Books Read Since April 23

• Re-read: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein

I used to belong to the Doubleday Bargain Book Club and once tried to order this; even though I was in my teens Mom put the kibosh on it when she read the description of it being "an underground classic." In high school I bought the paperback copy. Heinlein is always readable, even if the text turns organized religions on their head. I've read criticisms of Jubal Harshaw, and he does pontificate a bit much, but I've always had a sneaking fondness for the old coot.

• Rebel Angels, Libba Bray

I have to admit, I liked A Great and Terrible Beauty with enough interest to go out and get this next book in the series. If nothing else, I want to see what happens to Ann, the charity pupil whose rich relatives are sending her to school just to train her as a governess for their children. What a horrible prospect! The fangirl commentary about heroine Gemma and her relationship with the exotic Indian boy who is supposed to be defeating her gets a bit thick at times, though.

• Watch Your Language, Robert Gorrell

This was an okay book about English grammar and linguistics I bought at the library sale. The most interesting part was the intriguing cover illustrating idioms, including a carrot-man eating a carrot ("you are what you eat") which has "cauliflower ears."

• Penny From Heaven, Jennifer Holm

I simply loved this book. It's the story of Barbara Ann Falucci, nicknamed "Penny," a fatherless girl growing up torn between her WASP mother's world (she and her mother live with her mother's parents) and the world of her father's large, complicated but loving Italian family in 1953. Since both my sets of grandparents came from Italy, I'm usually wary of books that contain Italian families; they are either ga-ga over the Mafia or do not seem authentic. I was in love with Penny's wonderful paternal family immediately; I knew all these people from my own experience. My dad's mother even did her cooking at a gas-converted coal stove in the basement because it was cooler in summer and she didn't want to "mess up" the nice kitchen upstairs! The food (sfogliatelles!), the homes, the loving uncles, the men torn between pleasing their mothers or their wives, the one male cousin who's always in trouble, Grandma dressed in black making homemade macaroni and homemade gravy (not "pasta" and "sauce," which are "Med-i-gone" terms!)...wow, it took me all back. Holm has the early 50s atmosphere down pat...I wished I could open a door and go back to meet all her characters, visit the Sweet Shoppe and the family butcher shop, and listen to "Dem Bums" on the radio. I also was drawn into the growing mystery about Penny's father, which exposes a chapter in history that most people have never heard of. I'm glad I decided to purchase this book; if you are Italian, this is a must have.

• Re-read: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Absolutely one of my favorite books in the world, although the business with Tom Sawyer at the end makes me want to shake the foreign-romance-obsessed Tom. Huck's growing realization that Jim is not "property" but a man is as absorbing on the 20th read as on the first. I read Finn on my own at age twelve and was quite annoyed when we didn't read it again in ninth grade; later in college I did an essay about my favorite character in the book, the poor deceased Emmaline Grangerford, so warped by her family's feud with the Shepherdson clan that she continually obsessed over funerary art and poetry.

• Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches?, Mike O'Connor

Bird information and trivia written with a light hand by a Cape Cod newspaper columnist and wild bird store owner. My favorite: O'Connor's response to a man who wants to buy "a bird bath for my wife": he asks how large the wife is. :-)

• Re-read: The Sidetracked Sisters' Happiness File, Pam Young and Peggy Jones

Back when our office was still in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, a remainder book sale opened in an abandoned store and continued for at least a year. I'd walk to the store at least once a week and accumulated quite a collection at bargain prices. I had over a dozen books about babies and children preparatory to the time when I might get pregnant; when it didn't work out I packed them away and eventually gave them to Goodwill. I bought Cantor's wonderful Where the Old Roads Go, about traveling the state highways of New England, Pullman's Ruby in the Smoke and Shadow in the North, a "bathroom book" about the unusual subjects people do newsletters about, a book on organizing, and divers others.

One of the others was Pam Young and Peggy Jones' "Sidetracked Sisters" books about their efforts to conquer disorganization in their homes by using a system of 3x5 reminder cards. Their amusing texts covered the home, and then the kitchen, but this book, the Happiness File is my favorite of them, about achieving personal goals using the same methods. Pam and Peggy are like old friends.

• The Complete Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds, Juliette Cunliffe

I suppose we needed yet another book about dog breeds like I need the proverbial hole in my head; however, this was published in Britain, with the UK dog classifications, and half the book is not about breeds, but about dogs in general (carriage dogs, turnspit dogs, how Crufts started, dogs in history, dogs in art, etc.) and rare breeds are also featured.

• And, of course, preparing for the Big Event in July, have re-read: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince.

I am presently reading the great The Old Iron Road, about a family who follows the trail of the pioneers from Missouri to California, mostly traveling along the old Lincoln Highway, and about the history (the Transcontinental Railroad, the Indian Wars), personalities (Willa Cather, John C. Frémont), and other points of interest observed. Great stuff, and haven't even left Nebraska yet.

A Sad Return

Incidentally, blackmask.com is now back, under the moniker of "Munsey's" (a classic Canadian magazine) with unfinished sections of the main page and a server so glacial that molasses in January would be quicker. But the e-books are still there.

Stories for "Wide Awake" Youngsters

Many children's magazines flourished in the 19th century. While several were published by religious groups and featured highly-moral stories, others were secular, although milder moral stories were the rule, and disobedient children or those urchins who smoked or used slang were reformed (except in the weekly Youth's Companion, where even mention of tobacco or "drink" was forbidden).

While St. Nicholas was the most remembered of these publications and had the second-longest run, others were quite well-known during their time: Merry's Museum (edited for some time by Louisa May Alcott), Our Young Folks (whose merge with St. Nicholas upon the latter magazine's 1873 debut was unknown to editor J.T. Trowbridge until it was a fait accompli), and Wide Awake, published by Daniel Lothrop starting in 1875; he later married Harriet Mulford Stone, better known as "Margaret Sidney," whom he met when she submitted the first of the "Five Little Peppers" stories to the magazine. Wide Awake was also later bought out by St. Nicholas (in 1893).

Having finished my St. Nicholas collection, I thought I would add one or two other titles of the same time period, but so far I've only obtained some bound volumes of Wide Awake. My first was the June-November 1889 volume, "CC," my oldest, "R" from 1884 arrived today (but I won't be reading it for a while as it needs major repairs as did the "CC" volume). The oldest I have read at this point is "Z" from 1888.

In format, the Wide Awake volumes closely resemble St. Nicholas as well as other adult magazines of the time: two column 10-point type, with engravings as illustrations. It has a couple of regular features: "Men and Things," short anecdotes about discoveries, people, or even cute stories about the things small children say, and "Tangles," a short puzzle page.

I'm probably biased by my St. Nicholas collection, but the stories in Wide Awake seem a bit more didactic than those of its competitor. All the fiction, even the continuing adventures of the Pepper clan, seem to emphasize ideals and lessons learned; these qualities are also present in St. Nicholas despite Mary Mapes Dodge insistence that the magazine not be too didactic, but of a lesser emphasis. For instance, one continuing "serial" of Volumes BB and CC is a series of letters from "Daisy," a newly-married middle class young lady in Boston, to her friend "Pattie," in which Daisy usually works some instruction in good manners, for instance, how hurt she felt when a young woman she knew snubbed her due to the part of town she lived in and how snubbing is wrong, or how some of her old friends visit and show poor manners.

However, the Wide Awake volumes also have some articles about traveling in the 1800s that are fascinating and absorbing to read. Olive Risley Seward, for instance, has a series of travel narratives called "Around the World Stories" in which she talks about the dangers, hardships, and joys of two young women traveling the world, including trips to China and Java. Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of pioneer John C. Frémont, has a remarkable series of articles about Western pioneer life.

There are also numerous articles about life in foreign countries and stories about royalty, the latter which seemed to fascinate Americans in the late 19th century. Of course, as with all articles dealing with foreigners in those days, some customs are described as "queer" or "savage" or "barbaric," with American customs generally regarded as superior ("pretty" customs like Japanese flower arranging and other things of that nature are usually conceded as being a good thing, however, and often something that might be emulated in American homes).

There are even some articles in Wide Awake that seem more suited to adults of the time, and were probably written for older children, what we today would call high school/college age teenagers. "The Republican Court," for instance, is a long article about Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, and their contemporaries in "society" in early U.S. politics. A later series, "Children of the Presidents," discuss the offspring of George Washington through James Madison (at least of the issues I have) during both their childhood and adulthood.

The most unique portion of the magazine is the C.Y.F.R.U., the Chautauqua Young Folks' Reading Union. The Chautauqua movement began in 1874, "an adult education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and specialists of the day." Today we pop on the television or surf the internet and watch/read about these subjects and cannot really imagine how isolated communities, especially rural communities, were in the 1800s. Both men and women, and even children, flocked to Chautauqua meetings and classies that brought them knowledge of the outside world.

Wide Awake's Chautauqua sessions-in-articles include "Cooking in the Public Schools," which include lessons on how to make a proper fire in a cookstove and about basic cooking of bread and meat. There is a long series about famous gems and another about geologic and wilderness habitats. One series called "Our Asiatic Cousins," covering the "Hindoos" and other Asiatic peoples, was written by Mrs. A.H. Leonowens, the "Anna" of Anna and the King of Siam/The King and I.

