend very little time with this book, and yet I have only about 150 pages to go. This is a wonderful edition, with excellent maps and explanatory notes. (I'm reading the 125th Anniversary Edition.)

A couple of chapters ago, we just had Huck explaining to Jim all about English royalty and his story about Henry VIII: "All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on." It reminds me of some of the victims people in Jay Leno's "Jay Walking" segments.

Two books that I'm dipping into that go along with the Twain book: Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn, by Tom Quirk, a professor I know at U of Missouri, Columbia; and Was Huck Black?, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Twain scholar. That book has been on my shelf forever, and I told myself the next time I read HF, I would read Fishkin. She's professor of AmStudies at U of Texas, Austin.

I'm also working my way through Arthur Gelb's City Room. This is a fascinating look at Manhattan in the 1940s and the "how to" of the newspaper business, particularly The New York Times. Another book in this category that I'd like to get to before too long is The Paper's Papers by Richard F. Shepard. This is billed as "A reporter's journey through the archives of The New York Times. And there's another one I'd like to read: City Editor by Stanley Walker.

OK, I'll confess that I started book #4 of Julia Spencer-Fleming's series, which is To Darkness and To Death. Ah Julia, I just don't quite know what to think about you. It reminds me a little bit of a comment that one of my friends, at the time an MLA student, told me her professor made about her novel: "I'm continuing to read this, but I don't know why" (which seemed incredibly unhelpful for a professor to say, but that's an MLA program for you). Like her professor, I'm continuing to read this series, but I'm not sure why. I've given up my hope that she will grow (develop?) these characters. I was drawn in by her better-than-average writing, but I guess she's taken her talent as far as she's able to go, so I'll take the series at face value. It's something to spend time and relax with.

S-F blew it, by the way, in this book. I've been sort of on the fence about her portrayal of Claire Ferguson, the woman Episcopal priest; I've been most of the time willing to let S-F have her way with the character. In this book, however, she has the rookie priest referring to the bishop's visit as a "dog and pony show," and instead of showing up on the Saturday before to help the congregation get ready for his/her (is the New York Episcopal bishop a she???--I don't know, but she could be) visit the next day, Claire goes off to assist in a search and rescue. It would never happen. Yeah, I know, it's fiction, but even fiction needs to be somewhat credible.

Looking over the books that I'm reading and have read this month, I'd like to find a good memoir to sort of round things out. I also want to think about my next AmLit book: maybe a reread of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Great Round-up, Becky. I seem to be all over the place too...... although veering towards the point of least resistance. Whatever book I pick up does grab my attention but I keep picking up the 'litest' book first......I keep excusing myself that it's the dead of winter, zero outside, that I'm hibernating, but..... I usually have an indecent amount of mental energy in the winter, but this year I don't.

Death Comes for the Archbishop was a revelation to me, it is my favorite Cather. If I wasn't already reading 800 books I would read it with you.

>168 sibylline:. Well, I imagine a good deal of mental and other energy is going towards becoming a year-round Vermont resident. Just guessing.

Yes, I think Death is my favorite Cather, with the exception of some of her short stories: "Neighbor Rosicky" comes to mind.

Just catching up on threads, Becky. . .

I enjoyed Feiler's Walking the Bible very much when I read it a couple of years ago. I am glad to see you liked the book.

Hi Stasia! It was a very good read. I'm glad I finally got to it. There are so many books like this on my shelves that I've been saying, "Some day" about; I hope this year will be a year filled with reading more of those.

I love this 125th anniversary edition of Huckleberry Finn for its illustrations. Reading the book with illustrations by E.W. Kemble and John Harley adds a dimension to the novel that shouldn't be missed. Today I bought a book recommended by U of Missouri Twain Scholar Tom Quirk: Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain's Creative Process by Victor A. Doyno. I'm also reading Quirk's essays about the novel in his book, Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn. Quirk's style is engaging and accessible, particularly for an academic. He admits these essays are rather old-fashioned in their concerns, specimens of what used to be known as "humanistic inquiry." He also confesses that he believes in "literary values . . . and {I} like to think they spill over into the realm of public and political life, the way I imagine the local pastor likes to believe his sermon will carry through till Monday."

Here's a link to a website with the original illustrations.

