SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

Confession: I hadn’t read anything by Ray Bradbury, Pasadena’s most famous author, not even Fahrenheit 451 (I started it once and then got distracted and moved to something else). I KNOW. So I was excited to read this one, which sounded perfect for Halloweentime (demonic carnival!). But…I was a little disappointed. It’s poetically written, but at times almost too much so; it seemed opaque or strangely abstract and wasn’t as scary as I’d expected. Maybe that’s the fault of my own expectations (I get that it’s more a coming-of-age story than a horror tale), but it paled in comparison to Shirley Jackson.

I AM THE CHEESE

I never read this classic or any other Robert Cormier when I was young, so I’m glad this got picked for my book club. Though the OMG-it-turns-out-my-family’s-in-witness-protection narrative is a bit played out now, it probably wasn’t at the time, and the real twist of the book was ingenious and probably would have blown my mind at age 12. Not lovable, but well-written and quite chilling.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

I was years late to the party on this one, mostly because I couldn’t get it from the library on audiobook, which is how I’ve been enjoying the rest of my Bill Bryson. It was as enjoyable as promised, and has effectively disabused me of any fantasies I had of hiking the Appalachian Trail.

CARNEY’S HOUSE PARTY

The only Deep Valley book I was never able to obtain until HarperCollins’s recent (and very handsome) rerelease. I always liked Carney, with her ambition of going to Vassar, and this one gives us some vintage women’s-college atmosphere (“Winkie took charge of the rarebit and Peg toasted crackers over the gas light. ‘Who’s going to make the cocoa?’ she called. ‘Not me,’ said Win, who was tuning her ukulele.”) while also giving us a glimpse of Betsy and the rest of the Crowd in the “lost years” between Betsy and Joe and Betsy and the Great World. A new favorite.

TATTOOS ON THE HEART: THE POWER OF BOUNDLESS COMPASSION

I went to hear Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, speak at a local bookstore and he was astoundingly awesome. I bought a copy of his book and got it signed for A’s mom’s birthday, but couldn’t resist giving it a quick read before sending it off. Less a memoir than a loose collection of homilies and anecdotes, it’s profoundly inspiring, but I gotta say, it pales in comparison to seeing Father Greg in person. If you ever have the chance, do so (and while you’re at it, visit Homegirl Café—they catered the reading, and the food was delicious).

ICE: GREAT MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF COLD, HARD WATER

I’ve counted University of Minnesota art/American studies professor Karal Ann Marling among my favorite nonfiction writers (along with Susan Orlean and Mary Roach) because of her ability to balance substance with wit and fun, but her most recent book left me—sorry, just can’t resist—rather cold. It was enjoyable enough, especially during a 100-degree heat wave, and presented some interesting factoids, but it seemed a bit thin in some places and scattershot in others.

HALF BAKED

I can never resist books based on the blogs I follow. If you haven’t read Flotsam, I recommend doing so, but even if you’re not a blog fan, this memoir is worth checking out. Alexa Stevenson’s story (subtitled The Story of My Nerves, My Newborn, and How We Both Learned to Breathe) is amazing and her sense of humor irresistible—plus, she’s from Minnesota! Books about childbearing aren’t my number-one interest, but as a fellow worrier, I loved how Stevenson framed her tale as a meditation on anxiety, and I did a lot of head-nodding over passages like this one:

The mistake I made—and would keep making, over and over—was in believing that my apprehension had a protective quality; that preparing for the worst would arm me against misfortune. Regrettably, the disaster you expect is seldom the one visited upon you.

MAPP AND LUCIA

In this, the fourth book in E.F. Benson’s delightful 1920s/30s Mapp and Lucia series, the respective heroines of the previous three books face off. Forget comedies of manners—this is a cage match of manners, as Lucia, having thoroughly conquered Riseholme, moves into Miss Mapp’s turf in Tilling (with the faithful Georgie in tow, thank goodness), and all-out social war ensues. Fun from beginning to end.

SEPTEMBER READING NUBBINS

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith: I’ve never quite fallen in love with Smith, but she’s brilliant and a fan of E.M. Forster and Buffy, so that makes her A-OK in my book. Although this collection is a bit uneven, it’s always interesting to watch the elegantly expressed workings of her mind, and I loved some of the literary and personal pieces. Thanks for the recommendation, Editor A!

Sh*t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern: Lent to me by Editor A. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up on my own, but I’ve got to admit it was pretty hilarious. The Twitter-feed quotes provided most of the laughs, but Halpern adds some welcome content by interspersing brief essays about his dad. Still semi-disposable, but I didn’t regret the hour or so it took to read.

The Complete Peanuts: 1963-1964, by Charles M. Schulz: More Peanuts awesomeness. ’Nuff said.

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

I was a fan of this book (by Sheila Burnford) and the movie when I was younger (NOT the early-’90s Michael J. Fox/Sally Field-voiced atrocity where the animals talked to each other, but the nearly dialogue-free 1963 version—I had an abiding love for all the obscure classic live-action Disney movies and would always rent them on video when given the opportunity). I even, embarrassingly in retrospect, performed an excerpt from it as a Declam piece in eighth grade. I loved animal books, and this was one of the few in which the tears jerked were happy ones—no wrenching death scenes here.

I hadn’t revisited it since then, and upon rereading it for book group, I was pleased to discover that it’s still good. Burnford didn’t write it specifically as a YA book, and I think it shows: it’s short and the story is simple, but except for the focus on animals there’s little here that screams “hey kids” (yeah, two of the pets’ owners are children, but the POV dwells more on the adults). The vocabulary is sophisticated and the tone realistic, occasionally—in that no-nonsense midcentury way—grimly so. One thing I hadn’t remembered was how violent parts of the book are; of course narrative drama requires the lost pets to overcome hardship and obstacles on their trek, but the middle of the book feels like a series of bloody cage matches: Dog vs. bear! Dog vs. dog! Cat vs. lynx! Dog vs. porcupine! It started to feel a tad repetitive. By far the best elements of the book are the descriptions of the Canadian wilderness and the animals themselves (pet owners will particularly appreciate this accuracy), plus the gorgeous illustrations by Carl Burger. For the most part, Burnford admirably resists anthropomorphizing (not only do the animals not talk to each other, but they aren’t even referred to by name most of the time, just as “the old dog,” “the young dog,” and “the cat”) and excessive sentimentality. Yet did I still cry during the big reunion scene at the end? Yes. Yes I did.

A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET

This has always been my favorite entry in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet, and I’ve probably read it more times than all the other books combined. Mostly it’s because I’m a sucker for time travel and all its altering-the-future-by-influencing-the-past complexities. Also because it has a unicorn, and no little girl of the 1980s could resist a unicorn. But on this latest reread, I’ll admit I was less enchanted. The story of Charles Wallace saving the world from nuclear war on Thanksgiving by entering a series of interlinked stories in the past is cleverly suspenseful and all, but maybe…a little cheesily mystical in parts? And I gotta say, there’s a major logic hole for me in the concept that one could stop an evil dictator by going back in time and changing who his ancestors were. In this book, some people are super-good and others are just plain bad, and the good people have good descendents and the bad people have bad ones, which is at best oversimplistic and at worst smacks alarmingly of eugenics, and it kept bothering me the more I thought about it. There’s still a lot to love here—especially the present-day scenes with the always-adorable Murrys—but this may be one of my few childhood faves that holds up less well under adult scrutiny. Still, it does include a kitten, so bonus points there.

PACKING FOR MARS: THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF LIFE IN THE VOID

I want to have a beer with Mary Roach. Not only is she hilarious, brilliant, and talented, but we also seem to be fascinated and amused by exactly the same aspects of history and science—specifically, the audacity and quirkiness of human endeavor. Her books don’t just answer the question “What do we know about this topic?” but “What crazy-ass studies did we have to perform to learn it and who the hell had the bizarre job of thinking them up and doing them?” She hunts down interesting factoids, but it’s her irreverent, fearless, delightfully nerdy, voraciously curious approach I really adore; I could read a Mary Roach book about watching paint dry. So, although I have no particular interest in space travel, I loved this book. Bonk and Stiff remain her best works, but this is still a must-read. Roach’s dogged search to discover whether one of the first chimps in space was nicknamed “Enos the penis” by his trainers because he touched himself at a news conference or just because he was kind of a jerk is in itself worth the price of admission.

WHEN YOU REACH ME

So hearted, I can hardly tell you. I don’t manage to keep abreast of much contemporary YA unless it achieves Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games pop-culture status, but when I heard that this book by Rebecca Stead was not only the 2010 Newbery Medal winner but also an homage to A Wrinkle in Time, I knew I had to check it out, and oh, I was not disappointed. This is a straight-up good read. I’m a sucker for time travel, and the 1970s NYC setting made it feel so dearly reminiscent of the classic urban novels I loved as a kid (and still love), like Harriet the Spy and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where the kids were smart and independent and adventurous and all-around awesome. In fact, When You Reach Me has more in common with those books than it does with L’Engle’s sweeping good-and-evil battles, although the protagonist reads Wrinkle over and over again, and there are definitely quantum-physics themes. The style is deceptively simple and straightforward, the ideas complex, and the plot excitingly twisty but never head-spinning. There are elements of sci-fi and a dark mystery, but they’re grounded in real characters and emotions. It’s poignant and thought-provoking but also fun and lovable. I really can’t say enough good things about this book, except that you should read it.

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

(By L.M. Montgomery) Because this is one of my favorite childhood novels, period, I was surprised—and, I’ll admit, peeved—that several of my book group members who were reading it for the first time (!) didn’t particularly enjoy it. The main complaints seemed to be that (a) it’s long, (b) nothing much happens, and (c) Anne is annoying. I won’t address these sacrilegious claims here—oh, wait, I totally will: (a) not really, (b) many beloved books of this genre (Little House, Ramona, etc.) consist of similar linked chapter-long escapades constructed from the small dramas of everyday life, so the lack of complex overarching plot is hardly unique, plus some of us happen to like quiet, old-fashioned stories, thankyouverymuch, and (c) maybe a little, both also charming and hilarious.

