BTT: A second first time?

BTT: What book would you love to be able to read again for the first time?



You know, I'm not really sure. Would it be Jane Eyre so I could follow Jane for the first time again? Would it be Winnie-the-Pooh so I could hear my mom and dad read it to me again? Would it be And the Band Played On so I can experience the growing sense of dread and righteous indignation because with the realization that my generation got majorly screwed by the Reagan administration and the conservatives?

I guess I would have to pick Winnie-the-Pooh, but only if one of my parents reads it to me. I still love Pooh but I can never have the magic of being a child and having my stories read to me again.

(Note: I've decided to start doing a few more memes - they are fun and I always enjoy reading all the other responses)

The Lemonade Award

I received the Lemonade Award from Cathy at The One-Eyed Stuffed Bunny and ... - thanks very much!

According to the rules I'm supposed to pass this on to ten blogs that show great attitude or gratitude (show gratitude?, just FYI chain letters are not my cup of tea)...

As far as attitude, I have to go with The Media Morgue, The Film Noir Experience, Please Don't Eat the Books, Eh, tu Mr. Destructo? (not for the faint-hearted), The World According to Me, Bridget Zinn (go support Bridget, she's a fighter), and I'm totally going to cheat and give it to Meredith even though she's sans blog but she's a great reporter for The CR Gazette (Twitter link). As for gratitude, definitely going to The Forgetful Librarian (for her Swine Flu post, thanks much), Booking Through Thursday, and Nick Hornby (total cop-out because he doesn't allow comments on his posts but he does great things with books, movies, and charities for kids).

The Rules:
1) Put the Lemonade Award logo on your blog or post. (done - it's in the left-hand column)
2) Nominate at least 10 blogs that show great attitude or gratitude. (hmmm)
3) Link to your nominees within your post. (done)
4) Let the nominees know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog. (might take a bit)
5) Share the love and link to the person from whom you received your award. (done)

Caddie Woodlawn

I was a big Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, had all the books in the pretty hardcover bindings, and read them cover to cover many times, the whole series through. They were a gift from my grandmother. My grandmother is also the one who introduced me to Caddie Woodlawn but I don't remember ever owning a copy so I must have read it at my grandmother's house. I was always very partial to Caddie; she and Laura were very similar, even from the same area of the country, but for some reason Caddie always seemed a little more "real" to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. Re-reading Caddie now I think it's the author/subject that causes the difference; while Laura wrote from an autobiographical stand-point, Carol Ryrie Brink wrote about her grandmother, the real Caddie (nee Woodhouse), and perhaps that created more space between writer and subject, however small.

The new edition of Caddie has a note from Brink - something missing in my grandmother's old copy - and it was very nice to read a bit about how Brink and her grandmother interacted. There are some things I did not remember from my childhood readings and, strangely enough, the biggest hole in my memory centered around Caddie's father; I completely forgot he was from England which is huge because that fact informs several other plot points in the book including the final chapters. I do realize now that I read Caddie long before I had a good hold on the historical timeline (I believe I first read this in second grade because we hadn't moved to the new school district at the time); there are a number of facts related to the Civil War that I have a far better understanding of having had fifth-grade history. A hold-over from childhood is my lack of knowledge of the folk songs Robert Ireton sings; I'd not heard of any of them at the time but this time 'round I have Google so I can search for the music.

Caddie lived in Wisconsin about ten years or so before Laura so the setting is slightly altered. There is more interaction with Native American tribes in Caddie than in the Little House in the Big Woods and there seems to be better communication with the rest of the US at large in Laura's time than Caddie's. Brink seems to include a subtle lesson on racism and tolerance which I don't recall from the Little House books. While the Ingalls' don't seem to mind the neighboring Native American tribes but interact little with them, Mr. Woodlawn actively seems to offer friendship and assistance to John's tribe; Brink also treats the biracial Hankinson family with sympathy, showing how the father's cowardice and lack of tolerance drives his wife to return to her people, leaving her children behind. Mr. Woodlawn also relates the stringent nature of the class system in England through the story of his childhood.

