Library Chicken Update :: 2.21.18
Even the flu can't keep Suzanne from short stories, bookish memoirs, surprisingly intense popular fiction, and a little Vonnegut.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Well, it all had to come crashing down sooner or later. I’ve been on a bit of a book bender for the past couple of months, but I could only juggle two full library cards’ worth of books for so long (as per usual, please don’t mention the two cards thing to my local branch), and as we all know, in Library Chicken the house (i.e., the library) always wins. I don’t want to discuss the ‘returned books’ score (which you can find at the end of this update) except to note that I had THE FLU last week so I’m blaming everything on that. (If you happen to see my husband out and about and he claims that I had a bad cold, not the flu, tells him that you DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES and it DOESN’T MATTER that when everyone else in the house got sick they were only down for a couple of days because maybe they just had a cold but I had the REAL ACTUAL FLU. Also please remind him to get more Tang at the grocery store because I am a child of the 70s and 80s and I know for a fact that Tang and Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup — served side by side, not mixed together because that would be stupid and gross — make up an all-powerful healing potion and my recovery is entirely due to their miraculous effects.)
Anyway, thank goodness that’s all over and I’m sure I’ll never have such a large Library Chicken crash ever again, and pay no attention to the rumbling and creaking noises coming from the large remaining stacks of library books clustered around my bed because I’m sure that’s completely normal and totally not an ominous foreshadowing of the future.
BOOKMARKED: READING MY WAY FROM HOLLYWOOD TO BROOKLYN by Wendy W. Fairey
MY LIFE WITH BOB: FLAWED HEROINE KEEPS BOOK OF BOOKS, PLOT ENSUES by Pamela Paul
Two reading memoirs from two interesting women. Wendy Fairey, a professor of English literature, is the daughter of Sheila Graham, known in her time both for being a gossip columnist during Hollywood’s “Golden Age” and for being in a relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald during his final years in California. As a child, Fairey first learned to love books by browsing through the library of classic novels that Fitzgerald had given to her mother long ago. Fairey tells the story of her life as it parallels some of her all-time favorite books, including David Copperfield, To the Lighthouse, and Howard’s End. In comparison, Pamela Paul did not grow up in a household that valued reading, and often felt that she could never get enough books to satisfy her. As a high schooler, she started keeping a list of books read — the Book of Books, aka Bob — and this memoir reflects back on her life through Bob and the books that meant the most to her at particular times. Paul is only a couple of years younger than I am, so her list of favorite books in childhood looks very familiar, but beyond the voracious reading I don’t think she and I have much in common. Except, that is, for our joint all-consuming hatred of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, a book that I was tricked into reading years ago when it kept showing up on lists of favorite humorous books (in Paul’s case, a boyfriend made her read it). Flashman merits a chapter in her memoir, in which she exposes it for the racist, wildly misogynistic mess that it is, and Paul will always have a special place in my heart for that alone.
(LC Score: +1 ½, Bookmarked returned overdue)
THE ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY: AN ANTHOLOGY FROM THE CLASSICAL ERA TO THE PRESENT edited by Phillip Lopate
I enjoy essay collections and this thick volume (published in 1995) goes all the way back to Seneca, Plutarch, and Montaigne to explore the beginnings of the “personal essay.” I was a little surprised that I actually preferred the older authors to the most of the modern ones (Edward Hoagland, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, etc.) included here and I have a whole new stack of names to add to my to-read list (as if it needed to get any longer). (Challenge Accepted: “an essay anthology” from the Read Harder 2018 challenge)
(LC Score: +½, returned overdue)
THE OXFORD BOOK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY GHOST STORIES edited by Michael Cox
ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S SPELLBINDERS IN SUSPENSE
More short stories! I’ve read several Oxford anthologies at this point and they generally do a good solid job of rounding up a collection of quality stories from (mostly) familiar authors. This 1996 collection takes us from 1910 (E. Nesbit) to 1994 (Jane Gardam), with the likes of Angela Carter, Penelope Lively, and Fay Weldon making appearances along the way. The Alfred Hitchcock collection is one of dozens of short grab-bag anthologies published under Hitchcock’s name in the 60s and 70s for young readers (I certainly gobbled up my share of these from the children’s section of my hometown library). I picked this one up because it had a particular story that we’re going to do in our homeschool class this semester, but beyond that it’s a little bit like buying a lottery ticket and waiting to see what you’re going to get. This one includes a Dorothy Sayers’ standalone mystery, Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds” (the inspiration for the film), and a cute little mystery involving a Saint Bernard and starring a husband-and-wife team of amateur sleuths from an author I’d never heard of (but I’ve already ordered a used copy of the first book in their out-of-print series, so I’ll let you know how that goes).
(LC Score: +2)
GET IN TROUBLE: STORIES by Kelly Link
VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE by Karen Russell
SELF-HELP by Lorrie Moore
Of course, short story anthologies inevitably lead me to authors that I want to read more of, which is how I found my way to these three collections. I’ve been hearing about Kelly Link as a talented writer of bizarre and fantastical short fiction for years, and now that I’ve finally read her work I want to track down all the authors and critics and fellow readers who recommended her and say, “Yes, I know you TOLD me to read her, but why didn’t you MAKE me?” I expect I’ll be reading my way through her backlist in the very near future. I had read (and enjoyed) Karen Russell’s novel, Swamplandia!, a few years ago, so I was not surprised that I enjoyed this collection of strange and melancholy tales, about topics ranging from Japanese women literally morphing into silkworms to U.S. Presidents reincarnated as farm horses to, yes, vampires in a lemon grove. Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help doesn’t have the fantastical elements of the other two collections, but she still manages to create her own mini-worlds in this short collection, explaining (among other things) “How to Talk to Your Mother” and “How to Become a Writer.” Each of these short collections is an entertaining and memorable read.
(LC Score: +2, Get in Trouble and Vampires returned overdue)
ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE by Gail Honeyman
I was on the hold list for a while waiting for this buzzy book, but once I began reading it I realized that it was not what I had expected. The effusive blurbs and reviews had led me to anticipate a sweet, quirky story about a younger (or older) woman who transforms a somewhat lonely life by finding friends (and perhaps romance) and creating an extended if unusual family-of-choice. I LOVE books like that (read Elinor Lipman for some good examples) but a few pages into this one I was thinking that Eleanor has got a lot more problems (and can be a lot more annoying) than I would have thought. As it turns out, she has a very dark backstory, which is revealed over the course of the book (though never in detail), making her transformation more about survival than superficial change. Once I adjusted my expectations, I raced through to the end of the book, and I will definitely be picking up Honeyman’s next novel.
(LC Score: +1)
PLAYER PIANO by Kurt Vonnegut
Somehow I missed Vonnegut as a younger reader. I’m not sure how. As a committed reader of science fiction I was always seeing his name as one of our “respectable” sf writers (a category of two, as I recall, consisting only of Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury), but I just never got around to reading anything by him beyond a few famous stories like “Harrison Bergeron.” It’s past time for me to remedy that, so I’ve begun with his first novel, Player Piano, set in a near-future world where managers and engineers rule the world in the name of greater efficiency and greater profits, and most of humanity has been mechanized out of a job. (It’s an Ayn-Randian utopia written as a Vonnegut dystopia.) Vonnegut’s writing drew me in right from the very beginning, though the world that he builds is not very complete or believable. More upsetting was the realization that Vonnegut’s world, at least in this novel, is almost completely free of women (except as wife-accessories) and people of color; essentially it felt like a novel written by a white man for white men about white men screwing over other white men, which made it a little hard for me to get into. I generally think of Vonnegut as a compassionate and deeply humane man, ahead of his time, so perhaps my expectations were a little too high when it comes to his treatment of issues around sexism and racism. That said, I’m looking forward to continuing my Vonnegut odyssey.
(LC Score: +1)
GRATUITOUS EPILOGUE by Andrea K. Host
IN ARCADIA by Andrea K. Host
Books 4 and 5 in the Touchstone trilogy (just go with it), a self-published science fiction YA series. The trilogy that preceded these “extra” works, about an Australian teenager named Cass who finds herself suddenly in another world where she is fortunately rescued by super-hot teenage psychic space ninjas, was a very fun read and I have to love any author who dares to title her work Gratuitous Epilogue. As foreshadowed, the fourth entry in the series has very little plot, instead devoting itself to Cass’s happily-ever-after life of weddings, babies, and home decor. In Arcadia switches narrators to follow Cass’s mom, newly immigrated to Cass’s world, and her romance with the older leader and mentor of the previously mentioned super-hot psychic space ninjas. I’m not much of a romance novel reader, so I may have skimmed here and there, but both “extras” are entertaining and fun reads, in part because Cass and her mom are both huge science-fiction/fantasy/gaming/anime nerds and references to all things nerdy and wonderful abound.
(LC Score: 0, read on Kindle)
RETURNED UNREAD: LC Score -25
Library Chicken Score for 2/21/18: -17
Running Score: -5
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- VANESSA BELL by Frances Spalding (more girl who reads Woolf and Woolf-adjacent reading)
- HOW TO READ A BOOK: THE CLASSIC GUIDE TO INTELLIGENT READING by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (better late than never, right?)
- NECESSITY by Jo Walton (final book in the Thessaly trilogy — yes I know this was on here before but I MEAN IT this time)
- PUZZLE FOR PLAYERS by Patrick Quentin (first book in that husband-and-wife sleuth series - fingers crossed that it’s good!)
Book Nerd: Delightfully Doleful Books for Dark and Dreary Winter Days
When the weather outside is frightful, Suzanne embraces the dark side with a gloomy, Gothic reading list that makes a bleak winter day seem positively cheerful by comparison.
Suzanne is on Library Chicken break this week because she is recovering from the flu. (She is fine! But we are exercising all possible caution!) While she is drinking plenty of fluids and getting lots of rest, we are republishing one of her winter book columns.
After a (too) long, (too) hot summer, winter has finally arrived in Georgia and the weather people on the news are saying things like “prepare for ARCTIC BLAST 2017.” It’s gloomy and grey outside and pitch black by 6 p.m., meaning that I’m ready to get PJ-ed and hop into bed by 6:30. Some people like to read about the beach and happier tropical climes when the weather outside is frightful, but I prefer to hibernate with a stack of library books by my side featuring frost-bitten protagonists trying to survive the elements, so I can revel in my warm, afghan-covered indoor-ness while they’re being chased by wolves. It’s time to build a fire and read To Build a Fire.
For many in my generation, Joan Aiken is the queen of this sort of middle grade gothic, with her loosely connected alternate history series beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. In Wolves, two young girls fight back against an evil governess (and an assortment of wolves) with the help of hermit-boy Simon, who lives in the woods and raises geese and bees. Simon moves to London and becomes the protagonist in my favorite book of the original trilogy, Black Hearts in Battersea, where he thwarts a Hanoverian plot to assassinate the king. Simon’s friend, Dido Twite, takes up the narrative (and visits America) with her adventures in Nightbirds on Nantucket. I didn’t realize at the time that Dido went on to star in several more books written by Aiken, but I’ve been catching up with the series and all the treacherous Hanoverian plots, my favorite of which involves sliding St. Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames during the coronation of King Richard IV.
If you prefer your wolves and evil plots a big closer to home, Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty is the start of another great middle school series, set in the Biltmore Estate and the surrounding forests and mountains of Asheville, Tenn. I’ve visited Biltmore several times, and it’s a treat to see the rooms I’ve toured come alive in Beatty’s version of life at Biltmore in 1899. Serafina, daughter of one of the house employees, prowls the house at night and designates herself Chief Rat Catcher, but children both upstairs and downstairs are going missing and Serafina soon realizes that there are evil forces at work, discovering her own magical heritage in the meantime. The second book in the series, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, picks up where the first book leaves off, continuing the fight against evil and Serafina’s journey of self-discovery.
This past year, my favorite example of Dickensian dreariness was in the three volumes of the Iremonger trilogy by Edward Carey. Carey, an Englishman, has said that he was inspired to write the series after moving to Austin, Texas, and missing the grey gloominess of London. Beginning with the first novel, Heap House, he creates a complete world around the Iremonger family, who live in the midst of the vast rubbish dump produced by Victorian-era London. The enormous heaps are a dangerous ecosystem of their own, but also the source of the Iremonger wealth, and each member of the family is assigned a “birth object,” a particular item that they must carry with them for their entire lives. I loved everything about these books: the detailed (and very gloomy) illustrations, the always-not-quite-right Iremonger names, and the story, which ultimately spills out of the heaps to infect all of London. The books are aimed at middle school readers and teens, but I think they’d be great fun as readalouds, as long as the listeners are okay with the occasional (very) unfortunate event.
