jillmwo's ponderings on books read in 2015

In what has now become an unofficial New Year's tradition, my spouse and I watched a Shakespeare DVD on this first day of January in 2015, specifically Richard II. This version had David Tennant in the title role and he was splendid. Nigel Somebody-or-other played Henry Bolingbroke (eventually Henry IV) as something of a power-hungry thug. What makes this version of Richard II different from the Ben Whishaw version in The Hollow Crown series (2013) is the sense that Richard II was the rightful king and ultimately he might have been a good one, had he been allowed to grow into the role over time. The Ben Whishaw version suggested that Richard II was just too weak as a king and the country was really better off with Henry IV. I recommend the David Tennant version.

Beyond that, I think you probably know what I read -- Jane Austen, 19th century literature, non-fiction, and mysteries. I don't see that changing in the next twelve months, but it's possible that I will surprise you. Other topics such as film adaptation sometimes surface out of curiosity -- heritage studies as film genre, for example. (That’s a thing? Yes. Yes, it is.)

Oh, and I'm probably going to give Middlemarch a shot.

And with the grace noted by many but envied by few, I have managed to start 3 separate reading threads when I only need one in 2015. This is the one I'll keep active. Apologies

This is the one I'm starring, then, and I'll dismiss the other two. I'd hate to lose track! Happy new year.

I look forward to your entertaining and educational expositions. Between your thread and @Meredy's, I feel like I'm upgrading my education in the most enjoyable way possible.

Oh, I've been meaning to read Middlemarch ever since I was--ahem--supposed to read it in college Freshman English about 30 years ago. A group read, perhaps?

You make me feel better, >5 Marissa_Doyle: . I thought I was the last hold-out on this one. I have read *some* of George Eliot's works, but they tend to be the shorter ones, like Silas Marner. The last time I tried to read Middlemarch, I was so disenchanted by Dorothea's marriage to Casaubon that I couldn't continue. But I'm going to try to re-engage with the novel (at least in part because I am enjoying My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead).

Apologies for the poor punctuation, but I haven't had enough coffee yet this am.

You aren't the only one who has multiple new threads. I suspect a bug.

*cough* I assumed that was a bug and immediately commented in the wrong one. So just ignore that and I'll join in here ;)

>1 jillmwo: jillmwo: One of my favourite books that never returned home after a loan was an exploration of Shakespeare's Kings against the history they were inspired by. I recall that John Julius Norwich tried to unpick some of the bias, but I don't recall that Richard II came out of it all that well. I might have to look out the David Tennant version (I really wanted to go see it, but it was kill for tickets territory in terms of its popularity as you can imagine!) and enjoy the alternative perspective.

Well, now you've done it, >8 imyril: ; my husband will immediately want to know the title of the book and whether we can get a used copy of it off eBay or Amazon. I got him a book for Christmas entitled Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles and he's been gulping it down and sharing the good bits. He's a frustrated performer. (He's doing the lighting for a production of Twelfth Night this month, just to keep the troupe going.)

Actually, I just went poking around on Amazon. Was this the book you meant: Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages 1337-1448? The touchstones here on LT aren't recognizing it, but that's the one that seems to fit.

At any rate, I know absolutely nothing about Richard II so when I watched The Hollow Crown initially, I had no factual base against which I might gauge Shakespeare's bias. I recognized John of Gaunt but not more than that. I've watched at least three different versions of the play over the course of the past twelve-eighteen months, so now I know the famous bits as when Richard returns home from Ireland and sinks down upon the sand having realized that his power base is gone.

Post a note when you're starting Middlemarch, won't you? I'm not big on group reads, but it'd be nice to have company on this one. I have loved everything I've read by George Eliot, but somehow it's still hard to get started. You'll inspire me.

I'll do that, @Meredy! I have just properly grasped the fact that this is one *lengthy* novel so it will take a while to plow through. I've been thoroughly slothful today - coffee and petits fors, Poirot on the DVD player, hanging out on LT -- but I've managed to read three chapters in My Life in Middlemarch and the copy of the novel itself isn't due to arrive from Amazon until tomorrow. I don't have too many days like this so it may take FOREVER to get through Middlemarch

My New Year's Resolution (already broken, but I'm going to try to begin again) is to not order any more books until I've read all the ones I've currently got in hand.

I'm the only person I know who preferred The Mill on the Floss to Middlemarch. I wasn't crazy about either, but somehow I related just a little to the brother and sister in MotF.

I also will keep my eyes open for when you start Middlemarch. I believe it is on my shelves and very large, so I might decide to read it this year also.

>9 jillmwo: yes, that's the one. Although I feel a little embarrassed about hitting someone not even on LT with a book bullet - it feels like friendly fire!

...and I might join in the reading of Middlemarch. It's been 20 years and I'd like to revisit it - but it is dauntingly thick to tackle on my own :)

Oh Middlemarch.

I have it as an audio and tried to listen, but it soon became background noise of boredom. People say it is a worthy book. Maybe if we hold hands we can get through it together. Makes it hard to turn pages though.

>15 Bookmarque: good idea. Let's practice turning pages with our noses.

I know! Let's read it it March. Maybe sometime around the middle--?

Groan.
Lol.

Middlemarch in mid-March sounds good to me.
Just beware o' them ides.

We're all on the same wavelength. March was the month where I thought I might be able to fit it into my overall schedule, so we'll aim for that. One book per month? There are 8 books plus an epilogue which would take us to November. Or would approaching it that way drag it out past all bearing?

@jillmwo, I am glad I found your 2015 reading thread. It is starred and noted.

By the way, I have not read Middlemarch but I am confused by the impromptu group read that has come to light in the posts above. It appears many people have tried to read it but been distracted for one reason or other. The most positive thing I noted above is @Bookmarque's comment, "People say it is a worthy book". Am I missing something or is everyone agreeing to read a book that everyone thinks will be a chore?

I hope everyone enjoys Middlemarch. I look forward to following the discussion but I think I will not join in the read unless everyone's comments ooze enthusiasm. I think I will stick with my simple Henry James and his smoothly flowing prose. ;-)

Well, you know @pgmcc, that Henry James wrote The Portrait of a Lady as a kind of counterpoint to Middlemarch. As I understand it, he thought he could improve upon Dorothea Brooke.

I suppose Middlemarch is a recognized challenge on the basis of its length alone, but it is supposed to be the epitome of the British novel. Which is why one feels intimidated. However, like @Jim53 above in #12, other works by George Eliot tend to be a lot more easy to get into. For myself, I thought I might give Middlemarch another whirl to see if I am yet enough of a grown-up (to quote Virginia Woolf) to read and appreciate it. It's entirely possible that I still won't get through it.

OTOH, I have a close friend who read Middlemarch her first shot out and enjoyed it immensely. She still credits me with recommending and handing it to her. (That is despite my protests and doubts. How could I possibly have recommended it to her when I haven't read it myself? But she swears it was me.) Still I wouldn't have thought she was enough of a grown-up at the time to appreciate it either.

I don't know if that explains why we'll going to attempt reading MIddlemarch as if it were an ascent of Everest, but if I were you, I wouldn't expect the group to collectively ooze enthusiasm. There seem to be an alarming lack of expert sherpas in the Pub to help us acclimate to the rareified air.

>19 pgmcc:, I think that some books have to be read at a certain time or age. At 18 I wasn't ready for Middlemarch, but maybe at 51 I will be, now that I have more of a background in 19th century English cultural history and...well, am a grown-up. It might be that this time, it won't be a chore to read. If I do start it in March and it fails once again to keep my attention, I will cheerfully invoke the Pearl Rule on it.

Fair point pgmcc. Speaking for myself alone, I've heard enough good things about Middlemarch to have made me use an audible credit on it. Maybe it was my frame of mind or the time of year that kept me from being caught up by it when I tried listening the first time, but I'm willing to try it again and somehow doing it as a group task might make it easier as other people bring good points to light. Overall I've liked the classic English lit I've read and so would like to add Middlemarch to the list. If it's a slog though, I'm not going to put myself through hell.

I think I acquired it after because I heard so many people on LT talking about it. I like to give all those old books a try, but this one is so thick I've veered away from it. I find myself very reluctant to commit to thick books recently.

You are starred jillmwo. And even before I read this thread I had planned on reading Middlemarch this year, so the middle of March sounds like the perfect time to start. I picked up a copy years ago so I will feel slightly smug that I'm reading one of my TBRs ;)

Oh, wait... having to be a grown-up could be a problem.

At last I've managed to find the right thread!

I love Middlemarch and didn't find it a chore at all. There are so many entwined stories within the book that if you don't like one of them you'll soon enough switch back to one of the others. The BBC adaptation from 1992 or thereabouts was very good - it stuck closely to the novel and was extremely well cast. If the book starts to drag, give it a try.

>26 Sakerfalcon: I've seen the BBC treatment and really enjoyed it. And I read and loved Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda, and The Mill on the Floss. My mother was a great admirer of Eliot and I have her very old editions of all the books. And I really like a long book (when well done) so I can settle in and live with it for a long time. So I'm up for this.

One of the benefits of taking down the Christmas tree is restored access to a particular bookshelf in the living room. There at my fingertips was a copy of Amos Barton by George Eliot, a book I’d forgotten I owned. But it was the first book I finished reading in 2015.

Amos Barton is an odd little novella, usually found grouped with two other novellas in Scenes of Clerical Life. I think Eliot intended it as a character sketch of an ordinary man who fails in his obligations to those around him. He is oblivious to the needs of others. Amos Barton isn’t a particularly effective member of the clergy and his parishioners have no particular regard for him -- neither the middle-class ones snug in their homes by the fire nor the more miserable ones found in the workhouses. He is simply a poor curate, possessed of a wife and more children than he can afford. Barton is unaware of how he is viewed by his parishioners (conceivably, a good thing, as Eliot notes). In turn, he is disdainful of the villagers under his care but pursues a friendship with a visiting nitwit Countess and her half-brother who rank above him socially. For all their claimed interest in Barton’s professional role, neither is possessed of any degree of moral rectitude. Barton’s reputation becomes compromised (however unreasoningly) and yet it is the novel’s only person of upright character and worth who pays for his weakness.

Part of the problem is that Barton is unsuited to his profession, focusing on irrelevancies that have no part in ordinary life. The Shepperton parishioners are equally part of the problem as they fail to exert themselves in understanding the man. The gap between is too great, Eliot aims some excellent barbs in describing the villagers. One character is described as “a childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of spending nothing”

Best quote: Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

On the other hand, when the chips are down, it is the village community that actually steps forward to support Barton when he discovers how badly he has gauged his situation.

There really is no happy ending here. Except that ultimately some of Barton’s children manage to side-step their father’s fate in working at a career for which he is unsuited. If there’s a moral to this tale, it is that Eliot believes that Barton should have accepted the realities of his life and sought to understand the value of what was at hand.

Note: this is the one where Eliot devotes an entire paragraph to the superiority of cream fresh from the cow. It’s also the one where cream (or lack thereof) is the thing that triggers the final outcome. Perhaps it’s intended as a metaphor for the milk of human kindness?

Not yet ready for Middlemarch per se, but I am reminded that I like Eliot and I will continue with that theme as I finish My Life in Middlemarch.

In a bit of LT serendipity, there was a reference to Middlemarch in a book I was reading today, Cutting for Stone. On the one hand, the excerpt quoted was not encouraging to either me nor the characters reading it, on the other, both characters were drawn into the story and enjoyed finishing it.

Can we go back to Shakespeare? I took @imryil's advice back on January 2nd and ordered Shakespeare's Kings which arrived today. It looks fabulous and I will know more about Richard II and others of that bloodline before I'm through.

>30 jillmwo: hurray! I remember it being a joy. I might have to replace my own missing copy and revisit it - it's not a period of history I knew much about except through Shakespeare, so the comparison of fact/fiction/propaganda was priceless.

>31 imyril: Does it paint the real-life Richard III as villain, hero, or something in between?

Just for you @Meredy I looked ahead at the chapter covering Richard III. Norwich believes that the historical Richard III was not nearly as black of heart as Shakespeare suggests. That said, as near as I can tell (and I didn't read the chapter closely), he believes that Richard III was just as power-hungry as the rest of the family and thus not nearly as honorable/misunderstood as Josephine Tey suggested. So not a revisionist by any stretch.

Norwich does recommend the biography of Richard by Desmond Seward.

>33 jillmwo: Thanks. I'm just starting Rebecca Fraser's book, The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History, and I'll be interested to see how she handles it in this 2005 work. The finding of his remains sure brought out some vocal and differing opinions.

>34 Meredy: erk! I guess it's only fair that I get a ricochet bullet after lobbing Shakespeare's Kings around. The Story of Britain sounds like just what I need after a very fractured historical education (my education wasn't kind to the subject - I studied it in German, and spent at least a year using reference books that exceeded my linguistic abilities. And needless to say, we didn't cover English history in German!)

...although I may wait to hear your verdict on it first.

