Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters

Since unknown books don't always pan out for me, I decided to play it safe. The reviewers were unanimously positive about Eleanor Brown's debut novel, The Weird Sisters, a poignant homecoming comedy.  The premise is simple, even common.  Three 30ish sisters return to their hometown in Ohio to care for their sick mother, who has breast cancer. The divergence from the familiar is in the details. The sisters, raised by an English professor father and a bibliophilic mother in an idyllic college town, quote Shakespeare to one another, though out of context.  

Is the novel good or is it fey?  A little bit of both.  

Three troubled sisters return home, regress to their childhoods, confront one another about their weaknesses, and have revelations that change their lives.  Brown makes her story unique by casting two of the daughters as prodigals and mixing first-person plural with third-person singular point-of-view. Sometimes the style is effective, other times it is disorienting. "It was our fault, probably, the way we'd always babied her. Or maybe it was our father's fault--Cordelia had always been his favorite....She was the Cordelia to his Lear."  Some of this is lovely, some too obvious.

The three sisters read, read, and read.  They read wherever they are.  Brown endearingly describes their reading habits, though she seldom tells us what they're reading.  Her musings on reading kept me reading, even when the characters didn't interest me. 

The eldest sister is Rose, a spinsterish math professor who can't leave home and dithers over joining her cute fiance in England; Bean (Bianca), a thief who got fired for embezzling funds from an office in New York; and Cordy (Cordelia), a nomad hippie who follows bands and has spent years greasy-haired on the road (Brown impressed me with her description of the dirt).  

Rose is perhaps the most realistically portrayed.  As a perfectionist, she doesn't get along very well with anybody, but she needs to take care of her family.  Rose is the one who has taken the trouble to care for her mother with breast cancer.  When the other two come home, she is a bit perturbed.  She loves Barnwell and would love to teach there.  Her sisters hate Barnwell.  But Rose's boyfriend has taken a job in England, and she doesn't know that to do.. 

Thirty-year-old Bean is the bad girl who has been to New York but fucked up big-time. Not only did she embezzle, but she spent it all on clothes.  And now that she is back in Barnwell, she has an affair with her favorite professor's husband while the professor is out of town.  She has no loyalty. How did she come from this mild family? Brown tries to explain. 

Cordy is the centered one--Brown tells us so.  Having shoplifted a pregnancy kit in the desert (her first theft), she comes home because she has nowhere to go. Cordy weathers her pregnancy and charms us with her conciliatory skills. But let me say right now that I am unsympathetic to post-feminist tales about single women whose problems are solved by pregnancy. I can't help but agree with Cordy's father that an unemployed nomad should have an abortion.  But Cordy takes a job as a barista...will having a baby fix everything?


The portrait of the mother, her illness, remoteness, and exhaustion, is perfect.  Their father seems almost too much the absent-minded professor.  And this is part of the problem.  The characters are sometimes just types.  To be fair, Brown concentrates on making Bean real near the end. So much energy goes into this portrait that the others are evanescent by comparison.


The novel is reasonably well-written, the kind of medium-good book I associate with light summer reading. But the book would have to be much stronger for me to want to spend time with Bean and Cordy, who, though they are fellow readers, have little to offer with their blurry, compromised morals. Somehow this light novel, with its less than light conflicts, annoys me.   And let us just say all three sisters end up with a unique relationship to theft, and I'm wondering where that comes from.  

The Weird Sisters probably has a sell-by date of age 30.  Not bad, but certainly not as good as the publicity made it sound. 

Bibliobits: A Voyage to Arcturus & Strange Books

I walked into a musty used bookstore whose front window was boarded-up. I wouldn't have known it was a bookstore if the door hadn't been open.  I found a copy of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which I'd been looking for for years. 

"How much?"

Everything was $2.00.  The owner was a cattleman who liked to come into the city.  He told me he used to have a better location for the bookstore.  He had often driven to Minneapolis to buy books in bulk from a wholesaler.  Now he depended on church sales and romances.

The store was damp and cold--he kept the heat off--and fluorescent lamps swung from the ceiling on precarious wires. He switched on the lights when a customer browsed in a specific aisle.  Lots of running around flicking switches.  Otherwise, there was zero organization.  A section was labeled SCIENCE FICTION or POETRY, but you were likely to find A Midsummer Night's Dream in SF and Muriel Spark's Symposium in Poetry. I found all kinds of treasures and first editions.  But I also wanted to organize the books.  He wasn't concerned with that.


The bookstore closed.  One day I went there and all the books were gone.

I neatened my shelves recently and found a few from this odd bookstore.  The Best of Hans Andersen, illustrated by Michele Danon-Marcho and Maya Filip, English text by Claire Stewart, was published by Treasure Press in 1983. This 235-page out-of-print book has slightly offbeat, stylized full-page and two-page illustrations reminiscent of folk art.  The style differs from pic to pic, presumably according to the bent of the two artists. Some of the illustrations are delicate, others are blocky and comical, others are oddly textured and kitschy.  Heroes and heroines tend to be stylized gamines with saucer eyes and reams of eye makeup.  Peasants have big eyes in chunkier faces.  The tone of an illustration can be sad and surreal, as in "The Fir Tree," when the dying, burning tree has a vision of a winter night. In the illustration below, a competent Thumbelina forages for food in the snow.  A towering red mushroom and textured pine cone opposite inspire no fear, because they fit the background of an ordinary fairy tale.

,

Illustration from "Thumbelina"

Okay, not a classic, but fun.  I wonder what happened to Treasure Press.  

There are some other interesting books, too.  John Galsworthy's Worshipful Society is part of a Galsworthy set, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1929.  The novels are The Country House, Fraternity, and The Patrician.  I've read the first of the three.


And then there's Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night in a library binding.  


And Ruth Suckow's The Folks.  That's coming up as One of My Reads of the Year.


