Books Completed Since November 1

 The Happy Hollisters and the Secret of the Lucky Coins, Jerry West

Sometimes one little action starts a whole lot of plot: in this 22nd entry in the Happy Hollisters series, someone gives four-year old Sue a "lucky penny." That's all it takes for the other children, Pete (age 12), Pam, 10, seven-year-old Ricky, and Holly, age 6, to get absorbed in coin collecting. (As usual, the kids' bete noire Joey Brill tries to make off with their coins.) They take their collection with them to Crestview, where they used to live, to visit their cousins Teddy and Jean, and enroute take cover from a small tornado. Afterwards, Pete discovers a rare Oak Tree shilling in a fallen tree. It has mysterious marks on it that seem to point to a hidden treasure. Once they arrive in Crestview, a local museum has a coin collection stolen! Coincidence? Well, of course, this is a happy Hollisters mystery, after all.

As was begun in the previous Little Mermaid adventure, Ricky is still doing dumb things and getting in trouble for it. This time Holly gets herself into a sticky situation as well as the kids play around a cannon monument. However, some novel twists in this story: turns out Joey Brill is visiting his cousin in Crestview, so we're stuck with him there, but he bullies smaller Oz, too. So Oz prefers the Hollisters a whole lot more than he likes Joey's company! Oz is also talented at drawing and provides the police a valuable clue. In another break from the norm, the children catch the museum thief early in the story, but believe his story about why he committed the robbery and help find justice for him. Otherwise it's business as usual as the quintet and Teddy and Jean hunt clues and piece together what's going on.

 

  False Value, Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant was suspended from the police force after the Faceless Man died. Since then he's been anticipating fatherhood and wondering what to do next. His decision: take a technical job with a rising new company, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation—where he discovers he's actually been hired to spy on the employees and figure out why there are gaps in the security logs.

 

Actually, he's not all that he seems. Alternating chapters take us back in time to where Peter discovers that somewhere there is a primitive Babbage machine called a Mary Engine that goes back to the days of Ada Lovelace, a gadget that has terrifying magical abilities. Once Peter discovers there's a secure area at the SCC, he's pretty sure it's hiding this amazing machine. But what does SCC mogul Terrence Skinner planning to do with it? With the help of two of the employees, Peter's about to find out—if he can also cope with the Librarians from the U.S. who are after the same device.

The Mary Engine is an intriguing idea, but overall this entry in the series lacks that special something that makes the Grant books a delight to read. For one, an occasional reference to another fandom is fun. It's always enjoyable to find a Doctor Who or other fannish reference in these books. But Skinner's whole company is a riff on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the references to Vogons, Magratheans, and mice just go on and on. (Although I have to admit having the baddie named "Skinner" along with the multiple reference to mice is a neat science in-joke.) Plus a lot of the story takes place at Peter's place of work and it's dull hanging around an office all day; I can almost see the fluorescent lights. (::flinch!::)

 

 The October Man, Ben Aaronovitch

Another book I read at least twice as an e-book, but it didn't seem "real" till I had a hard copy.  This takes place in Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" universe, which I've been a fan of since the first book Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in the U.S.). However, rather than concentrating on Aaronovitch's usual protagonist, Peter Grant, we are shown another aspect of the magical universe portrayed in the "Rivers" books.

In Germany, Tobias Winter is also a young magic practitioner and part of the German police force. He is called to the Moselle Valley area when a corpse is found completely covered by a fungus that is also used in winemaking, and detects traces of magic ("vestigia") at the murder site and from the corpse. Now all he has to do is find out why the man died in such an unusual way.

Tobi is a pleasant character, although I didn't think his background and experience were as interesting as Peter Grant's. However, I enjoyed learning more about the German magic discipline, and Tobi's investigation with his partner (Vanessa Sommer, assigned to him by someone with a puckish sense of humor) not only turns up river spirits of a type Peter Grant would be familiar with, but another esoteric member of the community as well as a vengeful spirit. The wine-making lore was interesting as well, although I was a bit grossed out to learn that there are wines made using mold! The usual touches of Aaronovitch humor enliven the story, and I loved Vanessa's encounter with a young child who's more than she appears.

 

  God, War, and Providence, James A. Warren

Roger Williams had radical ideas. The Puritans were aghast when Williams dared to say that people who were not from the Puritan sect could still be as good and as Christian as the Puritans were. He had the temerity to think that non-traditional sects, like the Society of Friends (Quakers), and that even Jews had the right to worship as they wished. And, most shockingly, he believe the "savages" like the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Pequot tribes were not tools of the devil as the Puritans believed, but could be as good as Christian men without being Christian, and that their laws were just.

I'm sure Williams was not perfect, a man of his times, and had his own prejudices, but the fact that he believed all the things above, and also that a woman like Anne Hutchinson was just as capable as a man in proclaiming the gospel put him in a higher class than most of the Europeans that arrived on New England shores in the 17th century. He advocated for the Narragansetts almost until the day he died, fighting a losing battle against the Puritans and their complicated machinations with the Pequots, pretending to be their allies until the Pequots themselves were in the way of the English settlers. This is the story of Williams' futile fight for the rights of the Narragansetts and the greed for land that eventually toppled all the New England tribes. Not a hard read and contains supplemental maps and illustrations (including a map of the original Providence settlement).

 

  Re-read: The Book of Stillmeadow, Gladys Taber

Back in the 1930s, Gladys Taber, her best friend Eleanor Mayer, and their husbands bought a Connecticut farmhouse, like many others of their era, to spend weekends and summers at rather than live year round in the concrete canyons of New York City. Taber began writing columns about her life in the country and the result were her non-fiction "Stillmeadow" books. I "met" Gladys in seventh grade via her book Especially Dogs in my junior-high library.

 

The Stillmeadow books were "hygge" long before Americans started mispronouncing the Danish word. In fact, rumor still has it Gladys was the inspiration for Elizabeth Lane in Christmas in Connecticut, except Elizabeth was a fraud and Gladys was the real thing. Together she and Eleanor ("Jill" in the books) raised their kids (Taber was later divorced, Eleanor's husband died), bred cocker spaniels, were owned by adored cats, kept a garden, canned and preserved foods, kept the farmhouse (built in the late 1600s) from falling apart, and submerged themselves in the slow turn of the seasons. This book opens in November and closes in October of the next year, chronicling the growth of the children, the antics of the dogs, and the sheer beauty of the Connecticut countryside. They are just so calming and comforting—sometimes funny, occasionally sad, filled with the scents and sounds of grass, birds, excited dogs, crickets, the steady thunk of Jill's hoe and rake, the Stillmeadow kitchen and the huge colonial fireplace.

 

Any day with Gladys is one filled with happiness and beauty.

 

  Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Kent Nerburn

After writing two books on Ojibwe culture in collaboration with Native students, Kent Nerburn is contacted by an elderly Lakota man named Dan who had read the books and liked that Nerburn neither romanticized the Native group he wrote about nor was a "wannabe Indian," a non-Native person who tries to co-op Native culture as something to improve non-Native lives. Dan has spent the past few years writing down his perceptions of Native and white people, and asks Nerburn to make them into a coherent narrative. Nerburn's first attempt sounds stilted to him, but Dan seems to like it—at first, then thinks he's trying too hard to make it sound "white." Finally he rips him the notes he's written and instead takes Nerburn, along with his good friend Grover and a dog named Fatback, on an odyssey through the Native lands around them, trying to impress upon the author how much the Native population has lost from contact with European explorers and settlers.

This is a sad and unsettling book that makes you realize how much was taken away from Native American cultures in the past 400 years. When Europeans came to this country they eventually became "American" but were always allowed to keep the memories of their original culture alive. Foods were assimilated into the American diet, as well as customs and religion. Yet the various Native tribes, each with their own individual cultures, that were here when the European settlers arrived were expected to give up these cultures and customs and religion to embrace the new European ways and forget the old. Those who did not comply were browbeat, physically beaten, even killed. Now that the "worm has turned," so to speak, many wish to learn about Native culture, but still overlay their knowledge with their own assumptions, thus you get "Indian rituals" bathed in a rosy glow, the so-called "magic Indian" with supernatural powers, or the "noble savage" stereotype without seeing Native people as individuals. Worse, non-Natives wish to co-opt Native practices for their own improvement, even emulating Native dress and way of life. Dan presents Nerburn with the reality of modern Native life and the shadows of the past that haunt them.

