Reading in 2022 - Jill Reads in Snatches

Okay, there are too many books in front of me to tell you what I am currently reading. There's the one entitled Kate Chase and William Sprague: Gender and Politics in a Civil War Marriage. There's the much more lightweight Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime which actually has chapters amenable to being read in snatches. There's a pile with Martha Wells' Network Effect which I've been meaning to read for the past year as it was a 2020 Christmas gift from my son. And I have the lovely Folio editions of Melmoth the Wanderer and The Phantom of the Opera. Those are a true tactile and visual pleasure. There are great quantities of ebooks available on my Kindle.

But it's New Year's Day and that means no work today; I am going to try to see if I remember how to do a DNBR day. Is it possible for me to read something w/o feeling that I should be taking notes on it or analyzing it? (Less of a rhetorical question than you might think....a result of the pandemic and my fog brain.)

For the sake of maintaining some degree of humor about the situation, I will tell you that I had actually come up with two other titles for this thread. (1) Ruminated, Plotted and Set Down which is a quote from Shakespeare and supposedly reflective of me chewing over and really thinking about my reading. And then the other one (2) being Conspicuous Display which ties into the overflow of books sitting in piles around me, none of which I've actually read or otherwise digested. But the title of the thread above actually is the truth. Amidst the pandemic, I've read in brief snatches and can barely recall what I have read or why anyone else might be interested in why its worthwhile picking it up.

*murfle*

Happy New Year to all here in the Pub.

Oh, and as a post-script to pgmcc, I watched Mark Gatiss' very effective adaptation of the M.R. James short story of The Mezzotint and even in dreary morning daylight, it was a completely unsettling experience. I don't know whether to blame Gatiss or James for that.

>1 jillmwo: Happy New Thread, and here's to a lot of satisfying reading in 2022, my friend!

May your reading bring you joy this year (well, it definitely will if you read Network Effect...)

Happy reading in 2022!

Your "snatches" hit me with enough bullets. I'd hate to see what happened if you ever really tried. ;)

It's good to greet a new year with a book in hand. Wishing you the best of the best.

Happy new year! I hope it will bring you lots of good books!

Erle Stanley Gardner understood the concept of building a brand, a franchise in the modern sense. He identified and applied a specific set of practices in developing what he called his "Fiction Factory". He wanted to make his living through writing rather than from the law; he wanted more flexibility in his life style so that he could go fishing or camping. I know this from reading Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner. Somehow the book makes Gardner's approach to his work of writing for pulps as well as higher class publications sound admirable. To his credit, the man had a real interest in learning as much as he could about how the process worked -- what readers really wanted, the pacing, the character relationships, etc. And his prose remains readable in much the same way that Christie’s has.

One of the interesting observations from this book (and the writers had access to Gardner’s working papers held by the Harry Ransom Center at the Univ of Texas) was the following:

Gardner started with an incidental mystery which intrigued both his detective and the reader and then – after the reader was acquainted with the characters and their conflicts – led to the murder.

You could say the same thing about Christie.

Equally interesting (because I never had been aware) were these points:

“Della Street brought Perry Mason most of his mysteries, although he found some on his own while driving, reading the newspaper, and engaging in other mundane activities.”

“In plotting, Gardner approached his story from the viewpoint of the murderer; in writing he presented the resulting sequence of events from the viewpoint of the detective.”

I had said last month that my husband had asked for this book as a Christmas gift but that I was so impatient to read it myself that I bought a Kindle edition in order to satisfy my curiosity. I feel as if I need to revisit it again once I’ve read one or two of the full length novels. I did read a novella length story, The Case of the Crimson Kiss (to compare it with the TV episode) but I’m also sampling one or two full length novels as well to see if I can pick up on some of what they’ve laid out as Gardner’s techniques. I have the one about the Terrified Typist as well as the one about the Borrowed Brunette. Because I'm familiar with the two TV episodes, I can skim quickly thru either. Gardner didn’t believe in either big words or complex sentences – he knew some portion of the audience was going to want to read something without much in the way of speed bumps. (Maybe I should stop looking down my nose at modern-day authors who have learned from Gardner's Fiction Factory and who can churn out content the way Gardner did.)

>2 jillmwo: I enjoyed it too. My only criticism would be the ending. He did not have to create an image of the creature. I prefer the Hitchcock approach of letting the viewer's imagination create the image of the "thing". That way it is much more horrifying.

I must read the story again. It is my favourite James story, but then again, it is some years since I read them all. I do remember enjoying every single story.

>9 jillmwo:
I had a big response typed in for this post and lost it. I must have hit the wrong key. Having quieted my disappointment over the intervening time I am now going to attempt a rewrite.

You hit me with this book bullet in your previous thread. At that time I obtained the Kindle version.

Your markspersonship was so successful for the following reasons.

1. Anything to do with Perry Mason grabs my attention. Growing up in the 1960s Perry Mason was a staple weekly programme in our house. You might say I grew up with Perry Mason in the house. So, nostalgia is the one word reason.

2. Over the holidays I noticed Perry Mason shows are being re-run on a channel here. That brought back more nostalgia. Do not believe those people who say nostalgia is not what it used to be.

3. Your descriptions of the book's content play to my interest in stories and their structures, their construction and how they affect the reader. I have read two books in recent years on story structure and how stories work. These are:

Into The Woods by John Yorke, former television commissioning editor, producer, scriptwriter and Head of BBC Drama. The book presented his hypothesis that all stories, even three act plays, conform to a five act structure. He does not affirm this as a rule, but demonstrates it with well known films and novels. He does mention that he has never found a story that did not follow this structure.

Having read Yorke's book I have found myself seeing the structure in the books I have been reading, including my current read, Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1864.

The other book on stories was, The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. He takes a look at storytelling from a psychological angle and explains how stories affect us emotionally and how they play to our psychological make-up. This was a fascinating book.

Storr references Yorke's book and included it, along with The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, as the only books on story structure worth reading. Booker's book has been on my shelf for some time but its size has prevented my taking it up to read before now.

So, my third point for Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner, is my interest in story structure, construction and story impact on the reader. Your posts leave me feeling this book will work very well with my other books on story structure, construction and story impact on the reader. I have a strong sense that once I have started reading this on the Kindle I might be tempted to buy a physical copy to keep with my growing set of excellent books on stories.

Thank you for bringing this book to my attention.

E.T.A. I have just checked the pricing for the hardback and paperback editions; £84.95 and £70.24 respectively. Perhaps I will not be getting a physical copy.

>10 pgmcc: Oh, Hitchcock got that right. I remember reading Stephen King's It and finding it terrifying just because IT had no form--and then in the climax he gave it a form, and right there, all the scariness melted away for me.

>11 pgmcc: I find this topic (what is "story" and why do human brains crave it) fascinating as well. Have you explored Lisa Cron's book on brain science and storytelling? I've taken workshops with her, and her work is very intriguing.

>10 pgmcc: and >12 Marissa_Doyle: I think what becomes interesting is how Gardner views the practical craft of creation and how he viewed the actual business of his occupation and conditions in the marketplace. Gardner got his start in the pulps and worked out a formula over the course of the allotted time he'd given himself to make his writing work. Part of what was involved was learning to listen to his editors but a lot of it was Gardner's focus on what readers wanted and what would sell. He kept honing things down. His prose may be basic and downright pedestrian but it is tuned to the reader looking for entertainment. He doesn't waste the reader's time.

He's interesting to learn from; he has a lovely 10-step ladder for establishing what sets the murder in motion. He sets up logic puzzles (but nothing near as elaborate as some of Christie's. I'm thinking in particular of the Rube Goldberg crime she concocted for Hercule Poirot's Christmas but his puzzles are more oriented in navigating the labyrinth of police procedure and legal machinations. And, if the television versions are any indication, the narratives are all straight chronological in their unfolding. Point A to Point B and ultimately to Point C. No bouncing back and forth throughout between what's happening in the here-and-now and what happened way back in time. That's a very specific choice of narrative flow (and again, one that is more efficient for a reader who may simply want to be told a story).

Gardner was a smart and focused professional (as writers have to be, if they're going to live by their writing). I think it's interesting to consider how they do what they. (Particularly as I don't think I can do what fiction writers do. It's very complex and my brain hasn't been trained to plot things out that way.)

>13 jillmwo: He doesn’t waste the reader’s time.: would that more authors would learn that lesson.

>12 Marissa_Doyle:
I have not read anything by Lisa Cron. I see four books credited to her. Is Wired for Story the one you are referring to?

>15 pgmcc: That's her first, IIRC, so a good place to start.

I want to pick up again on the discussion of narrative structure. In part because my husband and I have been chatting off and on about it in the context of a television show. We have watched both existing episodes of The Book of Boba Fett. The technique used to present Boba Fett has been alternating between flashbacks to his past when he held no power and the “current” time period when he is the head of Mos Eisley. (Oh, and no worries, I’m not doing any spoilers.) At any rate, my husband was grousing about why he felt it was inadequate entertainment. Last night he thought the problem was that the producers were simply borrowing too obviously from all the tropes found in the John Carter books, but then this morning he shifted his view and claimed that instead the problem was that they were setting up Boba Fett (a bounty hunter when we initially met him in the SW universe) instead as Lawrence of Arabia. He didn’t think the back-and-forth between the past and the present situations gave the viewer enough “ummph” to move forward with the character.

To which I as a loving wife responded by wondering if his perceptions of the show were quite fair – he saw it as having an agenda of presenting issues of imperialism, colonialism, with a white male as saving various tribal peoples when we’d only seen two episodes. How can one fairly critique a serialized narrative when you haven’t seen yet where it was headed. He didn’t know what the story-tellers thought they were doing or of the full story they hoped to present. Lots of speculation was possible, but he didn’t really know. But my husband felt he was pretty sure he did know.

This brings us back to the question of whether you finish a book you find boring in the hopes of it getting better or if you chuck it away and go find something else. My personal philosophy is that you go ahead and finish it, just because you might be wrong about what the author is doing or hopes to do; my husband’s approach is more to put it aside. The question is where does the author put the signposts for the reader in his or her narrative structure so that the reader can get a sense of the narrative’s direction.

Genres and sub-genres kind of help us with the navigation needed. I know what I’m getting into when I settle in with a Perry Mason. Whether book or tv episode, he’s the hero and he’s going to get his client off and all will be neat and tidy at the end, if a bit suspenseful in the middle. Perry Mason’s been around for a while and the “brand” is well-known. In the context of Boba Fett, less is known. Is Boba Fett SUPPOSED to be the hero? (We thought he was a bounty hunter and therefore “scum” as one of the imperial officers called him.) I can’t be sure of what the intent is in the story and the powers-behind-the-curtain hope that will induce me to give them money and/or attention as I wait for a big reveal.

Understanding the narrative structure helps us to know when we might expect the big reveal and therefore whether we can be sure giving our time and attention to the storyteller will be worthwhile. That's why reading Melmoth the Wanderer is somewhat challenging. Why is the author taking me back in time and why are there stories nested within stories? What can I expect to get at the end? What's the pay-off going to be? I suspect it won't be a tidy one.

(I haven’t got a Ph.D. in literature, but that’s what I as a reader think.)

Edited to add a postscript: My husband posted his succinct commentary on Boba Fett on his blog over at: https://myretirementdiary.blogspot.com/2022/01/boba-feckless.html

>17 jillmwo:
Personally I find it very difficult to abandon a book, even one I an not enjoying, because I am nagged by doubts as to whether I have correctly guessed the author's intent. The only reasons that I tend to actually abandon books are (i) written so badly that they are painful to struggle through (ii) extreme content (detailed torture, child sex etc.) (iii) a historical setting that is so inaccurate that what the author intends has clearly parted company with its execution or (iv) total and utter generic blandness.

However I find that the novels that I enjoy most do not fit neatly into genre categories, and those that are written to the label tend to be a little bland. Sov that is not a solution that works for me.

As to Bobba Fett: he is a bounty hunter, but he was raised as a Mandalorian. They are bounty hunters, but with an extremely strong moral and religious code. They take bounties - which means that their word is their bond and you can trust ones to carry out whatever they have said that they will do. But that does not mean that they will choose to accept ANY contract (although some might). Since the invasion of Mandalore by the empire, there is an argument for setting Mandalorians as the previous set of "heroic resistance".

I know this partially from having watched The Mandalorian, but somewhat more from having played a Mandalorian in the MMORG, The Old Republic (which actually does a fair job of showing the good and bad side of various cultures in the Star Wars universe).

And that, I suspect, is the root of the problem. I am not a Star Wars aficionado. I have nor even seen all the main films (just the original trilogy when they first came out, plus The Phantom Menace). But in the forty odd years since the first film, there have been many additions to the universe, in many media.

There were many, many books, that were considered canon - until Disney took over the franchise, and declared that they were not. There were cartoons, computer games, a table-top RPG, a MMORG...and now the new Disney-authorised novels. And each one adds more "backstory". And there are many, many different writers involved, who do not necessarily share identical conceptions. This is the old shared universe problem writ large.

