2011 Reading Challenge~Books #3 and #4

I managed two books this week, mainly because the first one was so short I finished it on Sunday. Read on for details . . .

Having watched the film version of 84, Charing Cross Road many times I was eager to read the book. I reserved it from our local library and was surprised by its modest dimensions when the librarian handed it over. Ninety-seven pages, that was all, and those not very full either. The book consists of letters exchanged between Helene Hanff, living in New York City, and the employees of Marks & Co., a used bookshop in London. Unable to get what she wants in New York, Hanff writes to Marks and Co., and thus begins a long, warm, and even loving relationship between her and Frank Doel, Cecily Farr, and the other "inmates" of the shop. The correspondence lasts for many years, and a real friendship springs up between them, though they never meet. The movie supplies a lot of details that the reader of the book must infer and fills in large dollops of narrative, which I didn't find distracting or distressing, though I might have if I had watched the movie after I had read the book. Both are funny and delightful.

I have many online friends. I have met almost none of them in person, but they are my friends nevertheless. I sometimes think it odd how many people I "know" through cyberspace and will likely never meet but who have enriched my life. I care what happens to them. These internet friends are in my thoughts and prayers, and I talk about them to my family and "real life" friends as if . . . well, as if they are my friends too~which they are! 84, Charing Cross Road is a reminder to me that sincere friendship can be nurtured through many media. Helene and all in the bookshop were true friends. It's just that that friendship was conducted from oppposite sides of the Atlantic through letters and parcels. What difference did that make, after all? Clearly, they made a difference in each other's life.



Add Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome to my short list of funniest books ever written. I actually laughed out loud. Many times. Why do I find British humor so completely amusing (except for Monty Python~blech!)? I think it's the quiet subtlety of so much of it. It doesn't slap you in the face but respects your intelligence and expects you to have to think to get the gag. Sometimes it slowly dawns on you. Jerome (how convenient to have the same first and last name!) achieves this over and over again. I found myself re-reading many passages just to revel in the hilarity. I positively wallowed in it at times. The plot (if you can call it that) revolves around a boat trip the author, two friends, and a dog are taking on the Thames in 1888. The mishaps are numerous. The book is largely one digressive jaunt into Jerome's past foibles after another. These side-trips are inspired by the events of the three men's journey (and don't forget the dog!) in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. On the other hand, Jerome at times offers some lovely and poignant descriptions of, for instance, the scenery that momentarily made me forget I was reading a comedy. Then at the last minute he tacks on a funny sentence that suddenly reminds the forgetful reader that he is reading drollery.

Now I have an urge to re-read To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, but since I just re-read it this past summer, I shall forgo that pleasure for now. I wonder what else Jerome K. Jerome has written, though. A little research is in order . . .


Here's trusty Mr. Linky for anyone who wants to share a book:

On My Mind

Brenda at Down to Earth has started a new Friday feature called "On My Mind" in which participants share something they are thinking about today. Here's my contribution:

The nice man in the brown truck delivered two highly diverting packages this week. One contained fabric for making dishtowels and dustcloths! The selvedges are finished so all I have to do is cut the length I want, hem both ends, and I've got a nifty new cloth. Girl of the House has some too for her hope chest, and I have more than enough to save for later and for giving. Fabric.com is having a terrific sale. (Thanks to Like Mother, Like Daughter for the link.)




We ordered our garden seeds early to take advantage of another terrific sale at Henry Field's. I plan to plant lettuce indoors in window boxes on our back porch and keep it going year round. Maybe I won't have to buy anymore lettuce. When we want some, we'll just go pick some. Think it'll work?

For Your Reading Pleasure

Some interesting links from around the web:

Are you sure you want a husband who . . .?

Regulation vs. Legislation

Head Start Fraud: It's Worse Than You Think

Leila waxes eloquent on the common dishtowel here and here.

2011 Reading Challenge~Book #2

Last night I crossed book #2 of my reading challenge, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, off my list of "gotta reads." It was different than I expected but enjoyable. Not amazing, but enjoyable. Reading it was like sitting down with an elderly relative and listening to her stories of her childhood. Mildred Armstrong Kalish reminisces about growing up on a farm during the Depression without emphasizing deprivation, which was a welcome change from other Depresseion-era books I've read (which admittedly are not many). While her young self was far from pampered, she feels blessed to have grown up when and where she did. The amount of work required from the entire family to produce the food that they would eat (very little was bought) is staggering. Yet they all willingly pitched in and never complained . . . well, seldom complained. Their thrift and ingenuity fill in any perceived lack in their lives. They seemed contented and happy with their simple, unglamorous lives.

This is not a linear narrative of Kalish's life told in story form in the manner of, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. Instead, Kalish dedicates entire chapters each to a single subject: relatives, medicine, wash day, nut-gathering, school, animal tales, leisure, gardening. They lived their lives in seamless harmony so that it was often impossible to distiguish work from fun, for those who lived it and for the readers. Life was hard but immensely satisfying, according to the author.

