Boxes of Books in Celebration of One's Thingaversary - jillmwo's reading in 2014

To all of you who encourage weak-willed sorts like myself in buying too many books, this thread is dutifully dedicated. I am celebrating my eighth Thingaversary today. On the basis of @pgmcc's bizarre mathematical conclusions, I went out and ordered more than ten books.

I started out this morning reading The Country House Revealed. I only caught one or two episodes on PBS, but the stories were so compelling that I wanted to learn more. This is a nicely produced companion volume to the television series and will give me lots of opportunities to explore related topics. I even learned a new word this morning! The word is enfilade and the term refers to a series of rooms where opened doors through those rooms create a long view running the entire length of that building. The other thing that makes this book of interest is the fact that the six houses included in it are each still in private hands and are not open to the public as with so many of those houses belonging to the National Trust.

Happy Thingaversary!

>1 jillmwo: On the basis of pgmcc's bizarre mathematical conclusions

I am flattered.

I went out and ordered more than ten books.

You are welcome. ;-)

Have a fantastic Thingaversary

By the way, given you are enjoying The Country House Revealed you may be interested in Irish Country Houses: A Chronicle of Change from Collins Press. There is more information here. I have found it an interesting volume.

@pgmcc: Congratulations you on your masterly blow at the end of post #3. Jill had it coming to her, after knocking me out with her description of The Country House Revealed.

@jillmwo: Happy Thingaversary!!!

>4 SylviaC: Congratulations you on your masterly blow at the end of post #3.

Thank you, Sylvia. One does what one can.

;-)

By the way, you might also be interested in Irish Country Houses: A Chronicle of Change.

>5 pgmcc: Oooh! A twofer!

>1 jillmwo: On the basis of pgmcc's bizarre mathematical conclusions

I've heard that being upside-down all the time affects one's mathematical reasoning.

Yea for number eight!

>1 jillmwo: Congratulations, and I hope you can revel in your week ahead to enjoy them all!

I won!! I won!! I won the Spatula of Just Desserts award at this week-end's Bake Off. I made a stupid little lemon cheesecake pudding pie and the folks this weekend loved it. I have achieved...well, I've achieved something. Recognition, prestige, maybe only bragging rights. But I finally won the Spatula.

(Please note that this is a comfortably competitive bake-off between friends on a holiday weekend. No prize money or anything. Just the recognition from one's friends that one makes a halfway decent contribution to the general potluck feast.)

But I'll take my moments of glory when they come!

Congrats! That sort of thing sounds like more fun than some huge competition.

>9 jillmwo: Let's hear it for glory! Hurrah. Congratulations, Jill. Glory is glory, however modest.

The Spatula of Just Desserts will look good on the mantle. (We need a picture)

Your dessert sounds wonderful! Perfect for summer.

>9 jillmwo: Congratulations. I wish you could share some of the lemon cheesecake. Wield your spatula with pride.

Go Jill! And what Pete and suitable1 said.

I will do something about photographing the Spatula as the glitter work makes it a sight worth seeing. I had also brought along a recipe for rice pudding but that wasn't being entered into the competition. In the meantime, I did finish The Day of the Triffids while on vacation and I am so sorry I waited until now to read it. It remains just as frightening at the end as in the early bits. I will never view invasive species in my yard in quite the same way. Aside from the horror elements however, I found it interesting that Triffids reminded me strongly of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Landfall. There were the same echoes of what does one do if one is thrown backward to a world where one can't take advantage of what may be thought of as ordinary technologies. There was a very similar discussion of gender roles in terms of biological responsibilities in ensuring survival of the species. Wyndham was talking about surviving in the aftermath of such events as Hiroshima and Nagasaki and one set of comments I read suggested that the Triffids were symbolic of the Russian threat encroaching upon Western civilization. I had only read the Triffids as being a warning against the impact of radiation on organic life forms (in much the same vein as Godzilla). Still I could see where the commentator was coming from.

Fascinating read as John Wyndham had a lot in common with H.G. Wells in commenting upon human behavior in the wake of some massive disruption of the social order. The book was mesmerizing to the point of me whipping out the book to read any time someone would leave me alone over the course of the holiday weekend.

In your edition of Triffids, did a large portion of chapter 2 focus on the Russian origin of the triffids? My old Fawcett version barely mentioned it, whereas it is quite significant in my Penguin Classics edition.

>16 jillmwo: It's one of my favorite books, Day of the triffids. I love Wyndham's style and how he logically goes through all the consequences of the disaster. I also like the conversation two of the characters have at the end, about how they'll discuss this with their children, what to tell them about what went wrong.

>17 SylviaC: In my Kindle edition in Chapter Two, there is a discussion of the origins of the Triffids. It's unclear to me from the text whether the Triffids are a form of biological warfare (one theory) created by the Russians or whether they simply developed the triffids as an alternative to fossil fuel based oil (the second theory). It is made clear that the Russians are involved, and it's made clear that an unscrupulous pilot sneaks the oil out of Russia and is shot down by the Russians which is how the seeds are dispersed throughout the globe. The plant becomes ubiquitous (once everyone figures out that you have to trim back the poisonous tongue or lash that the plants have).

What is not made clear (or at least I missed it) was whether the blindness that affects the bulk of the population is due to the aforementioned weapons of biological warfare (and therefore unrelated to the triffids) or if the two cataclysmic events were supposed to be tied together. The planet had had time to domesticate the Triffids, so I finally decided that the two events were unrelated.

>18 zjakkelien: I liked the discussion you mentioned, but felt bad that the humans had to yield up the farm and leave. They'd built it up as a home, but I suppose you can make a case for the idea that Wyndham was warning us that if we ruin the earth through nuclear bombs, we might have to leave this planet our home and move over to the moon.

>19 jillmwo: I seem to remember (but it's been a while since I read the book) that the triffids sort of took advantage of all the blind people? I thought that people get blind due to one of the biological weapons in the sky, and the triffids, who display some form of intelligence, make use of it. As a matter of fact, I thought that was revealed during the discussion of the two main characters we discussed.

Congrats on earning the Spatula!

I've enjoyed every Wyndham book that I've read so far (only 3) and I should make time to get to another sometime soon.

I have already discussed The Day of the Triffids but while on vacation, I did also quickly speed through a cute bit of fluff entitled Patricia Brent, Spinster. I think I learned of from someone here on LT although I can't now find the thread or set of comments. I certainly wouldn’t have gone searching for it on Gutenberg otherwise. At any rate, this novel is a comedic tale of a young working woman who is living in a boarding house full of much older people who she discovers have the temerity to express pity for her. She reacts poorly, creating an imaginary fiance who she is then forced to produce in real life. She grabs a nearby soldier (this is set during World War I) and the bulk of the novel is devoted to the working out of a romance between the two. I didn’t fall in love with this, but it was light and amusing.

The other book I’m futzing with on this last day of my vacation is The Year Without Summer. It’s popular-science-style non-fiction. The book is attempting to describe for a general audience the meteorological impact of the largest recorded eruption of a volcano back in 1815. The still active volcano, Tambora, caused two years of climatological disruption which in turn had a ripple effect on various economies and lives. As one example, there were significant snowfalls in June in Quebec. As another example, the point is made that the unpleasant weather that the eruption caused was what forced Mary Shelley and her travel companions to sit around the fire during the summer and come up with books like Frankenstein. The weather disruptions had an impact on crops, subsequently causing food shortages in a Europe exhausted by the Napoleonic wars; beyond that, there were extended ripple effects. All in all, this should have been a fascinating read. Unfortunately, as educational as it has been, I’m not fascinated by it at all. The authors (an American historian and a British meteorologist) haven’t woven the two aspects of the book together as skillfully as I would have wanted. (Translation: I would have organized and written this book differently. Chapters would have been shorter and included maps. There would have been sub-headings and references tied back to the scientific explanations for the various ecological events. Don’t keep telling me about aerosol layers without making it easy for me to go back and recall what one of those was.)

What I Now Know About Panna Cotta

SO yesterday was my first attempt at making the cold pudding/custard known as Panna Cotta. Even as a faulty first attempt, my spouse really liked it (and his primary experience with it was the version served by a local chain restaurant). I began with a very simple recipe.