>35 imyril: I'm still in the first chapter (the Romans), but I'd say go to Amazon and look it over. And be sure to read the fourth and fifth paragraphs in the preface, where the author sets forth her philosophical approach. The stories "embedded in the national psyche" are just what I was after here: trying to absorb in a systematic way, and not piecemeal (a little Henry Tudor, a little Lionheart, a little Camelot, a gulp of Scots Wha Hae), what a reasonably well educated British reader would bring to the many new and old British novels I read and films I see. I'm not daunted by the 800 pages; indeed, I was happy to find this in one volume.

And I've made a note of Shakespeare's Kings to come back to after I have a full framework to place them in.

You have a three-fold understanding of the universe (that is, Chaos-Order-LifeSpirit) in Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The universe has been brought under the control of man → in this universe, that is the Amn race. The inhabitants of this universe are cold. There is a key passage in understanding this society:

What is it that an Arameri should know, Auntie?” I asked. It was something I had wondered since our first meeting.

She paused, glanced back at me. “How to be cruel,” she said very softly. “How to spend life like currency and wield death itself as a weapon.” She lowered her eyes. “Your mother told me that, once. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Life as mortal combat. Described that way, one wouldn’t think The Hundred, Thousand Kingdoms would be a very pleasant read. And yet, (and I know I’m three or four years late in getting around to reading this fantasy title), this is a galloping good read. I found the main character to be both interesting as well as plausible. The physical environment in which she found herself was novel and interesting. I found the three-fold structure of this universe to be intriguing as a mechanism for exploring ways of thinking about gods and mortals. I thought the underlying themes of power, race, and fate to be marvelously well handled in that they were present but not heavy-handedly so. One could use them as a springboard for thought or not, as one chose. My primary quibble with this was that I found the sexual attraction between Yeine and Nadahoth to tend towards the wearying end of things. (You know, some women manage to go through life quite successfully without ever finding a “soul mate” and they do JUST FINE. Why does there always have to be a romance in these things?)

I got handed this by one of the participants in the sf/mystery book group I attend and her recommendation was based on the identity of the author as a woman of color. She wanted to read science fiction that wasn’t framed from a purely Caucasian framework. I wasn’t expecting much despite all the recommendations on LT. I just thought it would be another example of the same-old-same-old factory-produced commodity that fuels genre fiction as revenue stream. Ostensibly new, but re-hashing old materials. The Hundred-Thousand Kingdoms was far beyond that.

(BTW, visit this URL: http://www.fantasy-matters.com/2011/10/beyond-worldbuilding-cosmobuilding-or.htm...
to see how she was thinking about her universe as she constructed it.)

Oh, and now I'm going back to Shakespeare. And Chocolate Cake. And Coffee. This past work week was exasperating and that will be continuing as a general theme until the end of February. But this is Sunday morning and I am going to focus on those three things. Shakespeare. Cake. Coffee.

>37 jillmwo: That quote, in a nutshell, is how Mao ran China, according to Jung Chang.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms sounded great and I went to add it to my wishlist and found it already there! Now I'll have to actually get it!

Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles

The author of this (Julian Curry) may be recognizable to you as Claude Erskine-Brown of Rumpole (remember, on PBS?) He led the various contacts through an analysis of how they interpreted key roles for purposes of a particular production. Each interview walks the actors through key aspects of the production, critical reception, specific quotes from the text and character analysis. Together these provide the reader with a better sense of the performer’s process.

I particularly enjoyed Judy Dench talking about playing Juliet under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli. Listening to her description of what he was trying to do, it seems as if he was using this stage production to prepare for the Olivia Hussey movie version. (Very italian, very natural, very cinematic). He adopts what Dench calls a naturalistic approach, with “a proper life going on”. In terms of interpretation, what I found most interesting was Dench discussion of how Juliet grows up over the course of the play. She’s a fourteen year old girl with just that level of maturity at the beginning of the play, but by the close, she’s become more of a thinking adult.

But who would have thought that consummate professional Derek Jacobi suffered from stage fright over the course of a three year period? The role he discusses in this book is Malvolio in Twelfth Night and he admits it’s a smaller part that he took on just because it was the bare minimum that he felt capable of performing in returning to the stage.

Kevin Spacey talks about Richard II and that’s all about power, so right up the alley of the House of Cards star.

There’s more from Jude Law, Penelope Wilton, Helen Mirren and others. (Note: depending upon what device you use or possibly your geographical situation, you may be able to license individual chapters from this book so that you needn’t pay to read about Brian Cox in Titus Andronicus or Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus if you choose not to do so. The UK-based publisher is Nick Hern. which may explain why I couldn’t purchase/license those chapters broken apart, using a Kindle in the U.S.)

Interesting set of predictions for what we'll see in trade publishing over the course of 2015:
http://publishingperspectives.com/2015/01/five-trade-publishing-predictions-2015...

As it happens, I know the author and I suspect he's got a pretty good handle on the world.

>42 jillmwo: Very interesting indeed, Jill. Thank you. I do try to track this stuff even though I'm retired. I'm still very much a reader (and I do still correct typos with a pencil).

A couple of nights ago at the writers' club I listened to a speaker who is a self-avowed expert on marketing self-published books. He said, "Your fellow writers are not your competition. Your competition is anything that people spend their time on: computers, smartphones, and so on. Your fellow writers are your friends." I think publishing too has finally reevaluated its competition.

>41 jillmwo: Heh, I saw Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus in his first run in Shoreditch (not the film he made subsequently) and it was an excellent production. Reading between the lines, I take it that it is less electrifying in print ;) ...to be fair, I'm yet to see a Fiennes interview in which he displays any charm, so that doesn't entirely surprise me. Definitely an actor I prefer in character than in person.

>44 imyril: As I recall from a school setwork, "charm" is not a term that sits well on the character Coriolanus.

>45 hfglen: perhaps that's why he was so convincing :)

Poirot and Me - David Suchet

This might be a badly written book. I can’t be sure. Perhaps it is one of those rapidly ghost-written productions by some anonymous book packager that are packaged somewhat deceptively with a celebrity’s name and face on the cover. The interviews of David Suchet that I've read have always suggested to me that he would be an interesting person to get to know, so I'm wondering. OR the problem with this book may just be my personal cantankerousness these days. That’s also a possibility.

You should know that I have admired Suchet as an actor since the very first time I watched Playing Shakespeare on DVD. As part of a televised Royal Shakespeare Company workshop during the 1980’s, Suchet and Patrick Stewart did a bit of each playing Shylock but with entirely different interpretations of the character. It was a great eye-opener. Because Suchet and Stewart are both really good at what they do for a living.

I’m actually not a big fan of Hercule Poirot as a character but, on screen, I thought Suchet did much to make his eccentricities more tolerable. So I was hoping that I would find this book engaging and potentially useful in discussing The Mysterious Affair at Styles at the library this month. Perhaps Suchet would talk about his work experiences as an actor in different roles or about doing classical theater versus doing television. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of that here. Everyone he works with is always wonderful (so no green room gossip or amusing tales of “on set” shenanigans) Directors, writers, costume designers are all very nice people and always very kind to him. Even the fans are always nice. It’s an indication that Suchet is a nice man and a consummate professional, but it’s not entirely believable. Surely, there must have been some instance of crankiness that fell across his path?

He references every single one of the 70 episodes he did as Poirot but really doesn’t go into any of depth about why some changes were required in bringing some of the lesser short stories to television. He’ll characterize a tale as “slight” but not go into any detail of how the script made it more palatable. It is a linear and at times repetitive rendition of the on-going insecurities of a working actor, “Will they renew us for another season? I must keep working in order to pay the rent. Oh, here’s a chance to be on stage in a play. Oh, well, what do you know? They want me to do another season of Poirot!”. To be fair, there are instances where he must approach a director about whether or not Poirot would actually do a particular bit of business. But again, there is never any indication of unpleasantness. Suchet produces his five page document of 93 characteristics with which Christie endowed her detective and magical harmony descends. I suppose actually that this is a different way of exposing an actor's process from the approach adopted up in #41. Or maybe the interview approach adopted in the Shakespeare title is really the most effective way of eliciting the information. It's possible.

David Suchet may be -- undoubtedly is -- a very nice man, but his book isn't nearly as scintillating as I’d hoped for. (Thank heaven I bought a used copy. If I’d paid full price for his book, I’d be muttering even more darkly into my coffee than I am now.)

Oh, that's too bad! I felt a book bullet coming on because we adore David Suchet as Poirot, but it veered off and disintegrated.

>48 Marissa_Doyle: ditto, I thank you >47 jillmwo:, you have saved me; and for this I will not complain the other 99 times out of a hundred you hit me with a bb.

Well, just to be fair, someone else had an entirely different response to the book over here: http://investigatingpoirot.blogspot.com/2013/11/david-suchets-poirot-and-me-2013...

Your mileage may vary.

Nope, I want to keep my delusions intact. I love Suchet, I love Poirot, and I rarely like celebrity biographies. I'm good.

Well as you can see from the preceding messages, both Marissa Doyle and MrsLee have escaped book bullets. I’m horrified and feel I must make up for this by bringing something new and different to their attention. This is The Original Folk and Fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, a new translation by an expert in the field, Jack Zipes, whose works you may know from titles like Don’t Bet on The Prince. (NOTE: Wonky touchstone on the title I'm discussing so I'm double bracketing the author name in the hope you'll find the right book...)

Updated to add: Link to work page for the specific title I'm discussing found here: https://www.librarything.com/work/15001798/book/115737535

You might not have seen the marketing campaign that Princeton University Press (PUP) put on in the month of December about this title. PUP featured 12 days of short tales and original artwork from the newly published translation, complete with illustrations by Andrea Dezso (http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2014/12/12/on-the-first-day-presenting-the-twelve-days-of-grimms/). I had only happened upon it by accident; otherwise I might never have encountered the book.

What makes this book interesting is all the stories (pleasant and otherwise) that you may have missed reading from your childhood. Those blithely sanitized versions might have been sanitised for good cause. If you follow that link above, for example, you’ll find the horrific tale of what happens when children play at slaughtering a pig (or you can read it on page 79 in the printed volume). Back on my reading thread in 2012, I commented briefly on Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm which really is suitable in most respects for sharing with your child or younger siblings. Zipes’ version really isn’t. In fact there’s an interesting bit in the Zipes’ preface that references re-telling of the tales “mixing in mannerisms of contemporary writing.” Pullman did that with some deftness to make the tales he selected more fun to read aloud, but there is none of that in the 170 tales contained in this edition.

Zipes does what Philip Pullman could not, when I talked about his collection of fairy tales. An acknowledged expert in German, comparative literature and fairy tales, Zipes created his own translation of the two earliest editions of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm. He does not expurgate, he does not censor, he does not in any way soften these tales from the harsh originals gathered at least in part from an oral tradition that was disappearing from German homes even as the Brothers worked to preserve them. (We tend to forget that the Brothers -- at least one of them -- was employed as a librarian.)

The illustrations by Andrea Dezsö nicely complement the macabre tales. Because so many of these tales from the 18th century which appear in this volume are macabre and are unapologetic in presenting the savagery that we know continues to lurk in modern man in the 21st century. Interestingly, he appears to favor illustrating the less "safe" tales. Quick side note: Dezso frequently illustrates the tales that feature Satan -- who really isn’t nearly as frightening as you might anticipate s/he would be. But like the tales, some of the illustrations may not be entirely suitable for children. (Again follow that link to the Princeton University Press blog in the second paragraph above.

This one is entirely worth your while, even if a few moral lessons do slip in now and again. For example, there is the tale where no one wants to kiss the lazy and idle raven and thereby transform him back into his original form of a handsome prince. Nope, sometimes if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you are stuck with the consequences!

So, now go out and add this book to your TBR pile. Or, again, there might be consequences...

Sounds like a cool edition!

>52 jillmwo: Oh, I definitely want this one. And soon!

I remembering seeing an article on that edition of the Brother's Grimm tales, and thought it sounded really interesting.

Would you recommend reading it, if you've never read the 'sanitized' versions for the tales?

Missed by a hair. I have read an unsanitized version which made my hair stand on end, and was very cool and gory, long ago. No revisiting for me, too many TBR mountains to climb. You will have to do better than that. ;D I did enjoy reading your post though, jillmwo!

>55 heathn: , I would recommend reading this edition, regardless of your familiarity with the childhood versions. I was surprised at how compelling (even if disturbing) these stories were.

>56 MrsLee: , curses! Foiled again!!

>52 jillmwo: Oh, fine. Just let me go clean off this blood...

Does it count if I buy it, give it to my wife to give to me as a birthday present?

If it does then I've been hit.

>59 pgmcc: Sometimes I think you say these things just to humor me and not because you've really been hit. A bouquet of receipts from your local Dublin bookshop would lend greater authenticity to your claim.

