labwriter: 2011, thread 5

This is my thread for May/June.



It's almost mid-June and the hollyhocks are looking good. Love these!

Here's thread #4

Here's thread #3

Here's thread #2

Here's thread #1




Books Finished in May, 2011

1. Mission Compromised, by Oliver North and Joe Musser. 3.5 stars
2. Decision Points by George W. Bush.
3. The Perfect Husband, by Lisa Gardner. 3 stars
4. Oldtown Folks, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. 5 stars
5. Faithful Place, by Tana French. 4 stars
6. Nobody's Business #1. 5 stars
7. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. 5 stars

Books Finished (or Abandoned) in June, 2011

1. Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor. 4 stars
2. Against All Enemies, by "Tom Clancy." 1/2 star (because I couldn't give it negative stars). Abandoned after reading 400 pages.
3. My Own Country, a memoir by Abraham Verghese. 4 stars

After having a great reading month in April (not great in number, but the enjoyment factor was high), May is turning out to be a bit of a slog as far as reading goes. Here's what I'm reading now, reading goals for spring, etc.

1. I'm rather bogged down in an AmLit read, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks. From my notes I see that I estimated that "no doubt" the book would take me "most if not all of April to read." Heh. I understand why it's taking me so long to get through this thing. First of all, it's 585 pages of a rather small font, so it's not a small book. Then secondly, Stowe references multitudes of book titles, authors, people of the time, etc.; to "get" what Stowe was doing in this book, it really is necessary to read it in front of the computer, connected to the internet, so that these references can be looked up. And third, along with an entertaining description of New England life after the Revolution and before the railroads, Stowe has given us something of a tretise on the early religious history of New England. Complicating what she is doing here is that, while she has set the book in the late 18th century, she often lapses into a discussion/debate of the issues of the conflicts of two religious sects, eclectic evangelicalism, which was her own religious tradition, and strict Edwardsean Calvinism, as they had evolved in her own time, the mid-19th century. I completely understand why the book isn't taught in high schools or lower-level undergraduate college classes; however, I wish someone in one of my upper level college AmLit courses, or certainly in one of my graduate courses, would have taken on this book.

2. Another book I'm bogged down in, although I'm almost stopped dead in my tracks in this one, is The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, by Richard Kluger. This is a great book about one of New York's most influencial newspapers during the 20th century. It's part of my 1920s and 1930s New York study, and despite the fact that this is a fascinating book, I'm not making much headway in it. Currently I'm slogging through the very early Horace Greeley years, and while this is interesting, what I'm really after is the paper in the 1920s through 1940s. "Circumstances" of the last couple of months have more or less knocked me off of my game and caused me some real challenges with my focus on this project; however, I've gotten some things figured out and feel that I'm coming around to getting back at this again. I'm going to get the Stowe book off my plate, and then I'm attacking the Kluger book with a vengeance.

3. Fiction. I like to read fiction at night, but lately what I've been reading has been pretty mindless. I don't know if that's because "mindless" is what I've needed as a break after a difficult day, or perhaps it's nothing more than pure self-indulgence. Regardless of the why of it, life is too short to read too much of this junk, so what I would like to do with the rest of the month of May in this category is to get into some meatier fiction. To that end, I plan to read a novel that comes highly recommended, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. While I wait for that one to come in the mail, I'm finishing the third of three of the Tana French books, Faithful Place. So far I'm liking this one better than her second one, The Likeness, sort of the typical second-book-letdown (the "sophomore curse")that very often happens with writers.

I didn't know a thing about my mother's grandmother, Grandma Witzke, until I started doing some family history. I assumed she was Austrian like her husband ("Witzke"), but it turns out she was 100% Americanized Irish, which helped to explain a whole lot about the whacked-out stories I'd heard about her from my mother (don't take that wrong, I'm not dissing the Irish). Finding out that Grandma was a Baxter caused me to go on a hunt for my Irish roots, and in doing so I found a wonderful book (naturally, a book) called Irish America: Coming into Clover, by Maureen Dezell a book that "explains" the Irish-American personality, and it really opened up my eyes to a lot of the behavior I've observed in myself and in some of my family. (I highly recommend this book, by the way, if you are in any way involved with someone who is Irish-American.)

Anywho, that's the long way of getting around to talking about Tana French's third book, Faithful Place. I'm really loving this thing. The main character, Frank Mackey, a cop who grew up poor in Dublin's inner city, goes to see his Irish family for the first time in 20 years (and yes, that's very Irish, turning your back on a part of the family, even sometimes living in the same neighborhood, and not speaking to them for years)--and the family interactions are both hilarious and sadly bittersweet. My Kindle tells me I'm 11% into the book, so I'm not very far into it yet, but I'm hugely enjoying this.

Hi Becky!
Your mock orange bushes are beauteous!
Just thought I would mention that Cutting for Stone is one of my favorites. I hope you love it too!
Having Irish ancestors, your comments about Irish America and Faithful Place intrigue me. Your family interactions comment is quite apparent on the Irish side of my family - but not the French side. Huh.
Happy reading and gardening! :)

Hi Claudia, nice to see you, and I'm happy to hear your endorsement of the Verghese book! I'm really looking forward to it.

I love mock oranges -- we can just barely barely have them here, the bushes always stay small and spindly, but still fragrant.

Lovely, lovely! I also am a Cutting for Stone enthusiast. I read the first bit quite happily, not seeing what the fuss was about, and suddenly realized that I couldn't put it down. I also have Irish in me, and The Horse's Mouth is one of my favorites. That Irish wit was very like my grandpappy's.

Oh, well, sadly these were supposed to be fragrant mock orange blossoms--that's what the nursery people told me. So I planted three of them and--no fragrance, absolutely none. So I went back to the nursery the next year and my buddy there said, "No problem, these are the ones you need, you evidently were given the wrong ones." I brought the new plants home, transplanted the other three bushes, put in the new ones--and next year it was the same deal, no fragrance. Oh well.

Peggy, thanks for the recommendations. I sure wish I had known my ggrandmother--I think she must have been a real hoot!

Beautiful flowers Becky! We had a mock orange bush when I was growing up, so this brings back memories. (Ours weren't fragrant either, or were overpowered by the lilac growing next to them.)

I'm glad you're enjoying the Tana French. I'm about a third of the way through the likeness, and I'm enjoying it.

Hope you like Cutting for stone. I tried it as an audiobook, and decided I need hard copy in front of me. It's on a long hold list at the library, so it will be awhile before I get back to it.

The mock orange bushes are beautiful. I've never heard of them before.

I'm hoping you love Cutting for Stone because I have a copy I've been neglecting. The only book I've read by Verghese is The Tennis Partner which is nonfiction about his friendship with another doctor who worked for him at an El Paso TX hospital. It was slow at times but the ending was so powerful that I consider it one of my favorite books.

Our bush is the thinnest thing ever with not so many blooms and sooooooo smelly. I wish I could send you all cuttings. It won't bloom until mid June here!

Hi Ardene, Pat, & Lucy. You know, looking at those mock orange blossoms, I just realized that my little (how shall I say this?--"hippy"--OK is was early 70s) wedding dress was white with yellow ribbons threaded through eyelet lace--so I guess that might be why they remind me of sweet June brides? Oh, we were so young!

I'm so happy to hear all the positive chatter here about Cutting for Stone. Ardene, I hope your library has about 20 copies so the line will move fast!

Checking in, Becky! Love the picture of the mock orange blossoms.

I'm here to report that I can't put down Tana French's third book, Faithful Place. If anything about a poor Dublin Irish community interests you, including the family dynamics of adult children and their Irish parents, then this is your book. The narrator, undercover detective Frank Mackey, and his siblings were born in the 1980s. A couple of the male sibs are still living in their parents' home. The married sisters live nearby. There are some really funny lines in this thing, and yet we know that there's nothing funny for these people about doing something as simple as sitting down to a family dinner. The mother ("Ma") is depicted as a dreadful harridan--some reviewer somewhere said that she gives Olivia Soprano a run for her money (I first started watching the Sopranos because my younger brother called me and said, "You have to see this show--the mother is our mother, to a 'T'"--well, no kidding, she was, but I digress); the father ("Da") is a drunken nonentity who hasn't worked, maybe forever. As hopeless as the neighborhood was when Frank was a kid growing up there, it's even more so now 30-some years later. Working at the Guinness plant is the one "great job"; otherwise, people either work at whatever odd job they can pick up and/or live off the dole. Life seems very limited and hopeless. Yet with all of that, you tend to fall in love with these people, at least I have.

One of the things that annoys me about the Kindle is that if there's a good quote that I want to find and I didn't mark it while I was reading it, then forget it--like you can with a book, you can't just easily page through the thing and find the quote. I should just bookmark the pages with these memorable lines instead of highlighting the lines themselves--that would be easier--but I forget to do it.

Anyway, if you read French's first or second book and you liked either one of them at all, then you'll probably like this one even better. This is a stand-alone book--you don't need to have read the other two. What she's doing here is using the character of Frank Mackey from the second book, but I don't even remember much about him in that book. What I do remember was a lot of really good writing with a plot that asked you to leave your brain at the door. You won't have to do that with this book. When you read this thing, you will know you're in the hands of a great writer, and you feel you can trust her not to disappoint you. With this book, French shows herself to be a major talent. If mysteries normally leave you cold (or you turn up your nose in disdain at the genre), well, all I can say is, don't miss this one for its excellent writing--and I guess I'm going out on a limb a little bit here because I'm only 25% finished with the book. If the ending is miserable, I will report that, but I don't get that feeling with this book. (OK, I realize I'm gushing and babbling here.)

The paperback version is due to be released on June 28. I'm going to buy it when it comes out so that I can have the book on my shelf for my permanent collection.

P.S. I was just thinking, in the most recent nonmemorable book that I finished (OK, I had to go back and look because I couldn't remember the title or the author--haha), Lisa Gardner's The Perfect Husband, it was painful to read that thing because the author had no business trying to create a male narrator--it was mostly just awful whenever she was in that guy's head, since you keep saying to yourself, I don't think an ex-Marine mercenary would be such a vacillating, emotional-wreck wuss. I'm pretty sure that had I read French's book first and then tried to read Gardner's, I would have thrown Gardner's across the room by about page 10. I can't believe I gave it 3 stars, but I have to let that stand. (Well, OK, I gave it 3 starts because Gardner definitely has potential and this was an early effort.) French's detective Frank Mackey, on the other hand, is spot-on believable, as is everyone else.

I definitely need to get to the third French book. I just need to read my copy of the second book first!

Well, Stasia, don't let not reading the second one stop you from reading the third one.

Yeah, but I own the second one and do not own the third one :)

Well, you've just convinced to me give French a try. I have a copy of In the Woods, but haven't been terribly tempted by what I've heard about it. you will know you're in the hands of a great writer, and you feel you can trust her not to disappoint you. That's the best thing you can say about an author, if you ask me. Trust is a must.

I enjoyed In the Woods much more than I did The Likeness. ITW has a couple of good characters who work together to solve a crime, Cassie and Rob. The Rob guy was a bit too touchy-feely for me sometimes, but that's just me, and since he's her first-person character in this thing, I did find myself annoyed at times. I have a note that says she danced a little bit close to the line of creating an unlikeable narrator, but she must have managed to pull it off, because my memories of the book, overall, are positive. I found myself at about one-third of the way wishing she would pick it up a bit, but then by the time I was halfway through, I was really hooked.

Ultimately, I gave the book four stars, which says it was above the usual book that I read in the category of mystery/detective novel. Hope that helps.

It's all I can do not to leap out of my chair and jump in the car and find a bookstore......

I'm delighted to hear that she's back on form for #3. Of course, I still have to read #2 first - especially since I have it...

I'm simply stopping by to wave hi and see what you are reading!

hmm, may have to check these out!

Another Cutting for Stone fan here...

I had some mock orange once, left for me by one of the house's previous owners. It was fragrant, and I still love the scent.

Just ordered, via a huge discount, some of the room freshener that comes with reeds and I'm hooked on the scent - a combination of ALL my faves, mock orange, lilac, peony, jasmine and some others. And yet not too sweet. Bliss. Can have the scent year round!!

Hi Peggy, Linda, Sib, & Suzanne. Thanks for stopping by.

Peggy, I thought the plot for #2 was dumb, although the writing was good, so there's that.

Suzanne, sounds lovely, what is the brand?

My reading list is whittled down to two books these days: the Tana French novel and the Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks. I'm determined to finish OF this weekend. DH was planning to go fishing, so I thought I'd have a reading weekend, but he changed his mind, so now the weekend is sort of up in the air.

Enjoy your Saturday, whatever you're doing!

I hope you enjoy your Saturday too, Becky!

Thanks, Stasia.

Well, DH decided to go fishing after all, so it's just me and the dogs at home on a rainy, cool Saturday. This is going to be a "read without guilt" day--haha.

I just now this minute finished Harriet Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks. If you're interested, there's a thread for the group read where Lucy and I posted about the book. I gave it 5-stars. It's definitely a book that should be known and read, by anyone who is interested in reading the great works of American Literature. IMO, anyway, this book falls into the category of "great" AmLit books. I can't believe no one taught it at the university, and I know that no one did, the entire 10 years that I was there taking classes part-time, because I made myself aware of every syllabus put out by every professor in the English dept. Oh well.

