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.