Each C.Y.F.R.U. is concluded with "Search Questions" in various sections of history.

The format of Wide Awake, however, apparently changed between 1889 and 1891, the latter the most recent volume I have received. Perhaps the publisher, due to failing sales, decided to aim the publication more at younger children, because the majority of the articles in the 1891 volume are in larger type over one page instead of in columns, with a simpler vocabulary, and only twenty or so pages near the end of the issue revert to the two-column format with more adult themes (including Margaret Sidney's Five Little Peppers Grown Up).

It will be interesting to investigate this further.

Books Read Since March 29

• A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray

I was caught up enough in this book about Victorian girls at a posh boarding school who become involved with magic to buy the sequel, although I do agree with the reviewers that all the characters are self-centered. However, most girls of that age are, and wealthy girls were brought up to be self-centered. I can't say the leading character is altogether likable, but she is absorbing to follow.

• Trouble in Spades, Heather Webber

I don't usually read second books in a series first, but I found this on the $1 spinner at Dollar General. It's about a woman who does landscaping who has recently been divorced, her prima-donna sister, and assorted other crazies. I found this cute but nothing special. I usually don't have problems with a multiple cast of characters, but all the players in this one made my head spin. Also it seems there were too many weird neighbors to go along with the weird relatives.

• Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin

I've seen this in paperback at the store, but this particular volume I found in hardback at the Smithsonian on discount. I was fascinated, not just due to the examination of how animals percieve the world differently, but also by the fact that the author is autistic, but has learned to cope with the chaotic (to her) world of the non-autistic. I have a friend with an autistic child, but his condition is more serious than the author's and it gave me an insight into his world.

• I started reading the Civil War mystery A Grave at Glorietta (another $1 spinner acquisition, since I'm not much of a Civil War buff), but I ended up forgetting it at the bank on Saturday morning and it wasn't worth going back for.

• The Rocking Chair Reader: Coming Home

This is a feel-good anthology of Chicken Soup for the Soul-like stories about people's memories of growing up and returning to the small towns where they either grew up or spent a lot of time (with grandparents or other relatives). If you have similar memories, or just want to see what it was like, these are sweet stories, but I didn't like them well enough to keep the book.

• Re-reads: Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, both about fan fiction, although Jenkins and Bacon-Smith both discuss "songtapes" and Jenkins addresses filksongs. These are two 1992 classic texts about fandom and fan fiction. I also have Jenkins and Tulloch's study of Star Trek and Doctor Who fans, which I have not re-read lately. I would like to get some of Jenkins' (and others) books about fandom in the age of the Internet.

How Can So Many Memories Fit Into One Little Book? #1

Does anyone else have books that are more than just books, because they have become part of the time and place that you first read them?

Back during college I happened to catch the Masterpiece Theatre presentation of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Murder Must Advertise (this was before the British mysteries were spun off to Mystery). I remember Alistair Cooke's delightful commentary on the British society portrayed by Sayers, but most of all I remember Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter. Many people complain he was too old for the role and I suppose he was, but he fit the bill perfectly.

In any case, this caused me to go out and buy all the Wimsey books, and several weeks ago I dug out my copy of The Nine Tailors again and plumped happily into the affairs of little Fenchurch St. Paul and making agreeable reacquaintance of Lord Peter, the inestimable Mervyn Bunter (Wimsey's faithful gentleman's gentleman), the garrilous Reverend Venables, precocious Hilary Thorpe, the Thodays and all the working-class folks of the village—and of the eight-bell ring in the large village church: the bells John, Jericho, Jubilee, Saboath, Batty Thomas, Gaude, Dimity, and Tailor Paul. (That's all from memory!) Tailor Paul is the tenor bell, which is rung nine strokes whenever a man dies, which gives the novel its name.

I can't sniff the book print in this one without falling deep, deep into a time machine and coming out in the midst of the little Paperback Books (that's what it was called, and that's what you made the check out to) store that used to be on Weybosset Street in Providence in the 1960s and 1970s. It was across the street from Providence's signature department store, the Outlet Company.

Compared to the designer stores we have today, the paperback bookstore wasn't much on decoration. The show windows in front were always filled with books whose covers were fading from the sun. When you entered, you faced an L-shaped floor plan and the linoleum on the floor was cracked and broken. The cashier sat in a booth that was reached by a short flight of stairs, so she could overlook the store for shoplifters. Racks of books were even set up against this booth. The bookshelves were plain wood, nothing much—but they were crammed with books, books, books... The shelves reached up to about six feet, and then the remainder of the wall and then entire ceiling was covered with posters: rock bands, television favorites, even those black-light psychedelic things so favored in the late 60s. No coffee shop, no games, no overbright lighting—just filled bookshelves and the heady scent of bookprint.

The paperback bookstore had the best media book section anywhere. If a television series had a novelization based on it, or if a book was being made into a movie, it showed up on their shelves long before it hit the screen or theatre. I still have my copy of Cromwell that I bought after we had seen the Richard Harris movie as a school field trip.

The cashier there, a heavyset young woman, was also fannish. One day I was surprised to see what looked like some typeset 8 1/2 by 11 pages stapled together with a colored cardstock cover with drawings of some Star Trek characters on it. I looked at it, but it was priced more than I had. I wish I'd picked it up; it was the infamous "Night of the Twin Moons" Sarek/Amanda fanzine, the very first time I'd ever seen one. I didn't realize what it was until I read the book Star Trek Lives!

The mystery books were off in the back right corner—I can remember the whole floor plan as if it were yesterday—and the Lord Peter Wimsey books were on the right wall, a shelf or two from the bottom. They were $1.25 in those days, a vast sum, and I ended up buying two at the time from my college textbook money without telling my mother. (I bought the trade paperback, Lord Peter, with all the Wimsey short stories including the elusive "Talboys," which takes place after Peter and Harriet have three sons, and my mother had a fit when she found out I paid...ulp!...$3.95 for it!) Most of the books were published by Avon, but for some reason The Nine Tailors was owned by another publisher, Harcourt, so all my copies don't match. I swallowed them all like sweets and then read them a second time, and some, like Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors, over and over again.

When I open up The Nine Tailors, I open the door to the paperback bookstore again, hear the bell, sniff the ink scent that is more compelling than any perfume...

Studying Harry Potter

If in some ways unconventionally.

Harry Potter and the Mystery of an Academic Obsession

Books Read Since My Last Post

There were actually several more, but I wanted those to be separate posts.

• Carpe Demon, Julie Kenner

Amusing mystery-fantasy that is described as "Suppose Buffy the vampire slayer grew up, had a family, then hid her past?" Kate Connor was once a demon hunter, now she's a stay-at-home mom whose husband is running for public office. Demons haven't bothered her for years: now several of them are after her at once. This is just fun, especially if you were once a "Buffy" fan.

• Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, Joseph Kett

Scholarly but absorbing history of childhood in America. for those of you who think today's American children have no childhood, this look into the past will assure you that there was once much worse fates: miniature adults in the colonial world, apprenticeships, pioneer hardships, child labor.

• Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher

The latest in paperback in Butcher's Harry Dresden series. As always, Harry is in trouble, but this time it involves a horror convention and the daughter of a close friend. When the story's over...well, let's say something has been added to Harry's life.

• PC Annoyances, Steve Bass

This is a re-read, a book I got off the remainder shelf. The links and tips are still quite useful. Thankfully it guided me through getting rid of all those wretched headers in Eudora 7.

• No Uncertain Terms, William Safire

Twelfth in the series of books taken from Safire's On Language column. I found this one at Daedalus Books in Odenton, Maryland, during vacation last year. I hadn't bought a Safire compilation in a dog's age since the price of a new volume had skyrocketed back in the 1990s. Very, very enjoyable as always, especially the "Bloopie" awards.

• Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers (A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century, Rosemarie Ostler

Another Daedalus find. An entertaining read for an linguistic aficionado, although it might bore others. I've read books on the same subject with more lively writing. Also, one chapter surprised me: after the author includes Star Trek words influencing English in the 1960s, there was no corresponding section on the number of Star Wars terms in the 1970s (except for the obvious "Star Wars" defense system). Where was "Use the Force" and other SW vocabulary that entered the language?

• Al Capone Does My Shirts, Gennifer Choldenko

Moose Flanagan and his family move to Alcatraz Island in 1935, where his father has taken a combination electrician/guard job in the hope that a nearby special school will "cure" his sister Natalie, who today would be classified as autistic. His mother clings to this hope while Moose must adjust to a new school, the machinations of the warden's daughter, and taking care of his sister. Very readable and touching story of a family coping with a "different" child in the 1930s, against the backdrop of the infamous prison.

• Grails: Quest for the Dawn (anthology)

After having been burnt by several SF or fantasy anthologies in the past few years, this was a pleasant surprise. I notice from at least one review that they were disappointed that all the stories were not about "The Holy Grail." Rather, "grail" is used in a larger sense as some ideal, whether relating to Arthurian fantasy or not. As always, some of the stories are better than others, but on a whole I enjoyed it.