Let me know if you have any grey and gloomy favorites that keep you warm over the winter, and Happy Reading!
This was originally published in the winter 2017 issue of HSL.
Library Chicken Update :: 1.31.18
On a particularly good Library Chicken week, Suzanne's reading short stories, British detectives, a little Virginia Woolf fan fiction, a charming novel totally worth the library hold list, and more.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
LIBRARY CHICKEN PLAY-BY-PLAY: So today I dropped by the library to return three books (that I had not yet read, prompting much gnashing of teeth on my part) so that I could pick up three holds that would expire tomorrow. (I still have three additional holds waiting for me, but I’m hoping I can read three of my new books quickly — meaning in the next six days — and return them before those holds expire.) Meanwhile, I returned a couple of books from my husband’s card. (REMINDER: PLEASE DO NOT INFORM MY LIBRARY OF MY ILLICIT USE OF THE SPOUSAL CARD.) I had to wander around for a few minutes to give the librarian time to check in my newly-returned books before grabbing the holds, and I perhaps maybe might have picked up an additional book (by the author of one of the books I had to return unread) to check out on the spousal card. But there’s no problem here because I CAN QUIT ANYTIME I WANT. (In my defense, A.S. King’s I Crawl Through It looks bizarre and amazing and I was very sad about returning Please Ignore Vera Dietz unread.)
- GREAT SHORT STORIES BY AMERICAN WOMEN edited by Candace Ward
- BLACK AMERICAN SHORT STORIES: A CENTURY OF THE BEST edited by John Henrik Clarke
- GROWING UP ETHNIC IN AMERICA: CONTEMPORARY FICTION ABOUT LEARNING TO BE AMERICAN edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan
As you may be able to tell, I’m still working on my massive backlog of anthologies, along with trying to read more diversely. The American Women collection is a Dover Thrift Edition with 13 stories. It has a few classics I’ve read before (yes, I’ll read “The Yellow Wallpaper” again!) but mostly I picked it up because it included Louisa May Alcott’s fictionalized satire of her father’s (failed) utopian community: “Transcendental Wild Oats.” Black American Short Stories was a great introduction to writers I would like to read more of (and had surprisingly little overlap with another anthology I’ve read recently: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1899-1967). By far my favorite part of this chronologically organized collection was towards the back of the book, where we started to get some wonderful female writers, including Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Eugenia Collier. The anthology that I most enjoyed, though, was Growing Up Ethnic in America, which collects authors like Sherman Alexie, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich in stories ranging from humorous to heart-breaking. This collection would make a great spine for a homeschool high school lit class, so it’s definitely HOMESCHOOL RECOMMENDED.
(LC Score: +3)
THE POISON ORACLE by Peter Dickinson
Peter Dickinson has written some of the most bizarre mysteries I’ve ever read and I’m having a great time working through his backlist. This one is set in an Arabian palace that’s shaped like an upside-down ziggurat and follows a British linguist who runs the Sultan’s private zoo while performing language experiments with his (the linguist’s) best friend, a chimpanzee. And then things get odd. Once again (as in the first of the James Pibble mysteries, The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest), Dickinson has created a fictional primitive tribe and once again I’m a little worried that the entire premise falls somewhere between “very concerning” and “straight up super-racist” (and that’s not even including the racism in the linguist’s depiction of his Arab employer) but I just can’t resist Dickinson’s strange little books.
(LC Score: +1)
- THE DETECTIVE WORE SILK DRAWERS by Peter Lovesey
- THE LAST DETECTIVE by Peter Lovesey
Two entries from two different mystery series by the same author. The Detective Wore Silk Drawers is the second Sergeant Cribb mystery, set in Victorian England, where Cribb investigates a murder linked to illegal bare-knuckle boxing. The Last Detective is a contemporary mystery (circa 1991) introducing detective Peter Diamond. And here’s where I admit that I did NOT like Det. Diamond AT ALL. Why did I continue reading the book, you ask? Because one of the plot points in the murder (which took place in Bath, England) revolved around the discovery of long-lost Jane Austen letters and OF COURSE I’M READING THAT. By the end of the book... well, I still didn’t like Diamond all that much, but if I could grow to love the sexist, racist, determinedly un-PC Andrew Dalziel (in Reginald Hill’s great series of mysteries beginning with A Clubbable Woman), I’m willing to give Diamond one more chance.
(LC Score: +2)
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles
I know y’all have heard of this one because EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU must have been on the hold list ahead of me at my library but oh my gosh was it ever worth the wait! In 1922, 30-year-old Count Rostov is sentenced to permanent house arrest (for the crime of being an aristocrat) at Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, but he’s determined to enjoy life nonetheless. It is SO CHARMING and DELIGHTFUL and we all need more of that right now so run out and read this immediately (or at least put yourself on your library’s hold list and settle in for the wait).
(LC Score: +1)
THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS by Jo Walton
This sequel to The Just City, continuing the story of the time-traveler philosophers who attempt to create Plato’s Republic in an experiment set up by the goddess Athena, is tied with A Gentleman in Moscow for my favorite read of the fortnight. As usual, I can never guess where Walton is going, but I always enjoy the ride. I don’t want to give away any spoilers but I will say that we get to meet another one of Athena’s relatives in this one.
(LC Score: +1)
HOW I LIVE NOW by Meg Rosoff
This was YA author Rosoff’s debut novel and wow, she started off with a bang. (No pun intended.) Rosoff’s narrator, Daisy, is an anorexic American teen who is sent off to England to stay with cousins just before the start of a massive world war that results in England’s occupation. The details of the war are deliberately left vague, leaving the reader to focus on Daisy’s powerful tale of determination and survival. Sometimes grim, but so good.
(LC Score: +1)
VANESSA AND HER SISTER by Priya Parmar
This time around in my Girl Who Read Woolf project I picked up this fictionalization of Virginia’s relationship with her sister Vanessa, told in Vanessa’s voice (with occasional letters to and from assorted Bloomsburians) and covering the time period from the beginnings of Bloomsbury up until Virginia’s marriage to Leonard. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Parmar does a wonderful job with the characters’ voices and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
(LC Score: +1)
EDGAR ALLAN POE: HIS LIFE AND LEGACY by Jeffrey Meyers
We’re reading Poe in this semester’s short story class so I wanted to brush up on his life story. The short version: he was super-talented but also terrible. Meyers is, I think, overly generous to the irascible and thin-skinned author (and I found that I enjoyed Kenneth Silverman’s very scholarly Edgar A. Poe: A Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance a bit more) but this is a solid introduction to Poe’s eventful life.
(LC Score: +1)
- RETURNED UNREAD: LC Score -5
- Library Chicken Score for 1/31/18: 6
- Running Score: 12
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- 100 YEARS OF THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor (more short stories!)
- SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG by Kitty Burns Florey (a mini-history of the art of diagramming sentences because why not?)
- NECESSITY by Jo Walton (final book in the Thessaly trilogy)
- ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE by Gail Honeyman (after another long wait on the hold list)
Library Chicken Update :: Top 10 Fiction Books Read in 2017
Suzanne's best fiction reads of last year include more than one addictive series, plus haunted houses, Sherlock homages, classic Hollywood in space, and more.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
It’s still January, right? Which means there’s still time to sneak in one last Top Ten Favorites List before tackling all the books on The Millions Great 2018 Book Preview or trying to catch up with everything on the 2018 Tournament of Books shortlist. So if you’re looking for some great fiction to read this year, here are my suggestions!
TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING: BOOK ONE OF TERRA IGNOTA by Ada Palmer
It does feel just a bit risky to put book one of a trilogy on a top ten list when I haven’t read books two and three yet. I’ve been burned before by trilogies that started out amazing and went rapidly downhill. But Palmer’s vision of the 25th century — written in the style of an 18th century novel — was too wonderful to leave off the list. I can’t wait to read her follow-ups: Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle.
THE IMPERIAL RADCH series by Ann Leckie
One science fiction series that I did read in its entirety in 2017 was Leckie’s space opera trilogy: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy. We follow our protagonist to a satisfying conclusion at the end of the series, but Leckie’s galactic empire is big enough to hold many other tales, and I’m looking forward to reading Provenance, a new novel set in the world of the Imperial Radch.
THE SMALL CHANGE trilogy by Jo Walton
Walton goes back in time to rewrite history in her Small Change series, which imagines a near-fascist England after Germany is victorious in World War II. Farthing, Ha’Penny, and Half a Crown are alternate histories that read like thrillers, and (unfortunately) they felt particularly relevant in 2017.
THE SUPERNATURAL ENHANCEMENTS by Edgar Cantero
I love haunted house stories. I love epistolary novels. Cantero thoughtfully puts these two genres together for me in The Supernatural Enhancements, so of course I because an instant fan (and early reader of his Cthulhu vs. Scooby Doo follow-up, Meddling Kids.)
WHITE IS FOR WITCHING by Helen Oyeyemi
Another haunted house story — plus this one has creepy twins, so you know it’s going to be awesome. It was hard to pick just one Oyeyemi to put on the list, given that I spent 2017 binging through her backlist, but this was the first novel I read by her and it’s unforgettable, along with being super-creepy in the best way.
RADIANCE by Catherynne M. Valente
Space whales, lunar movie studios, and a private investigator on the trail of a missing filmmaker: this novel is almost impossible to describe as it jumps from film noir to silver-screen gossip columns to serious Oyeyemi-level creepiness. Try to hold on to something sturdy when you’re reading it.
THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead
Before the zombies of Zone One and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Whitehead wrote this strange and moving story of the first black female elevator inspector and her involvement in the great schism between the Empiricists and the Intuitionists. I would not have guessed that anyone could make the philosophy of elevator inspection fascinating enough to carry me through an entire novel, but I should know better than to underestimate Whitehead.
ALVA AND IRVA: THE TWINS WHO SAVED A CITY by Edward Carey
I’ve noticed that “weird” seems to have been a theme for my 2017 reading, but even among the other odd and bizarre entries on this list, Carey’s novel stands out. Alva and Irva are twin sisters obsessed with the scale model they’ve created of the city they live in, Entralia. Carey is best known for his Iremonger trilogy (for younger readers), but his earlier adult novels are also great (and very strange) reads.
DUST AND SHADOW: AN ACCOUNT OF THE RIPPER KILLINGS BY DR. JOHN H. WATSON by Lyndsay Faye
Sherlock, Watson, and Jack the Ripper: this is the best post-Conan-Doyle Holmes novel I’ve ever read. In other great news, Faye’s new collection, The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, means that I can spend even more time adventuring with my favorite Victorian sleuth.
ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf
I’ve always heard that this time-traveling gender-swapping novel of romance and adventure was charming and utterly delightful. Turns out that it is even more charming and utterly delightful than I expected.
And Because I Read So Many Great Books Last Year, Here Are a Dozen More Awesome Novels:
This Week in Library Chicken :: 1.17.18
Suzanne kicks off a new year of library chicken with mysteries, biographies, short stories, and some decidedly weird fiction.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
It’s the first Library Chicken Update of 2018! We’re wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch in honor of the new year. I’m looking forward to a great year of reading, but mostly I’ve been busy rearranging my to-read list and (finally) copying it over from Amazon Wish Lists to my goodreads account. There’s no easy way to do this (that I’ve discovered), so I’m going through and transferring it book by book, which takes a while when you have [ACTUAL NUMBER REDACTED BECAUSE I’M EMBARRASSED BY THE EXCESSIVENESS OF IT ALL] books on your list. It’s a wonderful way to waste time online, though, and I’m much more cheerful afterward than if I’d spent the same amount of time on Facebook or Twitter being brought up to date on all the horrible things happening in the world.
Also new this year, in an effort to make it look like I’m accomplishing something by lying around and reading all day (and because it seems like a lot of fun), I’m officially tackling three reading challenges: BookRiot’s Read Harder Challenge, the Popsugar Reading Challenge, and of course our very own HSL’s 2018 Reading Challenge! Happy reading, everyone!
THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY by Edmund Crispin
Gervase Fen #1. New year, new mystery series! This 1940s series stars an Oxford don as our sleuth. In fact, as Fen says early on in this erudite murder mystery, set around the production of a new play in Oxford: “I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.” I love it when books break the fourth wall, so I’m definitely looking forward to #2.