I started with a quarter cup of 2 percent milk in a dish and added 1 and a half teaspoons of Knox unflavored gelatin. The instructions tell you to set it aside for 5-10 minutes to allow the gelatin to “bloom”. What this means is that you want to sprinkle the teaspoons of gelatin over the surface of the milk to avoid clumping in so far as possible. That allows the gelatin to absorb as much of the milk as it can.

What you do next is take a half cup of milk with a half cup of sugar and *gently* heat that (very low temp) on the stove to the point of allowing the sugar to dissolve. (Personally, I’d cut that back to a quarter cup of sugar for reasons I’ll get to).

Once you’ve gotten the sugar dissolved in the milk, you allow that to come to just below a boil. Then remove it from the heat and dissolve your gelatin mixture into the hot liquid. Figure that this takes maybe 3-5 minutes as you’re stirring the whole constantly. When you think, you’ve successfully melted everything together, put the pan to one side (removed from any portion of the hot stove) while you do the next step.

Then mix a cup and a half of buttermilk with a half-teaspoon to a full teaspoon of vanilla. Gradually mix in the gelatin-sugar-milk mixture into the buttermilk, gently stirring as you go.

The next step is to pour the complete mixture through a fine mesh strainer into four 6-oz custard cups. (The strainer catches any minute blobs of undissolved gelatin. You want a very smooth end result.) You can oil the custard cups lightly with Pam if you think you want to plate the panna cotta but, if you think you’ll just eat it from the custard cups, you needn’t worry about that part.

Leave it in the fridge for anything between 4 hours and overnight. One caution I saw frequently in the Internet recipes for panna cotta -- you do want to cover the custard cups w/ plastic wrap in the fridge to avoid the pudding developing a skin. In my trial run, I wasn’t being particular (translation: I forgot that they all said to do this. No big deal.)

You can top this with just about anything your heart desires -- fresh fruit, canned fruit, a dollop of fruit spread, ice cream toppings. Whatever. The fancy versions usually do fresh fruit with some sweet syrup involving a liqueur of some sort. The fanciest version I saw was Champagne Panna Cotta with Surgared Grapes. Looked absolutely fabulous and utterly, utterly decadent.

So what did I learn? First of all, the next time around, I would use some percentage of cream rather than just a combination of milk and buttermilk. The cream would add a real layer of richness to this dessert even as it adds calories and fat. I’d also reduce the half-cup of sugar to something more approximating a heaping quarter cup. That’s because the other additions (in terms of fresh fruit and/or flavor extracts) come with their own natural sugars. (Assuming that you’re looking for sweet rather than sugar shock.) I would do this the next time with any fruit that one normally thinks of combining with cream -- so peaches, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc.-- and I’d put it in the bottom of the dishes before pouring in the liquid panna cotta. I had thought I had raspberries in the fridge for use in yesterday’s trial run, but those had gone a bit fuzzy. So, instead, I used fruit spread from a jar.

What I like about panna cotta is that it’s lighter than ice cream (so perfect when you know you shouldn’t be eating Ben & Jerry’s) but still refreshingly cold. And it is true that you can whip up the same thing I did in well under 15 minutes.

Morgue Drawer Four is an oddly humorous tale of a murdered young car thief and the peculiar relationship he forms with a coroner assigned to his autopsy. Only the coroner, Martin, can hear the voice of the victim, Pascha, who is communicating telepathically. Naturally Pascha wants to know who murdered him and pushes Martin to investigate. Unfortunately where Pascha is belligerent, Martin is rather shy. The young tough is used to dealing with the criminal population where Martin is not and this too leads to some funny situations as we watch Pascha try to coach Martin on how to behave, what to ask, and when to get out of the neighborhood. While it’s not a deep mystery and I don’t think it would be entirely to the tastes of my library book group, Morgue Drawer Four is a good bit of entertainment. Even if the basic idea of the dead communicating with the living may seem a bit worn, there were sufficient twists here to make it a good beach read.

By the way, @Busifer recommended this to me and I want to give full credit for book bullets. It’s entirely possible that the Germans are more to my taste than, say, the Norwegians when it comes to crime novels. (I’m looking pointedly at Jo Nesbo whose works send me into a corner with a pillow over my head.) That said, Busifer, have you read others in the Morgue series? Are the follow-ups worthwhile?

>24 jillmwo: My mother and I really enjoyed that book, too. I have purchased the second, but haven't read it yet. I expected it to not be one of my favorites, but it was an unexpected delight due to the humor.

The first book that I have found deeply engaging in months has been an autobiography/memoir by Mother Dolores Hart and Richard De Neut. Dolores Hart was a young actress in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties whose main pop culture reference (if you look her up on Wikipedia) is that she was the first girl to kiss Elvis Presley on-screen. Once you read her autobiography, however, you realize that this should be the *last* thing that serves as her legacy. Dolores Hart is far more than that. She’s sharp, she’s thoughtful, she’s *smart*. She may be known as an actress insofar as the public is concerned, but she’s also her monastery’s carpenter as well as a national spokesperson for the painful condition, peripheral neuropathy. She is a nun in one of the most forward thinking Benedictine communities in the United States as well as being a voting member (in good standing) of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. She was featured in an HBO documentary nominated for an Oscar at some point in the past two or three years. (I've watched the documentary twice once I remembered that 'Hey, we have cable".) The media was much taken with the idea that she would attend the Oscar ceremony in her full traditional habit. I was much more taken by the idea that she appeared on TCM with Robert Osborne as one of his guest programmers.

Can you tell I’m impressed by this woman?

Her autobiography The Ear of the Heart is a chunk of a volume, being more than 400 pages long. (You know how some autobiographies -- particularly of starlets -- can just be duller than dishwater? This one isn't like that.) What is amazing is that she’s not sappy at any point while telling her story; she is providing an account of her extraordinary life as a child of alcoholic parents, becoming a jet set star ("the next Grace Kelly") and then making an active choice to do something that would seem to be almost diametrically opposed to Hollywood’s values. And yet the story comes full circle. (I won't tell you how but it was enormously satisfying to read about.)

Beneath the stories though, there’s a discussion of her working out a way to keep true to her own sense of identity and her self. As an even greater challenge, she does so in the context of working out how to do that in the context of a monastic community but as well in a larger society that largely prevents humans from being their authentic selves. Dolores Hart sounds like a really fun lady and her intellect shines through.

I know it is unlikely to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I do recommend this. (One thing I should note. I actually remember the Ladies Home Journal article in 1970 referenced in the book that discussed her history. It must have made quite the impression on me (even without seeing her movies). Because between that and reading In this House of Brede, I spent a lot of time researching Benedictines in my adolescence. Seriously, I found this one deeply satisfying.

That does sound good. Maybe I'll look out for it at book sales. I seem to be stockpiling biographies. That must be the category for which I have the highest unread ratio, but I just keep acquiring them.

She sounds like an absolutely fascinating lady. I think I'd be very interested in her biography.

Jill, I think only you could interest a dyed-in-the-wool atheist like me in a nun's memoir...except I've always kind of liked nuns (left over from my kindergarten year in a Catholic school, I think.)

ETA: No, Meredy probably could too, now that I think of it. ;)

In this instance, it's less about any single profession held by the speaker/biographer and more about the personal experience and emerging wisdom.

But now I'm caught up in a marvelous piece of non-fiction Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty which I found via The Country House Revealed. There was a house discussed -- the Wentworth Woodhouse with its 365 rooms and perfectly proportioned Marble Saloon -- where the BBC television show hinted at all sorts of internal family drama. Black Diamonds is all about the scope of the hidden family drama. It's appalling to read on any number of levels, but you can't turn away from the oncoming train wreck that's going to tear through this massive aristocratic fortune. (And based on what I read, the wrangling continues about the house to the present day.)

>30 jillmwo: Ooooooh...