Congratulations on finishing Oldtown Folks. You've made me want to read it someday, but it will have to be after I read Uncle Tom's Cabin which isn't exactly calling to me these days. Not sure why as I'm usually into iconic reads.

I've enjoyed each of the Tana French books for different reasons. I'm looking forward to see what characters she includes in her next book.

Becky, I'm very frustrated with my moonflower seeds. I planted them in peat pots three weeks ago, kept them nice and moist in indirect sunlight inside the house for the first two weeks; moved them outside when it warmed up last week. Thanks to an inquisitive squirrel who had to see what I was trying to grow, I found several of the pots demolished and my seeds doing absolutely nothing. I've brought the survivors back inside with the return of the Arctic blast. My question: do you think there's any hope or should I just throw my attempts on the compost pile?

Congratulations on finishing Oldtown Folks, Becky. I've been skimming that thread and one of the impressions I got from your discussion with Lucy was it was a difficult book to get through but I'm not sure I have a good understanding why. Was it the length, the writing style, the story? Five stars is a pretty high recommendation but I'm afraid I wouldn't finish it.

Donna, re: the moonflower seeds. What I remember from last year: I started the seeds (I think at the end of April) in little peat pots and put them outside. Last spring, according to one of my notes, was also cool and wet. I remember waiting forever to see anything from those seeds. Actually, I think I gave up on them, thinkinng the squirrels had gotten to them or something. Then one day, long after I was expecting anything, I saw them starting to poke through the top of the soil. So I would continue to hope that you might still get results.

I also remember that it took forever for the seed leaves to grow. I have a picture of two small seed leaves in the little pot, with a date of May 23, so that gives you an idea of how slow they were. The instructions on my packet said not to transplant the vine into the ground until two or three sets of leaves are showing. I think it was actually the first part of June before I transplated them into the ground.

My guess is, these things like heat, and the seeds just pretty much sit there in the ground until things warm up to their liking. Just a guess. Good luck! I haven't planted mine yet.

>29 labwriter:. Hi Pat. Yes, it was a difficult book to get through. Hilariously, at the chapter before the last one, Stowe writes this:

I am warned by the increased quantity of manuscript which lies before me that, if I go on recounting scenes and incidents with equal minuteness, my story will transcend the limits of modern patience. (1452)

One of the reasons it took me so long was because I was writing too much about each chapter in my posts--a bad habit, writing over-long. The writing style wasn't particularly difficult. If you've read Uncle Tom's Cabin, then you have an idea of how she writes. She had a lot of references and literary allusions that I needed to look up to make sense of what she was writing about. But probably the most difficult part of the book was her detailed history of Calvinism (and different sects of Calvinism), plus her take on other religions (fortunately I'm Episcopalian, so I understood what she was getting at there). Mostly she assumed on the readers' part a great deal of knowledge and familiarity of this religious history. Actually, the story that sort of got buried in all of the rest of it was pretty good, plus her characterization of different "types" was wonderful. There was a character I didn't post too much about named Sam Lawson who was a perfect Shakespearean fool--the kind who is no fool at all--and she used him to give a running commentary on the community.

Five stars in my rating system may mean nothing more than the book was challenging and worthwhile--although that's a lot, to me. I think my rating system says that a five-star book might also be one I never want to lay eyes on again, maybe like Ulysses. Ha. Religion was such a big part of the cultural history of our young country. Stowe is writing about the 1780s or so in this book from her own perspective of the 1860s, which adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of the book in the 2010s. I had to work at this book, but the work was worthwhile, so that's why the 5 stars--sort of like my other AmLit read not long ago, Absalom, Absalom!. If I'm going to work that hard on a book, then it had better be 5 stars--ha.

Congrats on finishing Oldtown Folks. I haven't given up yet - just a little bogged down with This House of Brede and A Storm of Swords - both of them major whoppers that are leaving me no room for much of anything else.

Great summing up of the difficulties Becky.... of course, I'm still in the throes.

my rating system says that a five-star book might also be one I never want to lay eyes on again

I had to laugh at that but I get what you mean. Thanks for the explanation of the difficulties in appreciating the book. I may take it out of the library at some point but I'll keep in mind your comment about needing to know about the religious history she talks about.

I love seeing the picture of your mock orange bush when I click on your thread. It looks so healthy!

I love Shakespeare's fools -- was reminded of that at going to see Lear a week or so ago.

The air diffuser is part of the Charlotte Moss collection for Agraria; the scent is labeled "Virginia". It's horribly expensive; I think I only paid 1/3 of retail and now I'm wishing I had ordered two at that price. The votive candles are slightly cheaper, but still far from cheap, sadly. I do like the air diffusers -- amazingly, the cats aren't remotely interested in playing with the reeds, they last a long time and the scents are far nicer and more subtle than commercial air fresheners.

Must dash to run errands...

Oh, the "Virginia" from the Agraria collection looks wonderful. I'm always stumped when DH asks me what I want for my birthday or whatever. I'm going to have to put that one in my memory bank. Wow, if you paid 1/3, then you got a good deal.

It's Sunday, so my religious/spiritual read for the day is God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is of course a committed atheist. I enjoy his writing and respect him as a very intelligent man, and I thought I would read this one, not to be convinced of his point of view, not to argue his point of view, but to try to understand what it's like to be inside the head of an atheist (and absolutely no condescension should be read into that statement, just to be clear). I recently watched a debate between Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza which was quite entertaining, if "entertaining" is the right word. I guess so.



This will be the first Hitchens book that I've read. He has a memoir out called Hitch-22 which might be worthwhile.

I will be interested in seeing your take on the Hitchens book, Becky.

I read a lot yesterday in my Tana French book, Faithful Place. I find myself seriously emotionally engaged with the characters in this book and still hugely enjoying the read at 70% of the way through.

>29 labwriter:: I had a little miracle of nature occur...walked in the door from church and the first thing I noticed was a pale green shoot (actually more like a stem and leaf blob) emerging from one of my peat pots. I'm eagerly watching the remaining seven pots for signs of life. Thanks for the info and encouragement.

I, too, am eagerly awaiting your reaction to the Hitchens' book. Love the name of his memoir! I need to get back to my Spong one of these days.

Donna, glad to hear about your moonflower vines!

Oh gosh, moonflower season again! This year I am hoping to get one that blooms. I was too late, I think, last year.

This year I'm trying to read as much American literature as I can, with a goal of maybe 6 or 8 solid reads, things like Absalom, Absalom! or my latest one, Oldtown Folks. So I was thinking about what might come next, and I find myself drawn to Civil War literature, mainly because of a genealogy project I've been working on. On my shelf is Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the Civil War, published in 1955.

I'm going to use this as my AmLit entry and also as my nighttime novel--it will fit both categories. So I guess I'll start this one when I've finished a couple of other novels that are in the queue.

I was wondering, has anyone read this one?

>41 sibylline:. Yeah, Lucy, can you even believe it? I am so slow this season at getting things into the ground, but part of that is by design because I was reading the Farmer's Almanac and it said that we would have a long, slow, cooler-than-normal spring. So no need to rush to get those petunias, etc. in the ground. What I usually do is start out gung-ho and then loose my enthusiasm in about July, so I'm going to try slow and steady in the garden this year.

P.S. I have the "slow" down really well--haha.

Hitch is great, becky. Hitch 22 has moved up a bit, on my awful TBR pile. Thanks for the reminder.

Becky, I read Andersonville too long ago to remember anything beyond the fact that I was moved by it. I should definitely reread.....but not now, I'm afraid.

Reporting in on Faithful Place. I'm 80% finished and sort of wishing that French would get on with it. She has only one pov character in this thing, which is fine, but it's a lot to hang on one character's shoulders. Ditto with this one storyline. There's no sub-plot, no side story, so the main plot has to carry the day. In a way this is refreshing, since it seems that it's become popular with fiction writers these days to have multiple pov characters and to jump around in subplots like a scalded rat. However, there are times in this thing when I wish we could get out of Frank Mackey's head and get away from his strong voice, just for a little bit. The emotional tone coming from the narrator is so strong, but you do wish for a break from him once in awhile. I think it would be such fun to be inside one of his sister's heads occasionally, for example. His family is such a mess, so much fun to read about, such a living disaster.

I'm happy to see that she's finally used a bit of dark foreshadowing (oh, hello! what is she doing here?), even though it's about 80% of the way along. It helps to add interest at this point and puts a question into the reader's mind. After all, this thing is a mystery, and yet so far it's been pretty straightforward.

I'm also finding her time shifts in this thing to be pretty clunky and awkward--too amateurish for someone with her experience--she's not a newbie writer anymore. She ought to study someone like John Irving who is a master at using "time" in the novel, so much so that time actually becomes a character in his books.

Those are quibbles, though. French is such a talented writer in so many ways that she pretty much blows my mind.

I finished Faithful Place by Tana French last night. There are 62 reviews of it here at LT, so it seems sort of pointless to write a review. The ending was fine. Pretty much the endings to books in this genre never really surprise all that much, do they? But it wasn't disappointing, either. I was trying to decide whether to give this book a 4 or a 5, so that pretty much told me that it's a 4-star. In my rating, 4 stars is very high. I would definitely recommend this one, and I'm eagerly waiting to see what she does next.

For reading enjoyment and also writerly talent, I would put French in the same category along with Stieg Larsson and books like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Looks like I have some good reading to look forward too!

Just slithering by....... I noticed they have Faithful Place at the library when I was there the other day..... how long can I resist?

Are you going ahead with Andersonville? I don't think I can read that right now although I am interested. I feel as though I've read it, so I should go look for a copy and see.

Hi Sib. No, I'm putting Andersonville back on the shelf until...maybe summer.

I'm currently reading Abraham Verghese's novel, Cutting for Stone. It's amazing, as everyone here has said.

Unfortunately, my reading time has been slashed because of other projects...life getting in the way. Ha. Happy reading.

Oh, and it's Sunday, so I guess I should read a little in my Sunday read, Christoper Hitchens' God Is Not Great. Frankly, and I'm not very far into it yet so maybe he'll get off of his emotionally wrought soapbox, but so far his sanctimonious language about "we atheists" is as annoying as any evangelical I've ever read. Come on, Christopher, I was hoping for better from you.

I'm thinking one of the best parts of the book is going to be all of his references. Hitchens is stunningly well-read, remembers everything he reads, and can even quote long passages from things that he's read. The last 60 Minutes (or whatever it was) interview that I saw with him, they showed his groaning bookshelves and said that he had read every one. Oh my.

And P.S. I notice this morning that I'm at 38 of 75 books for the year. Halfway and it's only May. That's pretty good. One of my goals this year is to try to inject a little balance into my life, so I think, for me anyway, 75 books in a year is enough. My heavy reading times tend to be January-February when it's cold outside and July-August when it's hot. So I expect to slow down a bit on the reading until maybe July.

I notice this morning that I'm at 38 of 75 books for the year. Halfway and it's only May. That's pretty good.

Yes it is, Becky! Congratulations!

Glad to hear you are enjoying Cutting for Stone. The book was one of my favorites last year.

Hi Stasia! Yes, wow, Verghese is amazing. I guess there must be "natural writers" just like there are naturals at other things. I have no doubt that he works hard at it, but he makes his own writing seem effortless. Lyrical is the word that comes to mind, without trying to be. I don't know that I would have heard of the book except for LT, so I'm very thankful for this place for that.

Verghese is one of my LT discoveries too. I enjoyed his nonfiction My Own Country too. If you have not read that one, I recommend it.

So many books, so little time! I am having the same issues as yourself - so much else going on suddenly -- everyone crams so much into the non-snowy months, as many projects as possible plus social events. We're getting ready for the last load of stuff that was in storage -- mostly books (uh oh, no shelves for them) and china (no shelves yet for them either) and the rest is all, thank heavens, the hubster's shop/studio stuff. And here I am just babbling along on your thread.

Maybe the Verghese should be my next literary fiction read when I finish the Egan.

Oh and I'm back because I meant to say after catching up on your comments that this morning I spent reading the (unpublished) Memoirs of the father of a friend of mine, life growing up in rural VT, and it was the most charming, delightful, intelligent and entertaining piece of work, with none of that arch self-consciousness of so much 'writerly' work. So refreshing.

Last night I started the Verghese and was going to read "a chapter" because it was late--just to see if I would like it. Two hours later (at 2:00 a.m.), I had to force myself to put it down.

---and so it will go until you finish it, Becky. And probably in tears, not least because there's no more. Add me to the list that found Verghese enthralling.

A tornado hit the center of Joplin, MO last night. 89 are reported dead this morning. It's been a tough season. God bless Joplin.

Oh that's bad. And the worst part of the season isn't even half-way over.

Becky, my husband told me about the tornado in Joplin but I hadn't seen any pictures. That really looks devastating.

I had to make sure this morning that that's not where you are, Becky. I don't, in fact, think that any of our little band here lives in Joplin, but it looks awful, awful. I watched the Weather Channel a little last night while I got supper - people frantically trying to find a way to dig their neighbors out of their houses. Pray for God's mercy, if you're a praying person.