The one thing I'm not quite sure on was Brink's stance on women's rights. She wrote Caddie in 1935-36 so women were in the workplace, had the right to vote, etc. but still had a bit to go. in the 1860s of Caddie's childhood, she was allowed to run and play with her brothers as a counter against the poor health that killed a younger sister; she can do just about everything her brothers can but her mother constantly pushes her to act like a proper young lady of the 1860s (like her elder sister Clara). In a scene near the end of the book Caddie's father comes to comfort her and talks of how women are meant to be good, and keep house, and tame the wild fathers and brothers (a bit like the "Angel in the House" Victorian concept, which wouldn't be off time-period-wise); I'm sure it was decently close to the real conversation between Caddie and her father. Caddie decides that she ought to start learning to help Mother....but Brink doesn't let us know how Caddie feels, truly. Caddie enjoys her first foray into ladyhood - learning to quilt - and seems to like being in the kitchen, too, but the book ends shortly after. I get the feeling that Caddie won't go over to the "accomplished" side like Cousin Annabelle, but I feel like Caddie's voice gets lost at this point in the book. There is a follow up volume, Caddie Woodlawn's Family, so I'll probably need to read that (which I've never done) to see where Caddie's life takes her, if the book extends that far.

The vocabulary list is quite long this time; I pulled words and phrases that I'm sure I didn't actually know as a second grader and inferred the meanings for myself:
inseparable, hassocks, "hot pitch", indignation, leisurely, disinherited, lofty, taverns, frail, "public houses", escapade, titters, smarting, inconsolable, disgrace, massacre, victuals, obscurity, insure, impassive, enthralled, remote, irksome, cowards/cowardice (cowardice is the actual word), pendulum, unfathomable, weariness, abolition, aristocrat, homesteads, sportsman (in the upper-crusty sense of shooting), wholesale, slaughter, haymow, smirk, reproaches, drenching, whippersnapper, "treading on air", trinket, darning, sulphur, gravely, pompously, wheedled, enterprise, daintier, challis, sedately, muffler, dassn't, sledge (I might have known this one), tumultuous, picallili (guaratee I didn't know what that was), soliloquize, titillate, muskrats, breeches, clogs, gimcracks, clambered, notions, guttural, tactful, bewilderment, proteges, capered, jostled, coaxed, arbutus, "accomplished", anticlimax, trilliums, hepaticas, impartial, wistful, churning, vicissitudes, apparition, cultivated, quaint, rustic, impish, fatigued, vivaciously, momentum, pandemonium, stupendous, distraught
(sorry for the paragraph - the list was way too long)

Next up in the Newbery reading is From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - who wouldn't want to run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Current book-in-progress: Wives and Daughters, Sexing the Cherry, The Palace of Illusions, The Liar, A History of God, Burnt Shadows
Current knitted item: Karma's poncho - one stripe repeat left
Current movie obsession: Ian McKellan's Richard III should be in the mailbox today
Current iTunes loop: Lost in a Good Book is in the car; have some yummy classical CDs winging their way to me from B&N

Teaser Tuesdays: Sexing the Cherry

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page - BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
4. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

LIES 8: It was not the first thing she saw, how could it have been? Nor was the night in the fog-covered field the first thing I saw. But before then we were like those who dream and pass through life as a series of shadows. And so what we have told you is true, although it is not.
(p 106, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson; a new edition is here)

For more teasers, visit MizB's blog!

Water Ghosts

I received a copy of Water Ghosts via a drawing on Twitter from PenguinPress/PenguinUSA. Let me tell you, I might not have picked this novel up since I've already got so much on my plate but I'm very glad that receiving a copy gratis forced me to read it right away. It is beautiful.

Shawna Yang Ryan's debut novel is a beautiful, heartbreaking look at a forgotten segment of American history. Every one of Ryan's characters - Corlissa, Sophia, Richard, Howar, Chloe, Poppy, Ming Wai - has been lovingly rendered to the point that the prose of the novel becomes tactile, almost real. You can taste the salt Ming Wai leaves behind, feel the heaviness of the air as Corlissa works; a major sensory focus of the writing is smell and scent. The book covers a space of only a few months in 1928 but the narrative loops back and forth, like interconnected short stories, and changes narrators when convenient so that all the stories are eventually brought to the reader's attention. Intertwined with the story of the boat women are tales from Chinese folklore and mythology and this contributes to the "ghost story" feel of the novel. There is also an ethereal quality to the work but instead of floating in air it's like floating under water, like the rippling of silk; the characters struggle to float free of their pasts, to avoid sinking under the town of Locke, California. While the political climate and laws of immigration in 1928 are not directly a focus of the narrative, ideas regarding sexuality, morality, racism, and culture lie beneath the characters' stories; the whitegirl brothel, the lack of ethnic Chinese women among the immigrant community (only merchants could obtain a visa to bring a wife to the US from China), the mix of Christian ideology with Chinese tradition, and the notion of honor all come to play in the novel. I particularly enjoyed Ryan's debut novel (originally published as Locke 1928 by El Leon) and I hope her next published work isn't very far in the future.

