muddy21's hat is in the ring again!

Best Holiday Wishes from my house to yours!!

From the introductions page...

Hi all, I'm Marilyn, 58, living in southern New Hampshire with two sons, 19 & 17 years old, and two cats, 9 years old. This will be my fifth year on LT. Love the 75ers as a group, though I haven't yet made it through that many books in a year. That is partially due to poor record-keeping and inconsistent posting on my part, though, so this year my watchword is "consistency"!

I read mostly nonfiction - ranging from science and nature to memoirs and history, with a fair amount of education, neuroscience and technology thrown in for good measure. I dabble a bit in genealogy and local history and live in a very old house, so there's a bit of preservation as well. I work in the library at an independent boarding school (grades 9-12), so I also fit in a bit of YA here and there. I enjoy needlework and am active in an online crafts group at Craftster.org. Gardening is another interest, and a small vineyard figures prominently in my retirement plans!

Glad to be back with the 75's and looking forward to lots of new reading ideas this year. As always, I'm hoping to post more regularly than I have done in the past and to be more comprehensive in my listing of titles read...we'll see! I've also joined the NonFiction Challenge group this year, with a thread here

Number of books read in 2012....


Number books sent on to others in 2012...

Number of books bought in 2012...


Books I've read this year:

22. Not So Big Solutions for Your Home by Sarah Susanka
21. American Bungalow Style text by Robert Winter photographs by Alexander Vertikoff
20. the rural life by Verlyn Klinkenborg
19. Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: a Practical Guide to Assessment and Intervention by Peg Dawson
18. What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past by Nancy K Miller
17. The Forest Unseen: a Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell
16. Hoopla! The Art of Unexpected Embroidery by Leanne Prain
15. Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read
14. Sea-captains' houses and rose-covered cottages: the Architectural heritage of Nantucket Island by Margaret Moore Booker
13. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
12. Telling Your Own Stories by Donald Davis
11. The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith
10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
9. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
8. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
7. The Elements of Style (4th edition) by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
6. and I shall have some peace there: trading in the fast lane for my own dirt road by Margaret Roach
5. My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
4. Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels
3. A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell
2. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
1. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

Books I've passed along this year:
1. Heirs of Hammerfell by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Books I've bought this year:
1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau - to read for class, only $6.98 at B&N!
2. The Elements of Style 4th edition by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White - to read for class, replaces the one I bought in high school in 1968
3. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff - to read for class
4. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver - because I couldn't resist
5. Stop Walking on Eggshells by Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger

Just read your intro post. You're a fellow New Englander and sound like you read good stuff; I'm not sure why I missed you last year! Anyway, adding a star now and looking forward to it ...

Welcome back!

Hi Marilyn - welcome back!

#3 & #4 - thanks! it's good to be here again.

#2 - well, I was really only here at the beginning of the year and the very end, so it would have been easy to miss me. For most of the rest of the year I was AWOL, dealing with life :p I'm looking forward to the coming year and I'll be checking in on your thread as well since we do seem to have common interests. One book I read recently and very much enjoyed was The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It involves New England, natural history (more specifically the gastropods - my favorites), and memoirs. It's a very quick read (too quick, really - I would have been happy to have it keep going for a while). Nice to meet you!

Glad to see you back with us again, Marilyn!

Hi Marilyn, I've had The sound of A Wild Snail Eating on my WL for awhile now. I hope to finally read it in 2012. I may also "borrow" (if I may) your idea of putting my intro at the top of my new thread. Have a great reading year ahead!

I'll look forward to following your reading. Happy New Year!

Hi Muddy - thanks for the welcome. I'm originally from NH too - maybe that explains things!

I have you starred and look forward to following you this year! Have a great New Years!

Looking forward to following you and your books this year, Marilyn. May you have a wonderful new year full of good things.

#6 - Thanks, Stasia, good to hear from you! Good luck with school - my new program starts this Tuesday....yikes!!!

#7 - Donna, I hope you like Wild Snail as much as I did. I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. I'm happy to have you borrow the intro idea. I find redundancy can help to minimize my ever-present state of mild confusion :P, so once having written the introduction I thought it might be helpful to have it here as well.

#8 - Thanks for visiting, Cindy! I can't wait to get going - fresh starts are always exciting.

#9 - Hi again, resnovae! I'm a little nervous to ask what sorts of things are explained by a NH origin :o/ What part of the state are you from?

#10 - Beth, it's nice to have you visit! I do enjoy hearing about your reads - particularly the nonfiction ones.

#11 - Gail, thanks for stopping by. We have a very interesting collection of books in common. It will be interesting to see our readings go through the coming year.

I only wish I could have you all over for a pot of tea and a plate of snickerdoodles. I'd love to have your shoes under my table for a spell!!