I heard, but haven't yet verified, that this was the deadliest single tornado since the 1950s. I have a friend whose niece lost everything--except her life. She was hunkered down in her bathtub, protecting her baby with her body. When it was over, she was looking up at sky and everything around her was gone.

Update. More than 75% of the town of Joplin is gone. I'm just trying to imagine what that would be like, and I can't do it.

I am glad you and yours are safe, Becky.

Prayers are going up from this house for the people of Joplin.

OK, books. I'm working on a project that involves newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in New York. I've been reading (or trying to read, but not very successfully) a book by Richard Kluger about the NY Herald Tribune, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. I'm going down to my basement and not coming up until I've read the last 75 pages of Section One. Bye for now.

#61 Are you sure that isn't "more than 25%" of the town...not that that isn't bad enough, but I've seen and heard multiple reports of 25-30% of the town damaged or destroyed.

>64 laytonwoman3rd:. Well, maybe it depends on what "destroyed" means, but that figure of 75% of the town "leveled" comes from the Red Cross. Joplin is a town of 50,000, so it's not a very big place.

The winds were clocked at 198 mph, according to the Nat'l Weather Service. The tornado itself was 3/4 of a mile wide, and it ripped the town in half, since the tornado tore through the center of town. It was a monster tornado. The Walmart and Home Depot both collapsed, and now that they're getting into some of that wreckage, the death toll is going up--119 as of tonight. It's been raining there most of the day and there are more storms brewing for tonight.

I was reading Cutting for Stone last night and laughing my brains out. Abraham Verghese is obviously an overachiever. Not only is he a professor of medicine at Stanford, but he's also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he earned an MFA. Good grief.

Anyway, that's by way of saying that his medical "business" in this novel is spot-on. I loved the part where he has Dr. Thomas Stone throwing instruments in his OR: "Thomas Stone was an occasional flinger of instruments, though never in front of Matron." This takes me back to my days in L&D where one of my jobs was to act as scrub nurse during C/Sections. And yes, I've had doctors "fling" instruments; we also had one doc flip over an entire table of instruments during a delivery because the scissors were dull. I am loving this book--ha.

>65 labwriter:. I watched the evening news, and you're right---the devastation is beyond imagining. Still haven't heard that 75% figure, but the Red Cross should know.

I can't get my touchstones to work this morning, although I'm seeing other posts where the feature is working just fine. Is anyone else having this problem?

I downloaded IE9 to my laptop and have had all kinds of problems with it, including the touchstones not working. It was probably something to do with one of the properties I had either turned on or off, but I couldn't figure out what it was, so this morning I went back to IE8. Probably a detail no one is interested in, but if anyone else is having trouble, that's my story.

Test: Cutting for Stone. Whoo-hoo.

Once again, new and improved isn't.

Well, it may be Peggy that I just don't have the right switch flipped for IE9 to work the way I want it to--which I guess is my bad and not theirs. I went back to IE8 and now I'm happy again.

So has everyone in the 75 group fallen out of love with Louise Penny? I see her newest book will be released on 30 Aug 2011, A Trick of Light, which I'm sure doesn't have a touchstone here as yet. Oh, wrong-o, yes it does.



I'm going to have to look back to see how far I got with this Inspector Gamache series--maybe two books into it. I enjoyed the books, although I think what I remember is that I found them a bit "sweet" for the mystery/detective genre. I don't know, I'd have to look back at my notes.

Is this an ER book? (another thing here at LT I don't involve myself with, since I don't like being obliged to finish a book and write a review if I don't like it--which I would feel obliged to do if I received an ER book). Anywho, just thought I'd ask, since Penny seemed to have been such a fav here in the past.

I'm in the basement with the dogs, have been for the past hour, it's black as night outside, sirens going off, a nasty "red-orange" cell just went right through the middle of St. Louis on the weather map, another is headed our way. Most of my books are down here, and I have my laptop and my dogs. Otherwise....I think clearly there's a level of denial that serves as a protective shield--"not me"--it's a sort of a brain filter or something. I don't think people really believe a big disaster will befall them until it does. However, I do find myself taking more precautions than usual this season; for instance, it's very unusual for me to go down to the basement because of a storm, even with sirens. These are some freaked-out days, that's for sure.

Oh my! I hope everything passed over you OK. I think I'll go look at a weather map. If you are all right, put out an all clear when you can.

Hi Sib--thanks for the post. We're out of the basement. I think we're all just a bit nervous, since the horrendous pics from Joplin have been shown here on the news pretty much all day every day since Saturday--or Sunday, I guess it was. --Which in a way is a good thing, because it's easy to get desensitized to the warnings. Ah well.

We had tornado sirens going off here Monday night too, Becky, so I understand what you were going through. I am glad to hear that you are out of the basement :)

I am still in love with Louise Penny, but I have read everything in the Gamache series until the new one comes out in the fall.

Glad all is well, thought it might be after I checked the radar map. We have all kinds of things to contend with, weather-wise, but not tornados. We do get 'mini-bursts' more than we used to -- I picture them as whirling balls of wind that just hit a slope -- and any weak or oddly shaped tree in that area will get hammered. Lately we have this weird phenom of trees breaking off about ten feet up -- mostly hemlocks and pines -- most strange because the hemlocks esp aren't even all that well-rooted.

Your basement sounds like a congenial place to wait out the storms, Becky. But that tension is tough on you, isn't it? Glad you're OK. I just heard there were something like 81 tornadoes confirmed in Kansas, Missouri and Southern Illinois yesterday. I hope this tantrum wears itself out pretty soon.

I'm actually reading NO. 3 in Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series now. I'm not in love with these, but she irritated me so with her teases about that mysterious old Arnot case in the first two, and someone told me it gets more fully explained in this one, so I'm going to finish it and then see how I feel about reading any more.

Your comments about not participating in the ER program are interesting. I've been very careful about what books Iasked for, for the most part choosing authors known to me, or non-fiction subject matter that I really find fascinating. But the only consequence of not reviewing something is that it decreases your chances of getting more books through the program. And you can always post 25 words or so about why a book stinks, even if you decided not to finish it---that counts as a review.

We had more tree damage last night--but to our neighbors on the right and left, for a change. The church next door had the trunk of a small junk tree (well, actually about 20 feet tall, so not so small) snapped off near the top. The thing just missed our fence when it fell. But strangest of all is the huge limb from our sycamore that's hanging down, absolutely stuck and hung up in one of the neighbor's trees, hanging over their shed. The "rule" around here (I imagine most everywhere) is that, regardless of who "owns" the tree, if it's your property that's damaged, then you have to pay for it. This is sort of a shared tree anyway, in that it's almost exactly on our adjoining property line. I have someone out every year to trim the parts of the tree that hang in our yard, but the neighbors don't do anything with their side of it. Now there's this huge branch hanging down--but completely stuck. So strange. If it were me, I'd have my tree guys out to take care of it, but I bet these neighbors won't. Oh well.

>79 laytonwoman3rd:. Hi Linda. Yes, I think this weather is getting on my last nerve. Although it's hard to complain when you see what the people of Joplin and other places are going through. I should read the #3 Louise Penny book--I think I remember having the same issue with the first two that you describe, but people here tend to be quite loyal fans, so maybe it's just a matter of hanging in there with her.

Maybe I'll have to give the ER program another look.

I have two books right now that I need to review for ER---I've read them both, and usually I get my reviews out fairly quickly, but these hit me at a mentally hectic time, and I just haven't put fingers to keys to get them done. Futhermore, my husband grabbed one of the books to read it himself, so in those evening moments when I might have set out to do the review, I couldn't pry it from his hands for reference!

I don't know about you, Becky, but I'm really glad to have a basement these days. My brother, SIL, niece and her boyfriend, and great-nephew all come over and we have a "party." That's well and good until the sirens go off in the middle of the night. I'm grateful that hasn't happened recently.

I've also read all the Three Pines books and am waiting for the new one in August. Most of them have gotten 3.5 stars from me...solidly fitting into the good but not great category. I love the setting and some of the characters; the mysteries themselves are just okay. I hope I haven't lost my seat on the 3 Pines bus for saying that. I'd really love to go to Canada and get out of the Missouri heat this summer.

Hi Becky. It's good to hear you're OK. I just woke up and saw the news about all the tornadoes in your area yesterday. Of all the weather disasters, tornadoes seem the scariest to me, probably because of all those repeated viewings of The Wizard of Oz as a child.

I've been somewhat distracted lately by RL. My MIL is getting ready to move to a assisted living facility and we're helping her go through everything in the house she's owned for 60 years.

I hope things are calmer for you today.

I held off on the ER books for six or seven months -- and then I decided, oh why not? - if the book is a reasonably good one I would have been likely to consider for myself in a bookshop and and that I know there is a readership for, I can give it to my library when I'm done, which helps them. So far I'm 4 for 4 -- I've had 4 ER books, carefully chosen, I've liked them all, (really enjoyed one) but I don't pick another one until the first one is done and reviewed. I think I had to skip one month because of that, but you can dally over signing up for a book until the month 'closes' and I don't think it makes a diff. whether you get the book or not since I generally choose one late in the month. I think maybe there was also a month where I didn't see anything suitable and skipped. So that is my ER wisdom for what it's worth! (not much!) The downside is that it does cut down on getting at the books already on my tbr shelf because I do feel a certain pressure to read them. On the other hand, not one has been a 'long' read or terribly challenging.

Hi Everyone.

Yes, Donna I am grateful for our basement these days. This is the first season in 20 years here that we've felt the need to ride out these storms in the basement. And you reminded me of one of the things I really liked about Penny's books--I hugely enjoyed the setting.

Pat, I remember how hard it was to move my mom out of her house a few years ago. Oh, I feel for you--it's just plain hard on everyone.

Lucy & Linda, thanks for the ER tips. I guess I'll give them a try one of these months.

All is quiet today, just on and off rain. Stay safe, Stasia. Maybe we're going to be out of this tornado season soon--I hope so.

Happy reading. I was up at 4:00 a.m. with my younger dog, Docker--the vomit comet, as he is sometimes affectionately known. So it's already been a long day. I think I need to go read. DH seems to be planning some sort of "project" (rolls eyes), so I need to find a good place to hide out.

I am right along with you in hoping that we are out of tornado season, Becky!

I'm 428/658 pages into Cutting for Stone. I'm really loving this book, partly for the extreme medical/surgical/disease detail from Verghese. But I wonder how I would react to it if I didn't have a nursing background, particularly in labor & delivery (one of the major characters is an obstetrician/gynecologist)? I'm thinking I might be put off (or disturbed) by it. I also wonder if Verghese ever felt like he might be taking a risk by including so much detail?

I also wish that he had let his young narrator grow up a bit faster in the book. It seemed like he was 10-12 years old forever, which I couldn't help but think was a bit limiting.

Anywho, that one is my major read these days. As usual, I've started too many books at once and I'm having trouble moving any one of them along, other than the Verghese. I also see a big house project looming in my future, which is going to seriously cut into my reading time if it comes to pass. Sigh.

Update. Busy, busy day today; no time for reading.

I loved Cutting for Stone, Becky, and I was never a nurse :)

I hope you get time for reading over the weekend!

Me too. You've made amazing progress though. I'm so glad you like it after all our praising it to the skies.

Hi Stasia & Peggy. That's good feedback. I can see why people love the book. I recently read a NYT review of Cutting for Stone that compared this book to John Iriving and Salman Rushdie. Irving is one of my favorite writers (except for the books he's written that I hate--haha), but I've never read Rushdie, although I've always meant to, particularly The Satanic Verses. I think the comparison to Iriving is the way Verghese uses time in the novel, taking the narrator from youth to adulthood, as in A Prayer for Owen Meany, one of my all-time favs.

All right, you people have done it. I'm starting Cutting for Stone TODAY. To heck with Louise Penny---I just can't get into The Cruellest Month and I don't think I'm going to waste any more time on it.

>92 laytonwoman3rd:. LOL, Linda. Sorry about the Penny, but I hope you like Verghese. I'm quite happily moving along in the book, now at 502/658.

>91 labwriter:. Interestingly, I found something in the acknowledgements at the back of the book, where Verghese thanks John Iriving "for his friendship all these years. I have learned so much from him both in our correspondence and in his published work." So obviously The NYT's reviewer's "insight" about likening Verghese to John Irving wasn't original. I would like it better if these reviewers would actually say where they got their idea in the first place, and then expound on it a little, rather than just taking the idea straight from the author's acknowledgments and doing nothing with it. Meh.

Verghese is incredibly generous in his acknowledgments section, giving credit as a source to everything he can think of. He must be a truly good person--that's how he strikes me throughtout the book. The character of Ghosh strikes me as someone who might have a good deal of Verghese in him--although of course that sort of speculation is dangerous. I'm really looking forward to reading My Own Country, Verghese's memoir.

I hope you enjoy My Own Country when you get to it, Becky. That was the first Verghese book I read and I loved it. You will probably have an entirely different perspective on the book since you were a nurse and I cannot wait to see your insights on it.

I'm not getting much reading done during the day these days, but I stayed up last night and finished Cutting for Stone. I am totally over the moon about this book. I've already said it reminds me of one of my John Irving favorites, A Prayer for Owen Meany, mostly in the way he uses time in the novel, starting the narrator out at about age 10 and taking him into adulthood. There's also a spiritual component to both books that has something of the same feel. I would put Irving's book on my 100 Favorite Books shelf, so that's high praise.

