THE NIGHT BOOKMOBILE

Audrey Niffenegger is best known as the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife (which I love), but she’s also a visual artist who has written and illustrated several graphic novels. This one is more like a picture book for adults, clocking in at just 40 pages, with large full-color art and simple, spare text. The plot is both enchanting and haunting: a woman walking alone in Chicago at night stumbles across a bookmobile that contains every item she’s ever read, even cereal boxes (my favorite detail is that in the books she never finished, all the pages are blank after the point at which she stopped reading). In the morning, the bookmobile departs, but she’s become obsessed with it and spends the rest of her life searching for it. She encounters it only twice more over the course of many years, both times with life-changing results.

This story resonated deeply with me, as I assume it should for any dedicated book lover; it captures the fascinating power that books hold over those who read them—their pleasures (you are made of sterner stuff than I if you don’t think the night bookmobile sounds like the supercoolest thing ever), but also their perils (the prevailing tone is dark, particularly the ending). The book took about 10 minutes to read, but its spooky loveliness will stay with me for a long time. I was excited to read in the afterword that Niffenegger plans to make it the first volume of a larger project called “The Library.”

THE PENDERWICKS AT POINT MOUETTE

As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I loved Jeanne Birdsall’s two previous Penderwicks books, The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardham Street, and this one was every bit as adorable. Cozy but not cloying, old-fashioned without being out-of-touch, and gentle but never boring, all the stories about the smart, lively, prickly, closely knit Penderwick sisters are instant classics. I want to load this description with words like “sweet” and “cute” and “adorable,” but don’t get the wrong idea; there’s nothing forced or precious here. As lovable as they are, the Penderwicks are realistic characters: intellectual but not overly precocious, just as interested in soccer as in books, quirky but not neurotic, nice but not saintly…and sometimes downright cranky. In this installment, watchful eldest sister Rosalind departs for a much-needed vacation from her duties, leaving hot-tempered Skye as the reluctant and often frantic OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick) as she and her two younger sisters—dreamy writer Jane and shy little Batty, who quite frankly steals any scene in which she appears—their friend Jeffrey, and their aunt Claire head up to a cottage on the coast of Maine. This book combines two of my favorite kid’s-book tropes, the Warm Large Family and the Idyllic Summer Vacation, into a very unique, funny, and even moving tale. I’ve read that Birdsall has planned this as a five-book series, and although I’m thrilled that there are two new Penderwicks books in my future, part of me is thinking, Only five? I could quite happily read about the Penderwicks until they are old and gray.

DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

I’ve loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels since high school, so I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to check out any other books Douglas Adams may have written until I saw Dirk Gently mentioned in glowing terms at Bookshelves of Doom. And, duh, I really liked it—as of course I would, since it involves both time travel and a quirky private detective, two of my favorite literary elements, handled with Adams’s signature wit. (There are also ghosts, cats, pizza, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to sweeten the deal.) It will take repeated readings for Dirk Gently to rival Hitchhiker’s Guide in my affections, but with a book this fun, the prospect is hardly a chore. In the meantime, I’ve laid hold of the sequel, and I’m crossing my fingers that the forthcoming BBC show will be a worthy adaptation...and comes to the U.S. soon.

SWIMMING IN THE STENO POOL

Given its subtitle, A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office, and its cheeky vintage-art cover, one might be forgiven for assuming that is just another one of the heaps of lightweight hipster nostalgia books that began to flood the market in the early 2000s, when reviving/celebrating/satirizing midcentury culture and design became all the rage. That is, if one didn’t happen to know that Lynn Peril is one of the sharpest, wittiest feminist cultural historians around. As the author of the sadly defunct zine Mystery Date, the books Pink Think and College Girls, and the “Museum of Femorabilia” column in Bust magazine, she specializes in examining the ways in which women’s identities were portrayed and constructed through pop culture—advertising, advice books, etc.—throughout the twentieth century. She continues this effort in Steno Pool, exploring the history of that much maligned, celebrated, and even fetishized figure, the secretary: a topic near to her heart because, it turns out, she is one.

