Alexandra Stoddard:
The Art of the Possible
27 September 2001
When I graduated from high school, I took some of the money I was given as graduation gifts and made my first real splurge in a bookstore. One of the books I picked up, just because it sounded interesting and because I like reading about interior decorating, was Alexandra Stoddard's Living a Beautiful Life. I enjoyed it greatly at the time and still like to reread it on occasion.
For a while, I was regularly buying Stoddard's books, even in hardcover. Gradually, I started finding that her work no longer spoke to me. She talks about simplicity and elegance and focusing on the essentials in your life, and yet she's doing it from the viewpoint of someone who's apparently been financially well-off most of her life. She doesn't give much advice that's directly helpful to this young working mother who is struggling to grow a writing career as well as run the household, earn the family paycheck, improve a so-so marriage, and spend time with her kid. Which is a pity, because I may be part of the audience she wants to speak to.
The Art of the Possible is a case in point. Fundamental theme: Learn to move away from perfectionism, so that you can live a more balanced and satisfying life. For someone in my situation, juggling many roles and pressures, a book like this could carry some valuable advice or practical hints. However, about all I got out of it is "don't expect yourself to do everything perfectly". Believe me, I don't. But Stoddard's options seem to be more along the lines of "do I wait for the perfect way to decorate this window, or do I put together something that's not quite what I want but still charming?" or "friends are coming to dinner, and something's gone wrong in the cooking; what do we serve them?", and mine seem more like "do I take this action that'll improve our family finances but cut drastically into my limited writing time, or do I continue our current path that's gradually draining our savings but giving me enough time to write?" or "do I try to teach my husband this general household skill to the point where he can and will do it reliably, knowing that this will probably take several months at best, or am I better off continuing to do it myself?"
So I unloaded it at the local used book store. A bit more room on my bookshelves so that someday I might have the space to be simple and elegant....
Jennie Lindquist:
The Golden Name Day
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The Little Silver House
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The Crystal Tree
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Brian Jacques:
Redwall
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Dorothy Dunnett:
Pawn in Frankincense
19 September 2001
In times of trouble, it's good to have some old favorites to turn to. This weekend, I reread Jennie Lindquist's wonderful books about a Swedish-American family in New Hampshire in the early 1900s: The Golden Name Day, The Little Silver House, and The Crystal Tree. When Nancy Bruce's mother becomes ill, Nancy goes to stay with Grandma and Grandpa Benson, long-time friends of her parents. Though she misses her parents and has some sad times, she also finds great enjoyment playing with the Bensons' grandchildren, meeting new people, and learning about Swedish customs.
The first two books are dear childhood favorites, that I checked out from the library over and over again; I loved the books so much that I named all my Barbie dolls after the characters. The third I'd never heard of until I was an adult; I ultimately bought a library edition off Amazon. I can see why it's more obscure -- the beginning is a bit awkward and includes a boring infodump (I can see summarizing the events of the previous books, but did it have to take two pages??), it feels less polished than the other two, and it doesn't really introduce anything more of the Swedish customs, which were always the most interesting part of the books for me. But the mystery about the Crane family and some of the new characters are quite nice, and it's good to revisit the family.
Another old favorite that I revisited this weekend was Rumer Godden's Home is the Sailor, one of her children's books about sentient dolls. I find Godden a very variable author -- some of her books are my very very favorites, and some I'm so bored by that I can't finish. This, obviously, is on the favorite end. The Raleigh doll family can't seem to keep male dolls; their father was lost in the sand dunes; their older brother was given away. "Nine-year-old" doll Curly decides that he is going to change that. And soon, he goes on an adventurous journey.... Heartwarming. And as someone who's always had a soft spot for miniatures, I love the descriptions of the dollhouse and its furnishings.
Recently I read Brian Jacques's Redwall for the first time. It's entirely possible that this may one day be one of my son's childhood favorites; if I'd read it at eight or nine, I'd have been enchanted too. Reading it as an adult...well, it's charming, but it doesn't warm my heart. Still, there are some wonderful characters; Matthias himself doesn't do much for me, but Jess Squirrel, Basil Stag Hare, Warbeak, and the Foremole, among others, are enjoyable. The language is a delight. And Cluny the Scourge -- hey, if I can take a villain seriously when I associate his name with a variety of bobbin lace, that's a pretty villainous villain!
On the adult level, I'm now two-thirds through with Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, having finished Pawn in Frankincense (a.k.a How Mean Can An Author Be To Her Character Without Utterly Destroying Him?). If you have a two-year-old son, I recommend waiting on this book until he's three. Especially if he's blond. And that's about all I'm going to say about the plot. (Oh, it's extremely good. It's also brutal.)
Dorothy Dunnett
The Disorderly Knights
6 September 2001
Dorothy Dunnett strikes again. The Disorderly Knights, the third of the Lymond chronicles, covers Lymond's adventures on Malta and setting up a fighting group in Scotland. I was spoilered about the major villain before reading it, alas; it would have been interesting to see how long it took for the penny to drop otherwise. But the passage where Lymond is talking about how to discredit someone is, absolutely, utterly, perfect.
Maud Hart Lovelace
Emily of Deep Valley
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Guy Gavriel Kay
The Summer Tree
1 September 2001
The first book that I clearly remember reading was Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, at a friend's birthday party when I was about six. (Spent almost the whole party reading the book. After that, I didn't get invited to birthday parties very often....) Lovelace's Deep Valley books are a treasured part of my childhood, and they still hold up rather well when I reread them as an adult.
My favorite of all the books, though, was Emily of Deep Valley -- which has been the most terminally out-of-print of any of them. But it's now been reprinted, to join the others, and I am overjoyed to finally own a copy.
I reread it this weekend, and I still love it. Emily's "what do I do now?" situation is one I can somewhat identify with, and her changing feelings about Don are also familiar. I don't know if I'd have liked this book if I hadn't discovered it as a kid, but hey, I did discover it as a kid ;-).
On the Bright Weavings forum, a discussion area for Guy Gavriel Kay's works, we're group-reading Fionavar Tapestry, a triology about five people from Toronto who go to a fantasy world and end up utterly changed. I've just finished the first book, The Summer Tree. Kay is one of my favorite authors, and would probably be on my buy-in-hardback list if we didn't already have all his books in paperback. But I have to admit, I'm not overly crazy about Fionavar. The fact that I read it after I'd read Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan probably has something to do with this! Fionavar isn't bad fantasy, but you can definitely tell it's early Kay. And when I'm reading it slowly and attentively, there are bits that grate on me. The two female Terran characters receive relatively little development in this first book -- Kim's great change doesn't mean as much to me when I don't really know what she was like before, and Jennifer, well, her lack of personality is probably intentional, given her later role in the story, but nonetheless.... Paul, Dave, and Kevin are all interesting people, though, and many of the Fionavarans are as well. I can surely understand the priestess Jaelle when she speaks bitterly about not having experienced the presence of her goddess. The general storyline is reasonably engaging, and some of the language is very beautiful. And as a whole, it still leaves me thinking "let's see, how soon are we going to get to Arbonne?"
Although it may also be that for me, Kay is a writer best read in my usual way (really fast, and repeatedly, so the good stuff under the surface gradually percolates up into my attention) rather than in a slow, measured, studious way. Rather ironic given that Kay's own goals, from what he's said in interviews, is to be the kind of writer that rewards the attentive, studious reader. Ah well. I figure that he's writing the best of both worlds -- entertainment with depth.