>29 Marissa_Doyle: That's a compliment, as I read it! Thank you. I'm a committed atheist myself, but I have long been fascinated by the matter of what people believe and why. I treat magic and religion as things of a similar kind (having been struck a very long time ago by reading an account of Moses and Aaron in the Pharaoh's court from the point of view of the Egyptians, who regarded them as "the Hebrew magicians"), and I separate my view of a sincere believer from my opinion of the beliefs.

This year I've read memoirs of both Karen Armstrong and Huston Smith and got a great deal out of them. I felt the same about bios of the Dalai Lama and Suzuki-roshi and the story of Issan Dorsey, as well as many others: all revealing and thought-provoking, even if not uniformly--allow me to put this in quotes--"inspiring."

>26 jillmwo: You might have got me with that one too.

>32 Meredy: It was absolutely a compliment, Meredy. And yes, regarding the difference between a believer and the beliefs. I've somehow managed to acquire a dearly beloved friend who is a born-again evangelical Christian, but it still somehow works.

And I got hit by the Black Diamonds bullet as well, but it doesn't seem to be out in the US yet... :(

(And...I've just posted my review of the Huston Smith memoir.)

Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty
Catherine Bailey

The reference to "Rise" in the sub-title is a bit of an over-statement. When this tale opens, the dynasty was already well established; to describe the family fortune as comfortable is actually rather an understatement. This was one of the wealthiest families in England, despite the fact the the 6th Earl of Fitzwilliam (who has died when the tale begins) had installed only one flushing toilet in a house of 356 rooms and corridors that extended 5 miles. (From the nursery to the dining room was a shorter distance, just an eighth of a mile). The family has issues that will ultimately undermine its activities. The parallel story is that of the economic structure of the time which is also deteriorating. There is no particularly reprehensible behavior here, just some decades of sadly blinkered human behavior. It’s important to note that none of the Earls of Fitzwilliam discussed in this social history were *bad* men. In many instances, they showed more depth of character and caring than the broader government or general society. They were simply caught up in events that overwhelmed their capabilities.

This book represents an antidote to the romanticism of Downton Abbey which is not to say that various novelists haven’t made a good living drawing off of this fodder. (I’m thinking of such novels as T. Tenbarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson.) There are questionable male heirs, bad marriages, unverified marriages, alcoholics and a host of similarly sensational events. It is those that keep the reader turning the page. One can’t quite believe that this would go on.

But those aspects are set in the context of the economic disparities of the time and the gaps between the aristocratic lifestyle and that of the miners supporting his lordship are set out, using primary documents, diaries of eyewitnesses, and newspaper accounts Bailey provides the right level of historical context. One comes away understanding much more about the General Strikes in Britain in the first decades of the twentieth century.

But what is even more amazing (to me as an individual reader) is the account of the burning of the family records housed in Wentworth Woodhouse, a conflagration that went on for three full weeks in an attempt to maintain the family’s privacy and reputation. Never mind the archival value of such historical documentation; this was the move of a family to keep itself to itself. (While some of the burning may have been intended to prevent unhappy family secrets from being revealed, a good deal of it appears to have been an effort to spite those who might otherwise have indiscriminately dismissed the contributions of an economic powerhouse.) It’s an incredible story and I’m not surprised at the rave reviews Black Diamonds received upon publication. Fascinating and recommended.

If Black Diamonds happens to cross my path, I'll have to check it out.

>35 jillmwo: Book bullet!

Digression: I really like Madame Vastra, Jacx and Jenny. And yes, I wish they had their own spin-off. And I think a Doctor in his nightgown and carpet slippers is delightful. (Ooops, that ought to be Strax.)

>38 jillmwo: agreed on all three counts :) I'm looking forward to this incarnation even more after last night!

Dear British LT Buddies and Other LT Friends Who Are Part of the British Commonwealth: I forgave you years ago for burning down our White House. I understand that it was done in a moment of -- something -- and that we should now be able to look back on that day together 200 years ago and laugh about it as good friends do. (So please don't feel you need to apologize for it now: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28929626) Love, Jill

PS. Also because you did give us Doctor Who, a thing for which my spouse is eternally grateful. Oh, and you also gave us Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Daphne DuMaurier, and Benedict Cumberbatch (I mean, William Shakespeare...)

Oh dear - some people need a sense of humour injection.

Does this mean we can demand an apology for all the US films where the baddy is British ;)

Well, I think it's funny. :) Also, >40 jillmwo: and I will join you, because in addition to your list of gifts I add: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellis Peters, scones, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, the whole Mystery Series, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lee, David Tennant, Judi Dench, oh, so many more. Love our cousins across the pond!

Thanks for the language, too. And the law.

>42 MrsLee: Point of information: Peter O'Toole was Irish.

:-)

Well...I'm from way up in Northern California, from a town with a population of 300, full of cowboys and farmers, but most people assume I'm near the beaches, live near the Bay Area, etc. ;)

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend, just didn't research. But we all know that the most handsome men are Irish anyway, don't we?

>45 MrsLee: No offence taken. Flattery will get you anywhere.
;-)

>45 MrsLee:

You mean California isn't just San Francisco and LA?

>45 MrsLee: How far from the giant redwoods?

Lunch Break here. Following up on >45 MrsLee: I have to agree with MrsLee that Irish men are handsome. (I am married to one of those fair-skinned Irishmen so you know, I kind of have to say that.) But were it not for the fact that I happen to have seen on IMDB that Peter O'Toole's middle name was Seamus, I too might have assumed that he was British by birth. He played those roles so well. He was Henry II in Becket and The Lion in Winter. He played Mr. Chipping in Goodbye Mr Chips. He played Lawrence of Arabia. He wasn't really plausible as an Italian pope in the Tudors on TV, but then again, that wasn't a particularly plausible rendition of history in the first place...

You of course @pgmcc are handsome. You as well >48 hfglen: . (Flattery may be slathered on for best results...)

>49 jillmwo: *bows* ;)

Oh, oh, oh! Will you preen again @hfglen? And @pgmcc, too?

>48 hfglen: 3 hours and 46 minutes, sans potty stops.

Matchless by Gregory Macguire

There is a heartbreaking tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a little girl who is forced to be out on the streets, shoeless, trying to sell matches in order to bring money home to an abusive father. It’s winter-time, specifically New Years Eve. Of course, she’s not able to sell even one match. She huddles in a side street niche for protection against the cold and lights one of the unsold matches in order to stay warm. There follow some visions of a warm stove, a great Christmas feast, of a great tree decorated in light, and finally a vision of her dead grandmother who embraces the little girl. There’s a bit of foreshadowing in a reference to her seeing a falling star and the tale her grandmother told her that such a sight indicates a soul dying. In the edition I read as a child, there was an illustration of a decidedly masculine angel carrying her off to be in Paradise with her grandmother. A cold, miserably lonely little girl has died -- on the street -- during what is arguably the Western world’s most festive and happy holiday period.

The Little Match Girl is a masterpiece. It stabs at the heart. It’s painful and real and relevant. Because this stuff still happens.

However, it’s characterized as being too bleak for modern sensibilities and therefore Gregory Macguire wrote Matchless as an “illumination” of the story. You know, to brighten it up. Because we can’t have sadness woven into Christmas festivities. (I swear, this is where I think of Disney’s version of Pollyanna and we’ll all play the “Glad Game”. Because this is where Maguire is going…)

He leaves Andersen’s story almost entirely intact within Matchless, but his “illumination” undercuts the original by not validating that we are dealing with tragedy. Anderson has written a tale of a most vulnerable human facing the darkness of Death by striking flame from a match, essentially using the quickly extinguished light as a metaphor for our inadequacies in addressing an existential reality. There’s no sadness or abuse in Maguire’s world. His framing tale removes the abusive drunken father, instead showing him to be an unemployed widower, emotionally paralyzed and incapable of caring for two additional infant children. His matchbook-selling daughter is still found frozen dead on New Year’s Day, but other (more competent) individuals swoop in, pick up the pieces and put the family back on track. The widower marries his (more competent) rescuer. She in turn rescues him a second time by managing to get him employment at the palace and the two squalling infants are provided with a fond mother and a caring big brother. New income streams, new family all magically materialize within a twelvemonth and everything is hunky dory. And those falling stars? They don’t mean anyone is dying; no, those stars are going to live on in the skies and be with lots of other stars and their light will show everyone the way home.