Adapting a “Dated” or “Slight” Agatha Christie Poirot Short Story

The text version of Agatha Christie’s short story The Underdog is a fairly classic country house murder. The owner of the house is a wealthy businessman. He’s not particularly easy to get on with necessarily, but he likes those who are willing to stand up to him the way his (former) actress wife does. He’s actually rather devoted to her. Also living under his roof are his brother, a wayward nephew Charles, a male secretary (Owen Trefusis) and a female secretary/companion. It’s the secretary/companion who is sent to fetch Hercule Poirot down to Mon Repos after the businessman is murdered in his Tower room. The thing is that the evidence all points to the dissolute nephew, but the illogical actress wife is absolutely convinced that it was her husband’s male secretary who actually killed him. She’s got no proof, but her intuition is “never wrong”. Poirot (along with his valet, Georges) makes the trip down to Mon Repos to see what can be learned. He’s somewhat taken by Lily Margrave, the secretary/companion, who is intelligent, well bred, neatly dressed and who seems somewhat protective towards her employer.

What leads one to interpret this story as being (primarily at least) about “class” is due to the fact that there are at least four instances of Poirot interacting with those whose role in the house precludes them from being fully forthcoming when asked questions about those who out-rank them. One of those exchanges is with Georges (Poirot’s valet) who is a key player in the final resolution of the mystery. Poirot informs Georges that he will require his assistance in the investigation but as a sop informs the valet that his role will be painless. On the one hand, it’s an exchange aimed at eliciting a chuckle from the reader, but it also indicates a certain cavalier attitude towards George. After all, Poirot might think the participation would be painless, but does George agree? Would he perhaps wish he could tell his fussy employer that (like Melville’s Bartleby) he’d rather NOT? There are other exchanges with the male secretary, the female companion, and even Lady Astwell, the actress who acknowledges that Lily Margrave is a born lady where Lady Astwell is not (as the servants very well know). And yet Lily is the subordinate.

So it was interesting to me over the weekend to see the television adaptation of this short story. The question becomes how do they bring this kind of theme to the surface? Well, disappointingly, they don’t really. The adaptation muffs it entirely, making the story not about class per se but rather about corporate espionage. Wait, what?

For television, the story got moved to the 1930’s. Had it remained in its original time period, the story’s ties to mining concessions of the original (published in 1926) would have made sense in a purely historical context. (Note: It's actually something of a red herring as a motive in the story.) Having moved the story to the nineteen thirties, however, the adaptation shifts the criminal motive to a more immediately recognizable motive for a corporate employee -- specifically someone working at a chemical corporation who is concerned with patents and profits and the like. So right there, you’ve already bastardized the original author’s thematic intent. The murder victim is no longer a man devoted to his wife (and therefore somewhat bearable), but instead his character flaws have been exaggerated so that he’s become an unrefined, coarse businessman -- the type who buys Belgian miniatures at a cut-rate price as an investment rather than appreciating the beauty of the art.

I am not unaware of the reasons why screenwriters make changes to source material, but it makes me NUTS when they do it at the expense of the original source material’s theme and crafted relationships between characters.

Harrumph. You can find the original short story in either an older paperback collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding or in the more recently published collection.Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories.

But while I'm here, let me ask one of the writers lurking about, whether doing something about class-structure and class-exclusivity would really have been so hard to do in a story-telling update? Do modern sensibilities really not get class hierarchy?

"Do modern sensibilities really not get class hierarchy?"

Alas, yes. I sent something to my agent which revolved around Almack's, that Regency institution for the upper classes, and even though she understands what Almack's was about and has read plenty of regency romance, she still struggled with the idea of Almack's members not wanting members of the merchant class to be allowed in and wasn't sure today's readers could deal.

I also think it can be an American vs. British issue as well

I understand them, but often shake my head at class hierarchy. I think it's because I was born in the latter half of the 20th cty and in the US. For example, I'm reading a Mary Elizabeth Braddon novel and in it a now rich man from poor beginnings is slighted because he wasn't to the manor born. Instead he had to strive up from nothing, make a pile of money and buy the manor. For some reason that makes him less of a good character than someone who did nothing. To me it's nonsensical although I understand the reasons and the origins of the attitude.

>63 Bookmarque: that sort of thing can be used to show the shortcomings of the folks who were born to the manor.

Ever bought a copy of a book in hardcover just because (a) you haven't read it; (b) you know it's supposed to be very, very good; and because (c) you were afraid it would go out of print if you waited until it was a good time to read it and would only be available electronically and you were afraid that it would be too hard to read on screen?

Please tell me I'm not alone in this kind of befuddled thinking...

>65 jillmwo: I do not think that to be befuddled thinking at all and I could see myself acting in exactly that way. Now, tell us the title of the book.

>66 pgmcc: I know. She's such a tease.

Are we putting in guesses? One book I can think of being almost impossible to read on screen is S.

What >66 pgmcc: says.

Well, before we get into all those specifics about titles we buy and don't buy and why, I want to talk about a book I just finished this morning.

I read a very British mystery entitled Smallbone Deceased, written by Michael Gilbert. It’s supposed to be his very, very best. My copy is part of a book series published by the Reader’s Digest Association characterized as The Best Mysteries of All Time. The book was originally published back in 1950, but my reprint edition is dated 2011. (Not that this is particularly relevant to anything.)

At any rate, Gilbert has a very interesting policeman, Inspector Hazelrigg, who sometimes partners with Henry Bohun, a solicitor. My first encounter with Hazelrigg was in a lovely little clerical mystery, Close Quarters, where the cathedral close is the tight community analogous to the English village found in Agatha Christie. CQ is set in 1937, a conventional, insular Church of England Cathedral community; this is a mystery that depends on everyone’s timetable and everyone knowing everyone else’s habits. There’s a murdered canon residentiary. Hazelrigg must narrow the window for the murder down to a 20 minute time frame which means that there are pubs and train schedules and Evensong. And a crossword puzzle. Absolutely the quintessential English Golden Age mystery. Bewildering at times if only because all the primary characters are male and all very nearly equally eccentric. But Hazelrigg eventually comes ‘round to the correct answer.

In Smallbone Deceased, you’re dealing with the ultimate locked room type of mystery. Someone’s been found dead in a room of deed boxes and the solicitor’s office is all abuzz over the death. Of course, this is a very conservative firm at the best of times. Maintaining an ordered process with carefully documented files is the highest professional achievement. The solution to the crime is tied in unhappy and unappreciated colleagues even as it is tied up with legal office work and procedure. Perhaps most revealing of its time and place is the description of commuter travel back in the late 40’s, when London was still recovering from the Second World War.

I didn’t try to work how who actually had “dunnit” in this one, but just went along for the ride. That said, what I did find was that there were some surprising twists that did lead me to push to finish the book before the weekend was over.

(BTW, I was deeply offended by the Telegraph newspaper in reporting Michael Gilbert's death. They didn't bother to be sure that they'd spelled the name of one of Gilbert's key fictional characters (Bohun) correctly in his obit. Is that sloppy or what?)

>52 jillmwo: I wander in for a catch up after some time away and BOINK! Book bullet! Consider me caught in the shoulder, rather than between the eyes - I shan't rush, but onto the wishlist goes Zipes.

...and yes, I'm also curious to know what the mysterious hardback was!

Good choice, >70 imyril:. Book bullets can be stored away to minimize the harm incurred.

>70 imyril: I see >71 jillmwo: is still avoiding the question.

>72 pgmcc: I noticed that too. She's good at this evasion lark.

So I’m preparing for a book talk this month (two actually) on titles by Agatha Christie. I have pulled three printed volumes that might (in library jargon) be described as reference works about the author. The first is called The Complete Christie. The second is The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Guide. The third is Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie. This last is the least likely to be described as a reference work; it’s highly illustrated and 'way too chatty in tone. However the other two might legitimately be seen as having some use in a public library collection. In fact, the editions I have appear to have been weeded from libraries.

The Reader’s Guide is probably the most useful of the three. The scope of the work is solely the novels written by Christie (no short stories, no plays, etc.) Each entry about a novel includes a discussion of the novel’s setting, a plot summary (without spoilers), a list of the characters in that novel, and a translation of foreign phrases according to chapter in each novel. (Poirot was given to exclamations in French.) (Irrelevant Aside: I’m disenchanted to realize that modern editions of Christie’s novels have simply translated Poirots excited utterances in French so that readers need not be baffled by expressions like “Mon Dieu”)

The Complete Christie is a tad more comprehensive. It encompasses all of Christie’s works, including her two volumes of poetry. But the entries are shorter -- publishing history, summary, characters (names listed in a string w/o any descriptors), and a brief indication of any existing television or movie adaptations.

The Bedside Bathtub and Armchair Companion is an assembly of writers describing the various novels by Christie along with several contributed short essays about the deadliest rooms in the house as well as the poisons used. It however makes no reference to Christie's poetry anymore than the Reader's Guide.

The common organizational structure across all three volumes is the publishing order of the various works. (Useful, but not necessarily the way users think when trying to find out particulars on Elephants Can Remember or The Mystery of the Blue Train).

However, what I’m wondering about is what happens to works like this in the digital age. These aren’t high end scholarly works. These titles were published by trade publishers and they’re priced at a point that would make them appealing to consumer markets. But the past twenty years has shown that online encyclopedias and similar reference work are used more frequently in digital form. How long will such things remain available in print?

How would you want to use such tools? Print or electronic?

Nice summary of the books.

In response to your question, I still prefer physical reference books. If it is a frequently used reference book I would develop a feel for where specific topics are located. Flicking through a physical book often reminds me of important detail I had forgotten. That could not happen as readily in an electronic copy.

I do not know about your side of the Atlantic but the physical book appears to be making a comeback over here.

Good luck with your book talks. I suppose there is no chance of a video or sound recording? The topic is fascinating.

By the way, in relation to what you said about recent editions: "Mon Dieu!"

All the French I know (which is very little indeed) I learned from reading Christie and Sayers and other like Golden Age mysteries.

I am not likely to study a subject in depth as you do, so I most likely would dip into and out of the internet for snippets of information. I agree with >75 pgmcc: though for actual studying. A physical book is much easier to flip back and forth when referencing information, and the physicality itself gives my brain clues as to where that information is at.

I, too, worry about the more obscure and arcane volumes which may sit gathering dust on library shelves only to be rediscovered in some year hence by a young set of eyes. Those would not likely survive if public libraries lean into the ebooks, and the private libraries fall to the pressures of de-cluttering, and live in smaller spaces.

Sigh.

I loved browsing through the large libraries I came across in homes of family friends when I was a youngster. Libraries were highly valued.

I have The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie, and The Agatha Christie Who's Who (which, sadly, identifies the murderers). At least, LT says I have them, but they are no longer visible on the shelf—I must have tucked them in behind, which indicates how often I expect to use them.

I find that wherever I'm reading, there is usually Internet access within arm's length, so I am more likely to do quick lookups online, rather than getting up to look for a book. I seldom use my dictionary or atlas anymore, which makes me kind of sad when I think about it, because I have adored atlases ever since I was a small child. The one reference book that I still use regularly in paper version is my thesaurus. I still find it easier and more comfortable to browse my battered up old thesaurus than to try to find the right word online.

As others have said, books are preferable for doing more in-depth research. Physical bookmarks and sticky notes are better organizational tools for me than lists of links.

Some reference books that aren't likely to be replaced by the Internet are the lavishly illustrated guides to fantasy worlds, like The People of Pern or The Atlas of Pern.

I just was reminded that LT system becomes perturbed when you have two copies of the same book listed in your library. It reminds me of that when I go into Add Books. Not sure why the message gets triggered, because the two editions have different ISBNs. Perhaps this is when we need an LT version of Siri so that one could explain to the system that you're aware of the duplication and that it's entirely okay.

Highly recommend Jerusalem Inn by Martha Grimes. Excellent Christmas mystery, complete with snow and an English Country House. Oh, and a kitten in the manger scene. How can you resist?

>80 jillmwo: I've read a couple of the Richard Jury series and enjoyed them. Will keep an eye out for this one.

>80 jillmwo: Pondering the best way, short of actually putting it on my engagement calendar, of reminding myself of this sometime around the first of December.

Just wait until the next significant snowfall hits your area, @Meredy. That's the significant element of the weather and season.

It's the fifth one of the series, @Jim53. I think the copyright date is either '81 or '84. But Jury and Plant have reached the point of having a good working relationship.

>83 jillmwo: I rely on fiction these days to satisfy my yearning for a good old-fashioned snowstorm. Not that I've envied folks in the Northeast through the battering of this winter...but I can't deny that I still miss real weather even after three and a half decades.

My work has been demanding these past few weeks, so I've just been dipping into the reassuring stuff of late. Georgette Heyer's A Blunt Instrument isn't particularly challenging, but it's about the right speed at the moment.

>84 Meredy:, I've been muttering to myself of late about whether it would be worth it to move to Arizona. And that's in the context of me working as a telecommuter. It's not like I have to worry about ice on the train platforms any more.

Avoiding ice is a good thing! Especially as we get to be a little bit "older". Falls are horrible and to avoided at all costs. I say: move!