 

  Re-read: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

 

  St. Nicholas, Volume 60, November 1932-October 1933, American Education Press

Well, this is it. The last bound volume of "St. Nicholas" I have in my possession to read. For the past...twenty? maybe thirty? I guess years I have read fifty nine of the sixty volumes up to this point (I'm missing Volume 58, November 1930-October 1931); I bought the first volume in Boston, but I don't recall when—November 1873 to October 1933, sixty years of the United States going from agrarian nation to minor world power. Thankfully this was better than the previous volume, although all twelve issues fitted into a volume that would have held six months' worth of material only a few years earlier.

The serials were interesting but minor, but at least better than the awful Young Ravenals in the previous volume, which should have been shot for cruelty to any adult, or kid for that matter, who had to read through that hot mess. "The White Feather" ended up satisfactorily, "The Man from Mystery House" was a good action piece, "The Lost Circe" was an okay girls' mystery, "Nest Among the Stars" starred the hapless Japheta (still not sure why she has that nickname) at camp trailing mishaps and mistaken identities in her wake (she almost gets one man labeled as a "Commie"), and I was disappointed they started a reasonably interesting story "Trail of the Borealis" just as I finished the volume. The big disappointment was the John Bennett (Master Skylark) serial which was a boring fantasy about a knight and a dragon; glad to not have to finish that. November 1932 had an article about the magazine's 60th anniversary and a couple of other pieces devoted to the event.

Of note in this issue is J. Frank Dobie's "When I Was a Boy on the Ranch" which was later oft-anthologized, two nature pieces by amateur naturalist Daniel P. Mannix (who later wrote The Fox and the Hound, later presented in a cleaned-up version by Disney), a piece about Rhode Island history (the sinking of the British ship Gaspé in Narragansett Bay), and what I think was the only magazine appearance of an excerpt from a "Little House" book, "Keeping House" from Farmer Boy, in which Almanzo's pet pig is named "Amy," not "Lucy" as in my copy. Odd. T. Morris Longstreth, he of the square-jawed heroes, has a neat "girl power" story about a young woman at a logging camp who secretly learns to fly the camp airplane and ends up saving the day and the hundredth anniversary of Louisa May Alcott's birth is celebrated.

They finally ditched the boring "Handcrafters" column, brought back the calendar in the last volume, dropped "The Letter Box" and then picked it up again because they added pages (having been whittled down to fifty previously) but used cheaper paper which is visibly yellow, and, also in the last issue, added an airplane column. Thank goodness the League was still intact!

 

  New England Flavor: Memoirs of a Country Boyhood, Haydn S. Pearson

This is Pearson's autobiographical look at his New Hampshire childhood growing up in the country town of Hancock, where his father was a Baptist minister and apple grower. He looks back on his chores—and there were many for a boy growing up on a farm, some monotonous like picking potato bugs off leaves and some occasionally interesting, like taking apples to the cider mill, and some pretty frustrating, like thawing out the water pump in the barnyard on a single-degree day. There are also fun activities like riding the snow roller in the winter to create a good sleighing surface on the roads, going fishing, waiting for the annual visit of the traveling peddler, and watching the blacksmith work.

Pearson takes us through a typical year on the farm, from winter days dressing in front of the stove, mud season followed by planting time, happy excursions to the swimming hole in summer, and finally harvesting and winnowing of crops. He also shares humorous stories about neighborhood characters or interactions, like the "horse trading" sequence that occurs at the end of chapter two, which is hilarious. The text is full of nostalgia in the tradition of Eric Sloane and would also be welcome to fans of Gladys Taber and Rachel Peden.

 

  This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing, Jacqueline Winspear

In the wake of sixteen novels, Winspear takes this opportunity to write about her unusual childhood. Her parents were an unconventional couple, living in homes that had no modern conveniences well into the 1960s, and at times they lived with the Romany people, following Rom customs, making their living among them. Jackie and her brother recall being called "dirty gypsies" due to that. Much of the opening pages of this autobiography are tied to the experiences of her parents. Her father was a city boy who fell in love with the country due to the quiet; ironically his war work involved working with explosives. An artistic man, he finally became a designer, but after working years at other grueling positions. Her mother and aunts were evacuated during the war to the home of a man who molested children; in her married life she did any work that came along, including harvesting and home cleaning, but finally became an executive in the British penal system.

 

Winspear paints her own childhood in misty watercolors that nevertheless reveal the hard knocks of life: her love of the country, her continued obsession with horses, trying to find her place with volatile parents who favored her brother, even to discovering some of her mother's most well-loved tales of the past were just fantasies. Young people who have grown up with running water and all the common utilities will probably blanch at her recollections of having to use the outhouse, carry water from the well, keep warm in winter with a hot brick in her bed. She recalls with pride how she earned the money for her very first wristwatch at the tender age of six by doing farm chores.

 

Sometimes the manuscript skips around from past to present to past again without rhyme nor reason; we seem to go from her terrible ordeal with scalding water as a toddler to a present encounter with a psychologist with few connecting threads. And though her brother appears throughout the manuscript, he seems to be a very nebulous presence who is in the tale one minute and then forgotten for pages upon end, and even after reading the book I can't figure out how she really feels about him. However, her childhood experiences are very striking and the evidently love of the countryside shines out from every page.

 

  Re-read: Stillmeadow Seasons, Gladys Taber

Stillmeadow Seasons is the third of Gladys Taber’s compilations about her life in her 1600s Connecticut farmhouse near Southbury, Connecticut. Taken from her magazine columns from 1947-1949, she begins her Stillmeadow year in April, where we watch spring bloom along with a new addition to the family, a rambunctious Irish setter puppy named Maeve. As always, against the progression of outdoor life from April to March of the next year, Gladys chats happily about canning and cooking, the lively cocker spaniels Honey, Melody, Little Sister, and Linda (and more), the cats Tigger and Esme, her favorite music, reading on cold winter nights, eating in the Quiet Garden (a new feature at Stillmeadow) on beautiful summer evenings, visits from her daughter and Jill’s children (now at college or already married), and the trials and comforts of owning an old house. Sometimes she is sober, as in addressing prejudice (some of her comments sound no different from ones we are hearing currently, which is inexpressibly sad) and fear of atomic devastation.

As someone who hates being outside int he sun, I am awed by Gladys’ and Jill’s energy in their garden and in their kitchen as well during the torrid summer months, but my favorite passages take place in Stillmeadow’s fall and winter seasons, when the ladies’ take a breather–well, while they’re not training the dogs, polishing the furniture, shoveling snow, and keeping the floors clean of snow–and enjoy a sit by the fire with a good book and classical music on the radio or the record player. The dogs are as endearing as ever, although a few familiar names from the first two books appear to have gone on to Rainbow Bridge (Star and Sister), and Maeve adds a hectic element to the household as she grows.

Gladys Taber was “mindful” long before the mindfulness movement became popular. She cherished every day, even rainy and cold ones, with something positive to say. You could spend no better time on any day, but especially on a chilly autumn or winter day, reading Taber for the ultimate chill-out.

 

  Murder at Icicle Lodge, J.D. Griffo

Alberta Scaglione is finally getting used to the fact that she inherited her late great-aunt's lovely cottage on Tranquility Lake when her granddaughter, a neophyte reporter on a local New Jersey newspaper, lands a plum assignment at Icicle Lodge, a skiing and skating resort in the mountains: interviewing Olympic gold-medal winning ice skater Pamela Gregory, who's from the area. Not only that, but "Jinx" is allowed to take some friends with her: grandma Alberta and her sister Helen, and sister-in-law Joyce. Plus Tranquility Lake's chief of police, a man Alberta used to babysit, has been invited by the owner to the reopening of Icicle Lodge, and he brings along Jinx's boyfriend Freddy, ex-nun Helen's nemesis Father Sal, and Alberta's new love interest Sloan. Unfortunately Pamela turns out to be a prima-donna bitch—and soon she's a murder victim. So now the Ferrara Family detectives, Alberta, Jinx, Joyce, and Helen, are back on the case, discovering that competitive ice skating is almost as cutthroat sharp as the skate blades themselves.