I finished my nighttime read, To Darkness and to Death, the fourth in the series by Julia Spencer-Fleming. Why I read this book. I have no idea. It was sitting on my bedside table, it was 1:00 a.m., I wasn't asleep yet, and I had finished the other book I was reading. With the end of this book, I'm finally ready to give up on this series. I like her main character very much, Claire Ferguson, the female Episcopal priest. I also like her dialogue, setting, and even the storyline in this one was pretty good, although S-F almost never disappoints with at least one improbable digression in the plot. However, after four books, I finally have to admit that there really has been no character development, and that's something I would hope for, regardless of genre, from someone of her talent. Therefore, what I have to conclude is that "character" for Spencer-Fleming isn't all that important. For me, character is what is memorable about most books. So I will move on. Maybe I'll come back to this series, maybe not. Rating: 3 stars

I started my next fiction book last night: Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell. I encountered this book when reading Mary McCarthy's biography. Published in 1956, it is a strange little book about the world of a progressive woman's college. Or maybe, it's a book about the strange little world of a progressive woman's college. Jarrell is having a wonderful time with his subject.

>173 labwriter:: sorry you didn't like it, Becky. I usually lose interest in a series after just a few books. But something about this series worked for me in a way others have not, and I went ahead and got #s 4-6 from PBS. I have yet to read them though.

I don't normally lose interest in a series if I like the characters, which is why I gave the Spencer-Fleming books four tries. For example, I've read every one of Daniel Silva's books with the Gabriel Allon character and enjoyed them all. I've even read all of the alphabet books with Kinsey Milhone, by Sue Grafton. I don't think I ask more of a genre than could reasonably be expected of it. The Sue Grafton books are on the level of brain candy, so I don't expect great things. But that being said, even Grafton has developed her character in interesting ways. I just don't think that Spencer-Fleming's focus is character development. Instead, she puts a lot of work into the "action-adventure" scenes. That's fine. I just don't find that aspect of her novels all that interesting.

Novels by poets are invariably slightly.... different and usually quite wonderful and sometimes delightfully whacky.

I had forgotten that I want this one. Thank you, Becky! The main character is supposed to be based on Mary McCarthy, right?

Hi Lucy & Peggy.

>177 LizzieD:. Yes, the main character of Jarrell's novel is Gertrude Johnson,based on Mary McCarthy. Ouch. Everyone at the college in Jarrell's novel knows that Gertrude is writing a book about them (which McCarthy actually did--The Groves of Academe, published 1951, which is also on my list of TBR's). The best jokes in the book are at Gertrude's expense. McCarthy probably deserved this, since she was known for her own "jokes" and making fun of the college where she and Jarrell both taught for a short time. I think McCarthy was a person like those we may have taunted in junior high--she could dish it out, but she sure couldn't take it.

I have had Pictures from an Institution in the BlackHole for a while now. I will be interested in seeing what you think of it when you are done, Becky.

>179 alcottacre:. Hi Stasia. Pictures from an Institution--Lucy's word for this book hits the mark--whacky. In places it's hilarious; other parts I have skimmed. Later in his life, Randall Jarrell denied that the character of Gertrude Johnson was based on Mary McCarthy, saying that she was "a type." Au contraire! Having just read Seeing Mary Plain, the Frances Kiernan biog of Mary, I would say that the Gertrude character is a mean, funny, and devastating portrait of Mary and also of her third husband, Bowden Broadwater (that's his real name). The portrait of the school and the girls who go there is also very funny. Supposedly this is based on Sarah Lawrence College where both McCarthy and Jarrell taught for a time. I read three-quarters of this book in one day, so it's a fast read.

I'm finishing up Huckleberry Finn this morning. As I've been reading this thing, I've been thinking about the controversy surrounding the New South edition which replaces each instance of the n-word with "slave." I guess it also does something to clean up "Injun" Joe. It might do other things as well--who knows?

It seems to me, and this is just part of my own musing about the issue, that anyone who is offended by Twain's use of the word is also going to be put off by Twain's negro dialect. For example: This is how Lize answers Aunt Sally when Lize reports on a missing bed sheet:

Aunt Sally: "Where's it gone, Lize?"

Lize: "Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss Sally. She wuz on de clo's line yistiddy, but she done gone; she ain' dah no mo', now."