Only a real geek will have covered ALL this material. But which bits a given person has encountered will depends on their age, and preferred media.

So although Bobba Fett was originally a minor character in the original trilogy of films, there already exists a large body of secondary material about him and his people. How much of that Disney accepts, and how much they have chosen to ignore is also unclear.

My impression is that the problem with the series you are currently watching is that this is not a new character's story. Much of the audience was already have a firm impression about him. But what impression that is will depend on which sources that have encountered. And that is a very odd base on which to try to build.

>17 jillmwo: I'm seeing many friends unimpressed with the Boba Fett show. I haven't tried it myself and am in no hurry. In our house the "rule" on new TV shows is to give it 3 episodes. If you don't like it by then, then drop it. It's rare we go against this though if something is horrid enough we'll drop it after only one or two episodes.

This rule kicked in for the Wheel of Time series for us. We weren't enjoying the show by the third episode and dropped it. I had some nagging doubts because it's WoT, so looked up spoilers for the rest of the series as it released and realized we made the right decision. That show just wasn't for us. Life's too short to watch bad TV! Or read bad books though I have a much harder time dropping a book I'm not enjoying ;)

>17 jillmwo:
Jill, did you deliberately set a trap for me with your post? Did you know that I was going to read that and have to jump in at the deep end? If so, well done. I am looking forward to engaging in this discussion.

By the way, in the interests of full disclosure, my last educational encounter on English literature was when I was 16 years old. It was my last class before sitting my Ordinary Level state exams. I passed my English Language, but failed my English Literature. So, any views I make here are the ramblings of a reader with literally no formal education on literature in the past forty-eight years, and whose last such encounter resulted in being identified by the state examining board as a failure.

Now, to address some of your points, or at least the points I took from your post.

This brings us back to the question of whether you finish a book you find boring in the hopes of it getting better or if you chuck it away and go find something else.

I think this involves two aspects of a book. The story and the quality of the author’s writing, and by writing I do not mean only their grammar, spelling and other mechanical elements of the written word, but also their ability to capture the reader’s interest and to hold it.

If the story is fascinating and intriguing, the reader may be willing to put up with some very bad writing to find out what happens. I can see argument for continuing with a book if the reader has been hooked by the story and I have found myself soldiering on in such circumstances before. On the other hand, if they are not interested in the story what is the point of going on. If they are not interested in the story, is it because it is a boring story or is it because the author is so bad they have hidden a good story behind a patina of poor writing.

In relation to keeping going in the hope that things will improve, I must present my personal experience. If you have already read about how I developed a hatred for Stephen Donaldson’s works and learnt a lesson about not wasting my life on books I was not enjoying, then you can skip on to the next topic.

I was late in life when I first read Lord of the Rings; I might have been twenty-one or twenty-two. Entering my dotage, you might say.

Well, Lord of the Rings blew me away. I really enjoyed it and it prompted me to look for other Fantasy novels so that I could repeat the experience.

I found Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson. It was fantasy. It looked good. It had a nice cover.

I jumped right in. It might have suffered from being read so soon after my reading of the masterful Lord of the Rings. I may have had a heightened expectation that it could not meet. Or it could be a crap book.

The main character suffered from leprosy and when he passed into another world he was relieved of the constrains and problems of his illness. Having read this book I think Donaldson gave his character leprosy simply to get a sympathy vote. Anyway, I started reading the book and when the character entered the other world there was a an evil that forced plants to grow rapidly and to suffer with the strain. There was never any indication of what was behind this evil and Lord Foul was never really shown as a purposeful being in any respect. He was just there to be evil.

I was not enjoying the story, but I thought, “It must get better. I am obviously missing something. Something will happen and it will become interesting.”

It did not, but then again, it was only the first book in a trilogy. The next books would be better.

Yes, I read the full trilogy and it did not get better. The main character was loathsome and the trilogy was basically a set up to have him commit incest with his daughter.

Then they brought out a follow-on trilogy. I knew that had to improve on the first three books.

I read the second trilogy.

The second trilogy was basically a set up to have him commit incest with his granddaughter, the daughter resulting from his initial incest with his daughter.

After reading those six books, wasting hours of my time on a story I was not enjoying and that never got any better, I decided I would never waste my time reading a book I was not enjoying and that I was simply reading in the vague hope that it would get any better.

Where the story is going.

As someone who is constantly thinking ahead when reading a novel and trying to work out where the author is taking me, and more often than not getting it wrong, I am not too worried about where the story takes me as long as the author makes it an interesting journey.

When I get to the end of a novel I can often look back and see where the author has signalled the end, but I can also see where they have included misinformation that indicates a different end. I remember Christopher Priest, author of many great stories including The Prestige, The Separation, and The Inverted World, giving a talk at the 2005 WorldCon in Glasgow about how his job, and the job of every fiction author, was misdirection. The Prestige was his latest book at the time and the film of the book was in production with his being consulted by the producers and the director. He made the point that he found writing a novel about a magician very enjoyable and discussed how his job was basically the job of an illusionist as he was constantly trying to open possible options in his stories that the readers might follow, but he was not revealing the path he was following until near the end of the tale.

By the way, Christopher Priest said he was very pleased with how the film was being made. What he did not tell us was that the story in the film differs significantly from the story in the book. It has the same premise, but they changed enough things to make it something totally separate from the book and enjoyable in its own right.

So, I would not worry about not knowing where the story is going as long as it is going somewhere. I would not worry that the author has not given me clear signposts as to where it is going. In fact, if I was getting too much direction I would be disappointed. Part of reading a novel is being surprised by what happens. If I have guessed correctly where the story is going I can be a little smug and pat myself on the back for being such a clever little boy, but then I will have been deprived of the pleasure of surprise when a plot takes an unexpected turn and brings me to pastures new and an entirely different view of the world.

Bottom line, I would not abandon reading a book simply because I could not fathom were it is going.

That's why reading Melmoth the Wanderer is somewhat challenging.

The structure of Melmoth the Wanderer is indeed convolute, peculiar, and definitely not linear. As you might guess, the structure of the novel has been the subject of study in itself. At the symposium on Melmoth the Wanderer there was a paper on the labyrinths in the story. The researcher giving her paper had not limited herself simply to the physical labyrinths, tunnels and cellars described in the story, but also discussed the labyrinthine structure of the book and how it twisted through time and space as if there were tunnels through the Earth and through time that could be traversed by Melmoth.

If I were to make a single criticism about Melmoth the Wanderer it would be that Maturin, once he made a point with a given scene, often went on to make the same point with another scene.

I do not want to give anything away, but for me the ultimate payback in the story is the experience of Melmoth himself rather than that of his victims.

I have mentioned elsewhere that I gained a lot more from the book than people not familiar with the socio-political history of Ireland and Ireland’s relationship with England at the time, or with Maturin’s own circumstances would get. The fact that there is a significant body of research going on in universities across the world on this one book indicates that I am not the only one intrigued by the story and its context. The October symposium had people from Belgium talking about the many allusions to Shakespeare in Melmoth the Wanderer; a lady from the USA spoke on 'The Anxiety of Motherhood in Melmoth the Wanderer'; an academic from Exeter in England, spoke about the impact of Maturin’s work on Church of Ireland politics at the time, etc…

I found the ending of the book rewarding, and very thought provoking. It had me looking back at all the intricacies of the stories and reassessing them in the context of the ending.

The book is a slog to get through in many ways. Without knowing Maturin’s circumstances, and his fraught relationship with his superiors in The Church of Ireland, one would not necessarily see how he was poking at them under the veil of fiction, and also presenting a fiercely anti-Rome stance to protect his employment as a curate in the church.

If you are finding Melmoth the Wanderer too much of a slog, abandon it. As I have stated before, it has many aspects that I find fascinating from a socio-political viewpoint because of where I have grown up and currently live. The wealth of external factors that I benefit from will be magnifying my interest in the book and rewarding me in ways others will not necessarily enjoy.

>18 -pilgrim-:
...I find that the novels that I enjoy most do not fit neatly into genre categories...

Books that span genre, or defy genre, are the ones I like best. I think that is why I like Nick Harkaway's books so much.

Quote From Ngaio Marsh's Died in the Wool

The sound increased in volume. Individual bleatings, persistent and almost human, separated out from the multiple drone. A long galvanized iron shed appeared, flanked with drafting yards, beyond which lay a paddock so full of sheep that at a distance it looked like a shifting greyish lake. The sheep were driven up to the yards by men and dogs: the men yelled and the dogs barked remorselessly and without rhythm.

Those two sentences manage to appeal to all the senses.

>20 pgmcc: "Well, Lord of the Rings blew me away. I really enjoyed it and it prompted me to look for other Fantasy novels so that I could repeat the experience."

I had a similar experience with LOTR (though mine occurred at about age 14). The book I picked up was, alas, The Sword of Shannara. I toughed it out as well, but it was hurled across the room when I finished it. After having learnt that lesson, I didn't make it past about page 30 of Lord Foul's Bane. I believe it was Dorothy Parker who commented in a book review, “This is not a novel to be lightly tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force.”

>23 Marissa_Doyle: Lord Foul's Bane had the same effect on me, and I probably made it about the same distance into it as you did. I hated it so much I didn't even try to pass it on to anyone else - it and the two sequels which I had already acquired (probably second-hand, thank goodness) went straight in the garbage. Never made it far into the Shannara books either.

>23 Marissa_Doyle: & >24 tardis:
My copies ended up in the bin too.

I think I made it through the second book of that Donaldson series before I gave up. I'm so glad I never make it to the incest bits!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

>23 Marissa_Doyle: Sword of Shannara, isn't a great fantasy book, but I've always liked the characters, particularly Hendel and Balinor. However, Elfstones of Shannara and Wishsong of Shannara are great books, in my opinion, I thought in those cases Brooks transcended the 'just like LOTR' feel in the first book and did something on his own that was excellent.

My experience with the Donaldson books was different, I think it depends on whether you can get past Thomas Covenant being a very despicable anti-hero.

On my birthday weekend, I am afraid I fulfilled one of my elder sister’s predictions of my future road to ruin. I sat on the couch, nibbled on goodies from a box of chocolates while drinking coffee, and read a book. (I think at the time she was suggesting that doing so would make me a frivolous, unproductive member of society. To be fair, she’s much more productive today than I in many many ways…)

At any rate, what I read was The Empress of Salt and Fortune, an award-winning novella. I hadn’t heard of it except that it was part of a book group rotation in 2022. (That’s how I know I was gone too long from the Pub. I’m sure the rest of you will have already slurped this one down.)

At any rate, The Empress of Salt and Fortune is about how history is created and set down. A cleric takes the opportunity to visit a recently re-opened site to inventory the contents of a house occupied by a recently passed Empress. What do the remaining artifacts tell us about the people who lived there – the aristocracy and those who provided for them? What were their stories? The cleric, Chih, hears the story from an elder servitor, Rabbit, who probes the cleric’s comprehension of the tales by repeatedly asking “Do you understand?” It is important that an accurate record be kept and of course, historians don't always grasp or convey the truth of events. They can inventory the artifacts and piece together an idea of the life lived at the time, but they may not be able to fully understand or capture a larger truth.

A quick sample of the prose: “She would bring with her a wealth of salt, bushels of pearls, and enough whale oil to keep the palace alight for twenty years or more, one of the finest dowries ever to come to an emperor of Anh, but that was still a week away. When she first came to the Palace of Gleaming Light, In-yo was alone and empty-handed, wearing a splendid seal-fur dress that the ladies of the women’s quarter could only call strange and barbaric.”

This is a story of spying and whispers, covert hatred of the powerful, and revenge.

I don’t think it is as good as The Emperor’s Soul, the novella by Brandon Sanderson, but it kept my attention as I sat, with coffee and chocolates, ignoring the world around me.

>29 jillmwo: I'm glad you had a good birthday! I have this one on my Kindle since Tor was giving it away at some point in the last couple of years. I'm so pleased that it was a good read, even if it wasn't quite as good as the Sanderson novella. I will move it up the queue.

>30 clamairy: There is now a sequel out to The Empress of Salt and Fortune and I downloaded that one to my Kindle, but haven't yet read it. It too is a novella entitled When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain. I am looking forward to reading it but will wait a little while.

>31 jillmwo: You know now that I'm thinking about it I'm pretty sure it was the second book that Tor was giving away for free, and so I bought the first one when it was on sale. So I have them both loaded and waiting in the hidden chambers of my Kindle.

>32 clamairy:
The Chambers of My Kindle by Clam Airy

Now there's a great title for a story, and a great author name.

It could be a murder mystery, a romance, or a Gothic tale. Endless possibilities.

>33 pgmcc: It does have a nice ring to it...

Well, since she won the Hugo for The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the price on the upcoming third in the series has jumped dramatically. Into The Riverlands doesn't come out until October of 2022 but now is priced (pre-order) at $10.99 (Kindle) and $19.99 (Hardcover).

>33 pgmcc: and >34 clamairy: It sounds like a Gothic to me.

I sat, with coffee and chocolates, ignoring the world around me.