There's nearly as much backstabbing in this story as there is in Hamlet as old stories and rivalries emerge as Alberta and her family piece through the disconnected clues. I love these books because of the lead's Italian heritage, but I have to admit sometimes the climaxes to the stories are a bit improbable: this one involves a motorized chase. Also, one of the characters disappears about two-thirds of the way through the tale and, after being so concerned about the fate of that person, Alberta seems to go on with the investigation without worrying about or mentioning that person for several chapters, although the person is probably in danger. I kept thinking "Shouldn't they be searching for [character]?" Anyway, the mystery's okay, but the family and their dynamics are the real reasons for reading.

 

  Molly's Pilgrim, Barbara Cohen

 

  A Pioneer Thanksgiving, Barbara Greenwood, illustrated by Heather Collins

 

  1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving, Catherine O'Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac

 

  The Thanksgiving Treasure, Gail Rock

 

  A Black Country Christmas, Sutton Anthologies

 

  Chicken Soup for the Soul: Christmas is in the Air, Amy Newmark

 

Books Completed Since May 1

 Star Trek FAQ 2.0: Everything Left to Know About the Next Generation, the Movies and Beyond, Mark Clark
For the Star Trek fan in all of us: Clark, author of Star Trek FAQ, is back with this volume covering the six classic Trek films and the concurrent Star Trek: the Next Generation, and also the Next Generation films, chronicling the development of the films and the then parallel development of the new series—the very idea of which the original series fans appeared to hate—along with the casting of a new crew who would carry on the ideals of Star Trek without its characters being carbon-copies of the original Enterprise crew. TNG eventually surprised everyone, especially the die-hard fans of the original series, despite the bumps of the first season, in becoming a new fan favorite, with the quiet, cerebral Captain Picard garnering a big fan following along with the android Data, who had been originally scoffed at.

Clark also investigates "Treks not taken," like the "Starfleet Academy" idea, and also how Gene Roddenberry, who began suggesting plotlines that others knew were unworkable or repetitious, was gently eased out of the series he created. Chapters cover each season of Next Generation, plus there are offerings on Star Trek foods, guest stars, crossovers, Data's most memorable episodes, notable episodes, Worf and the conversion of Klingons into allies, new enemies like the Ferengi and the Cardassians, amateur Trek productions, Next Generation novels, and even profiles of series producers and directors. A big treat for classic series/Next Gen fans. One wishes for a book like this about the other Star Trek series, especially Deep Space 9.

 The Doggie in the Window, Rory Kress
After seeing a Wheaten terrier for the first time, Rory Kress knew she wanted one of her own. Not wanting to support puppy mills, she did copious research and then adopted a puppy from a store which had papers stating "Izzie" was born at the home of a reputable breeder who was certified by the USDA. Of course as a puppy Izzie had quirks, but they were just that, Rory thought, quirks, like people have, like being afraid of loud noises. But some years later Rory decided to investigate just what a USDA certification entailed—and it let her on a shocking trail.

I thought this book was a bit repetitive once the point was made, which is that a USDA certification doesn't mean squat. Of course they have rules about how animals have to be homed, fed, watered, and enriched, and basically they are bare minimum. Factory farms, where cows and pigs are kept in manure-caked pens all their lives and chickens are crowded into living spaces so small they have to have their beaks clipped so they don't peck each other to death, are also USDA certified. On her journey Rory visits pet shops and laboratories that work with animals; talks to puppy mill investigators, supposed "hoarders" giving up animals who are really puppy mill breeders in disguise, dog psychologists, and even actual responsible breeders; and, finally finds the place where Izzie came from: not the worst of puppy mills, but one nonetheless, despite that "USDA certification."

To be read by anyone who wants to buy a purebred or even one of these silly "designer breeds" (did you know the man who originally bred the "goldendoodle" now regrets doing it, because so many of the dogs are being bred irresponsibly?) to understand the conditions so many of these dogs are produced under.

 Another Man's Moccasins, Craig Johnson
In Absaroka County, Wyoming, Walt Longmire is called in when the body of a dead Vietnamese girl is found. Even more curiously, she has Walt's name among her effects. While investigating the site, Walt turns up Virgil White Buffalo, a member of the Crow nation who has just been released from prison and is living in a cave nearby. Walt soon doesn't believe Virgil has anything to do with the crime, but wants to help him as he works on the puzzle of the young woman, who triggers flashbacks of his time in Vietnam as a Marine investigator, and his friendship with a young prostitute at a run-down bar and gambling joint. Once a Vietnamese man shows up in Absaroka County, searching for a lost granddaughter that he states is the dead woman, it seems part of the mystery might be solved...or does it just make the story more complicated?

Fascinating, but very tough, entry in this already excellent series, touching on past crimes and well as present, and filling in more of Walt Longmire's past. His Vietnam flashbacks are very real: the smells, the heat, the clamor, the squalor, the fear, the innocence destroyed. I grew up during the Vietnam era and watched dead and wounded men nightly on news reports, but Walt's up-front and personal experience have brought that even further to life. The story of Virgil White Buffalo is also well done and a little sad. 

 America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Gail Collins
Even though today we are hearing more about the contributions of women to world history, we still seem to hear about the same women: the famous (or the kept-from-being-famous, like Caroline Herschel and Dorothy Wordsworth) and the wealthy. In this overflowing summary, Collins tackles 400 years of the lives of mostly ordinary women: indentured servants, slaves, widows who inherited their husbands' businesses, pioneer wives, colonial midwives, Civil War women forced to manage after a husband or brother's death, the first pioneering "working women," war workers from both world wars, and the Milltown-slugging 50s housewives, starting with Eleanor Dare, who gave birth to the historic Virginia before both disappeared from history, to the teen girls of the late 1990s, fixated on their bodies.

I just loved this book, although in 400 pages to cover 400 years naturally nothing really gets studied in depth. You just can't do it. What this book is is a springboard: to finding a period of history or a career type that most interests you and then doing even more reading: women spies in the Revolutionary era? women of color becoming entrepreneurs? pioneer women coping with loneliness and overwork? 1920s flappers? wives of Tories? women of the 1890s hospitalized for nervous complaints? Whatever interested you in this book is out there in more detail, so enjoy the text and then hunt up whatever intrigued you most!

 St. Nicholas, Volume XXV, May - October 1898, Century Publishing Company
This poor volume. It's in the worst shape of all my bound issues, the back completely falling apart. Had I the money, I'd get it rebound, or at least resewn. I ended up reading about half of it via digital copy on Google Books.

The serials are mostly a disappointment: we have "Two Biddicut Boys," begun in a previous volume, about two Connecticut lads duped into paying ten dollars for a trick dog that has one further trick: going back to its owner. They determine to make chase to get the dog or their ten dollars back, but it's a plodding narrative. "The Lakerim Athletic Club" (also joined in progress) is the seemingly endless saga of a dozen sports-obsessed boys who want to build a clubhouse. In the process each of the boys makes good at one sport, detailed in that particular entry, including, in the last part, a very funny entry where the club bookworm bests a professional golf player. The one cute serial (well, tolerable if you like tales about little girls and their ponies) is "Denise and Ned Toodles," the latter who is a clever Welsh pony. A nonfiction serial about pirates is also included.

"In Old Florence," little Japanese children, and weathervanes in Nantucket are covered in just some of the travel articles. "The Bumble Bee," "Tim: a Parrot Story," "Birds of Paradise," and modern diving methods highlight nature and science entries. Benjamin Franklin, Viking ships, the escape of privateer Miguel Pedro, photography landmarks, the at-the-time new queen of Holland, Wilhemina, and the amazing first-person "A Boy's Recollection of the Great Chicago Fire" are just some of the notable historical profiles.