I also have said that I loved all of the medical details in the book, particularly his details about surgery. Since Verghese is a physician, you have the feeling throughout that you can trust him to get the details right--and he does.

Another aspect of the book that was completely enjoyable was his playing around with the "twins" theme. This seems to be such a rich vein for a writer to explore, and yet I'm having a hard time thinking of another novelist who has done this (and I'm sure having said that, people here will come up with many examples, which is one thing I love about LT). For those who haven't read the book, it's narrated by Marion (a male "Marion") Stone who has a mirror-image twin, Shiva Stone.

I'm not going to review the book, since there are already plenty of reviews by others here. It's a solid 5-star read for me. The hardest thing for me about finishing a book like this (other than the fact that I don't have the book to read anymore) is starting another book. I hate to break into the beautiful dream created by Verghese and this book.

And P.S. If you haven't read A Prayer for Owen Meany because you've been put off by things you've heard about other John Iriving books, all I can say is--get over it and go out and get that book.

Well, I get to dodge both the BBs since I have read Cutting for Stone (and loved it) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (which I liked OK, but did not love.)

Very interesting comments, Becky. I didn't have time to get very far with the book yesterday, but I can already see I'm going to get lost in it when I do settle in. I loved Verghese's My Own Country AND A Prayer for Owen Meany too. I'm a qualified fan of John Irving, although he has written a couple I just couldn't deal with. And on the subject of twins, if you haven't read The Other by Tom Tryon, you should. It's a thriller, of sorts, very psychological, and it involves twins. It may be hard to find; it was published in the 1970's sometime, I think.

Yeah for another lover of A Prayer for Owen Meany!

Becky, I'm ever so glad you are ok after the wicked storm.

I read A Prayer for Owen Meany a long time ago but I remember loving it and I'm probably due for a re-read. I will have to get to Cutting for Stone soon. I got it as a Christmas gift and just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hi Stasia, Linda, Linda, & Pat

I'm glad to know there are other people who are Owen Meany fans. Irving has written other things that I simply can't read (like A Son of the Circus and The Fourth Hand, but he was back to the "old" John Irving in his latest one, Last Night in Twisted River. I loved that one.

Last night I started Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor, published in 1955, winner of Pulitzer Prized in 1956. Sometimes I find books written in the 1940s & 1950s to be unreadable, just from the standpoint of style, but this one is quite readable, IMO. I think it's interesting that very often books written in the 1930s are far more readable that those written a decade or two later.

Wiki says that Kantor wrote more than 30 novels. Kantor grew up in Iowa and later lived in New Jersey, so although the book is about Andersonville, a southern Civil War prisoner of war camp, Kantor himself was a "damn Yankee." So we'll see how that goes.

He has a stylistic tic that annoys me in that he doesn't use quotation marks around dialogue. However, I suppose I can forge on--ha.

Why am I reading this book? Well, I got onto something of a Civil War jag when I was reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's book. Also, this book fulfills one of my goals of 2011, which is to read more American classic fiction--or "literary" fiction, if you will.

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day. God bless our troops. We're doing what has become "the usual" for summertime weekends: smoking a couple of chickens. I also made a to-die-for soup last night that we'll eat today. It's not easy to get "the guys" in my house to be overly excited about soup, but this one has grilled vegetables--corn off the cob, red peppers, and tomatoes--all ground up in my Vita-Mix machine. Oh, good. Bye for now.

That soup sounds delicious Becky.

I'll be interested in what you think of Andersonville. I'm hoping to get into a class in the fall on Civil War Literature.

Hope you have a great Memorial Day.

Hi Pat. Oh, a class about Civil War lit would be so interesting! I hope you get in, because I love following along when you post your notes here.

Same to you, good Mem Day.

I read Andersonville many years ago. One of my husband's ancestors was imprisoned there briefly. He built a home in NE Pennsylvania in the manner of a Southern mansion after he returned from the war. I always thought that was odd. We have a print of the famous picture of the stockade, which hung in my father-in-law's "office" until they sold that house in 1982.

I hope you have better luck with Andersonville than I did, Becky. I may give it another shot at some future date though.

>103 laytonwoman3rd:. Linda, I'm just now into the building of the stockade, just 80/760 into the book. People in my mom's family fought on both sides of that war--there are lots of them. One of the things I hope to do someday is to find some of their stories.

>104 alcottacre:. Well, Stasia, no doubt this is going to be a tough book to get through. There's the story of the prison camp, of course, and that's going to be bad enough; then Kantor's style is also a bit bizarre sometimes. I hate it that he doesn't use quotation marks with dialogue. He also sometimes goes into a bizarre flight of ideas sort of thing where he's difficult to follow. Having said that, however, I think the Georgia slave-owning family he's using as an anchor for the story is interesting and sound.

Along with Andersonville, I'm also reading James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. He's an academic historian who has spent a lifetime studying and writing about the Civil War, and his books and scholarship are highly praised.

I'll be following your comments with interest!

I very much liked Battle Cry of Freedom, Becky, but I bet it has been 10+ years since I read it.

Oh hooray--happy dance! One of my favorite writers has a new book coming out June 14, Tom Clancy, Against All Enemies with a new character, ex Navy SEAL Max Moore. One (more) reason to love summer.

DH just said to me, "Oh good, just what you need--another book." I told him he should be happy it's books I like and not shoes.

Andersonville. If you haven't read the book and think you might want to, I guess I should put a spoiler alert here at the top of my post. I might give away some basic plot details when I post about the book, so just be forewarned.

Well, it would be too facile to say that the book is depressing, and "depressing" might not even be the right word. It's not even possible to imagine what the year 1864 might have felt like to people, especially people like the southern family of this novel who had lost 3 of 3 sons in the war. The mother is descending into madness, and the father is trying to cope with the loss of his sons while at the same time watching his land be appropriated for this cesspool of a prison.

The book has me in its grip. I'm at 167/760, and if I could (although I can't), I would sit and read this thing all day.

Happy June!

P.S. I should also add that Battle Cry of Freedom is fabulous and compelling, and I'm making good progress on that one as well.

Becky, I look forward to your continuing comments on both Andersonville and Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm sort of doing a readalong on Battle Cry, although I've only read two chapters. I've pulled it off the shelf and put it on an end table. That should help move things along. Only 26 chapters to go!

Happy for you that an author you love is giving you a book this summer!

I also want to report on my encyclopedia-like newspaper history by Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. I've finally made it out of the Horace Greeley era and into the 1920s when Ogden Reid and his wife Helen Rogers Reid owned and worked on the paper.

One of my research interests is women working in journalism in about the 1920s, 1930s in New York, and I keep coming across women who worked at the Tribune. One of the main reasons that I think so many women had good jobs there was because of Helen's influence. Her story is really fascinating, and I'm finally getting into the heart of it now. She was a young nobody from Appleton, Wisconsin who graduated from Barnard College in 1903. Right out of college she took a job as a sort of social secretary to Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, who was the wife of Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the Tribune. Helen was a total dynamo, and she made the most of her job with Elizabeth Reid, to say the least. After almost a decade of working for Mrs. Reid, Helen married Elizabeth's son, Ogden Reid, who was a nice person but something of a wasterel and eventually an alcoholic. I think Elizabeth wanted Helen to marry her son because she hoped Helen would be "the woman behind the man" for her son. She was, and then some.

Anywho, if you were a young woman in the Twenties and Thirties in New York, a graduate from one of the colleges somewhere, and you wanted a job in journalism, the Tribune was the place to go.

That's what I'm doing today, anyway, trying my darndest to make some headway in this book, started the first part of March. Sigh.

Bravo for slogging onward. I gather that while the content is good the reading is slow?

You always make my non-fiction nose twitch, Becky. I almost started something about the Civil War, but I want Mayflower more right now. Besides, if I try *Battle Cry* this summer instead of Shelby Foote #1, I'll have you and the group read for additional info! And by the by, people with even a minor interest in SF should know that the C-Span interview with him in his home (all 3+ hours of it) is available online. I've just started watching, and it's fascinating!

Oh, my, Peggy...what a door you've opened. I had no idea all those interviews were available on-line. I'll never do another productive thing!

#108: DH just said to me, "Oh good, just what you need--another book." I told him he should be happy it's books I like and not shoes.

I need to use that one with my hubby!

Hi everyone. Yeah, Sib, this book about the Tribune is great, except he's included every scrap of information from his research. I try to skim where I can, since I'm mainly interested in the women, although I also want to understand the culture and politics of the paper.

How are you liking Mayflower, Peggy? I got about 1/3 into it last year--no, must have been the year before, because it was pre-LT--and then got distracted by something else--not that the book wasn't good, but something else carried me away. It happens. I wish I had finished the thing when I was reading it.

Peggy, are you planning to read all three of the Foote books?

Oh, wow, that interview is tempting. I'm with Linda--how will I get anything done now, knowing those things are out there. Don't you love the internet?

Andersonville is an amazing book. His style is a little odd sometimes, where he goes into sort of a fugue state/flight of ideas thing sometimes, which is how he handles shifts in time. But I just keep plowing along, and eventually he comes out of it. It's really not quite as odd as I make it out to be.

I've been so neglecting my gardens, again this year. I really need to get out there today, regardless of the heat, which is murder. One of my problems is that I seem to have lost my garden hat, which saddens me to no end. I'm one of those people who likes certain "stuff" just so. I've had this hat for probably 15 years or so, and it's literally one of my favorite garden tools. I've turned the house upside down looking for it, but it's just nowhere. I've tried to find one like it online, and again--zero. Where could the thing possibly be? Life is odd.

Reporting on the garden hat saga. Hooray, I found one that's very like the one I had: Scala Women's Cotton Big Brim with Inner Drawstring, sold at Amazon for $21.99, no extra shipping because I have AmazonPrime. This beauty comes in 23 colors (I chose coral, so that DH will be able to find me out in the back forty--haha). It might even be the same one, for all I know. The hat is SPF 50, the fabric weave makes it look like linen, it will hold it's shape, it has a fully adjustable brim. Oh rare. Full disclosure: I wore my other hat to Washington, D.C. last August. It was a lovely sage green color and I dressed it up and changed it around with scarves tied to the brim. It was so cute and functional, but I evidently left it on the train or something.

Finding the hat and then also finding 3 little moonflower vines happily growing outside, self-planted from last year--my goodness, I ought to go buy a lottery ticket or something.

If you win the lottery, keep us in mind, Becky! :)

I am glad you found a new garden hat that will suit. Just watch - the other one will now turn up just because you found a substitute.

Hi Stasia, I will share! (except I've never bought a lottery ticket in my life--ha). You're right about the hat. I absolutely expect to find it now that I've ordered a new one. At least they will be different colors. Ha.

I have not ever bought one either, Becky :)

I am a hat person and I read about the Scala with great interest!

We bought lottery tickets once in Philly about --- ten or fifteen years ago -- the pot got so huge it was ridiculous! It became the 'thing' to do, which of course just made it even bigger. What I enjoyed was that odd 'bonding' with just about everyone.

Oh, yes, I can see how what you describe would make it fun.

The hat: if this one is like the one I had (or, too much to hope for maybe, the same one that I had before), then it will be the perfect hat. I will report.

I'm no stranger to LT but this is my first year to take on any of the challenges or to follow their related threads. I just wanted to say first that I do so enjoy the setting of Penny's novels (reminds me of what I envision my mother's perfect place to live wouuld be). And second, love your photo of the mock orange. There is one just outside the front door of the farmhouse we just moved into, and I'm hoping the blooms look as fabulous as your do when spring rolls around.

Hi Jeanne! Thanks so much for visiting--you have a very interesting profile--and your kind words about the mock orange pic. Now that they've finished blooming, I'm supposed to trim out about 1/3 of the bush. I did this two years ago but not last year, so I may have a good bit of work on my hands. I have six of these beauties, planted five years ago when they were just little bushlings.

Here's my hat. I went to the website to check on the order, and it's already been shipped. Whoo-hoo! If this is like my other one, then the brim is completely adjustable. Cute.

VERY cute! Will you post a picture of Becky in Hat when it arrives?
(I walked into a discount store many years ago and asked a clerk whether they carried hats. "Like the kind you wear on your head?" she asked.)
Will I read all 3 volumes of the Foote? I want to.
First I need to finish either Pagans and Christians which is demanding and Mayflower which is good, or at least one of them. I'm about half through the one and barely into the other.

Edited for simple usage error. Gag.

Oh Jeeze, Peggy, I just fell off my chair laughing--"Like the kind you wear on your head?" That's priceless.

Omigod... what else would one DO with a hat? The imagination boggles.

I adored Cutting for Stone; gave it five stars and posted my longest-ever review on Amazon (some folks are still having a debate on the comments section, but I have no idea about what; I figure it's too much to expect me to moderate or engage on a review I wrote within a month of the book's hardcover appearance, about two years ago.)

Re Louise Penny -- there are ARCs/galleys of her new book available; some were handed out at BookExpo. I wasn't there and missed out, but the publicist tells me that "handed out" would be far too demure a phrase to describe the scrum. Blood was spilled, allegedly. Anyway, the fact that there are ARCs augurs well for them to become available on ER or Vine.