I believe the word I’m searching for is twaddle. I had hoped to be able to give this book as a present to a friend who remembers The Little Match Girl as fondly as I do. No such luck.

Now returning to Ellery Queen and The Greek Coffin Mystery, alongside a piece of pie.

>53 jillmwo: I remember reading The Little Match Girl as a child. I share your distain for stories which are designed to deny the harshness of reality. It strikes me as having parallels with rewriting history.

>53 jillmwo: The Little Match Girl may have been my first realization that all was not right in the world. I sobbed every time I listened to it (we had a record of Hans Christian Anderson tales as read by Victor Borge). As much as the story saddened me, I would never want it retold. Some things are meant to make you cry, and they should.

>56 MrsLee: "a record of Hans Christian Anderson tales as read by Victor Borge"
Now that would be something special! I recall fondly, and still have on vinyl, a goodly selection of his humour and Piccolo, Saxie and company, but have not come across his reading anything.

>56 MrsLee: >57 hfglen:
I have two VHS tapes of Victor Borge's shows. I love his sketch about pronouncing punctuation.

>58 pgmcc: that, the inflationary language and the incidental puns :)

>53 jillmwo:, >56 MrsLee: Jerry Pinkney has done a beautiful picture book adaptation of The little match girl which relocates the tale in early C20th New York but otherwise sticks to the original, and effectively contrasts the poverty of the girl and her family with the richer city residents.

>57 hfglen: I found this when I searched. This is the album we had. I'm not brave enough to pursue downloading it, because I don't understand how that works, but if anyone else knows better, let me know.

http://wayoutjunk.blogspot.com/2009/01/victor-borge-presents-his-own.html

When you dip into a mystery written roughly 80 years ago you are bound to note differences in terms of style, pacing, vocabulary,etc. even to the point of sensing differences in how a particular type of crime might be viewed in the context of a particular period. I finally struggled through The Greek Coffin Mystery although it took me nearly three weeks’ time to do so. This mystery is crafted -- crafted to the extent that the table of contents with its chapter headings presents an acrostic to the reader. That alone made me stop and wonder if the chapter titles were selected for being apt descriptors or because they fit the need to spell out T-H-E-G-R-E-E-K-C-O-F-F-I-N-M-Y-S-T-E-R-Y-B-Y-E-L-L-E-R-Y-Q-U-E-E-N. It would take too much analytical work to figure it out (given real life time constraints) but that one bit of constructed meaning should give you a sense of the book’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It’s so brazenly a construction. One of the things that struck me about The Greek Coffin Mystery was that this was exactly the type of mystery writing that Raymond Chandler rebelled against. There’s not a single natural behavior involved in the final product. Characters get trotted on and off stage as required in service to the construction rather than as participants with independent minds and memories.

There were things I liked -- the vocabulary. Cadaveric, younker, bibulous -- not words you usually encounter in mystery fiction. The literary references -- Ellery Queen as a young man favors the Roman playwright, Terence, and quotes him more than once. For that matter, he references Voltaire and Dickens. Of course, in this novel, Ellery Queen is just out of college so one wonders if Queen isn’t just being shown as the kind of pretentious young man who really needs the stuffing to be knocked out of him by real world experience. Because one of the points made in this novel is that the character of Ellery Queen gets it wrong on occasion and that’s why he never reveals his thinking as to the identity of a guilty party until the very end. He embarrasses himself here by getting it publicly wrong in the first half of the book and vows never to allow himself to jump the gun again.

There were twists time and again that I did not see coming and I appreciated that aspect of The Greek Coffin Mystery as well. But at no time did I feel a flow in the writing of this novel. This is my second mystery by Ellery Queen and I don't think I'll trust a third.

I think I need to go back to reading non-fiction. Something less inflammatory like The Day Wall Street Exploded.

>62 jillmwo: I once read a very heated argument that anyone who didn't love Ellery Queen was a Republican, Conservative Christian who didn't know how to think. You might be able to guess which side I was on. :) I can appreciate the cleverness of the stories, but I never loved any of the characters.

Quick post during a lunch break. Have you all seen this list: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/have-you-read-the-200-best-american-novels/ ? The reason I ask is that I tend to prefer lists that offer up authors rather than specific works. I may not have read The Grapes of Wrath, but I have read Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie and his version of King Arthur and his Knights. Why must it be Wrath rather than the other two. I've read far more of Sarah Orne Jewett than just the one novella that they list.

By the way, for those of you lurking, there's been a list meme going around FB entitled "Ten Books That Have Stayed With You". I started up a similar list here on FB and would love to see some of you add to it. I think a couple of my FB/LT friends have already done so, but I'm fairly sure that there are those here who may choose to remain aloof from FB. So here's the link: https://www.librarything.com/list/9884/all/Ten-Books-That-Have-Stayed-With-Me

Have at it!!! And thank you to @Marissa_Doyle and @SylviaC for jump-starting it.

The Power of Habit

I read this book in the space of a weekend (that is, in actual chronology about two weekends back). I was expecting something a little different, something a little more in the vein of a self-help or how-to. Thankfully the author adopted a different approach. Duhigg examines the nuances of just how our brains construct the routines on which we rely for so much of our daily lives. For the record, altering such habits is handled via a process of identifying the cue that triggers a particular behavior and then working out how to replicate the reward that is felt after the routine completion of a series of actions (routine behavior). We successfully change our habits when we swap out a negative routine behavior with a behavior that still results in the desired reward but which is more positive. The author suggests that this type of re-programming process can be practiced by individuals, corporations and societies and provides some case studies as examples. (Note: Charles Duhigg, the author, is the journalist who wrote the 2012 New York Time article about Target analyzing data and applying that data to influence customer purchasing behaviors. Target’s analysts were able to use data to recognize behavioral shifts surrounding a possible pregnancy, even before the women themselves had shared the information with their families. They would then proceed to send her mysteriously convenient coupons just around the time the customer requires certain types of supplies. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html There’s nothing necessarily nefarious going on, but the NY Times story did alarm some consumers when they began to understand the potential for manipulation.)

There are standard routines on which we each rely to manage our lives. We depend on those routines in order to manage daily life. The more set the sequence of actions to be followed as part of a routine behavior, the less cognitive effort is required to accomplish a given task. That’s the goal of so much of modern life -- to not be forced to *think* how to do something.

Duhigg’s revelation to the reader is that it is work to figure out an alternative sequence of actions that our brains will accept as equally satisfying and pleasurable. It also takes time to wreak such a change -- another barrier to making the attempt. Some rewiring processes take longer than the conventionally accepted 21 days. The brain resists the change because either the behavior involves more processes than thought or because the neurological frisson of pleasure craved by the brain hasn’t been satisfied by the replacement routine. One of the final conclusions reached by the author is that for change to occur, the individual must have a belief, a firm sense of conviction that change is possible. The brain needs that conviction, that belief in order for the neurological rewiring to “take”.

Once individuals, communities and societies fall into a set of predictable routines, it’s easy for “outsiders” to take advantage of the knowledge for purposes of manipulation. The value in reading this book lies in the reader paying attention to what is entailed in behavioral change in order to minimize the impact of others' attempts to manipulate our behavior.

>65 jillmwo: How did you rate this one, Jill?

I tend to think of habits as sparing us the necessity of making thousands of small, distracting decisions every day. But of course bad habits are as automatic as good ones and may be much more tenacious. When my kids were trying to give up thumb-sucking, I told them a habit was something you do all the time without thinking. One of them challenged me to give up smoking at the same time, and you know, I did it. "If I can do it, you can do it," he said. He's still proud of that.

> 65 You appear to have hit me with your BB gun. My work involves a lot of change management and your book review leads me to understand the book explains some of the neuroscience behind that.

Did you rate the book highly?

>66 Meredy: and >67 pgmcc:, I think this is a worthwhile read in terms of the reader walking away with a better understanding of just how the brain works for purposes of behavior modification. I don't think it is, in any way, a how-to book. (Although, certainly, the notes in the back of the book would point you to some useful research findings and similar material.)