Library Books

• A Country Practice: Scenes from a Veterinary Life, Douglas Whynott

If you're looking for a cozy James Herriot-style vet narrative, this isn't it. However, if you want a good look at a modern American rural veterinary practice (the setting is Walpole, New Hampshire), you will probably enjoy this. Whynott's prose is lively and we hear about the farmers' and animals' lives as well as the business of the vets.

• Giving Thanks, Kathleen Curtin, Sandra L. Oliver, and Plimouth Plantation

The first half is a history of Thanksgiving, and the other half is recipes, with some historical background. Not bad, but I felt they apologized too much for the old practice of not mentioning the Native American contributions to culture in Plymouth, aside from the usual history book tales of Squanto. It happened and, sadly, we can't change it. We can only do our best not to allow such insensitivity again.

• Spice: The History of a Temptation, Jack Turner

Turner examines the various reasons for the spice trade: for power, religious need, and especially garnishment of food. He pooh-poohs the theory that spice was necessary to cover "rotted" meat in the Middle Ages and supposes it was more to cover up the taste of the only means of curing meat back then: the intense salty taste of preserved meat. He also examines the sexual connotations of spice.

• A Dog's History of America, Mark Derr

Enjoyable book with reservations, and a warning to beware of children being attracted by the "pretty white dog" on the cover; the narrative is very mature, especially the appalling violence perpetrated by Columbus and later Spanish explorers on the Native population of the Americas. Derr's political views creep in occasionally, and he seems overly fond of the word "extirpation" (it's mentioned so frequently it really stands out). At one point he is discussing the Dalmatian and it is mispelled as "dalmation" at least half of the dozen times the breed name is mentioned. There are also some odd omissions: he talks about the San Francisco dogs "Bummer" and "Lazarus" at length, but not their titular owner, "Emperor" Joshua Norton, and mentions the Seeing Eye without once mentioning the famous Buddy and her handler Morris Frank.

• The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Mark Bittner

I saw this book discussed on an interview show when it came out, but had not gotten around to reading it until now. Bittner, who accepted a caretaker job at a San Francisco residence, discovered a flock of parrots (mostly cherry-headed conures, but also a couple of blue-headed conures and one mitred conure) living wild in his neighborhood. He began to feed and observe them, and the result is this delightful book about the lives of the flock members. As with any wild creatures, there are heartbreaks as well as triumphs and laughter, but when you finish you will love these birds and respect the man who let them remain themselves rather than trying to capture and tame/train them.

It All Started on Epiphany

Oliver Parker is a 12-year-old American boy who has spent three quarters of his life in Paris; his parents live there because his father is a journalist. He often feels lonely amongst his French classmates and a little out of place. There's also something bothering his parents, especially his father, who is covering the story of an old classmate, an electronics whiz who is coming to Paris to install some great new invention on the Eiffel Tower.

On the evening of Epiphany, his mother purchases the usual King's Cake that is eaten on that day, and makes certain, as she always does, that Oliver receives the little key token baked into the pastry. This means Oliver gets to wear the little gold paper crown that always comes with a galette des rois. Because he's had "one of those days" at school he leaves the crown on all night, and later in the evening after he finishes his homework and is practicing shadow figures on the wall, he looks into the kitchen window—and sees a boy wearing a doublet staring back at him.

So begins The King in the Window by Adam Gopnik, an old-fashioned, intense fantasy story that has Oliver embroiled with the ongoing war between the Window Wraiths (they reflect your image in windows and generally help you to look better) and the dark spirits of the mirrors, which steal your soul. Oliver has been recruited because the Window Wraiths, having seen him in the crown, think he is the King of the Window, who will deliver the world from the spirits of the mirrors, who are planning to break through to the real world and capture the soul of every human on earth. Next thing he knows, Oliver, a totally unremarkable young man, has stolen a glass sword from the Louvre, discovered allies in often-exasperated 13-year-old Neige, daughter of the caretaker of the Parkers' residence, and the exceedingly wealthy Mrs. Pearson, not to mention the clochards, the street dwellers of Paris, and his buddy from the United States, Charlie.

This is a complex fantasy, more suited to young adults than children, and adults who enjoy a flight of fancy. Oliver is no sterling genius and readers will sympathize with him as he tries to discover how he will defeat the mirror denizens. In addition, Gopnik paints the gloom and the glory of a Paris winter in words like watercolors until the city becomes a character as much as Oliver, Neige, and the rest.

Enchanting and enthralling and even a little melancholy.

Old-Time Curiosities from Books

Reading all the "Five Little Peppers" books over brings one back to a different age. Imagine being so poor that you've never received a letter or a parcel, like Mrs. Hansell in Ben Pepper. Or a wonderful game for children being "playing company," dressing up and pretending to call on your own brothers and sisters.

Some other aspects of Victorian America emerge. For instance, in the second story ever written about the Peppers, little Phronsie celebrates a great event: getting her first pair of brand-new shoes! But even then Mrs. Pepper must cut corners. She tells Polly and Ben to make sure that Mr. Beebe the shoe-store man gives them "evens" so the shoes will wear longer. If you're familiar with the history of shoes, you know that they were originally made the same for both feet. Once on, the shoes then conformed to the shape of your feet. If the shoes wore unevenly on one side—I always "turned on my heels" and rounded out the outsides of them, so my mother had the shoemaker put rubber "taps" on those corners—you could swap shoes and thus "evens" would wear longer. (As someone who has trouble with shoes, I can imagine how uncomfortable that would be!) Around 1822, American cobblers invented the first "left" and "right" side shoes made from specific lasts (molds) of each foot. Some slippers and light women's shoes continued to be made on straight lasts by the turn-shoe method until perhaps 1870. Apparently if Mrs. Pepper was still requesting "evens" in a story written in 1887, either they still made shoes like that for children, who were so hard on shoes, or Mr. Beebe was a very old-fashioned cobbler.

In several of the stories, Mrs. Pepper or another adult applies something called opodeldoc to cuts or bruises. This was a liniment made from, among other things, soap and camphor. Wikipedia tells a little more about opodeldoc, including the origin of the name. It's hard to imagine a day when a simple broken leg was a reason to panic, but blood poisoning or crippling might be the result of the injury.

There's also what sounds like a strange sounding remedy for the bruises that result when Dick Whitney falls down the stairs: brown paper is soaked in vinegar and put on the swellings that result. Again, this is a homeopathic remedy still recommended today:

Put five or six sheets of strong brown paper into a pan and cover with sage vinegar. Place a lid on the pan and steam over a very low heat for a few minutes. The time will depend on the type of paper used. It should soften and absorb some of the vinegar without breaking or disintegrating. Remove the paper and wrap it in overlapping layers around the affected part. Apply as hot as possible and build up several layers. Cover with plastic wrap and bandage in place. Leave for four hours and reapply twice a day until the swelling and bruising have subsided.

This is an effective remedy enshrined in the children's rhyme "Jack and Jill" (Jack "went to bed to mend his head with vinegar and brown paper"). It is very supportive and strengthening for bruises and swellings.

Books Read Since January 17

• A Hole in Juan, Gillian Roberts, the penultimate volume in her mystery series about Amanda Pepper, Philadelphia Prep teacher who gets involved in mysteries and her boyfriend-now-husband C.K. Mackenzie. This time a tough science instructor that the kids don't like is injured in a laboratory accident. Amanda is more upset than the rest of the instructors since before his accident the teacher confided to her that he was being harrassed by the students—and certain of her students are acting odd.

I was genuinely mystified by this one, but came out of it feeling depressed—are high-school kids today really that mean and petty? Did I just manage to avoid these poisonous creatures when I did the high school circuit?

• Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, Lee Goldberg, another original novel based on the television series. Union negotiations break down, the police walk off the job—and Monk is reinstated as a detective. First on his plate: a killer who offs women joggers and steals only their left shoe. If you think Monk is crazy, the other reinstated ex-police officers who make up his squad are even more daft: a Dirty Harry-attitude cop with "anger-management issues," an elderly man, and a paranoid woman officer who believes aliens are listening to our every word via our computers. Will Natalie survive this without going nuts?

I enjoyed reading this one because Goldberg has all the dialog down pat (well, he has written several episodes of the series, after all), especially between Stottlemeyer and Disher. I could pretty much hear the actors saying the dialog he'd written for them.

• The other four Five Little Peppers books I had never read. I got them through interlibrary loan. Most of them sell for $$$ online because the later books were not reprinted and so are rare. The Stories Polly Pepper Told occasionally shows up in bookstores inexpensively, but I've never wanted it because frankly I wasn't interested in the little fairy stories Polly told to keep the younger kids occupied. However, I realized when I finally read the book that it also had framing sequences and stories about the family itself, so if I ever see it cheap again, I'll probably grab it. There's one story where we actually hear something about the childrens' father, and another where they are snowbound.

Writers sometimes get themselves into traps when they create a popular character. They have other ideas for other characters and stories, but people clamor for more of the popular character. Louisa May Alcott finally wished that the March family would be blown up in some cataclysm so she could escape them and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of course "killed off" Sherlock Holmes, then later "resurrected" him because of the outcry.