So is this dialect going to be "offensive" to those who are also provoked by the n-word? And how soon are we going to have another edition that "cleans up" the negro dialect? At what point is the book no longer the work of Mark Twain? If the New South people want to sell their edition (and, make no mistake, that is what it's about--sales) as The Modified Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, based on the original version by Mark Twain, then I have no problem with that. Otherwise, they should keep their hands off Twain's book.

Sometimes lost in all the seriousness of issues discussed in and about this book is the fact that Huckleberry Finn is also hilarious. I particularly love the chapters with Aunt Sally, Huck and Tom. Tom Sawyer has decided that Jim, who is being kept in a shed as a runaway on Aunt Sally's property, needs some snakes in order to be a "proper" prisoner. Tom would like rattlesnakes, but he will settle for tying buttons onto the tails of garter-snakes if Jim won't accept the other kind. So Tom and Huck go about finding some snakes for Jim, and of course they find a splendid assortment which they put in a bag in their room. Naturally, "somehow" the snakes work themselves out of the bag.

Well, they was handsome, and striped, and there warn't no harm in a million of them; but that never made no difference to aunt Sally, she despised snakes, be the breed what they might, and she couldn't stand them, no way you could fix it; and every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn't make no difference what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out. I never see such a woman. And you would hear her whoop to Jericho. You couldn't get her to take aholt of one of them with the tongs. And if she turned over and found one in bed, she would scramble out and lift a howl that you would think the house was afire. . . . Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the house for as much as a week, aunt Sally warn't over it yet; she warn't near over it; when she was setting thinking about something, you could touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump right out of her stockings. It was very curious. But Tom said all women was just so. He said they was made that way; for some reason or other.

Oh, and P.S. I find myself disagreeing with my former assessment of a "flawed" ending. I had no trouble with the ending this reading. I can recall why I was so twisted up by the ending the last time I read it. Oh well, this time it struck me as just right.

Morning, Becky. Did I mention how much I deplore the cleaning up of Twain? I am in complete agreement about having a "based-on" book if somebody cares to do that. I argue somewhere (was it here? I'm too lazy to look) that the n-word is so overdone that it gets tedious, and I think that MT was smart enough to plan it that way. The reader gets overloaded and is probably not as likely to use it himself. Then too, Twain is willing to satirize everybody - a real equal -opportunity writer. I love the book.
And I thought that I read The Groves of Academe long ago, but now I believe that I read only The Group. SO.... If my name ever comes up at PBS for your Jarrell, I'll read them both!

Hi Peggy. I couldn't agree more--"so overdone that it gets tedious." I love the book too. I just now finished it, how Huck ends it with saying that if he'd known what trouble it was to write a book, he'd never have started this one. Love it.

I'm going to finish the Randall Jarrell and then read McCarthy's Groves. I think I'm also going to read Finn by John Clinch.

I mentioned somewhere that 2011 is going to be my year for re-reading American literature. Next on the list is Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'm going to be reading from the Scholarly Edition published by the U of Nebraska P, 1999. This edition includes copious explanatory notes and a historical essay by John Murphy, a life-long Cather scholar from Brigham Young U. The hardbound edition also includes some really wonderful photos of the area: of Cather on horseback near Santa Fe, of the "real people" of this story, and also of some useful maps. I highly recommend this edition for anyone interested in reading this book. You may be able to find one used, although they tend to hold their price and they're expensive. My guess is that large libraries or university libraries will have this edition. The paperback version will probably leave out some of the scholarly apparatus, including the photos. That's been my experience of other books in this series.

Ed. to fix speling.

Becky, all your discussions have prompted me to get copies of Seeing Mary Plain and Huckleberry Finn. I'm waiting to receive the McCarthy bio from PBS and just got Huckleberry Finn from Amazon. It's a paperback copy and seems to have the same illustrations that you gave the link for earlier.

I also really enjoyed A Grief Observed which I think you recommended over on the Religion thread. Like Lucy, I think I need an LT collection or tag for "books recommended by Becky."

We must have cross-posted. I'll be interested in hearing your comments about Death Comes for the Archbishop. I read that at the end of last year so it's still fairly fresh in my memory.