Books you would never look for, because you didn't know they existed.

One Bag

Get ready for work.  Wash hair--check.  Dress all in Bean or Bauer--check.  Find book and notebook--check.  Print out worksheets--check.  Stuff everything into one bag--check. Wonder if I really want to do this. 

I need to get out of the Matrix.

I'm not an uber-teacher. I'm an occasional teacher. I get haggard and raspy-voiced. Then I find a nice long freelance job and don't think about teaching for years.  Then I teach again, because (a) it's going to save the world, or (b) I need to get out of the Matrix. 

People insanely call me up.  I say insanely because I don't advertise.  What happens is they say they want to learn my subject and somebody passes on my name.  And then I feel obligated. I've overprepared an estimated seven million times.  I overprepared again last week.  I can't be Miss Bishop (the heroine of Bess Streeter Aldrich's novel), but I can overprepare. One hour, 10 worksheets.  Just in case. 

The biggest problem is packing all my materials into one bag. I'm a one-bag fanatic. One bag... "indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." I used to carry two or three bags but it was a punishing weight-bearing exercise.  Sometimes I had to ask my husband to help (this for my night classes).

Do I need a huge shoulder bag? Or a totebag? I found this bag on the internet (it comes in different colors).  I like the look of it.  But shoulder bags are unwieldy. Too much weight on one shoulder can disturb the equilibrium of the back. 

How about a messenger bag?  I have occasionally slung one across my shoulder and back and it's much more comfortable than a shoulder bag.  But it's still not optimal for balance if you carry too many books. 

A backpack? Yes.  Balance is essential.  Perfect stability. You can cram as many books and notebooks as you need and it just rests in the hollow of your back.  You're not aware of it.

And so I'm back in the work world again, "editing" my bag for next time because I realize I don't need to carry The Complete Works of X.

Root Vegetable Soup

It is cold. Spring yesterday, winter today.  I wanted to read Kristin Lavransdatter, drink outsized mugs of tea, and make ginger date muffins, but at 3:00 I had that slept-in-my-makeup feeling and had to get out of the house.  Out of the pajamas and into the jeans. Threw some more makeup on to protect my face.  It was bleak and foggy, we had left our walk too late, and big wet Kleenex-size flakes fell for awhile.  My husband wanted gummy bears, or gummy Easter eggs, but the store was closed.

Old-fashioned bookstore:  if only we had one in town.

The Bookstore That Never Sells Any Books was open, but my husband sensibly refused to shop there.  "I've spent more money at the candy store than there."  He thought I would buy a book and then they would insult us. These old-style Dickensian booksellers sit with pursed lips behind the counter, keep the store in a warm fug that makes you want to faint, and tell you you will not understand the second book of Abdlerahman Munif's trilogy (which they don't want to order).  The Amazon boxes are in everybody's recycling cans in the adjacent streets because nobody can buy anything at this bookstore.  



Now, I must admit, in my hometown (unlike here) indie booksellers are magnanimous and business-like.  You can buy anything you want: remaindered editions of Martha Gellhorn, small-press books, the latest Indie Reads books, and marijuana (oops, I made up that last part).  You can buy scrabble dictionaries, The Weird Sisters, Herodotus, or Ouida's Moths. You can order books. 

We wished we had some gummy bears...

Tonight I made root vegetable soup to protect us from the cold.  You throw in any root vegetables you want...turnips, carrots, parsnips, potatoes...and also some rice, and then cook in broth for 30 minutes.  Then you saute some onions and throw them in for 10 minutes.  Then you add some egg mixed with lemon at the last minute...and then you eat.   

And now back to Kristin Lavransdatter.  Really, I like this much more than The Master of Hestviken.

The Oscar Deficit and The Adjustment Bureau

We're catching up on our Oscar deficit.  We watched The Kids Are All Right, a contemporary riff on D. H. Lawrence's The Fox, a story of two California lesbians (butch and femme), their kids, and a mischievous hippieish sperm donor, whose affair with Jules (the femme member, Julianne Moore) threatens to break up the family.   Great actors; not my kind of movie.

Then we decided to go to another movie.  We especially like science fiction, and hadn't seen any SF since Hereafter.

We lined up for The Adjustment Bureau, a science fiction movie starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, based on Philip K. Dick's 1954 short story, "Adjustment Team." (You can read it online here,)   The movie, unlike Dick's funny, paranoid SF allegory, is a science fiction romance, a suspenseful love story about an appealing couple, David and Elise, who win our hearts with rapid-fire banter, individualism, and glowing animal spirits, but are persecuted by  supernatural agents determined to keep them apart.  

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a working-class politician.  Before NBC calls the election for the other guy, David hides in the restroom to compose his concession speech.  Here he encounters Elise (Emily Blunt), who has crashed a wedding. She encourages him to be subversive about the PR aspects of his political career, which wins the people's trust and makes him the favorite in an election three years later.  But love is out of control and scary in this SF universe:  sex + politics threatens the world, according to the agents, and they stage incidents to keep the couple apart to control an uncontrollable society.  The plot is fueled by political paranoia (the original short story, sans love, is about the McCarthy age?) personified by secret agents of the mysterious Chairman.  

There is some humor.  "This guy is a pain in the ass," says one of the agents, irritated by David's continual defiance and independence. My husband was amused by the agents' 1950-ish dull raincoats and fedoras (I wonder:  the Men in the Gray Flannel Suits behind the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?). The most horrifying scene is when David walks into his office and catches the agents "adjusting" his friends with machines.  Because David won't give in to pressure, they strike a deal with him:  they won't adjust him, if he doesn't tell anyone what he knows about them.  And he learns some terrifying things about the future.

We can all recognize a metaphor for the rumored undercover agents and their undermining of political movements, but we also have an Orpheus and Eurydice situation:  David guides Elise through an underworld of symbolic doors that take them on a shortcut tour of New York (I don't get that part), and shows her the terrifying world behind their world.