I picked up this book mainly because I loved Peril’s previous two and it seemed like good retro fun. I was not surprised to be so interested and entertained, but I was a bit taken aback by how much it resonated with me. A history of secretaries is by proxy a partial history of women in the modern white-collar workforce (since it was one of the few jobs outside the home that was socially acceptable for women—at least, single women; there is an entire chapter on the additional obstacles, including outright firing, faced by working married women—and remains female-dominated today), and as an office worker myself, I connected with it quite personally. The story is both empowering (working girls, yay!) and depressing (sexism, boo!); even if you think you know it—typing and dictation, groping and harassment, the glass ceiling and making coffee—seeing it all laid out with Peril’s stringent analysis is informative. So much of the material she quotes might seem hilariously antiquated and irrelevant if she didn’t do such a good job of demonstrating how systematically it reflected complex social norms that still resonate today. I’ll resist launching a rant, but much of the book inspires a healthy sense of outrage, though it’s leavened by amusing factoids and Peril’s wry humor. This is a natural follow-up to College Girls and a good companion to one of my other favorite twentieth-century histories, Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girls. Not to mention a great reminder of how fortunate I am to have a job that values me and doesn’t limit or discriminate against me, which is useful to think about when I’m dragging myself reluctantly out of bed on a Monday morning.

TROUBLING A STAR

In Madeleine L’Engle’s final Austin family book (which takes place during the school year directly following the momentous summer of A Ring of Endless Light but was published 14 years later), Vicky travels to Antarctica to visit Adam Eddington, who is working at a research station, and becomes embroiled in international intrigue. The setting is interesting and I especially like that L’Engle makes use of the fictional South American nation of Vespugia that she created for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but overall I found it a bit dull. The story is mostly travelogue, without either the excitement of Arm of the Starfish or the coming-of-age introspection of The Moon by Night. The good-vs.-evil struggle feels low-stakes and tacked on, the conclusion unsatisfying, probably because Vicky has very little agency; she’s just on a tour, and the big climax is that she gets stranded on an iceberg by the bad guys and then…waits to be rescued by the good guys? I didn’t see much continuity between this Vicky and the passionate dreamer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it seemed especially weird that there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to recent discovery that she can communicate telepathically with dolphins. I’m just saying, if I discover I can talk to dolphins one summer, and I find myself on a boat in the Antarctic a few months later, I might try conversing with a seal or a whale or something, especially when in peril, but it doesn’t even cross Vicky’s mind. Devoid of that mystical wacky awesomeness, Troubling a Star feels flat.

MRS. AMES

Another one of the fab Bloomsbury Group vintage reprints, and this one by E.F. Benson, author of the fab Mapp & Lucia series. A match made in heaven? I think so! Mrs. Ames starts out seeming very familiar, set as it is in the small town of Riseborough, which the reader may be forgiven for confusing with Riseholme, the setting of the first two Lucia books. In Riseborough, as in Riseholme and Tilling, dwell a great many upper-middle-class people with too much time on their hands, and thus nothing better to do than to pry into the business of their neighbors and endlessly jockey for social supremacy. As always, Benson documents their infighting with affectionate but wicked wit; here’s my favorite line, the initial description of Mrs. Ames herself, the town’s queen bee:

In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad.