(LC Score: +1)
FUN PHANTOMS: TALES OF GHOSTLY ENTERTAINMENT edited by Sean Manley and Gogo Lewis
THE OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH DETECTIVE STORIES edited by Patricia Craig
This week I start the short stories class at our hybrid homeschool (Poe! Jackson! Wodehouse! more Poe!), but I’ve still got anthologies stacked all over the floor, waiting to be read. Now that I’ve (re)discovered the joys of short fiction I have, as usual, become a bit obsessed. I’ve taken a break from The Modern Tradition this and 50 Short Masterpieces that to veer into genre with some ghost and detective stories. Fun Phantoms is an unusual 1979 collection that specializes in humorous ghost stories, some of which are classics (e.g., “The Canterville Ghost” and “The Open Window”) and some of which (ahem) are not. Meanwhile, The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories takes us all the way from the classic early days of alibis based on train schedules and locked room whodunits to the 1980s with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. I do have a bone to pick with the editor: at a minimum, a story included in an anthology of “detective stories” should actually have a detective in it. If it has a murder but no detective, that’s a crime story, and that, I would think, belongs in a whole other anthology.
(Challenge Accepted: HSLs “A Collection of Short Stories”)
(LC Score: +2)
THE WEIRD: A COMPENDIUM OF STRANGE AND DARK STORIES edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
“Weird” is a difficult genre to describe —it’s something of a cross between horror and sf/fantasy, and it may be my favorite kind of writing just now. A shelf of “Modern Weird” would include books by Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Helen Oyeyemi, and the co-editor of this anthology, Jeff VanderMeer, but this massive (over 1100 pages!) and thoroughly enjoyable collection goes back in time and around the world to collect weird tales from a diverse group of authors. Full of wonderful and disturbing stories, this anthology is more than an introduction to the genre, it’s an education.
(LC Score: +1)
CARTER & LOVECRAFT by Jonathan L. Howard
THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM by Victor LaValle
H.P. Lovecraft is classic weird, and modern authors have been having a wonderful time in the past few years revisiting and revising him. And he does need some revising: H.P. is unfortunately as well known for his virulent racism and sexism as he is for tentacled mind-melting hell-beasts. Howard and LaValle both play with that reputation in different ways. In Carter & Lovecraft, an ex-cop private eye gets mixed up with the last Lovecraft descendant — who happens to be both female and black — and a plot to change the rules of reality in very unpleasant ways. (SPOILER: By the end of the novel things are looking fairly bleak for our heroes, but the sequel, ominously titled After the End of the World, just came out for all of us who want to read what happens next.) In The Ballad of Black Tom, LaValle reimagines Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”, often described as H.P.’s most racist tale, by telling the story from a different perspective, creating a powerful novella that comments both on the original work and on modern day society. (SPOILER: It also includes a tentacled hell-beast or two.)
(LC Score: +2)
EVERY HEART A DOORWAY by Seanan McGuire
I’d had this fantasy novella (first in the Wayward Children trilogy) about a boarding school for children who had disappeared into magical worlds and had trouble readjusting when they returned to their old lives on my list for a while, but Amy’s positive review pushed it to the top, just in time for the release of the final book in the series. Can’t wait to read the next one!
(Challenge Accepted: home|school|life’s “The First Book in a Series” and “A Book You Can Read in One Day”, ReadHarder’s “A One-Sitting Book”)
(LC Score: +1)
THE COMMON READER: FIRST SERIES by Virginia Woolf
I’ve read several of Woolf’s novels, but this is the first time I’m tackling her essays. Her narrative voice is, as always, engaging and very pleasant to spend time with, but I was a little intimidated by the French and Greek quotations that she apparently expects her “common” reader to be able to handle.
(LC Score: +1)
VIRGINIA WOOLF: A BIOGRAPHY by Quentin Bell
PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE: VITA SACKVILLE-WEST AND HAROLD NICOLSON by Nigel Nicolson
I picked these up as part of my ongoing Girl-Who-Reads-Woolf project. Bell’s biography of his aunt Virginia is the original account of her life, but I didn’t expect to be so charmed by his wry narration. He treats his topic with the casual informality appropriate to a nephew and I only wish he’d written a dozen other Bloomsbury biographies for me to read. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nicolson presents the autobiographical writings of his mother (and Virginia’s great friend), Vita, along with his own history of her life. Vita’s portion is mostly an overwrought account of her wild affair with Violet Keppel/Trefusis, still ongoing at the time of her writing. Both books together present a fascinating account of two unique partnerships made up of talented and original people: Virginia and Leonard, and Vita and Harold.
(LC Score: +2)
RETURNED UNREAD: LC Score -4
Library Chicken Score for 1/17/18: 6
- Running Score: 6
- Challenges Met: 4
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- Growing Up Ethnic in America edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (short story collection about learning to be American)
- Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury (revisiting one of my favorite authors)
- The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton (sequel to The Just City)
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (finally got my hands on this one after spending months on the hold list)
Library Chicken Update: Top Nonfiction Books Read in 2017
Suzanne's favorite nonfiction reads of 2017 grappled with race in America, considered communities forged by disaster, illuminated under-appreciated women in history, and more.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Happy New Year! Before we return to our regularly scheduled Library Chicken updates, we’re going to take a look back at the past year with Library Chicken’s Top Ten Favorite Nonfiction Books Read in 2017 so you can load up your to-read list.
2017 was a big year for nonfiction here at Library Chicken HQ. Usually, nonfiction makes up about 20-25% of my annual reading, but this year it was up to a whopping 31%, including the following fantastic reads (in no particular order):
THE GIFTS OF IMPERFECTION: LET GO OF WHO YOU THINK YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE AND EMBRACE WHO YOU ARE by Brene Brown
Self-help books are something of a gamble for me. Am I going to read something that can help and inspire me as I navigate daily life, or am I going to experience pages of cutesy (and trademarked) Self-Help Lingo? (Don’t forget to buy the calendar, daily planner, and ticket to the seminar!) Brown’s short but engaging book definitely fell in the first column. I was still thinking about it (and enthusiastically pushing it on my very patient friends) months after I first read it.
A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL: THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMUNITIES THAT ARISE IN DISASTER by Rebecca Solnit
I really needed this book in 2017. Rebecca Solnit (author of Men Explain Things to Me) writes about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and how humans generally respond to tragedy and disaster not with panic or selfishness, but by reaching out a helping hand to their neighbors. A great read if you’re looking to restore your faith in your fellow man.
NEUROTRIBES: THE LEGACY OF AUTISM AND THE FUTURE OF NEURODIVERSITY by Steve Silberman
A fascinating look at the history of autism as a diagnosis. That history can be at times infuriating and deeply upsetting, but it always feels topical and relevant to the conversations we’re having today (or should be having) about creating a society where neurodiversity can thrive.
BOOK OF AGES: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF JANE FRANKLIN by Jill Lepore
Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, Jane, was his faithful correspondent for years and inherited her own set of intellectual gifts, but was denied access to education and opportunities to exercise her talents. A bittersweet but compelling history by the author of two other nonfiction books I enjoyed in 2017: The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Joe Gould’s Teeth.
THE PEABODY SISTERS: THREE SISTERS WHO IGNITED AMERICAN ROMANTICISM by Megan Marshall
Sophia, the youngest sister and a talented artist, married Nathaniel Hawthorne. The middle sister, Mary, married the American educator Horace Mann, and was a writer and educator in her own right. And the eldest sister Elizabeth--well, she was too busy running a bookstore and teaching with Bronson Alcott and getting her brother-in-law Hawthorne a job and hanging out with Emerson and Thoreau and creating kindergartens throughout the land and basically BEING AWESOME ALL THE TIME to get married. Marshall mysteriously ends her history halfway through the sisters’ lives, but it’s still a wonderful introduction to these amazing women, and once you’re finished you can read her biography of another talented and unfairly forgotten woman: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.
A HOUSE FULL OF DAUGHTERS: A MEMOIR OF SEVEN GENERATIONS by Juliet Nicolson
Nicolson traces the fascinating and scandalous history of her female ancestors, including her grandmother, Vita Sackville-West. An entertaining truth-is-stranger-than-fiction account of flamenco dancers, vicious inheritance battles, and shocking (for their time) lesbian relationships.
HARRIET TUBMAN: THE ROAD TO FREEDOM by Catherine Clinton
I spent part of 2017 catching up on American history that I’d missed (and that my education had neglected). Clinton’s biography is a wonderful introduction to Tubman, a real life superhero. Just put Harriet on all the money already.
MARCH by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
This three-volume graphic novel series tells the story of another American hero, John Lewis. It’s a must-read history of the civil rights movement, at a time when we desperately need to remember and learn from the accomplishments of earlier generations.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I don’t know what more I can say about this deservedly much-praised memoir of being a black man in America. Toni Morrison calls it “required reading.” Listen to Toni.
STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA by Ibram X. Kendi
I think it’s okay to be a bit dubious when a book describes itself as “definitive”, but this history easily earns its subtitle, and was perhaps the most important book I read in 2017. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Library Chicken Update :: Top 10 Kids/Young Adult Books Read in 2017
Suzanne picks the best 10 children's and young adult books she crossed off her TBR list in 2017 in this Library Chicken roundup.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
It’s my favorite time of the year: LIST TIME! There’s nothing I love more than a good list, so we’re taking a break from your regularly scheduled Library Chicken Update to present (in no particular order) Library Chicken’s Top 10 Kids/Young Adult Books Read in 2017. (Stay tuned next week for Library Chicken’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books!)
THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL by Ryan North and Erica Henderson
LUMBERJANES by Noelle Stevenson (and others)
PAPER GIRLS by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
One of the themes of my 2017 reading turned out to be graphic novels about awesome young women doing awesome things with all their awesome friends. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Lumberjanes series are wonderfully smart, funny, and diverse, and would make great gifts for your favorite 8- to 12-year-olds. (I’m speaking from experience, as two of my favorite 9-year-olds are now big fans after getting the first couple of volumes from their Auntie Suzanne.) For older YA readers (and fans of Stranger Things), Paper Girls is a fantastic time-traveling alien-invasion adventure set in the 80s. Definitely put these books on your holiday shopping lists, but be sure to enjoy them yourself before giving them away!
AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor
I loved this story of a 12-year-old Nigerian-American girl discovering her magical powers with the help of fellow students and an assortment of mysterious elders. It’s a wonderful read, especially for anyone who obsessively checks bookstore shelves just in case another Harry Potter novel has suddenly appeared. I haven’t yet read the sequel, Akata Warrior, but it’s on my Christmas wishlist (HINT HINT).
ONE CRAZY SUMMER (and sequels) by Rita Williams-Garcia
In 1968, three sisters travel from New York to California to spend the summer with the mother who left them to follow her own dreams. Instead of visiting Disneyland, they find themselves at a Black Panther day camp. After reading the first book, I couldn’t wait to read more about this amazing, loving, complicated family in P.S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama. My only complaint is that there aren’t more books in the series, as I’d happily follow these sisters from pre-teens to 40-somethings. (As an extra bonus, the covers of all three books are gorgeous.)
THE GLASS TOWN GAME by Catherynne M. Valente
Valente is swiftly moving up the ranks in the list of my all-time favorite authors. This novel follows the four young Bronte siblings (Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne) as they accidentally find themselves in a magical world of their own creation. Similar in style to Valente’s Fairyland series with a dash of The Phantom Tollbooth, this would be a great read-aloud and introduction to the Brontes (although you may have to prepare your listeners for some post-book heartbreak when they learn about the eventual fates of the siblings). I especially loved the Jane Austen cameo, presented (as Valente apologetically notes) from Charlotte’s point of view (she’s not a fan).
THE ALEX CROW by Andrew Smith
Smith’s YA novels (including the apocalyptic Grasshopper Jungle) are bizarre, upsetting, raunchy, utterly original, and chock full of adolescent males acting as adolescent-male-y as humanly possible. They are also entertaining, compelling, and surprisingly touching (even if you happen to be neither adolescent nor male). Our protagonist here is Ariel, a young war refugee adopted by an American family, and it only gets weirder (much much weirder) from there.
LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND by M.T. Anderson
This YA novella was short but memorable, exploring ideas about imperialism and cultural appropriation through the alien vuvv, Earth’s new, (mostly) benign overlords. To make money in the post-vuvv economy, our hero Adam and his girlfriend livestream their romance for the aliens’ enjoyment, but that’s a little more difficult now that they’ve broken up.
GLORY O'BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE by A.S. King
Petrified bat drinking leads to strange visions of a near future anti-feminist Second American Civil War. Really, that’s all the info you should need to run out and read this YA novel, but if it helps it’s also a sensitive portrayal of family, loss, and friendship. (Also a good warning to readers not to drink petrified bats.)
THE RAVEN CYCLE by Maggie Stiefvater
Stiefvater’s four book fantasy YA series (beginning with The Raven Boys) includes a family of eccentric psychics, the clairvoyant daughter of the house, and a set of cute prep school boys who may have strange powers of their own. It’s great all the way through and I look forward to reading more Stiefvater in 2018.