But what’s more interesting to me than how anyone could possibly dislike this book is how my reading of it has changed over time: As a kid, I totally identified with Anne’s rapturously romantic, imaginative view of life—understood the importance of a bosom friend, loved Tennyson, and would definitely have named a pond The Lake of Shining Waters. When I reread it somewhere around college age, I was a bit embarrassed; I skimmed all the long nature descriptions and found Anne silly and irritating. This time around, I found my perspective has shifted; I paid much more attention to the details of the historical and geographical setting, and if I identified with any characters, it was often with the adults in the story, alternately aggravated, amused, and delighted by Anne’s adventures. While there were always parts that made me laugh before (raspberry cordial! The unfortunately Lily Maid!), now I was struck by the fact that this is first and foremost a really funny book, sharing a lot in common with the vintage comedies of manners I enjoy as an adult. I especially developed a love for Marilla I’d never felt in the past (probably aided by the fact that I rewatched the movie and saw Colleen Dewhurst’s sly, warm performance with fresh eyes). However, two things remain unchanged: I still have a crush on Gilbert and I still cry when Matthew dies. I’ll definitely be rereading the rest of the series...as soon as I finish all of L’Engle, that is.

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

I got a hand-me-down copy of this long ago from A’s mother, but resisted reading it for a long time even though I love the other Edith Wharton books I’ve read (The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and particularly The House of Mirth). I suspected there was a reason it was one of her more obscure efforts; most summaries include words like “biting” and “satirical,” which is often code for “unlikeable.” And indeed, the main character, the ruthless, materialistic social climber Undine Spragg (is it a coincidence her initials are U.S.?), who repeatedly marries and divorces in search of the wealth and status she feels she is entitled to, is hard to sympathize with and often made me want to throttle her. Yet I found this book completely fascinating and surprisingly enjoyable—the satire isn’t laugh-aloud funny, but there’s a grim, riveting pleasure in Wharton’s vivid, incisive, unrelenting dissection of the era, class, and characters she depicts.

But while it’s easy to read the book as just a what-is-society-coming-to/get-off-my-lawn takedown of a new age of bloodless noveau riche opportunism, there’s more to it than that. Wharton also underscores that if Undine had been a man, her determination and ambition might have been productively channeled into business, but as a woman, her only recourse is to desperately jump from man to man, eternally frustrated (whatever she manages to get, it is never enough) and causing collateral damage right and left. I might not recommend this as someone’s first taste of Wharton, but it’s as powerful and brilliant as any of her other masterpieces.

MISS MAPP

Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older....Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

This is the second or third book in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, depending on how you figure (second published, but the omnibus edition of the series I got from the library had it third, which makes some sense because it’s about a completely different character and town). Like the two Lucia books, it centers around the social machinations of a strong-willed woman and her friends (or frenemies) in a quirky small town, but the similarities end there. While Lucia is grandiose—egotistical, snobbish, “artistic”—Miss Mapp is petty, a nosy, conniving, parsimonious spinster (I hate to use the word, but she lives up to the stereotype), and her battles for social supremacy center around small matters of bridge parties, dressmaking, red-currant fool, and the drinking habits of elderly bachelors. Like Lucia, she disarms frequent but (usually ineffectual) challenges to her position (mostly from her hilarious rival Godiva “Diva” Plaistow) with relative ease, but she takes a more obvious, sometimes downright mean, pleasure in thwarting her enemies. This sounds unpleasant, but never fear; she is thoroughly as delightful to read about as Lucia, sometimes even more so. Like the townspeople of Tilling, who chafe under her dictatorship but ultimately accept their defeats with resigned good humor, I grew to love Miss Mapp and her antics, because no matter how maddening, they definitely make life more interesting.

MANY WATERS

This was published later than the rest of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet (in 1986), and I always think of it as the last book, but it actually takes place between A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, so I’m reading it in that sequence.

I ain’t gonna lie: it’s kind of weird. Weirder than the previous book’s mitochondrial adventures, you ask? In this one, twins Sandy and Dennys, the “ordinary” members of the Murry family, are transported back to the time of Noah and the flood (presupposing that story literally happened), when people’s lives span hundreds of years and shapeshifting angels (seraphim) and fallen angels (nephilim), not to mention unicorns and manticores, walk the earth. It’s the Bible as sci-fi. I was fascinated by this book as a child, but at the same time it creeped me out, and it turns out I still feel pretty much the same way. On the one hand, it’s fun to see the practical twins dealing with a decidedly bizarre situation, and L’Engle’s rendering of her imagined world is detailed and interesting—particularly the fact that people keep adorable terrier-sized mammoths as pets! But on the other hand, it’s dark, and there are a lot of sexual undertones going on, which I guess is in keeping with the tone of the Bible but pretty unsettling for a kid, like nephilim impregnating human women and an unfortunately over-the-top virgin/whore dichotomy between the two female characters the twins both fall for: Yalith, Noah’s superpure daughter, and the megasexy (and therefore, of course, in league with the bad guys) Tiglah. I can’t get too down on the book’s feminist cred, though, because L’Engle also makes some sharp commentary on the original story through the existence of Yalith, who’s left out in the cold when God commands Noah to bring only his three sons and their wives aboard the ark. I also liked the subtle way in which the characters of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, the supposed fathers of the modern-day human race, are portrayed as kind of a dickwad, a middlingly OK guy, and a standup dude, respectively (and their wives handily correspond to the same traits, with Ham’s wife a sister of the evil Tiglah and Japheth’s wife part angel), which is about the same mix of good and bad people you probably find in society today. Well played, L’Engle. Now where’s my mini mammoth?

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS: 1955–1956

The characters are surprisingly young in this early stage of the strip (Lucy sleeps in a crib; Linus can’t walk), but key patterns are already in place—Linus’s security blanket, Charlie Brown’s kite-flying ineptitude, Lucy and Shroeder’s dance of pursuit and rejection, Pigpen’s dirtiness. Most notably, in December 1956, Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown for the first time. I never approved of that meanness, but otherwise: classic, and awesome.

WALK TWO MOONS

Despite the fact that it’s a Newbery winner, I’d never heard of this Sharon Creech novel (or Sharon Creech, for that matter) until it was selected for our book club. That’s because it was published in 1994, long after I had outgrown YA books and several years before I grew back into them again. I was rather unenthused when I sat down to read it; the Amazon and book-flap descriptions made it sound suspiciously dull and earnest, possibly Tough Teen Issue-y. I was thrilled to be proven dead wrong. This is a beautifully written and moving book with serious themes (occasionally enough to move a grownup to tears), but it’s also quirky and funny and original and endearing. We all loved it so much that our book club discussion consisted mainly of comparing favorite parts. If this book had existed when I was a kid, I think my younger self would have really enjoyed it—especially the part that takes place in Pipestone. Minnesota, represent! (Aw, now I wonder what happened to the little pipestone turtle I once bought there as a childhood souvenir...)

LUCIA IN LONDON

The second (or third, depending on who you ask) book of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, in which Lucia moves to London and starts social climbing on a grand scale. Thoroughly as delightful as the first.

MY ANTONIA

OMG LOVED. I spent a weekend in Nebraska in June, and it gave me a hankering to reread O Pioneers!, which I’d enjoyed years ago. Then I realized that perhaps I should check out that other little novel Willa Cather’s famous for writing, the one that many of my friends count among their favorites, the one that for some reason I’d never read. And what do you know? I adored it: the gorgeous landscape descriptions, the portrayal of stark pioneer life and strong immigrant women…I hope it won’t sound dismissive if I call it Little House for grownups. It’s got the nature and the coziness and the hardship and the nostalgia, but with deeper themes, including sexuality and violence (HOLY CRAP that Russian story about the wolves and the wedding party will haunt me always). The whole time I was reading it, I talked it up to everyone I knew, which resulted in the sad revelation that a few of my dear friends are closeted Cather haters and the awesome discovery that my mom had read it and adored it; her exact review was “That book blew my mind.” After I’d finished it, I wanted to just turn around and reread it, and subsequent books seemed to pale in comparison. I don’t think it’s premature to say that this is going to be my favorite book of the year.

SHAKESPEARE: THE WORLD AS STAGE

A nice, funny, absorbing little biography by Bill Bryson, which I listened to on CD while commuting. As in A Short History of Nearly Everything, he focuses on what we know and how we know it, and in the case of Shakespeare, it turns out that what we know isn’t much at all. Bryson very reasonably debunks a lot of accepted Shakespeare “facts” (including a number that I’d learned from my high-school English textbook) as mere assumptions (often wildly inaccurate ones), contextualizes the actual facts that remain, and resoundingly shoots down the ridiculous “authorship question.” As a bonus, the audiobook is read by the author. My favorite part:

Nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit of it—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book,” a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS: 1959–1960

Of course, after reading the Charles M. Schulz biography, I had to revisit the work itself. I still own the two old collections (Peanuts Treasury and A Snoopy Festival) I used to reread obsessively as a child, but I wanted to see some strips that were new to me, and luckily Fantagraphics is releasing the entire comic sequentially in gorgeous editions, of which my library carries a few. The earlier ones (before the strip became so Snoopy-centric in the late 1960s/early 1970s) have always been my favorites, so I picked the oldest one on the shelf. It turned out to be a landmark two years: the birth of Sally, the first mention of the Great Pumpkin, Linus’s love for Miss Othmar, Lucy’s psychiatric practice, and the famous “happiness is a warm puppy” strip. Smart, alternately bleak and sweet, and even better than I remembered.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A BIOGRAPHY

This had been sitting on my TBR list for years and I’m so glad I finally picked it up. I loved Peanuts (along with Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, and Doonesbury—sigh! for the golden age of comics) as a kid, so getting the behind-the-scenes story was really exciting, and I liked the way David Michaelis analyzes the comic strip through the biographical lens (comics are interspersed with the text to underscore certain points). And although I knew Schulz was Minnesotan, I’d never really realized that his childhood home and his father’s barbershop were at the corner of Selby and Snelling in St. Paul, just 1.5 miles from where I grew up (I even took violin lessons in the same building where Schulz attended elementary school decades before) and half a mile from the apartment I lived in as an adult, so the entire story of his background had a special resonance to me.