That sounds like the perfect birthday, Jill! I'm glad you enjoyed yourself.

I too have Empress of salt and fortune lurking somewhere on my kindle.

>35 jillmwo:
Jill, I agree, but I did not want to box Clam Airy into a specific genre, not when she might see my post.

In honor of A.A. Milne:

So wherever I am, there's always Pooh,
There's always Pooh and Me.
"What would I do?" I said to Pooh,
"If it wasn't for you," and Pooh said: "True,
It isn't much fun for One, but Two,
Can stick together, says Pooh, says he. "That's how it is," says Pooh.

My mother read so much of Milne's poetry to me. This is one I know by heart...

>38 jillmwo: Those are the lines my son and his wife had read at their wedding. :)

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

For reasons I won’t go into, I revisited this book this week. I know I read it for the first time when I was 7 or 8. We were stationed in Bangkok at the time and I don’t think the limited post library had any of the other books in the series (although my memory may well be faulty on that). Certainly, I never knew there was a series of other titles behind it until I was in college and doing my “children’s lit” class as part of the library coursework. At any rate, there were a couple of things that struck me reading it this week as an adult.

--The warning about not closing yourself into the wardrobe, but remembering to leave the door ajar for purposes of safety. Lucy is smart and remembers, but arrogant Edmund does not.
--The meals eaten with Mr. Tumnus and with the Beavers. Toast with lots of butter and lots of honey. Think what a treat that combination must have seemed back in 1950 when rationing was not so very far distant in the past And the marmalade roll that Mrs Beaver manages to whip together at the drop of a hat. (And clever female that she is, she also had the forethought to grab a bread knife so when Father Christmas leaves them with a tea tray. It never struck me as a child that she might have grabbed the bread knife as protection against the evid White Witch.) Oh and her sewing machine!!
--The magical hot beverage that the dwarf hands to Edmund. We don’t know what the liquid is that is in the jeweled, golden cup, just that it was “sweet, foamy and creamy and warmed him right down to his toes”. For years, I wondered what Turkish delight was like; I had always thought it was like a very chewy taffy kind-of-thing. But apparently not. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_delight.

It is true that reading as an adult, there were things that hit me as being just too “twee”. I can see why people object to his writing of certain characters as well. None of it was a hot button for me necessarily, but I did notice one or two things that I would have just skipped over as a child, seeing it as being irrelevant or nonsensical. I still groan at the closing chapter where, because they’ve all been in Narnia as kings and queens, the children adopt bad Arthurian speech habits. Even as a kid, that hit me as being flatly unbelievable.

At the same time, I was perfectly accepting of the mix of giants, robins, fauns and naiads and other assorted creatures. I’d forgotten that the unicorn had a blue horn and that the giant was named Rumblebuffin.

Revisiting this reminded me mostly of how early C.S. Lewis entered my reading life. Just the fact that I can remember the library where I found it the first time is an indication of the impact at the time. (I think I was unfamiliar with the genre of fantasy at that age. I knew what fairy tales were but that may have been where I stopped.)

>40 jillmwo: Seems like you enjoyed it, I'm glad it held up for you.

>40 jillmwo: Yes! I was about the same age when I first read it, and I grimaced at how the kids spoke at the end.

>40 jillmwo: I'm glad this held up for you! There is a lot of good stuff in the Narnia books despite the problems that stand out to us as adults, and I'm glad those bits haven't lost their magic.

Over the weekend, I gulped down something that I think had been a daily deal on Kindle awhile back, specifically The Last Bookshop in London. It’s ostensibly the story of a young woman of 18 who arrives in London just before England enters World War II. I say ostensibly because the real focus of the book is London during the Blitz.

I didn’t find any of the characters to be particularly well-rounded; they were types rather than being interesting in and of themselves. They were there to underscore a point being made by the author and you knew in advance which individuals were going to come together over the course of the 300 pages – the bereaved mother with the orphan, the romance between the shop clerk and the handsome draft-age engineer who recommends the Count of Monte Cristo to her, the curmudgeonly unsuccessful bookseller who finally and properly puts the witchy successful bookseller in her place. At any rate, not a tough read but a nice and simple distraction.

What it really made me think about was how young adults pick up history nowadays – reading historical fiction, binge-watching documentaries, tidbits posted here and there in postings to specialized blogs, photos from archives, etc. The kind of white papers on historical figures that I've been writing as a freelancer -- sufficiently researched for the purpose of marketing an academic database but by no means, a fully fleshed out rendition of history.

I did see a brief interview with the author where she talked about encountering archived oral histories from survivors with personal experience of the Blitz archived at Mass Observation -- http://www.massobs.org.uk/ I’d never heard of this archive before, but it looks like it could be a lot of fun to explore. I wonder how much of the material here she encountered in that archive. A pivotal event in the book is the bombing of Paternoster Row in 1940, when incendiary bombs destroyed something on the order of five million books (if one believes Wikipedia). It must have been horrific to witness. At some point, the firefighters simply had to allow the fire to burn itself out.

I imagine that this one made the NY Times bestseller because it resonates with those who saw in it as a parallel to the crisis of the pandemic and western civilization crumbling around us. (Yes, I know it felt like that at times. But our local skyscrapers are still standing even if corporate dress codes have been reduced to the rubble of sweatpants and crocs.) I am torn on this one, because I can honestly say that I kept turning the pages until late one night and than grabbed it to read some more with my coffee the next morning. The problem is that while I kind of enjoyed reading it in a lickety-split time frame, I don’t want to necessarily recommend it. It’s nice. It’s soothing. It has the comforting aura of hot oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. And it represents about as much challenge. (Imagining who I'd give this to, it would probably be to some impressionable high school girl in the hope that it would spark interest in the history but I'm really not sure if I'd do that.)

I’ll be returning to Wilkie Collins this coming weekend. And probably watching more of the Julian Fellowes series on The Gilded Age. Deception, sensational political corruption and excess – the best history has to offer!

>44 jillmwo:
The problem is that while I kind of enjoyed reading it in a lickety-split time frame, I don’t want to necessarily recommend it. It’s nice. It’s soothing. It has the comforting aura of hot oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins. And it represents about as much challenge.

I get the feeling that you are almost embarrassed with having enjoyed reading this book, but that you cannot deny that it did pique your interest, and put you in the read-it-late and pick-it-up-at-any-opportunity mood. Regardless of the content, or whether you would recommend it or not, it sounds to me that it was a great book for you at the time.

>44 jillmwo: I might Have Words about the comfort factor of raisins in oatmeal...

But yes, a lot of this is why I write books with historical settings for YA readers and blog about historical topics: because I hope that something I've written will spark an interest and inspire a reader to dig deeper into history some day. Well, that and it's fun for me. :)

>45 pgmcc: I rather think it's more that I am embarrassed to admit that I could get suckered in by something so shallow in its presentation of a very challenging, frequently miserable human experience. It's the LONDON BLITZ for heavens sake. The author brought in everything that might tug on the heartstrings of a reader -- right down to an adorable kitten winning the heart of the man who denies from the first he is lonely and would benefit from the companionship of a pet. Then the reader gets to drop a sentimental tear when the man dies (rather predictably). We got glimpses of the experience of those who lived through it but not to the degree that would make a real difference in how one might understand the horror of the historical event. (Admittedly, any book that did would be a real downer of a read and likely not make the NYTimes bestseller list.) But I fell for it and yes, I am a bit embarrassed.

>46 Marissa_Doyle: Fine. We'll leave out the raisins, if need be. Would peaches work for you?

>41 Karlstar: >43 Sakerfalcon: and >42 Jim53: I'm almost afraid to touch any of the other titles in the set.

>47 jillmwo: Can I have Marissa's raisins?

I've felt this away about several things I've read over the years. Don't feel guilty, just think about how much better your next great book will seem by comparison.

>49 clamairy: No doubt you have a raison for asking ...

>40 jillmwo: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe entered my life via a wonderful teacher reading it to a bunch of seven year olds. (I immediately devoured the rest of the sequence under my own steam!)

BTW, food rationing in Britain did not end until 1954. It was still operating in 1950 (with the exception that bread was no longer rationed).

How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life

In real life (at least in my experience), monasteries and cathedrals tend to be cold and drafty structures. However, if ever someone worked out how to be comfortably cozy in such a setting, I think there can be appeal to the lifestyle. Six hours of labor per day, time for reading and study being required of each individual every day, meals taken with company, individual sleeping spaces – I’m not seeing why we wouldn’t want to embrace such practices. If you study the architectural plans of places like St. Gall (see https://www.medievalists.net/2022/01/st-gall-plan-medieval-monasteries/), there’s a pleasant organization to the community.

Daniele Cybulskie is an interesting person – she’s one who has mastered presenting her information in an interesting and very accessible fashion. She developed The Medieval Podcast, is present over on Medievalists.net, and she runs The Medieval Masterclass for Creators, which is described as “an online course designed to provide novelists, game developers, and other fiction creators with expert information in a visual format to help them bring their medieval worlds to life.” How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life is not perhaps full of new insights about monasticism nor does it offer any particularly new ideas of self-care, but it is exactly what it promises in the back-of-the-book blurb. It’s an entertaining and historically accurate rendition of how monks managed their days and points out the bits of that life that can be carried over into modern life. It has amusing original drawings as part of the text and lovely (if somewhat small) reproductions of medieval manuscripts to illustrate how that life was lived.

If you knew nothing about monasticism, this could be a nice introduction. If you want to learn about monastic life without having to wade through the underlying rationale for why this was perceived as being a wise approach to spiritual growth – again this is a nice little introduction. There is lightness. There is accurate detail. There is a certain down-to-earth common sense to it. And being less than 200 pages, it’s a quick read.

If, on the other hand, you’ve done any serious reading of non-fiction on the topic of monastic life, you probably won’t learn much from reading this one. One or two light anecdotes or tidbits of historical practice, perhaps, but no depth that one couldn’t pick up from magazine articles. The book does come with a glossary, recommended reading and an index. It’s a launching point for the reader, not more than that.

All of this again comes around to the question hovering in my brain of how we introduce historical facts and/or beliefs to those who’ve never before encountered the subject matter. This isn’t a BAD book, it has its place, but it’s not lingering on my bookshelf. It’ll get passed to a local little free library where I hope it will do someone good.

>52 jillmwo: One of my fantasy vacations is to go for one or two months into an Abby, or an Order? Not sure what they are called these days. I would want it to be one with a vow of silence, one which would allow the visitors (like me) to participate or not in the religious observances, or stay quiet during them one's room, meditating. One which would also allow the visitors to participate in the daily work.

I don't think I could ever join one though. The politics and submitting oneself to the rule of others who might be petty tyrants would be more than my spiritual self could handle.

>53 MrsLee:. Re usage --> Abbey is the physical structure while Order is the organization of monks or nuns or what-have-you.

I have a similar fantasy of visiting one and coming away with some major epiphany of understanding about myself and what it is I ought to be doing with my life. But it would have to be a place where I wouldn't freeze to death or suffer with cold toes for the entire time. Otherwise, I've read enough to be fairly confident that I'm not suited to joining an Order either. (And I'm not wise enough to know how to start up one up that I would be suited to!!!)

>53 MrsLee: & >54 jillmwo: The Order of Beneficent Bookworms! I'm in!

>55 clamairy: I think we could work with that.

>55 clamairy: and >56 MrsLee: Well, three of us might be all we'd need to get the party --er, Order -- going. But one bit of monastic practice, I'm not sure I'm up for. I don't think I want to have to rise before sun-up. (Which during the winter months means not before 7am.)

>51 -pilgrim-:, >53 MrsLee:

I have done something like this. More than once, although only for a week each time. Once to learn Gregorian chant, and once as a "retreat", to help a friend work through a crisis. Each time I wished that I could stay.

>57 jillmwo: Don't forget the 3am service.

>59 -pilgrim-: Excellent point.

I have not yet finished Wilkie Collins’ novel No Name but that is more due to minimal reading time than anything else. The book itself almost deserves the description of "thrilling" as well as the genre classification of “sensation novel”. There’s the lovely young heroine that we meet in the bosom of her family, much cherished by her parents, older sister and trusted governess. She is shown to have a gift for local theatrical entertainment. However early on, we learn that her parents were living together without benefit of clergy and, (due to the arcane technicalities of Victorian law and more specifically, wills as legal instruments), the two daughters are left without any resources upon the deaths of their mother and father. One daughter, the virtuous Norah, goes off to become a governess. The other daughter, Magdalen (pronounced Mad-lin) is shattered and angry at the loss of her position and subsequently of her frankly unworthy fiancee. She is determined to get revenge on the men who inherit the family wealth and dismiss her and her sister without care. (Bum-bum-bum → suspenseful music plays).