In grand Luciaesque fashion, Mrs. Ames soon faces a contender to her throne, her younger, new-to-town cousin Mrs. Evans, and a series of competitive parties and other social maneuvers ensues. But in the Mapp & Lucia books, feelings (except perhaps jealousy and pride) rarely run very deeply, with romantic relationships absent, irrelevant, or considered downright gauche. Mrs. Ames ventures into more emotional territory when Mr. Ames becomes increasingly infatuated with Mrs. Evans, and Mrs. Ames finds she minds this very much. At first, the situation seems comical and harmless, as Mr. Ames makes a mild fool of himself and Mrs. Ames makes failed attempts to recapture his attention by dying her hair and using anti-wrinkle creams; there is nothing Benson does better than exploit the foibles of his characters to hilarious if uncomfortable effect, like an early-1900s version of The Office. But as the relationship between Mr. Ames and Mrs. Evans (who is bored and unfulfilled, “an unexploded shell, liable to blow to bits both itself and any who handled her”) grows more serious, Mrs. Ames finds herself reassessing both her marriage and her life. All comes right in the end, but there’s much more poignancy and self-discovery in this story (as well as an interesting semi-sympathetic, but occasionally derisive portrayal of the women’s suffrage movement) than the cover blurb led me to expect. (“A clever, laughable little satire in the author’s lightest and happiest mood,” said the Time Literary Supplement on its publication in 1912, which is either a severe case of missing the point completely or a reflection of the fact that Benson was best known for writing ghost stories, in comparison to which this is no doubt light and happy, before he started the Mapp & Lucia series 10 years later.)

There is more pathos and a sharper edge to the humor here, and I found the story moving, even sad. It’s not as charming and lovable as Mapp & Lucia, but it’s just as clever and entertaining, and a good demonstration of Benson’s range as a writer. I just wish I could find more books by him! My library only has some collections of his ghost stories, a few of his nonfiction works, and Dodo, the book that apparently first made him a sensation (it seems to be a darker satire about a ruthless social climber). I may have to check out Dodo by default, though I’d prefer something more cheerful.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK RETRO

As I predicted, I checked out another Ralph Keyes book on language, and also as predicted, it quickly verged on language-book exhaustion—or, possibly, this one wasn’t quite as good a read as Euphemania. Subtitled Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech, this one deals with what Keyes calls “retrotalk”: allusions to past phenomena that still exist as artifacts in our language today. It’s an interesting concept, one that was first introduced to me as a teenager when my much-younger cousin asked me why we say “roll down the window” and I realized he’d never seen a car without automatic windows (!), and which is increasingly a topic among my peers as we get older, especially for my friends who are college professors and repeatedly shocked by the pop-culture references their students don’t understand. And I certainly learned a lot from this book (although I can’t remember any examples off the top of my head), particularly about older and more obscure phrase origins.

However, my problem with it was twofold: (1) The book doesn’t flow as well as Euphemania; it contains less high-level analysis and so often reads like lists of words and their origins organized in paragraph form. Admittedly, Keyes acknowledges this in his introduction, noting that it can be dipped into rather than read straight through, but I was reading it straight through, and at times it felt scattershot and tedious. Part of the tedium also stemmed from the fact that (2) the book is so broad-focused that at times it laps over into simply being an elementary history of the United States. I know there are plenty of people who don’t know what Watergate or the Cuban missile crisis are, but couldn’t they just look it up online or in an encyclopedia? Do we really need to explain them here? Isn’t anything considered common knowledge anymore? I wish Keyes had focused on some of the more obscure concepts and left the basic ones alone. Keyes does argue that there are plenty of people who don’t know the basic ones, and that someday most people won’t remember them, the way there are already many people who don’t remember pay phones, but that doesn’t make it any less dull to read sections that amount to “once upon a time, there were these things called record players, and here is the associated terminology.” This book would make an excellent primer on cultural references for non-Americans, the young, and anyone else who’d like to brush up them (I know post-WWII history always got serious short shrift in my schooling; I happened to learn most of it from a childhood spent reading Doonesbury, my former job as an editor of middle-grade history books, and a personal fascination with the era), but to me it was only of mild interest.