I didn’t always love Michaelis’s writing style—it tended toward the melodramatic/psychoanalytic at times—and the depiction of Schulz’s later life started to meander, but for the most part I was absolutely riveted. It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a complicated man who wasn’t always the warm and fuzzy person his fans hoped for, but for some reason I felt a deep sympathy for him...even when his biographer didn’t always seem to. Furthermore, I’m grateful to have been reminded of how good Peanuts used to be and how much it meant to me.

JACOB HAVE I LOVED

(By Katherine Paterson) My pick for book club, because can you believe I had never read it? Despite the fact that it takes place during WWII and on an island? I think as a child I sensed that it would contain precious little of my favorite reading fodder: animals and nature, cozy food descriptions, rugged survival narratives, magic/alternate worlds, historical settings, or charming hijinks of precocious youngsters. The cover, with its windswept young woman staring moodily out to sea, smacked of Bleak Realism and Tough Teen Issues, topics I tended to avoid. And in a way, I was right. This is a classic and well-written book, but I probably wouldn’t have liked it back then and didn’t fall in love with it as an adult either. My favorite part was actually the last chapter or so, when Sara Louise grows up and becomes a midwife in a mining town and finally gets over her issues. That could have been an entire book unto itself!

THE DRAGONFLY POOL

I’m usually wary of “new” (which for me is post-1990) YA books (for pete’s sake, I’m still trying to catch up on all the classic ones), but when I read about this one by Eva Ibbotsen, it sounded too good to pass up—for one thing, it includes both boarding school and World War II, two settings for which I have an unabashed weakness. For another, although it may have been published in 2008, this is good old-fashioned children’s literature in the best sense: sweet, quaint, eccentric, funny, intelligent, level-headed, and timeless (other examples: Hilary McKay and Jeanne Birdsall’s Penderwicks series). I was entertained and thoroughly charmed, and am afraid I might have to explore other Ibbotsen books—OK, possibly all of them. Best line:

The snooty Verity turned out to be the best at dancing, which was a pity but the kind of thing that happens in life.

QUEEN LUCIA

Love, love, loved! This E.F. Benson classic was another Connie Willis recommendation, and unlike Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it was right up my gentle-British-comedy-of-manners-loving alley. Published in 1920, it follows the members of the leisure class in the small, close-knit, quirky town of Riseholme as they amuse themselves with gossip and social one-man-upmanship—in particular, competing for the favors of two fascinating new arrivals to the village, an Indian yoga guru and a famous opera singer. The ringleader of all this is Lucia (her real name is Emmeline Lucas, but she cultivates faux Italianisms), a sort of ruthless, pretentious cross between Gwyneth Paltrow (of GOOP), Martha Stewart, and perhaps Napoleon.

A story about snobbishness and social striving sounds unpleasant at first, but Benson’s genius is that his characters’ foibles are so realistic and meticulously observed that they become lovable, even if exasperating. You simultaneously cheer for Lucia’s triumphs and laugh in satisfaction when she’s cut down to size. I expected to be reminded of P.G. Wodehouse, but the humor is much less broad and none of the characters are so modern or sophisticated, except maybe in their own minds, as Wodehouse’s upper-crust flappers and gadflys; a more apt comparison may be the sly satire of Jane Austen, minus the romance. The best part is that this is the first part of a six-book series, which possesses a devoted (if cultishly small) following and, though only intermittently in print (I’ll be scouring eBay for copies), was adapted into a Masterpiece Theater miniseries (Mapp & Lucia in the 1980s). I’ll be reading them all, and you should too! Here’s my favorite quote just to whet your whistle, spoken by the wonderful Olga Bracely:

“Come into my house instantly, and we’ll drink vermouth. Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we’ll hope for the best.”

THE WIND IN THE DOOR

The second step in my quest to read all of Madeleine L’Engle. For some reason I didn’t own this one as a child, and only read it about half as much as A Wrinkle in Time or my then-favorite, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Something about it seemed boring to me, which is odd because now I think I almost like it even better than Wrinkle; the characters are more developed, the themes are more complex, there’s more action, and I love Mr. Jenkins and Proginoskes—although the climactic sequence when the characters are disembodied within Charles Wallace’s mitochondria gets a little long and abstract and weird, so that I kept envisioning it rendered in trippy 1970s animation. Perhaps that’s what turned me off of the book as a kid; I was easily creeped out by surrealism. Anyway, great book. I’m excited to be tackling the whole series.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

I’m a huge fan/wannabe collector of semi-obscure early-twentieth-century comic novels (c.f. The Pursuit of Love/Love in a Cold Climate, Cold Comfort Farm, The Enchanted April, Christopher and Columbus, Three Men in a Boat, Lucky Jim, I Capture the Castle, Parnasssus on Wheels/The Haunted Bookshop, all of P.G. Wodehouse), and this one came recommended by my top authorcrush Connie Willis, not to mention that no less a luminary than Edith Wharton called it “the great American novel.” But I gotta say, I was disappointed. It seemed like pretty much a one-joke pony (“Look! This narrator is dumb! And a gold digger!”), and I think if it had been written by a man, I would have found it downright mean-spirited. The funniest bits were the sarcastic cracks from Dorothy—a better demonstration of Anita Loos’s wit than the broad satire of Lorelai. It wasn’t a bad book; I had just been expecting to love it and it left me rather cold. I rewatched the movie afterward and actually prefer it—Jane Russell is even funnier than the book version of Dorothy, and Marilyn Monroe makes Lorelei more than a bimbo. To me, the book is sadly skippable, though I might check out a biography of Loos sometime.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY—1910

Sigh. I really have to just quit this series, because I’ve liked each entry progressively less. For one thing, Alan Moore’s repeated overreliance on rape as a plot device is growing tiresome, if not downright nauseating. Other than that, I’m sorry to say I found this one a bit of a snooze.

THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND

I had definitely heard of this novel by Elizabeth George Speare—it’s a YA classic and won the Newbery in 1959—but I’m not sure I ever read it as a child. As much as I liked stories set in Olden Times, I preferred the frontier to the colonies and the nineteenth century to the earlier ones, so I may have avoided it on that count, or perhaps I read it and forgot it. I certainly didn’t find it that memorable this time around, when I read it for my book club; it was well written, had a strong heroine, and felt fairly accurate, but the plot was standard historical fiction with few surprises. I liked it fine, but I didn’t love it and wouldn’t reread it.

THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN’S BAG

Alan Bradley’s second Flavia de Luce mystery. I liked it about as much as I liked the first one, which is to say: fairly well. My favorite part was actually the Sir Walter Raleigh poem that lends the book its title:

To His Son
Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallows tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

Oh, snap!

LITTLE DORRIT

My annual Dickens read, chosen mainly because (a) I hadn’t read it and knew little about it, except that it featured a pyramid scheme, which seemed timely; and (b) I wanted an excuse to watch the Andrew Davies adaptation that had recently aired on Masterpiece Theater (I refuse to start calling it Masterpiece Classic). I’m actually still working on finishing watching the miniseries, but I really liked the book. It was long, and it didn’t thrill me the way Bleak House did, but that was mostly when it strayed too far away from the core compelling story of Little Dorrit and her horrible family. I didn’t like Rigaud as a villain, but I did love the Circumlocution Office, every scene with dialogue from Flora, and the chill-inducing last appearance of Mr. Merdle. I just love Dickens. I’m already trying to decide which one I want to tackle next year; although I do want to revisit some of the ones my dad read to me when I was young (Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Tale of Two Cities), there are technically only three major books I have yet to experience: Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend. None of which I know very much about, and all of which seem like the less glamorous entries in the Dickens canon. I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

NAPOLEON’S PRIVATES

A picked Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped off a bookstore shelf as a gift for his uncle last Christmas, and when he brought it home, I noticed that it was by Tony Perrottet, whose publicist I interned for back in college. The agency wasn’t actively working with him at the time, but I got a free copy of his book of travel essays, Off the Deep End, which I remember enjoying, so it was goodwill/nostalgia plus the promise of naughty historical factoids that prompted me to check this out of the library. And it was a fun read, intermittently fascinating (the titular organ, if it is in fact authentic, currently resides in a suitcase under a bed in New Jersey) and forgettable (I knew some of the stuff already; the assortment of topics was uneven and seemed random at times). It’s worth a browse—the easy-reference charts, such as “Where Are They Now? Celebrity Body Parts” and “How Wretched Were the Impressionists?”, were particularly amusing—and will correct those misguided souls who think history is boring, but anyone who’s already up on their offbeat anecdotes might get impatient reading it all the way through.

A WRINKLE IN TIME

Still awesome, of course. I’ve read Madeleine L’Engle’s four main Murry books over and over again throughout my life, but I never managed to get all the way through the whole sequence of related Austin and O’Keefe books, so that is my new unofficial project. Year(s) of L’Engle, ahoy!

ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS/ZIA

Ah, the book that taught me the word “abalone”! I’ve read Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins a dozen times over the years and still love it as much as ever, but in a totally different way than when I was a kid. Back then, I was all about the cozy Little Houseish survival porn, yearning for my very own island, a pet wolf-dog, a skirt made of cormorant feathers, and a fence made of whale ribs. And…OK, I still covet those things, but this time, reading it for my book club, I was struck by how very poignant this story is. Karana’s mother is dead, her father and most of the other men in her tribe are murdered by Aleuts, and she stays behind on the island for her little brother (in real life, probably her son) who promptly gets killed by wild dogs, leaving her all alone for 18 years before being rescued and taken to the mainland, where she finds that her people have scattered, no one speaks her language, and she dies within weeks. And I was jealous of her tame sea otter?