"The Kingdom of Yvetot" tells a unique story about a family in France who have a tiny kingdom bequeathed to them due to an event in 1066. In "A Stamp-Collector's Experience," a man who finds a set of rare stamps and compares them with another set is promptly accused of theft. An etymological article traces the history of flower names, another language offering lists words that came from odd sources. "On Deck," from Carolyn Wells, contains the names of over 90 Shakespeare characters. "Uncle Sam's 'Farm' in Canada" talks about the tiny portion of the U.S. that thrusts up past the Canadian border at "Lake of the Woods." Since this was the time of the Spanish-American war, the July, August, and September issues have numerous articles about the ocean, from seafaring adventures to photos of the latest of US Navy ships to explanations of how storms form on the water. And "O-U-G-H, or the Cross Farmer" notes that the spelling and pronunciation of English words isn't just a modern conundrum!

 The Wonderful Year, Nancy Barnes
The Martin family is moving to an orchard in Colorado!

The doctor says Mr. Martin, an attorney, has overworked himself, and must go do something else out in fresh air for a year or two. So the whole family—Dad, adventurous mother Jo, 12-year-old Ellen, the family horse Billy, the family terrier Bobby, the canaries and the goldfish, and all their furniture—hop a train to Mesa, Colorado, to try their hand at raising fruit for a couple of years. It's the early part of the 20th century (it's after 1912 because Ellen learns to play two currently popular songs on the piano: "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" and "Melancholy Baby") and Ellen eventually overcomes her reluctance to leave home and friends, especially after she befriends fifteen-year-old Ronnie Ferrington on the next farm, for to her surprise he treats her like an equal and doesn't tease like the boys she used to know. When her parents finally buy her a bicycle, Ellen's happiness is complete.

There are some scary adventures when Ellen encounters a snake and gets lost exploring the countryside on her own, but otherwise it's a year of happy discovery, and, as hinted at in the final few chapters, also a year of approaching adulthood.

Very ambling, sweet, slow-moving story about growing up, with a very unconventional mother character and an adventurous girl who's not invulnerable to crushes but who is definitely her own person and not tied to gender expectations of the pre-First World War years. Also, illustrated by Kate Seredy in the sketchy style in which she was known for then.


  Becoming Mrs. Lewis, Patti Callahan
I knew of Joy Davidman Lewis from the film Shadowlands and from the books The Narnian and C.S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies along with online bios of C.S. "Jack" Lewis, so I was interested in reading this novel of her friendship and then love for Lewis. I mostly enjoyed it, as it clearly illustrated how the pair intellectually stimulated each other through their letters and later through their personal relationship. You really got a feeling for Joy's increasing dismay into her disintegrating marriage (her husband, Bill Gresham, was an alcoholic and adulterer), her love of her two sons, and her admiration, first intellectually and then emotionally, for Lewis. Her descriptions of Oxford make me want to pull up stakes and move there. And the sad discovery of her real cause of chronic illness and its terrible repercussions are all too vivid.

However, it pretty much asks us to admire Joy as an independent woman who chose to make a change in her life when we would have criticized a man for exhibiting the same behavior. She pretty much walks out on her husband and kids, leaving them with her (as described by Joy) much more attractive cousin (and then seems surprised of nowhere that hubby and cousin get cozy together!) while she's enjoying herself in England with Jack Lewis, his brother Warnie, and Jack's friends. Then she does reclaim her sons and brings them to England, but the book glosses over the fact that while the younger, Douglas, loved Jack Lewis, England, and the whole arrangement, the older boy David disliked Lewis and the whole situation, and even today refuses to speak about it. Lewis, despite his eccentricities, seems almost too idealized as well.

 The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy, Jacopo Della Quergia
This has to be the strangest alternative history/steampunk fantasy I've ever read. A couple of times I considered giving up on it, because some of the characters were just so strange, but on the other hand I wanted to know how it came out. Oddly enough, I'm not sure how it did!

Following real historic events, which are footnoted, the story follows President William Howard Taft, his opinionated and intelligent wife Nellie, his Secret Service guard Willkie, his personal friend and assistant Archibald Butt, and Robert Todd Lincoln (plus a supporting cast both historical and fictional) try to solve the riddle of an impossibly-manufactured pocket watch Robert inherited from his father (and which inadvertently may have caused his assassination), mysterious lights from an equally hush-hush mine in Alaska, and an attempt on the life of Nikola Tesla—and that's just for starters.

The book starts out with a crazy bang with the President in London participating in a wrestling match against five opponents, and winning. Then he has to race home because the automaton (a maligned unit created by Thomas Edison) that impersonates him when he's secretly off on Airship One, his state-of-the-art zeppelin, is malfunctioning and wrecking the White House. All this goes on before the mystery of the pocket watch ever starts, and then comes a mysterious Russian, a standoff at a secret lab at Yale, and finally the maiden voyage of the Titanic (with all this other stuff going on, you had to figure Titanic came into it somehow).

I like alternative history stories and historical stories, but this one was just too weird for me

 The Joy of Being Disorganized, Pam Young
I'm disappointed.

So long ago, in the 1990s when one of those temporary overstock book sales lasted for over a year in an old clothing store near my office, I found the first of the organizing books by "the Sidetracked Sisters" Pam Young and Peggy Jones. Pam and Peggy were two untidy sisters, who, to the dismay of their clean-as-a-pin mother, were as kids and grew up to be slobs whose husbands were always late to work (despite working like crazy to help clean up the mess), their kids late to school, and they were late to everything and missed appointments and meetings because they never learned to corral their stuff properly and take charge of their time—until they formed an easily-followed index card-driven system to bring order and calm to their lives.

The two organizing books, a cookbook, and, my favorite, The Sidetracked Sisters' Happiness File (which anticipated Gretchen Rubin by thirty years) written by Pam and Peggy in a lively style were all great. This, written only by Pam (Peggy having retired due to bad health) is...not good. Basically it's a big long pep talk with a motherly narration, tedious folksy stories, and a big dollop of Christianity. The book itself looks self-published and distressingly cheap, with big fat type, wide margins, and widely spaced paragraphs. It's, frankly, dull, and I'm really glad I bought a cheap used copy instead of ordering a new one off Amazon.

 Drop Dead Healthy, A.J. Jacobs
Have I mentioned lately that Julie Jacobs is a saint? (Not to mention their two patient sons!)

Yes, husband and dad A.J.'s on a new quest: to be as perfectly healthy as he can. And he's going to do it from top to toe. He begins with healthy eating, but covers everything from eyes and ears to hands and feet to glands and organs. Of course along the way he hits every health fad, from cleanses to vegetarianism to acupuncture to alternative medicines to that oldie-but-goodie, thoroughly chewing your food, and talks to some very sensible doctors, scientists, and other knowledgeable folks and a few really weird ones.

As I started this book I mused that this might not be as good as the first two books, but A.J. was sneaky: he paralleled his quest for good health with the failing health of his grandfather, a humorous, loveable guy whose deterioration with age as the narrative continues is painful to read. So this entry in A.J.'s experimental adventures is a bittersweet one, and, considering the conflicting health advice he gets from experts, an intriguing tale as well.

 Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders, Jean Lorrah
This was one of the first (#20) of the Pocket Books line of Star Trek novels, and written by Jean Lorrah, a beloved member of the original Trek fan community, author of one of the most well-known of the early fanzines, "Night of the Twin Moons," the first to concentrate on the relationship of Spock's parents. Lorrah later went on to write non-Trek fiction. I picked it up for a dime at a book sale. I think I was overcharged.

Saying that, I didn't find it as terrible as some reviewers did. I did appreciate the effort Lorrah made to further extrapolate the lives of Vulcans and the geography of the planet, not to mention discussing the non-Vulcans who lived and worked on the planet, including physician Daniel Corrigan and instructor Elenya Miller, who have to interact with the stoic (not emotionless) Vulcans every day.

Unfortunately, the book's mystery isn't very mysterious. The assailant is introduced early on, and there are blatant (at least to me) clues that led me to think "This person could be the killer" and then reject the very idea because this person, by their attitude, was absolutely too obvious and just couldn't be the one. Wrong. Then Captain Kirk basically deputizes himself to find the murderer. Jim Kirk is one hell of a captain. He's a terrible detective. He makes lists of suspects. Then lets his suspects see them. Seriously?

I'm also unsure if Lorrah herself put in all the breathless moments and the exclamation points. I've read other Lorrah; she never seemed this ...emotional. The text is sprinkled with !!!!!!!s everywhere. I'm thinking some "helpful" editorial assistant added them later to "add excitement," and all it does is make the story look like Amateur Hour.