I hate SPAM

Some jackass has gotten hold of the "All Internal Medicine" email list at work and is now occupied in sending all of us spam email.

Which, in turn, prompts everyone to get pissed off, hit "Reply all," and request that their email be removed from the list.

Which we all get since about 1000+ of us are listed in "All Internal Medicine" - probably more.

And all of these emails come through on my BlackBerry.

Idiots.

A Canticle for Liebowitz

I spent the weekend reading and didn't turn on my computer once (I did check email/Twitter via Blackberry). It felt kind of odd - I feel sort of behindhand now since I have BNBC posts and blogs to catch up on and there are a lot of both.

One of the things I finished this weekend was A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. I still can't believe I never read this book until now given that I have an affinity for dystopic/post-apocalyptic science fiction. Even though the book's events are inspired by the nuclear arms race of the 1950s I think it is quite applicable to the 21st century as well. The idea that the world will succumb to nuclear annihilation, entering a dark age, only to have knowledge resurrected by the Church is an interesting one and still an idea that may or may not come to fruition in the real world. The characters of A Canticle for Liebowitz are an intersting collection of the secular, the sacred, and the divine, right down to the omnipresent buzzards, so there are moments of humor and levity in Miller's dark world, too. I was also pleased by the construction of the storyline; I have a continual complaint regarding books that over-forshadow their own plotlines and I loved how Canticle didn't reveal the book's trajectory until the latter half of the third section. I only wish I could read Hebrew characters left by the wanderer/hermit character - I could type the Latin into a translator to figure out the monks' messages, etc., but I wasn't able to do so with the Hebrew. Miller also sets up an interesting dialogue about suicide and euthanasia near the end of the book; this dialogue is never really finished, particularly given that the section is narrated from the perspective of the Church, but it seems to side with the position of the Church (I think, unless the position is meant to be ironic and Miller is siding with those who believe in suicide/euthanasia). We'll never get a good answer because Miller committed suicide in the 1990s.

I bought more books this weekend and am now undecided as to what I should plow through next.

Schadenfreude

I've spent the last week and a half drowning in schadenfreude because of the flu. My boss looks like hell (she looks a bit better this week), everyone else is running up and down working on disaster preparedness in case every crazy in the region wants to be tested for swineflu, and I get to sit in my nice, quiet office drinking my tea and playing with my database. I feel a little bad; I keep asking if anyone needs help but I keep being told that everyone is fine so I guess I will keep playing with my database and try not to worry about it.

I keep playing on Twitter. It's turning into a lucrative past-time because I've acquired three books via contests/give-aways on Twitter plus I was introduced (also via Twitter) to a VP from a publishing firm who is interested in sending me promotional copies (I think I'll share with Kat). I recently received a copy of Burnt Shadows via a PicadorUSA drawing (that's two from them now) and a copy of Water Ghosts is coming from Penguin. They both look very good. I feel a bit greedy now that I've got three plus the possibility of more...am I always this ridiculous? It does keep me on my toes as regards my reading since I really have to finish things if I get them gratis and the Book Clubs have a good May line-up.

Speaking of the BN Book Clubs, you can follow them on Twitter, too, haha (BNBookClubs). They've also just announced enrollment for the next First Look Book Club to start on June 1; the editors have picked Of Bees and Mist, a debut novel by Erick Setiawan, and it looks to be a wonderful piece of writing. To enroll in the FLBC you need to sign up for a My B&N account at http://www.bn.com/ (click on the red My B&N button); then go to this thread and follow the instructions (you'll need to have your "Private Message" function, aka PM, enabled to enroll). There is a limit to the number of books available so sign-up soon! While you're waiting for your book to arrive, visit the other groups - I moderate "Literature by Women" (shameless plug, I know).

On a side note I've been very good as regards the diet, er, healthy eating, since I managed to find the grocery store last weekend. I'm already dreading the idea of going back but I have to (HAVE TO) get back in the habit of going frequently so as to keep the fridge full of good fruits and veg. Prevents me from making rice as a "snack" (bad, bad habit).

PS: Dead serious, I'm being followed on Twitter by someone who goes by the name of Jane Eyre (Thornfield Jane). Odd.