I think I glossed over a lot of the sadness back then because (A) I took the matter-of-factness of Karana’s voice at face value, though that same stoicism only amps up the emotion for me as an adult; I get goosebumps every time I read the chilling simplicity with which she mourns her faithful dog: “‘Rontu!’ I cried. ‘Oh, Rontu!’ I buried him on the headland.” SOB! (B) The descriptions of the landscape and animals and Karana’s love for the island are so very lovely that I still want to go to there; I was a nature-loving kid, but it’s extra-cool now that I live in the very area where the book takes place. This was the first time I’d reread the book since moving here—I don’t think I even realized it was set in California when I was younger—and this time around, having visited one of the Channel Islands, an elephant seal (“sea elephant” in the book) rookery, and the Santa Barbara Mission (where a plaque acknowledges the unknown gravesite of the real-life “Karana”), I could envision everything so vividly.

For extra credit, I figured I’d better check out Zia, the sequel to Blue Dolphins, which covers Karana’s brief post-rescue life through the eyes of her niece, Zia. O’Dell does a good job of conveying the complex, often chaotic interactions between the native peoples, padres, soldiers, and ranchers of Southern California during this era, and the Karana-related bits—still poignant as hell—do a nice job of wrapping up the loose ends of her story (dog lovers will be glad to know that Zia and Rontu-Aru befriend each other at the end), but overall it falls flat in comparison, maybe because Zia is powerless in her world, whereas Karana’s is such an epic tale of self-sufficiency and (a certain kind of) freedom.

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel is nowhere near as good as her debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I lurved), mostly because the characters aren’t particularly likeable, but the combo of twins, ghosts, a kitten, and a London cemetery is still pretty compelling. Even though the story didn’t add up to much, the Victorianish, A.S. Byatt-y vibe kept me interested. I wouldn’t bother reading it again, but I’m glad I did it once.

THE UNTHINKABLE

I’m a worrier, particularly now that I have dependents (well, cats) and live far from most of my friends and family—in earthquake country, to boot. I try to heed post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-temblor, post-H1N1 advice to “be prepared” for a major disaster, but it’s hard to know exactly what situations to prepare for—forced to evacuate? Stuck at home with no electricity or water? Stranded at work, in my car, on the train, or elsewhere? I can’t carry a suitcase with me everywhere, and anyway, the long lists of items to stock in my emergency kit never answer my real questions: What does a disaster feel like, and how would I deal with it? Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, in which she interviews survivors of terrorist attacks, plane crashes, fires, and other disasters to illustrate human behavior in such situations, was very helpful. It doesn’t provide gimmicky tips about duct-taping your windows; it focuses on our psychological and physiological responses in times of crisis and how those can be helpful or hurtful (many of the modern disasters we face, like large-scale bombings, are so different from the dangers we evolved to cope with that our instincts may not always be correct). The stories are harrowing, but they’re also riveting (I had this as an audiobook, and it was a good one to keep me interested while commuting) and ultimately empowering. No one can stop all disasters from occurring or guarantee you’ll never experience them, but you can try to understand and control how you might react. Keeping an extra supply of bottled water is important, but so is training your brain to work quickly and clearly under stress. Somehow, I find this comforting.

MARCH READING NUBBINS

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, by Malcolm Gladwell: Fascinating essays.

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger: Meh. The Catcher in the Rye awakened grand plans in me to read all the Glass family stories, but this just didn’t grab me. It was well written, but not my bag.

Inexcusable, by Chris Lynch: For my book club, a contemporary YA novel written from the point of view of a seemingly nice boy who commits acquaintance rape. It’s not perfectly executed or particularly lovable, but it’s an interesting exercise in unreliable narration and a thought-provoking read for teens.

EMILY OF DEEP VALLEY

Loved. Of course Betsy is nearest to my heart, but strictly in terms of quality, this might be an even better book than any of the Betsy ones—and since it’s the most standalone and serious of all the Deep Valley books, it makes a good entry point for an adult reader. It also dispels any fear that Maud Hart Lovelace might be a one-trick pony, for Emily Webster is a completely different heroine than Betsy: an only child, an orphan, with no close friends and an uncertain future. Though a bright student who yearns to attend college like her peers, she can’t leave her grandfather, so she must “muster her wits” to build a life for herself in Deep Valley. Emily’s determined journey from timidity and alienation to self-actualization is an inspiring coming-of-age story, and there are fun cameos from Betsy and her friends along the way (Emily graduates from high school two years behind Betsy, so we get a glimpse of the Crowd in the “lost” years between Betsy and Joe and Betsy and the Great World).

WINONA’S PONY CART

In addition to the Betsy-Tacy series, Maud Hart Lovelace published three spinoff “Deep Valley” books, none of which I’d read before. (They’re currently out of print, but Harper Collins appears to be republishing them—hopefully, with the same sleek and sophisticated treatment it just gave to the later Betsy-Tacy books—in October, which I eagerly await because my library doesn’t have the one I most want to read, Carney’s House Party.) This one, set sometime between Betsy-Tacy and Tib and Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, stars an 8-year-old Winona Root, with Betsy, Tacy, and Tib as supporting cast. The plot is simple (Winona has a birthday and wants a pony) but charming; sassy Winona makes a fun protagonist, and it’s interesting to see things from her point of view (as opposed to her semi-nemesis role in Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown).

BLACKOUT

Connie Willis’s latest is right up my alley: time travel, England in WWII, and a loose continuation of my faves “Fire Watch,” Doomsday Book, and To Say Nothing of the Dog. It’s a cliff-hanging two-parter (the second half, All Clear, comes out in October), so I can’t really give a final judgment yet, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

J.D. Salinger’s death inspired us to pick this for our YA book club. I’d read it once before, but in college (just on my own, not for a class), too late, I felt at the time, for it to have a genuine impact on me. Knowing the book had such an iconic status made it hard for it to live up to its reputation. I remember thinking it was well-written, but I just didn’t see how so many people could love it so much—and especially, how it could inspire someone to assassinate Lennon or Reagan. I was too caught up in the idea that I was supposed to identify with Holden Caulfield, and I didn’t. How could I, really? I was a 1990s suburban Midwestern girl with no real experience of getting expelled from boarding school, drinking, smoking, sex, true alienation, or wandering New York City alone. I had a hard time even sympathizing with Holden’s refusal to get good grades.

Rereading the book in my thirties, however, I was freed from a lot of the assumptions about how it was supposed to make me feel, and I really liked it. Two decades removed from Holden, I saw him as a typical smart, sensitive, posturing teenage boy, sometimes endearing, sometimes annoying as hell, trying to come to terms with one of the central revelations of growing up: that a lot of the adult world is bullshit. A lot of people just buy into the bullshit, and others (like me) recognize it and try to live with it as best they can without letting it touch them, but some people just can’t handle it, and it hurts them. Realizing that I could understand Holden without having to always like him was the key to the book for me. Even though I don’t really like picaresque plot structures like this one, I enjoyed it as a masterful character study (and not just of Holden—Phoebe is one of the most awesome little girls in classic literature). I’ll still roll my eyes at anyone who calls Holden their hero (a la Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl), but I definitely won’t be all “Ho hum, The Catcher in the Rye, so cliché” anymore, which I’d fallen into the habit of before. I might not adore it or want to carry a copy around in my back pocket, but it’s a genuinely good book.

BETSY’S WEDDING

The last book in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, and the one least palatable to me as a child. It was always a comedown when my favorite characters got married (see: The First Four Years, Anne of Ingleside and its sequels, and Little Men/Jo’s Boys); they seemed to become markedly less interesting. Now that I’m older, however, adult pursuits don’t seem quite so boring, and even if the beloved characters lose a bit of their joie de vivre, I’m still fascinated by how their grown-up adventures reflect the values and customs of their historical eras.

Some parts of Betsy’s Wedding raised my modern feminist hackles; in the previous books, Betsy’s always been ambitious, but in this one the focus is largely on Joe’s career, and when offered a writing job she refuses it: “I already have a job...And it’s important, and very hard. It’s learning how to keep house” (although until she masters it, Joe does all the cooking, which is sort of rad, and when the U.S. finally joins WWI at the end of the book and Joe enlists, Betsy does finally take that job). Even worse, in the way of smug marrieds throughout history, Betsy and Tacy seem to have become so suddenly conservative that they’re aghast at independent-minded Tib’s swingin’ singlehood (“Tib will soon be earning so much money that she won’t meet many men who earn as much money as she does…And then she’ll start driving around in her car, and getting more and more independent, and she won’t marry at all, maybe! And then what will she do when she’s old?”) and hatch elaborate plans to get her safely married off as soon as possible (spoiler: she gets married).

Luckily, there’s a lot of good stuff here as well: Betsy and Joe’s relationship has realistic struggles but is sweet and equable, the descriptions of their cozy home are deeply satisfying, I loved the detailed Twin Cities references (picnics at Lake Harriet, sailing on Lake Calhoun, visits to Fort Snelling and Minnehaha Falls), the Ray family continues to be awesome (especially, surprisingly, Margaret), we find out what happened to old characters like Cab and Carney, and plenty of fun is had (I particularly enjoyed the Violent Study Club, a rather bohemian gathering of Joe’s newspaper colleagues—both male and female—“to talk writing, read aloud, argue, and drink coffee”). And the period details continue to amaze: When Betsy and Joe want to buy a house, they walk around the neighborhood until they find one for sale on the very street they want to live on, walk around the yard and decide it's perfect, walk down to the real estate agent’s office, and have the following conversation:

“Yes, young folks, that’s a good little house.”
“What does it sell for?” Joe asked.
“Four thousand, five hundred.”
“We could stand good monthly payments,” Joe said. “And we’re responsible people. I’m on the Courier. But we can’t pay much down.”
“Just three hundred dollars,” Betsy put in.
“I don’t believe…that the size of the down payment matters much in this case. The owners are old people, well fixed; going to California. I think it could be arranged.”
Joe looked at Betsy…“Did you bring the check book, honey?”
“Yes, dear.” She drew it out of her bag.
“Whoa!” said Mr. Munson. “I can’t show you that house today. I can’t get a key until tomorrow.”
“We looked in the windows,” Betsy explained politely.
“They might as well have our three hundred dollars, sir,” said Joe, taking out his pen.
“I won’t cash that check,” said Mr. Munson, “until you can look through the house. Of course, it’s all right. It really is. A good hot water furnace. Hardwood floors.”