Hi Pat, nice to see you! I'm just over the moon about that particular Mary McCarthy biog, as I guess my comments indicate. Kiernan has used an interesting format, directly quoting so many of Mary's friends and colleagues. I think it works for her subject, since Mary knew so many people and was such an outsized character. It allowed the biographer to stand apart from all the "issues" of Mary's life and personality and to take a more balanced, objective stand.

I saw where you asked for and received several C.S. Lewis recommendations. I would second the one about The Great Divorce and also add The Problem of Pain.

I'm looking forward to re-reading Cather's Death. It's been awhile. I was fortunate enough to attend a Cather colloquium in Mesa Verde, Colorado some years ago. The Cather scholars are wonderful, welcoming people, even towards a lowly grad student.

I have The Great Divorce on my library list and as soon as I pick up the books I already have on hold, I can move it on to my hold list (it's at another library so it'll be a "transit request").

I'm really looking forward to your comments about the Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, partly so I can justify spendng the money on a copy.

I also finished Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man by Tom Quirk. 4 stars. These essays are written in "normal" and quite accessible rather than "scholarly" language, and I found them to be quite interesting especially when read along with the novel. One caution: the essays were written over a period of years, some before the 665 manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn, written in Twain's hand, were found in a trunk in California. Quirk says in his introduction that he let the essays stand, even where he "got some things wrong" about the writing of the novel, and I think that's the right thing to do.

Enjoying the discussions, Huck and Mary, two American originals, certainly. I have to sheepishly admit that I generally enjoy books by writers about academia -- there's a kind of tension perhaps as writers generally don't feel properly part of it as they are not 'scholars' with phd's..... anyhow.... I can never resist them.

Hi Lucy. Oh, well, then, you could also turn around and talk about the tension between professors and their students at a tony, expensive school like "Benton": "It was amusing to contrast the respectable casserole'd poverty of a professor and his wife with the matter-of-fact opulence--for Benton was a very expensive college--of some of the girls who sat on the floor at his feet." "Amusing" to whom, Jarrell doesn't exactly make clear, although we hear this statement in the voice of the narrator. Perhaps Jarrell himself was amused by this when he was teaching at Sarah Lawrence--who knows?

When I was reading this passage earlier in Jarrell's book, I was reminded of another similar contrast that must have rankled, at least to a degree: salaried magazine fiction editors who were in a position of having to kowtow to writers making fabulous money for a short story or a novel serialization in the magazine(and of course I'm speaking of the 1930s or so, not of today).

I guess that sort of tension you speak of exists in many environments.

Ed. for fat-finger typing.

I finished Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell, a novel published in 1952. This is a wickedly funny book. 4 stars. The chapter "Art Night" is worth the whole book.

I forgot to add Why I Read This Book

I found a reference to Jarrell's book in the Seeing Mary Plain, the biography I recently read of Mary McCarthy. This is a roman a clef (or, alternately, auto da fe) that may have been an answer to McCarthy's The Groves of Academe (which I plan to read but haven't read yet). Jarrell tried to distance himself from the devastating portrait of Mary McCarthy as Gertrude in his book, but clearly his portrait was too spot-on for the character to have been anyone but Mary. Since Mary herself never shied away from saying exactly what she thought of everyone, this portrait may have been just deserts (or just desserts for the reader, since it was so much fun). Anyway, although it really doesn't matter who the "real" Gertrude was based on, it was fun reading this book with Mary McCarthy and her wowser, over-the-top personality so fresh in my mind.

Becky - I've been enjoying hearing about your reading of Huck Finn and the related books. I was a tour guide in Hannibal, MO when I was an undergrad, but I haven't read much Twain since. Reading your comments makes me want to do some re-reads.

>193 porch_reader:. Thanks for visiting! I've always thought it would be fun to be a tour guide. I toured the Mark Twain house in Hartford not all that long ago, and I was so impressed by the young guide who gave us our tour. He said that all the guides were encouraged to choose things that appealed to them about the house and to create their own targeted tours. It was a lot of fun. For the past 20+ years I've lived in a town not all that far from Hannibal near St. Louis, but I've never taken a tour there. Maybe it's time to do that!

#192: OK, I am going to have to get to that one soon!

So I was working on the laptop at the dining room table yesterday, surrounded by piles of books. I've been working on the first floor instead of upstairs in my office because my gimpy Labrador, Jack, is having trouble with the stairs and he likes to sit at my feet. Good grief, spoiled much? Anyway, it took me the better part of an hour to put the books upstairs and downstairs in their places and then to figure out--what's next?

