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.