Current book-in-progress: Wives and Daughters, The Palace of Illusions, A Canticle for Liebowitz, A History of God,...anything else?
Current knitted item: Karma's poncho, now about 2/3 done
Current movie obsession: Time Bandits (how is it that I've never watched this movie?) and Three Days of the Condor (also, given my parents' affinity for Robert Redford, how is it I've never watched this?)
Current iTunes loop: Blue Monday by New Order (had to get this from iTunes because the Muzak at the store was taunting me) and Thursday Next on audio (first book is abridged, bah!)

The Story of a Marriage

I received The Story of a Marriage via a drawing/contest on Twitter from PicadorUSA. I'm still a little stunned because I've only recently learned how many book give-aways exist on the web, so thanks @PicadorUSA!

Greer's book is a quiet, meditative reflection on marriage told through the eyes of the narrator and wife, Pearlie; as the first-person narrator, she is always told what Holland might be thinking or needing and never truly asks for herself so it sets up an interesting commentary on 1950s repression. Because the novel is set in the 1950s of the Korean War, the McCarthy hearings, and the Rosenberg execution, real events also shape Pearlie's story and thoughts on her marriage. Of particular interest is Pearlie's fixation on Ethel Rosenberg and how Ethel is reflected in Pearlie's thoughts; the ramifications of silence and inaction are at the heart of Pearlie's story, too, and Pearlie has learned to find her voice and path at the end of the novel. The real beauty of the novel lies in reading Pearlie's reasoning and decision-making process which is particularly gratifying because I figured out the central problem of the marriage in about twenty pages and that was about twenty-five pages prior to the problem's unmasking. The most interesting character in this novel is Buzz, of whom I won't say much more because anything you know about him spoils part of the story, which is interesting because while Pearlie's story is central to the novel, you can't get rid of Buzz because he always shows up.

I've read some reviews where this was called tedious or confusing; while the book is quiet and slow I didn't find it tedious and most certainly not confusing. I also read a reveiw that noted Greer should have mentioned Sonny's polio more often aside from the few sentences at the beginning. Well, considering there were often mentions of Sonny's odd gait and his need for new leg braces, Greer does mention Sonny's condition from time to time but since ad nauseum description of a medical condition would not be in line with Pearlie's character (an uneducated Af-Am woman from a poor Kentucky town) that would be out of place in a story Pearlie is narrating. I liked the book. Pooh on everyone else.

The Princes in the Tower

I finished this a few weeks back and my posting schedule got interrupted because of that dratted flu and associated panic. Everything got interrupted, let's just put it that way.

The Princes in the Tower differs quite a bit from the previous Weir histories/biographies I read recently. For one thing, Weir is writing with a far more scholarly tone because she is evaluating the veracity and accuracy of historical documents used in reconstructing the history of Richard III and his nephews, Edward V and Richard of York. She backs up several times to go over different events with different contemporary sources. So the intimacy that I felt when reading about Eleanor or Katherine isn't there because the focus isn't on one person but many people involved in a singluar event in history. The book is shorter than the others, too, but that doesn't make it any easier to read. Weir comes down firmly on the side of those who hold Richard III responsible for the deaths of his nephews and she tells you why she thinks that way; however, she does present all the evidence both against Richard and that used to "prove" his innocence although she does debunk the innocent side of the story so you might be persuaded to side with her anyway.

This was an interesting read; Weir actually took time to explain why her interpretation of the historical record differed from the BBC judicial program (which found Richard III innocent) which I found to be very nice because she essentially covered all her bases then. If you're a Richard III "revisionist" you won't like this book; if you like Shakespeare's play then you need to read this book because it gives depth to one of literature's most famous villains.

Buyer Beware

When the nice saleslady at Ann Taylor Loft asks if you want to upgrade from the company charge card to the new Ann Taylor Loft MASTERCARD (because you are such a good customer, blah, blah, blah) she is lying if she tells you the balance from the company card will roll over to the new MC.

It doesn't.

I have to pay TWO Loft bills until I can figure out how to pay the Loft store card with the new Loft MC. However, if I play my cards right I might have the Loft store card paid off in a few months, huzzah for that, so it might not come to a pissy phone call to customer service.

Mother's cupboard is now somewhat full

Back from the grocery store - I went before noon and it was surprisingly easy to navigate around New Pi because it wasn't busy, yet (I didn't attempt Hy-Vee). There was also a farmer's market occuring so that might have had something to do with it.

I now have some yummy veggies, bread, and deli meat so I can at least feed myself at home rather than always seeing what take-away is available.

The kitty-boys are now on their extra-best behavior because I also have cheese. And they like cheese. Dante is also trying to wash my face since that shows he loves me and lovey kitties get treats.

Or so they think. Dante is the fat kitty; he and I are in the same boat diet-wise.