Fortunately the chase scenes are only moderately terrifying (I can't take too much visual horror).  Parts of this movie are excellent: parts are philosophical, like a movie-novel of ideas, parts are political, parts are chick flick, parts are sheer exciting SF, and parts don't work.  I very much enjoyed it.  The acting is good.  In a kind of crazy way it says more to me than The Kids Are All Right.  


Yes, I know.  That's why I don't write about movies.

Traffic, Sundays in America, & The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

TRAFFIC.  Under the radar.  No Twitter account. I was accused of inviting a jam.  CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. 

Not much goes on here at Frisbee. We're a backwater.   Twitter stalkers sat back and waited; nothing happened.  Occasionally I stopped in to say I read a book, ate a cupcake, or rode my bicycle.


A  few people were hyped up this week because of something I wrote on conflict of interest.  Marketers, reviewers, bookstore affiliates:  what are the ethics? 


I learned something:  I'm a communist, or a rebel.  Don't stand up for integrity.  Usually my blog has no Twitter-based traffic, because I have no Twitter account.  A small group of berserk readers, sparked by a Twitter SOS, told me I was "ornery" for joking about Persephone Reading Week.  Notwithstanding my argument about the incestuousness of the marketing-blogger-bookstore affiliate community, I was condemned as  a "negative" person who doesn't want to "promote" books.  It is the "law" that forces bloggers to list all the free books they market for publishers.  Yet it is apparently unnecessary for  bookstore affiliate bloggers to reveal that they may, and do, profit from their reviews.

My husband looked at the stats on my blog--the same few twitterers hovered all day--and proposed that I end the excitement by deleting my 30-word joke AND their hysterical comments.  They went back to their hole in the UK.... 


At this point, you won't be surprised, I feel no obligation to read another Persephone book ever.  And I was probably one of their better customers...  

SUNDAYS IN AMERICA.  A few years ago I read an enjoyable book by Suzanne Strempek Shea, Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore.  Her thoughtful, entertaining, often humorous account of her year of volunteering in an independent bookstore was right up my alley because I love anything about books. Her reason for working there, however, was dark:   A survivor of breast cancer, she was exhausted after illness and chemotherapy, and, though she was healing, needed a reason to get out of the house.  

Shea is the author of feather-light, humorous novels about the Polish-American Catholic community:  polkas, kielbasa, family, and romance.  I especially like her non-fiction, and just bought Sundays in America:  A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith.   Shea, a Catholic, moved by the faith of the mourners of Pope John Paul, decided to travel around the U.S. and visit a different church--Baptist, Quaker, Mormon, etc.-- every week to explore the meaningful religious lives of Americans and center herself again. 

THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY.  This came in at the library and I do want to read it.  It is, however, 607 pages of small print.  It may be due at the library before I get around to it.  I have a biography to finish first.  And I'm still reading Kristin Lavransdatter.  I may have to check out Sofia Tolstoy multiple times.

The Bookstore Diet, The Difficulty of Buying New Books, & Kristin Lavransdatter

I am on my Official Bookstore Diet.  I buy a book for every pound I lose.  If the same pound keeps going away and coming back, is it cheating?  But I'm interpreting my dieting rules literally. 

The diet works like this.  Lose one pound.  Buy a book.  Stay at the Relative's for two days.  Gain one pound. Keep the book.   Go home.  Lose the pound again.  Buy a book.

And if you ride your bicycle four hours, you can have a cupcake.

The sun came out and I rode my bike to the bookstore.  I was not looking for any specific titles. Here on the NEW shelves are the books booksellers want you to buy.  None of these appealed to me.  Tom Clancy and John Lescroart spark sales.  Lots of thrillers and pop books the publishers depend on to support the "literary" selection.

I considered Leslie Daniels's Cleaning Nabokov's House, a short, witty novel, according to several reviewers, about a bemused divorcee who moves into a house inhabited by Nabokov, but it looked too slight, too inconsequential to trade a pound for.  Louise Dean's novel, The Old Romantic, will turn up at the library.  I read one of her books a few years ago and enjoyed it.

Then I decided not to buy a book by a New Yorker or an Englishwoman.  I am always buying books by New Yorkers and Englishwomen.  So this eliminated others I was vacillating about.

Susand Froderberg's Old Border Road looked very good. How did I select it from the new shelves?  By the blurbs.  Robert Olmstead and Ivan Doig had good things to say about it.  I sat in a big chair and read a chapter of this lyrical Western, the style and storytelling both rapid-fire and oblique.  But I am afraid to take a chance on someone unknown, because I made a few errors in impulsive choices last fall.  And then it turned out the author lives in New York anyway and I had to say no.

I ended up buying a new novel by a well-known, but not too well-known, writer, Sheri Holman.  And then, oh no, I got home and learned she lives in BROOKLYN.  I thought she was a Southern writer.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset's masterpiece.  This fascinating trilogy, written in luminous medieval-style language, chronicles a Norwegian woman's life in the 14th century, spanning her childhood, teens, love affairs, marriage, religious dilemmas, religious pilgrimages, and the disappointments of life with Erlend, her weak husband. Undset won the Nobel Prize in 1928, and is also known for The Master of Hestviken, a tetralogy set in the Middle Ages. Kristin Lavransdatter is one of my favorite books, read again and again, and I own the "Nobel edition" published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929, the Charles Archer translation. I own the old translations, but Kristin Lavransdatter is also available in a beautiful new Penguin translation by the award-winning Tina Nunnally. 