(of course, I do not know what all you have to consider in making such a decision, so feel free to disregard my advice)

Some weekends back, I fell down one of those YouTube rabbit holes where you begin by watching a brief five-minute video (chiefly, out of curiosity) and three hours later emerge a bit bleary eyed baffled by human behavior and wondering just how far out of it you as an individual might be. I honestly can’t tell you what drew me in, but somehow or other I discovered a community of videographers who are obsessed with paper planners and organizers. They show you their binders, how they divide up the internal sections and how they decorate their weekly pages to reflect the holidays and shifts of season, events in their lives and the rest. For every business professional who is using a smart phone to track professional commitments, there is a home-based worker for whom the planner is a form of scrapbooking and creative expression. It’s not a photo album nor an artist’s portfolio, but neither is it the dull agenda you may recall.

I can remember a time in the ‘eighties when the hot business accessory was a Filofax or a Dayrunner. They could be quite expensive to purchase and maintain, but I will never forget the upset experienced by one business executive I knew who lost her FIlofax somewhere on a European trip. Without exaggeration, that Filofax served as half of her brain and, without it, she was at a serious disadvantage professionally and personally. With the advent of online services like Google Calendar and smart phones with alarms, I knew that many of the various companies who produce these things -- Filofax, Franklin Covey, etc. -- had suffered disruption and there were news stories of various mergers and acquisitions in that particular business sector. Well, while the audience for planners may not be as big as it was 30 years ago, the industry is by no means dead. There are home-based entrepreneurs and creative artists as well as ordinary moms who are still quite focused and reliant on paper planners.

What has this to do with books? Well, at some point, I discovered a history of daily planners published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. Written by Molly McCarthy, this book -- The Accidental Diarist -- provides a history of daily planners in the United States from the one maintained by George Washington prior to the Revolutionary War through to the modern era. This is a serious work of scholarship about the rise of the commercially-produced diary in this country and what the use of those planners reveals about the ordinary person’s relationship to time and documentation. As McCarthy says in one of the early chapters, the history of the diary is a history of how we document our time, our finances and ourselves. When we started out, we didn’t emphasize hourly chunks of time in quite the way we do now; diaries would capture births and deaths, debts and payments, and other brief notations of importance. McCarthy tells of an 18th century physician who noted in his diary the babies he delivered, their gender, and in some instances, their deaths. He subsequently noted down the totals for a particular twelve-month. It served as a professional reckoning. In the modern era, planners may break down the course of the day in fifteen minute chunks (although 30 minute chunks are still the more mainstream) and may be used to track even something as pedestrian as the number of glasses of water drunk daily. How we document our time reveals our attitude towards how we justify our existence (demonstrating how productive we are) and commemorate the meaning of our activities (our excitement over attending a particular concert or the date of an announced engagement).

Honestly, this is a readable history of a physical artifact -- historically speaking, a primary document --that represents a glimpse into the ordinary lives of our forebears. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it interesting to read because it caused me to reconsider and rethink behaviors that I had largely attributed just to the twentieth century. Our history is not about those individuals who can afford $600 leather organizers; it’s just as much about those who use Excel spreadsheets to create and print out new inserts for $5 binders. I have a better understanding of those souls on Youtube., I grasp see how those videographers are following in the footsteps of others, even while using the form in novel fashion.

The Boston Globe write up gives even greater detail: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/01/the-daily-planner-american-history/W...

BTW, life is a bit helter-skelter at the moment. I haven't forgotten Middlemarch but my mind just can't be there at the moment.

Jill, I have a fairly large collection of 19th century aides-memoires and their cousins, carnets de bal, little notepads made of thin sheets of bone or ivory often inscribed with the day of the week to keep track of engagements and shopping lists and so one--they could be written on with pencil and wiped clean. One French one I have from the 1870s is still penciled full of a lady's gambling debts.

>87 jillmwo: There is a comedy film you may be aware of which was originally called "Filofax" but was subsequently renamed "Taking Care of Business". It was about someone who finds a lost Filofax and tries to return it to the owner. Light hearted fun with actor James Balushi.

Two entirely unchallenging reads these past few weeks. I read Fallen Women by Sandra Dallas and High Rising by Angela Thirkell. I found High Rising the better of the two. It was totally and joyously farcical in tone. Not a single entirely realistic character. They were immediately recognizable however as personality types. There was Tony the child entirely obsessed by his trains and rather oblivious to the adults around him (although not without manners). There was his mother, Laura Morland, the successful author and Tony’s widowed mother. However she’s fairly competent all on her own and has managed to write ten novels, raise sons and acquire a small flat in London as well as a cottage in the country. She has a reliable cook named Stoker with whom she shares household chores and village gossip. Laura is just fine. On the other hand, she is surrounded by others who might be charitably referred to as mad. There is George Knox and his daughter Sybil. There is Adrian Coates, her publisher, and Anne Todd, her part-time secretary. Oh, yes, there is also Doctor Ford and the Incubus, otherwise known as George’s secretary, Miss Grey. All of these folks are fun to listen to and sometimes, just a bit mad. I was so touched by the Dr’s proposal of marriage at a critical moment. I hope he meets someone right for him later in Thirkell's Barsetshire series.

Fallen Women was a nicely researched historical mystery with an insufficient number of suspects. It deals with prostitution in Denver in 1885. The biggest problem with the title was that the female amateur sleuth insisted on doing some entirely stupid things that would have gotten her snubbed by if not banned from polite society. It was again one of those instances of putting a 21st century sensibility into a 19th century situation. Not horrible, but an unfortunately less-than-satisfactory read.

Work continues to be *difficult*. Or at least demanding. I am having to resort to idiot coping mechanisms.

I like the juxtaposition of those titles.

Nicely spotted, MrsLee.

I may just have to read that history of personal calendars. I've been time and calendar obsessed all my life. Every year I'd relish the chance to purchase a new calendar for my purse but of course now most of my calendar is entered into my iPhone; however, that has not slowed me! I have at least three paper calendars on my walls, two bound paper calendars (purse, and desk), and two erasable white boards (one for daily tasks, the other for daily commitments such as work schedules which change every day). Ridiculous! I know! But I seem to need them in my elder years when the short term memory is just not as good as is needed. Everyone has their quirks, don't we.

>94 maggie1944: Are you familiar with John Cleese's film, "Clockwise", about a time management obsessed headmaster? It is very funny. I think John Cleese got the idea for the film after making several corporate education videos on the subject of time management.

No, I never have seen this. It sounds hysterical. I love John Cleese's humor.

I can identify with "idiot coping mechanisms," both in coping with idiots and in doing things that I consider idiotic just to keep going. Been doing a bunch of both myself lately.

Okay, I'm just going to put this out there on the table for everyone to see. Life isn't working as well as it needs to work. I'm reading the really comforting stuff that was recommended earlier in one of my threads -- Georgette Heyer's The Reluctant Widow, Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, Angela Thirkell's Wild Strawberries, even Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys for heaven's sake -- but the fact remains that the universe is just messing with me and my circumstances. It could be far worse I know. I should be trying to be grateful for my current set of circumstances as they're far less burdensome than the circumstances of others I know.

BUT STILL...

Which causes another question to come up in my head. Is it really expressing gratitude when you express relief that your life is not like the difficult life that you know others experience? It's a rhetorical question but I do wonder sometimes when I read all these various accounts of the benefits derived from keeping gratitude journals, etc. What constitutes real gratitude?

I have even sunk to reading three daily horoscopes to see if those can offer intelligence (Yes, I know. It's stupid. It's not my finest hour, I agree. But I will say that there is a marvel of writing skill required in writing sentences that might or might not be construed as vague encouragement or cautionary advice. At least, I've not sunk to the point of phoning the Psychic Network for guidance or insight.)

Oh, yes, and my township library book group read The Miniaturist and loved it. (That surprised me because I thought for sure they would object to the incident involving the death of the much loved pet. But they're tougher than I am, I suppose.)

So are the rest of you all still alive? Roll call? Has @pgmcc been reading the classics previously assigned? By the way, I did read the most curious "book" in a Kindle edition recently. Very short, which was why it only cost me 99 cents. It's a book entitled Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn by Carrie Sessarego. She looks at three classics -- Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights -- in terms of text and movie/television adaptations to see what works and what doesn't. I may have to go reread Jane Eyre with an eye to her comments. Her discussion of Heathcliff and Cathy and the wretched dynamics in that family was quite refreshing in its honesty.

I will also admit that tonight I'm actually eating store-bought cheesecake and calling it dinner. (I'm alone in the house. Nobody else will gripe that I'm not feeding them a nutritious meal...)

>98 jillmwo: If things a crap but not as crappy as other people's crap, they are still crap. I hope the World starts working the way it should. In the meantime, if you feel like complaining, complain away.

I may not have been reading the classics you have prescribed, but I have been reading some classic Gothic stories. Does that count?

By the way, I was just about to sign off and was lamenting not seeing any posts from you recently when your post appeared. It is good to hear from you.

>98 jillmwo: As someone who is currently going through some of the worst stuff I've ever dealt with, I say this: just because somebody else is worse off, it doesn't mean you're better off. Bad is bad. We do what we can.

There's probably always something to be grateful for. To me that also implies something/? to be grateful to, and that doesn't happen to be part of my thinking. That approach really helps some people a lot when they find themselves in trouble. If it works, great, but I don't think it means there's something wrong with you if it doesn't.

I hope you find a way out or through just as soon as possible. Meanwhile, courage.

I agree with Meredy - bad is bad, getting through it in relatively one piece is what matters (not so much the how...let's hear it for horoscopes or the good 'ole comfort read!) But you do need to be as kind to yourself as you would be to others who are struggling.

It is good to hear from you, I was starting to worry.

On the topic of gratitude journals, I believe that advice is very helpful for people who make a habit of staying focused on what's missing in their lives, or what is hard, or just run of the mill low self esteem, and excessive self criticism. The suggestion is to just take a moment each day and pay some healthy attention to what you do have in your life for which you are grateful. I know that my being grateful for having purchased a house which now may be sufficient to finance my next step does not eliminate the fact that it is not as much financial benefit as I would like to have. Glass half full or half empty kind of thinking. Knowing that there are people in the world who do not even own a glass does not make a half empty glass all that much more appealing. But it does provide some perspective.

I sincerely hope the circumstances which are bedeviling you just now soon disappear, and a much more satisfying set of circumstances come into place.

Lots of positive thoughts from over here. I can only chime in with the rest: we all have our own coping mechanisms, and I will freely admit that things like gratitude journals have never featured in mine. Cheesecake, hot chocolate and comfort reads, on the other hand... if we can't curl up with these things when life is hard, we're making life harder. Hurray for cake!

I hope things improve for you soon.

Other people's misery has never made mine seem less by contrast, although I am truly fortunate in my circumstances. When bad things come to us, we just need to manage ourselves as well as we can, I think.

On a positive note, I've enjoyed your thread and all your notes about books, whether I would read them or not. It's always refreshing to have a different viewpoint to look at.

I hope things get better for you as soon as possible.

Call it gratitude, call it perspective, it helps no matter what it is. Take comfort where you find it, know that you are loved and appreciated and valued, certainly by many here, probably by more in your physical/non-internet life. Be gentle with yourself. I have found much comfort from the title of a book (which is definitely spiritual) Learning to Walk in the Dark. It is rather my mantra for those dark times of life.

Glad you were able to drop by and visit here for a bit.

Doesn't matter if it's not 'as bad' as someone else, if it's happening to you then it's bad. Hope you can quickly get through what it is.

I think that your book on film adaptations sounds really cool. I love arguing about what film adaptations got right and wrong, usually more wrong. Will have to put it in a wishlist to look into after I have read all three books. I'm currently reading Jane Eyre now, and actually watched the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice last night.

Good to "see" you here, Jill. I haven't been online as much either lately... lots of fewmets striking the windmill. Sending good wishes and virtual hugs.

The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Agatha Christie

Collection of short stories featuring Mr. Satterthwaite (an older gentleman, recently retired) who feels himself to be something of a non-entity except when in the company of his friend Mr. Quin. Despite his insecurity, Mr. Satterthwaite is in reality a patron of the arts, a cultivated man of travel, a kind, trustworthy and well-informed old gentleman. However, when in Quin’s company, he feels himself to rise to a higher level of perception. Mr. Satterthwaite becomes an observant narrator, picking out the particular and perhaps more telling human behaviors that reveal dark and light. Quin doesn’t have much in the way of distinguishing physical or personal traits; unpredictably, he may appear in a dark restaurant or in a train compartment. Sometimes there is a play of color about him, but most frequently he is encountered as a “dark” man.

The striking aspect of this detective and sidekick is that you’re not quite sure who is the main detective and who the sidekick. Quin materializes as a sign that something is about to happen (at least, that is how Satterthwaite excitedly views any manifestation). However, in the stories, his narrative function is to prompt Satterthwaite to examine his own line of thinking more closely whenever it would seem that the elderly gentleman is about to give up or pursue the too-obvious solution rather than the correct one. Quin seems to be a benign intelligence, but it is always Satterthwaite who identifies the guilty party in the stories.

It’s an interesting conceit for a partnership in fiction and, while lightweight for a novel-length work, it works well for short stories.