Thus far – two-thirds of the way through – I’m finding it delightfully melodramatic and wonder if Collins’ readership were truly horrified by the decline of Magdalen’s fortunes as they read this in serial form, learning what happens month to month. I mean, at one point, the girl goes on the public stage (gasp – she becomes an actress and the horror of that causes her sister to lose *her* position as a governess in a respectable household.). There are two key secondary characters who become cunning adversaries - Captain Wragge and Mrs. Lecount – one only slightly more trustworthy than the other. I mean, you really do want to find out what happens next with this crowd of characters and you only hope that the poor 19-year old heroine makes it through her trials and tribulations.

I have some idea of what happens by the end of the book, but I am still reading somewhat breathlessly. Reading books like this really could be the ruination of one, since the whole purpose of publishing a sensation novel was to distract the idle from the boredom of daily duties by offering them dramatic plots and tidbits of scandal. Collins is throughout commenting on the so-called sanctity of marriage and Victorian sentimental (and legal) assumptions about what marital status conferred on two individuals.

Frankly, I am having fun imagining how women might have sat about in their parlors reading this one aloud to each other on a month-to-month basis. I mean the book isn’t Middlemarch by a long shot, but it certainly explores with emotional intensity the horrors of facing a life unequally chained in marriage to an absolute idiot.

>61 jillmwo: He was a man who lived what he preached. His personal arrangements were very unconventional. I cannot decide whether they were exploitative or an attempt to give the women in his life freedom from the negative effects of Victorian marital law.

>62 -pilgrim-: I agree. It is very difficult to gauge his character in some ways as a result. Did he really believe in what his books seemed to espouse? He never married, but did maintain a long-term relationship with one of his mistresses (Caroline Graves). I could be wrong, but I think I recall something about him being buried with her. At the same time, he had a second mistress with whom he had children. It was certainly a very curious living arrangement for the time.

>63 jillmwo: He appeared to be having a long-term relationship with both simultaneously. This arrangement does not appear to have satisfied Caroline, since she contracted her second marriage in the middle of this relationship (Collins being present at the church), but after two years she returned to Collins. And yes, she was buried with him.

Well, as it turned out, I had underestimated where Collins was going with No Name. When i'd posted before, I had reached the harrowing point where Magdalen was agonizing over whether she would go through with a marriage to the man she loathed. Despite the somewhat melodramatic tone of the prose, Collins succeeded in making me sympathize with the heroine's despair and misery. Through the final third of the book, the action focuses on the legal means used to keep money "in the family" as it were and the final 100 pages focused on the slow fall of the young woman's fortune and position.

In my view, one of Collins' strengths is his back-and-forth dialogue between eccentric and memorable characters. It's only when he goes pages and pages without dialogue that he becomes a bit boring. No Name suffers a bit from this problem in the final third of the book. On the other hand, the actual structure of the book (long narrative "Scenes" alternating with shorter, stacatto "Between The Scenes" sections) helps the pace of the story-telling.

Collins was decidedly a free-thinker in Victorian England (as >64 -pilgrim-: notes). His point in No Name is that the legality conferred by marriage certificates is far less important than the authenticity of genuine feeling between two life-partners and the valued legality of wills and trusts ought not to be viewed as a weapon. At the same time, it is clear that he's against fortune hunters of all shapes, size and descriptions. In that context, he does not differentiate between the male and female; both are bad.

Honestly, this is the kind of Victorian literature that is well served by multiple readings. Collins has a sense of humor that bubbles inappropriately to the surface at time, but as a lawyer, he also saw the gaps in the system that hurt specific segments of society. I'm kind of thinking I will hold on to this for a second somewhat slower reading.

>53 MrsLee: You might want to look into visitors' season at Tassajara:

https://www.sfzc.org/practice-centers/tassajara

>66 Meredy: Thanks :)

Sometimes one watches things on television like the Miss Marple version of Towards Zero and it drives one back to the source material. The thing that caught my attention most strongly in reading this was how the opening was structured. Published in 1944, this particular Christie mystery starts out in January and steadfastly moves towards September when the actual murder takes place. The whole point from Christie’s perspective was to write a detective novel that didn’t start with the murder itself but which started from the point where the motive hardens in the murderer’s mind. The first segment opens with an older judge hearkening back to a case he recalls, one where a child was accused of murder and where it seems possible the child got away with murder. The second segment was in the mind of the individual putting the final touches on the plan for committing the murder. The third was from the perspective of Inspector Battle. Christie continues this shifting from one mind to another for another five or six segments, these unfolding over the course of several months.

In terms of narrative structure, she sets up just four formal breaks – sections of the book rather than chapters (most annoying when you’re trying to find a good place to pause your reading). Towards Zero is very short in terms of actual page count (perhaps due as much to paper shortages during the war as due to the requirements of her story). Not quite as polished in some ways as other Christie novels, I found this one somewhat confusing to follow on television but much more logically delivered in prose.

(One side note, just because it’s so clearly a 21st century kind of experience. I had ordered this as a used book from someplace in Utah and had requested an upgrade on shipping so that I could track where the package was. There was a snowstorm so I was aware that there would be a delay in receipt. The package moved across country until the point where the system said it had been delivered to my mailbox. But it HADN”T. We checked with our immediate neighbors and with the folks across the road from us but none of them had it. So last Friday my long-suffering spouse went to the post office with the tracking info. The supervisor studied the paperwork and went “Hmm” and said she’d have to check with the actual mail carrier. She’d call my husband later in the day. Within an hour, she’d called and said they were still checking. By 4pm (aware that the office closed at 4:30pm) my husband called back and spoke w/ the actual postmaster for that area office. He indicated that they had worked out where the package had gone (not more than a block or two away from us.) My husband offered to go over to the house to retrieve the package (given how close it was) but the postmaster requested that he not do so. They were re-sending the mail carrier back to collect the piece and that we’d be hearing from the individual. Sure enough, in less than 30 minutes, a somewhat dim-witted individual showed up at our door with the package in hand and allowed as how he had delivered the piece to the wrong house. What my husband and I were struck by the accuracy that the post office could show in tracking it down to the address where the actual package had been dropped, even though where it got dropped was WRONG. The little devices that the carriers use to send updates are quite granular in pinpointing where things go but it all hangs on whether or not the carrier actually bothered to get the STREET right…)

Meanwhile I've started on Arcadia by Iain Pears which I'm enjoying very much.

>68 jillmwo: I am amazed that you got it after it was delivered incorrectly! I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this all took place on the same day?

>69 clamairy: roughly two days. Wednesday - ABEBooks system tells me that package was delivered but we don't have it. Thursday - check with all of the neighbors, check w/ original seller to see if they know anything, and initial visit to post office. Friday - package re-delivered.

All in all probably something more than 36 hours but less than 48 huors.

>70 jillmwo: Then you were very lucky that someone did the right thing and didn't open it! When my mom was still alive I ordered some art books for her from ABE and she waited over a month to tell me they never showed up. I did manage to have them ship her a replacement. Lost books are definitely a big issue. I suspect it's because of the weight.

Just published a piece on book banning and the careful need for precision vocabulary in our discussions: Follow the links; that's what they're there for...(imagine a smiling emojii here)

https://www.niso.org/niso-io/2022/03/curtailing-access-eleven-links

>71 clamairy: I agree that we were lucky.

>72 jillmwo:
An excellent article with a well balanced argument. I particularly like the discussion on format being pertinent, and how access to a work in a particular format may be to the detriment of the reading experience for that work.

E.T.A.
Your points about comic specific requirements and attributes reminded me of Umberto Eco's comments in Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation, about translating from one medium to another. He saw translation as not being simply about language, but also converting a work from one medium to another. The most obvious such translation today is from book to screen.

Just so that I can find them when I need them -- the Arcadia group read sub-threads:

Chapters 1-11 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/339721#n7766606
Chapters 12-22 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/339731
Chapters 23 - 33 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/339793#n7772499

>75 jillmwo: I'm sorry. I thought the links were all added to the pinned post. I will do that now.

Fixed, Also don't forget this one!
Chapters 34-44 - https://www.librarything.com/topic/339919

>76 clamairy: Thanks, clam!

Still working my way thru Arcadia. Speeding along through it and then realized that I needed to go back and revisit some of the earlier portions. Interesting to check back on 2015 emails to see how this initiative was discussed by some of the folks I knew who were hot to develop new forms of the digital book.

NOTE: I haven't decided yet, but may post this over in the group read (end thread) as well. I haven't been able to post a real review of Arcadia because I'm still sorting through all of these different elements.

My focus on thinking about Arcadia has not been on all the time travel/time transit. I’ve really been focused on the handling of the cross-narrative of the book and the software application. Based on what I read in an article/review in The Bustle about the two, in terms of wordcount, the software app was actually longer by about a third than the print volume. Specifically, this bit:

Arcadia has 10 separate narrative strands, which intertwine and overlap with each other so extensively that Pears worried readers wouldn’t be able to keep track. By using an app to tell the story, readers are able to glide effortlessly between storylines to follow the plot at their own pace, and in their own way…While a printed version of Iain Pears’ Arcadia will be released next month, it will only contain 180,000 of the app’s 250,000 words — and Pears stresses that readers really do need the app to help them understand; it's not just a digital companion, but a whole new art form.

So my first obsession was to work out the ten different narrative strands. Watching the YouTube video (https://youtu.be/kpnWPCl_v1Y) introducing the app, the menu shows the following ten approaches to the story:

The Student’s tale Jay
The Professor’s tale Henry Lytten
The Historian’s tale Henary
The Scientist’s tale Angela Meerson
The Manager’s Tale Chang
The Policeman’s Tale Jack More
The Outlaw’s Tale Parmachon
The Teacher’s tale
The Wanderer’s tale Rosalind
The Oligarch’s tale Oldmanter

You see there’s no corresponding spoiler segment for the Teacher. I can’t work out who the Teacher is in this narrative and it’s kind of bugging me. To make it even more confusing, the YouTube video shows one set of narrative options but there are screenshots of the app on an iphone that list a slightly different set of options: Teacher, Student, Young Girl, Outlaw, Professor, Assistant, Scientist, Policeman, Manager and Oligarch. Input would be welcome in sorting out this one. Have I mis-"assigned" a tale?

Now another quote from another article about this book, the source being an industry publication specifically for and about the book publishing industry:

The app presents all the possible ways Pears could have told the story, with a choice of 10 character strands. It also allows readers to approach the novel as a series of traditional linear stories, and they are granted the opportunity to switch between these tales and worlds at ease. The reader is in control of their reading experience and can read or leave out sections as they choose. The entire story is mapped visually with each reader’s map displaying a unique representation of their journey. Different ways of reading create different relationships between the characters, this leads to a different understanding of how the stories can be told. To counter this, the Arcadia app allows Pears to “bypass the limitations of the classic linear structure” and build a “multi-stranded story”.

Pears actually published an article in the Guardian that explained what he thought he was doing in developing the text for both print and software. In particular the software was supposed to enhance the time travel element of the work: the reader can switch to the story of Jay, one of his characters, and the order of reading determines whether Jay’s actions are caused by Lytten’s writing, or the other way round..

Theoretically, at least, the most authentic version of Arcadia ought to be the software version, given what Pears said he was trying to do in terms of escaping the linear narrative that the print format tends to favor/support. Sadly the app version is no longer supported. (Another aspect I wish I knew more about in this case is the author-publisher contract. I sincerely hope that Pears plans on willing his papers to a library upon his death so that perhaps some university archivist can find a way to bring this back for additional study.)

>78 jillmwo: Thank you for putting in the effort to research this! Yes, the lack of information regarding how the app was structured is frustrating. I sure wish some type of static document remained to at least provide a more detailed outline than what can be found online.

Regarding the narrative strands, I thought perhaps Hanslip would have been considered The Manager?

>72 jillmwo: I know I'm late, but that was excellent, thank you.

>78 jillmwo:
An excellent post. Like you, I cannot think who The Teacher is, unless it is Jaqui, or possibly Henary’s master, whose name escapes me for the moment.
I do tend to agree with ScoLgo that Hanslip is The Manager.

>81 pgmcc: Henary's master was the suicidalEtheran.

EtA: Wasn't Rambert Aliena's teacher? Seems Rambert and Etheran were too much the side characters to be considered for their own narrative tho... unless one of their stories was fleshed out in those missing 70,000 words?

>82 ScoLgo: Thank you!

>78 jillmwo: I have to come back and read this slowly when I have a bigger chunk of time. Thanks for posting it.

>78 jillmwo: I wonder if Henarymight be the teacher and Emily the historian.

I have gulped down The Witness for the Dead which was wonderfully done, but I won't have the time this weekend to write a real review, but my thanks to those of you who recommended it (I think I'm blaming karlstar, clamairy, sakerfalcon most immediately for the BB but I'm confident that my addled brain is leaving someone out.).

In the meantime, we may be going to have spring. My husband is insisting that I LEAVE the house as the temperature is going up to 70 degrees (farenheit) later today. However, some part of me really wants to go back to bed for a nap (and at only quarter to 11 in the morning!)

>86 jillmwo: We had that warmth yesterday. Today it's mid 50s and there is no sun. But yesterday was so wonderful I'm still clinging to it.

You're welcome for the book recommendation. I believe you were hit with the bullet(s?) that passed through karlstar, sakerfalcon, tardis and Storeetllr before I was struck.