Readable as a curiosity. Just don't pay too much!

 St. Nicholas, Volume LVII, May through October 1930, Century Publishing Company, Scholastic Publishing Company
Well, this was it. With the May issue, "St. Nicholas" stepped out of one publishing company (The Century Company was killed by the Depression) and into another. The format of the magazine continued for two more issues, and then the boom really struck: only one serial, fewer stories, "The Watch Tower" and "Keeping Up With Science" halved in pages.

The stories about "boys and girls" were mostly about older teens, and mostly sporting older teens: tales had to do with golf, tennis, football, even a girl training a hound for foxhunting; there was also a teen sister cooking dinner for an uncle, another teen girl entering an art contest. Tommy Dane, the American boy living and working in Mexico, had a couple of outings, one with frantic gunplay; Felix, an older teen working at his first factory job, endures jibes for being slow, but he also has something an quicker employee does not; Hsiao Fu, a teen boy in China, has a return engagement in which he shows that helping others is not bad luck; and the serial is an interesting entry from Hildegarde Hawthorne (a frequent "Nick" contributor who was the granddaughter of Nathaniel), "The Navajo Cañon [note spelling!] Mystery" in which the Native characters are treated with relative respect, for all that they speak in some sort of weird patois where they mix up their "L" and "R" pronunciations, the protagonists two older teens who have driven a jalopy of their own construction across country. There's also "Kin to the Woods: A Story of the Tennessee Cumberlands," whose ecological theme is still current today. The Great War is still a subject in "How Shorty Got the Iron Cross" as well as in "Keewah," the story of a range horse who finds himself on the battlefield.

The nonfiction devotes a good deal of time to aircraft and flying, at least one article in each issue, including one in which both boys and girls are encouraged to get into piloting gliders (oh, I can see helicopter parents blanching about this now; one of the girls they feature is only thirteen!). Another article talks about the fun both sexes can have with a small outboard motor. Several of the nonfiction pieces are nature stories about an animal told from their point of view, including one about a trout named Flash. Richard Byrd is still being lauded for his flight over Antarctica.

Sadly, an excellent article about training your hunting dog is marred at the beginning with a joke about lazy dogs told by "two darkies." Not to mention there's a "Rastus" joke in the "Just for Fun" column in the October issue, showing that "St. Nicholas" unfortunately was not free of the adult bigotry that ran rampant at that time. It's always jarring when these instances come up, because the magazine is otherwise written at such a high level of intelligence.

 World War II Rhode Island, Christian McBurney, Brian L. Wallis, Patrick T. Conley, John W. Kennedy
This is a slim but dense volume of different essays about World War II in the Ocean State (or "Little Rhody," as it was nicknamed back then). Opening and closing pieces address how the citizens of the state received the news of Pearl Harbor and of VJ Day, but the rest talk about war events specific to the state. Most obviously, there is the story of the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point that later gave its name to the utilitarian metal building known in the US as a "Quonset hut," plus the torpedo station and Naval college in Newport. Davisville, near Quonset, was the home of the "Seabees," the Naval engineers. There are also articles on women war workers, plus the daycare workers who watched over their children, and the Liberty Ship shipyards, but the most intriguing pieces are about the prisoner-of-war camps in the state, one which was just a POW camp, the other which was an indoctrination camp which prepared Germans for postwar life: teaching them that Hitler was wrong in his bigotry against Jews, that countries other than Germany were not "decadent" and barbaric (this was particularly necessary for the young soldiers who were brainwashed early as part of the Hitler Youth). Interesting reading for all Rhode Islanders!

 The National Review Treasury of Children's Literature, edited by William F. Buckley
I first came upon this, and its companion volume via a reference to "St. Nicholas." And indeed, all but two of the stories in this volume are from that magazine. So, since I have all these magazines, why would I order the same stories in these volumes?

Alas, because I am a "St. Nicholas" purist, it  had to be. Luckily I found excellent secondhand copies at low prices. And once again I was seduced by the content: two of Alcott's "Spinning Wheel" stories, one with a plucky girl heroine Tabby Turnbull; two Jack London offerings; several of Palmer Cox's Brownie poems and adorable illustrations (also Carolyn Wells' "Happychaps," which appear to be little insects); a good collection of fairy stories, including a selection from Lewis Carroll's Sylvia and Bruno; two Native American legends; fables like "Noll and Antoonje"; two stories from The Jungle Book (which Rudyard Kipling was encouraged to write by the editors of "St. Nicholas"); even novella-length treats like Tom Sawyer Abroad (which still reads to me like Mark Twain got bored after ten chapters and just abruptly ended it) and Sir Marrok, about Arthurian-era Sherwood Forest.

The one real curiosity here is Buckley's attempt to write a "St. Nicholas"-like story about a boy who learns a lesson, "The Temptation of Wilfred Malachey." It's set modern-day with computers, but has young Wilfred (the son of an impoverished writer nevertheless determined Wilfred get a good education) going to boarding school and, finding he has no funds to treat his fellow wealthy classmates, beginning to steal from them. Then he finds gold: one of the teachers appears to have a computer that grants wishes! One reads it wondering just what Buckley was trying to get at.

 Re-read: Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
Two years after her trial for murder, Harriet Vane is still unsettled by what happened to her and stuck with a fine case of writer's block. To relax she takes a walking tour of the southwest coast of England, only to find a man with his throat cut by a straight razor on a rock near the surf. By the time she reaches the nearest town, Wilvercombe, the body has been washed away by the tide, but Harriet dutifully reports the crime to the police. The news makes the papers and Lord Peter Wimsey arrives to see if he can be of help solving the crime, something Harriet is both interested and repelled at doing, especially after sad, fortyish widow Mrs. Weldon, staying at the same posh hotel the murdered man worked at, confesses to the mystery writer that the dead man was her young Russian fiance who had escaped the Soviet Union and she feels his death was caused by Bolsheviks.

Lord Peter and Harriet's sleuthing (ably aided by Wimsey's manservant and best friend Mervyn Bunter, the local Inspector Umpelty, Peter's old friend reporter Salcombe Hardy, and even London Inspector Charles Parker) is delightful, with them sharing a repartee along the lines of Nick and Nora Charles, save that Harriet is still firm about refusing Peter's marriage proposals. The evidence is complicated by a hiker, a camper driving a three-wheeled Morris, a woman in a red motorcar with a funny license plate, a drunken itinerant hairdresser (we would call him a barber), a couple of seagoing locals who are acting mysteriously, the other dancers at the hotel, Mrs. Weldon's exasperated farmer son, and even an escaped horse. Tide tables and a secret code make this a suitably complex murder mystery, even if it doesn't advance Lord Peter's "case" much.

 Lord Darcy: Murder and Magic, Too Many Magicians, Lord Darcy Investigates, Randall Garrett
A friend has been recommending these to me for years, so when this omnibus copy showed up for a buck at the book sale, why not? It's the mid-1960s on an alternate Earth where (a) magic works and science is viewed with skeptical amusement and (b) Richard the Lionheart never died from the wound sustained in the Crusades, so England and France never parted ways and a Plantagenet still sits on the combined throne of the Anglo-French Empire. Lord Darcy (his first name unknown) is an investigator for Prince Richard, the brother of John IV, the King. Darcy, who vaguely resembles Sherlock Holmes (and perhaps Heathcliff), partners with an overweight red-haired master magician, Sean O Lochlainn, to investigate crimes. The volume presents eight of the ten Lord Darcy short stories (more like novellas) and the one Darcy novel.

I love the world-building in these stories up to a point. The result of the Plantagenet line continuation through Prince Arthur seems very real. Also the "magic" having definite rules rather than just appearing (forgive the pun) "like magic" makes the situation much more believable. The mysteries themselves are excellent; Garrett loves locked room tales and it shows in his complicated plots (although one seems borrowed from Dorothy Sayers and another from Agatha Christie—but with a twist in the latter).