I'm quite happy to use ER, although since I only get one book a month, and it's the algorithm that picks, I try to be very careful with what I request; I'll look for things that otherwise I might have to wait to get from the library, or that I know I'm interested in reading. On Vine, I'm more willing to take a flyer, as I get 4 books a month, so one can always be so bad I don't even want to finish and review it.

#127: I admit I would be tempted to ask her 'Where do you where your hats if not on your head?'

That is truly priceless. I suppose you could have quipped, well actually, I'm hoping to find a rabbit in one.

I am reading the Verghese now. Wow!

It was so hot last night, and our compressor or something flipped out. I told my DH that it was 85 degrees in the house, but this was at midnight and he was too sound asleep to wake up to check it out. My young Lab, Docker, was collapsing with the heat, so we went down to the basement and I read my book, Andersonville until the heat woke up DH. He flipped a switch, everything was fixed, and at 2:00 a.m. I went back to bed. Consequently, I got a whole lot of reading done last night on this book. It's an amazing book, but if you don't "do" tough reads, then this one isn't for you. I'm at 346/760, and I'm about to go hunker down in the basement (cool) and do a little reading. Dinner is under control, soup is on (summer soup, requested by the guys in my house--what a surprise that one is!), and I'm ready to take a break from a hot, busy day.

Hope everyone is having a great Saturday.

I'm sorry for the misery, Becky. Getting to read a lot is good though, right. And hooray for switch-flippers! I don't need to put *A'ville* back on my list, but I remember less about it than I want to. On the other hand, rereading is one reason that I give for owning books.....

ETA: I wish I had been quick enough to respond with rabbit in hat. As it was, the only thing I could do was feebly agree that that was the exact kind of hat I was looking for.
(My mother had an eccentric friend who was shopping in that same store when she noticed that the clerk helping her looked like the family that had run the fruit stand across the river for decades. So Lillian asked, "Are you an Easter?" The clerk responded, "An Easter what?"
Now I have finished all my Nichols stories.)

Is that why I keep them?

Oh summer soup! Do you have 'The Silver Palate' -- there is a watercress/zucchini based soup (good hot or cold) that we call 'green soup' and invariably convinces people (quite wrongly) that I am a whizz bang cook. I like the grilled veg idea a lot. Haven't done that, or, maybe just by accident w. leftovers, but not on purpose, if that makes any sense.......

Sorry it is so hot, thank heavens you have the basement! It's been in the forties at night here, but you don't really want to know that.

I feel the same way as you Peggy -- I know I read it, I have a few little images in my head.....

The Silver Palate--no I don't have that book, but I will check it out. You're right--ha--I don't want to know about your night of forties temps. It's going to be high 90s all this week, not cooling off all that much at night. We broke a record yesterday with 97 degrees--a record since 1915 or something. Ye gads. I would have far less problem with these temps in the 90s if this were August or September, since by that time you know that it's just a matter of hanging in there for awhile and the temp will break. But the first week of June? meh.

Anywho, it's Sunday, so I'm going back to my Sunday read, which currently is Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. So far, neither is this book, although I'm {still} not very far into it. He just has such a snarky tone in this thing: "I once wrote a book about George Orwell, who might have been my hero if I had heroes..." --he just constantly throws in those kinds of zingers. Tiresome.

I think I'm still in the first chapter, although I don't know for sure because I'm reading it on my Kindle and they don't seem to have provided a TOC. However, I assume I'm in Chapter 1 because I'm only 5% into this thing. I think I already mentioned somewhere that I think the best part of this book might be all the other books and writers he mentions.

Although maybe I like his snarky attitude when I agree with him--ha, OK, that's probably true. He mentions the "fatuous" Church of England who has "cheaply disgarded the splendid liturgy of the King James Bible and the Cranmer prayer book"--ditto the Episcopal Church in the United States (aka ECUSA).

Oh, he does have such a way with words. I can't be upset with him for long. He makes mention of a reading he did at his father's funeral: "I chose this because of its haunting and elusive character, which will be with me at the last hour, and for its essentially secular injunction, and because it shone out from the wasteland of rant and complaint and nonsense and bullying which surrounds it."

OK, I realize that I should quote what he was reading from, it's only fair to people not reading along with me:

This is Saint Paul (or "Saint Paul," as Hitchens writes it) to the Philippians, 4:8. Finally, Brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Happy Sunday, and happy reading.

So DH was going through a box this morning, and said, "Oh, here's something you would probably use"--and threw me a gift card from B&N--$50! Giggle. Yeah, I think I can probably do something with that.

Becky.. and others... thanks for the laugh(s) about your hat. I'm glad you found a replacement. You'll need it for sure in this hot weather. Did I miss spring?

I've love to find a $50 gift card for books. Alas, all mine were used up in the Borders' closing.

Happy Sunday to you! Stay inside until your new hat is delivered.

I do like that Saint Paul segment, and Hitchens's comment on it. Because at the heart of all religious injunctions, aren't those sentiments there? And aren't they just as convincing to those of us without strong religious faith? Because they remind us we have a duty of care in the world we inhabit. I think that one reason religion has been so enduring is that it provides a context for this -- someone whose authority cannot ever be questioned, because it is divine, telling us how to behave, that there are rules that MUST be followed. And at the core of all religions is the one rule, in one shape or another, that of "do unto others..." Any theological edict that strays away from these principles is, IMO, one that man has created out of fear, hatred or arrogance, and not divinely-inspired theology. Here endeth the lecture....

>138 Chatterbox:. Well, I'm still just starting Chapt. 2, so it's not possible yet to see where Hitchens is going with this. One of the things he says in Chapt. 1 is that religion endures, in fact will never die out, because of our fear of death, fear of the dark, of the unknown, and of each other. So if I'm reading him right, he would claim that ALL religions are created out of fear.

I don't know if Hitchens would say that "we have a duty of care" in the world. I don't know, but I sort of doubt it. He says that he's perfectly happy to grant people their religion, to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, etc: "I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition--which is that they in turn leave me alone" (emphasis his).

I'm not in Hitchens's camp on this subject, but I do appreciate his point of view and I'm particularly liking his references to so many different philosophers, literary figures, religious leaders, etc. He's very tough--makes me think, stretches my brain. And sometimes he just makes me fall off my chair laughing--calling today's Anglican Church "a pathetic bleating sheep." {His words about the subject are funny; the "pathetic" state of the Anglican Church I definitely do not find funny at all.}

I'm sitting here wondering if it's possible I won't finish a single book during the month of June. Ack. My reading time has become fractured--I'm down to maybe a third of what I was reading compared to this time last year. I have a big project that's taking a lot of my focus and energy, but--even so--I still need to read.

I just took stock of my reading for June, and I think--ahem--I may have discovered at least part of my problem. I'm the type who normally has several books going at once, but right now I'm reading 5 books. Four out of five of those books are 700 pages or more, and one of the four is over 800 pages. Only one of them is in the 300 page range. Good grief, what am I thinking? Well, it's clear I'm reading as if I were still spending as much time on reading as I was last year.

So I've come up with a strategy for the rest of June. It's nothing deep or particuarly brilliant, but it is a plan. Now, wait for it...I'm going to finish these books. Additionally, if there's one that isn't worth the time, then I'll abandon the darn thing. Simple. Get these books off of the "currently reading" list. Move them along.

What I'm reading:

Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor. This is my current AmLit read, doubling as my nighttime fiction book. Now I know why I tend to read lighter fare at night. However, if I don't read this one at night, then I'll still be reading it in August, and I think that would be bad for my mental health.

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. This is my current "Sunday" read. I'm giving it almost no time, so after about a month I'm still in Chapt. 2.

Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson. An excellent one-volume hx of the Civil War, something I've not read enough about. I'd like to read Shelby Foote's 3-volume series, but I might have to plan for that next winter.

The Peabody Sisters, by Megan Marshall. A wonderful group biography of "three women who ignited American Romanticism." It's a fascinating read, but the tiny font is daunting. I ought to put all the others away and read just this one, although that's how I feel about all of these books.

The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, by Richard Kluger. Thank you, Mr. Kluger, for putting EVERY FACT discovered by you in your research into this book. If there's one book I'd like to throw out the window right now, it would be this one. And yet the information in it is excellent.

I admit that I'm probably with Hitchens on his belief in the core reason for religion's enduring power -- at least in general terms. But rather than fear, I'd suggest it's a desire to provide an explanation for the utterly unknowable. As a species, we don't tolerate unanswerable questions very well.

Indeed, as I think I mentioned somewhere else recently, it was reading in anthropology about the ways different societies developed explanations for death and religious supports for taboos and commandments that made me less likely to have faith in any specific religious tradition. If anything made me an agnostic, that would probably be it.

My goodness Becky! That is a weighty list indeed. I wouldn't be doing very well with that many long and demanding books either. I've found I get very mopey if I'm stuck reading the same books for too long, even if I like them. Finishing things gives me a sense of progress, illusory as it is!

I think "mopey" is the perfect word.

>141 Chatterbox:. If anything made me an agnostic, that would probably be it. So then does that mean you're not? But you're leaning that way? Or you would like to be? Or....? I guess I just assumed you were either an agnostic or an atheist.

Much as I loathe categories, I'd put myself in the agnostic camp. Being an atheist would require the level of certainty that faith requires, ironically enough. Faith isn't something you can whistle up and have it appear -- something I think the most avid proselytizers completely miss/don't get. I've had people tell me "you just have to believe." Well...

Hat update. See #119, 126. I knew, by the price, that the new hat I was buying wasn't likely to be the same as my original hat. This new one is like a cheap knockoff of the other one--same design, lighter, cheaper material. The band adjusts with a cord inside the hat band, but this cord is 1/4" in diameter where the other one was very thin, so with this one you end up with a noticeable lump in the hatband. And oh my, the color--CORAL, not coral. However, for the price it's a fine hat. It will stay on my head, it covers my face, and it looks decent. The material is supposed to be SPF 50.

The real issue is, now that I have a hat again, I have a whole lot of work to do outside. And evidently we went right from May weather to deepest, hottest, nastiest August. I think it was 90 degrees when I went to bed last night. Some people like the heat. I do not, not particularly.

Sorry about the hat, and the heat. I'm with you - 90 degrees is not even for the birds. We've had the same sudden transition here, and it's no fun, even in a city full of airconditioning.

140 (labwriter): That's quite a list! I got myself into a similar predicament in May, a bunch of books begun, all perfectly decent and plausible selections, none quite suited my mood, and so much else was going on that some days I read nothing. Toward the end of the month, I counted up the remaining pages, set a goal per day, and plowed through. Some began to grab me as I read. Some I skimmed. Does skimming count as reading? Yes it does. There is no test at the end.

145 (Chatterbox): Being an atheist would require the level of certainty that faith requires, ironically enough.
Exactly why I call myself agnostic. There's a level beyond which I don't know how to think about things.

Leslie D. Weatherhead wrote The Christian Agnostic sometime in the 60's or 70's. I found the basic concept enormously helpful: believe the foundation of the faith that Jesus died and was raised. Put what you can't deal with aside. Of course, I realize that the resurrection is chief stumbling block, but it was enlightening to me as a person of faith.

But oh, Peggy, haven't you heard, Christians don't have to believe in anything anymore. Just ask the current presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), Katharine Jefferts Schori. I left the church when this woman was elected in 2006--and she's "it" for 10 years. By that time there will be nothing left of ECUSA to return to.

Her sermons make no mention of the cross, Jesus' death or resurrection, she never uses the term "Gospel," she doesn't mention Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, although sometimes she does use the term "spirit." She will never refer to Jesus as "Lord" and in many sermons she has been known to avoid saying "Christ" or "Christian" altogether--but I did once hear her refer to "Mother Jesus." Likewise, there's no sin or hell or judgment in her vocabulary--no "salvation." She avoids words like "faith" or "belief" or "trust." Her concerns are those of the UN Millenium Goals and other ideas that she shares with social welfare agencies. She would make a wonderful Unitarian--and I say that with great respect for Unitarians. The tragedy is, she's trying to make the Episcopal Church into something resembling a sectarian feelgood social network agency.

So see, you don't have to believe in any of it. To be a person of faith in KJS's world is completely meaningless.

Do I sound bitter. Yes, I am, a bit.

#145 Being an atheist would require the level of certainty that faith requires, ironically enough. That's what bothers me about Hitchens. His atheistic fervor is religious to the extreme. I heard him speak once, and while I find him brilliant, and well-informed, his superior attitude is a real put-off. Feels like he's on a crusade, which I suppose he would say he is.

>151 laytonwoman3rd:. That's how Hitchens comes across in the first chapter of God Is Not Great--if he were religious, he'd be called a religious zealot. Atheist zealot? Haha. I still like him, though. I don't mind his extreme fervor. What really annoys me is wishy-washy, especially about things that matter.

The subtitle of the book is How Religion Poisons Everything, so he doesn't believe that religion is just some benign force out there. He truly believes it to be malevolent. Consequently, I think he does feel like he's on a crusade--to convince people that it's a good thing not to believe. Now whether he goes so far as to try to convince believers that they're all wrong, I don't know--I'm not that far into the book yet.