THE BONESHAKER

This should have been such a slam dunk: a YA novel set in small-town Missouri in 1913, featuring a mechanically-minded tomboy protagonist who must beat the devil at his game, plus the titular bicycle, an ominous traveling medicine show, a blues guitarist reminiscent of Robert Johnson (with a similar Faustian story attached), steampunky automata, and a healthy dose of American folklore. But it just didn’t do it for me. I hesitate to place too much judgment on Kate Milford’s writing because I listened to this as an audiobook—which I plucked semi-randomly off the shelf at the library for my commuting entertainment, perhaps having confused it with Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which, confusingly coincidentally, is another YA novel published at around the same time, with harder-core steampunk elements and zombies to boot. I’m not a committed audiobook fan, so it’s possible something about this just didn’t translate from page to voice (I do know the book featured plentiful illustrations, which of course I missed out on), and maybe I’d have enjoyed this more if I actually read it (it’s gotten a lot of good reviews, strengthening the It’s Just Me theory).

I really did like the idea of the book, just not the execution. The characters, particularly Natalie, the heroine, felt flat and wooden; the pacing was often ponderous; there were lots of descriptive passages that seemed like they were supposed to be lyrical but didn’t sing; too much of the plot seemed to be contrived around Natalie having inexplicable visions at convenient moments; and in the end some narrative threads were unresolved—I think because Milford is planning a sequel, but it felt unsatisfying. Would it be insulting to say that I’d like to see someone adapt this into a movie? With the action at the forefront and some awesome visuals (I’m thinking Tim Burton would be perfect for this), it would make a damn cool and creepy Southern Gothic fantasy film. As an audiobook, however…meh.

THE DAUGHTER OF TIME

This was the first Josephine Tey book I ever read, way back in 1996; my father handed it to me during my freshman year of college because I had just read (and loved) Shakespeare’s Richard III. (I was also primed to read it because it gets a shout out in my beloved Tam Lin.) It’s an Inspector Grant mystery, but with a novelty twist: Grant is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg and, bored silly, he ends up investigating the murders of the princes in the Tower. I’ve said before how ridiculously seductive I find books that involve a lot of suspenseful historical researching (Possession is another), so of course this one grabbed me: I reread it in one sitting, on a flight from L.A. to Minneapolis, and was enthralled the whole time, even though I already knew the outcome: Grant proves, quite convincingly in my opinion, that Richard had no motive to commit the crime, whereas Henry Tudor did and certainly had reason to try to pin it on Richard (pro-Tudor historians such as Thomas More are definitely responsible for Richard’s portrayal, in Shakespeare and popular culture, as an evil hunchback).

The book definitely stands on its own enough that fans of historical mysteries can enjoy it without having read the rest of the Grant series (obviously, I existed quite happily for 14 years after reading this without feeling compelled to check out another), but this time around, after having read all the books in order, it was even more fun—I had a better sense of Grant’s personality and could recognize recurring characters like Sergeant Williams and Marta Hallard. This is one of Tey’s best works and definitely my favorite Grant book…at least so far; I still have one more to go.

BOSSYPANTS

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.

See, even the back cover is funny! I don’t normally gravitate toward large-print, wide-spaced, photo-on-the-cover celebrity/entertainment/humor books, but I love Tina Fey and think she’s a great comedy writer as well as a seemingly swell person, so not surprisingly, I acquired (as a thoughtful birthday gift from Friend M), read, and enjoyed her book. This collection of short, mostly biographical essays is a quick read; it’s full of Fey’s wry, self-deprecating humor, but also thoughtful and honest about her experiences as a nerd, woman, actor, writer, and mom. It was especially interesting to read the last chapter, in which she explores her indecision about having a second child—she wants one, but knows it could perilously interrupt her career at its peak (or as she calls it, her “last five minutes of fame”) and put her TV show’s staff of 200 people out of work (“I thought 30 Rock would be canceled by now”)—given that since its writing, she had obviously made up her mind; she recently announced her pregnancy, and 30 Rock will return midseason to give her a maternity break, which seems to work out well for everyone—except possibly me, who will miss it in the meantime.

But it’s Fey’s smart, snarky feminism I love the best, as in the piece where she responds to fictional (but obviously based on reality) Internet hate mail. Here’s her answer to the complaint that she ruined SNL, is only famous because she’s a woman and a liberal, and isn’t funny:

Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?