Darcy is...interesting, but I never get a sense of him as a real person. To me he compares less favorably to someone like Lord Peter Wimsey, who became more fully rounded as each novel was released. Darcy seems more an idealized (handsome, athletic, intelligent yet intuitive) character, very two-dimensional. Master Sean, who operates as his forensic assistant rather than a "Watson," is more interesting, but if Garrett had called him "the tubby Irish sorcerer" one more time I was going to scream. I preferred the short stories to Too Many Magicians, which I felt was overlong, although it does introduce Mary, Dowager Duchess of Cumberland, who seems rather sweet on Darcy and who I enjoyed. Magicians, unfortunately, also introduces a fascinating character, Lord John Quetzal, who's a magician from this universe's version of Mexico, and who disappears halfway through the book, as if Garrett had changed the end and not made accommodation for him. (Also, if the Marquis of London and Lord Bontriumphe are based on Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, I'll guarantee you I'll never read a Wolfe novel. Two more annoying characters I've never read.)

Something else bothered me: I understand that the magic of the Darcy world has basically retarded the development of technology, but they developed some technology—steam trains, a version of the telephone, telegraphs, even a primitive magic-battery-powered flashlight—and then quit. Somehow I can't see 1966 still having horses, carriages, gaslight, etc. Seems odd to reach a level of technology and then just quit

Still, recommended if you like fantasy elements in your mysteries.

 The Happy Hollisters at Pony Hill Farm, Jerry West
A wooden horse leads to a real one in this complicated (well, for a kids' book) entry in the Hollister series. The kids—12-year-old Pete, 10-year-old Pam, Ricky (age 7), Holly (age 6), and 4-year-old Sue—wish to buy an Appaloosa (not capitalized in the story) rocking horse at an auction of a recently-deceased Shoreham resident. At the auction they meet Chuck, the dead man's nephew, who never knew his uncle and was hoping to find out something more about him. The kids later find a clue in the rocking horse of a possible inheritance for Chuck, but by then the boy has left town. Soon they're preoccupied with an invitation to visit a place called Pony Hill Farm—where, presto, a lost Appaloosa filly shows up. Could she have something to do with the rocking horse the kids bought?

If you say "no," you haven't read enough Happy Hollisters books!

How you react to this one depends on your tolerances for one whopping coincidence. It's nonstop action (and Joey Brill gets his at least once, praise the Lord!) in which the girls shine, especially Holly, who handles a big quarter horse and some trick riding with ease. If you've read a couple of the few stories where only the boys go on ahead to track the bad guys and the girls stay back where it's "safe," this one has a great rib-tickling high-five of a denouement!

Books Completed Since April 1

 Re-read: Lord Peter, Dorothy L. Sayers
I started reading The Moor on April first, but realized as the news reports continued that I needed a comfort read. Since I'd finished the second book of Sayers' letters last month, it was natural for me to pick this up. It brings back all sorts of old, happy memories: I started reading the Wimsey books after Murder Must Advertise showed up on Masterpiece Theatre in 1974, while I was attending Rhode Island College. I'd take the bus downtown and use my college textbook money to buy the novels two at the time ($2.50 total at the Paperback Books store on Weybosset Street). I paused at buying this one because it was...gasp!...$3.95! I bought it nevertheless...

This is a collection of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories previously published in other books, plus, at the time of the publication, a previously unpublished and neat little short story called merely "Talboys" that was written in 1942, and involved Peter solving a mystery that could involve his eldest son Bredon, then aged six. The mysteries within do not all involve murders; some of the tales involve missing wills, purloined (or soon-to-be-purloined) jewels, a misshapen human being held prisoner, and even a missing street address. Two of the adventures allude to the time where Lord Peter was working undercover for the government, and another takes place upon the birth of his and Harriet's first child. One involves a giant cross-word puzzle and a friend of his sister Mary, in another he has the assistance of his young nephew Jerry. There's also a wonderful novella-length story that involves the appearance of a "death coach," a demure mare named "Polly Flinders," and two rival brothers.

I can't decide if any of these is my favorite, but they're all delightfully Wimsey and therein lies their charm.

 Anonymous Is a Woman: A Global Chronicle of Gender Inequality, Nina Ansary
Ansary is an Iranian who wrote a groundbreaking book on women in Iran called Jewels of Allah, about how women were devalued in that society. This is a very beautifully presented volume about how women from all societies have been devalued over the centuries, the title coming from Virginia Woolf's cynical remark after observing that there were no women of Shakespeare's era who wrote anything extraordinary when every man seemed capable of it:  "Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them was often a woman."

The bulk of the book is fifty short portraits of women who were pretty much marginalized in their time (like Lillian Gilbreth, Bessie Coleman, and Maria Mitchell) to women who pretty much have vanished from history, such as En Hedu-Anna, astronomer, and Tapputi-Belatekallim, Babylonian chemist from the BC era, to a nineteenth century French marine biologist and the first female diplomat, Armenian Dian Agabeg Apcar. All these entries are accompanied by lovely pen-and-wash drawings in greys, tans, blues and greens of each woman.

 The Moor, William Atkins
In English literature, what can be so menacing as the mention of the moors? The bleak landscape of Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles always brings to mind mystery and murder and a sense of the uncanny. Even before she discovers the wildlife-strewn moors to be a good place from her friend Dickon, The Secret Garden's Mary Lennox looks upon the wild moors surrounding Misselthwaite Manor as something disagreeable and moody.

Atkins takes us to the moors in all their seasons, from south (Bodmin Moor) to north (the Otterburn military facility), to discover their wildlife and their peculiar makeup (peated soil unsuited for the growing of crops). But this isn't merely a nature book: Atkins also tells us about the history contained on each of the moors: the murder of Charlotte Dymond, servant girl, on Bodmin Moor; the real story behind the tale of Lorna Doone; the black dog who prompted "the Hound," the landscape of Tarka the otter; attempts to farm the moor, which were disastrous due to the acidic soil; the tragedy that happened in "Bronte Country" in Haworth (and what Bronte tourism has done to the area); the raising of grouse for the pleasure of wealthy men and the hunts performed with beaters; the use of "useless land" by the military.

Beautifully described by Atkins as he hikes each moor and weaves each region's folklore into the rugged landscape.

 St. Nicholas, Volume LVII, November 1929-April 1930
Because there's nothing like a "St. Nicholas" for comfort reading. This, at the time I write it, is the last one in my collection, and the final six issues published by the Century Company (I believe they went out of business during the Depression). Some interesting reading here, including the serial "At the Sign of the Wild Horse," the story of Veronica, who goes to visit her eccentric uncle and aunt at an artist's colony in NY, where she's at first attracted to handsome, indolent cousin Brad over younger brother George, who's industrious, competent, and socially awkward. The other stories I particularly liked was a series about Iglaome, an Inuit boy, son of a tribal chief, and his adventures. Some of these old texts devalue minorities, but the stories about Iglaome and his way of life are just plain adventure tales with no annoying commentary about a "primitive" way of life. (Also enjoyable were a trio of stories about a young man named Hsaio Fu living a traditional life in China.)

Still popular in the volume are short stories about army life during what was then known as "the Great War," including an amusing one where the camp mutt persuades a man to re-enlist, and two stories about "Shorty" and "Red," who serve in the tank corps. Other stories I liked were "The Chucklehead" about a sheepherder asked to give up his great lumbering old English sheepdog in favor of a collie (and how the collie comes out second best); "In the Storm Country" about two quarreling children at Christmastime at a deserted ranch; another in the "Tommy Dane" series about a young man and his partner, an expatriot Brooklynite, who work on a Mexican ranch, this one about a clueless "tenderfoot" visitor; and "The Sky Test" in which a teenage boy working on an airfield has to keep a undisciplined wealthy man from wrecking the airplane he so cavalierly flies.

The regular columns "Keeping Up With Science" and "The Watch Tower" (which was begun after the US entrance into WWI) are also of interest. "Science" celebrates both Admiral Byrd's successful flight over the South Pole and also the physical discovery of the planet [yes, planet; I'm old school!] Pluto. Some of the stories are remarkably current, such as articles about the gross waste of coal-powered plants and the pollution it causes as well as the necessity of reforestation. "Watch Tower" chronicles the negotiations between the US and the European countries to reduce submarines (France is the lone hold-out!) Two issues featured only international correspondence in "The Letter Box," with the correspondents detailing how life was lived in New Zealand, Argentina, China, Japan, etc. in 1930.