I am still on the first volume, The Bridal Wreath.  Many of the events in Kristin's childhood shape her religious views.  A boyfriend is killed in a fight with a man who attempts to rape Kristin.  She begs to go to a convent after his death, but is not meant to be a nun:  she meets another man.   Earlier, when her younger sister, Ulvhild, is crippled in an accident, Kristin is influenced by Lady Aashild, a healer who tends to Ulvhild and teaches Kristin much about medicine.  Lady Aashild is an aristocrat, a passionate woman who left her rich first husband to live with a lover later accused of murdering the first husband.  Long married to her second husband, Lady Aashild is very philosophical, and when Kristin questions her about regrets, she says:

"Good days may last long if one lives wisely and deals warily with what one has; all wise folk know that, and 'tis therefore, I trow, that wise folk must rest content with good days--for the best days of all cost very dear.  In this world they call him a fool who wastes his heritage that he may make merry in the days of his youth.  As to that each man may deem as he lists.  But that man only do I call a fool and a very dolt who rues his bargain after it is made; and twice a simpleton and a fool of fools is he who thinks to see more of his boon-companions after his heritage is gone--"

I always feel very Catholic when I read this novel.

World Book Night 2011 & My Book Giveaway 2000

On World Book Night, Saturday, March 5, twenty-eight thousand activists will give away 40,000 books in the UK and Ireland.  A screening committee chose the givers on the basis of letters explaining why they wanted to give away a particular book.  Each patron will distribute 48 copies of his or her selected book to members of the public on Saturday. 


It's sweet, a little corny, and remarkably random, but the list of 25 eclectic giveaway books chosen by a committee demonstrates an appreciation of all genres.  The "givers" must have shown the enthusiasm of the Oprah Book Club participants who write emails to explain why they love a book and want to appear on a Book Club segment of her show. Will people actually be giving away books at night?  There will be readings, etc.

I had my own Book Day in 2000, sort of.  Flush from a recent job,  I bought all the Signet classics at the mall.  Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Dostoevsky, & Edith Wharton.  I gave away the books to people who worked in retail and service professions.

My first stop was the Elizabeth Arden counter. I needed a lipstick. The gals at EA love to read, have Harvard degrees, and are always kind about not insisting on a makeover.  They told me not to spend an incredible sum of money on an anti-wrinkle cream.  This in exchange for My Antonia and The House of Mirth.


Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard  went to a cook--all right, I did write about his restaurant first, but the story appeared before I gave the book to the happy chef (whose degree was in business and Italian).


An American Tragedy went to a hairdresser.


A convenience store clerk chose The Philosophy of Aristotle, and a manager at Dillard's selected Life on the Mississippi.


Everybody likes a good book.  

Pop Fiction: The Clan of the Cave Bear & The French Lieutenant's Woman

James Franco on General Hospital

I have yet to finish The Clan of the Cave Bear or The French Lieutenant's Woman. 

The Relative's new apartment at the OPH (my generic label = Old People's Home) is too small to accommodate both reading and TV.  The Talk, General Hospital, and Rachael Ray interfered even with the frothiest of novels. When the Relative fell asleep, I could not turn down the volume without waking her.  Spotting James Franco on General Hospital (a guest star appearance) and rating the makeovers on Rachael Ray became essential diversions. Was Franco the artist-mobster or the ponytailed boyfriend?  Did we prefer dread locks or the short hair in the makeover? The woman with the frizzy hair was pretty with her hair tamed.   At night I stayed in the Relative's empty house (some furniture is in the new apartment, the rest crammed into the basement), and gobbled parts of Jean Auel's first novel in her Earth's Children series and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.  

The Clan of the Cave Bear kept me rapt for hours.  It is an entertaining pop historical novel, but has more in common with feminist SF or fantasy.  Ayla, the Cro-Magnon heroine, is the definitive autodidact female role model.  She can hunt, swim, and save cave-children from drowning and hyena abductions. Adopted by a Neanderthal medicine woman after an earthquake, Ayla, one of the Cro-Magnon "Other Ones," is hated by the men in the Neanderthal clan, especially by Browd, the chief's son.  She is more intelligent than the Neanderthals:  she can make inferences, deductions, and connections that are too difficult for the primitive clan.  They depend on a "race" memory for knowledge of their customs, and even knowledge of medicine and hunting, while she can reason and refine.  Browd beats her, berates her, and even rapes her, and this is within the realm of acceptable behavior.  She is almost killed after she saves Browd's child, because she killed the hyena with a sling and hunting is forbidden for women.

Auel is a pretty good writer.  I'm very happy to read about Ayla and her adventures. Now if only I were a PR whore, I would be happy to receive the COMPLETE EARTH CHILDREN SERIES ON MY NOOK. 

The French Lieutenant's Woman is supposed to be my "literary" pop fiction of the week. John Fowles is one of those writers I read at MY FRIEND'S COUNTRY HOUSE (illustration at left). 

Fowles is good, but is one of those best-selling writers likely to be forgotten.  His books, though smart, are not quite on the level of, say, John Barth's or Donald Barthleme's masterpieces.   The intricate design is there, but the voice, diction, and style are unsubtle and wordy.  There's a sort of chuckling at his own brilliance that undercuts his authority.   If you like meta-fiction, read Chapter 13 of his pseudo-nineteenth-century novel The French Lieutenant's Woman:

"If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and "voice" of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story:  that the novelist stands next to God.  But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word."

Fowles provides footnotes and socio-economic analysis of class, politics, and sexual mores of the 19th century in addition to the narrative.  The multifaceted story centers on Charles, an aristocrat engaged to Tina, a bright but shallow rich merchant's daughter, who may someday be his intellectual equal, but is not now.  He finds himself fascinated by the French Lieutenant's Woman, a fallen woman closer to his own age who mysteriously walks by the sea and in the woods every afternoon.  Sara, deserted by the French lieutenant,  is nicknamed Tragedy, and Charles' involvement with her grows out of an entanglement that both attracts and repels him.  Sara's character is slowly revealed to us, through the eyes of men and women, through John Fowles, and through herself. 