>151 laytonwoman3rd: Agreed!
Interestingly enough (although I can't claim to have read the book, some 75'ers did this year, I think) Julian of Norwich also refers to "Jesus our Mother" --- think "born again." Nothing new under the sun!
And we know about the church at Laodicea!

Yes--Laodicia--great point, Peggy.

You know, I have no problem with the "Jesus our Mother" language or image coming from a Julian of Norwich. One of my favorite books is The Forgotten Desert Mothers, by Laura Swan, and I'm sure that if I were to look through that book, I would find the ammas speaking that way, or at least I imagine they might. But there's just something so offensive about KJS's use of the term, probably because she does it not out of a sense of compassion, love, and inclusiveness, seeing a dual nature in Christ, but instead from the point of view of "fixing" what she sees as a male-dominated system with her own "politically correct" agenda. Yes, that's one of the things that annoys me about the woman--her injecting a political point of view into everything, even her sermons. And of course, her world view is "correct"--based on what, exactly? Meh. The woman is a disaster.

Reading all the above with interest. A while ago I encountered this poem and was blown away:

IF THERE IS NO GOD

Even if there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper.
Nor is he permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying there is no God.

~Czeslaw Milosz

I've seen slightly different translations -- some have the Even, some don't -- I like the Even. But it shows the perils of translation, without the Even, it is a much tougher poem. Shows what wimp I am, I guess.

I like that very much, Sib.

Me too.

The first time I read it I had chills all over -- and it still manages to do that for me.

#155 I marked it as a favorite so I don't lose it. Thanks for posting it.

>150 labwriter: De-lurking for a minute here to say that this article I read yesterday makes perfect sense now. I didn't see how this could possibly happen but now, considering your comments about the Episcopal bishop, it makes perfect sense Becky.

>160 brenzi:. This is an example of the schism that's going on in the Episcopal Church and one parish's response of how they're dealing with what they see as heresy coming from the presiding bishop. The media want to make it all about ordaining openly gay priests, but that really isn't the major issue--but it makes a nice sound bite and also makes the people leaving the church out to be bigots--an easy cheap shot.

It's heartbreaking what some parishes are going through. When a parish decides to leave the diocese (a diocese is just a group of parishes that is overseen by a bishop--like the Diocese of Missouri, for example, which is overseen by Missouri's bishop, and the presiding bishop is the head over all of them), then they leave EVERYTHING behind, including the building and its contents. They walk away from all of it. Imagine. Yes, I know, "the Church" isn't a particular building, but it's a very tough deal, especially when you walk away from something like the pair of stained glass windows given for your great-grandparents by your grandfather. Awful.

It wouldn't have to be this way if the parish could negotiate to buy their property, but Katharine Jefferts Schori has taken a very hard-line stand, suing parishes, winning in court (she has spent a lot of money for pricey lawyers), and then turning around and selling a building to another denomination--or to the city, that turns it into a bar, or whatever. As far as I'm concerned, the woman is the very personification of evil.

Andersonville is a book I continue to feel a great deal of ambivalence about. It's amazing to me that this thing won a Pulitzer Prize, especially in 1956. Having been a kid in the Fifties, and then especially looking back on that time from the perspective of the these recent years, it all seems like such Leave-It-To-Beaverland. Yet this book is very, very hard to read sometimes. The effects of scurvy alone on these poor men is just not to be believed. Anyway, I'm getting through it--almost, but not quite, to the home stretch--573/760.

One of the reasons I'm not getting much reading done is the work I'm doing outside. I finally decided that it was futile to hope for cooler temps, so I'm gardening despite the high 90s temps, and I also try to get outside early. Even so, I end up pretty much completely fried after a couple of hours. The upside of summer gardening/yard work is that it helps to take off those winter-sitting-inside-at-the-computer pounds. Whoo-hoo.

The fifties were so schizoid -- and there was a huge amount of angst around due to the Cold War - maybe a book like this one was weirdly catharctic?

I always vow, when it is hot, that I will do everything early, and then........ so I am very admiring that not only you are doing the work but begin rewarded by slimming down! What could be more rewarding -- gorgeous flowers and sveltitude.

Well, I am such a slug all winter long that the bar is set pretty low for increasing my activity--haha.

Yes, I think you're right, Lucy, about the schizoid Fifties. I need to be done with this book. Will press on.

Wow, I LOVE that Milosz poem... thanks for posting!

I think I would have a very hard time shifting from being Anglican to being Catholic. Even high-church C of E adherents would have to acknowledge doctrinal issues such as papal infallibility. How will the parish deal with issues like birth control? And I have to blink at this concession toward married priests who convert -- and I know this has happened before. If a married priest is OK, then it is OK, period. It's a matter of LOGIC. If chastity is a requirement to become a Catholic priest, and it's so ferociously important, than it should be an absolute standard. Otherwise, as you say, Becky, it's being wishy-washy on key doctrinal points.

I can see why many Episcopalians would be peeved. What latitude is there within the Episcopal church for bishops of individual dioceses to vary from the line set by the presiding bishop? Within England, for instance, it's still possible for individual clergy to use the old Book of Common Prayer in many services in place of the revised prayer book. From a purely literary view, I love that.

You might be interested in reading this series of books by Elizabeth Pewsey, the Mountjoy novels. While she takes a very scathing view of self-important pompous and self-righteous people, that extends to the "happy clappy" gang in the C of E. She sets the novels in Eyot, a fictional version of York, and there are people like Canon Holigost who want to ban traditional church music in favor of... well, you get the point. Her underlying agenda, in the novels, is that whatever people choose to do and how they choose to interact with each other is their responsibility, and that they need to do it without peering over their neighbors' shoulder or imposing their viewpoint on others. Kind of in the spirit of the Milosz poem.

I agree with Hitchens to some extent -- that religion can be a force for evil. Look at the Inquisition; the Crusades; the anti-gay campaigns that tacitly condone violence; the open violence at abortion clinics in "the name of God" -- or, going further afield, terrorism or violence by most religious groups in the name of God, from the Zionists who murdered Rabin to the Palestinian terrorists; the Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs literally at each others' throats in India, etc. But where I differ from Hitchens is that religious faith can be a force for good, when it pushes people to listen to their better angels and refrain from judging others, from violence, etc, and when it pushes them to acts of courage and kindness. There are few people I admire more than those who behave selflessly; chunks of that admiration can vanish when they insist they are only doing it because God tells them to. (Eg, a woman I saw who gave a woman at the cash register in front of her $5 to cover the balance of her grocery bill, but then told her she needed to thank God and pray...) I rather like the idea that I understand is at the heart of Jewish philanthropy -- a good deed done in silence is more meritorious than one done in hopes of recognition, even if that recognition is requested (ostensibly) for God.

'nuff said! Rant over. Returning to regularly-scheduled coughing and sneezing.

Well, none of that sounded particularly like a rant to me. Rather thoughtful and restrained, in fact. It's such a pleasure to be in company where this subject can be discussed without resorting to righteousness and puffery. Thanks for giving us all your space, Becky.

#165: that religious faith can be a force for good, when it pushes people to listen to their better angels and refrain from judging others, from violence, etc, and when it pushes them to acts of courage and kindness

As a Christian, I get very tired of people pointing out how bad religion is, what bad things have been done in religion's name etc, completely overlooking the good things that religious faith has done and continues to do. I am not denying that bad things are done in the name of religion, just wishing that there was a bit more balanced approach.

Stasia, just a personal thought here, but I wonder how much of that "all the evils of the world are due to religion" stuff is a reaction to the other side; to people of faith making outsize claims for their faith of choice and ignoring the downside? Few religious or anti-religious zealots are able to view their own side of the argument dispassionately, whether out of willful blindness or defensiveness. Any emotional engagement with the subject works against being dispassionate. And simply speaking personally, the one thing calculated to get on my nerves are those who believe that having religious faith boosts them to a higher moral level; that it trumps how they live in the world and interact with others.

#168: simply speaking personally, the one thing calculated to get on my nerves are those who believe that having religious faith boosts them to a higher moral level

It gets on my nerves too, Suz!

I agree with you - as with everything else in life, when the emotions are engaged it is impossible to view other sides of an argument dispassionately.

>165 Chatterbox:. As a non-practicing Episcopalian, I'm not peeved, I'm heartbroken, over what's going on in my church today. I guess, in a nutshell, it's the secularization of the church that bothers me the most. If you follow the preaching of super-smart Katharine Jefferts Schori, you don't have to believe in anything at all in order to be part of "her" Episcopal church. That's quite different from struggling with the issues, which I imagine all of us do to one degree or another.

The schism that's going on in the Episcopal Church (I call it ECUSA--some call it TEC) is complicated, because some parishes have decided to become part of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and some have joined the Anglican Church in America (ACA)--two very different entities. I think it's parishes in the ACA who have petitioned to become part of the Roman Catholic Church, the Maryland parish in the link above (at #160) being the first to do so. I think there are about 100 parishes in ACA and probably about 700 or so in ACNA.

Whatever an individual parish decides to do, the issue becomes more clear when you put a face on it--here's what one parish has recently gone through in finally deciding to end their court fight with Katharine Jefferts Schori and TEC. The description of their "farewell to the building" service made me very sad and yet I was heartened that these people are willing to stand firm in their beliefs. (Note in the blog article that even though TEC--i.e. KJS and her legal minions--wasn't able to sell the church building, at the same time they were unwilling to rent it to the parish who once inhabited the building. This is the sort of nasty hardball that TEC plays--and yes, I do so hope that one day KJS will have to answer to a higher authority for what she's done on her watch.)

The Diocese of Missouri, where I live, is a very liberal disocese. Most people in my former parish are quite pleased with KJS and what she's doing in TEC. I would add that there are also many who are either clueless about the issues involved or who simply don't care.

I'm here to report that I'm at 670/760 in Andersonville--so whoo-hoo less than 100 pages to go. I'm glad to have read this book, but I will be even happier to have it finished.

Cheers for you in the last lap.

Absolutely! I know the feeling well......maybe even had it with *A'ville*!

*Cheering Becky on to the finish line*

Hooray. Thanks everyone, it's done! I'm giving it 4 stars. I have absolutely no idea how to rate such a book, so I'm going with with my gut--4.

Andersonville--why did I read this book? This book has been sitting on my shelf for years. I briefly tried it once before and got nowhere in it. At the present time, I'm on something of a Civil War reading jag, plowing through (albeit slowly) McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Before the year is out, I would also like to at least start Shelby Foote's trilogy. I had already read Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I thought I would try this one as a work of fiction to go along with the historical books. This is also part of my effort to read more American literature this year. So I can put another one into that column.

I've been thinking about the next AmLit book I'd like to read. It might be a re-read of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. I have an excellent scholarly edition that I'd like to read that contains copious notes on the text plus a historical essay about the writing of the book. It's probably been about fifteen years since I've read this one, so it's due for another go-around. I think it's one of Cather's best books, probably my favorite. The only problem with this one is that it is another monster of a book, so I may wait awhile before I start the thing.

This is Sunday, so I need to go read a chapter or two in my Sunday book, the one by Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Happy Sunday, everyone.

Kudos to you on finishing Andersonville, Becky!

oh my I love that Cather -- I might be tempted. My good copy is however packed up in the storage unit, HOWEVER, maybe this is the impetus I need?????

Good luck with the Hitchens! A lovely book I would like to recommend is Buddhism for Beginners by Stephen Batchelor.

Becky, I vote for the re-read of Death Comes for the Archbishop. I read that last year and loved it and would consider re-reading it soon if you and Lucy did one of your mini GRs with it. I'd love to do that with the input from the two of you.

Hi Pat. That sounds like fun, and it would be great to have your input on the book too! Maybe late summer? Early fall? Let's definitely keep it in mind.

Sounds good to me.

I just saw your hollyhocks. They're beautiful. I need to check the beginning of your thread more often.

I love the hollyhocks too. They grew with great abandon up the side of my grandmother's house. My brother and his family live there now, and they remodeled a few years ago by putting an addition on that side. No more hollyhocks, thought I. But I gave my sister-in-law too little credit. She had saved the seeds for years; re-planted, and sure enough, they grace the new side just as well as they did the old!

>181 laytonwoman3rd:. That's a nice story about your SIL and the hollyhocks. I grew up with these growing in every vacant lot (wow, there were actually vacant lots back then) and alley when I was a kid in Denver. I really love them, although I've allowed the ones I had to sort of be overtaken by a couple of rather aggressive plants in my garden. I need to get my hollyhock patch reestablished.

I love the photos of hollyhocks!

Hollyhocks! Yes!

I'm giving the Christopher Hitchens book a little bit of time this morning, since I didn't get a chance to read anything yesterday. DH has gone a little nuts with the outside projects lately, and I was out helping him. We have two smallish elms out in the back that are dead from Dutch Elm Disease (that again--I lived in Denver in the Sixties when all of our elms died from that), so we're having them taken out. It's a part of the yard hidden by the garage, so it's typically just ignored. Well...he decided to take out the bushes and vines that have grown near the power lines (yes, our power lines are still above ground in our neighborhood and probably always will be). So now we have a monster pile of limbs ready for my tree guys to take away when they take out the elms and also a mulberry that was planted too close to the sycamore and is now just making a mess of itself. Anyway, that's why I got no reading done yesterday. Thankfully DH is back to work on his own stuff this morning--ha.