 The Happy Hollisters and the Cowboy Mystery, Jerry West
Number twenty in this series is a fast-moving story that starts out with a Nevada father and his two children rescuing Pam and Ricky after the Hollisters' burro Domingo gets into into his head to wander out in the road. Mr. Blair, son Bunky and daughter Gina are returning from New York where they were trying to sell their ranch, but the buyer backed out because his timid daughter saw flashing lights in the distant hills; plus someone is making off with baby pronghorns on their property. If that wasn't bad enough, someone seems to have been following them!

Next thing you know Elaine Hollister and the kids are on the way to Nevada, where 12-year-old Pete, 10-year-old Pam, Ricky (age 7), Holly (age 6), and 4-year-old Sue are eager to solve another mystery. On the way there, someone steals Mrs. Hollister's wallet and she's accused of causing a car accident, and when they get there the kids see someone at the sheriff's office they're sure is a bad guy, but he turns out to be the Tumbling K's (the Kirby ranch) new cowhand. The kids are still convinced he's the culprit, but what's with those flashing lights, vanishing pronghorn fawns, not to mention mysterious figures flitting in the woods?

Really, there's something going every minute in this story, and the girls rarely sit anything out because of their sex: Pam and Holly even go along with Gina and ranch employee Cindy when they go hunting for the bad guys following a hunch Pete has after doing research in the local library. In this one, though, Ricky gets the last word!

 The Journal of Beatrix Potter, From 1881 to 1897, translated by Leslie Linder

In the 1950s, a motley pile of papers was found on one of Beatrix Potter's properties that she had left to the National Trust. They were in a strange shorthand code that no one had seen before, and some were in the tiniest print on small note sheets of paper. Leslie Linder, intrigued, brought some of these sheets home and tried to decipher them. It took months, but Linder finally worked out a key, and this volume is the painstaking work of years.

Beatrix's journal, written from when she was fourteen to when she was thirty, with some gaps for illness, were written in code in a desperate attempt to have at least a little privacy from two parents who pretty much controlled her life, her mother considering that Beatrix's life should be taking care of the Potter household and relieving her (Mrs. Potter) of the responsibility. Meanwhile, Beatrix took drawing lessons, studied animals and plants, and went to art exhibitions to learn techniques.

If you are looking for some giddy schoolgirl's hidden thoughts about sex or boys, you won't find that here. Beatrix worked her opinionated wit on art galleries (Michaelangelo, she thought, was overrated), the strange people encountered in the Potters' travels to Scotland and the Lake district, and even the behavior of her own pets. Some of her commentary is her blunt talk about politics—she hated Prime Minister Gladstone (whom her father photographed professionally) and his role in the death of General "Chinese" Gordon, and angrily hoped that his government would be voted down.

How much you enjoy this is dependent on your interest in Beatrix Potter. Note that you won't discover anything about her "little books" like Peter Rabbit which made her famous, or about her art techniques, although you will see frustrated commentary about art supplies and techniques that she dislikes, and the fact that some of her art classes did not teach her what she wanted to know. Near the end of the journal she does talk about her uncle talking her into submitting her mushroom and other fungi drawings to a learned journal; they were favorably received until the scientists found out they were drawn by a woman. The journal ends before she had any of her books published, so you won't read about her effort to privately publish Peter Rabbit, and then her partnership with Frederick Warne & Co. There are black and white and color plates of Beatrix's art, sketches, and paintings, photos of the original diary pages, and photos of Beatrix and photos taken by her father Rupert Potter.

 Re-read: The Librarians and the Pot of Gold, Greg Cox
Of course I had to have a hard copy; e-books are sadly still unsatisfying. This is the third and last of Cox's original novels based on the TNT fantasy series The Librarians. In 441 AD, the Librarians' deadliest enemies, the Serpent Brotherhood, led by the sinister Lady Sibella, tried to wrest a pot of gold from a reluctant leprechaun and sacrifice an innocent infant to their malevolent cause. With the help of a Librarian, his Guardian, and the man who would later become Saint Patrick, Sibella was destroyed and the plot thwarted. Now a new leader, Max Lambton, a amoral Englishman who has taken over the Serpent Brotherhood with Coral Marsh, his partner who can create magical objects, wishes to finish the job Sibella began. It's up to Eve Baird, Guardian; Librarians Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, and Ezekiel Jones; plus the caretaker of the Library Annex, Jenkins (Flynn Carsen is missing in action in this outing), to stop him.

With the action revolving around St. Patrick's Day, the plot moves swiftly from Ireland to Paris (where the Librarians face off against the Phantom of the Opera) to Oregon to Chicago and even to an colony of leprechauns near the Annex. The plot, however, isn't quite as tight as the previous two. There is one character who appears whom you almost immediately guess who the person is. I was also quite disappointed that there was seemingly no way to save another character, who seemed promising and might prove an interesting project for Jenkins. However, the entire book is worthy of  a Librarians episode as Cox works his own magic on the familiar characters. Once again Cox does a great job making each character sound just like his or her television counterpart; you can hear John Larroquette speak when you read Jenkins' lines.

BTW, when Jenkins mentioned one of the items in the library was Prufrock's Peach, I nearly spit out my drink. Not only media asides, but literary ones as well! Good one, Greg! 

 My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective, edited by Michael Kurland
I quite enjoyed this collection of Sherlock Holmes tales not told from the point of view of John Watson. As in all these collections, some are better than others. Probably my favorite story in this volume is "The Dollmaker of Marigold Walk" in which Mary Morstan, the first Mrs. Watson, solves a mystery that begins when a settlement-house regular is robbed, although the tale of the second wife, Juliet, is almost as entertaining. Two members of the Baker Street Irregulars have their own stories, but I preferred the one in which Wiggins is instructed in crime investigation by Holmes himself by helping a Professor Charles Dodgson (yes, "Lewis Carroll") find some missing journals to Billy's adventure with a Hungarian woman. The Mrs. Hudson story is told in the form of an interview in which she tells the story of Holmes helping her husband Harry. In another tale, Irene Adler's daughter, Neige receives her late mother's bequest—and a long-hidden secret.

Poe's "M. Dupin" has his own story, as does James Phillimore (he who vanished after bringing his umbrella home), Professor Moriarty, Colonel Moran, and Reginald Musgrave (who recounts how he first met Holmes). At the end are amusing little short pieces by an aggrieved Inspector Lestrade, Watson's dresser Stamford, and other characters.

 Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man, Tom Quirk
This is a fairly interesting set of essays about Mark Twain himself and about Huckleberry Finn in particular, and is especially absorbing when the writing of the novel itself is talked about. Twain did not write the book all in one sitting, and indeed it ends up being a combination of river adventure, lampoons of Southern customs and hypocracy, and then the strange, often objectionable final part with Tom Sawyer engineering a "romantic" escape for Jim. Quirk also compares Twain's writing for Finn against his nonfiction narratives A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and various short essays. He also discusses the racism charge against the Huckleberry Finn, and how Jim was championed by no less than Ralph Ellison and other African-American activists.

 The Narnian, Alan Jacobs
While this follows the life of C.S. Lewis from his birth to death, it is not a traditional biography. Instead Jacobs follows Lewis through his creative output, from the fantasy world "Boxen" he made up with his older brother "Warnie" as escape from their distant, alcoholic father, through his journey to Christianity from a long period as an atheist and his science-fiction trilogy and Christian writings, and finally to the Narnia books, and then his final writings. His friendship with the Inklings, including J.R.R. Tolkien (who Lewis called "Tollers"), his strange pact with a friend during the first World War that left him promising care to his friend's mother and sister throughout the former's lifetime (even though she became a burden to him), and his final relationship (initially friendship and finally love) with his American correspondent Joy Davidman is also chronicled.

This is the first bio of Lewis that I've read, so I don't know if Jacobs has omitted vital facts or not, but it was absorbing reading that brought Lewis and his friends to life. I could almost see "Jack" Lewis wandering about in his rumpled clothes and bellowing a greeting to his university students.