Today at work, I listened to a 60-minute webinar on book production and the supply chain. It's really rather disheartening. The production workflows for delivering print look challenging for at least another year. Mills are switching over their production time to delivering paper better suited to packaging (heavier brown paper, more profitable) rather than giving manufacturing time to the better stocks of paper needed for printing. Lead times for getting into the printer production queues are lengthening so they're telling publishers to finalize their print runs much farther in advance than has been done in previous years. (A colleague of mine confirmed that this is what her son who works for a major trade publisher is experiencing. Publishers have to book way in advance at this point. If you the publisher miss a deadline at the printers, you go back to the end of the line.) The printer supply chain is also recommending that publishers minimize specialty requirements generated by innovative book design. (Remember S., the book with all the neat inserts that was the brain child of Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams? No more of that for a good long while. I suspect we'll see lots and lots of trade paperbacks printed on newspaper stock.)

Print sales may be up, but publisher earnings are down because of the constraints from manufacturing and freight costs. Books are going to be more expensive. (Sigh) Note that this will have an impact on what your local library can afford to acquire.

Why, yes, I really am a delightful little of ray of sunshine in your day, aren't I? Snark tags and sarcasm emoji should be inserted here around that last sentence.

>88 jillmwo: The company I worked for in the 1990s did a supply chain (an area I am supposed to have some expertise in) assignment for the UK publishing industry. It was a fascinating assignment. It was primarily undertaken in response to the demise of the Net Book Agreement, an agreement that lasted from 1900 to the 1990s that set a fixed price for books sold to the public in the UK and Ireland. Some large retailers started discounting and then the agreement was judged to be illegal.

Your description of what is happening now would indicate two things to me. Firstly, the industry is producing more paper packaging in response to the greening of the economy, and secondly, perhaps we will see the return of the pulps.

Thank you for your little ray of sunshine on this bright, sunny Wednesday morning.

I do remember, S.. While it was innovative, and while I was moved to buy a copy, I did not really get into it. I tried to read it and abandoned it. Perhaps I will try again. I felt it was too contrived. It was an experiment in using the new technologies and media, and, to me, it did not grab my attention. It must have been a nightmare for production. Modern manufacturing is all about standardisation and anything that disrupts the standard process is viewed as a cost and a pain in the proverbial.

Manufacturing now aims to make more with less. The cost accountants they employ would like to drive that to the ultimate, logical end, of making everything with nothing. I often feel processes and process improvement methods, lose sight of the limits to what can be done. It is like the business analysts who see an industry growing at 30% per-annum and produce their projections and forecasts on the assumption that 30% annual growth will carry on into the future forever and could even increase. Market saturation and product lifecycle are terms not present in the analysts toolkit.

>86 jillmwo: You are welcome, glad you enjoyed it! I'm looking forward to the next one.

>88 jillmwo: Thank you for that insight into the business.

The book business has taken one pummeling after another. I remember decades ago when the tax laws changed so that publishers had to pay taxes on their backlists as inventory, prompting them to destroy older books that sold slowly because they couldn't afford to keep them. That was a big hit for academic titles. And then a lot of mainstream work started coming out first in paperback instead of hardcover. The internet took numerous whacks at the publishing industry, not meaning to do harm, but it did. And now paper . . . This bothers me for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is simply that we can read a book, meaning words printed on paper and bound, without having to plug anything in. This could be a crucial consideration at some time not too long from now, such as if the grid collapses. Too much of our collective knowledge, culture, history, and systems are trapped within electronic media that could fail us.

So this week’s conversation about reading centers once again on presentation of history. (Snarky observations about me turning into a nerdy type in my old age may be left in the replies below.) I was so excited last week to begin reading Diamonds and Deadlines because the topic was Mrs. Frank Leslie of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly fame. I knew very little about her before I started. Basically I knew that she took over the publishing operation upon her husband's death in 1880 and that she had left the Women’s Suffrage movement 2 million dollars on her death which carried the campaign forward from the 19th century and into the 20th. From that you might assume that she was relatively respectable.

This is not the full story. She was a strong character and a better than average business woman, but had all the details about her background been known, she’d never have been deemed as respectable by Gilded Age standards. She may or may not have been of mixed race, but it’s fairly certain that she was born out of wedlock. She was noted for her beauty and appears to have earned her living on her back in her younger days. The real story is how someone with that kind of background ever managed to climb the 19th century social ladder to the point where she was able to attend upper-class soirees in a Worth gown and draped in $70,000 worth of diamonds.

Reading this particular historical biography is a bit like reading a compilation of articles from People magazine. The content is enjoyable in that same way. There’s a certain salacious fun to reading about and considering how a menage a trois might have been managed in old New York during the Gilded Age. The author wants to immerse the reader in Gilded Age society, so there are lush descriptions of clothing, decor and other period excess.

The book is clearly targeted to the casually interested reader rather than the professional historian. (That is, one might read it for background but you probably wouldn’t want to cite it as a source.) The layout and design of the front and back matter underscore that. There are references of a sort provided to the reader, but not as numbered footnotes. Someone decided to group those references in the back of the book under notes and list them by PG NUMBER, using a particularly funky format. One picked at random from Chapter Three reads 77. He returned the...see account in Detroit Free Press, July 21, 1868. That translates to the reader having to be aware of what page s/he is reading, flipping back to the back of the book to the Notes, navigating to the relevant chapter and page number, and then remembering the particular beginning words of the sentence on that page that contained the quote. It’s not that the author has not done her research, but rather that the reader is likely to get lost in trying to follow the breadcrumbs left as a guide to that research.

The photos and etchings are handled a bit oddly as well, There’s a full paragraph describing an editorial cartoon about the Frank Leslie offices. But there’s no list of illustrations included in the front or back matter. No indication of where you might see the actual cartoon that the author thinks is important. Only if you go slowly through the glossy page insert of halftones, do you happen to trip over it (recognizing it only from the description you read in the first place). A captiont had the specific source publication and date and a mention of the private collection granting permission for its use. But nothing to tie it back to the previous chapter where it was discussed.

All that said, I’m still reading along. Miriam Follin Squier Leslie (et al. because she went through three or four spouses in her lifetime) is an interesting character and I respect her for coming up the hard scrabble way in what was such a male-dominated world. One kind of wonders why no one has told her story as a mini-series or a docudrama. Julian Fellowes’ Gilded Age isn’t getting into this kind of scandalous nitty gritty.

What kind of a bookstore browser are YOU? https://slate.com/culture/2022/04/in-praise-of-good-bookstores-jeff-deutsch-of-t...

I was able to finish Danger on the Atlantic this week. It’s the third volume in the Jane Wunderly mystery series. I gave an overview of the first title in the series last year: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328063#7430378 but was underwhelmed by the second installment. The first one was better and had won an Agatha award from the Malice Domestic judges

In Danger on the Atlantic, Jane Wunderly has gone undercover with Redvers on a transatlantic cruise. There are two mysteries – the search for a German who appears to be stealing government secrets and the search for a husband who has gone missing within hours of the ship leaving port. It’s not a bad leisure read, although I had some quibbles The plot needed a greater number of suspects than the author had supplied. And she had a whole ocean liner with plenty of cabins to populate. I will keep reading Neubauer’s books because I like the way she handles the romantic interest between Jane and Redvers. It’s never allowed to overwhelm the actual mystery that needs to be solved. (I’ve been obsessing over the whole shipboard mystery kind of thing because of the Death on the Nile movie. Did I already say I thought Brannagh’s production did a better job of it than I’d anticipated they would? I have a lovely second ocean voyage myster waiting for me to begin, entitled Murder on “B” Deck by Vincent Starrett. And of course, this week is the anniversary of the Titanic going down.

>93 jillmwo: I'm not sure, I'm going to go with chef.

>93 jillmwo: I think I'm the chef, the general and the idler... But never at the same time.

Read a Twitter update to my >88 jillmwo: above. (https://www.librarything.com/topic/338187#7793774) The twitter thread and associated replies says a lot about what it's like to work in trade publishing and university press publishing world at the moment. https://twitter.com/megireid/status/1513948809482670092

Diamonds and Deadlines led me to read a biography of Mrs. Frank Leslie that was a little less gossipy in tone, Madeleine B. Stern wrote Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs Frank Leslie that conveys well the personality and backbone of Mrs. Leslie. (She actually had her name legally changed to Frank Leslie upon the death of her publisher husband. ) She was a supporter of all the great causes of her day - temperance, women’s suffrage, etc. – but she was never accepted into the Ward McCalister-Caroline Astor ranks of New York Society. I’d recommend the Stern biography over the Prioleau biography. Purple Passage might be harder to find (although I was able to get hold of a 1970 reprint that was reasonably priced) but it is a better, more informative read.

Murder on “B” Deck. This is a reprint from Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press. I won’t say I loved it but I did find it interesting. Vincent Starrett’s opening chapter was based on a real life incident; someone had gone onboard ship in the 20;s to say farewell to a friend embarking on a trip to Europe and managed to miss the final warming of “All Ashore That’s Going Ashore”. So a hapless novelist is onboard when there’s a murder discovered. Working with the wonderfully astute Mr. Ghost, the novelist helps in the investigation. One of the aspects that caught my attention here was the presence and descriptions of early moving pictures. The book doesn’t play up the glamor of travel or the luxury of the ship itself; the focus is on the puzzle resolution. Another aspect of interest is that the book doesn’t give you much background on the two dead victims; the focus is ALL on the “How and Why Was This Crime Committed”. It does focus on the creation of the fictional self in real life, on the printed page and on-screen. One thing that didn’t really work for me was the presence of discussion questions in the book; not particularly interesting questions and I don’t think any book group worth its salt would have spent time on them.

And tomorrow, my book group will actually be chatting about Marissa Doyle’s novella, The Forgery Furore and one of the women actually mentioned to me how much fun she was having with it. Regency fantasy, with the ladies of Almack’s exerting their care over the social whirl of the Marriage Mart.

The Phantom of the Opera - Midway through this and wondering why I disliked it so much the first time I tried to read it.

Edited to note that NONE of the touchstones seem to be working this afternoon.

>98 jillmwo: How old were you when you first read it? I read it about 10ish years ago, after seeing the modern musical. I think I liked it a lot.

>99 MrsLee: I think I first tried Phantom of the Opera when I was in my thirties. A friend had suggested that I might enjoy it because it was a mystery. She and I then went back and forth over the elimination of the character of the Persian in the musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to focus on the love story and show the Phantom as being a tragic figure. I tended to think that had not been in keeping with the author's original intent; the Phantom was guilty of more than one murder. One might be sympathetic over the circumstances that put him on the road to committing those murders, but one ought not to be sympathetic to the actual crime. I am picking up more readily in this reading the humor that Leroux included in his text and some of the small kindnesses that he shows to those who are kind to him.

>100 jillmwo: I looked up my review. I gave it 4 stars (my stars equal enjoyment factor for me, not writing quality). I found parts of it awkward writing, which I attributed to the translation. My summation, "Like Frankenstein, it is the story of a great man who cannot be accepted because of his utter ugliness and is driven mad because of it."

>100 jillmwo: I looked it up on my old book log (it's just a text document) and I read it when I was 33 and gave it 3 out of 4 stars. I vaguely remember enjoying it, but finding it less substantial than I was expecting.

>101 MrsLee: and >102 clamairy: Insofar as I can tell, the Signet edition that I read 30 years or so ago was using the sole English translation at that time (one that dated back to 1909-1914?). That's the one that you can see on Project Gutenberg. (Apparently it was only after the musical's success that there was interest in revisiting the novel. My current version of Phantom is using the translation by David Coward done in 2012 which flows much more readily. I have to admit I'm enjoying this translation much more so far. (But we haven't yet met the Persian so I'm not sure if that shift will present an issue in my enjoyment. I must admit that its the secondary characters that are really catching my attention. The male romantic lead, Raoul, is a pretty boy nitwit, if one is truly honest.)

Okay, I’m counting this as the first time I ever really read The Phantom of the Opera because I feel sure that my first attempt at reading it thirty years ago was absolutely fragmented, desultory and unappreciative of the text itself. (I was distracted with small children perhaps, but I also suspect my understanding of humanity might also have been different back then.)

First of all, the Folio edition (a gift) that I was reading this past week or two was a beautifully designed packaging of the content. It was particularly well laid out; the cover featured the Phantom as the Red Death character and the back displayed the Punjabi noose. Each chapter had its own title page, with black and white decorative notes (such as the scorpion and the grasshopper). The font was clear and contrasted well against the page, The paper stock was of good quality and itself a pleasure to the touch..

Secondly, the translation in reading The Phantom of the Opera really makes a difference as well. The free version that one finds on Project Gutenberg is the original English translation that dates back to 1910. It’s rather ponderous. It was only since Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical proved popular that new translations were made available. David Coward’s translation dates back to 2012 and was published by Oxford University Press whereas another recent one by Mireille Ribiere was commissioned by Penguin. (I was reading Coward’s translation.)