And…that’s it. That’s apparently all you had to do to buy a nice three-bedroom house in 1915. Sigh.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID

Like most really good memoirs, Bill Bryson’s engaging and funny portrait of his childhood in 1950s Iowa is not a straightforward “this happened to me and then this happened” narrative, but rather an homage to a particular place and time, suffused with personal anecdotes. Its blend of charming nostalgia and broad comic exaggeration reminded me vaguely of Calvin Trillin and kept me happy during a series of grinding commutes. I particularly liked the audiobook because it was read by the author—not always a great idea, but it works well for memoirs, and Bryson is an entertaining reader with an intriguing mid-Atlantic accent (he’s lived in England for so long that he sounds perfectly British sometimes, but then at other times you can hear the Des Moines boy underneath).

CLEAVING

In general, I’m Team Julie Powell. I loved The Julie/Julia Project (the first food blog I ever read!) and its subsequent book and film adaptations (Meryl Streep was TOTALLY ROBBED of her deserved Oscar, by the way). When I started seeing scathing reviews of her second book, I chalked it up to (a) the Powell-hating backlash that seemed to sweep the Internet in the wake of her fame; and (b) the fact that those who knew Powell only from her portrayal by miscast sweetheart Amy Adams were having trouble reconciling their cute Hollywood image of her with the gritty reality of the book’s subject matter—Powell’s extramarital affair and her apprenticeship in butchery (when informed of Powell’s real-life infidelity in an interview, Adams famously rejoined, “Well, my Julie would never do that”). I was fully prepared not to like Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession as much as its predecessor, but I still wanted to read it—and, frankly, all the accusations of juicy oversharing lobbed its way only made me more curious, so I was pleased when my friend M gave me a copy for Christmas.

Unfortunately, while the book wasn’t quite the train wreck many reviewers made it out to be, I thoroughly disliked it. Some reviewers wrote as though the situation (Powell has passionate on-again-off-again affair with emotionally unavailable but sexually exciting man, yet wants to remain married; her husband knows, sees other women, but ultimately stays) were inherently revolting, but I thought it might have made an interesting and worthwhile memoir—if tackled, say, twenty years after the fact. As written, however, it completely lacks perspective, resulting in a tone-deaf narrative voice that vacillates between naked pleas for the reader’s sympathy (which I had a hard time mustering, not least because the lover Powell is so obsessed with seems like a pretentious asshole) and brutal self-flagellation. I kept feeling that Powell wants to simultaneously defend and punish herself—she offers the reader a stark portrait of her misery as though it’s supposed to stand in for the regret and repentance she claims to feel, but at the same time she’s obviously wallowing in her own sense of degradation (not coincidentally, she’s a self-described masochist). She confuses frankness and bravado with honesty. It’s not that her confessions are so raw or embarrassing, although at times they are; it’s that they seem painfully disingenuous, making the whole book feel both tedious and pointless. I could go on, but NPR’s Linda Holmes nails my feelings in her much more articulate review. Let me just say that we both agree on our least favorite moment of the book.

I had figured that at least I’d enjoy the food themes, but the butchery topic felt wedged in, mainly serving as an extended (and ultimately tiresome) metaphor for Powell’s own emotional state (bloody, earthy, sensuous, violent, etc.). And unfortunately, although Powell does her best to sexy them up with purple prose, it turns out that play-by-play descriptions of creating various cuts of meat are…rather tedious, in an “insert tab A into slot B” way.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend Cleaving, but it hasn’t necessarily put me off Powell for good. I was sad to see how quickly critics dogpiled on it, gleefully labeling it a disgusting, humiliating fiasco (Booklist went with “graphic, even gross,” which I think is unfairly over the top)—and by the way, I didn’t find the book as shockingly explicit as some salacious accounts suggested; awkward, yes, but hardly X-rated. For me, the off-puttingness was emotional, not physical, and my overwhelming reaction was frustration, not hatred or anger. I do hope that Powell is able to come back from this and find a topic she can write about more successfully. And I still think that Cleaving, with its double, opposed meanings, is a brilliant book title.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET

Editor A gave me this beautiful Reif Larsen novel for Christmas. Never have I read a book that reminded me more of a Wes Anderson film—or, more accurately, I liked it for some of the same reasons I like Wes Anderson movies: it’s delightfully, obsessively detailed; it takes place in a surreal, hyperintelligent, slightly old-fashioned/timeless reality; the main character is a sheltered, socially awkward, emotionally immature, unbelievably precocious child genius; and the plot requires some suspension of disbelief.

Raised on a Montana ranch by a cowboy father and a scientist mother, with a dramatic teenage sister and a beloved younger brother who recently died in a tragic accident, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a 12-year-old cartographer so artistically gifted that he wins a prestigious fellowship from the Smithsonian (the givers of the award have no idea he’s a child, of course) and decides to run away from home and ride the rails across the country to Washington, D.C. to accept it. Adventure and self-discovery, of course, ensue. T.S. is a charming narrator, and nearly every page of the book is illustrated with all his maps, charts, and illustrations. While the story wandered a bit, weakened toward the end, and ended too abruptly for me, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m always a sucker for a coming-of-age story, and I especially loved that the book is such a celebration of bookishness—with its extra-large hardcover size and complex marginalia, this is not something you could listen to as an audiobook or, I imagine, enjoy on an e-reader. Definitely a keeper. Thanks, Editor A!

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING

I read Notes From a Small Island years ago and was underwhelmed, but since people kept telling me how much they love Bill Bryson, he fit my audiobook criteria: Am curious enough to check it out, but don’t want to actually want to spend precious reading time on it. My library only offered a few Bryson books on CD, so I chose this one semi-blindly. And I’m so glad I did, because I loved it. As usual with science, my comprehension of the nitty-gritty mechanics faded in and out, but I understood enough to be both riveted and awed. Bryson not only provides a useful survey of every major scientific discipline (physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, meteorology, geology, and more) but also gossipy, hilarious glimpses of the personalities behind them. I used to edit biographies of scientists at my last job, so I’d already developed a taste for the history of science, particularly trivia about the oddities of its geniuses (Babbage and his hatred of street musicians! Newton and his wacky eye-poking experiment!), and Bryson provided a whole feast. Listening to this book on my commute, I came home every day bursting with new “Did you know…?” tales with which to regale A and anyone else who would listen. (Did you know that nearly all of Marie Curie’s belongings, from her research notes to her cookbooks, are still so radioactive that they have to be stored in lead boxes and handled wearing protective gear? Did you know that the unfortunate man who invented leaded gasoline also invented CFCs, and was killed by yet another of his inventions?) Sure, it may have given me some serious new apocalyptic scenarios to worry about (I’m already scared of earthquakes and global warming, but I had never thought about the likelihood of a meteor slamming into the Earth or the eruption of the gigantic volcano under Yellowstone National Park, both of which extinction-level events Bryson details with a little too much gusto), but overall this was an incredibly enlightening and entertaining book that I recommend to absolutely everyone.

A note on the audiobook factor: Even though it brightened up my commutes immeasurably, I almost would rather have read this book than listened to it. There were a lot of complex ideas to absorb, and it’s hard to really focus on statistics when you’re navigating traffic tangles. Also, Bryson’s train of thought seemed to keep wandering, which initially frustrated me until I peeked at a copy of the book at the library and realized that a lot of what sounded like digressions were actually footnotes, which the narrator simply read in line with the text—proving that sometimes, having the actual page in front of you can be extremely helpful. On the plus side, mad props to the narrator for navigating all the insanely difficult pronunciations (including phrases in a host of languages, the names of hundreds of different scientists, and highly technical scientific terminology) with ease in a pleasant British accent. I do think I’d like to buy a copy of the book so I can read it “for real” sometime.

CODEX

After liking The Magicians, I checked out Lev Grossman’s first novel, excited that it promised to be a literary mystery about searching for a lost book, complete with a bit of romance between scholars, a la Possession. I love suspenseful research scenes and hot library action! (I realize that sounds sarcastic, but it’s not. Judge me if you must.)

Unfortunately, Codex kind of…sucked? The book stuff kept me reading, but there was no payoff. The characters were flat and unlikable, the situations unconvincing, the pacing slow, the plot aimless. My particular beef was that the narrator was supposed to be this hotshot workaholic investment guy (and it suddenly occurs to me that having a character who does nothing but work is a pretty convenient way to explain the fact that he has no personality or believable life whatsoever) who abruptly blows off his job to become obsessed with this book mystery (as well as with a tedious online role-playing game that turns out to be barely tied to the plot). Now, for my money, if you’re going to have a character completely change his personality (a personality we have to take the author’s word for, because we have no evidence it really exists) and spend the entire book saying things along the lines of “he had never acted like this before” or “he had no idea why he was doing this, but he just couldn’t stop himself,” the only plausible explanation is probably going to be mystical. I guess because Grossman handled the supernatural so well in The Magicians, I assumed there might be an otherworldly element to the power of the quest for the codex to upend the narrator’s life. When this turned out not to be the case, the plot felt crushingly mundane to me. Once the questions of whether the codex would be found and what it would say were resolved, I found I didn’t care about the answers. As you can probably tell, the book really frustrated me; it had potential, but the plotting and character development felt so lazy. I actually wish I had skipped this one.