The Mysterious Mr. Quin is one of my favourite Christie books. I like to observe Mr. Satterthwaite develop his theories, and then re-examine them with Mr. Quin's encouragement. Also, I like the name Satterthwaite.

>108 jillmwo: There aren't many of Christie's books that I want to go back and reread, but this is one of them, especially given your comments.

>108 jillmwo: I missed that one somehow during my Christie phase (my twenties, mostly), maybe because I much prefer novels to short stories. But that does sound appealing.

The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose

This book got rave reviews when it came out in 2014. The author, Phyllis Rose, is an academic as well as a best-selling author. Some of you may have read Parallel Lives, a historical examination of five “famous name” Victorian marriages. (What made the marriages noteworthy in terms of success or lack thereof were the various expectations each partner brought to the partnership. But I digress.)

I actually picked up The Shelf by mistake. I’d found Parallel Lives interesting way back when, but I can’t say it was overly memorable. it wasn’t a “favorite”. And I was a bit put-off by the concept behind this project of hers. Reviewers described the idea behind the book as Rose picking out a random shelf in an upper East Side subscription library in New York City. She would read all the books on that shelf and write about the experience of this type of “extreme” reading as if it were somehow peculiarly odd or eccentric or even noteworthy.. (Hey, I know serious readers on Library Thing, Phyllis Rose. You’re not nearly eccentric enough to keep up…) To be fair, she did go through some machinations to set the parameters for selecting the shelf she was going to use as the foundation for this project. She did give some thought to it rather than just randomly adopting a bookcase (See Chapter 1 -- The Experiment Begins)

Well, I was wrong. (Yes, you might want to note that down on the calendar. I don’t admit it all that often.)

Taken chapter by chapter, I actually found it to be both engaging as well as worthwhile. The chapter on library weeding of collections was one of the best explanations of the challenges faced in that activity that I’ve ever read. It should be required reading. I want to hand it to every book blogger and local government official in every state in the Union before I have to read one more idiot entry about wicked librarians eliminating all of John Steinbeck’s work in favor of replacing those novels with Fifty Shades of Gray. (Can you tell this is a pet peeve of mine? That’s not what’s going on. This misinformation makes me nuts)

So I recommend that all of you should read Chapter 8 of The Shelf. Just do it. You don’t need to read the chapter about the Phantom of the Opera (although I personally found it well-researched and enjoyable). I am still making up my mind about the chapter on detective fiction. Isn’t it somewhat disdainful to refer to another writer’s body of work as being “intelligent, workman-like novels”? She does admit to preferring spy novels, but I would have hoped that she’d note that those operate on a different set of expectations than detective fiction and tried to meet this sub-genre on its own terms.

But pull her book down and read Chapter 8 for sure!

>109 SylviaC:, >110 Sakerfalcon:, >111 Meredy: I really like Mr. Satterthwaite himself as a character. He's so modest in his own assessment of what's happening. Quin is really (IMHO) not the central focus. He's the sidekick, for all that he is responsible for redirecting the older man's attention upon occasion.

And @Meredy, like you, I generally prefer novels, but in times of stress, I find I can retain short stories or single chapters more successfully.

BTW, has anyone lurking hereabouts read The Goblin Emperor? Does it involve vampires or the undead?

>113 jillmwo: Ok, Jill, you got me there with a BB while I was still reeling from a number of other recent hits.

>114 jillmwo: The Goblin Emperor has no vampires, werewolves, or other undead. It is a very good book, though. Highly recommended :)

>114 jillmwo: The Goblin Emperor was very good, and 100% vampire and zombie free. I'm looking forward to the sequel, if there is one.

>114 jillmwo:, >116 tardis:, >117 Marissa_Doyle: I concur!

>114 jillmwo: Are there any goblins in it?

In the first 25% of the book, there have been characters described as goblins. They have no relation to the goblins found in other literature (such as in Tolkien). Whether later in the text, the nature of that "goblin-hood" changes, I do not know. My only concerns was whether or not they could return from the dead.

(Is anyone else troubled by the seriousness with which I am actually responding to @pgmcc? Sometimes I think my mother was right. I really am Eeyore.)

I call it a becoming gravitas. ;)

>120 jillmwo:

My favourite Eeyore quote is, "You go and enjoy yourself. I'll just stay here and be miserable." It is in the clip below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytsCnISiCGY

I find it hard to believe you are an Eeyore, @jillmwo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQI0E1WCLMU

The Goblin Emperor

SO you are the umpteenth person in line to the throne and you never expect to inherit. You are of such little consequence in the grand scheme of things --even as a political pawn-- that you have lived in an isolated environment for most of your life and your education has been somewhat neglected by a resentful and abusive guardian. Then the unthinkable happens and you are brought to the imperial capital. You are thrust into the limelight and expected to wield limitless authority. You are unprepared but you are called to this role and you’re stuck with all that goes with it, whether good, bad or indifferent. What do you do?

Maia -- our protagonist -- is of mixed racial background (half-goblin, half elven). Having lost his loving mother as a child and kept at a great geographical distance by his cold-hearted father, Maia has received no training or education to enable him to assume the role of emperor. After the death of the Emperor (and the three older brothers that might normally be expected to succeed to the position), Maia finds that his new status requires that he rethink just about all of his relationships. There are enough twists in his learning curve to make the story interesting.

The Goblin Emperor takes place in a highly structured society. Addison (IMHO) did a reasonably good job of thinking through cultural hierarchies. (I was vaguely reminded of the Japanese Heian Dynasty as I was reading about the clothing. Either that or Princess Amidala’s kingdom in the Star Wars movies. At any rate, that formal and that restrictive of any kind of movement.)

The book was a fast read so what did I retain after gulping it down over the course of four days? (The novel is really well paced, and like any woman with a bag of potato chips in front of her, I kept reaching for more.) The use of the ears to show emotion (rather the way ears may indicate the emotional mood of canines) worked well for me. Maia is shown as surprisingly sympathetic when dealing with children; the nursery scenes with the younger cousins are charming. The Great Avar (his maternal grandfather) is a delightful character, possessed of both a large physique and a large heart. I was particularly struck in the opening chapter by the parallels drawn between Maia and the young Victoria awakened from sleep to be told she’d ascended to the throne. (Of course, I mistakenly therefore thought that Setherin would be a parallel figure to Louise Lehzen, Victoria’s protective surrogate mother and governess.)

I do have a bunch of quibbles. I was really bothered by the references to pneumatic tubes in this otherwise comparatively advanced civilization. It threw me out of the book every time I caught one. I was surprised that the sudden assumption of power never REALLY went to the teen-age emperor’s head (and realistically, wouldn’t that have to happen at least once?) Maia is so nice -- so incredibly enlightened all the time and towards all around him. He’s without any of the social biases towards women’s role in society, etc. Surely some of Setherin’s cultural biases would have been impressed upon him when it came to those lower on the social ladder? Because the point is made that this is a very rigid culture. One last quibble -- from a reader’s perspective, those names are absolutely unpronounceable.

But The Goblin Emperor was a good read for me insofar as it was unexpected (I had no pre-conceptions) and utterly refreshing (in that it wasn’t yet another coming-of-age story). Maia does come to maturity in this book, but the reader is (thankfully) not beaten over the head with it. I hate being thwacked by some great moral hammer.

Final note: BTW, can I just say that I appreciate that none of you have berated me over my too-frequent use of parentheses. It's a great kindness on your part.

(I'm rather fond of parentheses, myself.)

Sounds like a great book! I think I have it hidden in my Kindle.... but I'm busy reading about spies in Great Britain and on the Continent during WWII. I love narrative nonfiction!

But I bet I'll love the Goblin too.

Parentheses are a great voice modulator to my reading ear, I like them. ;)

I (frequently) can't resist parentheses either. No apology needed.

I've read a few LT reviews of The Goblin Emperor now and it sounds very charming. It is on my wishlist, quivering. How long before it flies off and gets me between the eyes remains to be seen.

It was hiding in my Kindle! Yeah! And I, too, am a great fan of parentheses. Wonderful punctuation.

>128 maggie1944: *thumbs up* I'm glad you found it on your Kindle and it's perfect reading for a weekend.

>124 SylviaC:, >126 MrsLee:, >127 imyril:, I love you all for understanding how I write when I'm in a chatty mood.

Just a passing idea: The thing that makes Curtain work as a novel is if you realize that Hercule Poirot is in the role of the author. He knows who X (the person committing the murder) is; Hastings is in the role of the reader and must piece clues together. It's the only way the final resolution makes sense or can be made acceptable to the reader. Poirot is the murderer himself and deceives Hastings throughout the novel just as the author plans the murder --thereby taking on the role of the criminal-- and the deception of the reader

Well, dadgumit, I missed my Thingaversary. I hadn't even thought about it, and now I'm overdue by a full week for ordering some obscene number of titles from the local book supplier. (I'm blaming @pgmcc because he was off being James Bond and not properly monitoring the situation. I think that means he has to pay for all of the books I choose to buy this year...@pgmcc, did you want to cut me a check or should I just invoice you?)

>131 jillmwo: Oh, no! And I thought you were in charge of enforcement, Jill. What shall we do?

For starters, I think we want to see a complete list of your celebratory and penitential purchases.

Is it possible to get one bye each decade?

>131 jillmwo: I think that means he has to pay for all of the books I choose to buy this year...pgmcc, did you want to cut me a check or should I just invoice you?)

I am advised that any further communication between us must be through my lawyers.

PS My laptop has overheated during the process of estimating the number of books YOU have to buy for overshooting your Thingaversary by a full week. It ran out of significant numbers.

Hah! Sez You! And a host of similar adult responses guaranteed to provoke...

Well, let's check the Terms of Service and User Guide. I have identified (without any significant degree of time-consuming effort) that I have a sufficient number of UNREAD titles purchased within the last twelve months to allow me to invoke the time-honored rule of "LT User is not required to buy MORE books in celebration of a Thingaversary, if by doing so, the action will result in divorce, dismemberment or actual death at the hands of his/her spouse or significant other". . Since by virtue of digital orders alone, the number exceeds the number of years on this platform plus, I'm going to announce that I'm in the clear.

OTOH, I may just postpone the buying associated with my Thingaversary for a six month period, at which time those parties interested may revisit the question. (Maybe by that time, @pgmcc will have mustered up the wherewithal required to buy a laptop, visit Boston, or both.)

>135 jillmwo:

You left out the asterisk - *except for members of The Green Dragon

>135 jillmwo: I heartily recommend the 'I'm replacing the books due with calories' solution. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable way to meet @pgmcc's stringent requirements :)

>137 imyril: You know, that's a delightfully creative approach to the problem. I think a foray into the kitchen might actually support higher brain function.

Book reviews coming later today.

>138 jillmwo: I think a foray into the kitchen might actually support higher brain function.

There are many advantages to this approach :)

>137 imyril: That's purely brilliant.

>140 Meredy: *curtseys* I do my best. I'm still doing penance with cheese and wine 6 months after my Thingaversary given the way the calculations work these days, but I can't say I'm not enjoying it.

Miss Mole by Emily Hilda Young (EH Young)

This is quintessential domestic fiction, but with a slight difference. Miss Mole is not married to the head of household Robert Corder. She is merely (perhaps invisibly) an employee, a spinster hired to be his housekeeper. Her cousin engineers the arrangement, as she doesn’t choose to have it be known that Miss Mole is a relative of hers anymore than she wants to have to take in a superfluous woman as a member of her own household.. Lilla wants Miss Hannah Mole to be self-sufficient, quite as much as Miss Mole herself wishes it. It’s just that Hannah has a mischievous streak in her that inevitably seems to create problems. She creates fictions, and she has an unfortunate tendency to burst out of the approved social grooves.

Before you’ve completed the first four chapters of this book, you understand that Hannah Mole appreciates the natural rhythms of the seasons. You know she has the on-going resilience of the competent optimist. Virago’s marketing blurb refers to her as “indomitable” and the word fits. Despite the difficulties of her situation, Miss Mole doesn’t accept the disdain or the snubs of the world around her. Hannah has an internal strength. She has a sense of fun, a sense of irony, a passionate love of beauty, and “the power to drag it from its hidden places”. She maintains a careful face to the adults who employ her, but there are those observant neighbors who see her for who she truly is. Miss Mole is a heroine though few about her understand that. She is, after all, an unmarried woman and she is therefore a superfluous woman.

“...she was as feminine as anyone else and she had suffered too much from being treated as a machine, but she was a human being more abundantly than she was a woman…”

Hannah does well, caring for Reverend Corder’s family -- Ethel, a fretful and repressed teenager, Ruth, a too-thin and too-sensitive child, and Wilfred -- a nephew with a spirit equal to the mischief of Miss Mole’s brain. She offers sound counsel to both Ethel and Ruth. One such bit -- entirely indicative of the lesson women at the time were finding they needed -- is “...Be anything you like, but be something. Simply being a useful woman like me isn’t enough…”

But Hannah Mole also has a past. A secret that we don’t even suspect until about two-thirds of the way through the novel. It may not strike today’s young women as being much of either a secret or a scandal, but at the time of the novel’s publication (1934), in that cultural framework, it would have been more than sufficient to lose Miss Mole her position in the polite society of Radstowe.