The companies that are used as examples in the book aren't trading away their competitive edge, but you can see how the approach adopted might work in another setting. There is one company in my own industry that I understand has used this book to think about its behavior and culture. I don't have any information about how successful their thinking about this has been in the actual adaptation to change. (I'm kind of afraid to ask, lest I inadvertently embarrass someone.)

It's not a particularly challenging read, which is why I could finish it in a weekend. So in terms of rating the book, I'd give it five stars for purposes of communicating knowledge and understanding. I think its greatest value is in pointing out how our routine behaviors can potentially open us up to manipulation by others in our environment. But other than informing me about how to think about implementing new routines and practices, I'd give it only about three stars as a manual for doing-it-yourself. Meredy was able to give up smoking without having read this book. How did she do that? Will-power? Distraction? She probably applied a bit of both, because she is a woman of sense. The author was able to give up cookies as a snack based on what he learned by researching the book and working out some fairly basic alternatives, but there wasn't anything that he did that couldn't have been gleaned from your average diet book.

Does that clarify my thinking, guys?

>68 jillmwo: Very much so. Thank you. I'll put it on my library list.

I quit smoking cold turkey; for me that was the only way. Gritty determination was part of it, and facing my son's challenge was another part. I really wanted the results, too: namely, to be free of the addiction. Also I journaled my last day and then my last pack, minute by minute, followed by a pretty intense few days of discomfort, and saved it to reread in case I ever thought I might want to go through withdrawal again. Which I didn't. So--resolve, motivation, and deterrent. (I also ate a lot of pretzels and chewed on a lot of pencils for a while afterward.)

But of course I don't want to divert your thread into a discussion about smoking. This post is about breaking a habit. I'm especially interested in the thought-manipulation aspect of the subject as you describe it.

>68 jillmwo: I agree with, @Meredy: you have clarified your thinking.

Now, rather than hijack your thread into talking about smoking I shall talk about "not" smoking.

I understood the concept that giving up smoking was easy. I did it hundreds of times.

What led me to finally give up was my imminent marriage. I was at a work Christmas party in 1982, the year before I got married. My Fiancée was a non-smoker. While at the party I thought about the smell of stale tobacco on clothes and curtains and furniture and...and then thought my future wife should not have to put up with that. It worked for me and I think it fits the pattern described in your posts.

On corporate manipulation, I worked for some years in the systems department of a chain store. We had a loyalty card scheme gathering information on people's purchases and offering them vouchers to attempt to move them onto new and more profitable products and brands. One of the key concepts, particularly for grocery chains, is that if one can persuade someone to buy their groceries in the same store for four weeks then they will shop in that same store for ten weeks. I am sure you have received offers like that when you receive a set of four vouchers offering double points with the vouchers valid on four successive weeks.

Most grocery chains find this works well. We discovered that it worked in Southern Ireland but it did not in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland people shopped in the store for four weeks and then moved on to whatever store was offering the best deals for week five. Being from Northern Ireland I understood this behaviour was related to the amount of Scottish blood in the populations veins and that my compatriots are too canny to be taken in by such Tom-foolery. As a company we withdrew the loyalty card system from Northern Ireland as it was ineffective in influencing customer behaviour.

Now that is truly quite interesting, @pgmcc. I had not realized that there would be such a distinct difference in cultural behaviors between Southern and Northern Ireland. Are you sure that Scottish blood is the real rationale?

@meredy, given how you describe the process of changing your behavior, I will be interested in how you view this one. I'm not sure that you will like it. You really didn't approach your own behavior modification in quite the way that Duhigg advocates. (Although I do think your use of journaling as part of the mechanism by which you shifted your behavior is a really interesting one.)

More on forming habits: http://lifehacker.com/if-you-enjoy-something-dont-try-to-make-it-a-habit-1637540...

On the other hand, willpower is limited and there's a physiological (I think that's the right word) reason for that: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/01/self-control.aspx

I have to go drink more coffee now.

I have a such a set of books to get through over the course of the next three months.

All This and Heaven Too Book and movie. Best seller from 1938. (Watch one single Bette Davis flick and this is where it leads)
The Map of Lost Memories for the township library group
The Last Policeman also for the township group
A Fatal Winter nice little cozy for the township group
For Information Specialists: Interpretations of References and Bibliographic Work (Information Policy, Management and Services) for work research. Quite the barn-burner, that one.
Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment --also work-related
The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd (Touchstone Wonky)
The Film of Fear by Frederic Arnold Kummer -- different bookgroup
A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland
Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker
In the Company of Thieves also by Kage Baker -- short stories so this might be manageable in the short term
Three Bags Full
Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil
Smallbone Deceased

and a couple of other mysteries lying about and glaring at me in some displeasure at being overlooked.

Actually, on one level, I do know how lucky I am to be reading this stuff. I just wish it was more leisurely at time.

Is that the Bates and White book? I remember loving the term "bibble."

Yes, it is. He also calls the bibliographic essay tedious reading. (I don't know why the touchstone isn't working in the context of the post, but is working in the right hand navigational bar/list of titles and authors.) I'm writing an article about the bibliographic essay and the book is for background research.

It must be middle-age. I'm forgetting so much of what I used to know just off-hand -- like the nuances of terminology in Library Land. (Are you a lurking librarian, @Jim53? You must be to recognize Bates and White.)

Well, YAY! http://boingboing.net/2014/09/25/kim-stanley-robinsons-mars-b.html I *like* his work and I think it's high time it was put into a visual medium.

*small but dignified happy dance on Friday morning*

>75 jillmwo: I went through part of an MA program in English Literature. The Bates and White came up in my Bibliography and Methods course. I got a pub out of that course: the Bulletin of Bibliography printed my summary of criticism of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. I even got the cover (ha!) with a nice picture of UKL.

>75 jillmwo: Should I read your essay before I try to write anything, uh, bibliographic? Is a bibliographic essay essentially the same thing as a survey of the literature? I've edited those (they're deadly) in the social sciences but never written one.

From the University of Florida definition: A bibliographic essay is a narrative discussion, i.e., a review, of the literature on a topic. It is the equivalent of a conversation in which someone not only advises you about "what's out there" but shapes that raw material into a coherent survey of the materials available. Like all bibliographies, the bibliographic essay enumerates sources and, like an annotated bibliography, it describes and analyses them. It goes beyond performing these functions, however, to comparing, contrasting, and evaluating the relationships among works. A bibliographic essay thus draws a picture of the literature of a topic, and in so doing, unlike a list and like an essay, it tends to take a position and establish an interpretive point of view.

Now, that's how they describe it in the discipline of history. If you were looking at medical literature, they'd call it a literature review. Then an author writing for Sage says it's a "systemic, explicit and reproducible method of identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing the existing body of completed and recorded work by researchers, scholars and practitioners." Even a descriptive definition sounds tedious, doesn't it?

TMI, but here are the three such volumes I admit to owning here on LT: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=jillmwo&tag=bibliography&c...

If you've edited stuff in the social sciences, @Meredy, I'm sure this sounds excruciatingly familiar. I agree that such things *can* be tedious reading, but that's true of much academic writing. That said, such things do serve a purpose as a short cut in bringing yourself up to speed on a niche topic. The question is whether this content form dies a quiet, unmourned death in the digital age or whether we keep it because it continues to be a useful shortcut for jump-starting an education (kind of like Cliff's Notes for professionals). I haven't figured out what I think yet.

(I was teasing you about writing one, primarily because you obviously have the intellect and the focus required in pulling one together. Make a list, @Meredy, and we'll call it quits. It's not like with @pgmcc where I really did force him to read Jane Eyre. Speaking of which, I'm sure I gave him another assignment to read some well-established 19th century classic. What was it? Something by one of the Bronte sisters? I should go nudge him.)

>79 jillmwo: I know you were. But after you flung that rubber gauntlet in my journal thread, I went back over my reading lists for the past two years looking for a theme and could hardly find anything. I'm all over the map. Three books about opium...probably not enough for a review. Still thinking. Not giving up yet, though.