It's time for another volume of correspondence. The last one was in November or December sometime, and I'd like to read 8 or 10 of these a year, just because I have so many of them on my shelf, so it's time for another. I'm intrigued by the Mitford sisters, so I bought The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, by Charlotte Mosley. This is a huge book, but it looks like a good one. Letters tend to read fast. I also bought a biog of the family, which is coming in the mail sometime, so I may read the two books together. One great thing about reading literary correspondence is that these books tend to be so cheap. I bought this one for one cent plus shipping at that online store that shall remain nameless on this thread.

For my fiction read, I'm reading Finn by Jon Clinch. I'm not too far into it yet, but I'm really enjoying his writing. Not a "pretty" subject (it starts out with a fly-blown body floating down the Mississippi), but it seems to be very good writing.

I think I mentioned my next AmLit book is Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.

And last, I'm still continuing to enjoy Arthur Gelb's account of working at The New York Times, beginning in the 1940s, City Room.

OK, that should keep me out of the malls. Heh.

A ton of good reading for you, Becky!

Wow, you have already read some very interesting books. A Grief Observed is on my Lewis-list for this year to reread. Out Of The Deep I Cry looks very interesting. Can one just jump into this series, do you think?

Well, interesting discussion on Bloom. I've read a little in The Western Canon - and I agree and disagree with his observations - but one thing that makes me sad is the words in the beginning of the book:

Reading the very best writers, let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy - is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde.

>198 ctpress:. Well, I would say to you, don't mistake what Bloom is saying here. Don't stop with that quotation--continue reading Bloom's argument in The Western Canon and in his other writing. He is writing against what he calls "The School of Resentment," those critics who seek to "use" (note the word) literature for some political or social activist cause at the expense of the aesthetics of a work. For example, I spent a lot of time when I was working on my English lit degrees reading second and third-rate literature because professors believed that assigning a particular author would somehow make me more "socially aware" or something. There were other agendas, but that was one of them. Bloom: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools."

Literature shouldn't be used to further someone's political agenda--that's a simplification, but I think it explains your quotation. When we start putting writers on the syllabus for reasons of social concern or politics rather than the aesthetics of the work, then we have missed the point. You can agree or disagree with Bloom, but I think that was his point. Bloom is very politically un-correct, and I believe that is the real source of the heartburn that exists around Bloom and his writing.

I just wanted to add the entire quotation here:

Art is perfectly useless according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight (The Western Canon, 14).

I'm going to have to re-read Huckleberry Finn at some point. I read it so long ago that I forget most of it. I do agree with you about the 'cleaning up' of it...no thanks. And the quote you posted about the snakes was funny...:)

Looking forward to your comments on The Mitfords and Finn.

You are bad, Becky. I just went to the unmentionable place and ordered the Mitford sisters' correspondence too - for 83¢ more than you paid. I had put it on the PBS wish list, but I was still 23 of 23, so .....

Hi Peggy. Ha, well, I'm bad for multiple reasons, but we can both be bad together, ordering from "that place." Actually, I'm sure most of us who use that site are aware than many of those sellers own brick and mortar used book shops, and it's their online business that keeps the doors open. Happy reading!

This has been a day of almost no reading, and I'm not sure why. I did get some work done on the Arthur Gelb history of The New York Times, City Room. I've decided that after this one I'm going to read a book by Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power: The Story of the Men Who Influence the Institution that Influences the World, another history of The Times.

I did nothing today with Finn. Nothing with The Mitfords. Sigh. And now it seems to be time to do something about dinner. Oh well, one of those days.

#204: Oh well, one of those days.

Unfortunately, we all have them. I hope this is your last one for a while, Becky.

Sorry to hear about the day getting away from you. That often happens to me. Somehow I can't really settle down to read until 7 or 8 p.m.

I wanted to let you know that I got my copy of Seeing Mary Plain today from PBS. It's a hardcover edition and I had to wrestle it out of my mailbox. I had no idea it was such a big book. I probably won't get to it until March or April but I'm looking forward to it.

Peggy, if you're reading this, I want to thank you again for getting me to join PBS. I haven't had any problems with them and have gotten alot of great books.