So I'm still only on CHAPTER TWO of the Hitchens, God Is Not Great: Chapt 2 is "Religion Kills." This chapter is about the bad things done in the name of religion. Says Hitchens, Well, I can stay just within the letter "B" in places where I've personally experienced "bad things" (I'm paraphrasing, obviously): Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. Then he goes on to chronicle all the horrors that religion has brought to these areas. As if no bad thing would ever have occurred in the history of the world without having religion behind it. It sort of reminds me of the argument that if we got rid of all the guns, then there would be no murders. No, if we got rid of guns, then people would kill each other with knives and baseball bats.

And this is interesting: "I can think of a handful of priests and bishops and rabbis and imams who have put humanity ahead of their own sect or creed. History gives us many other such examples....But this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion." So evidently if anything good comes from religion, in Hitchens world, then it comes, not from a place of religious belief, but instead from a place of purely human values and concerns that has nothing to do with religion. I'm not sure how you can know another person's heart in that way, Christopher.

I find his arguments to be rather childish in his need to see everything as black and white, with no shades of gray inbetween--"religion poisons everything." I guess actually I should say, he sees them as black and blacker. Hitchens on Billy Graham: "a man whose record of opportunism and anti-Semitism is in itself a minor national disgrace." I think Hitchens is suffering from deranged anti-religion syndrome. I'm afraid that rather than an intelligent discussion of atheism, instead this book is just going to be tedious throughout.

I don't exactly know what Hitchens is trying to do in this book. I think his aim is not to persuade, but instead to get some things off of his chest. Whatever. I'm wondering if his book The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever would be any better?

I'm reading Battle Cry of Freedom at night, trying to make some progress in this one. The first 300 or so of 850 pages are about the events and politics leading up to the war. I'm only at 145/850, so I have a long way to go with this one. I think I'm at a point where I rather desperately need to find something entertaining to read.

>186 labwriter:: Becky, you're further along in Battle Cry than I am. If you want an entertaining read about Civil War stuff, I highly recommend Confederates in the Attic. It makes me smile just to think of it.

I probably wouldn't like the Hitchens book. I also seem to have abandoned my Spong book.

My moonflower is starting to put out some side shoots. Yay!

Thanks for the tip about Confeds in the Attic, Donna. My moonflower vines are growing slowly, but I remember the same thing from last year--and then at some point they just took off. Glad yours are growing well. I loved these flowers last year.

I can see that pricing of Kindle books is going to be a continuing aggravation. I was going to buy Elly Griffiths second novel in the series, The Janus Stone, but Amazon is charging $14.30 for the Kindle edition, even though the book is out in paperback. Phooey--I won't do it.

Instead I'm going to get the second book in the Lincoln Rhymes series by Jeffery Deaver, The Coffin Dancer, 1998. I enjoyed the first one in this series. The Kindle edition of this one is $7.99, a price I can tolerate.

*sigh* It's too hot here for hollyhocks to thrive. I tried very hard as a young bride to make them grow. Nope. So I'll enjoy yours - thanks for posting the picture, Becky.

>190 LizzieD:. Huh. That surprises me, Peggy, since hollyhocks do well here and we certainly have hot, hot weather. Well, I imagine it could be a combination of things that makes them happy or unhappy. I'm sort of surprised that anything that thrives in Colorado, like hollyhocks, also grows well here. I hate it when people here in Missouri plant blue spruce, for example. The poor dears, while they do grow, they don't thrive, as you say, and they always seem to me to be choking on the heat and humidity. I wish people here wouldn't plant them.

That's like lilacs in Philadelphia; they always bothered me -- the blooms were always withered in about two or three days, just too hot -- Here the blooms last for almost three weeks.

Interesting that hollyhocks have a heat limit.

Beautiful hollyhocks, Becky!

Well, heck, I seem to have some sort of overuse injury to my right forearm, I'm thinking because I've been on the computer too much lately. It seems that typing on the keyboard and using the mouse seems to aggravate it--so if "this" makes it hurt, then quit doing "this." Great diagnosis. Haha. So I may not be around for a few days, since icing this thing and staying off the computer is helping. Happy reading, everyone.

Well, heck, indeed. Catch it quickly, and it should resolve, so you can return to the keyboard, and get it aggravated again in no time! Reading isn't problematic, is it? I have a touch of carpal tunnel syndrome which occasionally makes it hard to hold onto a book. These things should NEVER happen to us!

#194: Sorry to hear about the problem, Becky. Like Linda, I have CTS so I can relate.

Mice are the devil.

Ouch, Becky... Think about getting a trackball mouse of some kind. As long as it's properly positioned (ergonomically right height, etc.), all you are doing is resting your wrist and using your fingers to manipulate a little marble-like ball set in some kind of optical scanner. I find it much more efficient, and more precise, to boot. I switched to these when I was having problems of the kind you describe, and it was marvellous the difference that made. (it also helped that I got a really cool chair with adjustable arms, but I had to leave that behind when I left the WSJ bureau, so...) I now buy my own trackball mice, and assuming you don't have real-life cats prepared to knock them onto the floor and chase the round ball into a convenient dark hole, you're fine!

Hi everyone, and thanks for the good words. You make a good point, Suzanne, about a trackball mouse. I'll look into one. I think I injured my arm using my weedwhacker two days in a row. Then the mouse/keyboard stuff aggravates the injury. It helped yesterday to stay off the computer, and I actually got some reading done.

I'm working my way through a monster group biog, The Peabody Sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia. Elizabeth never married but instead was an educator and big in the Transcendental movement. Mary was married to Horace Mann. And Sophia was married to Nathaniel Hawthorne. This is Boston/New England between the Revolution and the Civil War. It's a good book that I haven't given much time to in the past 6 weeks or so, although Marshall's writing is a bit dry. I just wish they would print these darned books with larger print. I guess my eyes are giving out, even with my glasses; the small print never bothered me when I was young, but I find that I have less and less patience with it. I got a lot done on it yesterday when I stayed off the computer.

Oh dear, yesterday I got the new Tom Clancy in the mail, Against All Enemies. Talk about a monster book! This one would be a good book to read on the Kindle. The physical book is large, but the print is good-sized and there's a surprising amount of white space on each page. So why did they make this book so huge? Dunno. Anyway, Clancy is the perfect summer read, so now I have the entertainment fiction I was looking for. The problem with that is, will I get any other reading done?

Lucy (Sibyx) and I are going to read a biog together of Emily Dickinson--White Heat, about the friendship between ED and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This one is by Brenda Wineapple and gets rave reviews. If anyone is interested in joining us, watch for the link to the group read. I'm waiting to get this in the mail from Amazon.used.

Well, I'm finding that my day off the computer has helped out my arm, a lot (!), so I'm going to do it again today. Happy reading everyone. I hope the weather is nice where you are. We have had some delightful days here the past few days, in the 70s and 80s instead of those horrible 90s.

For cripes' sake. I just lost a long post that I wrote here, and for reasons of wanting to stay off the computer, I'm not going to repeat myself. Thanks for the good words, everyone, and Suzanne--good point about the trackball mouse. I think that would help a lot. Bye for now.

OH, it looks like I didn't lose it after all. What's with LT this morning?

#200 Whatever it is, it's not personal: it did it to me on another thread.

Hope your arm is soon better.

#200, 201---it's the solar flares. We're blaming everything on the solar flares right now.

Good luck with resting the arm. I can see how weed-whacking can complicate the normal strains on the arm and elbow. But then again, look at the reading you're doing.

Sympathies for the small print. I gave away a perfectly good 40 year old edition of Moby Dick because the font was so small, and bought myself another edition with more human-size type. I suspect this would be another book that reads well on the Kindle, and the illustrations are all black-and-white anyway. Inching closer to that type of device.

Close right in on it, Judy! I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to read chunksters on Kindle!
Becky, take care of yourself! I had noted the Peabody sisters before, and now you're making them practically irresistable - and you know what happened with the Mitfords!!!!!

Hope the arm feels better SOON -- I've had some issue on and off this spring from overuse, so I am very sympathetic -- and it is amazing how much other stuff one can get done with less computer...... sigh.

I enjoyed The Peabody Sisters when I read it a couple of years back, Becky. I hope you like it - although it is a pretty hefty book to deal with when you have arm issues already :)

Catherine, Linda, Judy, Peggy, Lucy, Stasia--thanks for visiting and for your kind words. My arm is hugely better today, swelling gone, pain mostly gone, so I guess staying away from the computer was a good strategy.

I'm using up a whole lot of time and energy and focus on another project, which is another reason I'm not around here much. The book that's really captured my attention in the last few days has been the one about the Peabody Sisters. The farther into it I get, the more I like it.

If you don't know Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, you can do a quick read about her here at the Wiki site.

The Peabody Sisters is about all three sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia, but clearly Elizabeth, the oldest sister, is the star of the show. She's a brilliant woman, but I also suspect that she's what might be called either "eccentric" or even, in today's vernacular, a whack job. The biographer, Megan Marshall, keeps Elizabeth's quirkiness to a minimum, which she should, since there are plenty of other biographers of contemporaries of Elizabeth who are more than willing to openly mock her. For example, although she is clearly a person of formidable intellect, one of the biographers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edwin Haviland Miller--his book, Salem Is My Dwelling Place--makes Elizabeth out, in almost every instance, to be something of a kindly busybody and a buffoon. He invites his readers to laugh at this woman in almost every entry about her. Haha, how ridiculous, a single woman with plans and strategies.

Anywho, I'm hugely enjoying the book, and although I'm only at 192/456, I highly recommend this book.

I just bought a great cookbook: Power Foods, put out by the editors of Whole Living magazine. Wow. There are some really super-looking recipes in this book. I'm making an effort to eat "real food" (vs highly processed food), because I think that the more of this kind of food I eat, the better it is for my weight. The power food recipes in this book are made with a group of 38 of the "healthiest" ingredients. The recipes look really good. Just paging through the book, I quickly came across 10 or 15 or so that I look forward to trying. All the recipes include calories, fat, carbs, protein, and fiber, so I can easily use all of these with my Weight Watcher program. I went back to WW about four weeks ago, since exercise alone isn't getting the job done. But that's all I want to say about that. I highly recommennd this book whether or not you're interested in losing weight. I'll report back when I've made some of the recipes.

#208: I just finished up a good one along the same lines, Becky. It is called The 200 Superfoods That Will Save Your Life. I will have to look for Power Foods. Thanks for that recommendation.

I'm hugely enjoying the newest Tom Clancy book, Against All Enemies. As with any Clancy novel, you have to be willing to be whiplashed around through the storylines. Keeping all the names of the characters straight is also a challenge. I can remember when it was the Russian names in Clancy novels that gave me trouble. In this one, he has the Taliban working together with Mexican cartels. If you read this book, prepare to have nighmares about what's going on at our southern border. You know the saying...you just can't make this stuff up.

Father's Day dinner is today, so here's the menu:

Steak out on the grill (a given)

...and my contribution, three recipes from my new Power Foods cookbook:

1. green bean, corn, and tomato salad, featuring fresh vegetables and a dressing of red-wine vinegar and olive oil.

2. roasted sweet potato wedges with sesame-soy dipping sauce. Think French fried without the frying. I'll also add one white potato, but that's sort of like camoflage.

3. berry grunt, with fresh cooked raspberries & blackberries, cinanamon-sugar dumplings, and a drizzle of heavy cream.

I love these "new" recipes that feature real food that not only boosts your health but also nourishes your spirit. It's such simple fare, but I guarantee the guys will love it.

Sounds delish, especially the berry grunt!

I haven't read a Clancy book since The Sum of All Fears, but I always thought I was learning something I didn't want to know.

Would you consider posting the recipes for the sweet potato wedges and dipping sauce? It sounds wonderful!

>213 alcottacre:. Sure. They're super-simple.

The recipe calls for 4 sweet potatoes (about 2 pounds, it says, but the size really varies), but of course you can use as many as you want.

1 Tbsp + 1 Tsp extra-virgin olive oil

Coarse salt

2 Tbsp low-sodium tamari soy sauce

2 Tbsp rice vinegar (unseasoned)

1/4 Tsp toasted sesame oil

Sesame seeds

1. Preheat oven to 425. Toss sweet potatoes with olive oil and 1/4 tsp salt on a rimmed baking sheet. Spread in an even layer, and roast, turning halfway through (they should release easily from sheet), until tender and lightly browned, about 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, stir together tamari, vinegar, and sesame oil in a small bowl.

3. Transfer potatoes to a serving dish; immediately sprinkle with sesame seeds. Serve with dipping sauce.

Have a great day, everyone!

#214: Thanks for posting the recipe, Becky!

I hope you have great day too.

I'm in the middle of the Clancy book, Against All Enemies. The book was written with another writer, Peter Telep. Maybe that's why I'm finding the writing so uneven--and "uneven" is being kind. If you read Clancy back in the days of his books with the Jack Ryan character, you'll remember that he was just a darned good story-teller. The main character in this book, Maxwell Moore, is really a disappointment. I remember not being able to put down books like Patriot Games or Clear and Present Danger, and it was largely because I liked the Jack Ryan character so much. I find myself not caring one whit about Max Moore. He's supposed to be an ex-Navy SEAL, but whoever it is writing about him in this book isn't selling that part of his biography.