This is wonderful domestic fiction, but it’s also a surprisingly satisfying character study. Young renders family dynamics and tensions very well. Miss Mole isn’t a magical Mary Poppins figure and not everyone in the story accepts her advice or warmth. I had a quibble with the final resolution, but I would still recommend this book. (So good!) There is a feminist undertone to it, but again, it's well-handled and doesn't overwhelm the characterization.

For the record, according to my order history on Amazon, I ordered this book (used) back in 2011. I didn’t get around to reading it until 2015, and, even then, that was because @SylviaC and @Sakerfalcon both wrote enthusiastically about it in recent months. (To make the situation even worse, apparently, I hadn’t even added Miss Mole to my library here on LT until this weekend. Now do you understand why I’m adopting @imyril’s calorie approach? I am not in control of my book collection.)

I see a continuation of this disturbance in the Force. People talking of swapping books for calorie control? What is LT coming to?

What is this caloric approach of which you speak? Sounds dangerous! Shall we have to go hungry for good reading?

>143 pgmcc: Calories should not be controlled. They should be enjoyed free-range in their wild state, as nature intended ;)

>144 maggie1944: I like to think of it as a free-form relationship, not a linear or inverse proportion. More books doesn't have to mean fewer calories!

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

The marketing pull for this mystery is that it was published in the same year as and takes place in the same locale as Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy NIght. Let us be upfront here and note that that’s about the only true parallel between the two works. Death on the Cherwell is far closer in spirit to the amateur sleuthing of Nancy Drew than the sophisticated approaches of Lord Peter and Bunter. The work opens with four young college women banding together against the college bursar (whose only real offense against the group appears to be requiring timely payment and adherence to rules). Just as the group has begun to settle some kind of classical pagan curse against the poor woman, they see an unattended canoe floating down the Cherwell towards them. Further investigation indicates the body of the bursar in said canoe. She’s dead.

The subsequent investigation introduces us to several other groups (male students, family members, grumpy neighbors, a faculty member or two,, and the police.) To her credit, Hay adheres to the Detection Club rules -- there is no hint of romance and the entire focus is identification of the killer and the working out of the specific timeline surrounding the death of the victim.

I didn’t find the character development to be particularly robust. The characters (those whose identities the reader can get hold of) may be memorable for all the wrong reasons. The Yugoslavian foreign student, the irascible neighbor, the dim Oxford male student stick in the head because they are drawn just a tad over-the-top while the four young women solving the problem are largely interchangeable.

This one does well if you’re the type of mystery reader who focuses on working through the logical ramifications of what’s told to the detective (because the puzzle hangs on some serious questions of timing). If you prefer to mix your mysteries with romance, paranormal, or whatever else, it is sadly not for you. I can understand why the British Library chose to include it in its Crime Library series, but I suspect it’s not going to achieve the status of an undiscovered classic. (Reaching for that aged chestnut of a cliche regularly applied to British Golden Age mysteries, it's just not going to be everyone's cup of tea.*)

*Yes, you get to blow raspberries at me for that last bit. It is a cliche and its use deserves the spray.

A very nice review of Miss Mole. I like your line "she has an unfortunate tendency to burst out of the approved social grooves." That is exactly what she does.

>147 SylviaC:, well, thank you for nudging the book higher in my TBR pile. Sometimes, as a reader, we just follow the direction pointed out by others. In this instance, it really paid off and I thank you!

Back up there in >132 Meredy:, I was advised to provide those here with a list of my proposed Thingaversary reading. Taken off of my Amazon wish list (another digital disaster area in my life) are the following:

The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World
Guards! Guards!
Enter Three Witches
Why Read Moby Dick?
Listening Valley
Swan Song
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Julius Caesar:The Annotated Shakespeare
Julius Caesar: Norton Critical Edition
A Burnable Book
Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library
A Man of Some Repute
Death's Bright Angel
Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction
Black Diamond - Martin Walker
Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth
In the Garden: Essays in honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett
Inheritor: Foreigner #3
Saratoga Trunk
The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home
The Ghost Writer

I guess you might say those are the semi-finalists. Some of you may even recognize recommendations that you've made to me in the past. If I were to actually BUY something (and my spouse is giving me the eye here), it would most likely be Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction, and maybe the essays in honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett.

In the meantime, I have a variety of titles untouched here in the house, and as soon as I find one that tickles today's brain neurons in just the right way, I'll let you know what I'm reading. I'm inclined to Terry Pratchett and Discworld. Oh, there is one I can tell you about. Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240-1570. Eamon Duffy wrote it and it's all about those lovely medieval Books of Hours. He notes that, while these were status symbols of wealth, many of the families used them as forms of documentation of births and deaths. He goes into great detail about human interaction with these books, based on the marginalia added by the owners. One of those instances where we know how much the artifact itself was used by studying all the grubby fingerprints in the margins. He notes that the librarians were concerned that he didn't want to use the pristine pages when he pulling together his manuscript for publication. It's research for a work-related blog entry. The other work related volume I read recently was Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World by Christine Borgman. Where's @Busifer? She'd love it.

There are two in that list I've read and loved. You probably know which ones. Not the scholarly ones. :)

I loved the movie "The Ghost Writer" with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, but it looks like it has nothing to do with the book you mentioned.

Murder at Sissingham Hall

This is a Golden-Age-style country-house murder mystery. While labelled as an Angela Marchmont mystery, as a sleuth, the woman takes a very back-seat role in this debut novel. Instead we hear the story from Charles, a young man returned from a stint abroad and invited down to an old friend’s house in the country. He himself has had brushes with the law and yet, with an eye towards duty, he notes some of the oddities surrounding the “body in the study” and questions some of the conclusions drawn alongside of Angela Marchmont.

This one is entirely soothing to read, including as it does classic touches like crystal whiskey decanters and hairs on the murder weapon. While I readily guessed the critical clue and even the identity of the murderer, there were sufficient twists to keep me reading. At the same time, there's a sedate pace to the narrative that makes it good bedtime reading.

>150 jillmwo: That sounds like a nice read.

I checked the book page and saw an original publication date in 2013, so I looked up the author, Clara Benson: 1890-1965. Those ambiguities occur frequently, and they bother me. The "original publication date" shown must apply to the particular paperback edition and not to the actual original release date of the novel. I wish our metadata could be clearer about this information.

I believe, @Meredy, that the original publication date that you see refers to the publication date on Amazon's CreateSpace platform. The story put forward is that the novels weren't published in her lifetime because she didn't see them as anything other than her own private amusement for herself and friends. When Amazon made self-publishing of ebooks available, Benson's heirs decided to publish the series of Angela Marchmont novels. Now I have no independent corroboration of this story, but the novel certainly reads like a novel from the '30's so I think this explanation of that 2013 date may be the accurate one.

That said, cleaning up metadata is going to take time. It's taken years to get the concept of the ISBN accepted by consumers, and even thirty-forty years in, there are issues with that as an identifier.

Oof. But that sounds like a very pleasant bullet to have taken. And it was only $1.99 at Barnes and Noble.

>152 jillmwo: That sounds entirely plausible. Thanks.

I'd call this an exceptional case, though. In many instances that I've looked up, including titles from well-known authors who published in their lifetime, I see the same thing, and it's very misleading. To me the problem isn't with showing the publication date of a particular edition. It's with labeling it "original publication date" when it isn't.

Personally, I am very confused when I enter data on my books here. It only asks for "Publication date" and "Publication." Wherever are you supposed to enter "Original" publication date? Also, why have both of the previous mentioned categories? I think us amateurs make a lot of mistakes because we don't understand the terms. I usually put the publication date of the copy I have in that space, then the copyright date under the publication, along with the company, etc.

>155 MrsLee: Suppose I see an intriguing review of some novel called Middlemarch. Is this something recent? I wonder. I look it up and see a Penguin edition published in 2003. Sounds great. I get it and open it and--whoa! Who talks like that? Turns out this thing was written and published a century and a half ago.

I agree that it can be hard to know how to enter catalog data. Perhaps we need more guidance. There are so many editions of so many things, and now in more formats than ever before. I think some people want their libraries to reflect the exact editions they have, and others just want to show that they have the book, so (especially for classics) a generic listing would do. But shouldn't "original" have only one meaning?

>155 MrsLee: & >156 Meredy:

I must agree with you that the date of publication can be confusing when so many recent editions of classics are advertised as first editions and the only thing new about it is the introduction.

Now, if you want some real publication date confusion watch the film extract below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsG_yPKAor4#t=34

First edition of the Iliad for $1! And picked up at garage sale. And in the original English, too!

>155 MrsLee: & >156 Meredy:

You probably know this already, but just in case:

Publication Date is supposed to be the date your edition was published. Original Publication Date is part of Common Knowledge since it should belong to the work as a whole.

>159 suitable1: Actually, thank you. I am always forgetting there is a difference between what I enter and the Common Knowledge area. It makes sense that OPD would be in Common Knowledge, but I am not likely to enter a volume with all the details, and then go to CK to enter more details. I would love to do this, but I don't have enough time to fiddle with my own editions.

>160 MrsLee:
What about all the extra time you have since you don't have to drive so far?

There's a library twist to this that really requires more explanation (and which explains why I referred to the ISBN above without much clarification). There is the original publication date of the WORK -- that is the author's composition of argument or narrative. In large part, at least in the United States, the copyright date and the original publication date may be conflated. (But there are issues with that which I won't go into here.) There are subsequent publication dates that are tied to the specific MANIFESTATION -- that is the physical artifact. For purposes of distribution, the manifestation gets an ISBN. When the rights to a particular WORK are transferred between publishers, the publishers create different ISBNs (because those are tied to the publisher's activity). For most purposes, the ISBN takes you to the correct edition in your hand, even if something like Jane Eyre has multiple editions (one volume, three volumes, etc.) published over an extended time period. Most library cataloging approaches care more for the particular edition in hand (because that is what is owned locally and that's what they need to inventory) than they do for the original publication date.

I hope I'm not insulting anyone here because I am sure many of you understand this. But when we look at things like Benson's work(s) which are written in one period (work created in the 1930's) but which aren't published until 2013 -- and self-published at that so it has Amazon's ASIN rather than a designated ISBN -- identification of what we're discussing becomes complicated. For the record, Amazon doesn't play nicely in terms of industry standards.

I hope this isn't deemed to be TMI (and it probably is more than anyone really wants to know), but this stuff gets messy very quickly and we're still transitioning between the print product and how that worked to a fully integrated network environment for digital publications where there are all kinds of new identifiers and access pointers required for things to work seamlessly. In a perfect world, the original metadata (including an original publication date) would accompany any and all manifestations so that we could track it accurately. But the assumption is that it isn't a high priority because most users/readers don't really care.

And for the record, I need to note that what I've written above is incredibly oversimplified. There are nuances and caveats to all of the various elements of my summary. (But as my daily work is not that of an actual practicing librarian, I don't want to wade in too deep for fear of disseminating incorrect information.)

Okay, time for a second cup of coffee. I have 45 minutes before I'm supposed to be like WORKING in REAL LIFE. Bleh. It's Monday.

>162 jillmwo: Many thanks for this eminently understandable explanation of something that is or should be of some importance to all of us. Implicit in what you wrote is an explanation of why some books will have no less than 3 ISBNs on the copyright page. In the example I'm thinking of, they are Subscribers' edition, hardcover and softcover, all published on nominally the same day and containing the same printed pages, but readily distinguishable as different artifacts.

Thank you, I like simple information.

>161 suitable1: Well, I walk to work now, which takes almost as long as it took me to drive to my other job. And I can listen to my audio books. :) No time saved however.

Thanks for that explanation. I often wonder why it can get so complicated to untangle original publication, copyright, and edition publication dates. And then there are different printing dates, as well.

>162 jillmwo: I hope this isn't deemed to be TMI

Personally, I love these kinds of discussions. When they start to go over my head, I like to jump up and try and grab on!

>164 MrsLee: Ha, that made me think of an old coworker who used to be fond of non sequitars, and liked to ask people "Did you walk to work or brig your lunch?"

Two different web links for you to look at:

A friend blogs about Shakespeare:
https://tishwells14.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/what-has-the-21st-century-done-to-t...

Everything you never understood about what's operating under large urban library systems
http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/06/middlewhere-landscapes-of-library-logistics/

For those of you who seriously want to explore more of what's behind my blurb in #162 above, google the acronym FRBR (Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records). Anything from the Library of Congress and/or OCLC as a resource is trustworthy reading. The thing of it is that you have to work out issues of identifiers, metadata and linked data before you can build the kind of networked digital information environment that Google has been training us to expect. (NOTE: discussions of FRBR are not recommended for those whose eyes glaze over during discussions of bibliographic practice, or who get bored by the slicing-and-dicing of bibliographic citations. You really have to be fascinated by such things in order for it to take hold. Personally, I'm just here on LT for the book bullets and the conversation.)

I liked the "Middlewhere" article. It reminded me of The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski, which has some chapters on the engineering challenges in designing library storage.