Oh yes, it's a huge old thing, that's for sure. I hope you like it.

Oh, and PS, in the back you'll find a helpful list of all the people the biographer uses in the book, explaining who they are. I found that very useful.

I'm reading a book on my Kindle that's pure fluff, and barely that: O: A Presidential Novel, by anonymous. {I gave up on the touchstone.}

Anyway, this is a novel written by "Anonymous" that came out just recently. I'm reading it so you don't have to--haha. Not to worry, for those who are a big fan of this president, the book is an "affectionate" and approving portrayal of the "real" O, and is a fictional account of O's 2012 reelection campaign--I have no doubt that in the novel he will prevail. The worst he's done so far is swear and smoke "three" cigarettes a day. He hates the press (well, who doesn't?). Why am I reading this? Because I'm a certified political junkie and I read everything like this.

I posted something about Finn yesterday, but lost it. I guess that happened to a lot of people. I'm working to read through chapter six because I want to read the group read posts that were made at the Missouri Readers group when they read this book in the summer of 2008. I almost got there last night, except that this is such a dark book that it's difficult to read right before I go to sleep because I end up dreaming about it.

Anyway, for those who haven't read Jon Clinch's book, this is a first novel (which is really hard to believe, because it's so beautifully written) from the point of view of Pap Finn, Huckleberry Finn's father. Did I say this book is dark? This is not for squeamish readers. That having been said, it is just an amazing novel. Clinch handles time in the novel like a pro, flashing back to when Finn himself was a boy, helping to explain the "why" of this illiterate, racist drunk. We are introduced to the Clinch-created characters in Pap Finn's family, the mother from a Philadelphia Quaker family who is out of place in this Missouri backwater; the father who is a judge, something like the evil twin of Judge Thatcher of Twain's books: "His mother is in the kitchen and with the blank thin expanse of her back she instructs him to linger not but instead to go direct to his father's study, which he does, and when the door opens to expel him later like the whale casting out Jonah he is neither in the mood for sympathy nor likely to receive it."

My one quarrel with the book is the dialogue, which is really terrible. I don't know whether Clinch was trying for some kind of effect here or whether he's just bad at writing dialogue. Finn is a man of few words, and admittedly he is an illiterate, anti-social bum, but pretty much all the characters in the book talk the same way he does. So I would watch for the dialogue in Clinch's next book and hope he comes up with something better. I read somewhere that Clinch wrote this thing in six months. If that's true, then he should have worked harder on the dialogue. Although something tells me that's a "writerly myth" made up to appeal to an interviewer.

Clinch has published a second novel, which I will be sure to get and would recommend based on just the first 60 pages of the first one: Kings of the Earth. He's also working on his third, and, interestingly, he posts fragments of the novel-in-progress on his website.

I finished City Room by Arthur Gelb, my last book of January. This book does a workmanlike job of describing how a newspaper was published, especially in the high days of the 1940s and 1950s. His narrative is no comparison to someone like Gay Talese's in his book The Kingdom and the Power, but for understanding how a newspaper worked, this is an excellent book. However, if I were going to read only one book about the history of The New York Times, I would read the book by Talese rather than this one by Gelb. This one should probably land somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars. I'll give it 3.5 stars.

I will have to see if the local library has The Kingdom and the Power rather than City Room, which I had checked on already. Thanks for the info, Becky.

The Talese book was originally published in 1966, but it was back in print in 2007. You're welcome, Stasia.

My local library has the original printing it looks like, not the later one.

>209 labwriter:: I've heard good things about that book, not sure why I've never picked it up.

I'm so glad you're liking Finn, Becky. The Missouri Readers will begin discussing another good book - a biography! - next week. It's called Nobody Said Not to Go. I had never heard of Emily Hahn before, but she was truly a woman ahead of her times. I left her in darkest Africa and need to see how she gets out of there and onto China.

I also need to unfreeze Kings of the Earth at the library. I think he's an amazing writer.

Clinch has never crossed my radar screen until now..... LT is kind of scary sometimes!

Becky, I'll be very interested in your comments about Finn. That book haunted me for days after I finished it! I finally resorted to putting together a time line of all the key events in the book, just as a way of wrapping my mind around the story.

Are you reading the Emily Hahn biography with us? Donna is farther along than I am. She's still in New York, but there has already been several mentions of Africa so I'm expecting that any time now.