"Margaret Sidney" (in real life Harriet Mulford Lothrop) intended to end the Pepper saga after four books, but her readers kept clamouring for more. Despite her professed affection for "the Little Brown House" folks, it must have bored her eventually to keep filling in these minute details of life with Ben, Polly, Joel, David, and Phronsie, because the later books are full of contrary timelines, character names transferred to other characters, and other signs that Mrs. Lothrop was just writing because they'd asked her to. The Adventures of Joel Pepper (which I own) and Our Davie Pepper and Five Little Peppers in the Little Brown House (which I borrowed) cram little details in between the events that take place in Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (Little Brown House does include the two original Pepper short stories written for Wide Awake!, a late 1800s children's magazine, which engendered the first book and eventually the series). Ben Pepper appears to take place between How They Grew and Midway—except that an event that happens in Midway has already taken place in Ben Pepper.

I wonder if Lothrop ever received letters from sharp-memoried fans who wondered why the Peppers' timeline was a bit warped the way people complain of inconsistencies on television series via the internet today?

Anyway, everything you ever wanted to know about the Five Little Peppers (and probably never wanted to ask) here.

"A Cracking Good Tale..."

The 7 Professors of the Far North by John Fardell.

Remember those cool kids' adventures of the 1950s and 1960s? Danny Dunn? Miss Pickerel and her junior sidekicks? The Three Investigators or the Hardy Boys or Rick Brandt or Nancy Drew when she wasn't waffling on about clothes like she does in the new books? Well, bring the format to the present, take three plucky kids (a brother and sister and a boy named Sam with an always useful Swiss Army knife), and get them involved with the kidnapping of six brilliant professors by an unbalanced and meglomaniac former colleague, then mix them with nonstop action, and you have this totally brill novel that you don't have to be a kid to enjoy.

Eleven-year-old Sam Carnabie is facing a boring vacation at his Aunt Roberta's house when his parents let him stay with their old instructor Professor Alexander Ampersand and his young wards, his orphaned niece and nephew Zara and Ben, in Edinburgh. Then one of Ampersand's colleagues shows up with the urgent message "Professor Murdo has returned to Nordbergen." Within a twinkling other colleagues arrive on the scene, then are kidnapped, leaving the kids on their own to mount a rescue.

Fast-paced action takes Sam, Ben and Zara across England, into Europe and then far to the north; meanwhile a mundane teenage girl named Marcia Slick is about to become a victim of her parents' obsessive need for perfection...

Incredible gadgets, adventures on a secret mode of transportation, despicable villains, travel in some of the most incredible vehicles ever, and engaging characters make this one not to miss.

Books Read

Finished Erik Larson's Thunderstruck. Not quite as compelling as Devil in the White City because poor abused Dr. Crippen isn't quite as fiendish as creepy homicidal Dr. Holmes. I find the Marconi parts absorbing, but then I have an interest in the creation of radio. I wish there had been more photos to show the radio apparatus, the English, U.S., and Canadian locations at that time, and the people involved.

Presently reading: 7 Professors of the Far North, which I bought and started on vacation but never finished, and Jill Churchill's Who's Sorry Now?, another in her "Grace and Favor" mysteries about brother and sister Robert and Lily Brewster, two formerly rich young people whose near starvation existance after the Depression wiped out their money is brought to an end by a bequest from their late uncle, who has promised them millions, but in the meantime they have to live at "Grace and Favor" cottage and learn how to work while uncle's financial advisor manages their money.

I've been reading these since the first because I've always had an interest in the Depression-era due to my parents having lived through it, but my favor in their grace [sorry, I went far for that one] diminishes with each new book. I've kept the others but I actually got rid of the one that had to do with the Bonus Marchers because the Bonus March took about half the book but had nothing to do with the story that was begun in the first chapter. It was as if Churchill said "Look at this disgraceful event in U.S. history; here, I'm going to describe it in detail!" just because it took place in the same era as her story.

Churchill's vocabulary and sentence structure seem to grow more simplistic with each successful volume as well. Who's Sorry Now? is full of short, choppy sentences and repeated explanations (how many times did we have to hear that Lily's dog Agatha rolled in something dead in the space of four pages?). I feel like I'm reading something meant for a reading-challenged teenager rather than an adult mystery novel.

Books Read Since December 30

• The Trouble With Magic
• A Charmed Death
both by Madelyn Alt
If you are a police procedural mystery lover, you will probably avoid; these are "cozies" that take place in the Midwest, where our heroine Maggie O'Neill finds a new direction (and new job) in life when she steps into Enchantments, a gift store that belongs to Felicity Dow, a down-to-earth practicing witch. In the course of the books Maggie helps solve the murder of Felicity's sister and then the murder of a popular high-school student, while she discovers her own esoteric powers.

• Walt Disney by Neal Gabler. Middle line, 600 page (the other 200 pages are appendix and index) bio of Disney: doesn't gloss his bad points like Bob Thomas, doesn't go overboard like Marc Eliot. Gabler's subtext is Disney's need for control.

• Christmas Remembered by Tomie dePaola, the children's book illustrator. Warm stories about memorable Christmases in his life; nothing remarkable, but a couple very humorous, especially the story of "Nana-Fall River."

Library books finished over the holiday: The Story of Santa Klaus [sic], William Walsh's 1909 effort to explain how tall austere St. Nicholas and other Christmas gift-givers became the American Santa Claus; The Book of Christmas Folklore, Tristam P. Coffin, a wry retelling of Christmas customs; Celebrating Christmas Around the World, short to long tales of Christmas in different countries edited by Herbert Wernecke (not sure what this book is supposed to be—it was published by a religious press and about half the stories are about missionaries celebrating in different lands, but there are some different pieces as well, including a humorous Reader's Digest-like offering about Danish husbands at Christmas, and the chapter from Hans Brinker; or the Silver Skates about St. Nicholas); and Christmas the World Over by Daniel J. Foley, again, chapters about Christmas celebrations in different locations, including Japan and China.

Presently in the middle of Thunderstruck by Eric Larson (Devil in the White City, Isaac's Storm).

Callahans at Christmas...

... in Holiday Harbour.

Babies and Bathwater

While surfing around for Christmas books, I came upon this website for librarians about culling out older holiday books. I found it rather sad, because I love old books.

Certainly I understand where the school may be coming from. As much as I like reading these old books, there are times when the blatant racism makes me pause. I remember how it bothered me to read old books where the villians were evil Italian organ grinders (like in The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew) or "dirty, smelly" Italians were featured; it was a big jolt to think that everyone didn't like my ethnic group. And I wince when I read the old series books with "typical Negro dialect" and lazy, shiftless "darkies" (like "Eradicate" in the Tom Swift books) and the "greasers" typically portrayed in books set out West. It baffles me after reading books, especially those for children, that used strong vocabularies, daring settings, and sturdy characters suddenly descending into portrayals of stereotypical ethnic and racial characters, how intelligent people could have ever believed these things.

But there they are. It's, for better or worse, what we were, what children had ingrained into them at a young age and then passed on to their children. Thankfully no one except some equally baffling extremists who rail on about "racial purity" believes that rot any longer.

Must the ideas in the books be tossed out, too? Perhaps, as long as they are in good shape, might the books be put into a special section for historical purposes, to be read by older people who understand "this is how it was" and discard the hurtful chaff for a portrait of the times? One of the collecting shows on the Treasure HD channel featured a young African-American man who collects cookie jars, statues, tools, etc. featuring blackface characters, mammys, Pullman porters, etc. He says they make him sad to know that people believed in the stereotypes portrayed by these sculptures, but that it happened and that thankfully we were past producing such things, that they were now tools in which to show people that times have changed for the better. Cannot the old books do the same?

The Last Volume

There was no way I could miss knowing about St. Nicholas magazine, given that I had read so many old children's books, especially those from the last century. Its name tended to be sprinkled here and there in various texts and biographies. Therefore when I found a nearly pristine May 1917 issue in a local bookstore many years back, I had to grab it, if nothing else just because the issue was published three months after my mother's birth. It was interesting to see what type of stories the children liked in those faraway days of World War I and suffragettes, and the advertisements for the latest things and also for private schools and camps, not to mention the news of the day in "The Watch Tower" column.

Later I found Henry Steele Commanger's St. Nicholas Anthology (mixed up with the Christmas books, of course; even the booksellers never seemed to "get" that this was not a Christmas magazine despite the title) and reveled in the old stories.

But it's when I found an 1888-1889 bound volume in Boston's Brattle Bookstore that my mania really began. After reading the volume I wanted more of the series.

Thanks to e-Bay and bookfinder.com (sadly, I never found another affordable volume in a bookstore), I started to collect the bound volumes one by one, most of them at very reasonable prices. I paid my limit (under $30) for one volume that was hard to find, one of the two volumes that featured color Arthur Rackham prints to fairy tales. It horrified me that people were buying these volumes just for the artwork—in fact, the one I paid the limit for actually had the Rackham illos torn out, but since I wasn't buying them for the color plates I didn't really care—and bidders were cheerfully advised by several sellers that you could "cut out the artwork and toss the rest of the volume away"!

One thing I discovered about halfway through collecting, by dint of purchasing a single 1935 issue, was that I actually did not want to collect the entire series. Somewhere in the very early 1930s, St. Nicholas' publisher fell victim to the Depression and sold the magazine to another company. The stories, as I discovered, although still more adult in tone than things marketed to children now, suffered such a decrease in quality that it was depressing. The illustrations were equally simplistic and the magazine was even advertising things like girls' fashions from expensive stores like Bonwit Teller as part of the content of the magazine. So I decided that I would stop with early 1930 and be done with it although I was probably safe ordering the remainder of the year (I think the sale was in 1931).