Thanks for sharing the second article, Jill. That made fascinating reading.

I clearly remember reading The Book on the Bookshelf as being fascinating for a "lay person" who just has a regular book-crazy interest level in shelves, and shelving books, and history! Well worth reading.

I can't say I'm as fascinated by the whole ISBN subject, but I do see that finding a way to integrate keeping track of "dead book" volumes along side of electronic books which are "owned" but not really. Sigh.

A propos ISBNs, I love that Thursday Next in the Jasper Fforde stories navigates through bookworld using ISBNs, not GPS.

>172 hfglen: Gawd I love the Thursday Next books, I must read more, I've only read the first two.

This will make you smile. It is the time of day when they feed the books (apparently): https://vine.co/v/ergx6hgudXV

I LOVE Melville House and their Moby Lives Blog. Today they're talking about the novella: http://www.mhpbooks.com/the-art-of-the-novella-challenge-33-the-duel-kuprin/
Go buy ALL THE BOOKS.

An Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books by John Carey

I had no idea who John Carey was when I picked up this book via Amazon. I was attracted by its title and the implied promise of a memoir given over to discussions of reading. I thought I might enjoy a charming glimpse of life within the confines of the Senior Commons Room and the Oxford quadrangles. The fact that there was no print version available in the US suggested to me that this wasn’t a big name. I did not realize that the man was a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Oxford with particular expertise on Milton and Donne or that he’d been the senior book critic for the Sunday Times.

So, while the rest of the US this week was arguing over the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, I focused on this little book. There were the bits about recognizable Oxford personalities (such as Tolkien’s mildewed scholar’s garb in the classroom). There were the discussions --as if dropped in casual conversation-- about Victorian literature and its escapism, about Tennyson’s poetry and a recognition that Browning’s was better. There are limited references about the Bodleian Library, but enough to make me sigh with envy. There’s a very clear sense of how the opportunity to study and live within Oxford represents a tremendous step up in experience. The lifestyle, the environment, is amazing. Descriptions and stories like Carey’s underscore the difference between getting an education so that you can get a job and an education based on the close reading of classics -- reading intended to deepen your understanding of what came before your own time and how it relates to you as a thinking individual. An Unexpected Professor may not itself be great literature, but the man behind it persuades you of the value of engaging with great literature.

Carey does give a sense of Oxford life from the earlier 1950’s as the most privileged life imaginable. One lives in buildings that reflect the mindsets of previous centuries (oaken walls, stained glass windows, etc.) and in some instances, at no cost to one’s pocket. There are opportunities to chat with the famous and/or the merely notable. One is invited to plunge into binge reading of literary giants (and not just in the context of checking off a specific number of titles on a syllabus). Yes, there were papers to write and tutorials. But when one has access to the Bodleian Library, how hard can such work be? In fact, based on Carey’s stories of Oxford in the 50’s and 60’s, one has a sense that far too many folks got to attend Oxford on the basis of birth rather than on the basis of brain. (There might be a bit of envy fueling that last sentence...)

There are contradictions in the life. For example, Carey notes one of his early opportunities as a scholar: Helen Gardner told me that Yale University Press had contacted her as they were looking for someone to translate Milton’s Latin Treatise Christian Doctrine for their great new international scholarly project, the Yale Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Would I do it? I said yes. I’m not sure I was right or that she was right to ask me. But I think she reckoned it would be good for my career and it probably was. It was made clear from the start that I would not be paid for my labours. The honor of taking part in the Yale project was considered payment enough.

The contradiction is that this was unpaid labour by someone deemed to be something of an expert in his subject for an entity that (at the time) was in no danger of going under. That's standard practice in academe, but that hardly makes it palatable to the scholar. The acceptability of the practice depends heavily on one's circumstances. The work here was done over the course of five years in this expert’s so called “spare time”. I think one can hear the wry tone adopted by Carey as he contemplates this academic practice of “gifting” one’s output. He loved what he was doing and wouldn’t have changed his situation, but there is a peculiar imbalance to the relationship between Yale and Carey as valued contributor.

For me, much of what was in Carey’s memoir covered novel ground and therefore, I found it by fits and spurts to be quite enjoyable. I’m not sure that it will be to everyone’s taste. But I do see it as a glimpse into another time, into a very different set of assumptions about privilege, and into a unique human intelligence.

BTW, the LT system is suggesting I should continue this by starting a new thread. Does the readership feel that would be a desirable thing?

Your thread isn't bothering me any, it's loading fine.

Fine by me too.

An Unexpected Professor looks like the kind of book that I keep buying and putting on my biography shelf, and don't get around to reading for years and years (if ever).

I think you might like some of it, SylviaC. But I admit there were chapters that did not really add all that much to the whole.

By the way, I'm reading a new bit of non-fiction -- Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books. Following after Carey's book, already it's given me a rueful flash of understanding of myself. (That is, a better understanding of why I read some of what I do. One of those instances, where a bit of age brings a bit of wisdom...) One doesn't just read to while away an hour; usually there's some other driver, isn't there? What do you all think?

>180 jillmwo: One doesn't just read to while away an hour; usually there's some other driver, isn't there? What do you all think?

I agree with the premise. In my own case the things I consciously look for are:

Something that will grab my interest and entertain me while educating me on some issue or giving me insight into another person or group's viewpoint on an issue. I like stories that explore social justice. Science Fiction of a higher quality can look at social issues in a relatively controlled environment.

I would agree with the statements below:

"Science Fiction is not about the future. It is about the present."

"If you want to tell the truth write fiction."

The latter statement applies, in my opinion, more to mainstream literature. One can see Dickens following this approach in A Christmas Carol and many of his other works.

Another driver for me is to support authors that I either know or that have produced works I like and believe justify supporting them by buying their new books.

So, yes, I do look for more than a tool to help me while away the hours. I will not pretend to know all my drivers but I am conscious of some of them.

Of course, I will never admit to having been hit by a book bullet such as, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, but I will admit to having been grazed.

I read nonfiction because I have an insatiable need to know stuff. My reasons for reading fiction are more complex. A large part of it is just because it makes me feel good. Part of it is seeking adventures, emotions and perspectives that are outside of my own experiences. Sometimes I read to distract myself from something that is causing anxiety. I also like the feeling of satisfaction when I encounter a particularly well turned phrase, perfectly executed plot, or fully formed character.

I read because I must. There are so many other things I could and possibly should do, but for my sanity, I read. All of the above mentioned reasons apply as well.

>180 jillmwo: Interesting question. I never read to while away time, or not since I was a youngster and had no idea what time meant. Now at least I have a glimmer of comprehension of how much of it there is and how little of it is ours.

I read to stretch myself and gain understanding. I read to escape. I read to try on someone else's head. I read to learn. I read for pleasure and fun.

>181 pgmcc: -- in this instance, you must take the book bullet. The first chapter spends a good deal of time with Henry James. And I agree with you about the usefulness of science fiction in discussing social issues/constructs/expectations.

>182 SylviaC: and >183 MrsLee: Reading different types of literature serves different purposes. For example, I am reading Marking The Hours as much to learn the history of a particular type of book as to understand a mindset. Reading Miss Mole was to "catch up" with others who had read it and recommended it. Reading Murder at Sissingham Hall was soothing, but other mysteries are read with an eye to analysis.

>184 Meredy: I like the idea of "trying on someone else's head". At the very least to get a sense of a different thought process.

One quick link here -- more on dates in metadata and in library records: http://litablog.org/2015/07/marc_dates/

>180 jillmwo: Depending on what I'm reading, a lot of it is for escapism. Being led by the author to someplace that is not living in the midwest of America. I think that is why I enjoy fantasy so much. The other reason is for broadening my horizons or knowledge base. That's why I enjoy biographies and histories.

I read for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it really is just to while away an hour, such as when I'm riding on Amtrak at the end of a day-long business trip. Something soothing works just fine in that context. But when one reads for diversion, the diversion takes a number of forms. Nineteenth century novels by Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope are great entertainment, but they take a certain amount of mental attention simply by virtue of the sentence structure, pacing and length. Sometimes, you think you're reading science fiction for a bit of entertainment but then the writer surprises you and you find yourself thinking about alternative approaches to existing social constructs and that requires brain work.

Sometimes it's to inform myself -- two books I've read in the past month have fallen into that category. When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business and Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in a Networked World. I read them for work and no other reason, but I found them interesting in terms of thinking about the future of information. Note the damn touchstones are wonky again.

Other times, I'm reading non-fiction because I think I want to be able to write about an idea that requires a parallel of some sort. (Why else would I be fixated on informal documentation, as captured in handwritten notes on the pages of medieval books of hours? Or am I right that Books of Hours are an interesting way of thinking about modern online interfaces and user experience? Then there's that whole compare-and-contrast thing with Anthony Berkeley and The Poisoned Chocolates Case. There was what he did with the short story and what he did with the full length novel.)

Sometimes I read stuff because I need to in order to make evenings more interesting for the book group participants. After all, last month's discussion of Hercule Poirot's last case Curtain somehow led us to talk about the works of Baroness Orkzy and The Scarlet Pimpernel, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, and The Old Man in the Corner.

And sometimes there are books that I have realized I read just to try to convince/persuade others that I'm smart too, a holdover from my childhood while competing with two over-achieving elder sisters.

(Why are you asking me if that last bit was what I meant in #180 above? You think I would admit that in public?)

BTW, someone in the pub, and I can't find it now, was talking about A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson. Who was it? I'm reading the novel as well and I'm enjoying it. (Of course, maybe it was someone over on Facebook.)

>188 jillmwo: Or am I right that Books of Hours are an interesting way of thinking about modern online interfaces and user experience?

Your comment reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

*snerk* >190 pgmcc:

An idle question for a Sunday evening: I came across a list of films used by a college instructor when teaching legal concepts to undergraduates (see http://letterboxd.com/artemiswinter/list/films-i-use-to-teach-law/). Most of the titles make sense on the face of it, but one struck me as odd. So I put it to this crowd in the Pub -- why would you include Nosferatu in a such a course? Is there a courtroom scene in that?

>191 jillmwo:
In terms of legal lessons from "Nosferatu" the only thing I can think of is the copyright issue surrounding the making of the film. Bram Stoker's wife refused to let the film makers call it Dracula as they had intended so they titled it, "Nosferatu" to get around the copyright laws. Shortly after releasing the film the producers wound up the company thus complicating the court cases that raged for some decades.

At one point a court ordered that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed and this instruction was put into action. Only one copy was missed. One that had been sent to the US and forgotten. It is only because of the discovery of this single copy that we can watch Nosferatu today. (Apologies if you knew all this.)

A lawyer friend of mine recommended a film called, "Shadow of The Vampire". It is a movie about the making of "Nosferatu" and if you do not know the background outlined above you might think it is a horror film when in fact it is a comedy. In this film the director, unbeknownst to the rest of the cast and crew, has recruited a real vampire to play the part of Nosferatu. It is very funny and is played very dead-pan.

I will ask my lawyer friend if she can see any other reason for showing Nosferatu when teaching law. Perhaps it is to show legal people what sort of garb they are supposed to wear in court.

"if she can see any other reason for showing Nosferatu when teaching law."

Or how much of the public will see them and make jokes about their profession? ;)

>192 pgmcc: I had no idea about all those informative tidbits. Very interesting.

Sacred Games by Gary Corby

This was the book for discussion this evening at the township library group. It was unfortunate that the group was so small because I had come prepared to go into a real discussion about how writers in a novel can convey a sense of a different place or different time. The mystery is set in ancient Greece -- say maybe 450-460 BC. I was reminded of the essay by Ursula K. Leguin in Language of the Night where she talks about how, if one can transfer a segment of dialogue from an imaginary world (fantasy) and place it wholesale in a modern setting (as in two men walking down the Capitol steps in Washington DC), then there was a problem with the writing. If something is fantasy, in order to have firmly placed the reader in this foreign place, then it ought not to sound like the ordinary world of the reader. (I'm paraphrasing LeGuin, but that's the meat of her argument.)

Now Corby delivers a fun story, well-paced, with lots of historical details. I don't mean to dismiss his work, because it does succeed on some levels. But there was one page that had a conversation between the protagonist and his prospective father-in-law that did not convey any sense of having taken place in ancient Greece. It could have taken place at my local supermarket. There was no creation of a sense of "other-ness". And there ought to have been.

I opened the discussion with the book group by noting that this was either a really bad book or a really good one, and I was hoping that hearing from them would help me work out the dilemma. I find it highly doubtful that a character in ancient Athens would actually use the word "ain't". Even if the Greek language does have contractions, even if the character was lacking in education, should the characterization have been rendered through the use of that particular bit of vocabulary? (And the rest of the exchanged dialog could indeed have been overheard at a modern supermarket.)

So the question then becomes whether this makes the whole book a bad book. Corby does do research into his time period. The pacing of his plot works well. He doesn't hit the reader over the head with slapstick humor. But is this sufficient? If you're writing an historical mystery, shouldn't there be a certain flavor of difference to the dialogue? Has there been an unfortunate shift in the world of professional fiction that says otherwise?