Library Chicken Update :: 12.5.17
Haunted houses, apocalypses, imperialism, and more Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
I’m back from Thanksgiving break with an extra-long list of books (read while digesting and/or having just a smidge more pumpkin pie). And if Thanksgiving’s over, that means it’s time to make up my holiday reading wishlist! (As in: I sure wish I had time to read all these books stacked all over my floor.)
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
My Girl-Who-Reads-Woolf project continues with a reread of her first novel, where Europeans travel to the wilds of South America for rest and recuperation, desperate (and doomed) love affairs, and many intense discussions on Life, Truth, and Connection (and the impossibility of same in today’s bourgeois world). Plus: a guest appearance by Mrs. Dalloway!
(LC Score: +1)
Landscape With Invisible Hand by M.T. Anderson
I’m a big fan of Anderson (especially his Pals in Peril series) and was excited to read this new YA novella about life on Earth after the arrival of the vuvv, an alien race that promises to deliver magical alien tech and a wonderful life for all. Not everything works out as planned, however, and it’s possible that Anderson is using this tale of alien invasion to comment on the dangers of imperialism and cultural appropriation. (SPOILER: That is DEFINITELY what he’s doing.) In fact, this would be a great conversation-starter (along with being a fun read) for middle and high schoolers as they are introduced to the (not so fun) idea of colonialism.
(LC Score: +1)
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King
And this was another great YA read with something to say about today’s world. Glory has just graduated from high school and is trying to figure out her future and deal with the long-delayed fallout of her mother’s suicide. Plus, the other day she and her best friend decided to drink a petrified bat (that is not a typo) and now Glory is having visions of a near-future Second American Civil War, which starts as a backlash to the feminist movement. King explores loss and friendship (and the loss of friendship) in original and memorable ways.
(LC Score: +1)
This House is Haunted by John Boyne
“I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father,” our Victorian narrator tells us in the opening sentence of this ghost story, as she explains how, after being orphaned, she was forced to become a governess and ended up in a strange empty mansion with her odd young charges and no other adults in sight. And YES, I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS, LET’S GO. Unfortunately, if you’re going to write about an isolated governess in a possibly haunted house, The Turn of the Screw sets a very high bar, and this story has too few surprises and drags on a bit too long to fulfill my initial excitement. (Also, when the governess tries to get help from the townsfolk because she’s living in a CLEARLY HAUNTED HOUSE THAT HAS ALREADY KILLED HER THREE PREDECESSORS they all treat her like she’s crazy, and I found that very annoying. IT’S SUPER OBVIOUSLY HAUNTED, PEOPLE.)
(LC Score: +1)
Slade House by David Mitchell
Haunted houses everywhere! This novella, a companion to Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (and the extended universe he’s apparently creating across all of his novels), tells the story of Slade House, occupied by “soul carnivores” who must feed every nine years. We learn its secrets from a series of doomed narrators (the first one, an autistic boy, is especially compelling) as the house reappears briefly and then vanishes on its nine-year cycle, leading to mysterious disappearances among the locals. I enjoyed this, but it did feel more like a DVD-extra or bonus track (is there a term for the literary version of that?) than a strong, stand-alone story.
(LC Score: +1)
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
And while I’m reading about haunted houses, it must be finally time to tackle this massive piece of metafiction. I love this kind of epistolary-plus storytelling, where we have different narrators telling different sections of the story that may themselves take the form of letters, transcripts, diagrams, and everything else, so it’s no surprise that I was completely caught up in this tale of a not-so-ordinary suburban house with corridors that appear and disappear and change shape in very disturbing fashion. It wasn’t quite as scary as I was expecting — perhaps because I’ve heard so much about it and have read other works that were obviously inspired by it — although Chapter Nine did give me a headache. Still totally worth it.
(LC Score: +1)
The Whalestoe Letters by Mark Z. Danielewski
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about me, but I’m something of a completist (see: my Alcott-adjacent reading project, my Georgia history reading project, my Bronte sister reading project, my Girl-Who-Reads-Woolf project, etc. etc.) so once I learned that Danielewski had published this addition to House of Leaves, containing material that was mostly already published in that book as an appendix but WITH SEVERAL ADDITIONAL PAGES I of course had to check it out. As it turns out, I couldn’t really tell the new stuff from the old. Probably not worth it (unless you’re a fellow obsessive), though it only took an hour or so to read so no big deal.
(LC Score: +1)
I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas
From the dismayingly Lovecraftian hallways of the House of Leaves we go to a murder mystery set at a Lovecraft convention in Providence, RI. It begins promisingly (and appropriately) with first-person narration from the corpse, who is inexplicably missing his face. As a long-term attendee of various science fiction conventions (only 269 days until DragonCon 2018, y’all!) I am always up for a literary glimpse of fandom, but Mamatas lost me when he depicted pretty much all of Lovecraft fandom as a sad, pathetic group of racist, sexist losers. Granted, Lovecraft himself was something of a racist, sexist loser, but that view ignores all of the recent amazing writing from diverse authors bringing Lovecraftian horrors to the modern world in creative and continually surprising ways. (See Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and Ellen Datlow’s two anthologies, Lovecraft Unbound and Lovecraft’s Monsters, to name just a few.) When depicting fandom, the line between affectionate mockery and vicious satire can be hard to define (and varies with the eye of the beholder), but if you’re in the mood for a murder at a con, may I suggest Sharyn McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun — though I should warn you that younger readers may need to google ‘floppy disc’ and other 80s relics to understand certain plot points.
(LC Score: +1)
Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
So basically at this point I’m reading big thick biographies of Thoreau so I can put off finally reading Walden, which I’m not looking forward to but should really read because I’m doing this whole Transcendentalist thing right now and it’s an American masterpiece and I think of myself as a well-read person and all that. (I had to have read excerpts in high school, right? If so, I have completely blocked it out, which doesn’t make me eager to give it another go.) Whatever my motivations, though, I enjoyed this biography of the (often annoying) Thoreau. Walls is clearly a Big Fan, but she tells an engaging story and I appreciated her often insightful commentary on the Transcendentalist movement in general.
(LC Score: +1)
The Modern Tradition: An Anthology of Short Stories edited by Daniel F. Howard
The Short Story: Fifty Masterpieces edited by Ellen C. Wynn
I’m teaching a short story course next semester, which means I get to pick a bunch of stories for the syllabus! And I probably should have started figuring the list out earlier! Especially as it’s been a long long time since I’ve read most of these! That said, I’m enjoying my trip down short-story lane — I’ve read novels almost exclusively for the past couple of decades, but I think that’s going to change. These collections contain stories and authors that have stood the test of time, so I was rereading old standbys (“Young Goodman Brown”) and finally reading classics that I’ve never quite gotten around to (“The Metamorphosis”) and discovering authors that I’ve heard of but never read and it turns out they’re awesome and I should read more of their stuff immediately (Doris Lessing). Also it turns out that I’ve been confusing Flannery O’Connor with Carson McCullers and I actually kind of like O’Connor? (Another blow to my long-standing prejudice against Southern Gothic fiction.) Anyway, it’s possible that I’ve picked up another dozen or so anthologies (i.e., more books that I can possibly read before the start of next semester) to keep me busy over the holidays. (I appear to be in an even more obsessive mood than usual these days.)
[Editor's note: Ahem.]
(LC Score: +2)
Sadly, even with Thanksgiving break I was unable to keep up with all those due dates and my RETURNED UNREAD score for this week stands at a very disappointing -8. I feel like I owe my library branch an apology. (LC Score: -8)
Library Chicken Score for 12/5/17: 3
Running Score: 118 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- The Evolution Man, Or How I Ate My Father by Roy Lewis (my dad has been bugging me to read this)
- Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin (because my middle schoolers are reading Oliver Twist)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan D. Hendrick (because I’m gradually moving from the Transcendentalists to the abolitionists)
- The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (over 1000 pages of spooky and upsetting stories that almost certainly will not make it onto next semester’s syllabus!)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scorecard (11.21.17)
Adventures with the Bloomsbury set, gossipy Edwardian servants, a delightful Victorian mystery, and more Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Happy Thanksgiving! All of us at Library Chicken HQ wish all of you a delicious turkey dinner (or vegetarian entree of your choice) and a stack of fresh library books to keep you occupied while you’re digesting. And now, to the books!
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
I love reading stories about older women who reach a point in their lives (after the children are grown) where they get to decide what they want to do without considering anyone else’s needs or feelings. (Maybe that says something about my life, after spending nearly 20 years as a stay-at-home mom. But nah, probably not.) This novel falls into that category: an 88-year-old matriarch, for many years a diplomatic and political hostess at her accomplished (and now deceased) husband’s side, is finally able to direct her own life. Predictably, her adult children are horrified by her choices. In the hands of another writer (maybe Angela Thirkell?), this could be a charming tale of eccentricity, with a pair or two of young folks getting married off along the way; as written by Sackville-West, it’s more contemplative and philosophical, but still charming. (LC Score: +1)
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison
After reading Virginia Woolf’s biography, I had to find a biography about the inspiration for Woolf’s Orlando, the scandalous Vita Sackville-West, who became a popular and successful author while juggling her many lovers. Unfortunately, I found Dennison’s narrative of Vita’s life often muddled and confusing, and while that may be a reflection of her admittedly confusing affairs, it’s hard to believe this lackluster biography could have been inspired by such a fascinating woman. I get the sense that Dennison doesn’t actually like Vita all that much. This was fine for an introduction, but I’ll have to go on the hunt for a book that does a better job of showing Vita’s charm and attractiveness. (LC Score: +1)
Below Stairs by Margaret Powell
Servants’ Hall by Margaret Powell
From the lady of the manor to the kitchen staff: as the subtitle will tell you, Below Stairs is “The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey.” Published in 1968, it was an immediate hit and led to Powell’s follow-up, Servants’ Hall. In this second book, Powell shares the story of a real-life “upstairs downstairs” romance (and eventual marriage) between a beautiful housemaid and the much older son of the house. Since this is not, in fact, a gorgeously produced BBC epic, things do not end well. (LC Score: +2)
Minding the Manor: The Memoirs of a 1930s English Kitchen Maid by Mollie Moran
Moran is a much more recent author; this memoir of her downstairs life wasn’t published until 2014, when the former kitchen maid turned 97 (!!!). I actually found Moran’s account more enjoyable than Powell’s better known books, perhaps because Moran herself is great fun and actually seems to like her fellow servants and (at least some of) her former employers. (LC Score: +1)
The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood
Humph. I was all ready for more tales from the manor and the subtitle here led me to believe that this book would dive into the wonderfulness that was English country house life between the wars (which apparently was awesome, as long as you were white, titled, and rich, but hey, who doesn’t like to spend the occasional hour imagining themselves as one of the fortunate few at the local stately home), but instead it was mostly about ARCHITECTURE. With the occasional chapter on INTERIOR DESIGN. The Amazon description even says, “Drawing on thousands of memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before,” but DO NOT BE FOOLED. I was promised “aristocratic soirées” and I got modernist layouts in Country Life. Not cool, Tinniswood, not cool at all. (LC Score: +1)
The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders
I’m giving up on the Edwardians and going back to hang out with the Victorians. In this mystery, widowed Laetitia Rodd acts as sleuth, investigating cases for her lawyer brother. Amy recommended this one and as usual, she was right! Now we just need Saunders to finish up the sequel. (LC Score: +1)
Library Chicken Score for 11/21/17: 7
Running Score: 116 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week
- This House is Haunted by John Boyne (my Halloween reading has finally made it to the top of the stack)
- Slade House by David Mitchell (another mysterious house from my fav Mitchell)
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (finally getting to this and I have no idea what to expect)
- The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi (I love a good theme)
Library Chicken Update :: 11.7.17
Scooby Doo meets Lovecraft, Plato fan fiction, classic and new British mysteries, and some feminist biographies feature in this week's Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
How is it November already? I mean, I’m more than happy for 2017 to be nearly over with (it hasn’t been great, let’s be honest), but I’m just not sure how we’ve made it this far. Clearly I need to pay more attention to what’s going on in the outside world--OR I could bury my head in my books and continue to ignore the passage of time. Yep, that second option works for me.
The Just City by Jo Walton
This book, about Pallas Athene setting up an experimental community based on Plato’s Republic and populated by people chosen from throughout human history, begins with Athene and Artemis trying to explain the concept of consent to Apollo. I’d recommend it based on that alone, but it just gets better from there. (Wait til you get to the part where Socrates tries to talk to the robots.) It’s first in a trilogy, so I’ll be tackling the sequel next — and I suppose I should finally get around to reading the Republic.