Eventually, except for five single issues and one six month volume (May through October of 1928), I had collected all the volumes I wanted. And what a reading feast, from children dressed in "roundabouts" and "trowsers" (yes, that's how it was spelled in 1873 and that big rock was spelled "bowlder") riding horse cars and carriages—of much interest are accounts of the western movement by people who were actually along the trail, like "The Boy Emigrants," a tale of hardship and travel that bely the scrubbed Ingalls on the television series—and reading of the latest experiments with electricity, all the way through to boys in caps and sneakers and girls in Mary Janes and party dresses traveling in automobiles and reading about the latest exploits of aviators. From the bucolic owners of Tinkham's tide mill to the independent "careless Kincaid" girls, from quaint natural histories through instructions for putting together your own radio. Rose Campbell, Cedric Errol, Sara Crewe, Fisher's Elizabeth Ann/Betsy, Jack Hazard, and Queen Ixix of Ix, not to mention Barbour's Tom, Dick and Harriet and other sports figures and Seaman's clever heroines all drew their first breaths in those pages. Stories, poems, puzzles, travelogues, history, humor, biography...the best reading feast ever.

It was actually Rosemary and Delight Kincaid who finally brought me that final 1928 volume a couple of weeks ago, when I realized that I wouldn't be able to finish reading "Those Careless Kincaids" if I didn't purchase it. Luckily a volume turned up on e-Bay just after I read the penultimate installment in the previous bound volume and I was able to snag it.

And I don't even like Rosemary and Delight all that much...but I do love St. Nicholas.

Try a little bit: you may, too!

A Tribute to St. Nicholas Magazine

(By the way, I was quite "chuffed" to notice that someone had used that web page as a source for a research paper on the magazine!)

Voices from the Past

Here's a great site about series books (mostly for girls, but there are a couple of boys' series, too), which includes photos of the books, plot synopses, etc. I'd give my eyeteeth to read some of these!

Series Books for Girls

One of the more interesting pages is about the Whitman Authorized Series which featured actresses like Jane Withers, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Grable, etc. in mysteries.

I Want My "Fix" Back

Granted, I still have many books in waiting, but I'm beginning to get worried about Blackmask.com. (For those who don't know, Blackmask.com's webmaster is being sued by Conde Nast. He has been publishing pulp novels that he said were in public domain on the site, but it turns out Conde Nast owns the rights to a bunch of them, especially Street and Smith's most famous creation, the Shadow. I don't have the whole story, just what I read on various Usenet groups, but apparently he was told to take them down and refused, so now the whole site's down.) Combined with the disappearance of Mary's series book site, this is pretty disappointing.

It's a pity because I am enjoying those wonderful old Stratemeyer Syndicate and other series novels for kids. Not only are they a wonderful window on the mores of kids as they were (and probably a lot of what adults wanted them to be!), but they're now unintentionally funny. How can you not laugh at boys calling each other "old bean" or spouting funny epithets like "great horny toads!" in place of profanity? Right now I am concurrently reading H. Irving Hancock's saga of Dick Prescott (and Greg Holmes) at West Point and Dave Darrin (and Dan Dalzell) at Annapolis (the other members of the "Dick & Co. sextette" as they are referred to in the ubiquitous summation, formerly "the High School Boys," Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton, are off being civil engineers all over the US).

Having made it through plebe year with Dick, Greg, Dave, and Dan, I have to admit the stories haven't changed much: each pits the boys against some physical and often moral challenge, and there's always some idiot classmate with a chip on his shoulder against Our Heroes who keeps trying to get them expelled/in trouble. Over at West Point, after two years of ragging on Prescott and Holmes, fellow Gridley High School classmate Bert Dodge finally was exposed and sent packing. I'm sure some fellow Dodge-supporter is primed to take his place. In Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis; or Two Midshipmen As Naval Academy Youngsters, classmate Pennington is aiming his big guns at Dave for getting him in trouble, although Dave actually saved him from getting booted from the Naval Academy by covering up the fact that Pennington stupidly smoked opium as a toothache remedy. The ethnic stereotypes are, as always, mildly distasteful—the whole opening opium den scene with its "velly evil" Chinese proprietor was pretty bad—but I find it interesting reading about the behind-the-scenes life of Army and Navy cadets: the system of hazing that is forbidden, but still exists; the grind of studies, "Flirtation Walk" along the Hudson and battleship cruises with the "middies."

Presumably everyone makes it through unscathed because Dave Darrin goes off to Vera Cruz in one book and then is mentioned as serving on a destroyer escort (along with Dan) when Dick Prescott goes off to fight the Boches in World War I. But getting there has been fun...

Callahans Revisited

Warning, spoilers ahoy!

This one, Keeping Cool, is a little more like it.

When we left our story, I was utterly disgusted after the second book in the series, Home Sweet Home wandered into girly-girly territory with a plot that could have been solved had Neeve (the outgoing, wildly creative one of the four cousins) simply talked to her "supergranny," Gee; quarrels over painting the girls' room, which eventually turns out a typical pink; and a haggle over, of all things, a makeup bag. ::snore:: This was a complete turnaround from the opening Callahan Cousins book, Summer Begins, in which the four 12-year old Callahan girl cousins—Neeve, Hilary (the athletic one), Phoebe (the bookworm), and Kate (the quiet, craft-oriented one) come to stay with Gee in her big house on Gull Island, learn to sail, and compete in a contest once practiced by their fathers and the children of a neighboring (and slightly snobby) family, the Bickets. Sloan Bicket, who is their age, becomes the girls' bete noire.

The third book is about Kate. Although Phoebe is the bookworm, she's also coolly blonde, a little patronizing, and dresses like a hippie. Of the four girls, Kate is the one I feel the most kinship to. She likes crafts and knitting, is afraid to talk to strangers and when she does often stammers (unless she shares a common interest with the person and then she is chatty and curious), carries things with her to feel secure, fusses over her cousins, cries easily, and keeps a to-do list. In this story, Kate gets tired of being teased about the things she does and is determined to change her image so she will be "cool." Of course she's only twelve and ends up going overboard on many things, annoying the other three several times, and, of course, in the end discovers that while there are some things she could improve in herself (eating better, not being afraid of strangers), she is at her best when she is herself. [Insert violin music here.]

In the course of the story, the girls also collect donations for a fundraiser at the Island's clinic and get into a rivalry with Sloan Bicket about who will collect the most donations. During Kate's self-improvement craze, she manages to get close to Sloan and discovers that like most snobs, Sloan is actually deeply insecure and also wishes her mother, a doctor at the very clinic they're seeking donations for, would pay more attention to her. She is also jealous of the Callahan girls' closeness to each other and actually is rather lonely. Yet Kate discovers that Mrs. Bicket is not the dragon she seems to be from Sloan's comments, but a very personable woman who takes her job very seriously.

Kate's eventual revelation works without being too sappy.

As always, my reservations on these books are the same ongoing complaints: Gee seems perfect (everyone loves her, she has a gorgeous house, she has the world's best housekeeper and cook, her generosity is never-ending). The girls aren't wastrels, but they want for nothing. They all wear designer clothing. The town is idyllic, a picture-perfect resort with everything freshly painted and wonderfully scented (even low tide doesn't smell bad on Gull Island). As much as I dislike "problem" books for children that contain nothing but endless despair, the Callahans' world is almost too much in the opposite direction. It's like living in a candy-perfect world and occasionally the sugar just gets to be a bit much.

The final book comes out in October, and is about Phoebe, the only one left. The girls are apparently staying overnight in a nearby whaling museum, which may prove interesting. Maybe the realities of whaling can add a little grit to the fairy tale.

On Paper

Here's a multi-part piece of fanfiction that's quite good: Hogan's Heroes: "Dear Diary"

Classics Continued

I have finished Volumes 1 and 2, Fairy Tales and Fables, and Folk Tales and Stories of Wonder. The familiar old fairy tales (well, most were familiar anyway) were easy reading, but I discovered small details in the tales that I'd forgotten over the years (there's a lot more to the Three Little Pigs, for instance, than shows up in the tales abbreviated for small children or in the Disney cartoon version). The second volume was more difficult to slog through—it includes Charles Dickens' "The Magic Fishbone," which is pretty dull (the king's interminable whining is annoying as well) and so many versions of the younger son or the dullard son who goes off to make his fortune and wins the the princess that they blur together. It did have the long versions of Aladdin and Ali Baba; those who have only seen the Disney version of Aladdin would probably be perturbed by the original. Aladdin is thoroughly unlikeable; he doesn't do a lick of work in the entire story and still gets rewarded for his "cleverness." Cleverness my foot; the genie does all the dirty work. The volume also includes some Asian folk tales that I had not heard before, including a magical one about a starved artist's dogsbody who longs to paint and receives instructions from a master's painting.

I have now started the third volume, with the familiar Greek and Roman myths: Phaeton, Prometheus, etc. I haven't read these since late elementary school/junior high and am interested in how the stories were adapted for the Collier printing.