After penciling my way through a lot of manuscripts back in the old days of hand-editing, I thought the main purpose of a review of the literature in the social sciences was to afford a pair of authors a publication credit when they couldn't think of anything else to write.

You're close. Primarily, it's a publication credit where you get to prove that you read lots of stuff.

(I thought you made him read Rebecca.)

I thought my homework was up to date. Oh dear! I will have to check my homework journal to see what is not marked as read.

>83 pgmcc: Aren't you submitting your book reports?

>84 Meredy: I do have a bit of a backlog. :-( Sorry!

Will I have to do detention?

Ahem, @pgmcc, poor time management is no excuse for not completing assignments. Perhaps you should be revisiting some of your chosen priorities that got you into this situation?

I'm returning to non-fiction. I'm finding I'm impatient with fiction. I want to shake authors by the shoulders and yell at them "What is your point?"

Sigh.

@Meredy, there is such a thing as the bibliographic essay devoted to a genre. Perhaps you could go back to your past two years and see if there's any group of titles that hits you that way?

>86 jillmwo: I'm on it. Don't want to get my name on the board.

Sometimes I get impatient with nonfiction in a similar way: Why didn't you integrate your material? Where is the flow? Do you even know there's somebody over here reading this, or are you just talking to yourself? Where is the engagement? Show me your passion for the subject--or why are you writing this?

When nonfiction satisfies this hope (can't call it an expectation), it's a real winner with me. Fiction, even poor fiction, rarely has a feeling of drudgery about it.

Okay, LT buddies in the UK, you have a mission. I understand from the following BBC news story that they have just opened up Elizabeth Gaskell's home to tourists after a massive and very expensive renovation effort: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29462260.
One of you must make a trip up to Manchester and report back. I discovered Gaskell's novels only as an adult and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. As ordinary life precludes me from traveling overseas to make a personal pilgrimage, I am forced to whine disagreeably. Anyone able to make a trip so I can live vicariously?

>88 jillmwo: And can I tag along as a vicarious passenger?

>88 jillmwo: Can't take a trip to Manchester 'cos I'm already there.

You know how you never visit attractions that are on your doorstep? This is one of those things for me.

>90 AHS-Wolfy: Can you be bribed to take a Saturday afternoon to go visit? What would it take? Because as you can see, both @Meredy and I are bouncing up in down in excitement on the order of "Please, take us, AHS-Wolfy? Please, please? Huh? Will you?"

(I am sure Meredy and I will promise to clean our rooms and finish any overdue book reports or bibliographic effort stacked on our desks.)

(I'll dust all the bookshelves too, but Jill has to change the cat litter box this time.)

>91 jillmwo: & >92 Meredy: Perhaps someone with more interest in the subject matter would be more beneficial for you to get your vicarious thrills from a visit. I don't even have a working camera right now so even if you are allowed to take pics, I couldn't. *looks around for a volunteer*

(Pssst, Jill, probably we shouldn't ask a guy.)

>88 jillmwo:

I wonder how a roof can be stolen?

>95 suitable1: , that question occurred to me as well in reading the BBC item. Perhaps portions of the roof were stolen? Shingles or something? I dunno.

In the meanwhile, have any of you ever been tempted to ruthlessly go through your bookshelves and get rid of everything except for the classics and non-fiction? That's where I am at the moment.

>95 suitable1: >96 jillmwo: It was common for certain buildings to have lead sheeting as the roofing material. It was and is a common occurrence for the lead to be stolen leaving the roof leaking and in need of repair.

>96 jillmwo: " have any of you ever been tempted to ruthlessly go through your bookshelves and get rid of everything except for the classics and non-fiction? "

Been there, done that, then found myself buying many of them again. Go carefully.

>96 jillmwo: What a scary thought!

>96 jillmwo: I suspect there is something you can take for that condition.

Perhaps a lie-down followed by a nice cup of tea and a good genre novel will help...

@jillmwo - step away from the bookcase. Put down that book. get right back from that bookcase. We would want any books to get hurt, now, would we?

I may have to resort to that turn-to-page-69 test for determining what I read. I am having to resort to re-reading 19th century novels and/or criticism of same. How do you all feel about Anthony Trollope? (Serious question) There is some leftover Austen. (Thank heaven for Maggie Lane. I have her new one, Growing Older With Jane Austen.)

What it comes down to really is that I want to return to a predictable (translation:Slower) environment. Where we all read slowly and thoughtfully, and gather in front of a companionable fire with a cup of coffee and a warm basset hound.

Oh, okay, @Marissa_Doyle, you can have a bunny instead. And @clamairy can have her boxer puppies, Rosie and Sammie. And I suppose that means we'll have to allow in the rest of the wildlife as well. (Although I draw the line at the heffalumps...)

Tiggers? Are Tiggers OK?

My reading this month has taken a sharp turn for the worse as well. There are three books I do want to read, but for some reason, I can't seem to begin any of them. So I watch cooking shows instead.

A kitty for me! But in return I'll open a bottle of jerepigo to share!

I like Trollope very much (serious answer).

Speaking of whom, might Angela Thirkell do the trick?

>103 jillmwo:

"Trollope is well known as a novelist and as creator of several memorable characters in his Barsethshire and Palliser books, but few are aware that he was also a major figure in the Post Office, responsible for the introduction of the pillar box and for the extension of postal services to rural districts. He spent many years in Ireland and it was his mover there in 1841 that saved him from likely dismissal in London."

Extract from, The GPO: Two Hundred Years of History.

>107 pgmcc: Wasn't he also a key player in the introduction of the Penny Post?

>108 hfglen: I am not sure of Trollope's role in the Penny Post. There was a Penny Post service established in Dublin in 1773 which was eight years before Trollope arrived in Ireland. It was in 1841 that Rowland Hill was successful in establishing a penny post service throughout Britain and Ireland.

ETA to correct a typo. The original remains for comparison and the amusement of the reader. Correct version below.

I am not sure of Trollope's role in the Penny Post. There was a Penny Post service established in Dublin in 1773 which was sixty-eight years before Trollope arrived in Ireland. It was in 1840 that Rowland Hill was successful in establishing a penny post service throughout Britain and Ireland.

And apparently he took his job in the Post Office quite seriously. I was skimming the introduction by Victoria Glendinning in my upstairs copy of Barchester Towers and she comments as well on his traveling about rural areas of Ireland and bringing those areas up to scratch. And of course, he wrote his novels during his frequent travel spells.

I am enjoying the re-read of Barchester Towers, at least in part because of the fun found in watching Obadiah Slope's conflict with Mrs. Proudie. I mean, Mrs. Proudie is at a disadvantage in so many ways during her first social reception of the Cathedral community. She gets upstaged by Madeline Neroni and then Slope won't do as she tells him (which is galling to her, because she "outranks" him).

Slope is himself a masterpiece. (And to make it even more delightful, he is apparently based partially on a real life person -- J.W. Cunningham, author of The Velvet Cushion, a particularly dreadful bit of religious propaganda. I am charmed.)

Oh, that's wonderful!

>109 pgmcc: Um...Trollope was born in 1815.

>112 Meredy: Thank you. I was trying to work out how Trollope could have been less than about 110 years old at the time of which we speak, given Pete's dates.

>112 Meredy: Thank you for your diligent proof-reading. To err is human. To make a complete cock-up one needs a computer.

Thank you for reminding me I am a computer.

;-)

>110 jillmwo: He was very diligent in the Post Office in Ireland and introduced some significant changes, especially in rolling postal services into rural areas. Apparently he was sent to Dublin from London as a last ditch attempt for the Post Office not to sack him for poor performance.

>144 Meredy: Oh, that wasn't proofreading. It was more like "Hmm--I didn't think Trollope was that early." So I checked.

I'm afraid I haven't read any of the Barchester books, but I did watch the whole BBC series, which was nicely done.

I think you'd enjoy Barchester Towers, Meredy--it's almost as slyly and skeweringly humorous as Austen.