(LC Score: +1)
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
The Scooby Gang accidentally reads from the Necronomicon. There. That’s all I’m going to say. If you don’t run out and IMMEDIATELY get this book, it’s no fault of mine.
(LC Score: +1)
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball
Elderly people are going missing in a small Japanese town. A young man confesses responsibility, but refuses to speak further, either in explanation or defense. This is a strange and compelling book. I found it both intriguing and irritating and honestly I’m not sure which reaction the author intended.
(LC Score: +1)
One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson
James Pibble mystery #6. This final Inspector Pibble mystery begins with Jimmy (now a widower and stuck in a fancy nursing home for the aged and infirm) contemplating suicide. Fortunately, before he can do anything drastic, he finds a dead body and gets caught up investigating the murder. After the depressing opening I was concerned that this last outing would be grim, but I found the ending to be unexpectedly sweet.
(LC Score: +1)
Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey
I could tell you that after finishing the Pibble books I needed to start a new mystery series, and this one — set at a Victorian six-day “pedestrian” competition and introducing Sergeant Cribb as our sleuth — seemed like a nice option, but we all know I had to pick it up because there’s no way I could resist that title, right?
(LC Score: +1)
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall
The (male) Transcendentalists may be obnoxious and annoying at times, but they did hang out with some incredibly brilliant and amazing women. (That I’ve SOMEHOW never heard of. American History, go to your room and think about what you’ve done wrong.) I didn’t quite fall in love with Margaret Fuller the way I have with some others in my recent Alcott-adjacent reading (Elizabeth Peabody, please be my best friend!) but this is a fascinating biography of a talented and unjustly-neglected American.
(LC Score: +1)
Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
From Concord to Bloomsbury! I’ve read a bit of Virginia Woolf’s fiction (most recently the very charming Orlando) and have been meaning to get back to her (and her motley crew of associates), so I thought this massive biography by Lee would be a good place to start. (If you haven’t noticed, I have a weakness for massive biographies.) As a newbie to all things Woolf, I found it a bit overwhelming — Lee engages not only with her subject, but with all the biographers, commentators, and critics who have written about Woolf over the years. It’s difficult to jump into the middle of that multi-decade conversation, but I enjoyed Lee’s take and am looking forward to reading more about the Bloomsbury (and Bloomsbury-adjacent) folk.
(LC Score: +1)
Yeah, I STILL don’t really want to talk about it: RETURNED UNREAD
(LC Score: -5)
Library Chicken Score for 11/7/17: 2
Running Score: 109 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton (sequel to The Just City)
- The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson (even though I’ve finished Inspector Pibble there is still Dickinson weirdness for me to enjoy)
- The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (rereading Woolf while reading about Woolf...)
- Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison (...and Woolf’s buddies)
Library Chicken Update :: 10.31.17
Why doesn't Harriet Tubman have her own Netflix series yet?? Plus getting the band back together, a Wodehouse homage that didn't work, and more books in this week's roundup.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Now, I am 100% pro-candy, but hear me out: what if all the bibliophiles got together with all our old books that we are ready to pass on and then we trick-or-treated each other (dressing up as our favorite literary characters and authors, naturally) so that we each ended up with a bagful of books?? I mean, we’d need fairly large bags, obviously, but when I imagine hearing “trick or treat!” followed by the satisfying thwack of a book into my treat bag I get very happy...
I’m a fan of “getting the band back together” stories, where we see how long-term relationships have changed over the decades as friends interact and age. This is literally one of those stories: we follow two couples, close friends since their college days, when three of them were in a band and briefly experienced vicarious stardom via the fourth band member, who left the band, became wildly famous (with one of their songs), and then died young and tragically. Now a movie is being contemplated about their old bandmate and not everyone is excited to see their past up on the big screen. The younger generation (each couple has a teenage child) complicates things further with a possible romance of their own. This is the third novel I’ve read by Straub and my favorite so far.
(LC Score: +1)
I’ve been gradually working my way through Ivy Compton-Burnett’s books without any particular plan, so I was surprised to see (in the introduction to this edition) that this was her last novel, edited and published posthumously. Usually that’s not a great sign, but Ivy’s acerbic dialog and her usual cast of characters (including controlling and passive-aggressive matriarchs, ironic young men, and dourly humorous servants) are all on display here, proving that even at age 85 she was still in fine form.
(LC Score: +1)
If I’m wandering through the library and spot a book with a title like Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse OF COURSE I’m going to pick it up immediately, regardless of how high the to-read stack is at home. This novel is apparently one of a series written by Sullivan about the fictional small town of Harvester, Minnesota and the personalities that inhabit it. Our protagonist is a widowed schoolteacher, who reads novels — especially those by P.G. Wodehouse — to distract herself from the difficulties and hardships of her life. It’s an interesting (and relatable) idea and I’m always up for a slice of small town life, but the more I learned about the citizens of Harvester, the more concerned I became. The schoolteacher receives ugly anonymous threats via mail for decades. Her son is viciously bullied both as a child and as a brain-damaged war veteran. Nasty gossip causes a town newcomer to lose his job, and eventually drives him to suicide. While I agree that Wodehouse is good for what ails you, it seems to me that maybe the schoolteacher would have been better off just moving to a new town.
(LC Score: +1)
I’ve enjoyed Jill Lepore’s nonfiction so I was looking forward to this novel, set in Boston in 1764 and telling the story (in alternating narratives) of a disgraced young woman who disguises herself as a boy and becomes an apprentice to a Scottish painter (who is himself on the run from his creditors). As the painter becomes disturbed by his strange feelings for his young apprentice (and the apprentice wonders whether it is safe to let him in on her secret), we also follow a subplot where two slaves have been wrongfully accused of murder after the mysterious death of their master. A murder mystery in pre-Revolution New England, an over-the-top romance involving disguised lovers, and angry commentary on racism and slavery (provided by the painter’s best friend, a brilliant and highly educated black man) — by all rights I should have loved this book, but somehow it never quite came together for me. Guess I’ll have to go back to the library and get another stack of Lepore’s nonfiction work.
(LC Score: +1)
This is an eclectic collection of Smith’s essays from various sources and occasions. Smith can be intimidatingly intellectual and a few of these pieces were a bit too highbrow for me (hardcore literary criticism involving authors I’ve never heard of, a deep dive into Italian cinema, etc.), but I do love her writing.
(LC Score: +1)
HARRIET TUBMAN IS THE BEST AND MOST AWESOME BUT HOW AM I ONLY LEARNING THE EXTENT OF HER AWESOMENESS NOW?!? (IT IS A TRAVESTY AND FLORIDA’S PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM — LOOKING AT YOU, BREVARD COUNTY — SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF ITSELF.) SHE SHOULD BE ON ALL THE MONEY AND HAVE ALL THE STATUES AND I IMMEDIATELY NEED AN ACTION-ADVENTURE MOVIE RETELLING HER REAL-LIFE EXPLOITS RESCUING ENSLAVED PEOPLE AND SPYING FOR THE UNION SO PLEASE MAKE THAT HAPPEN.
(LC Score: +1)
Picked this up to prepare for our reading of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in middle school literature. I had no idea that Mark Twain was such a diva. I suspect he’s one of those people who I love to read about but would almost certainly have found insufferable in real life.
(LC Score: +1)
Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about it: RETURNED UNREAD
(LC Score: -7)
Library Chicken Score for 10/31/17: 0
Running Score: 107 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- The Just City by Jo Walton (Pallas Athene helps set up an experimental city based on Plato’s Republic)
- Wobble to Death by Peter Lovesey (murder mystery set during a Victorian ‘pedestrian’ competition)
- Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall (those Transcendentalists just keep on coming)
- Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (because I think I may need a break from Concord MA)
Library Chicken Update 10/17/17
A strange book about an equally strange disappearance, a modern take on Sherlock, biographies of 19th century people we should know more about, and more in this week's Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
This was a better week for me, in terms of book count. This is good for my household as it turns out that I get very cranky when I don’t have enough reading time. Some people need to work out every day; I need to work on my to-read list.
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
This book is weird and mind-blowing and surprising and I spent a lot of time not having any idea what was happening AND I loved every word. The book-flap describes it as “a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space-opera mystery” and yeah, that probably sums it up. Set in a universe where the milk of Venusian whales allows travel through the solar system, we learn (via news articles, interviews, diary entries, movie scripts, etc.) about the strange disappearance of a talented young documentary filmmaker, herself the daughter of a famous director (who lives and works on the Moon, as does most of the Hollywood set). This is one of Valente’s adult novels (like Deathless, and unlike the Fairyland series), and veers toward the bizarre-and-occasionally-disturbing side of the street (where Valente can hang out with China Mieville and Helen Oyeyemi). Valente is awesome and wonderful in all the ways and you should read her books immediately.
(LC Score: +1)
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
This Sherlock novel (by the author of Magpie Murders) does a good job recreating the world of Holmes and Watson. It’s always fun to see the old crew (including Mycroft Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars), but my favorite recent Holmes novel, Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, is in no danger of being knocked from its number one spot.
(LC Score: +1)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
I have read a handful of Woolf’s books and am always meaning to return and systematically work my way through her oeuvre, but I picked up Orlando after having read a little bit about Vita Sackville-West (and knowing that Orlando is supposedly Woolf’s love letter to Vita). I knew a little bit about the title character, a gender-switching immortal who we follow through 400 years of English history, from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I didn’t really know what to expect from the book. IT IS SO CHARMING. Why didn’t anyone tell me how funny and charming it is? It’s just wonderful and I’d like to gush on about it some more but I’m off to watch the movie adaptation starring Tilda Swinton. SO CHARMING.
(LC Score: +1)
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson
I’m sure I read some Emerson in high school. I had to, right? In American Lit or something? Whatever I did read left me unimpressed with the Sage of Concord, who I generally thought of as a boring old white guy going on and on about the outdoors and the fabulousness of trees or something like that. (It’s entirely possible that I had confused him with his best bud Thoreau.) I wasn’t all that interested in returning to Ralph Waldo, but I’ve been working my way through the Alcott-adjacent biographies, and <eyeroll> I guess I should know a little bit more about him since he’s one of the giants of American literature or something like that. And, hey, it appears that Emerson has suddenly gotten a lot more interesting in the past 30 years! Richardson calls his book an “intellectual biography,” meaning that he tracks Emerson’s life through whatever Ralph Waldo was reading at the time, so as to trace the influence of literary works and philosophical texts on Emerson’s own thinking. As an obsessive reader myself, I love this idea, but mostly I learned that I am pitifully uninformed when it comes to Western philosophy, and there’s no way I can keep up reading-wise with Emerson (or Richardson, for that matter). Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed this bio and found that Emerson’s writing now resonates with me in a very powerful and unexpected way. I’ve put all his greatest hits on my to-read list, so there’s quite a bit more Emerson in my future.
(LC Score: +1)
Narrative of Sojourner Truth edited by Margaret Washington
Meanwhile, as I fill in the gaps in my Transcendentalist knowledge, I’m still trying to fill in the holes around African-American history. By which I mean: learn some basic African-American history. I wasn’t taught much of anything in school and (embarrassingly for me) I didn’t go looking for it until fairly recently. Sojourner Truth is one of those names I recognized, but could tell you next to nothing about. This is the (short) narrative of her life and experiences, as dictated by Truth to a friend (Truth was illiterate). This particular edition has a helpful historical introduction to Truth’s life and I can’t wait to read more about this amazing woman and her life as an abolitionist and women’s rights activist.
(LC Score: +1)
Library Chicken Score for 10/17/17: 5
Running Score: 107 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- Sojourner Truth’s America by Margaret Washington (I enjoyed Washington’s introduction so much I thought I’d read her biography of Truth)
- Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton (another amazing woman I know very little about)
- 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino (because I recently heard a recommendation and it has a wonderful title)
- Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero (another great title for a new YA novel by the author of The Supernatural Enhancements)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (10.10.17)
A surprisingly enjoyable Hawthorne biography, a weird take on a Russian fairy tale, a college murder mystery, and more books in this week's Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Man, Library Chicken gets a lot harder when I actually have a job and people expect me to do things. I’m going to have to give up sleeping (since I’ve already given up housework and interacting with the family) if I’m ever going to make it through the giant stack of library books next to the bed.
Rest You Merry by Charlotte MacLeod
Granted, it isn’t time to break out the holiday reading just yet, but I enjoyed this murder mystery with sleuth Peter Shandy (professor and radish expert), set on a college campus that goes way overboard with the Christmas decorations. There are several more Peter Shandy mysteries, so it looks like I’ve got another series to keep up with.