I am enjoying this, but it is not quite a pop classic, and I'm wishing I'd upped the ante this pop week with a John Cowper Powys or an Elizabeth North.  Perhaps A Maggot, the novel I most enjoyed by Fowles, is his best.

There is a movie of The French Lieutenant's Woman, starring Meryl Streep, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.  

What Do Bloggers Mean?

Sound familiar?  I've read plenty of blog reviews like this.  I haven't ached with loss yet, but I have recommended many books.

I recently wrote an unintentionally provocative piece about bloggers and bookstore affiliates. Is it conflict of interest?  Do bloggers compromise their standards when they sign up to sell books as Amazon or B&N affiliates ?  A blogger writes about a book. An image appears in the post, or in a sidebar on a blog, and if you click on the image you go right to Amazon, B&N, or another bookstore. Then if you buy the book, the blogger makes a little money. Bloggers visited my blog to say there was no conflict of interest.


Nobody but bloggers commented. 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. 

Corporations use bloggers to make money. Of course, bloggers can use corporations, too.  According to one blogger, she makes pennies per book sold. According to another, she made about $200 a year.  These two directly dealt with the issue and made no bones about it.  I have to admit I do not sneer at $200 a year.  I probably spend $1,000 a year on books.   


Oh, it's tempting to sign up as an affiliate.


But if I want to sell books, for God's sake, I'll open an online co-op.  The internet HAS compromised bloggers' ethics.  It makes things too easy for us.  It gives us a template:  Suddenly we find ourselves filling in the Amazon Associate gadget on the Blogger draft page even if we have no intention of doing so.  Honestly, it appears right here. I never asked for this to appear on my page.   Blogger must have made a deal with Amazon.  So click, click!  When I had a blog on Wordpress, one day I went to my blog and found an ad for my city.  It appeared without my permission.  You can imagine how I felt.

Bloggers are not journalists.  Far from it. They're not worried about journalistic ethics.   Everybody is blogging, writing on Facebook, & Twitter:  businesses (so many businesses), writers (so many writers), PR people (so many PR people), publishers (so many publishers), book lovers (professional and amateur), and who is who is who...well, we don't know.  People have different motives for what they do. 


So here are Four Three Precepts for PR Forewarnings:

1.  If a blogger lists books received from a publisher and thanks the publisher, why?  Reviewers are under no obligation to a publisher.  They are doing the favor, not vice versa, and might as well sort out the books first and review the good ones or bad ones.  My husband and I think some of these people are naive and are "bragging." Some may be quite cynical.

2.  If a blogger constantly thanks a publisher for sending a book and then gushes about it, it is a heads-up.  I'M JUST SAYING...


3.  My note of sympathy:  It IS difficult NOT to feel obligated to publicists who send you free books.  If a publicist seeks you out when you are not a professional reviewer, you feel good.  But after awhile it gets old.  You look at the packages with dismay if the books are not your kind of thing.  It isn't necessary to say, Look, I got a free book, and then to say you like it if you don't. It's heart-rending to stay silent, but sometimes you must. The publishers will keep sending them to you anyway because they appreciate your "selling" the books you like. 

4.  Why DOESN'T Persephone Books make bloggers affiliates?... [I deleted most of this paragraph to pacify the crazies.]

My husband notices these discrepancies and thinks there is something deeply wrong in the world of book blogging.  He prefers amateur sports blogs, where they share information about races, weather conditions, etc.  

Bicycling & Books

My first bicycle. Note the casual Amazonian outfit for my first bike ride and the sun squint that eventually lined my face.   Little did I know that I would one day ride a bike thousands of miles across four states. 

My first book,  Baby Animals, a Rand McNally Junior Elf book for 15 cents. Adorable dog, kitten, and chick on cover. Cheap books brought literacy, literature, and book-collecting into our house.


My mother must have been relieved when I learned to read.  I woke her up every morning at 5:30 to be read to.  This was a typical scene in our house (picture at right).  Mom reading (and having a bad hair day), I listening.  The boredom for her, the excitement for me.  Our next-door neighbor was a one-room school teacher whose job was cut when the state closed country schools and bused students into town.  We sat on Mrs. X's stoop and I read her stacks of Golden books, which she brought home from school in the summer, while she and my mother talked and my hair dried after a wash.  Very pleasant scenes.

Later, I subscribed to The Weekly Reader, and we ordered books from its book club.  Curious George, Homer Price, Little Witch, On Your Toes, Susie, The Kid Who Batted 1,000...wonderful books.  It was so exciting when the order arrived at school, our teacher ripped the box open, and called us up to the desk to distribute books.  

What a good beginning.  Of course I went on to Louisa May Alcott, E. Nesbit, and Beany Malone, and then begged books from bookstores for Christmas.  

Later there was the bicycling with books in my baskets to parks where I'd read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Jane Austen.


Bicycling and books:  essential parts of life.

Back and Forth

The Relative's illness brought out the worst in people.  There was mean-spiritedness, greed, and would have been fighting if people had been on speaking terms.  She has recovered and is out of the hospital.  The next question was, What was to be her fate?  Home with multiple services (my idea, because many agencies provide, in addition to visiting nurses, services such as grocery-shopping, cooking a meal, driving, etc.) or committed to an Old People's Home?  Well, she's in the OPH.  

This week I camped in her nearly empty house.  I brought a reading lamp, plugged in my clock radio, and huddled in the back bedroom.  There was no phone, no internet access.  The TV worked for one day and then the cable was cut.  It will be the electricity next, I thought.  I anxiously watched the snow fall.  I had not brought boots, only a bicycle, so I tried on all the boots I found in the closet.  Nothing fit.  (I felt like the Ugly Stepsister in Gregory Maguire's terrific book.)  I read Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear on my Nook, a novel I could dive into at the end of the day, regardless of the distractions. My pop fiction vacation.  And when I needed a break from that, I turned to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.