This is a lovely intro to the experience of a Gothic novel; the opera house setting is mysterious, riddled with passages, tunnels and secret doors, while also being broken up with bits and pieces of sets, stage props, etc.

It’s a really, really slow build with regard to the suspense that Leroux was focused on. This was also published initially as a serial in a weekly publication so that contributes to that slow build, but in the second half of the book, you’re gasping at the twists and cliffhangers that close out each chapter. It isn’t until Chapter 14 (Apollo’s Lyre) that Leroux ramps up the emotional pull on the reader. The final ten chapters of the book, when the reader is experiencing the Phantom’s horrors, are taut and horrific. There are weaknesses in Leroux’s story-telling (a few too many convenient lapses in describing events) but the tale still works.

When we meet her, Christine is entirely innocent and seriously focused on her art - hence her fascination with the Voice. Raoul (not being a musician) seeks to take her away from all that by marrying her, although his family would see Christine as entirely unsuitable. Erik shares with her a talent and passion for music, but staying with him suggests Christine would have to accept a form of Death. Erik is characterized as a “living corpse”. We're supposed to root for Raoul and Christine to come together.

As a character, Raoul is quite literally a “pretty boy” and well-born, automatically accepted by society, while the Phantom is essentially described as being the personification of Death, the product of disease (criticism suggests that the contemporary reader would have read Leroux’s description as indicative of hereditary syphilis). Raoui is not particularly strong as a hero, either in mind or in body; he very nearly succumbs in the Phantom’s torture chamber. Really, in terms of the dangers encountered and the rescue effected, Daroga the Persian is the real hero. (Which is where I fault Andrew Lloyd Webber for leaving him out of the story altogether.)

Raoul continuously speaks of killing Erik because it’s the only way he can be sure he’ll have Christine to himself. He is (in his way) as equally obsessed with possessing her as is the Phantom.

The book emphasizes the Phantom’s genius – his love of musical composition and performance, his Don Juan Triumphant, his talent for constructing complex environments that allow him to disappear instantly into the dark, a way of hiding. At least initially, he’s not portrayed as an awful person. He is gentlemanly and courteous to Madame Giry and tries to be kindly towards and protective of Christine and her talent. (up to a point, that is). Otherwise he’s a madman, but gifted in designing and engineering his building constructions and traps, he’s a magician and a ventriloquist. Formed by his experience in the Rosy Hours of Mazanderan and in pleasing the Sultana and the Shah, but also further abused by them. His looks condemn him to be alone forever and this drives him mad with despair when he wants to kill everyone in a terrorist act. Leroux manages to work in every kind of psychological and physical threat of death one can imagine. The Siren trap, the Congo experience, death by drowning, Hence the sensational horror is quite real.

What Andew Lloyd Webber got right was the humorous bits with the directors of the opera and others in the company. I liked his enhancement of Madame Giry as a cultured woman, but am not quite sure why he emphasized Little Meg in the show in quite the way that he did. She’s negligible in the book itself. Meanwhile, I wish he'd made more use of the Persian but he couldn't do that without having to recreate the experience in the Phantom's torture room.

Honestly, I don't know how many stars I'd give this, but I did find it to be a surprisingly compelling read. Which is probably why Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to revisit it and revitalize it on Broadway. Some of the twists caught me completely off-guard. I think it's worth a read and would recommend it.

>104 jillmwo: You make me want to read a more modern translation. The edition I have was published in 1987. It doesn't say who did the translation work though.

>104 jillmwo: You have me staggering away bullet-riddled. I've meant for some time to read the novel, but it hadn't yet floated to the top. Maybe now it has. I'll take your guidance on the translation.

I liked the 1925 film with Lon Chaney. I remember another one, also B&W, with somebody like Fredric March in the title role. I thought it was made in the thirties or forties, but it doesn't appear in IMDb. Are you acquainted with it? The 1943 version with Nelson Eddy is not the one I have in mind, nor is the 1962.

I saw the musical onstage both in San Francisco and in San Jose and wasn't overwhelmed.

>106 Meredy: There was a 1940s version with Claude Rains in the title role. (I think I've only seen it once and I don't remember if Nelson Eddy is in that one.) However, I just happened across a LibGuide that someone at Simmons created that might be helpful. Take at look at: https://simmonslis.libguides.com/phantomoftheopera/films Also, the Wikipedia entry on adaptations of Phantom is surprisingly detailed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptations_of_The_Phantom_of_the_Opera

I saw the musical in very bad seats in a Broadway theatre umpty ump years ago, and I must confess that the only thing I *really* remember was the chandelier coming down over the audience. But the music does stick in my brain.

I don't know how I'd go about adapting the story myself, except that I think the Persian could be an interesting POV character.

>107 jillmwo: Oh, yes, thanks, it was indeed Claude Rains! I wonder why that version was omitted from IMDb, which I thought was a pretty complete catalog.

No, Nelson Eddy is definitely not in that one. I can't even imagine what sort of picture would have roles for both Nelson Eddy and Claude Rains. I've enjoyed a lot of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald movies for what they are, but I wouldn't watch him in Phantom.

Oddly, in the two sources you cite, Nelson Eddy isn't mentioned.

As Alice said, "Curiouser and Curiouser". I've now found information that shows that Nelson Eddy WAS in the 1943 version. >108 Meredy: go take a quick look at the movie poster shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1943_film). IMDB backs it up: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036261/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_45

The summary there in the Wikipedia entry seems very much like the movie that I vaguely recall -- Raines' Phantom was injured as an adult, rather than being disfigured from birth.

Actually, I have encountered a word in use in my reading this past week that has just stuck with me. It was a relatively recent edition of Sense & Sensibility aimed at a particular segment of the education market; the editor/scholar paused at the end of the first volume to ask the reader what vices and virtues had emerged in the characters thus far. It was that use of the word, vice. (Honestly, my first mental reaction was to be jolted into wondering whether Austen would ever have thought in those terms? Well, yes, she did speak of her characters doing despicable things, but in much more oblique and/or genteel fashion than we generally think of when using the word, vice.) Because one of the things that I began wondering about was the way in which the definition of the word has shifted over time. Modern day criminology types generally use it to categorize social evils like prostitution, gambling, porn, etc. The older definition of mere moral failing or character flaw (which is what the S&S scholar meant) isn't nearly as frequently invoked.

I have no idea why I'm sharing this except that the terminology struck me as peculiar and out of step, even for a conservative market segment. (I had sufficient awareness of the individual scholar's general worldview that I couldn't really gasp in shock or horror. It just caught my attention and made me consider what the philosophical intent might have been.)

I like the philosophical slant of my leisure reading to be a bit on the readily recognizable side of things; wickedness should be comfortably called out as wickedness with the wise reader knowing whom to root for. The Phantom of the Opera (although pitiable in many respects) still killed at least one of the theater company stagehands; Willoughby in S&S did get an innocent girl pregnant out of wedlock and then abandon her.

Saturday had snatches of reading tucked here and there. Mother's Day did not.

(1) One of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. I had watched a somewhat slow episode of the 1970s BBC series of Father Brown. I tracked it down on my bookshelves and read it again, to see whether the problem was padding out of what might have been simply a thin short story. The title was “The Mirror of the Magistrate” and actually it struck me as being one of those instances where a mystery was simply the vehicle used by the author in order to make a point. There is a garden with high walls and a body is found there. The house shows signs of disruption – a broken mirror and plants tumbled off their shelf onto the floor. However, the house may have been left unattended. Who could have killed old Justice Gwynne? Was it the mad poet who lived next door, the disgruntled man-servant who slunk out for a pint at the pub, or the outspoken Irish political journalist? (For my money, the real point was a discussion of the complexities of one’s profession and how that activity is perceived and/or misinterpreted by others.)

(2) MrsLee’s reading thread reminded me of Tolkien this weekend and I ended up revisiting the man’s poem entitled Errantry from The Book of Tom Bombadil. Snippet below:

There was a merry passenger
A messenger, a mariner
He built a gilded gondola
to wander in, and had in her
A load of yellow oranges
And porridge for his provender
He perfumed her with marjoram
And cardamom and lavender

He called the winds of argosies
With cargoes in to carry him
Across the rivers seventeen
That lay between to tarry him

I really savored the rhyme scheme this time around. It makes such a difference when one reads or recites a piece aloud. Thank you, Mrs Lee.

(3) I started a new book The Murder of Mr. Wickham. Definitely qualifies as a light read, but the author caught my attention by bringing together in a house party major characters from each of Jane Austen’s six novels. The motivations she attributes to the various couples were quite interesting – Wentworth loses the fortune he had made in the Napoleonic Wars and fears the effect on Anne, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy both blame Wickham for the death of the little girl they had come to adore, Colonel Brandon and Marianne are tip-toeing around one another as are Edward Bartram and his wife, Fanny. Wickham has been up to no good – acts of seduction, speculation and blackmail. No one really regrets his passing, but the local Highbury society frowns on a murder at Donwell Abbey just the same and Frank Churchill is the magistrate in charge. Who bludgeoned Wickham in the hallway? I don’t know yet whodunnit, but it seems clear to me that this author likes Mansfield Park the very least of any of Austen’s full-length works. (And that kind of gets my juices going.)

By the way, how about that upset at the Kentucky Derby?! 80 to 1 that horse was.

>111 jillmwo: That is an entirely appropriate post number for you to praise a poem which Tolkien attributes to Bilbo Baggins. :)

>111 jillmwo:
The poem reads very well to the rhythm of a Gilbert & Sullivan song.

I am the very model of a modern major general.

>112 MrsLee:
Well spotted.

>111 jillmwo: >113 pgmcc: Are you familiar with Donald Swann's setting in The Road Goes Ever On (once recorded by a gent with the excellent name of Elvish)?

>115 hfglen: I used to (and may still) have a copy of that recording. It doesn’t seem to have ever been reissued, which is a great pity.

>112 MrsLee: No, I hadn't processed the significance of the number until you mentioned it!

>113 pgmcc: Oh, good grief. I will never not hear that now. How (and how long ago) did you discover that was a possible accompaniment? And there I was, simply declaiming to the (empty) room at large when I could have been doing Gilbert and Sullivan.

>115 hfglen: and >116 haydninvienna: I may or may not have heard it so I'll have to track it down...

>117 jillmwo:
It struck me on my first read.

>118 pgmcc: It's long been known that you can successfully sing much of Emily Dickinson's poetry to the theme song for the old TV show, Gilligan's Island. Everything scans perfectly. It had never occurred to me that one might do it just as readily with Gilbert and Sullivan. I wonder if Tolkien had that type of sense of humor. (Although Errantry isn't a humorous poem in the same way as the one about "There was an inn, a merry old inn, where they brewed a beer so brown...") Although I think they're both intended for young dreamers of various sorts. I remember being charmed by the expanded retelling of Hey, Diddle Diddle. We need to introduce kids to poetry like that rather than trying to expose them too early in life to Wordsworth and his Daffodils..

Come to that, my mother read me poems by A.A. Milne (King John was not a good man and no good friends had he; he stayed in every afternoon but no one came to tea) and Alfred Noyes (The highwayman came riding, riding, riding; the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.) Actually, we need more poetry that provides full length and detailed narratives. Because people get attached to doggerel things like Dangerous Dan McGrew (as memorably recited by Margaret Rutherford in bastardized Miss Marple films).

>119 jillmwo:
I loved Margaret Rutherford's portrayals of Miss Marple. Those films were my first exposure to Agatha Christie.

Have you seen Margaret Rutherford in Blythe Spirit? That is one of my favourite films. Wikipedia link HERE

My own structured exposure to poetry was grammar school. There would not have been much before that other than nursery rhymes. My first year English teacher was a lovely man and he would have been good at instilling a liking, if not love, for poetry, but the subsequent two English teachers I had were self-aggrandising bullies who thought they were God's gift to The World, and would have been more suited to playing their teaching role in a Charles Dickens novel. They did not develop any liking or love in poetry, or anything else, in the hearts of their pupils. They spent most of their time on Shakespeare sonnets and poems by Byron. Because of the syllabus they had to include a few more accessible poets (Frost; Lear; , but they were much more focused on performing the more worthy poetry in front of their captive audiences.

The result of this warped poetry education is that I tend to steer clear of poetry. There are a few poems I like, and there are some that have come to appreciate despite having been subjects of hatred thanks to the teachers I mentioned above, but in general I avoid. I have had sufficient attendance at poetry readings and poetry collection launches, to know that there are very few modern day poets, or would-be poets, that I am interested in hearing or reading further. Philistine I may be, but I am the product of my experience.

Off the top of my head, the poems I like include the more accessible examples below:
- Ozymandias
- Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
- On Stopping by a Wood in Winter
- The Raven

I read and reviewed a book of poetry, Vortex by John W. Sexton. I found it powerful and I ended up crying on the two occasions I read the collection. Sexton is a pedant for constructing poems that abide by all the rules of poetic form, and he is an expert at injecting real emotion into his poems. He argues that if one writes anything in any other form than poetry, it will be possible to come along at a later date and improve on it. (He says if you cannot do that then you haven't grown in the interim time period.) In poetry, however, he believes you can create a perfect poem, abiding by all the strictures of the discipline, and the selection of the perfect words. He likes to think that one can work on a poem and perfect it to the extent it cannot be improved.