(LC Score: +1)
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Valente is at the top of my list of “amazing authors that distressingly few people seem to have heard of.” If you haven’t read her Fairyland series (beginning with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making), you should do so immediately and then share with all the young people in your immediate vicinity. Deathless is another fairy tale of sorts, a retelling of the Russian story of Koschei the Deathless, set in the early days of the Soviet Union. It is wonderful and weird and much more adult than the Fairyland series (meaning I wouldn’t necessarily pass it along to younger fans). With Valente I never know if I should be upset that I didn’t hear about her sooner, or grateful that I can look forward to reading all of her books that I haven’t gotten to yet.
(LC Score: +1)
Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple
One of my favorite Alcott-adjacent biographies so far, which was a bit of a surprise given the subject matter. Nathaniel Hawthorne was the grumpy loner in the Concord set (when he wasn’t using his political connections, including best friend President Franklin Pierce, to get government work), but Wineapple’s biography is entertaining and engaging, with just the right amount of quiet snark.
(LC Score: +1)
How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
Follow-up to Foster’s How to Read Literature. Amy said I probably didn’t need to read this one once I’d read the first one, but WHATEVER, AMY, YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. (Except, actually, in those circumstances where you are.) I thought it was worth reading for this comment (on T.S. Eliot and symbolism): “I believe that when very young, Eliot was badly frightened by a double meaning, hence his determination to exert absolute authorial control,” but maybe that’s just me.
(LC Score: +1)
And as I may have hinted above, the RETURNED UNREAD (AND OCCASIONALLY OVERDUE) count keeps going up. Sigh.
(LC Score: -6 ½)
Library Chicken Score for 10/10/17: -2 ½
Running Score: 102 ½
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- Radiance by Catherynne Valente (just give me all the Valente books)
- Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore (American Revolutionary era hijinks co-written by one of my favorite historians)
- The Luck Runs Out by Charlotte MacLeod (Peter Shandy mystery #2)
- Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson (have I mentioned that the Alcotts had a LOT of famous neighbors?)
Book Nerd: The Under-Appreciated Authors Club
Jaclyn Moriarty is probably not the Napoleon of Crime, but she is an awesome YA writer whom you may not have discovered yet.
If you’ve missed Jaclyn Moriarty’s books, you’re certainly not the only one—but you should remedy this readerly omission as soon as possible.
Suzanne is having One of Those Weeks, so instead of Library Chicken, here’s a flashback to an author who made her TBR list totally explode in 2016.
In my last column, I highlighted the work of Chris Riddell, the award-winning British author and illustrator. (Late breaking update: A new Ottoline book, Ottoline and the Purple Fox, is coming out in September of this year. I’ve preordered my copy.) I hadn’t intended to make a habit of focusing on non-American authors who I think are criminally under-appreciated in the States, but Jaclyn Moriarty has a new book out and I just can’t help myself.
If you’re at all familiar with the name Moriarty (aside, of course, from the Napoleon of Crime), you may be thinking of Liane Moriarty, Australian author of the best-sellers Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret, among others. Jaclyn Moriarty is Liane’s sister and a YA author. While at times it’s been difficult to find her books here, all of the ones I’ll mention are currently in print or available as an ebook.
I first encountered Jaclyn Moriarty when I checked out a copy of The Year of Secret Assignments from my local library and liked it so much that I hunted up a used copy to add to my personal collection. In Secret Assignments, three best friends—Lydia, Emily, and Cassie—from a fancy private high school take part in a pen-pal assignment with three boys from the nearby non-fancy non-private high school and begin to suspect that at least one of the boys may not be who he seems. It’s an epistolary novel, made up of (as the title page explains) ‘Diary Entries, Rude Graffiti, Hate Mail, Love Letters, Revenge Plots, Date Plans, Notes Between Friends, and Famous Last Words.’ (Some of my favorite entries are the notes from parent to child. Emily’s father, a lawyer, begins one with: “I write to keep you informed of the progress of your parents, and to provide you with advice for your weekend. Your mother is currently: (a) blow-drying her hair; (b) shouting something inaudible down the stairs; and (c) cranky (because I lost the plane tickets).”) As the story progresses, we see romance, betrayal, and how far friends will go to look out for each other.
The Year of Secret Assignments is actually the second installment in the four-book Ashbury/Brookfield sequence, named for the rival high schools that appear in each book. Fortunately for me, since I hate to read a series out of order, the books focus on different characters each time and aren’t true sequels, though characters from one may appear in the background of another. Feeling Sorry for Celia, the first book, is also an epistolary novel centering around Ashbury-Brookfield pen-pals, but is more of a coming-of-age story, as the protagonist, Elizabeth, deals with first love and major changes in her relationship with her longtime best friend. Book three, The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, focuses on Bindy, the smartest and perhaps most obnoxious student at Ashbury High as her life slowly starts to fall apart. And in The Ghosts of Ashbury High, book four, two mysterious students transfer from Brookfield to Ashbury, setting the school abuzz with speculation which we get to read about in the form of assignments completed for a college entrance exam on gothic fiction.
Ghosts aside, the Ashbury/Brookfield series is set in the real world, but the pen-pals in Jaclyn Moriarty’s new trilogy, The Colors of Madeleine, exchange notes (via a crack in an unusual parking meter) between two very different worlds. Madeleine lives with her mother in Cambridge, England and, having run away from her previous jet-setting life with her wealthy father, is homeschooled along with two new Cambridge friends. Elliot, however, is from the town of Bonfire in the Kingdom of Cello, where magic and technology coexist, along with wandering seasons and rampaging Colors (Elliot’s father is missing and presumed dead after a vicious Purple attack). Madeleine and Elliot accidentally discover each other’s existence in the first book, A Corner of White. Cello is a charming and unique place–I especially enjoyed the inhabitants of Olde Quainte, who are legally required to use meaningless similes several times during each and every conversation (“as a peacock to a snow shovel”) but it’s in deep trouble, and Madeleine, with an assist from Isaac Newton (whom she becomes fascinated by after a homeschool assignment), is determined to help. Her mission becomes even more important in book two, The Cracks in the Kingdom, and book three, A Tangle of Gold. I loved this series—I loved that it kept me guessing and that some of what I had originally thought of as writing flaws in the first book turn out to be set-up for unexpected revelations at the end. I also loved its depiction of homeschooling as no big deal, along with an interesting description of someone adjusting to traditional education later on in the series. I did not love the cover, so if you have the misfortune to pick up one of the early editions with a manically cheerful girl and her orange umbrella, the one that looks like the cover to a generic 1980s copy of a Madeleine L’Engle teen romance (no disrespect to Ms. L’Engle), please know that the inside is a lot more interesting than the outside would lead you to believe.
I can’t wait to see what Jaclyn Moriarty will write next and if you know of an under-appreciated author who I should be reading, please let me know! Happy reading!
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (9.26.17)
Asian sci-fi voices, stories of American utopias, apocalyptic fiction, classic Hawthorne, and more in this week's Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Last week was big for Library Chicken HQ: after an unexpected hurricane delay, we had our first session of Middle School Monday classes at the homeschool hybrid academy, which means that I need to stop having so much fun reading whatever I want and get back to the list of books we’ll be tackling in class!
The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen
Sequel to The Three-Body Problem. This science fiction novel (translated from the Chinese) imagines worldwide responses to the threat of an alien invasion that is still a couple of centuries away. I haven’t read much Chinese sf and I was fascinated by the differences in tone; there’s a sort of fatalistic stoicism that I haven’t generally encountered in American sf. Is that a cultural difference? Unique to this author? Unique to this series? Clearly I need to read more Chinese science fiction to find out (as soon as I finish the third book in this trilogy). (LC Score: +1)
[Note from Amy: I recently read Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy, an anthology of sci-fi short stories, and I totally picked up the same note of fatalistic stoicism in every one of the stories. Anec-data does not equal truth, but still—we definitely picked up the same vibe.]
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
Oh, man, I love Oyeyemi so much. This is her first novel, written when she was eighteen years old (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD), and I couldn’t put it down. Jess, our eight-year-old protagonist, picks up an unusual friend (named TillyTilly) when she is in Nigeria, visiting her mother’s family. There are themes here that Oyeyemi will echo later on in her excellent ghost story, White is For Witching (that I now want to reread), and as is typical, she leaves certain plot elements vague and unresolved. And again, the writing is so good I don’t even mind about the unresolved bits. EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, people. (LC Score: +1)
Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll
I first encountered Doll as a blogger and internet essayist on the late and very much lamented website the-toast.net, and I’ll eagerly read anyone who was published on The Toast. This is a memoir built around the many weddings Doll has attended. It’s a very cute idea, but the structure is a bit flimsy, especially as she tries to turn every anecdote into a deep meaningful moment. She has more wedding misadventures than most—as she jokes at one point, the memoir could be subtitled something like “Jen Doll Had a Drinking Problem There For a While”, but by the end of the book I actually found it more concerning than funny. (LC Score: +1)
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings
New Harmony, Brook Farm, Oneida, the Shakers, and the Icarians: Jennings introduces us to a range of American communal societies in this entertaining overview. It turns out (who knew?) that the type of people who found these utopian communities are fascinating. Sometimes a bit terrifying, but always fascinating. I would like to immediately request full and detailed modern biographies of Robert Owen (of New Harmony), George Ripley (of Brook Farm), and MOST IMPORTANTLY, Frances (Fanny) Wright, founder of Nashoba. I need to know MORE. (LC Score: +1)
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
As I’ve mentioned before, Hawthorne was an early resident of Brook Farm, though he barely lasted six months. The Blithedale Romance, set at a suspiciously familiar utopian community known as Blithedale, is supposed to be his satire of that time, but he has little to say about the community itself. Instead, he gives us a romantic triangle with one man and two women: a Remarkable Woman With a Sketchy Past, and a Pure-Hearted Innocent. Unsurprisingly, the Remarkable Woman, though brave, intelligent, and beautiful, is brought low by her unconventionality, almost destroying the Pure-Hearted Innocent in the process. The Marble Faun adds an additional character (a romantic rectangle?) but keeps the Remarkable Woman vs. Pure-Hearted Innocent dynamic, stretching out the narrative with a large helping of anti-Italian and anti-Catholic bigotry. As you might suspect, I was not a huge fan of The Marble Faun, especially the coy ending where Hawthorne declines to explain what just happened, much less why (which also annoyed the readers and reviewers of the time, forcing him to add a grudgingly explanatory afterword to later editions). (LC Score: +1, finished the Library of American collection!)
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
Reread for Apocalyptic Lit class. The Age of Miracles is the first novel I assigned to my Apocalyptic Lit students, even though it’s actually a coming of age story, cleverly set during the (possible) end of the world. (I’m happy to report that it was a hit.) (LC Score: 0, off my own shelves)
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster
Amy recommended this book to me and I’m so glad I read it. Foster talks about literary analysis in terms of memory (or intertextuality, aka how texts influence each other), patterns, and symbols, providing a handy and entertaining cheat guide for students of literature. Moral: Amy is always right and should probably just be giving me a to-read list each week. (LC Score: 0, got my own copy so I can pass it along to the high schoolers in the family)
[Note from Amy: Ha! Between this and the Faulkner I might be able to retire from book recommending in a blaze of glory.]
Library Chicken Score for 9/26/17: 5
Running Score: 105
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week
- The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi (had to check this one out AGAIN)
- Death’s End by Cixin Liu (final book in the trilogy)
- Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey (the only Tey novel I have left to read <sniff>)
- Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple (I will enjoy judging Nathaniel after reading all those novels)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (9.19.17)
Disasters, ghosts, psychic ninjas, and classic detective stories racked up points on this week's Library Chicken scoreboard.
Disasters, ghosts, psychic ninjas, and classic detective stories racked up points on this week's Library Chicken scoreboard.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
I’m very happy to report that all our Georgia and Florida folks survived Hurricane Irma without major damage. At Library Chicken HQ we were very fortunate and didn’t even lose power, so were able to watch television and play video games and (most importantly) read in well-lit rooms while the wind and rain raged outside. (The library did close for a few days, but I had laid in an emergency stock of books and all was well.) I hope that all of you also made it through the recent excitement without major issues. On to the books!
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Speaking of disasters: in Essex, England, in 1893, rumours spread about the return of a sea monster to menace the community. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel, but it turned out to be mostly about recently widowed Cora, her (perhaps autistic) son, and the changing relationships among her circle of friends. I really enjoyed getting to know the characters—a great read.
(LC Score: +1)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book either, though I’ve read and enjoyed Saunders’ short stories. It’s a ghost story: Willie Lincoln, dead at age 12 from typhoid fever, is welcomed to the graveyard by a motley assortment of its inhabitants. The narrative is told in alternating spirit voices, which took a minute to get used to but makes for a quick, engaging read. The author’s unmistakable warmth, compassion, and humor is present throughout.