I bicycled to the new old age facility. Dog walkers tried to keep me off a bicycle path.  Wow.  They told me it was a nature path and that I was not allowed.  Big dogs, too.  BLOCKING the trail.  This would never happen in my city, where walkers and bicyclists roam the trails.  But I was able to use the damn trail later in the day, and thank goodness there are many bicyclists in this town.   I was not the only bicyclist out there in the 30-degree weather.  


The OPH is on the edge of town.  Why, I wonder?  So they can have the true suburban experience?  The Relative claims that no one will visit her because it's so far out of town.  It's only three miles, but it's true that most of her friends can no longer drive. I urged her to invite a few friends to a bridge party--we could easily set up a card table in her apartment--and my husband could pick them up.  But she doesn't like the idea.  She thinks this is like a hospital setting, and people should drop in.  She thinks she's going home, but the OPH "broker"-relative has talked of selling her house.  The tape measure is on the counter.  All I can do is be slightly subversive on the side.


These McDonald's-style places for the aged, in demand and big business, have a pretty facade to relieve our minds. Actually they're more like McRed Lobster crossed with Panera.  Solid, new, and unobtrusive.  A white winding stairway that no one uses since many are on canes or walkers. The place has a beautiful lounge, with a fireplace, and many comfortable chairs and couches.  It is like a coffeehouse without coffee.  There's music sometimes at night.  There is a dining room, where in theory people go to eat, though in reality some skip meals.  There is a room where people play cards, a computer room/library (I wildly hoped there would be a computer so I could check email, but no chance of that), a gym, a beauty salon, and a chapel.  It's very showy in the front lounges, less so in the dining room and apartments, and of course they have the services like garbage pick-up, laundry, etc.  So people feel comfortable about parking their relatives.


There are glitches.  She isn't getting her newspaper.  She didn't know there was a bus service.  She didn't know when her doctors' appointments were, though she gets free rides to the doctor apparently.  She had no stationery, envelopes, or stamps.  She did not know where the office was or have a phone number to contact them in case she needed anything.  She is receiving bills that worry her. She does wear a button around her neck so she can contact someone in an emergency.  She's only been there a few weeks and doesn't really care for playing cards every afternoon.  "Sometimes they need an extra for rummy," as she says, but bridge is her game.  

She needs more orientation.  Nobody lives in her town, not her "broker," as I call him,  nor any of her relatives.  And I'm not sure she shouldn't have been moved to one of OUR towns.  If she can't be at home, does the city matter? 

Well, I'm back home and am glad to be.  I do what I can, but I CAN'T move there.  I don't want to stay in a hotel, but that's obviously next.  The isolation is terrible in her house.  I'm used to having a computer, phone, and other accoutrements.  I've never had a reason for a cell phone, but I couldn't even call my husband in the evening.   Cell phone service is expensive, I don't need the fun features, but I now see why people have all that crap on their phones.  I couldn't check the internet. I couldn't even find out about buses the night of the snow because I didn't have internet access.  And I have the lowest-end Nook, the one that doesn't give you internet access except at home, because why pay $30 or $40 extra?  Fortunately I was able to get around as usual. Walk, bicycle:  you'll get there.

By the way, James Franco was a guest star on General Hospital, the best of the Relative's shows.  We kept trying to spot him, but I confess we haven't seen 127 Hours and didn't know his work.  We knew he was one of the handsome dark-haired men.  Which one?  Dante the policeman?  The ponytailed boyfriend of a young woman? (He quoted "In Memoriam.") Then at the very end, "Franco," an artist and mobster, appeared.  It was he!  It had to be.  The relative and I were thrilled.  He is very, very wicked, though.


The plot is convoluted.  A bride was blown up with a car bomb.  We couldn't believe it.  


"I'm wondering if she's really dead," the relative said.
"Is Sonny responsible?"  I wondered. "But they seemed so in love."

We were expecting the worst because it's a soap.

No, it was Franco!  He was scary.  

Did you know James Franco has written a book?

The Ultimate Bookstore Diet & Pop Fiction Vacation

I went on a diet.  I lost 10 pounds.  Then I lost five more pounds. Fifteen pounds! Then I gained five pounds back.  I didn't actually GAIN weight, since I'm still 10 pounds lighter than I was last summer.  So I've lost 10 pounds.   

I went on a bookstore diet.  I cut up a credit card and swore I would not buy books for ten months.  At a bookstore I considered Michael Frayn's My Father's Fortune, Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters, and Michelle Moran's Madame Tussaud:  A Novel of the Revolution.  

The odd thing is I find I don't really care if I'm fat or thin but I do like to buy books.
 
So last night I came up with the ultimate diet...the diet I know will work for me...because for every pound I lose I WILL buy a book!
 
"I'll go on a diet if you buy me a book," I said nonchalantly.
 
Now what husband doesn't prefer a svelte wife to a cozy one?  He immediately agreed.  He was ready to hop in the car and drive to a bookstore and buy me a book.  But then I explained the beauty of the plan.

 "I can download it onto my Nook."

"Really?  You don't prefer the hard copy?"

"The cover is sort of embarrassing."

It's not really embarrassing.  It's sort of pretty.  But the truth of the matter is I don't want to be seen with a book that screams The Clan of the Cave Bear.

Crown has reissued Jean Auel's entire Earth's Children series (novels set in prehistoric times) to prepare us for the release of her latest book, The Land of the Painted Cave, in the spring.

In the '80s I stumbled upon three of these books, read them, and then lost track. I found them utterly absorbing but didn't realize more had been published.  The bookstores have been pushing Auel online again this winter, but, to tell the truth, if I hadn't seen the attractive display of paperbacks at B&N I would not have considered them.