What impressed me most about Little Heathens was the vast store of what we more "enlightened" moderns would call "folk lore" exhibited by Kalish and her family. Doctors were something you only went to if home remedies were to no avail, and they almost always worked. Their knowledge of home nursing encompassed everything drawing out a splinter to remedying blood poisoning. Living so much by the seasons and off the land meant that they knew the natural world around them intimately, even down to the smallest dips and rises in the topography of their farms. They knew almost by instinct when to plant and when to harvest, where bees made their hives, and how to save seeds for the next year's planting. If you were to plop me or anyone else I know down in the middle of a wilderness, we wouldn't know the first thing about survival. But Kalish and her family would in the same amount of time be half-finished erecting a log cabin using makeshift tools fashioned from the natural materials around them and putting up food they've foraged from the forest for the winter in containers made of bark. We often assume that people in times before ours were ignorant, unsophisticated, and at the mercy of natural forces, but I've got a growing conviction that they were a lot smarter than we moderns want to give them credit for. It's a pity this kind of knowledge is dying along with our forefathers.

In the epilogue, Kalish tells us briefly of her life after the farm, and I discovered that she taught for a time at my college alma mater. I think I will look her up and see if I can find her mentioned in the archives somewhere.

The book gets a little earthy at times, so I wouldn't recommend just handing it over to your young-ish children (though I did and gasped a few times at what I had done!). I also detect a note of overweaning pride from time to time as Kalish tells us of her life and accomplishments. But then again, maybe she has earned the right to brag a little. Not particularly deep and difficult, the book lent itself to quick reading, and I now know that a 300-page book is about the limit of what I can handle in one week. If a slower pace and more thought are required, even that will be out of my reach, and I suspect that I will avoid certain books during this reading challenge just because I know I will not be able to keep up. Be that as it may, a whole two weeks into it I'm glad I've set this challenge before me. It's been beneficial.

NOTE: I've added a Mr. Linky in case anyone wants to share a book from the past week. If you have a book from the first week, please add it and a link to your blog (if you have one) in the comments section. Thanks!

From My Commonplace Book

"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."~~James D. Miles

"I am afraid that schools will prove to be wide gates to hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not constantly occupied with the Word of God must become currupt."~~Martin Luther

"The feeling that 'if nothing is happening, nothing is happening' is the prejudice of a superficial, dependent and hollow spirit, one that has succumbed to the age and can prove its own excellence only by the pseudo-events it is constantly organizing, like a bee, to that end."~~Vaclav Havel

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."~~Adlai Stevenson

2011 Reading Challenge~Book #1

Last night I finished the first book in my reading challenge: At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. This is the fascinating book I mentioned earlier, and I had actually begun it before starting my reading challenge, but since I wasn't more than halfway through this 450 page book, and some of the books waiting their turn are much shorter, I decided to count it.

Bryson uses his 1851 rectory in the English countryside as a jumping off point for exploring a wide range of historical topics loosely related to domestic life, everything from adulterated flour to the development of the staircase to the rise to prominance of the flush toilet. He hits on archeology, architecture, and agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, insecticides, and infectious diseases, to name a few. The "aha!" moments abound. If you are a fan of British literature and history, then this book will connect a lot of dots and fill in puzzling social and historical background. The author also touches on some American developments where they apply. I found every page fascinating and Bryson's writing quite witty in the dry manner that I enjoy. I never would have thought reading about building materials and sewers could be so enjoyable.

Bryson does share some tidbits that I wish I didn't now know, such as the rat-to-person ratio in the average city (in America too), what percentage of a six-year-old pillow's weight can be attributed to mites (it's bigger than you think), and what size crack an adult mouse can squeeze through to get into your house (it's smaller than you think). And we now close the lid when we flush the toilet. I'm just saying . . . Especially by the end of the book, I thought he was skimming across the surface of several topics in order to wrap things up quickly. He left me wanting to know more on many points, but that's not entirely bad, is it? The book is nearly 500 pages long as it is.

Don't expect Bryson to spend much time exploring the history of his particular house. While there is a bit of that, the house and its layout are just an excuse to go off on loosely related but thoroughly engrossing tangents suggested by the rooms themselves. Sometimes they are pretty far-flung, but they are always worth the trip.


(Picture: English Cottage IV by Terry Lawrence courtesy of allposters.com)

2011 Reading Challenge

My reading lagged a bit last year, so I've decided to challenge myself in 2011. My goal is to read a book a week~52 weeks, 52 books. I'm actually a week late getting started, so if I don't make up the time during 2011 I'll let myself lapse into 2012 a bit. I've already got a shelf set up with 15 or so books to tackle for starters. Some are very short (Good-bye, Mr. Chips) and some are much longer (The Pickwick Papers), so if I take more than a week to finish a long one, I can follow it up with a short one and still be on track. I will allow myself audio books as well. Looking at my pile so far, I see I need some more non-fiction and some books older than Dickens. I believe in C.S. Lewis' dictum about reading old books.

You can see what's on the docket in the sidebar, and every weekend I plan to post about that week's book. If I'm not able to keep up the pace, attempting to will result in my reading more books than I would have otherwise, so I don't really see how I can lose. Anyone care to join me?