(LC Score: +1)
The Lizard in the Cup by Peter Dickinson
James Pibble #5. I guess this week’s theme is I have no idea what’s coming next, because the PIbble mysteries continue to surprise with their offbeat weirdness. Here we’re on a Greek island with Pibble’s millionaire patron/employer. There are drugs, assassination attempts, and a crumbling monastery. (Believe it or not, this is Pibble’s second run-in with strange monks: the first was the subject of his third mystery, The Sinful Stones.)
(LC Score: +1)
Stray by Andrea Host
I don’t usually read self-published novels—not because I’m concerned that they’ll be of low quality (back in the day I read plenty of fanfic that was at least as good as if not better than many of the books from off the shelf at Barnes & Noble), but because I already need three Amazon wishlists to manage my to-read list and I’m afraid of what might happen if I opened the doors to the wild and wonderful world of self-publishing. This YA science fiction novel, however, came highly recommended by a friend who’s been pointing me towards great books since we were in junior high together, so of course I had to pick it up. It helps that, as part one of a four-book trilogy (yeah, I know, just go with it), this book is free for the Kindle. And it didn’t take long to get caught up in this story of a teenage Australian girl who accidentally steps through a wormhole on the way home from school and has to survive alone on a seemingly uninhabited alien world. (At least until—SPOILER ALERT—she’s rescued by psychic high-tech ninja types.) When the first book ended (or came to a pause point, since it leads directly into part two), I was more than ready to click the ‘buy’ button for the next one.
(LC Score: 0, read on Kindle)
- The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
- Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
- The Vorrh by Bruce Catling
- The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi
Here’s the thing: although we were delayed a week by Irma, the homeschool hybrid middle school that I’m teaching at this fall is about to start fall classes, which means that I don’t have quite as much time to read as I used to, and sometimes I have to return an ENTIRE STACK of GREAT BOOKS before I can get to them. Arrgh. What’s the equivalent of ‘my eyes were bigger than my stomach’ for books? RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -5, because two were returned late in addition to unread)
Library Chicken Score for 9/19/17: -2
Running Score: 100
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
- The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi (not going to let this one go back to the library without a fight)
- Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King (YA apocalyptic feminism)
- The Evolution Man Or How I Ate My Father by Roy Lewis (because my dad said I had to read it)
- One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson (final James Pibble mystery)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (9.5.17)
Suzanne breaks out the laminating machine but still finds time to dive into some Edwardian lit and a little American history in this week's Library Chicken.
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Why aren't there more wine commercials about laminating things?
PHOTO COURTESY OF SUZANNE REZELMAN
Lamination success!
PHOTO COURTESY OF SUZANNE REZELMAN
NON-BOOK-RELATED CONTENT: I don’t know if I’ve told you how terrible my kitchen is. The kitchen cabinets are cheap and awful-looking and original to the house (1970s). They’ve been painted a dirty cream that has chipped off in several places. Plus I never clean them, so that doesn’t help. When the kids were younger, we turned the kitchen into an art gallery and covered as much of the cabinets as possible with their creations, but over the years their artwork had become faded and ripped and stained and it was time <sniff> for it to come down. So I’ve been removing artwork and scraping tape and scrubbing the heck out of 40-year-old cabinets. As they still look awful, I pulled out the shoeboxes of family snapshots that I had stacked away in the closet (because, my children, there was once a time when cameras held something called FILM, which we then had to pay to get DEVELOPED even before we knew whether or not the pictures were any good, and some of us would always order DUPLICATE PRINTS in the vain hope that we would then remember to buy STAMPS and ENVELOPES to send them off in the ACTUAL MAIL to family members who probably weren’t all that interested in seeing them in the first place), and I got down the laminator that I bought a few years ago but never used, and I spent several days laminating ALL THE PICTURES. (It was great fun. Also a nice soothing meditative sort of activity, which I need in these troubled times. I had to stop because I ran out of laminating envelopes, but I’m going to lay in a new supply so I can go laminate things whenever I’ve accidentally listened to the news or seen a picture of the President or something.) Those are now covering my still-ugly but now less visible kitchen cabinets — all of which is to say: it’s a very short update this week, folks.
The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West
Scandalous doings of the aristocracy set at a vast English country estate: I’m all in. I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, but finally picked it up after reading A House Full of Daughters, Juliet Nicolson’s family history, including her paternal grandmother Vita. It did not disappoint and now I’ve got more Sackville-West novels to put on the to-read list.
(LC Score: +1)
The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel
I heard about this on Fresh Air and then picked it up off the new release section at the library. Markel’s history of the two Kellogg brothers, John Harvey (famous physician and originator of the modern concept of “wellness”) and Will Keith (famous businessman and originator of Kellogg’s Cornflakes), is interesting and entertaining, but drove me a little bit crazy by ignoring chronological order and jumping from subject to subject. It’s a good read — now I want to see a complete (and chronological!) joint biography of the brothers.
(LC Score: +1)
Library Chicken Score for 9/5/17: 2
Running Score: 98
On the TBR List for Next Week
- The Essex Serpent by Sara Perry (a sea monster threatens 1893 Essex)
- The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak (nerds come of age in the 1980s)
- Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller (a long-missing wife leaves behind letters hidden in her husband’s books)
- Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison (because she’s very cool)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (8.29.17)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
Lots of good books this week! When people ask how I have the time to read as many books as I do, I tell them the truth: I do as little housework as possible. This gets a polite chuckle, at least until they actually come over to my house, whereupon their eyes get very big and All Becomes Clear. My kitchen has reached a critical level of grime, however, so I’ve begun Taking Steps. SPOILER ALERT: next week’s Library Chicken Update may be considerably shorter.
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson
Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante
We’re starting with Little Women in Middle School Lit so I picked up a Louisa May biography which sent me down a rabbit hole of all the Alcott and Alcott-adjacent books I’ve added to my to-read (or reread) list over the years. The Reisen bio is detailed and complete, with new research, and a great read for anyone interested in LMA. I enjoy reading a couple of competing bios when I can: even biographers and historians who work hard to be unbiased necessarily shape their narrative with what they choose to include and exclude, and how they comment on and interpret their materials. In these three books, you can see that in the various treatments of Bronson Alcott, famous friend to Emerson and Thoreau, and famously poor provider for his family. Matteson, while acknowledging Bronson’s flaws, is anxious to present him in the best light possible (as is Reisen, to a somewhat lesser extent). LaPlante, refreshingly, is having None Of That, and while her bio is less detailed than the others, I enjoyed her constant irritation with Bronson (who really needs to be thwacked repeatedly with a large stick) and her shift of focus to Abigail Alcott, Louisa’s mother (and LaPlante’s several-times-great-aunt).
(LC Score: +3)
An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott
I’m slowly rereading my way through my shelves of children’s literature and conveniently, it’s time for some more Alcott (though I don’t think I’ll be revisiting Little Men or Jo’s Boys any time soon). This is one I hadn’t remembered well, perhaps because our heroine, a country girl sent to stay with a friend’s wealthy but discontented family, is a bit irritating, what with being so sweet and good all the time. The narrative perks up when it jumps forward a few years to show her as a young woman attempting to support herself in the city, but my favorite part of the book was an unexpected cameo from America’s Favorite Fighting Frenchman, when the grandmother told a tale of meeting the famous Lafayette in her youth (an anecdote based on LMA’s own family history).
(LC Score: 0, off my own shelves)
Fanshawe by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Did you know that Nathaniel Hawthorne was LMA’s neighbor in Concord? I remember Emerson and Thoreau, but somehow I always forget about Hawthorne. My daughter will be reading The Scarlet Letter this year, so it seemed like a good time to pick up the Library of America edition of Hawthorne’s novels. I hadn’t even heard of Fanshawe, which I guess is unsurprising since Hawthorne himself did everything he could to suppress his first published novel, including destroying all the copies he could get his hands on. It turns out to be a short novel about a Helpless Victim Girl falling prey to a bad guy before being rescued in the nick of time by a Heroic Virtuous Student, who then virtuously turns away from his hopeless love of the girl to succeed in his goal of dying young from too much studying. (I don’t know that it deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth, but I also wouldn’t go around recommending it to people.) Meanwhile, I hadn’t read The Scarlet Letter since 9th grade, when it was the source of much pain and suffering. Several decades later, I was surprised by how dramatic it was and I enjoyed it more than I expected. As a bonus, Hawthorne throws in a totally unnecessary but still awesome dig at Bronson Alcott in the Custom House opening.
(LC Score: 0, still working on the Library of America anthology)
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan
Time for a cozy mystery set in a bookstore! Except that this novel is most emphatically not that! I’m not sure where I got the idea that this would be a pleasant little murder mystery—perhaps I just associate bookstores with coziness?—but this book, about a bookstore employee who discovers a suicide in the store after closing time, is structured more like a thriller. Our heroine is the deeply damaged survivor of a horrific tragedy and this new death will lead her back to that childhood trauma. (I was reminded a bit of P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench.) A good read and books do feature prominently, but perhaps not exactly what I was looking for when I checked it out.
(LC Score: +1)
The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey
Alan Grant #6. I loved the beginning of this mystery, where Grant, suffering from PTSD-induced claustrophobia, goes to Scotland to recover, but I thought things got a bit heavy-handed with Tey’s introduction of an ignorant American who must be lectured at about the awesomeness of the British titled classes and the inherent classlessness of British life—none of which, by the way, has anything to do with the plot. (This novel was discovered in Tey’s papers after her death, leaving me to wonder if that bit would have been edited out had she lived to see it through publication.) Still, we do get a wonderful tale about a lost Arabian city. Overall, a nice send-off for Inspector Grant.
(LC Score: +1)
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran
Claire DeWitt #2. I am really enjoying the Zen-like mystery-solving abilities of screwed-up private investigator DeWitt and this mystery, involving the death of her musician ex-boyfriend, is a worthy sequel to the first book. Unfortunately, it ends with a cliffhanger and three years later (Bohemian Highway was published in 2014) there is no follow-up in sight.
(LC Score: +1)
Come Closer by Sara Gran
So if she’s not going to give me a Claire DeWitt, I’ll read another one of Gran’s books! That’ll show her! This one, her second book, is a horror novella about a woman being possessed by a demon. Good but super-creepy.
(LC Score: +1)
Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson
James Pibble #4. Inspector Pibble is now an ex-inspector, having been fired from the force (perhaps as a result of the events of The Sinful Stones, though we don’t learn the details). At loose ends, he starts investigating a home for intellectually and physically disabled children, all suffering from a (fictional) congenital disorder. As with The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest (though on a different topic), this seems like a scenario fraught with offensive possibilities, and similar to that first book, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. That said, the plot quickly takes an unexpected twist into the paranormal, and as usual, Dickinson has created a bizarre but fascinating read.
(LC Score: +1)
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book One written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, art by Brian Stelfreeze
This Week in Comics: You know I love Coates and Stelfreeze’s artwork here is simply gorgeous, but I think Marvel missed an opportunity with this collection. As a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’m more than ready to read some Black Panther as I eagerly await the movie (have you guys seen the trailer?!? IT LOOKS SO AWESOME), but as a newbie to the comics world, I was totally lost after being dropped right in the middle of a long-term ongoing storyline. I needed an issue #0 with the backstory or something. Despite that, it was well worth reading for the spectacular visuals, and I’ll keep going with the series in the hope that I’ll catch up sooner or later.
(LC Score: +1)
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
I was 7 years old when Star Wars came out. I first heard of the movie from an excited friend (also a 7-year-old girl) telling me all about this great princess who was sarcastic and funny (“This is some rescue!”) and strong enough to save the heroes who were trying to save her. I am so grateful that I was able to grow up with Princess Leia as one of my feminist icons—it’s no exaggeration to say that she changed my conception of what women (even princesses!) could be, and thus changed my world. It’s a tragedy that we no longer have Carrie Fisher here with us (goodness knows we need her) but it seems fitting that her final gift to us was this memoir. Now, okay, most of it is taken up with her secret affair with Harrison Ford (speaking of things that would have totally blown my 7-year-old mind) and while I’m as much of a sucker for celebrity gossip as anyone else, honestly, that doesn’t rank very high on my list of things I’d like to know about Carrie Fisher’s Star Wars experience. What I did learn was how talented a writer she was, even at age 19, even in her private I’m-desperately-in-love-and-can’t-think-of-anything-else journal entries. And how brave she was to share her self-absorbed uncertain teenage self with the world. I never dated anyone who looks like Han Solo, but I could relate to that all-encompassing hopeless first love (and believe me, NO ONE is ever going to see those diary entries). This is a must read for all us old-school Leia-wanna-be fangirls, and anyone else who appreciates Fisher’s smart, snarky, don’t-give-a-damn style. General Leia will be missed. Sniff.