Best of wishes for contented reading in the coming year.

Happy New Year, Marilyn! Good luck with school!

Happy New Year, Marilyn! The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is on my TBR list, but your comments make me want to get to it sooner, rather than later.

found and starred. waves. going to hide in corner now :)

Hello Marilyn from another fellow New Englander. Your snow picture has me waxing nostalgic as we've had less almost no snow here on the coast of Maine for the whole winter! It's downright freaky!

I'm also freaking out because I'm showing The Sound of the Wild Snail Eating as being in my library, but I can't for the life of me remember acquiring it, nor can I find it in my immediate visual range on the shelves/piles. A true mystery. I wonder if I meant to add it as a wishlist?

I'm starring and lurking for now, but looking forward to seeing what pops up on your reading list.

Started the year off with an oldie - Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman. I'd read this one before, but it was so long ago that it hardly qualified as a reread. The story of a new teacher's first year in the classroom, told in letters, memos, notes and directives. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always touching the heart.

I read Up the Down Staircase many years ago. Have you ever seen the film version? Nice adaptation of the book. I love teacher stories.

Sandy K

I also read Up the Down Staircase many years ago, and loved it. How sad to think that "inner-city" high schools have only gotten worse, if anything, in the years since. Both teachers and students deserve so much better!

I've never seen the film, though; I should see if it's on Netflix.

Thanks, Sandy & Rosalita. I don't think I ever have seen the movie. I'll have to look around for it.

I clicked the link you kindly left me to your thread only to discover that the reason I couldn't find it when I went looking, was because I already had it starred. Now I feel sheepish.

I see what you mean about getting off to a slow start, but at least if you only have one book, it was a good one. :) I remember picking up Up the Down Staircase s a teen because I liked how the title sounded, and liking it a lot more than I thought I would.

Just stopped by to drop off a star. It's always nice to find another person who enjoys non-fiction.

I love the photo on the top of your thread!

Book 3

A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell

After many years of marriage and with their son grown and gone, Sue Hubbell and her husband gave up their careers in New England academia. A back-to-the-land dream took them to the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, where they bought a cabin with some land and began planning for their new-found freedom from the world of work. Soon after making the move to the hills an even greater change occurred as Hubbell’s marriage dissolved and she found herself alone and struggling to support herself. Her book, A Country Year: Living the Questions, is a collection of personal essays in which Hubbell shares her transition to a new life – her new home, her new livelihood as beekeeper, and her growing appreciation for the beauty of the natural world around her.

The essays are loosely grouped into five seasonal sections. The book begins in the spring, proceeds through the year and finishes the following spring. Most of the essays are short and to the point, but always with some connection between Hubbell’s Ozark hillside and the greater world beyond. The seasonal focus serves more as a frame to provide boundaries and a point of reference for the essays rather than as a structure upon which to attach them.

Few of the essays are season-specific: there may be an initiating event that starts the essay, such as the ones related to the working world of a commercial beekeeper, but Hubbell then makes seamless segues into the world at large, closing with appreciation for the timeless relevance of the natural world. In one summer essay, as Hubbell talks about a day spent cutting wood to provide fuel for winter’s fires, she moves easily from physical labor in the forest to ruminations on the roles people play in tinkering with nature.

Hubbell’s departing husband had the grace to leave her with a full set of tools and we walk alongside as she treads a path from abandoned and disoriented ex-wife to competent and capable independent woman grateful for the twists and turns of fate that led to her new life. She vacillates between appreciation for the skills and support of her mountain neighbors and her occasional difficulty in reconciling their mountain-born-and-bred views with her own, developed over years of life as a socially and environmentally responsible urbanite. However different their perspectives may be, though, she strives to appreciate each for who they are without judgment. “But in the very long run I’m not so sure, and as in most lofty matters…I suspect that all our opinions are simply an expression of a personal sense of what is fitting and proper.” (p.141)

Hubbell invites us along for company as she comes to know and better understand her fellow creatures and makes new trails for herself along the way. As the essays progress she gradually reveals to us her growing comfort with her new circumstances. We are there with her as she moves from resignation to acceptance to a full embrace of the changes that have brought her to a new life and a new understanding of her world.

Sounds pretty good.

That is an impressive review. I enjoy non-fiction also, and this year plan to read several biographies of writers, some of their works and maybe some memoirs.i can be skeptical about memoirs, though. I approach them carefully.;) I read Wild Snail also and you can read my review if you go yo my profile page and click on reviews. I thought it was a fantastic premise and a well written book.