This book is nothing like the Clancy I remember. Granted, his writing wasn't perfect, but I always found him interesting. And he always got the details right--or at least they were completely believable, for someone who doesn't know all that much about the world these characters inhabit. The books were dense, the stories were interesting, the characters were real and entertaining.

The basic story line in this book has a lot of potential--the Taliban joining up with a major Mexican drug cartel--but the story isn't developed the way I would expect it to be if this book were entirely written by Tom Clancy. If the book were just written by a guy named Peter Telep, I would think that it was a pretty good effort for a new writer in the genre. Instead, I find myself disappointed, wishing Clancy had stopped when he was at the top of his game.

I'll finish the book because it's "good enough"; I just hope the second half doesn't descend into a total letdown.

I hope the book ends well for you too, Becky. Sorry to hear that it is such a disappointment.

Oh what a bummer!

Your Father's Day meal sounds lovely.

When I see how many pages Clancy has turned out, it reminds me of artist studios where there are dozens of apprentices working under the master's careful eye....except here the master isn't really and the eye not so careful.

>219 jeanned:. Exactly. I'm not even sure the master even read this one. I think the first chapters, where the story is set up, were probably either partially written or at least overseen by Clancy. The middle of the book--not. Will he be around to oversee the ending? I sure hope so.

OK, halfway through and I'm throwing in the towel on this Clancy book. I can't believe this man has so little respect for his own name or for his readers. When it gets to the point that the dialogue is laugh-out-loud stupid, then it's time to quit.

oh, your dinner menu sounds delightful...I'm feeling guilty because we are simply having pizza.

I did take Will out for Chinese food last night though.

That's just so terrible about the Clancy. I was thinking while I took my walk today that it is some weird 'scam' indeed -- put your name on a work you didn't write and lots of folks will buy it. Are you going to post a 'review'? It's a shame that anyone would spend money on it.

Yes, I did write what I thought of the thing. It's here. Some people actually like it (rolls eyes), but those must be people who haven't read his other stuff and who have a very high tolerance for junk reading. If this had just been a book by a guy named Peter Telep (his "co-author") I 1) wouldn't have bought it; and 2) wouldn't have given it 400 pages before I threw it against the wall.

P.S. The blurb on the dust cover says that the "co-author," Peter Telep, teaches creative writing, fiction writing, and scriptwriting courses at the U of Central Florida. Hahaha. I'd just love to hear his discussion about "dialogue."

This comes from an interview on his website:

How did you get the opportunity to write with Tom Clancy? What was that like?

We have the same publisher and editor. I was asked by the publisher and Clancy’s people, and what do you say? It was a terrific opportunity. Everything was done through e-mail and phone because Tom lives up in Maryland.

The creative process starts out with a big concept, and that’s made into an outline. We did write a very extensive outline for this book. I think it was 15,000 or 20,000 words or 30 or 40 pages of outline material. After a number of drafts, we were in agreement with what the book was going to be about.

Between Tom’s resources and my own, we were able to get a lot of the research done very quickly {no doubt! One of the best things about the real Tom Clancy books was his excellent research. The "research" for this one is thin--OK, it's not thin, it's pathetic}. It was a very smooth process. It was sort of a master and apprentice relationship, where I was able to learn the way Tom works. We were very happy with the way things turned out.

Well, he maybe have been able to "learn the way Tom works," but he sure didn't learn to write the way "Tom" writes. Meh. I want my money back, and I might just tell Amazon. I've never, ever sent a book back to them, and I'm a very good customer. So it might be interesting to see if they'll take it back.

P.S. again. Yes, Amazon will take back the book and even pay for the return postage. No hassles, the only exception being that this is a time-limited thing. Fortunately I'm well within the time limit. So back it goes.

Clancy must be getting tired..... I do think that is what happens to some of the prolific types unless they are like Follett and can shift interests sufficiently to keep themselves really engaged. Possibly what happens is.... a friend has an idea, you agree to 'help', you know your name will help the friend, and, you have a motive besides money, (although related) which is you haven't put anything out in awhile. Your publisher/editors agree to the scheme because they want your name out there too..... no one stops to think whether your name might be tarnished. And maybe it won't be, that's the worst part of it!

He's disrespecting his own brand, but most of all, his loyal readers. I don't give him a pass for that.

To replace the fiction book I was reading at night, I picked up the memoir by Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story. I'm really enjoying the setting of this book, Johnson City, Tennessee, an area where I've spent considerable time, working on my Campbell family genealogy. Verghese is an Infectious Disease physician, and his early years after finishing his fellowship corresponded to the beginnings of the AIDS outbreak in the mid-1980s.

>224 labwriter:: Well done getting your money back on the book. That master/apprentice relationship is less structured than I had imagined.

How very odd! Note that my post (7:13) comes in LATER than your post (7:29) -- In any case, Good-o for sending it back! Well done!

>229 sibylline:. Oh, I think that's because I edited my post at 7:29. The original post was earlier.

Hi Becky!
Following your thread - love the way it twists and turns. :)
Hope your arm is entirely better now.
I liked Verghese's book , glad you are liking it too...
I actually loved his Cutting For Stone even more.
There's another book he wrote - something about his tennis partner.
Have heard mixed reviews on that one... but I'll certainly try it one of these days.

Oh duh, I should have looked!

Just checking in with you Becky! I've been gone for a little while and catching up is a bit overwhelming.

Thanks for the laughs about the hat. I have a hat with a huge brim - it would be perfect for gardening in this heat, so thanks for the reminder.

Speaking of silly questions (like the hat one)...we have a friend who moved here to Pennsylvania from Jamaica to get married. It must be a language/culture thing, because whenever she hears that someone had a baby, she asks "What kind?" Obviously what she means is "Boy or Girl?" But I couldn't resist saying "Human!"

To go along with my current biog, The Peabody Sisters, I just bought a book of correspondence: Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, ed. by Bruce A. Ronda. The letters book was published in 1984 and the biog about the sisters by Megan Marshall in 2005. I wish someone would also publish the sisters' journals. Megan Marshall, the biographer, frequently quotes from the journals. I'd love to read them.

I'd love to know the story behind the book of correspondence--how and why Ronda came to edit Elizabeth's letters, since I don't believe there was a biography published about her when he did these. It's obviously a "scholarly" effort, with a good introduction, copious notes, and references. It makes me wonder why he didn't also write her biography.

Update. Well, it turns out that Ronda did write Elizabeth's biog: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms, 1999. He also teaches at Colorado State U, a place I'm very familiar with--in Fort Collins, CO. My SIL & BIL both graduated from there and have lived there since 1974, and we visit them there every couple of years or so. Great town. Ronda's biog says that he's currently working on a book about the influences of Transcendentalism.

Anywho, this looks like an excellent collection of letters.

Update #2. OK, so I bought the Ronda biog of E. Peabody. I couldn't resist.

I think that Megan Marshall's strategy of writing a group biog of the 3 sisters is a better one than just the single biog. These sisters' lives were so intertwined that it just makes sense to treat them in one biography.

Sometimes I get annoyed at different aspects of the university system, but if we didn't have university professors to write books like these, then they would never be written, because certainly no one is making any money on the books themselves.

According to my notes, I started the Peabody Sisters biog at the beginning of May. Oh woe. It's really an excellent book; I just haven't given it the time that's needed to get through the thing. I'm at 224/452, so almost halfway through. That's a bit misleading because Marshall has a couple of hundred pages of interesting notes to go along with it.

If anyone is interested in the beginnings and the influences of the Transcendental movement (think 1830s, 1840s and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, etc.) then this is a good reference for that time and the beginnings of the movement. Elizabeth was right in the middle of it all. Her sister Sophia wrote a journal of the time she spent in Dedham, Massachusetts in her early twenties that I would love to see published as a companion journal to Thoreau's work. Obviously I haven't read the journal (the Peabody papers seem to be spread all over the place, for some reason, probably because Sophia's and Mary's papers went wherever their husband's papers ended up, is my guess, and I think this one is at NYPL), but the quotes from it that Marshall includes make me want to read the whole thing.

You gotta love the little Google thing-y today in celebration of summer solstice--



Happy Summer Solstice, everyone! It's cool and rainy here today. What a kick!

Ah the solstice! A part of me always feels a bit sad...... but I love the pause at this time of year. But summer in VT is so fleeting you can feel the waning of it strongly by the end of July.

It was 47 at 6:30 -- but already it is in the 70's, bright and sunny and very very dry. We are all sneezing like mad!

I ran into a fascinating stretch in the Peabody Sisters book this morning. Two of the sisters, Sophia and Mary, went to Cuba for two years--I guess around 1832. Apparently it was a popular place for people, particularly those with TB, to go to try for a cure. Sophia didn't have TB, but she had absolutely debilitating migraine headaches, and her weight at this point was down to about 80 pounds. I think the family thought that something drastic was needed to shake things up. Mary went there as a governess in exchange for Sophia's board. But two years--that seems quite extreme, particularly since Mary viewed the life of a governess as the "worst of all slaveries."

It does seem amazing, but people seemed to go on these epic journeys in search of health back then, leaving everything behind -- I listened to a novel recently based on the life of (the earlier) Lady Duff-Gordon -- she left behind a three year old whom she basically never saw again -- and moved to Luxor, Egypt. The narrator of the novel questions the wisdom of it in the end -- perhaps staying home and dying sooner but with your family might have been better.

I'm adding the link here to our group read of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple. The thread is found in the group "Book Talk." If anyone wants to join us, you're more than welcome, as Lucy said on her thread. We've just started. This is a short, focused biog of Dickinson--not the huge 1,000-page thing that you get so used to seeing with biographies. Wineapple is a good writer, and the book has gotten rave reviews.

I'm reading the Abraham Verghese memoir as my nighttime read, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story. This is another "difficult" read, from the point of view of the subject. I'm not quite sure why I keep choosing books like this. Andersonville was a tough read, and now this one. Verghese is a new infectious disease physician in 1985, and he's working in Johnson City, Tennessee, an Appalachian town in northeast Tennessee that's very near Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. Verghese finds himself, because of his specialty and because AIDS was so new, to be the one and only AIDS expert in the area.

Verghese is a man of tremendous compassion, intelligence, empathy. He's also an amazing writer, who took some time off from being a physician (this was after his time in Johnson City) and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Verghese has a tremendous eye for detail, which must also make him an excellent diagnostician. It's also that eye for detail which makes this book a rather difficult read. AIDS is such a terrible disease, and Verghese doesn't ever let the reader look away from it. Yet with the same skill he movingly brings all of these people--patients, family members, co-workers--to life. Sometimes I find the book is so strong that I can only take it in small doses; sometimes, like last night, I can't put it down.

This paragraph is from his website:

I wanted the reader to see how entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling, a privileged yet hazardous undertaking. It's a view of medicine I don't think too many young people see in the West because, frankly, in the sterile hallways of modern medical-industrial complexes, where physicians and nurses are hunkered down behind computer monitors, and patients are whisked off here and there for this and that test, that side of medicine gets lost.

I'm at 260/432 in this book; I wish I could just say to everyone today--Leave me alone, I'm reading. However, I can't do that, so I have to be content to read the book at night; consequently I see at least a couple more sleep-shorted nights in my immediate future.

I will tackle this Verghese eventually. These doctor/writer folk fill me with awe.

>240 labwriter:. No kidding. Talk about an embarrassment of riches! He's such a talented guy.

Vastly interesting thread Becky. Loved the Milosz poem.

If you're looking for some light reading on the civil war, you might check out Union quilters by Jennifer Chiaverni This novel is set in Pennsylvania during the civil war and revolves around the activities of several women in a quilter's group, initially making quilts/raising funds to support men from their community in the union army, and then changes in their lives as the war goes on.

I'm sorry for the pain the struggles of the Episcopal church are causing for you. I'm not sure whay it's so hard in the heat of disagreements to be passionate about our own viewpoints and compassionate with those who don't share them, but it seems to happen all too often.

There's a poem by Naomi Shibab Nye called Kindness that I like - in part it says

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

. . . .

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

from the Words under the words (I think)

Ardene, that's a wonderful quote. The older I get, the more I too value kindness, and the common pleasure of being helpful.

Gorgeous poem Ardene, thank you.

That's so nice, Ardene. Thank you for your kind words.

I was a quilter for 20-some years until I had to put it all away so that I could work on other projects. I have no discipline when it comes to quilting--I will literally work on quilts for 12 or 16 hours a day once I get started. So I will definitely look for Union Quilters--thanks so much for the mention.

That is a lovely poem by yet another poet unknown to me. I just had to mention, Becky, that I accepted a copy of My Own Country this very morning at PBS, thinking I was getting something about Ethiopia! Oh my.

Hi Peggy, No, the book is all about the Johnson City, TN area, including VA, KY, and NC. I just finished it this afternoon--wow, it's going to take me some time to decompress. It's quite a book, but as I think I said, I'm not sure I'd recommend it since it's so emotionally heavy--you need to be prepared for it.

Time for a new thread.