>119 jillmwo: >120 pgmcc: Hear! Hear! I also had a pompous ass (from Godalming) who made it clear that he despised us colonials -- the opinion was mutual -- as an English teacher for most of high school. Fortunately, he went Home and had a nervous breakdown just in time for us to get a Johannesburg Jew straight out of college for our final year. As a result, I have a love of Chaucer (he showed us the dirty bits) and profound gratitude that where I live now is too warm and wet for daffodils. Though when we were still in Pretoria we dumbfounded a Kew-ite by having a small patch of daffodils under a bougainvillea, both flowering exuberantly together.

>119 jillmwo: Tolkien says that Bilbo wrote Errantry as a particular form of poem which Hobbits enjoy, the circular form. It comes back on itself and is meant for fun. :)

My experience of poetry is in read poems, not studied poems, and so perhaps I enjoy them more. I've not much experience with modern poetry; although there were several volumes I loved as a teen, I can't remember their authors now. My tastes tend towards Lear, Nash, Poe, Frost and now, Tolkien. I was particularly interested in his introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl. Alliterative poetry of the Medieval times was about much more than simply the sounds in the lines. To read poetry is a joy, and I can see how it would be satisfying to write, but I will stick to reading it.

>122 MrsLee: I find that I prefer poetry with a discernible rhyme scheme. I can't write it myself, but I enjoy the way that it trips off the tongue. I like poets with a sense of humor so Tolkien and Milne are favorites. I like poets who can tell good stories in narrative form. Tennyson's Lady Clare is another one that stuck from my childhood and Poe does delicious, spine-tingling stuff. Kipling has much to recommend him as well although he's deeply out of favor in the current environment.

As for poetry that I read as a teenager, I remember very earnestly reading Rod McKuen's poetry way back when. He's one whose work I'm pretty sure will not survive the ages.

More to come soon. I just finished reading The Leavenworth Case and I got more from it than I might have thought I would!!

>119 jillmwo: You dare to disparage Robert Service!!? (Yukon's favourite poet) Although personally I prefer The Cremation of Sam McGee and some of his other poems to The Shooting of Dan McGrew. :)

>124 NorthernStar: I am properly chastised. If only because I had never been aware of The Cremation of Sam McGee and now that I have read it, I’m chortling.

Honestly, I didn’t really know anything of Dangerous Dan McGrew until I watched the aforementioned Miss Marple movie and then, I’m sure that I’d assumed the poem had been written as a bit of a fun for Margaret Rutherford. Reading the poet’s bio over on the Poetry Foundation site was enlightening: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-w-service

I read The Leavenworth Case this past weekend and I don’t think I would have found it quite as engaging if I hadn’t so recently read the two biographies of Mrs. Frank Leslie earlier in the year or watched The Gilded Age series on HBO Max. The book is so reflective of its time. This detective story by Anna Katherine Green is in all truth a Gilded Age novel and it wasn’t hard to visualize in my imagination what was going on – how the women would have been dressed, why they would have felt they couldn’t flout social custom, etc. At the same time, there were the occasional over-the-top scenes where a character behaved in some entirely implausible fashion because that’s what the literary convention would have demanded.

As an example, here’s a scene between the youthful male lawyer (narrator) and the beautiful young woman who everyone believes did the murderous deed:

Subduing the wonder which I felt, I slowly followed her. There was no light in the room of death, but the flame of the gas-burner, at the far end of the hall, shone weirdly in, and by its glimmering I beheld her kneeling at the shrouded bed, her head bowed above that of the murdered man, her hand upon his breast.

“You have said that if I declared my innocence you would believe me,” she exclaimed, lifting her head as I entered. “See here,” and laying her cheek against the pallid brow of her dead benefactor, she kissed the clay-cold lips softly, wildly, agonizedly, then, leaping to her feet, cried, in a subdued but thrilling tone: “Could I do that if I were guilty? Would not the breath freeze on my lips, the blood congeal in my veins, and my heart faint at this contact? Son of a father loved and reverenced, can you believe me to be a woman stained with crime when I can do this?” and kneeling again she cast her arms over and about that inanimate form, looking in my face at the same time with an expression no mortal touch could paint, nor tongue describe.

Another indication of the cultural image of the ideal woman back then:

The noble figure appeared to droop, the gently lifted head to fall, and for a moment I doubted if I had been correct in my supposition. Then form and head slowly erected themselves, a soft voice spoke, and I heard a low “yes,” and hurriedly advancing, confronted—not Mary, with her glancing, feverish gaze, and scarlet, trembling lips—but Eleanore, the woman whose faintest look had moved me from the first, the woman whose husband I believed myself to be even then pursuing to his doom! He’s in love with her – the perfect lady – after only the most minimal acquaintance under very trying circumstances.

Without resorting to spoiler tags, there were things that were done well in this story as well as one or two cringe-worthy contrivances. Ebenezer Gryce is a prototype of the Great Detective in terms of thinking through possibilities and logically working out the solution. At the same time, he is NOT a gentleman, which is how our narrator friend gets drawn into the work. The well-bred lawyer will be accepted in some settings where Gryce would not be. The servant girl, Hannah, is fairly realistically drawn, although she seems to move too quickly from being functionally illiterate to competency.. The reader encounters twist after twist (even if a bit slowly for modern tastes) and each twist draws the reader further on.

The Leavenworth Case was initially published back in 1878 and the introduction (in the edition I was reading) pointed out that the author was a college-educated woman, the daughter of a lawyer. Anna Katherine Green went on to a robust career in writing, one that extended for decades. Wilkie Collins read The Leavenworth Case and thought highly of it. Arthur Conan Doyle visited her at some time during the 1890s because he also was impressed by Green’s output. And John Curran claims that Agatha Christie saw Gryce as an interesting model when she was developing Poirot.

Granted that I may have an eccentric fondness for the sensation novel as a genre – dramatic thrills with periodic instances of fainting and white-hands-held-to-her-brow – I found this to be good bedtime reading. Not soporific, but not overly gritty and realistic.

One passing note with regard to the cover art; the edition I read was one of those facsimile editions of a Collins Detective Club publication and it has a woman dressed as a flapper on the publisher’s contemporary cover. Totally, totally irrelevant marketing ploy. One might have to remove the dust jacket just because it’s so entirely WRONG.

Brief summation of findings from survey of 660+ American readers on their practices, habits: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/votelibraries/pages/5442/attachments/original/1...

High-level findings include:

Nearly 90% of adults report using or reading a book in the prior 12 months.

57% of books are read in print and 43% are in ebook or audiobook formats. This is a significant shift from pre-COVID levels where 76% of books were utilized in print.

Audiobooks as a percentage of digital interactions have increased from only 4% in April 2019 to 16% in April 2022.

Library utilization continues to be strong with 18% of readers sourcing their print and digital from the library.

Readers have shifted dramatically to online retailers as their primary source for reading and books (43%) with negative changes to people getting books from bricks-and-mortar retail (15%) and friends and family (15%).

Fully 55% of people who self-report using a library in the last 12 months used it to read or borrow books. A further 17% reported using the library to research or study.

>127 jillmwo: Thank you for sharing this info. Fascinating! I got so excited when I saw that 90%, but then went back and reread that the survey was of 'readers.'

Edited to add this link to a chart from last Fall:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/21/who-doesnt-read-books-in-americ...

>127 jillmwo: Thanks very much for sharing that, it was informative. It has been a long time since I want to a library to do research, I've considered it a few times lately, but I do enough of that at work, at the present.

Two-Way Murder by E.C.R. Lorac

Excellent mystery by E.C.R. Lorac (previously unpublished during the author’s lifetime, but recently released in 2021 by the British Library’s publishing arm). While driving a young lady home following a local Hunt Ball, Nicholas Brent’s car is stopped by the presence of a dead body lying in the middle of the narrow country road. A responsible citizen, he reports the body to a sleepy officer of the law some miles away, but complications ensue. There’s a certain amount of distrust among the locals in sharing what they know with the authorities and a certain amount of local history to be factored in, as well. Of the lovely Dilys Maine, the stalwart Alice Ridley, the hardened Michael Reeves, who is lying? And why? Young Inspector Waring and legal professional Ian MacBane must work it out. (They do tie things up nicely, but it’s quite a ride ‘til the end!) This is a thoroughly well-paced story with entirely plausible behaviors on the part of the various characters.

I immediately went and ordered more of her books.

Period Piece by Gwen Raverat

A series of loosely related personal essays about an Edwardian childhood, Period Piece pleasantly combines childhood comfort, nostalgia and eccentricity. The chapter entitled “The Five Uncles” is delightful. Another chapter on clothing contains a specific, extensive and fascinating list of the underwear that women were expected to wear at the time. (And a great cry for POCKETS. Apparently, it's only been in the past century that women were expected to do without.) The author, Gwen Raverat, was the granddaughter of the famous Charles Darwin, although the eminent researcher died in 1882, before she was born. The family (and many of its members) were associated with Cambridge University and the stories shared reflect something of an affluent middle class life. Her father was an astronomer, but Raverat herself became an artist and illustrator. (See examples of her work here: https://www.raverat.com/prints/prints-1909 )

A piece in the Smithsonian Magazine talks about Down House, which gets its own chapter in the book. The Smithsonian notes Darwin’s routine day: Every hour of his day was scheduled to roughly the same pattern for 40 years: a walk before breakfast, then work from 8 a.m. to midday, with a pause in mid-morning to listen to Emma read novels or family letters aloud. He went for a walk with his dog before lunch, the family’s main meal, at 1 o’clock. Then he read the newspaper, wrote letters or read until 3 o’clock, then rested, working again from 4:30 to 5:30. A simple dinner was served at 7:30, after which he played backgammon with Emma or billiards with his children or listened to Emma play the piano. Much of that focus got passed down to Darwin's sons and thus to the author's own childhood, although her mother --being an American-- apparently did loosen up the child rearing practices. (Her mother fostered independence in her children, but was herself a bit loose when it came to time management as a chapter entitled “Ladies” explains quite humorously.)

A lovely read, gently accepting of how the world of her childhood no longer existed at the time of the memoir’s publication in 1952. (Note that the book is available for free via Project Gutenberg (Canada).)

And you can read the Smithsonian magazine article here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/the-house-where-darwin-lived-4277158/

Also, it's not even my Thingaversary, but there are a multitude of books headed my way. And the denizens of the pub are in some part responsible.

(1) Stone's Fall by Iain Pears because pgmcc talked him up after the pub was reading Arcadia.
(2) Index, A History of because Meredy was talking about her enjoyment of it.
(3) A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. I think it was clamairy who recommended this one.

And just because I really liked the translation that he did of The Phantom of the Opera, I have ordered David Coward's translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was unable to get through it as a teenager, but I am willing to give it another go (particularly in one of the lovely fabric hardcover editions from Penguin Classics).

There's more! Portable Magic isn't available in the U.S. yet so I've had to go and order it from overseas. And I suspect that I've forgotten one or two other books lying about that I've not yet gotten to. West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War and one or two others.

And somehow or other, the book group decided it wanted to read H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy book -- the first one. I will never forget the woman I met one night (decades ago) in a Little Fuzzy costume as we waited in line to get into one of the Star Wars movies. She never stepped out of character the entire time.

>131 jillmwo: I read that years ago and liked it very well. I should take it out and dust it off (literally) for a re-read.

>132 jillmwo:
I see you have me firmly in the frame if it turns out you do not like Stone's Fall.

You do have a solid track-record with regards to hitting me with BBs. (The City of Brass; Reynard the Fox; Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer; Artists in Crime; Miss Pym Disposes; Verdict of Twelve; Tragedy At Law; et al). Well, you can add Two-Way Murder to your scorecard.

>131 jillmwo: I loved Period piece, the arrangement by theme rather than chronology was something I found very unusual and refreshing. I love her drawing of the tiger on the bed canopy! Reading it finally prompted me to visit Down House, which I have lived near for most of my life. When we went there happened to be an exhibition of Raverat's engravings on too, which was perfect!

>132 jillmwo: It's such an exciting feeling, knowing that books are on their way and any day you might come home to find one has arrived!

>135 Sakerfalcon: And don't you know that it has exactly been that kind of week! The two books I ordered from the UK arrived yesterday. A book I ordered for research arrived today and looks nice and juicy! And a silly paperback mystery showed up; I've been having an issue in processing the content on Kindle and I figured it would just be faster to sit down and read it properly in print. Some prose styles don't migrate well to the limited screen size of a Kindle.

And yes, I chuckled over the picture of the tiger on the canopy. But isn't that always the way? As children, we do create terrors for ourselves in odd ways.

>130 jillmwo: you nicked me with this one. I had heard of her Robert MacDonald series but this appears to be a standalone. Chester County library does not have it, but they have several others of hers, and I've put a couple on my list.