Classics Revisited

Wow! I received my Junior Classics set yesterday—five days from purchase to shipment arrival! I hadn't bought anything on eBay since fall of 2004, partially because of Mom being sick and all the other things that happened in 2005, and partially because, on my penultimate purchase of 2004, I never received my merchandise and the seller never responded to my e-mails. (After I posted feedback stating this, at least four other people contacted me saying this same seller had never sent their merchandise either and had not responded to their e-mails. I discovered just this morning that the seller actually left me a negative feedback, saying I was a "pain in the ass" for inquiring about my order!) Anyway, it had put me off ordering from eBay for a while.

The books are not mint, but in excellent shape. When I used to go upstairs at Linda's house and sneak a look at the copies her brother had (I still think of these volumes as "Armand's books" <g>), I mostly concentrated on Volume 9, "The Animal Book," but am planning to read them all, even the Greek and Roman myths, which I consider rather boring, and have started from the beginning with the fairy and folk tales. I'm discovering stories I recall reading so long ago, not just the standards like "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," but the entire story of "The Three Little Pigs," "The Goose Girl," etc. (I need to let James read "The Bremen Town Musicians" so he'll know what the statue of the animals at Lenox Mall is all about.)

Refreshingly, none of these books are in BIG PRINT or contain paragraphs interrupted with BIG COLORED WORDS in simplified vocabulary (dialect from other countries is even used); even the youngest child is considered to have some intelligence (and a friendly person to read it to them if necessary).

I did page through all of them, including "The Animal Book" and discovered that it contains John Muir's "Stickeen," which I originally read in an elementary school reader, and Eric Knight's original short story of "Lassie Come-Home," which contains several differences from the book, including Joe being named after his father and Priscilla being named Philippa and being older in the story (she can drive a car). Lassie's travels actually take up only two or three pages in the short story; it is mostly about the people around her and how they react to her faithfulness rather than actually about Lassie.

It is interesting to realize that much of what we think of as "children's stories" were not originally written just for children. Rather today their subject matter pegs them as "children's stories." "Lassie Come-Home" was not written for children and did not appear originally in a children's magazine, but rather in The Saturday Evening Post. "My Friend Flicka" is another—it was originally published in Story magazine, not a children's publication. People who see the novel version of Flicka as a sweet story about a boy and his horse have never read the book: Rob and Nell's marriage is chronicled in an adult manner, and topics of adult responsibility, the harsh reality of Western range life, and keeping body and soul together financially are all explored...not your usual topics for children. Years ago, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and others were all written as adult books.

Got A Set!

Won a set of Collier's Junior Classics on eBay last night. Supposedly mint, from 1956. Too cool.

Speaking of Series Books...

...here's a new fan-written Dana Girls mystery, "The Clue in the Rainbow." It's okay; the "Ice Castle" story is head and shoulders superior.

Sadly, No Mystery at All

I've always been an American history junkie, as well as collecting children's books, especially those I read in my childhood. When the Pleasant Company started publishing their American Girls books, I was frankly in "hog heaven" (except for the price—talk about overpriced books!—and then Sam's Club started stocking the collections, which removed the fiscal obstacle). The original stories were about Felicity, a colonial girl; Kirsten, an immigrant pioneer girl; Samantha, a wealthy Victorian girl; and Molly, a girl growing up during World War II. Naturally my first purchase would be Molly's stories, since my parents were teenagers and then adults during the Depression and World War II and I felt close to their history.

Gradually, and through a buyout of Pleasant Company by Mattel, the series grew to include Kaya, a pre-Revolutionary War Nez Perce girl; Josefina, an early 19th-century New Mexican girl; Addy, a girl who escaped slavery near the end of the Civil War; and Kit, a girl growing up during the Depression. Accompanying the books were dolls and accessories for each girl and then other special volumes (short story books, cookbooks, "how to draw" books, etc., the finest of these being the volumes "Welcome to _________'s World," which used photographs and drawings of the time to illustrate the era of each girl in the series—just the sort of thing I doted on).

The best development to emerge from the American Girls franchise, however, was a stand-alone series of books called the "History Mysteries." These did not involve the series characters and moved in a random manner from a mystery taking place in one era of American history to another. One book might take place in War of 1812 Louisiana, while another would involve a mystery while collecting scrap metal in World War II. The "mystery girls" weren't cookie-cutter versions of any of the series book leads and some of the various mysteries involved history eras not much talked about today, such as the participants of the Alaskan gold rush, the world of the War of 1812, the fascinating lives of the lighthouse keeper's children, and even the plight of the Loyalists during the American Revolution. One of the "History Mysteries," The Night Flyers, about homing pigeons and World War I, won a Juvenile Edgar Award (mystery writer's trophy) and another was nominated.

But since girls and mysteries have gone together since the days of August Huiell Seaman and the Stratmeyer Syndicate books, including the immortal Nancy Drew, the Mattel folks have recently released a new line of mysteries starring the American Girls series book protagonists themselves. The books are fairly interesting in working the mystery format into the series milieu (some of the series stories already having involved minor mysteries), but sadly it seems to have spelled the end of the "History Mystery" stand-alone stories (not one has been released since volume 22, which was at least two years ago). It means the mystery stories are now stuck completely in the era of the series stories and we won't see any other eras represented—so many stories and periods were still waiting to be told: how about a mystery set during the cattle drive days? during the Spanish-American war? in a CCC camp? in a post-war (WWII) housing shortage area? in Florida during its "wild west" pioneer days? at a Northwest logging camp? an early California fruit farm or at one of the Spanish missions or during the "Okies" flight west during the Dust Bowl? or a Northwest Native American mystery (or perhaps a Pilgrim era version)? or one set in the early New England textile mills? Hundreds of wonderful ideas here yet to go!

Maybe Mattel is just taking a breather...but I fear it's the last gasp instead. Apparently, like the television networks, they would rather rake in the bucks while sticking to a formula than continue to branch out into other interesting directions to challenge the minds of their readers. And that, especially for history and mystery lovers of all ages, is a great shame.

"Why Do You Want a Book? You Already Have One..."

... and other Bookworm Droppings.

Absurd remarks made by patrons of used bookstores. Very funny (including the typos).

Reading Online

One of my two favorite short stories, online: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Here's the other: "The Most Dangerous Game"

Tom, Dick and...Sam?

Here are some of the e-books I've whiled my way through during spare moments:

The Rover Boys at School

You've probably heard joking references to the Rover Boys all your life—but do you know who they actually were? Penned by "Arthur Whitfield," they were actually the very first series book creation of Edward Stratemeyer, whose syndicate series books for children and young adults later included The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and a whole stable of others. The Rover Boys are the sons of a famous archaeologist who is lost as the series opens, and the boys drive their uncle so wild they are sent to a military boarding school, very fashionable in that day, and to which they are wild to go. Dick is the levelheaded oldest, Tom is the prank-playing middle boy, and Sam is the youngest. Today they sound ridiculously old-fashioned—in several instances the boys even call someone "old top" and use British expressions—and Tom's pranks would probably get him sent to a psychiatrist, and of course ethnic humor and racial stereotypes abound. Still they are an amusing curiosity.

Miss Elliot's Girls

Cross Louisa May Alcott (children learning to be more patient and kind) with a naturalist story and a bit of humane teaching alá Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe and you have this curious story about a "lame young woman" who teaches the children in her care (mostly girls in a sewing circle, but also two boys) about the joys of insect life and being kind to animals. Pretty dull but a good example of a 19th century instructive tale.

The High School Boys' Canoe Club

H. Irving Hancock's sextet of clean-living American boys (their later adventures chatted about here) purchase a damaged "war canoe" from a show, have it repaired, and then participate in boat races at a nearby lake. Since it would be totally boring if they did nothing but, a vindictive bully from school keeps trying to sabotage their summer. Today the boys' parents would have the bully jailed or sent for counseling; back then the boys just solved their own problems until the bully's father figures out what his kid's been up to and ships him home in disgrace.

The Puritan Twins

I've read negative reviews of this Lucy Fitch Perkins "Twin book" and I must agree with them; pretty dull. The story is mostly about the male half of the twin contingent, Daniel, who gets to do all the interesting stuff, while his sister Nancy has to stay behind and be ladylike, or is always being berated for daydreaming and thinking for herself. So realistic of Puritan attitudes to women that it's boring.

The Motor Boys on the Pacific

Another in one of those series stories in which the boys are lucky enough to have some wonderful machine for themselves. In this case, the boys' wonderful speedboat is actually wrecked before the story even opens and several dull opening chapters are reserved for the filing of the insurance claim on it. Then the boys visit California and (how coincidental!) a boy leaving lets them use his big powerful motorboat for the summer! The rest of the story involves looking for a ship full of valuables. The lead characters are so forgettable that...darn...I've forgotten them.

Keineth

Nine-year-old Keineth lives a sheltered life on New York's Washington Square with her widower Dad and a Belgian nursemaid. But as World War I encroaches on the United States, "Tante" returns to Belgium to help her people and Dad, who's a diplomat, sends Keineth to live with friends while he goes to Europe to help make peace. Shy Keineth blossoms under the friendship of the family's children and learns many things before her Dad is safely returned. That's it. Think Understood Betsy with a parent and you have the story, if not the enthralling text.