>116 Meredy:. I liked that BBC production as well. Rickman was a good piece of casting in that. But I do recommend the entire series of the Barset novels, with the caveat that you do need to read The Warden before reading Barchester Towers. The first sets up the second in several key ways. By the time to get to the final novel The Last Chronicle of Barset, you understand the network of relationships and social conflicts. Trollop has his faults but he writes really memorable characters. And @Marissa_Doyle is right that he can be slyly and skeweringly humorous, at least in these early novels. My sense is that he got a bit darker in later works, like The Way We Live Now. That one is on my shelf but I haven't read it. (It is a whopper of a tome...) The Warden is reassuringly short and a nice introduction to Trollope.

Oh, and @MrsLee? The heffalumps can come in, but they need to avoid stepping on the basset hound's ears or sloshing the water dishes.

I rearranged a bookshelf or two today. I can now view my matched set of Folio Society Barchester novels when lying in my bed.

Pleasant dreams!

*Shrieking in defiance into the face of the Great Void of the Universe*

Nothing is working the way it should be. Work is aggravating. Personal life is aggravating.

I need to shriek and beat on something with a cricket bat.

*howls at the moon*

SO what's your favorite comfort read? What do you recommend in the way of self-help? (But I'm warning you that the first person who suggests Pollyanna buys the farm!)

Comfort reads: A College of Magics, The Grand Sophy or any of many Georgette Heyers, Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League, To Say Nothing of the Dog, or foodie memoirs by James Villas or Ruth Reichl.

Depends on the comfort you need. Do you need to immerse yourself in simpler times? The Little House on the Prairie or Anything Can Happen by George Papashvily - a story of an immigrant to America, very funny.

Do you need someone who understands you? Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Do you need to see the "good" guy go through hell and back, but win in the end and make sarcastic comments all the way through? Storm Front by Jim Butcher.

Do you need to have the world orderly and neat and predictable where justice is served, the people are witty and calm? The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers (or any other of her mysteries).

Do you need to be swept away into another world? The Fellowship of the Ring or almost any of Brandon Sanderson's novels.

Mostly though, pick a book you love the most and read it. Any of your favorites will do.

Georgette Heyer, D. E. Stevenson, Dorothy L. Sayers, Elizabeth Cadell, Lucilla Andrews, Dear Enemy, The Blue Sword, Beauty, The Sugar Queen, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Winter Solstice.

>121 jillmwo:
If you are in a non-fiction mood I point you to Critical Mass; Willful Blindness; Spy the Lie; The Blind Giant

Have you read UKL's The Other Wind? I have a copy that I keep in my office and open at random occasionally to help me regain my equilibrium. The story begins very simply and grows to affect the whole world powerfully. There are so many lovely little touches that I appreciate very much.

>121 jillmwo: Oh, do you have my sympathy! I really want to help.

When I feel that way, sometimes I want something that doesn't cloak or smother those emotions but expresses them and even outdoes them. That's when I put on music such as Carmina Burana or a loud Wagner piece and not some nice Debussy or Satie.

A classic murder mystery gets you some vicarious violence and also turns out right in the end, with justice served and all questions answered.

For grotesque and grisly, there's the Pendergast series. The bad guys do get caught, but not without a lot of messy work first.

For another sort of trip, I totally lost myself in Station Eleven recently and even forgive it for not playing out all the meetups and connections I was expecting.

Sometimes, though, nothing soothes like some traditional fairy tales such as the Andersen or Andrew Lang, in older editions, hardcover if possible, without 20th-century revisions to the language. With original pen-and-ink illustrations, of course.

I also think the other suggestions posted above are great, especially MrsLee's right-sized band-aids.

Two very British recommendations, both from the ‘thirties and ‘forties. (Maybe those are the decades where my head currently is for purposes of fantasy and coziness…)

I read the collection of short stories by Angela Thirkell, Christmas at High Rising. By far, my favorite story was “A Nice Day in Town”, which actually is an essay from 1942 originally appearing in London Calling. It was all about two women trying to manage the dailiness of things amidst the war effort, rationing, etc. What to do about a lack of elastic, saucepans, retail help and fish? I found it comforting if only because the end message is that through the kindness of strangers and each other, we manage to navigate through the shoals of imperfect life.

@Meredy is right. Sometimes a good murder mystery allows just the right amount of vicarious living. The second book I read is new in the sense of only just returning to an in-print status. It’s entitled Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story, originally published back in 1937. It’s part of the British Library Crime Classics series and the author is J. Jefferson Farjeon, brother of the more famous Eleanor Farjeon. This is the perfect British Christmas mystery, complete with British Railways, tea laid before the fire, country houses, and a goodly number of ghosts, screams, corpses and murders. There’s a bit of a slow build, but then it has a marvelous final third of the book where you’re fending off importunate spouses, idiot telemarketers and similar charity cases just because you must find out how this all will be resolved. (I will note that this is another story where the the women are the sensible ones. Sometimes one needs to be reminded that one’s own gender is the good one. Yes, that was sexist. Yes, I apologize to those who may be offended. No, I’m not going to delete the statement, because one day I’ll need to be reminded of it all over again as a coping mechanism.)

It's a bit nippy here this weekend. And later in the work week, I'm off again on Amtrak. Harrumph. But I'm making note of all the recommended comfort reads above. I may need them again soon. Many thanks to @MrsLee, @SylviaC, @Marissa_Doyle, @Jim53, @pgmcc, and @Meredy. For now, I'm putting away the cricket bat.

Gathering up book titles like squirrels store up acorns for the winter. A couple of common threads --

Reading (And Analysis)
How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide
Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
A Little History of Literature
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Cozy Mysteries
A Fatal Winter
The Body in the Transept
Detection Unlimited
Smallbone deceased

Austen
Mr. Collins Considered: Approaches to Jane Austen
The Watsons

Fluff
All This and Heaven Too

Oh, and a bunch of Shakespeare's history plays on DVD.

Oh my. I want to read all of those. Now. It would be interesting to see how the first batch compares to Francine Prose.

>128 jillmwo: A Mystery in White sounds delectable. I just put it on my library request list and found that their copies have been ordered but not yet received. A fresh library book! Hurray!

Something to enjoy over your Thanksgiving weekend (http://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/25/read-j-r-r-tolkien/) Michael Drout speaking at Carnegie Mellon in early October.

Obituary for P.D. James who died yesterday at the age of 94: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30232569

She was quite a woman, not just because she wrote marvelous novels but also because of her wide and varied interests and causes.

Okay, so today my husband and I went out to a local museum, one noted for its collection of materials pertaining to 19th and 20th century book and magazine illustration. We met a friend and we visited the Arthurian exhibit that the museum was featuring as part of its Christmas tradition. Naturally, the posted signs indicated the artist but also indicated the work from which a painting or drawing was intended to illuminate. (See how you can be led into temptation even when you don't go into the museum gift shop?)

The works that I was led to look at were as follows:
Tales from the Enchanted Isles by Ethel May Gate;
Arthur Pendragon of Britain by John W. Donaldson;
Chivalry by James Branch Cabell;
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain;
The Boy's King Arthur and finally,
The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser

It's always interesting to me to see how we present time-honored material to new readers. That last one was actually not on view, but there was a great and "approachable" book entitled The Red Cross Knight and Britomart which was really just bits of Spenser presented for younger readers.

At any rate. I'm downloading Chivalry from Project Gutenberg because it has wonderful paintings by N.C. Wyeth included with it. The other titles as collectibles were fairly much out of my price range. The Ethel May Gate one -- that is, Tales from the Enchanted Isles -- actually was published by Yale University Press back in 1926 and while there were copies of it floating about out there on the used book market, they were all in the triple digit price tag realm. It was described however as modern fairy tales, composed during the 1920's, and at the museum we visited, there was a lovely little piece illustrating a story entitled "The King's Sceptre". (Don't you wish you knew what made it magic?)

So at any rate, I'm going to try reading the Cabell title in the hopes that I will satisfy a particular itch awakened by the collection at the Brandywine. To make the day even more special and holiday-oriented, there was a massive train display to be viewed and there was a live music concert of Christmas hymns.

Loved every bit of it!

