I Love My Built-In Bookcases

Four years ago, when we were house hunting but I was briefly out of town, my husband told me about a house he had found and was excited about. The main draw was the location and the view. But knowing me and my devotion to books very well, he also told me of an added inducement: "It has built-in bookcases!" When I got back from my trip and saw the house, I loved it as much as my husband did, for many reasons, and one was those bookcases. They are floor-to-ceiling, with an abundance of space for many books. Of course I love bookcases in general: at home, in my office at the university, anywhere.... But there is something extra special about built-in bookcases. They are an integral part of a room, a sign that someone made books a priority when the house was built. They are so solid, so permanent. Readers, we bought the house and moved in very soon after. And one of the very first things I did when we moved in was to arrange my books on those magnificent, roomy built-in bookshelves!

Maisie Dobbs is Back

Although I have been a lifelong reader of mysteries (see my 1/27/10 post), I have "gone off" mysteries a bit the past couple of years. However, the publication of a new Maisie Dobbs mystery, "The Mapping of Love and Death" (HarperCollins, 2010), by Jacqueline Winspear, lured me back to the world of mysteries. This novel, the seventh in a wonderful series, all of which I have read, is as compellingly readable as its predecessors; I read it in one day. The series is set in England, post-World War I. Maisie Dobbs came from poverty but was discovered to be unusually bright, and with support from some rich patrons, received an excellent education, served as a nurse during the war, and now has her own small detective agency. In this most recent story, she is asked by an American family to find out information about their son's last weeks before he died in France during the war, and about a woman he had met before his death. In the course of unraveling an ever more complicated mystery, Maisie also deals with large changes in her personal life. If you enjoy mysteries, and you haven't yet discovered Maisie Dobbs, I urge you to find and read these novels about her, preferably starting with the first one, titled simply "Maisie Dobbs." I am guessing you will then be hooked, and will have the pleasure of the next six novels in front of you! If you are, on the other hand, already a Maisie Dobbs fan, you probably don't need my urging to find and read this latest installment of her story.

Stockpiling Books: A Unique Twist

In today's New York Times Book Review's back page essay, "My Backlogged Pages," John Feffer writes of the great stocks of books, many unread, that he has on shelves and in boxes. What distinguishes this story from others about voracious book buyers and readers is that Feffer bought most of these books when he was a teenager. To quote him: "I made these purchases three decades ago...in the initial phase of my love affair with books. It all took place at a book sale that happened one weekend a year...in a church around the corner from my house in suburban New Jersey." He goes on to tell of his excitement about the sale, and of his buying piles of books of many genres, all at less than 25 cents per book, and at the end of the sale, at $1 for all the books one could fit in a box or bag. He has been reading those books ever since. Looking back now, he says that "I still may not finish all the books....But I could never sell them or give them away. They are not just books, after all. Provided I hold on to this library, I can still pretend that I will be all the people that I imagined I would be as a teenager, as I wandered the church book sale and selected gifts for my futures selves." I urge you to read the full essay; the URL is below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Feffer-t.html

"Boys and Girls Like You and Me"

A new book. "Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories" (Scribner, 2010). By Aryn Kyle. Boys. Girls. Young people. Trauma. Drama. Divorced parents. Cruelty. Alienation. Sex. Joyless sex. Affairs. Tenuous relationships. Breakups. Desertion. Smoking. Lots of smoking. Drinking. Lots of drinking. Shoplifting. Meaningless jobs. Confusion. Halfhearted suicide attempts. Temporariness. Carelessness. Uncertainty. Angst. Lots of angst. Well-written. Recommended.

Consistency is the Hobgoblin....?

I often say that I will not read books electronically, on Kindle, the IPad, or the like. I feel very strongly about this (although I may have to eat my words at some point, as I have had to before regarding various technological advances). I want books to be published on paper, and I want to read them the old-fashioned way; I think giving up that experience would be a terrible loss. But I was thinking this morning about how much time I spend reading other things online: e-mail, Facebook, blogs, websites, news publications, journal articles when I am doing research, etc., etc.). Not to mention writing this blog and being glad when people read it online! I guess I am not as much of a purist on this topic as I like to think. Sigh. I still think that reading novels electronically is a very different thing than reading email, blogs, etc. But finally, perhaps my only defense is Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous words: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The Hodgepodge Reading of a Bookish Young Teenager

Reading a recent review of a new biography of Somerset Maugham reminded me of reading and loving his novels as a teenager. "Of Human Bondage." "The Moon and Sixpence." "Cakes and Ale." "The Razor's Edge." The novels were powerful and psychologically intriguing, and gave me the feeling of having a window into "real life." Thinking about these novels reminded me of the strange hodgepodge of books I read as a young teenager. I would follow up reading a children's mystery with an adult mystery with a bestseller with a nineteenth century novel, all jumbled together. For example, here is a small sampling of the books I read when I was about fourteen (taken from my ongoing "books read" list, kept from the age of ten; see my 1/24/10 and 1/25/10 posts for more about that list):
-Penny Allen and the Mystery of the Hidden Treasure
-The Seven Dials Mystery, by Agatha Christie
-Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther
-Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
-Anthem, by Ayn Rand (!)
-Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
-Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier
-Perry Mason and the Case of the Amorous Aunt (!), by Erle Stanley Gardner
-The Ugly American, by Lederer and Burdick
-Danny Orlis, Big Brother
-Maigret Has Scruples, by Simenon
-Babbit, by Sinclair Lewis
-The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky
I hardly think that at age fourteen I understood, beyond the plot, much about some of these books, especially "The Brothers Karamazov"! But I could feel that novel's power, its intimations of the complicated depths of human character and of what life could bring. And always, with all the sometimes indiscriminate reading, I was taking in the world, savoring all the experiences, sensing the vastness and complexity and possibility of life. I instinctively knew that books were my portal into that vastness.

"One D.O.A., One on the Way"

A very small book (166 small pages) from minimalist writer Mary Robison, "One D.O.A., One on the Way" (Counterpoint, 2009) has a very large impact. The novel is both a prolonged cry of despair for New Orleans, post-Katrina, and a sad sort of love letter to the city as well. The main character, Eve, a movie location scout without much visible work, is married to Adam, and is having an affair with his twin brother Saunders. Saunders' wife Petal has threatened him with a gun and is now in the only psychiatric hospital still open in N.O. Adam and Saunders' parents are rich and extremely difficult. The story is told in very short episodes, often less than a page long, and is interspersed with lists about the terrible conditions in N.O., such as the crime statistics and lack of adequate police or other city services. Also interspersed are frequent lists of different types of gun holsters available; guns are a motif throughout the story. Somehow, despite all the despair, Eve's persona is smart if wounded, and her voice is mordantly witty. The novel easily kept my attention all the way to the dramatic conclusion.