 St. Nicholas, Volume XIX, Part II: May to October 1892, the Century Company
So I went running back for the first of the five unread volumes of "St. Nicholas" I had. And I should have checked it after I bought it, because it's missing the month of August (I was missing a month out of my 1880 volume as well). Luckily this volume is digitized on Google Books, because I was following the adventures of both "Two Girls and a Boy," about Mildred, a girl living in "Washington City" with her parents, her father having been injured in the Civil War and still suffering the effects of a bullet that was not removed, and her friends, a brother and sister whose father is an Army officer, and "Tom Paulding," about a fatherless boy who is attempting to find a hidden hoard of gold in a part of New York City that was once countryside to help his mother pay the mortgage on their home.

The 1890s were the heyday of Tudor Jenks, who provided absurd fairy tale-like stories for the magazine, and several are included here. Several articles are about hunting, which were considered fit thrillers for boys of the day, but now strike readers as pointless. Why on earth would you want to kill a tapir? Three stories are about a sagacious horse named Rangoon (although the final story is a disappointment) and left me wanting more. A rather sad little story had to do with ten little Native American girls at an "Indian school" who raise money so a little "colored girl" can also go to school, knowing what I know now about how bad the "Indian schools" were for the pupils they were supposedly trying to help. There's also a rather pathetic little story about Napoleon's only son (Americans quite lionized Napoleon, judging by the articles about him) who had to give up being "the little king" to a mere duke in the Austrian army (his mother Marie-Louise was Austrian).

The missing volume was full of sea stories, including that of a cat who went to sea, how ships signal each other, a young man who goes out on a long-term fishing trip, and more. It was quite salt-sodden! 

One of the more interesting serials was a memoir of Laura E. Richards, a popular writer in her day, and the daughter of Julia Ward Howe (who wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic") and Samuel Gridley Howe, head of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, and an example of child life in a middle-class home of the day. Another nonfiction serial was "Strange Corners of Our Country" which talk about the natural wonders out West, like the National Bridge in Arizona and El Morro. And I found another article that related to my family: "Volcanoes and Earthquakes" once again talked about the earthquake that hit the island of Ischia (off the coast of Naples, Italy) in July 1883. From the article:

"It was nearly ten o'clock on a Saturday night. The week's work was done. The fishermen had drawn up their boats on the beach, and were in their homes. Hundreds of picturesque hotels and cottages nestled peacefully amid the tropical foliage. The hotels were thronged with visitors, and the theater was crowded.

"Suddenly a tremendous shock was felt, and a sound heard like the thundering of a train over a bridge. Two more shocks followed, and all was over. In the space of fifteen seconds three towns had been destroyed and thousands of people had lost their lives."

It was in this earthquake that my mother's father lost his own mother (and sadly gained the stepmother from Hell).

 The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller, Cleo Coyle
Penelope Thornton-McClure recommends a spicy new potboiler to a woman who walked into her aunt's small bookshop, only to have the women see a photo of the author and claim it's a photo of her! She then runs out of the shop, with the book unpaid for, furious. And when Pen ferrets out who she is and where she lives, and visits to get her money or the book back, she finds the woman dead after falling off a balcony. The bonehead chief of police thinks it's a suicide; Jack Shepard, the 1940s-era ghost who haunts Aunt Sadie's shop thinks it's murder. And then things get really strange: can Pen's old classmate, bookish J. Brainerd Parker, have anything to do with the racy bestseller? And what is she to do about the girl her eleven-year-old son ran away from school with so the grieving child could attend her father's funeral?

I have a love-hate relationship with this series of books, originally written under the pen name "Alice Kimberly." Although it takes place in Rhode Island, my home state, the author doesn't seem to know a damn thing about RI, and populates her fictional Quindicott village with a bunch of eccentric Yankees straight out of Cabot Cove on TV, when RI is primarily made up of people of Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Hispanic heritage. Nobody in Quindicott goes to Dunkin Donuts, eats clam cakes at Aunt Carrie's, buys doughboys at Oakland Beach, attends Catholic church feasts in the summer, and mourns the loss of traditional stores like Benny's and the Outlet Company. Instead they patronize the various quaint little shops with goofy pun names that populate every single cozy mystery small town. I was frankly astonished that in this book they actually use a specific "only in RI item" as a clue and actually included a person with the surname "Silva." Wow. Maybe this is progress?

The last one of this series was written in 2009, and, besides the usual gaffs mentioned above, I'm wondering what in holy hell happened with the characters in the past eleven years. Except for the murder angle, the story seems written more as a comedy than a mystery. Seymour Tarnish the postman babbles on with his supposedly fannish dialog and old media references, more annoying than ever. After seeing the mysterious woman's dead body, Penelope starts brooding about the suicide of her husband and wondering if she failed him, when in the previous books he was a creepy spoiled scion of a wealthy family who pretty much killed himself to spite her, and his equally creepy family kept trying to take her son Spencer away from her and bring him up as "an Aryan from Darien," to quote Auntie Mame. Police chief Ciders, who reminds me of the police detective on Father Brown (who couldn't find a white cat in a coal bin), seems to have gotten stupider in the interim. And what the dickens is with Jack? In the previous books he was impatient but also wise, and even sort of romantic, a cynic with a heart of gold and a soft spot for Penelope, both emotionally and sexually. In this book he just nags and nags and nags with his 1940s slang growing deeper and deeper with every page. You would think being a ghost in the 21st century he would modernize his vocabulary a little (I mean, in one part of the book he even plays and masters one of Spencer's video games, so he can learn)! If he nagged me as much as he nagged Penelope in this book, I would take the nickel that links Jack's ghost to the store and go toss it out in the ocean at Brenton Point!

Food for the Mind

What were adults reading 100 (or more) years ago?

I've chatted in this blog about my collection of bound issues of "St. Nicholas" magazine, which was published first by Scribner; their magazine for adults was, not surprisingly, "Scribner's Magazine"; when "St. Nicholas" was sold to the Century Company, naturally its adult counterpart was "The Century Magazine."

I've written about reading a bound copy of the latter before here, but if you want to do your own investigation, Google Books now "has you covered." For instance, here's a bound copy of 1912 -1913's "Century":

November 1912 - April 1913  

which includes the sobering “Is the Negro Having a Fair Chance?” by Booker T. Washington, a stinging indictment of "separate but equal."

From a year earlier: November 1911 - April 1912

In fact, if you note the first "Century" issue listed on this search page and click the "more editions" link next to it, you will get an extensive list of the bound issues you can check out.

But don't be surprised after reading the subjects and text in "The Century" if "The Economist" and "Scientific American" suddenly look like sixth-grade fare and "People" only fit for kindergarteners.

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!)

My St. Nicholas Book is Here!

Despite what McFarland's web page said, Amazon was right about this book.

The articles are:
"Children's Magazines" by Mary Mapes Dodge
"In Memory of Mary Mapes Dodge" by William Fayal Clarke (Dodge's successor)
"Fair Ideals and Heavy Responsibilities: The Editing of St. Nicholas Magazine" by Susan R. Gannon
"Illustrating St. Nicholas and the Influence of Mary Mapes Dodge" by Michael S. Joseph
"'Here's to Our Magazine!': Promoting St. Nicholas" by Susan R. Gannon
"St. Nicholas and Its Friends: The Magazine/Child Relationship" by Suzanne Rahn
"Young Eyewitnesses to History" by Suzanne Rahn
"In the Century's First Springtime: Albert Bigelow Paine and the St. Nicholas League" by Suzanne Rahn
"Onward and Upward with the Arts: the St. Nicholas League" by E.B. White
"A Debut in the League" by Suzanne Rahn
"The St. Nicholas Advertising Competition: Training the Magazine Reader" by Ellen Gruber Garvey
"'Work Well Done': Louisa May Alcott and Mary Mapes Dodge" by Daniel Shealy
"The Utopia of St. Nicholas: The Present as Prologue" by Fred Erisman
"Two Narrative Formulas" by R. Gordon Kelly
"Money: The Change of Fortune Story in St. Nicholas by Anne MacLeod
"St. Nicholas and the City Beautiful (1893-1894) by Greta Little
"'When Did Youth Ever Neglect to Bow Before Glory?': St. Nicholas and War" by Marilynn Strasser Olsen
"Young England Looks at America" by Gillian Avery

Needless to say, it looks "yummy"!