The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone

Some of the series' books involved ordinary kids; then there were the pseudo-science fictiony Tom Swiftian series that involved fantastic inventions and the boys who worked with them. In this case, one of the boys has a famous inventor dad who comes up with things like a fabulous electric car that goes miles without a charge, a fabulous airship which his sons and his friends get to travel on, and his newest invention, a radio telephone (which is more like a cell phone many years before its invention). Naturally the boys run afoul of bad guys. Despite the cool inventions, yet another set of youngsters so forgettable that I don't even remember their names.

Penrod and Sam

Booth Tarkington's sequel to Penrod is slightly less funny, but still amusing. Way back then the hi-jinks of Penrod and his buddy Sam were just taken as boys' pranks; they'd probably be arrested now.

The Secret of the Tower

A mystery by Anthony Hope that does not involve Ruritanian swordplay, involving a house with a mysterious tower room and the death of an old man. Main item of interest here, in this early 20th century novel, is that one of the protagonists is a woman doctor who neither faints, simpers, or acts like a fragile flower of Edwardian womanhood.

The Red House Mystery

The visit of a wealthy man's Australian brother provides the beginning of the mystery, which deepens after the wealthy man is murdered. Who did it? How did the murderer escape without being seen? Our sleuth is one Antony Gillingham, a friend of one of the people staying at the home of the murdered man, an amateur who slowly discovers all the clues. Most notable thing about this story: it was written by A.A. Milne of Winnie-the-Pooh fame.

A Name from the Past

I remember reading selections from Mary Antin's The Promised Land in school, but had not thought about her in years. Antin was a Russian Jew whose father moved the family to Boston in the late 1800s. Land is an absorbing autobiography about being an immigrant to the United States.

Mass Moments has a little newsclip, Mass Moments: Crowd Gathers to Hear Writer Mary Antin, that you can listen to and also more information.

You can read Promised Land online here, or read it online or download it in various e-book formats at Blackmask.com.

E-Books Redux

Ah, I've been absent here for a bit while I celebrated over in Holiday Harbour. Tend to read Christmas books over Christmas, but have been digging into the e-books lately.

Last read were two of Edith Van Dyne's "Aunt Jane's Nieces" books. In Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation, the girls and Uncle John spend their vacation in the quaint country town of Millville and start and run a newspaper. The colorful country characters from Aunt Jane's Nieces in Millville reappear while we also meet the mysterious "Thursday Smith," a clever but dissipated artist named Hetty Hewitt, and the usual (for the early 1900s) foreign rabble-rousing and drunken workmen, this time workers at a nearby mill. Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad takes place chiefly in Italy, where Uncle John runs afoul of a family of brigands who kidnap rich Americans and then demand they purchase some "antique" in order to be freed. Additionally, Louise is pursued by young Count Ferranti, who has a mysterious pass. The Italians in the story are all pretty stereotypical, but are also presented as having an odd sense of honor, which I find amusing rather than offensive. Young Tato, especially, is full of surprises.

The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas is the first in a series about a group of four teenage girls and their older chaperone, a teacher, who travel about having adventures. Miss Elting is their guiding force, and the girls are Jane McCarthy ("Crazy Jane," the one with the car, whose widowed father has allowed her to run wild), Harriet Burrell (the pretty, talented, intelligent one), Grace Thompson (the childish and rich one who, hilariously—well, according to the book she's hilarious, anyway—lisps), Hazel Holland (pretty much of a cipher) and Margery Brown (nicknamed "Buster" because she is fat). In the initial offering, the girls attend camp with the "Camp Girls" who more than vaguely sound like Campfire Girls and must cope with two unfriendly campers who take a dislike to them. Of the girls, Grace "Tommy" Thompson is the most odd; I'm with Mary Crosson's "Plain Jane" Series List, on which Mary comments "When the reader first meets this series, one burning question leaps to mind: what the heck is wrong with Grace 'Tommy' Thompson? She is short schoolbus material if I've ever seen it—she makes Bobby Belden or Betty from Roy's 'Girl Scouts' series look normal. At 14, she lisps, babbles, frequently needs to 'cuddle,' hallucinates pink elephants when she eats too late at night, wants to sleep in her tentmate's cot because she's 'thcaired of bearth,' etc." The lisping thing gets old really fast, but the girls can be vaguely interesting.

The Meadow Brook girls also go hiking, strike out on a houseboat, visit the White Mountains and the ocean, and play tennis.

Annie Fellows Johnston is most famous for her "Little Colonel" series of books, but she wrote other novels about friends of Lloyd Sherman, "the little Colonel" (if you've only seen the Shirley Temple movie, you don't know the entire story of Lloyd Sherman, who grows up, finds love, and gets married in a series of novels). The Gate of the Giant Scissors is one such book, about Joyce Ware, an American girl who has been sent to France with an aunt to continue her education. She is homesick for her active family and country home and befriends the little nephew of the owner of the estate on which "the gate of the giant scissors" opens; the little boy is perpetually abused and starved by the cruel caretaker of the estate. The "giant scissors" really existed. My favorite Annie Johnston is still Georgina of the Rainbows, but I haven't read that many of them yet.

Books from the Past

I'm toying with buying (which means I'm nosing around E-bay) a set of the Collier's Junior Classics again.

According to this site, Collier Targets Children with Junior Classics, Collier's intended this set of ten books as a child's counterpart to the Harvard Classics (a.k.a. "The Five Foot Shelf," which figured in an early episode of The Waltons). The set I would be looking for would be 1960 or earlier, as after that, Collier redid the volumes and arranged the stories under different categories. I have a single volume from that later set, the holiday volume, which I do enjoy, but the older set has a nostalgic interest as well.

In my early elementary school years, my best friend was a girl who was also named Linda. She lived one street down and several houses further on. Her older sister was already married, but her older brother's room was upstairs across the hall from her. One of the fascinating things in his room was a set of these Collier's Junior Classics.

As I got into fifth grade, Linda's and my interests started to diverge, plus she made two friends I really didn't like all that much. When these two girls were around all they wanted to talk about were clothes and boys. I thought boys, at least in the fashion they were talking about them, were boring, and clothes even more so. I confess that more often than I should I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom, sneak upstairs, and filch a copy of one of her brother's Junior Classics volumes to read for a while to get away from the ordeal of frills and fashion.

It was in "The Animal Book" that I first read one of my favorite dog stories, Albert Payson Terhune's "One Minute Longer."

Changing Tastes

If there's one thing interesting about reading old books, it's about how times and customs and even mealtimes have changed. Some of the changes are refreshing—it's nice to know we don't treat minority groups, immigrants, foreigners, or poor people the way we did back then. Other things just sound funny: girls wear kimonos, not bathrobes, folks go to "sleeping porches" in the summer to get away from the heat of the house, kids climb into "the tonneau" of the car, etc.

In Kit of Greenacre Farm (published 1919), our heroine Kit Bobbins, nearly sixteen, goes to live with her elderly reclusive uncle and his sister while the family house is being reconstructed (the oil stove caught fire and burned them out). Her scholarly uncle was expecting a boy (shades of Anne Shirley; Kit even has red hair), but Kit settles down much more quickly than Anne and is sent to a preparatory school for college-bound young ladies. She immediately befriends a French-Canadian "half breed" family, the Beaubiens, and sticks up for their daughter Marcelle when the other girls turn up their noses at this poor young woman coming into their school.

Kit and her friend Anne give a Founder's Day tea to see if they can get Marcelle properly introduced into the school's girlish society, and they will be serving six kinds of sandwiches. The menu is straight out of a 1920s cookbook: cheese with pimento sandwiches, cheese with chopped walnuts, lettuce and egg, chopped raisins with beaten white of egg, raspberry jam and cream cheese, and sardine on lettuce with maynonnaise and deviled ham. Macaroons, those cookies so loved in that era, are the sweet.

Can you imagine teenage girls eating anything like that today? The sardines would be enough to send most people running off posthaste, but they were extremely popular back then. Even worse, "chopped raisins with beaten white of egg"—basically a meringue sandwich! We would never serve anything like that today for fear of food poisoning.

(Does it strike anyone as odd that 85 years ago fresh eggs were okay to eat while today with all our health precautions we are afraid to each such things?)

The Magazine Files, Part 2: Regular Reading

I mentioned in “Yet Another Journal” that I was cleaning out my three-year collection of Period Living and Traditional Homes. They’re from England, beautifully printed, and although fun to read about the old house restorations, were becoming too expensive for my budget and not really useful. I’ll keep the Christmas and New Year’s issues, though; they’re full of bright baubles and old-fashioned trees—heavens, some folks still use candles, which I imagine are gorgeous, but I’m too afraid of fire to ever do so.

This is actually when I do most of my magazine buying: in the fall and winter. I end up bringing home Country and Vermont Life and Yankee and even Midwestern Living and, this year, even Arizona Highways for the vivid and colorful fall photo shots. They are so beautiful I wish I could drink in the vibrant colors: the juicy reds and oranges and golds that look as if they taste of cranberry and orange and cherry. They remind me there is a civilized season behind the depression and energy-sucking heat of summer.