(LC Score: +1)
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
This science fiction thriller has gotten great reviews—plus it was personally recommended by one of my best friends—but when it was finally my turn in the hold queue I found that I wasn’t in the mood to be thrilled. I’ll wait a bit and then try again. RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -1)
Library Chicken Score for 8/29/17: 9
Running Score: 96
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West (English country house novel: yes, please)
The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall (more Alcott-adjacent bios)
The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel (I love it when the book I just heard about on NPR shows up on the new release shelf)
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (great authors, great title)
Book Nerd: Library Chicken Weekly Scoreboard (8.22.17)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
PANIC AT THE LIBRARY. For four long days this week my library’s online systems were down, meaning that I could not check on holds or renew books as they came due. As you might expect, this threatened to throw the entire precarious system at Library Chicken HQ into disarray. Fortunately, I weathered the technological storm better than I would have expected—and in the process, discovered that some time ago the maximum number of checkouts per card had been doubled, from 25 to 50 (!!!). Somehow, I WAS NOT INFORMED of this life-altering event, but I’m doing my best to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, my family members have started gathering in small groups to have hushed conversations, and I may have overheard something about an “intervention”...
Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell
The Demon in the House by Angela Thirkell
August Folly by Angela Thirkell
Summer Half by Angela Thirkell
Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell
Now that we’re back from summer vacation and the high school kids have started school, it’s time for me to really dig into all that non-fiction reading and class prep I have on my to-do list for my outside classes this fall. But instead I decided to read the next five Thirkell Barsetshire books. As I’ve said in a previous update, they are charming and delightful (and only very occasionally racist and/or anti-Semitic) and a favorite comfort read of mine. Thirkell published about a book a year (these five take us from 1934 to 1938) set among various families and villages in fictional Barsetshire. There are eccentric but lovable noblewomen, English country house weekends, obnoxious lady novelists, hapless clergymen, public school intrigues, and, in every book, at least one awkward but good-hearted pair of young (and sometimes not so young) people will end up engaged. (NOTE: All of Thirkell’s teenagers and 20-somethings seem five to ten years younger than their supposed ages. This is especially noticeable in The Demon in the House, in which teenage Tony Morland acts about 8 years old throughout, demonstrating either (a) that our modern youth do in fact lose their childhood innocence much earlier than past generations, or (b) that Thirkell never actually hung out with any young people. It’s a little weird, but I try not to let it bother me.)
(LC Score: 0, off my own shelves)
Mother and Son by Ivy Compton-Burnett
After all that sweetness I need some sour. Compton-Burnett, like Thirkell, was a prolific English writer of popular novels during the 1930s and later, but there the resemblance ends. Where Thirkell is warm and gentle, Compton-Burnett is cold and cynical. Her books have a very distinctive style, consisting almost completely of dryly ironic dialogue, forcing a reader to pay close attention since it’s often difficult to tell which character is speaking (they all sound the same) or even which characters are part of the current conversation (since the author rarely deigns to let us know their movements). I think it’s safe to say that she is something of an acquired taste, and when I first read one of her novels, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to acquire it. But I read another, and then another, and now, every so often, I find myself in a mood for an Ivy—it’s a very particular clear-out-the-cobwebs sort of craving that no other author will satisfy. In Mother and Son, an overbearing matriarch with an overly-attached adult son advertises for a companion, but really, the plot doesn’t matter because I’m in it for all the sharply intelligent, passive-aggressive, calmly hostile conversations that will inevitably ensue.
(LC Score: +1)
The Sinful Stones by Peter Dickinson
Inspector James Pibble #3. In this mystery, Pibble finds himself (for complicated personal reasons) on a remote island with a cult-like group of monks. Unsurprisingly, all is not well. Dickinson’s Pibble mysteries continue to be bizarre and unlike anything I’ve read before (in the best way!).
(LC Score: +1)
The Green Gene by Peter Dickinson
This standalone novel by Dickinson takes place in a world just like our own—except that Celts have bright green skin (and can therefore be easily segregated from right-thinking Saxons). Our protagonist, an Indian researcher and medical statistician, has been hired by the British Race Relations Board to track down the elusive “green gene,” allowing them to identify carriers even if they’re not actually green-tinged. Although he’s a “Saxon” (at least according to his identity papers), he has to deal with other forms of racism and eventually discovers that the embattled and oppressed Celts can be ruthlessly violent towards their own people when dealing with ideological schisms. Published in 1973, it’s not exactly a cheery book, but it is a fascinating (and unfortunately relevant) take on racism from a unique perspective.
(LC Score: +1)
My Real Children by Jo Walton
I never know what I’m getting with a Jo Walton novel but I always enjoy the journey. Here, a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s realizes that she seems to be switching back and forth between two distinctly different timelines, each with its own set of memories. In one, she marries the man she shouldn’t have and suffers a great deal of personal sorrow; in the other, she has a lovely and fulfilled life, but the world is going to hell. Which one should she choose to live in? (NOTE: If ambiguous endings drive you crazy, be warned that Walton doesn’t tie everything up neatly here, though I felt fairly satisfied with my own interpretation of events.)
(LC Score: +1)
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t read Frederick Douglass before now, though I’m glad I tackled McFeely’s biography before diving into Douglass’s autobiographies. This Library of America edition collects Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); My Bondage and Freedom (1855); and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1893). Following his first published autobiography, Douglass’s practice was to use the text of the previous book, virtually unchanged, in each subsequent book, updating it with chapters describing the most recent events in his life. Narrative describes his life in slavery and is the emotional core (along with being the shortest and most successful of his works). I’ll be adding it to our own homeschool curriculum. HOMESCHOOL RECOMMENDED.
(LC Score: +1)
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Having read Between the World and Me, I’m already a devotee of Coates, and this memoir of his childhood (his first book) just confirms my admiration. Here we meet Coates’s unconventional family, including the older brother who taught him the Knowledge he needed to survive the streets of Baltimore, and the ex-Black-Panther father who raised him to be a Conscious black man in racist America. In passing, he casually (and constantly) references everything from the pop culture of the time, the fantasy worlds of D&D and superhero comics, and the by-words of Knowledge and Consciousness, leaving me slightly dizzy (since I didn’t understand more than half) but always swept away by his narrative.
(LC Score: +1)
Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore
This odd little book (by the always-interesting Lepore) explores the life of Joe Gould, a bizarre little man who was somehow discovered by (and won the patronage of) notable writers and intellectuals of his day, including e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. He claimed to be writing a massive oral history of the world (though it’s not clear if it ever existed) and became semi-famous after a New Yorker profile by Joseph Mitchell. He was also mentally ill and weirdly obsessed with race, with a history of stalking and harassing women. It’s a fascinating story, though I was left not quite sure what Gould ever did to merit his 15 minutes of fame. I suspect that Lepore was similarly puzzled.
(LC Score: +1)
A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations by Juliet Nicolson
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power, and Intrigue in an English Stately Home by Natalie Livingstone
Nicolson’s paternal grandmother was the writer Vita Sackville-West, whom she highlights in her engaging history of her fascinating female ancestors and the well-known English country homes they lived in. Meanwhile, Livingstone is the wife of the current lessee of Cliveden (now run as a five-star hotel), another famous home that played host to Restoration-era scandals, the Cliveden Set, and the 1960s Profumo affair, all explored in her entertaining book. Donations to the Library Chicken travel fund (so I can visit all these places myself) will be happily accepted!
(LC Score: +2)
Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
1980s mixtapes and magic—didn’t get to this one, but I’ll be checking it out again soon. RETURNED UNREAD. (LC Score: -1)
Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War by Fred Kaplan
I really should know better than to check out nice thick history books from the new releases (due back in two weeks, no renewals) section. RETURNED UNREAD. (LC Score: -1)
Library Chicken Score for 8/22/17: 7
Running Score: 87
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (PRINCESS LEIA WILL LIVE FOREVER)
The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey (final Alan Grant mystery)
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan (bookstore in the title = I’m sold)
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen (both for pleasure and for prep as Middle School Lit approaches)
Library Chicken Update CABIN-EXTRAVAGANZA 2017: THE AFTERMATH
Welcome to the weekly round-up of what the BookNerd is reading and how many points I scored (or lost) in Library Chicken. To recap, you get a point for returning a library book that you’ve read, you lose a point for returning a book unread, and while returning a book past the due date is technically legal, you do lose half a point. If you want to play along, leave your score in the comments!
CABIN-EXTRAVANGANZA, THE AFTERMATH: There’s always a bit of a dip in my Library Chicken score the week after the cabin. After all, once I’m back home I have to (1) return all those library books that I checked out for the cabin (which may take several trips), (2) catch up on TiVo (new episodes of The Great British Baking Show, So You Think You Can Dance, AND Grantchester on Masterpiece!), and finally (3) stare vaguely in the direction of the bags that need to be unpacked and laundry that needs to be done before deciding that “Nah, it can wait 'til next week,” (even though next week is the last week before school starts for the non-homeschoolers in the family, meaning that I’ll be frantically running around getting ready for orientation and there’s no way any laundry will get done). As you can see, with that whirlwind of activity there’s hardly any time at all for reading.
Frederick Douglass by William S. McFeely
I brought several big important biographies to the cabin but didn’t really get around to them. Fortunately, I was able to get to this one before it was due back. A thorough and very readable history of an important American life.
(LC Score: +1)
Passion and Affect by Laurie Colwin
Several years ago I zipped through all of Colwin’s novels, but I haven’t gotten to her short stories before now. I found this collection a bit disappointing—the stories were okay, if faintly depressing and not very memorable—until I read the two linked stories (“The Girl with the Harlequin Glasses” and “Passion and Affect”) about cousins Guido and Vincent and the women they love. Those two stories were fresh and funny and sweet and worth the price of admission all on their own.
(LC Score: 0, off my own shelves)
High Rising by Angela Thirkell
It’s been about three years since my last reread of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire series, which means that I’m overdue. (Also, I sometimes need a break from big important Frederick Douglass biographies.) Angela Thirkell wrote 29 books set in Anthony Trollope’s fictional Barsetshire, publishing roughly one a year throughout the 1930s and beyond, taking her characters through WWII and (just barely) into the 1960s. I’ll confess that I haven’t read all 29, but I have a healthy selection on my bookshelves and I turn to them when I am in need of charming delightfulness. Unfortunately, that occasionally comes along with the occasional hint of anti-Semitism (sadly not shocking in a British novel of the 1930s). This first book introduces us to popular author Laura Morland, her precocious young son, Tony, and their old friend George Knox, who in a display of poor judgement has taken on a pushy, bad-tempered, husband-hunting secretary, leaving Laura and co. to set things right.
(LC Score: 0. off my own shelves)
Bone Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith
This Week in Comics: As I’ve mentioned before, the Bone series by Jeff Smith has been acclaimed by critics and loved by various children in my own household, but I think I have to reluctantly admit that it’s not for me. There’s a lot here that is clever and charming, but the overall combination of silliness and seriousness doesn’t gel for me the way it seems to for others. That said, I’d still recommend it without hesitation for young readers interested in graphic novels.
(LC Score: +1)
Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington by Robert J. Norrell
Yep, this is one of those big important bios I didn’t get to in time. RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -1)
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
And here’s more interesting history that was due back at the library. RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -1)
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
So I was excited to see that my library had this new (2009) translation, complete and unabridged in English for the very first time! But I didn’t realize that it was over 700 pages! And when I tried the first couple of chapters I only understood about 50 percent of what she was saying! I think I’ll have to clear my calendar before my next attempt at this one, and maybe do some background reading about de Beauvoir for context, because I was very seriously lost. RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -1)
The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith
Smith is an original and compelling YA writer and I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, but I guess it’ll have to wait a little bit longer. RETURNED UNREAD.
(LC Score: -1)
Library Chicken Score for 8/1/17: -2
Running Score: 80
On the to-read/still-reading stack for next week:
Mother and Son by Ivy Compton-Burnett (the queen of acerbic dialogue)
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente (author of my new all-time favorite fantasy series)
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey (I’ve been aware of this title for forever but I don’t actually have any idea what it’s about)
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz (Sherlock fanfic by the author of Magpie Murders)
SUZANNE REZELMAN is home | school | life magazine’s Book Nerd. Subscribe to home/school/life to read her brilliant book recommendations and literary musings every issue. Your library list will thank you.