No, I'm not reading the Emily Hahn, but I'll be very interested to read the comments on the Missouri Readers group thread.

I'm through the first six chapters of Finn. It's a great book. For anyone thinking of reading it, I strongly recommend reading or rereading Huckleberry Finn before reading Clinch's book.

My favorite garden store is on Facebook. This was their post today as we wait for the "storm of the century" (according to the hyper-nervous weather readers on TV): On January 1st we had 9 and a half hours of sunlight. Today we have 10 hours and 12 minutes! Only 48 Days until Spring...but who is counting?

Oh man, we are going to get so hit with ice, big time. The chances of losing power in our neighborhood with a storm like this one is about 99%. Yikes. It's one thing to have this happen in the summer. You can live without A/C, but not without heat. I feel badly for all hospital workers on duty tonight and tomorrow morning. The patients (especially women in labor) will find a way to make it to the hospital; the nurses who get there (and they have to get there) won't be able to leave. I told Terri over on her thread, it was fun when I was young, but I sure am glad I'm not still working tonight! Stay warm and safe, everyone. And happy reading, if you're able.

Hi Becky,
I remember those days! They used to call in volunteers with 4 wheel drive to get nurses to work... but ICE! Not good at all.

Hope by some miracle you keep your electricy. At least we have a generator since we are without power frequently - sometimes 4-5 days at a stretch. No fun when you are cold and you worry about pipes freezing. :P

Good luck!

Thanks Claudia. Yes, I remember a Thanksgiving in Denver when we had 20 or so inches of snow and volunteers picked us up at home in their 4 wheel drives. But--haha--no one "volunteered" to take us back home.

Oh, right! Lots of double shifts for me. :P

Good luck staying warm Becky! I loved power outages as a kid, but not as an adult.

I'll keep my fingers crossed you don't lose power, Becky. I used to hate when that happened in NY and not knowing when it would come back on only made it worse.

I was just looking at the weather map thinking of you -- I guess we'll know why if you disappear for a day or two or three..... we're supposed to get over a foot of snow between Tuesday and Wednesday night, but that's no big deal compared to ice. I hope you get through it ok.

L

Becky, I hope your power doesn't go out for too long. In our neighborhood, all the power lines are underground so it's rare for us to lose power for more than an hour or two. That's plenty long. Do you have someplace to go if you need to?

Dear Becky, I hope you stay powered up and inside. It sounds truly miserable. Courage!

Thank you all for your kind words.

I tried to post a pic that I took when I took my dogs outside, but it just doesn't come through. Lots of ice tonight, but tomorrow is the storm. Oof.

#229 For all that it is dangerous and miserable, the ice is also really pretty, isn't it?

edit to clarify that I saw Becky's photo during the 6 minutes it was visible.

Hi Sandy! How's the weather by you? We still have power this morning, thank God. This morning one of the weather channels on the Internet is describing what's coming out of the sky right now as "light freezing rain ice pellets snow mist." That pretty much covers it.

This is St. Louis before the storm:



And last night's pic that I deleted:

Cool picture... bad ice!
Quite a creative weather report!
Get out the candles and afghans!

>231 labwriter:: LOL. I refused to join the throngs at the grocery store yesterday. There is absolutely no danger of us starving at our house. I didn't want to stock up on milk because we frequently lose power during big storms. Lucky has a full canister of dog food so we're in good shape.

Everything is closed here today. It is snowing heavily but I can still see the house across the lake so it can't be a blizzard. Still a good day to stay home and read. DH fired up both the wood stove downstairs and the pellet stove upstairs. Cozy and warm in here. And the computer works. Yay!

I really hate the ice, but it sure is pretty, isn't it? When I took the dog out this morning, the ice on the grass was even pretty! But the steps are impossible. I was startled this morning when I saw they cancelled the "Winter Storm Warning." Then I saw that they replaced it with a "Blizzard Warning." Good times.

My big old sycamore out in the back, covered with ice, is crackling under a slight breeze. The sound is absolutely mesmerizing. However, if the slight breeze becomes 40 mph winds like they're predicting along with a blizzard, then we may have a problem.



Ed to add the pic

I used to have a beautiful cherry tree out back, and when it would ice, it was absolutely gorgeous. Until one ice storm, when I looked out back and it was cracked clean down the middle. Sigh.