In the fall and winter I also purchase decorating magazines like Country Almanac and Country Decorating Ideas and Country Sampler because they have become warm and cozy instead of stuffed with a plethora of pinks and other pastels of the summer and spring issues. Each summer issue also manages to include an almost totally white room with filmy mosquito-net-like curtains dragging on the floor. If the curtains dragging on the floor isn’t bad enough, the monochrome white makes me want to run screaming from the house (who came up with this absurd notion of curtains getting all dusty on the floor anyway?). This is even worse than the spring explosion of cutesy flower patterns and ruffles everywhere—eeek! The only setup in the summer magazines that ever attracts me is the beach cottage look, with the beadboard and pale blues and nautical decorations.

I also pick up the October, November, and December Country Living each year half price with a Michael's coupon. They have some good articles but aren't worth full price. I actually prefer the British edition which I can't get half price but is often worth it at Christmastime: the British still remember the 12 Days of Christmas and while the American edition covers furnishings, plants, pets, and decorating in a country style, the British edition actually talks about really living in the country as well, with a regular article by a man who gave up a posh job to run a farm and other articles about real country living.

Once a year at Christmas I purchase Victorian Decorating because they’ll usually do an interesting article on scraps decorating and vintage ornaments, and look at one or two old homes decorated for the holidays. (Some of them are over-decorated, even for Victorian homes!) One year they showed the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which we have visited and I can imagine how it would be to live in the beautiful place with sumptious holiday decorations. (This is supposing, of course, I had someone else to clean the sprawling footage! <g>) Any other time of the year the lace frou-frous in VD drive me wild. I have the same problem with magazines like Romantic Country or Cottage Style; just too many bows and ruffles and furbelows for my taste. I don’t like the cute or feminine country styles, but nice plain, sturdy ginghams and wood in Shaker or Mission fashion. (I’m also apparently the only woman in the country who despises teddy bears, whether dressed in cute little dresses or overalls or baby clothing, or even au natural. I had a teddy I loved as a child but the moment I outgrew him I never went back; even then I always preferred my stuffed dogs.)

At Christmastime I also like to pick up Early American Life, which just had its life restored by a new publisher. Apparently the old management was running this fine magazine into the ground. In fact, the last few issues have been so interesting I’ve occasionally bought one when it isn’t winter time. They’ve had some absorbing historical articles, including a couple about textiles that I didn’t think I’d be interested in.

Each month I purchase Quick & Easy, a British cross-stitch magazine, from the one Barnes & Noble in the area that stocks it. I started buying it almost from when it came out because it has small, simple but attractive designs. Well, it still has some small designs, but also too many these days which are neither quick nor easy and I wonder why they’re in the magazine when the slack can be taken up by a number of sister magazines: Cross Stitcher, Cross Stitch Crazy, The World of Cross-Stitching. I miss the little Jo Verso-like sampler-type patterns that used to prevail (Jo unfortunately died in a car accident some time ago). Another monthly treat used to be the British nostalgia magazine, Best of British, but no one here in Atlanta seems to stock it any longer. I got my last issue while in Rhode Island; dozens of articles in small print with lots of color pictures of old market towns, bygone British brands and vehicles, and stories from readers about growing up or joining the armed services or surviving the Blitz and rationing. I finally broke down and got Reiman’s Reminisce by subscription bimonthly (and of course now I find it here and there where I didn’t before) because I enjoy this nostalgia magazine so much: personal stories here, as well, plus old slide photos, old cars, and the monthly column “I Know…I Was There.”

James gets the bimonthly Cooks Illustrated and the new Cooks Country magazines, but although I like reading the recipes and tips my favorite part of the former is always editor Christopher Kimball’s column about his hometown. I wish they’d collect them in a book!

The magazine I bought the longest (and subscribed to) I no longer receive or read, which is Starlog. I had the complete set for the longest time, with the original issue one, which was printed long before it was a regular magazine, devoted to Star Trek (this was even before the films came out). (It was so long ago, in fact, that the lead character in George Lucas’ new space epic, Star Wars, was still named “Luke Starkiller.”) I loved reading each issue. Then I loaned out an issue and didn’t get it back so didn’t have a complete set any longer, then I noticed I wasn’t reading them right away and in fact finding them unread months later. Regretfully but not regretfully, if that makes any sense, that’s when I let the subscription lapse. I was tempted by one the other day with Harry Potter stories in it, but decided against it. No sense letting that get going again.

The Magazine Files, Part 1: Farewell to the Real TV Guide

I was in love with TV Guide from the start, but the first magazine “I remember liking that liked me back,” as Rhoda Morgenstern would say, was Jack and Jill. I saw very few of these as a kid because we didn’t have a lot of money, but I had the odd issue of J&J and also a couple of Humpty Dumpty that I treasured and read until tattered. There were certain J&J issues that had Lassie articles in them, but I never was lucky enough to get one.

TV Guide came into our house once or twice yearly. When we cleaned out the basement for my father to fix it up, we found a 1961 Fall Preview in a pile of newspapers that I had long-ago scribbled on in black crayon. It’s now in my small collection: small because Mom knew I’d keep every one of the darn things and forbade me to do so. Even when I subscribed I had to promise her not to keep all the issues.

Of course TVG was “a better place” back then. There were not only listings and a little gossip and some picture-stories, but solid reviews and thoughtful profiles of actors and hit series and even serious pieces about the effects of television on children, on politics, on newsmaking, etc. I still have their all-news issue that followed television’s coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination. But then Walter Annenberg aimed for a serious product in general. TVG only got really frivolous at Christmas-time, when folk song artist Allen Sherman wrote an annual tongue-in-cheek poem placing all the network series in rhyme (42 years later I can still recall “Let the kindly candle kindle with warm and mellow thoughts of Grindl...").

Well, all hail Annenberg, for TVG has finally gone down with a whimper: the magazine became bad enough when media bimbo-guy Rupert Murdoch took it over and filled it full of upcoming movie trash, big print, and fashion elements, but now it’s magazine-sized and the listings are gone. Hellooooo! What good is a guide to TV without listings?

A moment of silence for what was once a great magazine...

It's Raining Estrogen

A few posts ago, I gave a glowing review to the first in a new set of girls' books called The Callahan Cousins. In The Summer Begins, 12-year-old cousins Hillary (the athletic one), Neeve (the well-traveled one), Kate (the friendly, rather ordinary one), and Phoebe (the bookish one) all gather at Grandmother Gee's sumptious summer home on Gull Island off the coast of New England, a privilege granted to all 12-year-old female cousins. I fell in love with the old-fashioned cover and found a good combo of old-fashioned girls' adventure and modern sentiments in the volume and was awaiting the next installment.

Boy, was I disappointed.

Home Sweet Home turns into an unbearable estrogen-fest which gets more annoying as the book proceeds.

Girls my age used to complain about the old books where the boys got to have all the adventures and the girls had to stay behind or do domestic things. Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and their ilk were some exceptions, but the majority of adventure stories were testosterone-fests. The men and boys in The Summer Begins were clearly supporting characters, but had various roles that kept them well-rounded. In Home Sweet Home the boys are mostly relegated to being boyfriends and are barely heard from. So much for the author trying to be well-balanced.

The story's main mystery is Neeve discovering a wedding photo of her dad with a woman who is not her mother. This unnerving plot device is like those aggravating romance books (and movies) where the heroine discovers something bad about the hero and, instead of confronting him about it, just stews and ignores him until the situation is cleared up. All Neeve had to do was ask Grandma Gee about the photo. Nope, Miss Independence sits and worries about it throughout the book, snapping at her cousins before finally confiding in them (and none of them advise asking their grandmother, either) and even falling under the influence of snobby Sloan Bicket, the bete noire of this tale, in an effort to get information. In one absolutely astonishing chapter, Neeve finds out that the relationship between her dad and this woman "ended badly" and jumps to the conclusion that her dad killed the woman. Huh? Her dad whom she loves despite the fact that he makes the family move so often? I watched a lot of crime TV as a kid and would have never, ever suspected my dad of murder in such a situation. What goes on in this kid's head?

The rest of the book is a long tedious argument between Neve and Kate about their summer project: redecorating the Dorm where the girls will have the privelege of living for the rest of the time. Even with Neeve's supposed "creative input," the room turns into a confection of mostly pink. Note to author: not all of us girls like pink, particularly when we had another favorite color and got stuck in pink endlessly as small children. The room turns out as predictably as some fluffy little girl's decorating book spec. Neeve also has a long running conflict with Sloan about some photos which she has traded...her makeup bag for. She spends at least a third of the book trying to get her makeup back. Oh, please.

Gee continues to act more like a friendly older sister than a real grandmother (and I don't mean that she ought to sit around and knit and bake cookies—heck, she has a housekeeper for that). At one point in the book she teaches all four girls to drive. Yes, they are twelve years old. She wants them to know in case of emergencies. Wow. Talk about your dream grandmother. She already has a bottomless budget, a big house, a pool, a boathouse, the Dorm, and even a housekeeper so these kids don't have to do a lick of work if they don't want to, and she teaches them to drive, too. I wasn't aware this was going to be a fantasy series.

The next book isn't out until May 2006. In it Kate is on a campaign to become "cool." Groan. Maybe by next year I'll have the bad taste out of my mouth, but right now, I'll pass.