Book 2

On Writing Well: the Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

It was interesting to read Zinsser’s comments on developing one’s style as an author. He strongly encourages the use of first person, a big departure from research papers where any mention of “I” or “me” is strictly against the rules. Zinsser contends that one's writing should be aimed at an audience of one – oneself. The writer must focus on the writing as an act of personal expression and trust that there will be some readers who find that genuine expression of interest. Pouring oneself onto the page for an unknown critical reader is an intimidating prospect and attempting to write for that sort of audience is unnerving at best. In Zinsser's view, while personal vulnerability is one of the things that makes writing so difficult, it is also a crucial component of establishing the author’s style and making what they’ve written appealing to others.

Throughout the book Zinsser stresses the importance of consistency and personal integrity. Develop your own voice and stay with it. Let your readers know who you are and that they can depend on you to be honest and fair with them. Find a topic, fix your focus on some small piece of that topic, and then make some personal connection to it. Dive in and enjoy the process – be flexible enough to see where it takes you. Don’t try to picture the completed piece until you get to the ending, otherwise you’ll find yourself drifting up roadways that are not on your route, or even worse encountering a roadblock right at the start.

Definitely a book worth reading!

Book 4

Forest Forensics: a Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels

Book 5

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

>26 muddy21:. I've never understood the research world's aversion to the first person. It just makes the writing convoluted and full of the awkward passive voice. "The rats were then stood on their heads", instead of "we then stood the rats on their heads". I think it's just plain bad writing. I know in my group, we try very hard to encourage use of the active voice. And whenever I see things like 'this writer encouraged the subject to verbalize their point of view' I flinch. How about "I encouraged him to talk"?

>29 scvlad: Agreed 100% on this one. It's hard to see what's so wrong about "I" and "me" - or why "this author" is better!

Poor rattys - standing about on their heads, indeed!

ETA Perhaps that should be ratties?

Book 6

and I shall have some peace there: trading in the fast lane for my own dirt road by Margaret Roach

It all started when I went looking for good opening paragraphs and got sidetracked by some old book-friends I hadn't seen in a long long time. When I came across Cannery Row by John Steinbeck I finally gave in and checked the audiobook version out from my library. It was a lot of fun & I enjoyed the reader's work very much. I've put in a request for the sequel, Sweet Thursday - I'm not sure I've ever read that one.

Hi, Marilyn, thanks for dropping by my thread. I am looking forward to following your reading this year, especially for science and nature books.

. . . looking for good opening paragraphs. . . - That sounds intriguing. Did you find any other good ones?

Book 7

The Elements of Style 4th Edition by William Strunk Jr and E B White

I am indebted to a high school English teacher for my first reading of The Elements of Style in 1968. Each time I return to the book I find myself struck anew by the way such a small book has stayed relevant despite all the changes we’ve seen both in the world at large and in our society in particular.

One of the things I like best about this book is the Strunk's emphasis on an author’s responsibility to the reader; not to impress the reader with one’s skill but to make the material as easily understood as possible. In the introduction White says that "Will (Strunk) felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope." We don’t get the sense that Strunk felt the trouble was due to any lack of skill or knowledge on the reader’s part, but rather that the danger lay in the natural inclination of an author to write in ways that were unintelligible or incomprehensible to the average reader. Reading a piece aloud seems to be one approach to finding those stumbling points during the revision process.

I still have my earlier edition of The Elements of Style and have reread it many times since my initial introduction. Recently I splurged and bought myself a new copy of the most current edition. I didn’t sit down to compare the two editions side by side so I can’t say much about the changes that have been made to the text of the book. I can say that I recognized many of the techniques I have internalized over the years and that it was interesting to see how many of the rules and principles I follow, particularly in my revisions. This is one book that will never go out of style.

Book 8

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Book 9

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard reflects on her outdoor experiences throughout the seasons of a year in the woods and waterways around her home in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The natural world follows a cycle that includes death and decay as surely as it does birth and new growth. Dillard exults in the beauty of nature but acknowledges that, just as beauty lies in the perception of the observer, so does the ugliness that rests on the other side of the coin. The author takes a two-pronged approach, sharing her observations on the natural world but then consistently attempting to interpret the things she sees in terms of human experience and her own interpretation of God the Creator.

Dillard is an accomplished writer so it’s no stretch to assume that the word “pilgrim” in the title was chosen with careful deliberation, forewarning as it does the religious aspects of her work. In Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, pilgrim is defined as “a person who passes through life as if in exile from a heavenly homeland or in search of it or of some high goal.”

In my observations of nature I have always been fascinated to find that the more we know, the more we can learn from what we see; that our familiarity, far from breeding contempt, allows us to be ever more distinctly aware of what we’re seeing. Dillard’s comments about observations in nature quickly drew me in. Unfortunately, Dillard’s word choices led away from nature to a human-centric judgment of the natural world – "gruesome", "grotesque", “its hideous horizontal, multijointed mouthparts”, “senseless and horrifying”, “…the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures”, “yard after yard of some unthinkable parasite he had just found”. It started sounding downright Lovecraftian at times.