>194 jillmwo: This was precisely my problem with the book I just finished. Set in 1500s Japan, if you didn't know that, you would have no clue. I did not feel the story was bad, I enjoyed the mystery and what the author said, but it didn't transport me. I just sat in my chair and read about people.

>194 jillmwo: I know nothing about that book, but I want to attend your book group! You have a talent for making people think about what they're reading.

>196 SylviaC: I know what you mean! But we are attending Jill's book group, aren't we? And yours...and mine...and MrsLee's...

>197 Meredy: Aren't we fortunate!

Have I ever told you three that you are among the most intelligent women I know? I am sure that, were we to be in the same room for a book group discussion, the three of you together would blow me out of the water. @Meredy would be keeping me on my toes and ensuring I was specific in my points and focusing on what was really worth the time. @MrsLee would prove by example how a real lady behaves in polite discussion even when disagreeing with the speaker, and @SylviaC would more than keep up her end of the discussion by articulate critiques of the month's selection. Meanwhile I'd have to redouble my own efforts to be sure I was fully informed and prepared to answer questions. None of this skimming over the book quickly the night before in order to give attendees the impression I'd been through the whole thing, while depending on Internet interviews and book blogs to fill out the gaps. (Seriously, I try not to do that because I'm being paid to do the book group at the library, but for some of the unpaid book groups of which I've been a member? There were definitely one or two times when I bluffed my way through....)

By the way, if anyone is still looking for a soothing cozy, let me recommend A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson. Nothing overly brilliant in terms of character or plot, but a manner of storytelling that kept me reading.

>199 jillmwo: Oh, wouldn't that be fun? I could think of a few other guests I'd love to include and make it even better, but what a treat that would be--to sit down together and just go at it. Two of us are in California, so that's a start.

What a nice thing to say, Jill. >>> smooch <<<

I hope Jill and MrsLee will both cook for our hypothetical gathering.

:) That would be so fun! >199 jillmwo: Is the one person on FB whose links I always follow because I know they will have an interesting thought or viewpoint. Just the same as her reading threads do. I feel so much smarter hanging out here with you ladies.

>191 jillmwo: & >193 MrsLee:

I have asked my legal adviser if she could see any other reasons for showing "Nosfteratu" during an undergraduate couse on law other than those I outined in 192 and she could not. In fact, she was not aware of all the details of the Dracula v Nosferatu case.

I felt quite smug after that conversation. She now knows where to come to for legal advice when she is stumped. :-)

>191 jillmwo: Ok, I'll take a shot at it.

• Themes. Predator and prey. Dealing with difficult clients. (In the Stoker original, Jonathan Harker was a solicitor.) Shady dealings. Use and abuse of power.

I would think, in fact, that almost any film at all could be used to illustrate and underscore something pertaining to law, ether directly or by some analogy, since law deals with a wide spectrum of human behavior and interaction. One might say that law touches everything.

Or perhaps

• Ulterior motive. Maybe the instructor considers Nosferatu to be an underrated classic that everyone ought to see, and so he uses his list of course materials to make sure that his students do see it. Sort of a private crusade.

And finally

• Under duress. Maybe the instructor did it while under the control of some perverse power that forced him to make and post strange lists against his will.

>204 Meredy: I personally prefer to believe that last option...

>205 mrgrooism:

Clearly the appropriate conclusion.

>199 jillmwo: Can I be a fly on the wall during this book club? I think it'd be fascinating just to watch, listen, and learn!

Away all weekend, so forgive the lack of responses. Yes, it did have to do with infringing on Dracula. A colleague over on Facebook as well as my son researched it to let me know. I almost posted this review before I left, but I wanted to chat with one of my buddies in the DC area over a particular point.

Patience and Fortitude: Power Real Estate and the Fight to Save a Public Library
Scott Sherman

Sherman is credited with uncovering a plan by the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library (NYPL) to sell its Manhattan real estate assets in order to cover the library’s operating deficits of 15 million annually. He won a New York Press Club Award for Journalism earlier this year as a result. This book is (I suppose) his reward for having brought the situation to public attention.

The fact of the existence of such a plan is undisputed. The involvement of real estate power brokers is also undisputed, as a number of them were on the NYPL Board of Trustees. Less frequently admitted publicly are the financial constraints under which this specific organization must operate. It’s supposed to be a world-class research facility open to the public, as well as maintaining as many as 89 branch lending libraries across the city serving dramatically different populations with diverse needs and expectations. Philanthropists are (and always have been) as important and influential in keeping the lights on as any set of politicians and bureaucrats. In the face of declining funding in recent decades, someone was going to have to get creative.

Manhattan is a very small but highly desirable real estate market. Air rights alone are worth millions and somebody thought it foolish that cash-strapped NYPL held prime real estate assets when selling those assets to other parties would generate immediate cash for the library and future tax revenues that the city itself desperately needed. So Paul LeClerc, CEO of the library between 1993 and 2011, got creative. He sold off some portion of the Library’s American art collection and consulted with his Board. The fruit of those discussions was the Central Library Plan (CLP), which called for the closing and consolidation of two specialized branches in mid-town Manhattan, selling off the real estate to developers, and re-designing the 42nd Street facility (with the lions named Patience and Fortitude out front) into a towering presence on Fifth Avenue. The plan entailed “renovating” the Beaux Art design of that building and moving a significant portion of the research collection to off-site storage.

Scott Sherman uncovered and published the news of this plan. He blames LeClerc for coming up with the idea, but is critical of Anthony Marx (LeClerc’s successor) for not killing the plan. The thrust of Patience and Fortitude (to use the short form of the book title) is how he galvanized public opinion into angry awareness and into action to block execution of the plan.

My biggest objection to this book is that it is all narrative, but not documentation. Clearly, Sherman interviewed a variety of people before his initial expose appeared in The Nation. He seems to have spent a certain amount of time digging up background on the history of the library in the New York Times. Much of that appears in this volume. But the book fails because he doesn’t provide the necessary references that allow the reader to go off on his or her own. There are no citations to newspapers of any sort; no bibliography of books consulted. He provides lengthy quotes from bloggers’ postings but without including a URL to any particular entry. There are multiple statements (not direct quotes) that are attributed to anonymous NYPL staff, whose aid is acknowledged at the end of the book even as their anonymity is preserved. But otherwise there is no way of independently corroborating Sherman’s version of facts or events. (You may be able to Google some portion of it, but that’s not a guarantee that what you see in a blog entry in 2015 is identical to the copy that Sherman read in 2012. Usually, in my experience, quality non-fiction includes some sort of note with the relevant URL and an indication of when the Web page was accessed by the author.)

The other disappointing thing was that Sherman made no attempt to do any research to determine whether senior professional library staff were actually following best library practice in removing the bulk of the research collection to off-site storage. (They were.) He criticizes the practice without understanding any of the facts behind that practice. Even if authorities didn’t give him the in-depth interviews he sought, he might still have read some of the professional literature that explained the rationale for the various plan elements to which he objected. He doesn’t seem to consider that a nineteenth century stone building doesn’t expand, even as the content held in the research collection does. He’s simply horrified that the reader off the street won’t be able to access old newspapers at a moment’s whim. Never mind that some of his own sources comment about such centuries-old newspapers crumbling at a touch.

For all that Sherman brought a questionable plan to light, this book does him no credit. It’s just a narrative, offering no corroborative evidence or substantive background to educate the reader as to the pros and cons. You might read this book, but you owe it to yourself to research the circumstances driving the opposing side.

>204 Meredy: What a fascinating way to create upheaval. Forcing entities to post strange lists against their will! I must think if there's a way we can implement that. There's a lot of potential there...

>207 heathn: Absolutely, my dear, the doors are always open!

Jill, that sounds like an amazing book, and so sad that he did not do his due diligence in documenting all of his sources so that the book's impact could be totally justified. I will not undertake reading it, but it does remind me of how Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, began his illustrious career in writing great historical books on Lyndon Baines Johnson. I loved it, and undertook reading the rest of his work, which I have not yet completed. Ah... the life of a reader, always more to read. (-:

Fewer Books: http://www.becomingminimalist.com/fewer-books/

Hmmm. Reactions?

>211 jillmwo: The world is full of crazies. Do not succumb to the disinformation spread by nutters.

Yes! I am not sure I'll jump full on into this guy's approach, he has blogs, and books, and newsletters, etc. etc. I think I'll read his first one and see. But between The Fly Lady and Tai Chi, I've been moving in this direction for years. It has taken me a long time to get rid of plenty of books, and I'm still buying, but slow but sure I'm moving into a smaller space, and spending less time managing my belongings. Less house = less cleaning; less yard = less yard work; etc.

Thanks for the link!

>209 jillmwo:, >211 jillmwo: Agents of chaos are everywhere.

I'm disappointed that the author of that article mistook "pouring" for "poring," When you read something intently and studiously, you're poring over it, not emptying out liquid.

For those of us who love the work of publishing house, Persephone Books: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/06/persephone_books_how_the_...

The key quote: To pick up a Persephone book is to encounter a minutely specialized, painstakingly crafted brand, one that I took a stab at characterizing as feminine before Beauman corrected me: “Not so much feminine as domestic,” she said.

Very slow day in the office in August.

What’s remarkable about Quick Curtain is not so much the crime presented as the detective team on stage for most of the narrative. There is Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard (Mr. Wilson, Sr.) and the younger man, a reporter, by name of Derek Wilson (Mr. Wilson, Jr.) It’s a father-son combination, and the dialogue between these two is frankly the most amusing element of this 1934 British mystery.

The murder takes place on stage. A (scripted) gunshot takes out one of the leading players, a romantic lead. Is it a case of a washed-up actor’s envy causing him to shoot a colleague and then hang himself? Or is there more to these two theatrical deaths than that? (Of course, there is…)

Alan Melville’s novel is squarely Golden Age British mystery fare. He provides you with an entertainment -- light reading with appropriate mocking of dramatis personae and the peculiarities of life in the theater. Dorothy Sayers was right in her review in suggesting that there is a certain lack of reality to the narrative. The lovely aspect of this particular novel is that it is like champagne -- bubbly, sparkling and tickling your fancy. It’s done in very broad strokes, lightly mocking in tone, and you think it’s not going to catch you off guard with its puzzle. BUT. In the concluding chapters, there is A Twist. The type of twist that makes you shout with laughter at having been gotten ‘round so successfully by the author. I really do recommend this one as a light and engaging read.

I can’t think why this particular release from the British Library has not gotten more attention. It’s really rather fun. Properly promoted, this one might have achieved the same quiet wave of success enjoyed by Mystery in White last Christmas.

Having said that, here’s where I notice some idiocy on the part of the British Library and their publishing partners. Quick Curtain is only available in a print format and only from sellers in the UK. There is no US or Kindle edition. Clearly Someone With Decision-Making Power has determined that some of the British Library Crime Classics (BLCC) will appeal to Americans and some won’t. So those that they think are some how beyond the ken of the American buyer are only distributed in the UK and if readers in the US want to get hold of them, then they must try to purchase through either the Book Depository or through Amazon.co.uk. If, however, someone has determined that “Oh, this one will find a market”, then suddenly that BLCC title gets printed through Poison Pen Press as well as in a digital edition and promptly disseminated via Amazon.com.

Honestly, publishers, you need to get over this whole territorial rights thing you’ve got going. It’s just inane. (Note that I typed inane -- not insane. The former is infinitely worse than the latter.) There’s no other descriptor. Utterly. Inane.

Quote: Real happiness consists in not what we actually accomplish, but in what we think we accomplish. (Comment made by Charles Green Shaw. For more on him, see http://www.aaa.si.edu/exhibitions/charles-green-shaw)

Taken from Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum by Liza Kirwin

The Smithsonian has an Archive of American Art. It bills that Archive as the world’s “pre-eminent and most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources that document the history of the visual arts in America.” What they’ve done is assemble in a book an array of such documentation; by which I mean expenses, instructions, lists of names, etc. Some of these are lists with interesting graphics and calligraphy; others are frankly humdrum. (I kid you not -- one of the artifacts referenced in this book -- which is published by Princeton Architectural Press, by the way -- was a grocery list found in the pocket of an artist at the time of his death.The artist misspelled the word “banana”.)

The point is that this is an interesting collection of “stuff”. I loved the packing list by the artist that was a series of pictures laid out on the page. Such an example of visual thinking! It’s almost foreign to me as a way of processing ideas or concepts. I’d write words; artists draw pictures. His list was too detailed to be just a form of mindless doodle.

Other items included in this book included accounting for taxes (such as those for Willem deKooning and his wife), a list of 29 things by H.L. Mencken that appeared in a letter to someone (very odd and humorous as correspondence goes). and a list by Pablo Picasso of those artists he thought worthy of inclusion in the Armory Show of 1912 (he misspells Duchamps' name. You know, the creator of Nude Descending A Staircase).

I picked this up as an offshoot of this whole planner-organization-documentation thing that’s been in the back of my head this spring/summer. Fascinating how different minds work out and document the details of their lives.