THE LEXICOGRAPHER’S DILEMMA

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English, From Shakespeare to South Park, by Jack Lynch: Carpool J gave this to me for Christmas, and he hadn’t read it; he just picked it off a shelf because it looked like something I would like. I was suspicious, but luckily, he was right. This look at the ongoing battle between prescriptivists (those who want to enforce “correct” language use) and descriptivists (those who simply want to analyze how language is actually used) recapped some stuff I dimly recalled from my college linguistics course, but threw in some new stuff and was entertainingly written enough to keep me engrossed. My main takeaways were: (1) The publisher must have come up with the subtitle, because Shakespeare is only mentioned in passing and South Park is used as a one-paragraph example. Sadly, Dryden, Swift, Johnson, and Webster, who play starring roles in the book, are less marketable. (2) People have been complaining about the decline of the language since we’ve had a language to complain about, and a lot of the bugaboos that used to drive them up the wall are now ordinary practices you wouldn’t bat an eyelash at. As someone whose job it is to be a critical reader and who tends to facepalm at least once per day over some horrific typo or grammatical error I’ve spotted, it is helpful to be reminded of this. The idea of “proper” English is a fairly recent invention, and the prescriptivists are fighting a losing battle, so I should probably relax a little. This is why I find reading history so comforting: you realize that people have always been certain that civilization is on the verge of collapse, and yet civilization keeps right on truckin’. (3) As much as I hate to admit it, the descriptivists generally have the right idea. Like me, Lynch has prescriptivist sympathies, but comes down logically on the descriptivist side. After all, language changes, whether we like it or not. However, it’s worth remembering that even if there isn’t one correct way to speak English, there are appropriate styles for specific contexts and occasions—most notably, formal written English—and knowing the rules of those styles is worthwhile. Because people are always going to judge you by how you use language. And let’s face it: I am one of those people.

REMAKE

Having read all the major Connie Willis novels, I’m slowly picking away at the various short stories and novellas that remain. My library didn’t have this one, but I wanted to get my hands on it because it’s about movies, so it was part of my Christmas Amazon gift-card haul. If I’d read a library copy first, I might not have felt the need to buy it, but even though it wasn’t her best work, it was still a fun and fast read. Set in a future where computers have replaced live movie production (old films are endlessly re-edited with different stars, dead actors are mashed together into remakes, and controlled substances such as alcohol are deleted entirely), Remake was a timely read, considering I’d just seen Avatar a few weeks before. Sometimes the futuristicness felt a little stale and belabored (the slang got dense and showoffy), the characters were a bit flat, and even though it was short I grew impatient with the plot (lots of scenes of the narrator doing drugs/getting drunk and editing films). But I loved the basic concept and all the detailed, well-researched references to classic films. It made me want to binge on old movies. And I think now that I know not to expect a huge payoff, it might make an enjoyable reread in a couple of years.

SUMMER OF MY GERMAN SOLDIER/MORNING IS A LONG TIME COMING

I started a book club at work that will read only young-adult novels. I wanted to do this because (a) They’re short, and every other book club I’ve been in has ultimately fizzled out when people stop finishing the books; (b) They’re fun and interesting; and (c) There are a lot of YA novels, particularly from the 1970s and 80s, that I want to revisit or that I missed the first time around, and I figured the nostalgia journey would be more fun when shared by others. I picked Summer of My German Soldier, the book by Bette Greene about a Jewish girl who shelters a runaway German POW in 1940s Arkansas, because I knew there would be a lot of discussion fodder and because I hadn’t reread it since my original middle-school experience. But whoa, what a difference a few decades make! What I remembered about the book was its impressive, delicious sadness, sitting as it did at the junction of two major tropes that are like catnip to YA girls: WWII (for some reason every teen girl I knew went through a phase of being obsessed with the Holocaust) and Romeo-and-Julietesque star-crossed young lovers. I still think the period and setting are interesting—you don’t see a lot of books about Jews in the South in the 1940s, period—but the sweet romance I remember fetishizing as a kid? Is really a friendship between a man in his early twenties and a 12-year-old girl. Sure, Patty has a crush on Anton (a crush my young self apparently shared, to have built up their relationship in my memory), but his attitude toward her, save for one kiss at the end, is pretty much brotherly/mentorlike, and they don’t even share that many scenes together. Instead, this is mainly a book about Patty’s coming of age in less than ideal conditions (isolated in a bigoted small town with a physically abusive father and emotionally abusive mother). It was good, but startlingly different from what I remembered—I must have pretty much missed the point the first time around.

While looking for the book in the library catalog, I learned there was a sequel, Morning Is a Long Time Coming, about Patty traveling to Europe to look for Anton’s family after graduating from high school, so I checked that out too. It was interesting to see what happened to Patty and see her gain some independence and confidence, but all her hardships don’t necessarily make her a likable character, and ultimately her angst annoyed me. Our group had a great discussion about these books, I enjoyed revisiting SoMGS, and both of them were well written, but I didn’t find them lovable.

ZEITOUN

A beautiful, fantastic, riveting, occasionally harrowing nonfiction work about one Syrian-American man’s experience in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I know some people like to hate on Dave Eggers, but those people should give him another try, because I swear he just keeps getting better and better.

BETSY AND THE GREAT WORLD

To a reader of the first eight books in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, the start of this one is disorienting. Suddenly four years have passed since we last left our heroine, her sister Julia is married, Tacy is married and pregnant, the Ray family has moved from Deep Valley to Minneapolis, Betsy and Joe are estranged (Joe has won a scholarship to Harvard and Betsy is dating another man), and Betsy’s college experience has been less than successful—marred by a bout of appendicitis and a long convalescence in California, her customary lack of interest in math and science, and a hectic, frivolous social life. Luckily, she has still been writing, publishing some successful stories, and when she decides she wants to drop out of school, her father generously agrees to send her on an educational trip abroad instead. Even for my adult self, this rapid change in circumstances is enough to prompt a “Wha-?” or two (I kept wishing Lovelace hadn’t skipped the college years entirely, because how fun would it be to read about those madcap 1900s sorority adventures at the U?), so you can imagine what a shock it was to my younger mind; I think I only broached this book a few times despite being such a great fan of the preceding volumes.

So Betsy’s on board a ship headed for Europe in January 1914. Anyone who knows anything about twentieth-century history will greet that revelation with an “Uh-oh,” but as a kid I was mostly oblivious to the shadow that rapidly approaching war casts on the book. And there is much to distract from it: the amazing glamour of the transatlantic crossing (staterooms, steamer chairs, mid-morning bouillon, a handsome purser, the Captain’s Ball!); exotic stops in the Azores, the Madeira islands, Gibraltar, and Algiers; living in Munich; being courted by an Italian in Venice; sojourns in Paris and London. Betsy’s personal journey is equally impressive; she’s traveling basically independently (although she has enough contacts and chaperones, mainly family friends, to be proper and makes additional friends along the way), and overcomes homesickness, loneliness, language barriers, and cultural differences, as well as growing as a writer. But rereading it now, I realized that this book is first and foremost a bittersweet valediction for a way of traveling that no longer exists (the world seemed so much bigger then!) and a bygone golden age of Europe about to be shattered by two world wars. (You can’t help wondering what happened to all the friends Betsy made in Germany and the young men at her London boarding house who so eagerly enlist when war breaks out. The fact that Betsy is still in England when war is declared is particularly fascinating, as Lovelace describes the Americans scrambling to get back home with a foreboding urgency Betsy doesn’t fully comprehend.) Even to Lovelace’s 1952 readers, I’m guessing that Betsy’s adventures seemed adorably quaint, tinged with the glow of nostalgia. This book is unabashedly romantic, and not just because it ends with one of the sweetest reconciliations in literature, in the form of the following message: “BETSY. THE GREAT WAR IS ON BUT I HOPE OURS IS OVER. PLEASE COME HOME. JOE.” It should be no surprise that the next book is called Betsy’s Wedding.

2009 IN BOOKS

I know this is an entire month late, but I analyzed my 2009 reading (all of which I managed to document on this blog, a new trick for me) and was pleased to learn that I managed one book more than in 2008 (that’s 68 books total, 45 fiction and 23 nonfiction, with 10 rereads and the rest new-to-me-titles). Of course, it’s the quality that really counts, not the quantity, and although there were a few books I now wish I hadn’t bothered with (The Food of a Younger Land, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, for instance), I read a lot of stuff I really liked last year. Here’s a list of my 10 faves (at least, in retrospect—it’s so hard to recall my exact comparative levels of enjoyment at the time), in chronological order:

Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, by Connie Willis
Shelf Discovery, by Lizzie Skurnick
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
The Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt
Blame, by Michelle Huneven
Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby
The Jeeves books, by P.G. Wodehouse—I can now say that I’ve read the entire series; I enjoyed them wholeheartedly and was quite surprised to discover that I’d barely read half of them before (apparently, I devoted more of my youth to reading the short stories over and over again than tracking down all the novels).

The Children of Men, by P.D. James, and Fray, by Joss Whedon, et al nearly made the list, so they get honorable mentions. And of course, a special “best reread” prize must go to the Betsy- Tacy series, which I’ve thoroughly loved revisiting so far (just one more to go!).

THE CAT-NAPPERS

Background: Published in 1974 in the U.K. as Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, then in 1975 in the U.S., this is the final Jeeves and Bertie novel (Wodehouse died in 1975).

This is the one where: Bertie deals with “what I suppose my biographers will refer to as The Maiden Eggesford Horror—or possibly The Curious Case of the Cat Which Kept Popping Up When Least Expected.”