If I was more interested in theology and religion I would perhaps have appreciated this book more than I did. As it was, though, I went through most of it thinking how much more I would have liked it if Dillard’s focus had been more upon the world and less upon its Creator.

I would also like very much to have further information about one particular statement she made,
"It is a fact that the men and women all over the northern hemisphere who dream up new plans for a perpetual motion machine conceive their best ideas in the spring." Is this according to the men and women themselves? Or the dates of applications made to the US Patent Office? But it says “northern hemisphere,” not US. Best ideas relative to what? Best by what measure? I would have been delighted if she had replaced a paragraph or two about the ugliness and degradation of nature to provide a little more information about these perpetual motion machines! But perhaps her intention was for us to think of nature as the ultimate perpetual motion machine?

Book 10

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau shares a collection of essays drawn from the journals he kept over a period of two years that he lived in a rough cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts at the edge of Walden Pond. Thoreau’s great experiment in living was an attempt to simplify his life in a quest to ascertain the true value of a life freed from social expectations and obligations.

Thoreau built the cabin with his own hands out of materials procured inexpensively by a variety of means. His diet was plain, consisting largely of what he could produce himself. He lived a mile in every direction from his nearest neighbors and took great delight in spending his time in the company of the natural world rather than that of men and society.

One of Thoreau’s basic tenets was that one cannot really know a thing until one has experienced it and he put himself to the test. There were tales of interesting experiments he made during his time in the woods. One elaborate winter project involved a painstaking mapping of the bottom of Walden Pond by means of innumerable soundings taken through holes in its frozen surface. Another was shared in his account of dining on woodchuck, specifically, a particular woodchuck that had been eating the beans in Thoreau’s garden and whose “transmigration” had occurred at Thoreau’s hand.

Thoreau considered the inheritance of property to be one of the greatest burdens a man could be asked to endure and that efforts to earn a livelihood often resulted in a spiritual death. He speculated that society would be much better served, and young men would learn far more, if they were put to work on the construction of buildings rather than paying vast sums of money to live at university in buildings built by others. Learned investigation and contemplation were far more likely to be productive when conducted by society’s elders who had already learned what life had to offer, in Thoreau’s estimation.

These ideals were admirable but there jarring inconsistencies throughout the book. There was great discussion about how degrading it was to work for a living or to shoulder one’s financial responsibilities but he was equally condescending about the men he met who were cheerfully content with a much simpler lot in life. Thoreau shares his observations about a local woodcutter who lived simply, never unwilling to delay his daily labors in order to stop to observe and appreciate the world around him or to harvest ingredients for his next meal. But while Thoreau considers those activities noble in his own experiment in living, he portrays the woodcutter who behaves similarly as a simpleton, an overgrown child, “But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.”

For all his talk about the importance of being contented with a simple life and how clever he had been to manage his self-sufficient living, Thoreau mentions in only the briefest words, that his cabin was built on land where he was a squatter. He then goes on to add, “But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it (p. 60).” A convenient sentiment when another man was shouldering the responsibility of paying the property taxes and bearing the initial investment of purchasing the property. Thoreau also glosses over the many dinners he ate as a guest at other people’s tables or about taking his laundry home to mother.

There are many, many familiar phrases in this book – phrases that have become a part of our national consciousness…
"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
"Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails."

And my own personal touchstone, one that my mother quoted years ago in her response to a teacher’s harsh report card comments about the learning style of my brother with ADD, and one that has become my mantra in supporting my son with ADD…
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

For giving us this one phrase alone I am more than willing to overlook the many inconsistencies that made Henry David Thoreau as clearly human as the rest of us.

Book 11
The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith

Book 12
Telling Your Own Stories by Donald Davis

Book 13
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Book 14
Sea-captains' houses and rose-covered cottages: the Architectural heritage of Nantucket Island by Margaret Moore Booker

Book 15
Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read

Book 16
Hoopla! The Art of Unexpected Embroidery by Leanne Prain

Book 17
The Forest Unseen: a Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

Book 18
What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past by Nancy K Miller

Book 19
Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: a Practical Guide to Assessment and Intervention by Peg Dawson and Richard Guare

Book 20
the rural life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Book 21
American Bungalow Style text by Robert Winter photographs by Alexander Vertikoff

Book 22
Not So Big Solutions for Your Home by Sarah Susanka

Oh, I love that American Bungalow book! My last house was a Craftsman bungalow and I fell in love with the style. I wish I had stayed long enough to really do it up right.

It was a lot of fun to look through, wasn't it? I was having my mother's house painted (which is more of a lake cottage than a true bungalow) and was looking for ideas for color combinations. I ended up going with ones that were very similar to the design on the covers of the book!

I bet that looks lovely!