P.S. Is anyone familiar with a French fairy named Tiphaine? She apparently appeared in some short story by Warwick Deeping in Harpers back in 1906, but I have to assume she was around before then. Perhaps in folklore?

>134 jillmwo: Not familiar, no. I've read a lot of folklore and fairy tales, but never run across that name. I did poke around a little, though. Look up this title on Amazon:

Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology, by Theresa Bane

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Fairies-World-Folklore-Mythology/dp/078647111...

and search inside for Tiphaine. There's an entry.

Without knowing the Harper's short story you're citing, I'd be willing to guess that the author felt free to do some inventing.

>135 Meredy: I have that book if anyone needs me to look anything up in it.

Okay, technically speaking, I am on vacation until January 5 (although the next two days both have serious work-related phone calls on the schedule). When I look back over the past year, it would appear that it wasn't that exciting of a year. At the moment, my TBR list is longer than the list of books I got through. That said, I have been re-reading Lost Horizon for the past two weeks. It's a very short book of only about 150-160 pages and I've been going through it for the past three weeks, so that should tell you something about how much leisure time there's been.

I first read this book back as a freshman in high school as part of the curriculum. That should tell you something about how long ago that was, because there's no way anyone would dare to try to require it nowadays. I'm not particularly sensitive to all the "--isms" as a general thing, but there is a surprising amount of imperialism present. And it is disconcertingly sexist in a way that slid past me at the age of 14. There are only two female characters (a beautiful Chinese musician and a plain British missionary) and neither is particularly positive as a role models go. What does stick with one (reading in in the modern era) is the point Hilton was making about the need to slow down and relish time and the beauties of culture. He does emphasize how the longer life enjoyed in Shangri-La allows the inhabitants the opportunity to take on the larger projects they've always dreamt of. I think this is why this book has remained on my shelf for years and years and years. I do wish we could kind of swat the young man Mallinson in this novel because he's just too full of his own concerns, too impatient and anxious to be off to the next thing. And of course one hopes that Conway makes it back safely to the lamasery and assumes the role of High Lama to safeguard the community. But Hilton leaves that open which adds to the wistfulness of the ending. Even I have to admit that Lost Horizon isn't great literature as generally defined. Still, it's definitely got something that recommends it. I can't imagine handing it off to the library Friends group to sell or sending it to Goodwill.

So that's where I am

>137 jillmwo: Lost Horizon was one of the first books my mother shared with me when she started recommending grown-up reading matter to me in my early teens. I found it totally thrilling. I'd never read anything that so realistically (to my young mind) depicted an exotic other world on our planet. It created an irresistible yearning to go there, and to other mythical places--which I continued to do in other reading. Maybe this one is best left to memory?

Not necessarily, @Meredy! I still enjoyed the novel. I just was able to see the flaws a little more clearly than I'd done before. They were always there, but perhaps cold-hearted, middle-aged cynicism simply led me to be less forgiving or at least, less apt to gloss over the unpleasant.

As an example, I do remember that when I was in high school I was required to write a character profile of one of the characters as a writing assignment. I chose the missionary Miss Brinklow and did my best to treat her sympathetically. When I read the book this time 'round, some part of me wondered whether I had interpreted her motives in an overly generous fashion (because she's really not a very likeable woman). But I'm pretty sure I remember choosing to write about her because she was the most prominent female in the book; the little Chinese princess was presented so vaguely as to make her a Mcguffin. How we as readers are to believe Mallinson and Conway both fall in love with her is beyond me. (Other than that she -- as the Feminine -- represents beauty and culture).

But as I said, I'm still not getting rid of the book. I'm just a little bemused by the way in which it caused me to notice how I've shifted perspectives over the course of the umpty-ump years that have passed.

Perhaps the book was visited by the Suck Fairy's older, more mature sister--the Reality Fairy. :)

>140 Marissa_Doyle: Well, who the heck invited HER? The Reality Fairy, I mean...

To you all, may the best of the season -- whether books, cheese, wine, comfy chairs, family, sunlight or snow -- be part of the next few days. And we'll make it a happy new year if we all keep coming to the Pub for friends and conversation and for second breakfasts...

>142 jillmwo: Many happy returns! I'll see you in the pub and I am sure before the new year arrives I will have given you plenty of ammunition to attack me relating to the planned reading unread; the reading done but not reported upon; and anything else you want to attack me on.

Have a great time over the coming week. I hope you manage to switch off and recharge the batteries.

>128 jillmwo: Mystery in White--lucky me! a new, fresh, unread copy--came in for me at the library just in time. I started it the day it started, December 24th, and finished it when it ended, last night, Christmas night. How perfect is that? (It doesn't have to be accidental to be perfect.)

I wasn't quite satisfied with the ending, but that doesn't matter. It was a thoroughly enjoyable classic Golden Age mystery, set in a snowbound country house, and just right for filling those odd little nooks and crannies of time over a busy holiday. Thanks for the bullet, Jill.

>144 Meredy: , apparently a lot of people have felt that way! According to an article in the Guardian (see http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/14/book-revival-james-daunt-waterstone..., Mystery in White was the Christmas sleeper at Waterstone's this year.

I"m so glad, however, that it met your mood. Like you, I recognized that the ending was less than persuasive but I was able to forgive it because of the charm factor. Still an enjoyable read!

Random observation about my reading this past holiday period. I read very quickly Susan Hill's ghost story, Printer's Devil Court, a Kindle Single that was on sale. I had great hopes for it because initially it seemed to be heading in a direction similar to Frankenstein (I know. Frankenstein is so very Christmas-oriented, isn't it?) At any rate, while there was a hint of Shelley's story in Hill's novella, it failed to live up to the promise.

Trying to work out why, I ran back to pull Collected Stories of M.R. James off the shelf to see if I could figure out why a story like Canon's Alberic's Scrapbook has the power to give me the shivers while Hill's didn't. In part, I don't think Hill focused as much on the horror of her "transformed corpse" whereas James did give you a sense of the ever-hovering cursed creature. There was a longer time frame involved in Hill's story (decades where no one has any sense of being haunted) while James' delivered his tale in a much shorter time frame and with a sense that the Canon of the story can't wait to get rid of the artifact that summons the creature.

So at any rate, if you're into the idea of ghosts during this season of the year, I would refer you back to M.R. James. There's nothing wrong with Hill, but she doesn't give me the shivers the way that Oxford don Montague Rhodes James manages to do.

Oh, and I can give a hearty thumbs up to The Last Policeman by Ben Winters. Not only did I enjoy the author's meditation on the question of how one behaves in the face of imminent death as a metric of character, but it was a good mystery all by itself. (And the ladies at the library got a kick out of it. One woman, who apparently assigns just one 30-minute period per day for her reading, confessed to picking up the book every chance she got, regardless of whether it was her standard reading period that day!)

So not very deep thoughts for the end of 2014, but satisfactory on this last day of the year. Onwards to 2015!!! Here's hoping I have a much better year in reading over the next twelve months. There wasn't much I was thrilled with in 2014.

Now must take the last baked item of 2014 out of the oven. (A rather superfluous rice pudding made only to serve my own cravings. I will gain at least a pound back by eating it all by myself this next week.)

I was debating whether to buy The Last Policeman series while it's on sale for Kindle, and now you've tipped the scale in favour.

>146 jillmwo: My Susan Hill toe-dipping with The Woman in Black did not leave me of a mind to track down her other works. It also demonstrated to me that her work does not measure up to the stories of M.R. James or Robert Aickman. Thanks to Faber & Faber Mr. Aickman's stories are available at more reasonable prices than they have been heretofore.

Have a great New Year with wonderful reading pleasure in 2015, serious or otherwise. Long live entertainment fodder!

I've enjoyed following your reading and your comments this year, Jill, and have my gold-star marker all ready to punch as soon as you post your new thread.

I'll add a recommendation for the Last Policeman series, especially the first and third.

>146 jillmwo: Printer's Devil Court was my least satisfying read of 2014. I don't know about your copy, but my edition had some fairly egregious editing errors too that didn't help with the continuity or flow of the story.

...of course, having been peppered with M R James recommendations by you and @pgmcc, I know what I have to do next year :)