The action takes place at: Maiden Eggesford, “one of those villages where there isn't much to do except walk down the main street and look at the Jubilee watering trough and then walk up the main street and look at the Jubilee watering trough from the other side”

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Vanessa Cook (“The thought occurred to me that in another thirty years or so she would look just like my Aunt Agatha, before whose glare, as is well known, strong men curl up like rabbits.”)

But she’s really in love with: Orlo Porter, “a beefy bloke…who had been on the same staircase with me at Oxford. Except for borrowing an occasional cup of sugar from one another and hulloing when we met on the stairs, we had never really been close, he being a prominent figure at the Union, where I was told he made fiery far-to-the-left speeches, while I was more the sort that is content just to exist beautifully.”

The task at hand: Relax and recover (Bertie starts the book with mysterious spots on his chest and is advised by his doctor to visit the country), keep Plank (whose memory is afflicted by malaria) from remembering that he thinks Bertie is a kleptomaniac named Alpine Joe, avoid the violent jealousy of Orlo Porter, avoid the wrath of Pop Cook, keep Aunt Dahlia from losing all her money on Jimmy Briscoe’s horse Simla (while also trying to return the cat she has stolen from Pop Cook in an effort to sabotage his competing horse, Potato Chip)

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia, “not to be confused with my Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and is strongly suspected of turning into a werewolf at the time of the full moon. Aunt Dahlia is as good a sort as ever said ‘Tally Ho’ to a fox, which she frequently did in her younger days when out with the Quorn and Pytchley. If she ever turned into a werewolf, it would be one of those jolly breeze werewolves whom it is a pleasure to know.”

• E. Jimpson Murgatroyd, a doctor with a“resemblance to a frog which had been looking on the dark side since it was a slip of a tadpole”

• Major Plank, “the explorer and rugby aficionado, whom I had last seen at his house in Gloucestershire when he was accusing me of trying to get five quid out of him under false pretenses”

• Pop Cook, “a red-faced little half-portion brandishing a hunting crop I didn’t much like the look of”

• Herbert “Billy” Graham, the poacher Aunt Dahlia hires to steal the cat--and whom Bertie must pay to return it again (“I had always supposed that poachers were tough-looking eggs who wore whatever they could borrow from scarecrows and shaved only once a week. He, to the contrary, was neatly clad in formfitting tweeds and was shaven to the bone. His eyes were frank and blue, his hair a becoming gray. I have seen more raffish cabinet ministers.”)

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Falling into a swimming pool, paying exorbitant fees to Graham to return the cat (twice, because the first time it follows him back home), being suspected several times of stealing the cat, and being tied up and gagged by Cook and Plank

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: N/A

First paragraph: “My attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in my bath, singing, if I remember rightly, the ‘Toreador Song’ from the opera Carmen. They were pink in color, rather like the first faint flush of dawn, and I viewed them with concern. I am not a fussy man, but I do object to being freckled like a pard, as I once heard Jeeves describe it, a pard, I take it, being something on the order of one of those dogs beginning with d.”

Bertie fashion moment: N/A

Slang I’d like to start using: It's not exactly slang, but next time I arrive at work after battling insane traffic, I'd like to steal Bertie's casual line “There were rather more astigmatic loonies sharing the road with me than I could have wished.”

Bertie gets no respect: “Anyone looking at you would write you off as a brainless nincompoop with about as much intelligence as a dead rabbit.”—Orlo Porter

Best Jeeves moment: “He expressed no surprise at seeing me tied to a sofa with curtain cords, just as he would have e. no s. if he had seen me being eaten by a crocodile…though in the latter case he might have heaved a regretful sigh.”

Best bit of description: Bertie, when Jeeves makes a brilliant observation: “I felt like Doctor Watson hearing Sherlock Holmes talking about the one hundred and forty-seven varieties of tobacco ash and the time it takes parsley to settle in the butter dish.”

Best bit of dialogue: “The girls you’ve been engaged to and have escaped from would reach, if placed end to end, from Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner. I won’t believe you’re married till I see the bishop and assistant clergy mopping their foreheads and saying, ‘Well, that’s that. We’ve really got the young blighter off at last.’”—Aunt Dahlia, to Bertie

My review: Three stars. It was enjoyable and pretty darn impressive considering it was written by a 93-year-old, but it's clearly a later effort (some of the jokes are retreads from earlier books), and stands a bit apart from the rest of the series. Bringing Plank back is a nice touch, but the rest of the characters are sketchily drawn, and the plot doesn't reach the full hilariously complex potential of the earlier ones (only one engaged couple?). Still, it has Aunt Dahlia, and also a cat. Although Wodehouse was a dog person, he describes cats rather adorably, and Bertie seems fond of them: “Ask any cat with whom I have had dealings what sort of a chap I am catwise, and it will tell you that I am a thoroughly good egg in whom complete confidence can safely be placed. Cats who know me well, like Aunt Dahlia's Augustus, will probably allude to my skill at scratching them behind the ear.”

The last few paragraphs are my favorite part and make a worthy ending for the whole series (as well as making me wonder why the American publisher changed the title to something so bland as The Cat-nappers), so I'm going to quote them here:

“Jeeves…Do you ever brood on life?”
“Occasionally, sir, when at leisure.”
“What do you make of it? Pretty odd in spots, don’t you think?”
“It might be so described, sir.”
“This business of such-and-such seeming to be so-and-so, when it really isn’t so-and-so at all. You follow me?”
“Not entirely, sir.”
“Well, take a simple instance. At first sight Maiden Eggesford had all the indications of being a haven of peace. You agree with me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As calm and quiet as you could wish, with honeysuckle-covered cottages and apple-cheeked villagers wherever you looked. Then it tore off its whiskers and revealed itself as an inferno. To obtain calm and quiet we had to come to New York, and there we got it in full measure. Life saunters along on an even keel. Nothing happens. Have we been mugged?”
“No, sir.”
“Or shot by youths?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir is right. We are tranquil. And I’ll tell you why. There are no aunts here. And in particular we are three thousand miles away from Mrs. Dahlia Travers of Brinkley Manor, Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire. Don’t get me wrong, Jeeves, I love the old flesh and blood. In fact I revere her. Nobody can say she isn’t good company. But her moral code is lax. She cannot distinguish between what is according to Hoyle and what is not according to Hoyle. If she wants to do anything, she doesn’t ask herself, ‘Would Emily Post approve of this?’; she goes ahead an does it, as she did in this matter of the cat. Do you know what is the trouble with aunts as a class?”
“No, sir.”
“They are not gentlemen,” I said gravely.

Had I read it before? Definitely not.

DECEMBER READING NUBBINS

The Best American Crime Reporting 2009, ed. Jeffrey Tobin: As I’ve said before, I think anthologies make perfect airline reading, and this one, with its built-in mystery and suspense, fit the bill especially well for my Thanksgiving travels (though I didn’t complete it until I returned, obviously). I found the essay on the Zankou Chicken murders especially fascinating, since it takes place in our neck of the woods and we love their food.

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith (audio): A perfectly pleasant way to while away a few commutes, though I confess I’ve already forgotten the plot.

Best Food Writing 2009, ed. Holly Hughes: For my Christmas in-flight entertainment. I read this anthology every year, and always enjoy it, particularly when it contains something new by Calvin Trillin. In general, though, I’m going to resolve to read fewer “best ___ writing” anthologies in 2010. They’re temporarily diverting, but I never feel satisfied after I’ve read them, and considering how many books I have on my reading list, I think my time could be better spent.

BETSY-TACY AND TIB/BETSY AND TACY GO OVER THE BIG HILL/BETSY AND TACY GO DOWNTOWN

My parents gave me the second through fourth books of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series for Christmas, thus completing my collection, and since I ended up spending a few days of my visit to Minnesota cozily snowed in, I decided I’d might as well reread them for the first time in years. Unsurprisingly, they were all charming and hugely enjoyable, following the three friends from ages eight to twelve. The girls try to learn to fly, cook “Everything Pudding” (throwing every ingredient in the kitchen into one horrible concoction; I tried this as a child myself!), form a secret society, cut off one another’s hair to make memory lockets after Tacy has diphtheria, meet Tib’s glamorous Aunt Dolly (who reappears in Betsy in Spite of Herself), write a letter to the King of Spain, explore “Little Syria,” see their first horseless carriage, hang out with sassy Winona Root (a member of the Crowd in the high-school books), befriend Mrs. Poppy (later Julia’s voice teacher), perform in a play of Rip Van Winkle, find Betsy’s long-lost actor uncle Keith (whose trunk becomes her writing desk in subsequent books), and go to a library for the first time (and meet Miss Sparrow, Betsy’s beloved librarian in the rest of the series).

But I had a weird revelation: I remember reading Betsy-Tacy and Tib over and over again as a kid, but Big Hill seemed only vaguely familiar, and I began to suspect that I’d only read Downtown once before. Given how much I loved the rest of the series, how much I loved series books in general, and what a voracious reader I was, I’m not entirely sure how this happened. It could be that I genuinely didn’t like Big Hill and Downtown, preferring to skip from the classic early books to the fascinating and sophisticated high-school ones. But I think it was more complex than that. Of course, like most children, I paid little attention to the vagaries of publication dates, bibliographies, card catalog entries, and such; I got my information about which book to read next from the order that the books appeared on the shelf, or the list of other books on the back cover. At the time, the Betsy-Tacy books weren’t being as clearly marketed as a series (Harper Collins now puts numbers on the spines), or at least the library copies I had access to were less uniform. Somehow I got it in my head that Big Hill and Downtown were simply lesser books, derivative spin-offs, rather than legitimate, chronological entries in a series. Rereading them now, I was surprised to see how many elements introduced in them reappear in the later books (as noted above), and how subtly Lovelace elevates the reading level as the characters mature. I’d always thought as the high-school books representing a huge break from the childishness of the earlier books, but now I see that these books are a natural bridge. I’m so happy to have been reintroduced to them.