Glad to hear my friends around the state are all safe and secure.

#235 Becky, it makes me cringe to think of it. Ice is the worst.

OK, so I'm a bit distracted this morning and don't much feel like reading. Here's a tip that someone posted for ice:

I don't use salt on the walkways because of my dogs. Instead of using the "paw safe" ice melt that costs $20 a containerful, try using kitty litter on the ice. It's perfectly safe for your pets and it's CHEAP--$3.00 for the same size container as the $20 ice melt. I tried it yesterday on my wooden deck which becomes treacherous when covered in ice. It created sort of a sandy sludge that was fine for walking on. Plus it won't hurt the wooden deck or my animals, so I'm happy.

#238 what a great idea!

We are great kitty litter fans too as long as it isn't used (ha ha - the amount I have to haul to the dump it gets tempting to recycle it) ---- We also save and use the ashes from the woodstove -- but only on road areas no one will be walking on as that gets messy unless you have a strict boots off at the door rule that you can enforce. Ashes are amazing on ice -- we also carry a bunch around in the car in winter. When it gets really really bad we'll put them just about anywhere.

Lucy, that's a great tip. I'll try that, too. I'm not worried about the mess right now--I'm worried about falling on this #%@& ice! Heh. I've moved up to my office where I can keep an eye on the sycamore from my window. No snow just yet--still ice. Meh.

>234 tloeffler: Grass???? What's that? Is that the green stuff we haven't seen for months and won't for several more? Sad story about the cherry tree. :(

Kitty litter is also good for soaking up oil spills/leaks on garage floors. Good idea for ice!

Brrrr. Beautiful pictures, but be careful!!! I know you will be, but I like to show concern.

Becky, I keep checking the weather reports every hour or two and they're showing the radar loop. I see the white snow areas moving across on top of us and St Louis just keeps getting hit with the pink ice blob. Ugh. I'd rather have snow. Our wind is beginning to get stronger and just now I heard a big gust hit the house. If you get this wind after all that ice, it will be a huge mess. How much ice have you gotten?

Keeping my fingers crossed that the worst of the wind will miss you.

Hooray for the kitty litter. I've heard it's good on ice. Stay safe & I hope your tree doesn't get damaged.

>244 sjmccreary:, 245. Thanks much! Yes, we're really in the pink--haha. We are in a mess of ice here, maybe two inches of sleet on top of an inch or so of ice. I'm hoping for an informative weather forecast around 5:00 p.m. central. The radar makes it look like the snow will miss us, but maybe there's more coming? Dunno.

So they're calling for 6-12 inches of snow overnight on top of the ice + winds. This is just about the strangest storm I've ever been involved with. The ground is absolutely smooth with a covering of snow/ice on the top that has the consistency of sand. It's surprisingly not all that slick. I just came in from taking my dogs outside. My younger dog, Docker, who is very small for a Lab and thinks he's still a puppy, is having a grand time imitating a penguin, sliding down the hill on his stomach. He's hilarious.

No report on reading today. . . because there's been no reading today.

In St. Louis, we love our Cards!



P.S. I didn't take this photo--I borrowed it from the weather channel.

Great picture, Becky. Wish you could have gotten one of your dog sliding on his stomach. Will check back later for another weather update.

Another great cardinal photo! They are great birds. We have an official snow day here for tomorrow, it's possible that we will get 20 inches, although I expect it will be a mere (!) 16 or so..... anyhow I have signed up for Stasia's 24 hour readathon. It'll be my first one on LT that I've managed to attend. Well -- maybe I should say that after.

Hi There

I'm compiling a list of birthdays of our group members. If you haven't done so already, would you mind stopping by this thread and posting yours.

Thanks.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/105833

I woke up this morning to POWER and intact trees. Where they were predicting a foot of snow, we got only a couple of inches on top of the couple of inches of ice & sleet. We are so very fortunate! I hope the rest of you are warm and with power. Thanks to all for the good wishes. We lost power for 10 days a few years ago, in the middle of summer, and it was no picnic. That's when they really started cutting back trees around the lines, and I guess it's made a difference. This morning my sycamore is crackling instead of creaking, and I'm just so thankful to see it whole. I love that tree.

Time for a new thread