On the other hand, they are perfect for my Pop Fiction Vacation.  Yes, starting today I am reading a LOT of pop fiction.  Auel's prehistoric novels about Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl who, after an earthquake, is adopted by a Neanderthal clan, are wonderfully and skillfully told.  You know the people who read all the Twilight books to get ready for a new one?  Well, I'm the Auel person doing the same thing.

I love the delineation of the character, Ayla, her resilience and strength that allow her to survive after an earthquake, and the intelligence and kindness of the two Neanderthals who adopt her,  a medicine woman, Iza, and the clan magician, Kreb.  There are also details about gathering herbs, making weapons, the difficulty of mathematics for a Neanderthal, and Ayla's Cro-Magnon quickness and daring to rebel.  Fascinating!

I hope I'll enjoy all of them.  I'll let you know.  I'm still on the first book.

Bloggers & Bookstore Affiliates

Chris Cleave, a novelist and Guardian writer, says that he received the worst review of his life from a blogger.  The mysterious unnamed blogger didn't show up for a recent lunch for nine writers and nine of the UK's most popular bloggers.  In fact, only four bloggers showed up for this lunch sponsored by Cleave's publisher.  Very odd.

Cleave says he thinks book reviewers and book bloggers are equally powerful and he doesn't prefer one to the other. He enjoyed chatting with Farm Lane Books, a blogger I confess I don't know.  But he humorously insists that some blogs are big business these days, receiving "a 6% kickback off Amazon when you click through on one of their links. I'm just saying." And, he goes on cattily, some bloggers receive tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, so they're NOT strictly the not-for-profit operations you'd imagine.  

His facetious remarks about the Amazon Associates program gave me pause.  I'm vaguely aware of bookstore affiliate programs:  Amazon Associates, the Book Depository Affiliates, & Barnes & Noble Affiliates.   The Am/Ass gadget appears in the sidebar of my draft blogger page.  The truth is I CAN'T profit from it because I can't be bothered to use it. 

I don't pay much attention to these links.  Well, perhaps I've noticed them, but I never click on the book image links at blogs.  If I want to buy a book, I note it in a notebook and then go to Amazon afterwards.  Amazon has the best website, so even when I don't buy, I often read up on books there.  

Do affiliates compromise more in their reviews?  I'd have to analyze reviews and note stats and...  Heavens!  It's not Bloggergate.  But I just clicked on some blogs on my blogroll and am amazed to find so many enrolled in affiliate programs, among them A Common Reader, A Work in Progress, Dovegreyreader, Nonsuch Books, Random Jottings, and The Literary Stew.

A few of these bloggers are really about PR.  They say they write only about books they like.  I used to suspect some of being marketing firms.  And that doesn't mean I don't enjoy them.  I DO.  Only not always for their book reviews.  They're TOO nice, and that means they're unreliable.


But quite a number on my blogroll are NOT enrolled in these programs.  I tend to respect their judgment, too. I must admit I feel relieved I'm not the only one not in business.  There's something about making money off a blog that doesn't SEEM right to me. I never thought about it, of course, before I read Cleave's Guardian piece, though.  


I read blogs for many reasons.  I like Dovegreyreader, Stuck in a Book, and Random Jottings for notes on English life-styles as much as reviews, Ellen and Jim Have a Blog Two for her academic fairness and intelligent criticism, The Fiction Desk for elegant writing, and A Work in Progress for the midwestern perspective on pop and literary novels. 

The truth is I'm much more interested in fair reviews than nice reviews.  Vintage Reading, an honorable, shrewd reviewer, didn't like Cathleen Schine's The Three Weissmans of Westport, but I was able to deduce that I might enjoy it, and I did.  A reviewer's opinion is only part of it, and doesn't dictate what I read.


My blog sketches & reviews help me remember my life:  books, bicycling, weather. Perhaps I would be nicer if I remembered that writers sometimes stop by.  But I honestly don't think about that much. 


And I'm not bothering to put links by the bloggers' names in this post; you'll have to go to my blogroll.  There are simply too many potential links in this post...

Bibliobits: If I Formed a Publishing Co., Dodie Smith's The New Moon with the Old, & Jo Walton's Among Others

Dodie Smith.  If I indulged the sudden impulse to become a publisher and reissue old books, I would reprint Dodie Smith's The New Moon with the Old. 

You all know Dodie Smith.  She is the world-famous author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I bought a copy of her adult novel, I Capture the Castle, for 25 cents at Good Will when I was 14 and subsequently carried it everywhere in a string bag which matched my fey green embroidered dress.

A few years ago I set out to collect all of Smith's novels.  (I wonder if I've paid them off yet. I recently cut up a credit card which was out of control.) The New Moon with the Old is my favorite.  On March 17, 2009, I blogged:  "This 1963 pop masterpiece has somehow fallen below the critical radar, but this witty, elegant novel is even more engaging than the classic, I Capture the Castle."

I am rereading The New Moon with the Old.  It is a fairy tale about work, a subject that fascinates me.  Smith, a playwright, has a somewhat artificial dramatic style that also appeals to me.  The novel begins with Jane Minton, the new secretary-housekeeper at Dome House, the country house of her charming London employer, Rupert Carrington.  A few days after she arrives, he flees the country guilty of financial misdeeds.   The novel is the story of what happens to Jane and the four Carrington children afterwards, when all must fend for themselves.  

Smith divides the novel into five books, "Jane," "Merry," "Drew," "Clare," and "Richard." Jane takes a job at a school to help support the household.  The two maids do the same:  they take a job at an inn to help out.  Oddly, the children, ages 14-24, find jobs in reverse chronological order.  Fourteen-year-old Merry, a talented actress, runs away and finds a job directing an aristocratic family's amateur theatricals.  Nineteen-year-old  Drew, an aspiring novelist writing a book about the Edwardians, becomes a companion to a 70-year-old woman who is slavishly trapped in an Edwardian life-style.  Clare, 21, who wants to be "a king's mistress" (the family joke and because of her reading of many Dumas novels), becomes a companion to an ex-king whose son falls in love with her.  As for Richard...