JULIET, NAKED

I uniformly love Nick Hornby’s nonfiction, but after adoring High Fidelity and About a Boy but then being lukewarm about the three novels that followed (except for How to Be Good, which I actively disliked), I was relieved to feel the old warm fuzzies for Juliet, Naked. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a solid return to form, centering on the unlikely friendship between Tucker Crowe, a cult singer-songwriter who vanished into obscurity under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago, and Annie, a middle-aged woman stuck in a dead-end relationship with an obsessive Crowe fan. (I was pleased to see a likable female narrator take center stage in a Hornby book, though I’ll admit Tucker, an aging version of the sensitive-man-boy-struggling-to-grow-up that Hornby does best, stole my heart more than I expected.) Hornby revisits his favorite themes of music, romance, and fandom, but with a new, welcome tinge of maturity and bittersweetness.

MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS

This makes three new books from my favorite authors in a single month! It didn’t change my life, but I enjoyed Michael Chabon’s entertaining and well-crafted, if occasionally lightweight, collection of essays on being a son and a father. Best quote:

Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic cook convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city—in every cranium—in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

MY LIFE IN FRANCE

My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme: Oh so charming, if intermittently a bit tedious in its details. Like many inexperienced memoirists, Child occasionally devolves into unfocused, strictly chronological play-by-play, giving every occurrence equal weight rather than concentrating on what we really want to know about, which is (a) THE FOOD, and (b) her all-around awesomeness—although I cut her major slack because this is an “as told to” book based on interviews she gave later in life to her grandnephew, rather than a piece of writing she carefully crafted. But that’s a small quibble about an otherwise witty and illuminating read. How could you fail to enjoy a book that contains prouncements like these?

• “I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian. The sight of France in my porthole was like a giant question mark.”

• “At Smith I did some theater, a bit of creative writing, and played basketball. But I was a pure romantic, and only operating with half my burners turned on; I spent most of my time there just growing up. It was during Prohibition and in my senior year a bunch of us piled into my car and drove to a speakeasy in Holyoke. It felt so dangerous and wicked. The speakeasy was on the top floor of a warehouse, and who knew what kind of people would be there? Well, everyone was perfectly nice, and we each drank one of everything, and on the drive home most of us got heartily sick. It was terribly exciting!”

• “Over the summer and into the fall of 1955, I finished my chicken research and began madly fussing about with geese and duck. One weekend I overdid it a bit, when, in a fit of experimental zeal, I consumed most of two boned stuffed ducks (one hot and braised, one cold en croute) in a sitting. I was a pig, frankly, and bilious for days, which served me right.”

BLAME

After loving Michelle Huneven’s first two novels, Round Rock and especially Jamesland, I’ve been waiting for her to come out with a new one ever since I moved to L.A., her home turf, so that she would do a reading and I could go see her. Well, finally she complied, and I did indeed meet her and get my copy of Jamesland signed at my local independent bookstore. The story of a thirtysomething academic who’s also a blackout drunk, wakes up in jail one morning, and is told she killed two pedestrians with her car the night before, Blame combines many of Huneven’s usual themes (specifically, addiction and recovery) with the fascinating details of Patsy’s experiences in prison (including a stint as a volunteer firefighter—California really does use convicts to fight wildfires) and as an ex-con. The plot meanders a bit and ends up spanning decades, but that’s because Huneven’s real concern is far-reaching: how people go about building meaningful lives and forging bonds with others, particularly in the midst of chaos and tragedy. As always, Huneven writes beautifully and creates compelling characters, and overall I loved the book (maybe not quite as much as Jamesland—but I need to reread it before I can make that claim definitive). As a bonus, the book is set in Pasadena and Altadena, so I got a particular thrill out of seeing my town portrayed in fiction (Pie-n-Burger, represent!).

THE CHILDREN’S BOOK

I’ve always counted A.S. Byatt as one of my very favorite writers, but after being uninspired by her last few books, I’d started to fear that either her glory days were over or my earlier passion had been a misguided youthful illusion (I first fell in love with Possession in high school, when I was more easily impressed, and The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in the heady days of college, in the midst of studying the Elizabethans and art history, which they heavily reference). So I was relieved by how much I enjoyed The Children’s Book. Admittedly, I’m predisposed to like anything focused on the Victorian/Edwardian era, but I do think this is a good book. Basically a story of several generations of a loose group of artists and freethinkers and their tangled relationships, it’s huge (688 pages) and sprawling (spanning about 25 years and encompassing fairy tales, pottery, puppetry, theater, Fabian socialism, anarchism, the World’s Fair, the suffrage movement, World War I) and dense (in fact, parts of it read almost like nonfiction, as Byatt describes the sweeping social and political changes of the day). Luckily, it also reads like the best kind of soap opera, with romantic affairs, questionable parentage, secret pregnancies, and other dark secrets abounding. Once again, I stand amazed at how Byatt can create compelling individual characters while simultaneously summing up an entire bygone age, and make it all so pleasurable to read that no matter how long it lasts, you’re sorry when it ends and immediately want to start rereading.

JEEVES AND THE TIE THAT BINDS

Background: Published in 1971 (British title was Much Obliged, Jeeves)—when P.G. Wodehouse was 90 years old.

This is the one where: We learn Jeeves’ first name! (It’s Reginald.) (Bertie’s reaction: “It had never occurred to me before that he had a first name. I couldn’t help thinking what embarrassment would have been caused if it had been Bertie.”)

The action takes place at: Brinkley Court

Bertie accidentally gets engaged to:

• Madeline Bassett, “as mushy a character as ever broke biscuit, convinced that the stars are God’s daisy chain and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born. The last thing, as you can well imagine, one would want about the home.”

• Florence Craye, “as imperious as a traffic cop”

But she’s really in love with:

• Madeline: Roderick Spode, aka Lord Sidcup (“Our views on each other were definite. His was that what England needed if it was to become a land fit for heroes to live in was fewer and better Woosters, while I had always felt that there was nothing wrong with England that a ton of bricks falling from a height on Spode’s head wouldn’t cure.”)

• Florence: Bertie’s friend Harold “Ginger” Winship (“He had the...poetic look, as if at any moment about to rhyme June with moon, yet gave the impression…of being able, if he cared to, to fell an ox with a single blow. I don’t know if he had ever actually done this, for one so seldom meets an ox, but in his undergraduate days he had felled people right and left, having represented the University in the ring as a heavyweight for a matter of three years. He may have included oxen among his victims.”)

The task at hand: Help Ginger earn Florence’s respect by getting elected to the House of Commons in the Market Snodsbury by-election, recover the Junior Ganymede club book (in which valets write secret information about their employers; there are 18 pages on Bertie) from Bingley’s nefarious clutches (he wants to use it to blackmail Ginger), convince L.P. Runkle to pay Tuppy Glossop the money his father earned for inventing headache pills called Runkle’s Magic Midgets so that Tuppy can afford to marry Aunt Dahlia’s daughter Angela

Other characters include:

• Aunt Dahlia: “My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football…Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably she unbends a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumored to do, and her attitude toward me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard; whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a pantomime dame in a Christmas pantomime.”

• Mrs. McCorkadale, a lawyer running against Ginger in the by-election: “She had a beaky nose, tight, thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo.”

• Bingley (formerly Brinkley, the violent drunken Communist temporary valet who burns down Bertie’s cottage in Thank You, Jeeves; apparently, Wodehouse renamed him to avoid confusion with Brinkley Court), “a smallish, plumpish, Gawd-help-us-ish member” of Jeeves’s Junior Ganymede club
  

• Magnolia Glendennon, Ginger’s American secretary, with whom he eventually elopes
  

• L.P. Runkle, a financier, “an extremely stout individual with a large pink face and a panama hat with a pink ribbon”

Bertie’s trials and tribulations include: Once again being pegged as a kleptomaniac after getting caught with Runkle’s camera and then his silver porringer (which Aunt Dahlia stole in an attempt to gain leverage over him, but Bertie tries to return)

Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: N/A

First paragraph: “As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I was conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I’ve got the word right. Pretty good the setup looked to me. Here I was, back in the old familiar headquarters, and the thought that I had seen the last of Totleigh Towers, of Sir Watkyn Bassett, of his daughter Madeline and above all of the unspeakable Spode, or Lord Sidcup as he now calls himself, was like the medium dose for adult of one of those patent medicines which tone the system and impart a gentle glow.”

Bertie fashion moment:
Jeeves: “Pardon me, your tie.”
Bertie: “What’s wrong with it?”
Jeeves: “Everything, sir. If you will allow me.”
Bertie: “All right, go ahead. But I can’t help asking myself if ties really matter at a time like this.”
Jeeves: “There is no time when ties do not matter, sir.”

Slang I’d like to start using: “one for the tonsils”; i.e., a drink: “I found him in the lobby where you have the pre-luncheon gargle before proceeding to the grillroom, and after the initial What-ho-ing and What-a-time-since-we-met-ing, inevitable when two vanished hands who haven’t seen each other for ages reestablish contact, he asked me if I would like one for the tonsils.”

Bertie gets no respect: “You must be as big an ass as you look, which is saying a good deal.”—Spode

Best Jeeves moment:
Bertie: “Shakespeare said some rather good things.”
Jeeves: “I understand that he has given uniform satisfaction, sir.”

Best bit of description: “Recent events had caused me to perspire in the manner popularized by the fountains at Versailles.”

Best bit of dialogue:
Runkle: “Girls will be girls.”
Spode: “Yes, but I wish they wouldn’t.”

My review: Four stars. As always, I love Aunt Dahlia, Madeline, and Spode, and this book might have the most satisfying ending of the whole series, in which Jeeves tears all the pages about Bertie out of the club book after they both agree that he should remain permanently in Bertie’s service. Awww.

Had I read it before? No.

Next up: The Cat-Nappers (the final Jeeves book!)