>137 Jim53:
>130 jillmwo: hit me with that one too.

Two quick reviews this weekend

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho. An enjoyable fantasy set in an imaginary China. A religious anchorite falls in with a group of mercantile thieves and adventures ensue. Not as good as it might have been, had it been fleshed out a tad more, but still a rather enjoyable novella. Honestly, at one point, I was doing a mental eye roll, considering whether I was irritated enough to quit, but then the plot twists kicked in and I went along happily. Not sure this one segment of the protagonist’s story is particularly memorable, but I rather enjoy the prospect of additional chapters. (Hopefully, there will be more coming.)

Fall of Angels – This is an introduction of a new detective – John Redfyre, a somewhat “posh” copper in 1920’s London. He’s the youngest of four brothers, he’s survived the first world war and is now proving his value as a Detective Inspector to the Met. Because this is the first in this series by Barbara Cleverly, there is a certain amount of time establishing the working relationships between what one assumes will be on-going series characters. The case on which Redfyre is working provides the reader with a sense of the imbalance of the social environment. In such a rigidly-defined set of class tiers, how would someone have shifted their standing? How were women to finagle their way into the rarified halls of academe? What made this one particularly interesting to me was the first five chapters where the writing was particularly tight in showing Redfyre engage in close circumstances. Barbara Cleverly can be very good at character development and this was one set of chapters where the author’s gift shone forth. If you’re looking for a nicely complex mystery to take along with you to the beach, this one will do nicely. (It’s also longer than most mysteries these days – about 360 pages – which means you can’t really finish it in a weekend. (At least, I couldn’t.)

I am finishing up another white paper this rainy weekend. More history and again, one wants to laugh at people who are worried about brainwashing children in school. There was so much left out of our middle-school and high-school courses on American history and the teaching time has only gotten more compacted since the 60s and 70s. There were great gobs of stuff that just got a swift, generalized sweep back then, and nowadays I am sure that students probably don't get much more. I mean you might get some names and an overview of the historical flow but really, we're doing everyone such a disservice the way we handle it now.

This year -- well, this particular reading thread for me -- really has consisted of one long thematic rant about how we don't communicate history at all well.

Edited to correct typos, shift a word here or there, etc.

Quick Addendum. Watched for the umpteenth time last night the movie Now Voyager. I actually read the Olive Prouty novel on which it was based back in 2008 and I think everyone should read that book for a variety of reasons (see https://individualtake.blogspot.com/2008/04/now-voyager-title-now-voyager-author...
I watch that movie whenever it's on Turner Classic Movies and the book itself deserves a much, much wider readership than it actually has.

The Grief of Stones came out this past week. Magically appearing on my Kindle, it happened to hit me just when I was in the right mood to revisit the elven/goblin world of The Goblin Emperor and The Witness for the Dead. While, as always, the names and titles of rank appearing in Addison’s work can be challenging to keep straight, the activities of her characters are interesting. Once again, we’re dealing with the somewhat impoverished Witness, young Othala Thara Celehar. Death is a constant in Amalo (hence the series title, The Cemeteries of Amalo) and it is his role to respond to petitions for investigations into untoward or unexpected deaths. Addison is very good at weaving stories of these various investigations into one cohesive whole while at the same time building the reader's awareness of the various plateaus of existence – whether biological or spiritual. Some of the petitioners' concerns seem relatively minor, but then lead you deeper into the world and culture she's created. This second installment of the series moved the main character along in ways I had not anticipated. It was a quick read initially, but one which will stand up to a second read down the road. (About two-thirds of the way through, we see Celehar walking a maze as a spiritual aide to his mental health and I wanted to punch the air and yell “YES. THIS”. Walking a labyrinth is not something one usually encounters in fiction and not that many people are familiar with the practice. I loved encountering it here.) At any rate, this novel is thoroughly enjoyable both as a fantasy and as a mystery. I just wish there were MORE OF THEM.

>141 jillmwo: Good to know this one is out already and I'm glad you enjoyed it, I'll put it on my list.

>141 jillmwo: I doubt there are spoilers, but I only read the first few sentences of your review and stopped. I should be able to borrow this ebook within the next week. I will come back then! (But I'm glad you enjoyed it.)

>141 jillmwo: I SO want to read this!

Okay, I didn’t finish any book in the past ten days but I have been reading.

Who Killed Jane Stanford? I am reading this one on the basis of the recent (very positive) review in The New Yorker. The subject is the widow of railroad magnate, Leland Stanford. She and her husband lost their son (Leland Stanford, Jr.) at the age of fifteen to typhoid fever while traveling in Europe. The establishment of Stanford University was intended to be a memorial to that son, their only child. After her spouse died in 1893, Jane Stanford was in possession of a fabulous fortune, part of which was supposed to be channeled to the university. She exerted what may be viewed as undue control and as the book opens, we learn that someone tried to poison her using a bottle of Poland Springs water at her bedside. While that attempt failed, a subsequent attempt succeeded in ending Jane Stanford’s life. At the time, it was reported as being of natural causes, The book explores who might have done that and who might have been responsible for the century-long cover-up. The Gilded Age in America was not an overly-ethical period of history.

The Mystery of the Spanish Chest This was a bedtime re-read. It’s frequently referred to as an extended short story, published in 1960; the length is actually that of a novella. That means there isn’t a lot of room within which to maneuver. Poirot is on his own in solving the problem. Hastings is off in another part of the world, and Miss Lemon refuses to be drawn into a plainly unproductive use of her time. There aren’t very many individual characters who can be viewed as potential suspects - six people, one of them dead. Poirot has to interview each of them and identify the guilty party – all in roughly 100 pages.

There are no chapter breaks in this – just the use of dingbats to indicate a shift in location and time. To make it interesting, Christie manages to balance something of a meditation on Shakespearean tragedy with her shortlist of suspects. This case is of interest for purposes of procrastination on Poirot’s part; he’s bored by other responsibilities. The whole thing is very linear and bare-bones in how it's told. Flesh is put on the bones of that narrative by means of the meditation on Shakespeare although a case could be made that the Shakespearean elements of Othello could just as easily be seen as the key in playing fair with the reader. What matters to me is why she did it this way and whether there are lessons to be learned from it. Mulling this over. It might be that this is a writing exercise of sorts, kind of the way in which John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation was a re-versioning of the original novel, Little Fuzzy. Christie was reworking a very old short story about the Baghdad Chest while also drawing from what she did in Five Little Pigs.

My problem is that mulling this over as one falls asleep, one forgets what thought led to what. Or what one intended to do with the thought in the first place.

>145 jillmwo: "The Gilded Age in America was not an overly-ethical period of history."
Have we had one yet? But that book sounds fascinating.

I am in complete agreement concerning those bedtime flashes of brilliance that are cinders by morning.

Quote from a mystery that I honestly can't recommend (because of the truly absurd resolution offered). OTOH, there was this brief description of a bookshop.

The walls were book-covered up to the high ceiling, and on tables and benches and chairs were more books. And not only books, there were fascinating bits of curious crafts. Old glass, Early American as well as foreign stuff. Pretty tricks, like ships in bottles and silver teaspoons in a cherry pit. But mostly books. Books you’d forgotten and books you wished you had forgotten. Rare books and always genuine. Queer books, holy books and poems by the Sweet Singer of Michigan. But all these things were in the great front room. There was a smaller room back of it, where the more nearly priceless volumes were kept...

Despite the disappointment of the above, I continue to read other stuff.

>147 jillmwo: How wonderfully atmospheric! Sorry the rest of it wasn't up to snuff.

It took me a while to work through it (more my fault than the author’s) but I did finally finish Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University. By the time I was done, I felt deeply sorry for Jane Stanford and not just because she was the murdered party. She was married to Leland Stanford, railroad baron but not a particularly honest or ethical man. Nor was he any kind of financial genius. She lost her only son to typhoid in 1884. The son was the light of her existence and she fell prey to spiritualism in the wake of his passing. However, both parents wanted to start a university in their son’s memory. They did so but financially, there were issues with the legal instruments in getting it established. Special legislation got ram-rodded through the state government. Roughly ten years later, Leland Stanford Sr. passed away and his widow had to fight for control over the estate. It’s no wonder that Jane Stanford was autocratic and isolated from normal relationships. She had staff and household retainers, but tended to dictate their personal lives as a condition of employment (as did most affluent women of the period). Tensions ran high in her household, based on personal diaries and statements quoted here. Life with her couldn't have been easy, but she struck me as someone who must have been emotionally starved in life in a number of ways.

Because Stanford University was a memorial to her son, she was on their Board of Trustees and exerted unusual (and frequently unwarranted) control over the nascent institution. Jane Stanford meddled in faculty affairs in a number of ways and David Starr Jordan (the first president of Stanford) had to counteract her bad behaviors while still keeping her on his side in running things. Stanford didn’t yet have a reputation to build on and Jordan needed every penny to maintain university operations. Note that Jordan exerted his control over the university by using methods not far removed from those used by Leland Stanford himself. Put nicely, he was fighting to build the university. (More frankly, he wanted fame and a personal legacy and had no hesitation in manipulating a wealthy woman to his own ends.)

At any rate, numerous people had legitimate cause to wish her gone. There was one attempt to poison her in her own home and then, just a few weeks later in 1905 as she vacationed in Hawaii, there was a second successful attempt. Someone killed her with strychnine. That would be bad enough, but there were those – most notably those at Stanford University – who couldn’t afford for her death to be the result of murder or the result of unsound mind. It might slow and complicate the distribution of her estate and Stanford needed that money. So through a cooperative effort by corrupt officials in government and in law enforcement, her murder was denied and left unsolved. For more than a century, Jane Stanford’s death was set down in official records as being due to natural causes.

Who Killed Jane Stanford? offers an argument for who was responsible for her death and who engineered the cover-up. White takes a while to assemble his backstory and the various motivations, but the prose is not dense nor is it overly academic in tone. I kept reading because I wanted to follow the timeline. There’s a lot to absorb with recognizable historical names and events popping up, ranging from Wyatt Earp working as a bodyguard to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There’s police corruption and Chinese crime lords. You have financial skullduggery and administrative malfeasance. The cover-up (as one might expect) meant destruction and “loss” of a variety of documentation. There are no heroes in this story – just the logical arrangement of events, largely assembled by Richard White with initial assistance by groups of students. (Working archivists at Stanford were also involved as the acknowledgement chapter makes clear.)

An interesting read and fascinating as a glimpse into the Gilded Age. Not a period terribly far removed from the current era. So, to confirm back to clam when she responded up there in #146 above, I'm giving this a thumbs-up.

(More to come tomorrow on a different title.)

>149 jillmwo: It sounds like an accurate description of San Francisco politics and policing at that time. At least from everything I've read.

Interesting consideration of a mystery (unnamed here in case someone actually should happen to read it). It’s a debut novel that appeared back in the ‘30’s, so think “Golden Age” mystery as characterized by a single Plot A, told in a straightforward linear narrative style.

You are introduced to the 5 chief suspects and the murder victim. The murder victim is an unpleasant old woman who has spent YEARS lording her power (riches) over and exerting control over poor relations and others of her household. Everyone agrees she’s a witch of a woman – arrogant, rude and generally a PITA. The chief suspects are those living in the same house with her and those forced to engage regularly with the victim and others of the household

There’s an idiotic companion who is allowed one night out of the house per week but who otherwise is there to be at the beck and call of her employer. There are two female family members in their twenties or thereabouts. One is shy and retiring and the other is more open and forthcoming. Only one of the two has a regular male suitor and, of course, the suitor may or may not be sincere. There is a butler, a cook and two housemaids. The two professionals who are regularly in contact with the old woman are her doctor who has had the old woman as a patient for a number of years and a lawyer who is kept busy every time there is a change to be made to the will and the beneficiaries mentioned in the bill.

The old woman is poisoned in the evening when all of the regular members of the household are assumed to be settled in for the night. Now, given the conventions of the Golden Age mystery, that the servants aren’t really serious suspects.That said, two of them are on notice as being sacked. With immediate access to the crime scene and preferred means of murder, you’ve got the two young women, the male suitor, and the female companion, Members of law enforcement, the doctor and (one assumes) the lawyer are only called after the body is discovered. An investigation ensues and the household is tense.

What I found interesting was that the villain, the murderer of the piece, was actually presented as being the most cooperative and caring individual of the bunch. For the initial three chapters,at least, the murderer is given the most attention by an omnicient narrator. The reader is led to assume that this is the character with whom one will be spending the most time. What I’m in the midst of doing now – now that I’ve finished the book and know whodunnit – is working out at what point, the author began to seriously leverage misdirection.

>150 MrsLee: The author is a history professor at Stanford and my biggest concern in reading it was that he might try to whitewash the inconvenient elements that reflected poorly on his employer. But there really wasn't much of that going on, and the author appears to have done the due diligence needed.

>149 jillmwo: A high-school friend of mine, who went to Stanford, used to say that he went to Leland Stanford Junior College.