Well, I haven't gotten that far and I don't remember much about Richard.  He's the dull one. 

Anyway, one thing that strikes me this time is the isolation of Drew in his Edwardian "time machine."  His employer, Miss Whitecliff, whose life was directed by her ancient domineering mother until the matriarch died a few years ago, cannot make the simplest decisions, cannot even write a grocery list, and was slowly starving, along with her two dependent maids, until Drew came along, contacted her lawyer, and arranged modern life, bringing in food, newspapers, a wireless, central heating, and a refrigerator.


The village appears quaint and completely antique to him until he updates the house.  Then modernity abounds. Suddenly he realizes the house had misled him.  He is grateful to find himself back in the 20th century. He needs contact.

And, for Trivial Pursuit Night on The New Moon with the Old, you'll want to know that Clare's favorite Dumas book is Louise de la Vallicre.

Jo Walton's Among Others.  I bought this novel by chance at B&N because the premise reminded me of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, a literary novel about magic and literature.  According to a blurb by Suzy McKee Charnas, "This is a love letter, laced with sharp-edged anguish and triumph, from within the SF/F genres.  Among Others shows just how such books are not only entertaining stories but social lifelines."

Doesn't this sound like my kind of thing?  I love SF and fantasy.

The narrator, 15-year-old Morwenna Phelps, keeps a diary at boarding school, in which she records not only encounters with fairies, ghosts, and various odd students, but her impressions of the science fiction and fantasy novels she inhales.  Morwenna understands the gravitas of reading and writes very well about books.  In fact, she spends more time writing about books than people.  Dramatic events include getting a library card at the village library, befriending the school librarian, and joining a science fiction book club.  It is a bit Y.A.-ish in its weaker parts, though it is marketed in the adult SF section and mostly deserves this designation. Perhaps we can blame the failings on Twitterish editors:  great beginnings, award-winning writing, then floundering because no one reads beyond 140 characters.  I will finish, this, though, because Walton is clearly a superior writer and I love the premise for this novel. 

Anorexia in Old Age and Isolation at the Relative's House

The historic Hamburg Inn. 

A few weeks ago the Relative was in the hospital. It was an hour's trek to the hospital through an unplowed foot of blizzard snow.  The days were both full and depressing.  I tracked the Relative's vital signs in a notebook, watched her favorite TV shows with her, recorded conversations with nurses, and pushed her IV during walks. 

The dietitian was direct.  She told her,  "You've lost a lot of weight this year and eating is the main thing standing between you and going home."

The Relative has developed a contempt for food. She went from a size large to a petite-petite in a year.  Anorexia in old age?  She didn't bother to talk to the dietitian.

According to a 2001 article in the Guardian:  "Though anorexia nervosa is most commonly associated with teenage girls and young women, the latest research shows that it is as likely to occur in the elderly - and that eating disorders in the elderly are more deadly, accounting for 78% of all anorexia deaths."

It may be anorexia.  I fleetingly thought of it at the time, yet no one suggested it. This may be because of widespread ignorance of psychiatric problems, the general lack of psychiatric training among physicians (an average of two weeks in a four-year residency) and nurses, and separation between the hospital and its psychiatric ward. 
 
I was there mainly to make sure she ate a little.  I spoon-fed her some small bites of vanilla pudding until she defensively began to use utensils again. "Can't I just feed myself?"  The nurses were convinced she was mentally incompetent and had forgotten how to use a fork.   I tempted her with pie from the cafeteria--she ate the whole piece with a fork--and a hamburger from Hamburg Inn--she ate it with her hands.

At the end of the day I was eager to go home.  I collapsed on the couch.  I was eerily isolated from the world.  The newspaper had been stopped at her house, there was no mail, no internet access, the street was still unplowed, there were only 20 books in the house, and the TV dominated the living room. I had to bring in food from the outside world because she obviously had not been eating for some time.

It's odd to stay in a TV-oriented house.  What was happening in the world?  I had no information except from the TV.  The blizzard was the only local news.  I had investigated and experienced the weather personally and didn't need the "Road Warrior" reports.  How I missed print and the internet.

Yet there must have been 50 cable channels.  Change the channel and you get V, The Good Wife, old movies, reruns of The Sopranos, or the Lifetime channel.  Where's the news?  I didn't have the faintest idea.


I looked at the relative's books.  I was desperate for something to read and hoped to learn more about her.  Books are simply not her thing, though.  There were:

1. Barry Paris's biography of Audrey Hepburn.  I wouldn't have minded reading that.  But Audrey weighed 103 at tops and I'm afraid the Relative weighs less now.

2.  Two copies of Gone with the Wind.  Scarlett wore a corset!


3.    The Torch is Passed.  A book about John F. Kennedy published in 1964.  Did the Relative order this through an ad in the paper?  

4.  Several books by Danielle Steele.  Romances about thin people, I'm assuming.

5.  Gladys Taber's The Book of Stillmeadow.  She was a magazine writer who wrote several books and this is the story of a year at her country house.  I left this during a previous visit and forgot to bring it home again this time.   I haven't read Taber, so can't say if it's good or not.


I found some old photo albums and "read" those instead.  And of course I had brought some books from home.

Addendum:  Now the Relative is out of the hospital but eating is still a problem.  She is in a new place, found by another closer relative, and weasels out of going to the cafeteria for meals.   It may really be anorexia.  Apparently large numbers of people in assisted living refuse to eat. Some get very depressed.  Some die of starvation.  Doctors don't often diagnose anorexia in old age.  They consider the loss of appetite normal.


Loss of appetite is one thing; refusal to eat is another.