Farewells...Some of Them Welcome

"Mark's" went out of business last Saturday.

"Mark's" was officially the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop (run of course by Mark Stevens). It was here when I arrived in Georgia in 1988. It was so much of an institution in our lives that it seems remarkable that it's gone. But Mark just couldn't keep up with the expenses of running an independent bookstore. The internet and the bigger chain stores were eating his market.

Actually, we had stopped going to the store frequently after it moved from the Virginia Highland area. The new store on Cheshire Bridge Road was roomier but not as homey, and since the Phoenix Science Fiction Society was no longer meeting, we just weren't out in that neighborhood very often. I could go at lunch at work until we moved, and even then could only spend about 20 minutes browsing because of fighting through traffic there and back.

Mark was then gradually surrounded by "adult entertainment" facilities and finally he moved to a little store off Shallowford Road. Most people didn't know it was there. In fact, the day I went to the closing sale, at least two people wandered in saying they had never known the store was there before. A pity.

Anyway, I picked up nine books, including a British Sherlock Holmes homage I enjoyed (sadly, it's the only Holmes book by that writer ever released in paperback). Five of the books were from Valerie Wolzien's Susan Henshaw mystery series, including the newest, which I'm steadily reading through.

When I'm done reading, it's bye-bye Wolzien.

I don't hate these books, but I don't really like them, either. Susan Henshaw is a well-to-do Connecticut housewife with a penchant for solving mysteries. In the later books, the police chief even calls her in on crimes. Her best friend is Kathleen, a police officer who came to town to solve a murder in the first book, fell in love, married and had a family. Susan is married to Jed, and they have two children, Chrissy and Chad. Jed works for an advertising agency.

If this all, except for the solving mysteries part, sounds unbearably boring, it is. Plus I find that, although I'm perfectly okay accepting wealthy Lord Peter Wimsey and Sir Adam Sinclair as protagonists of what I find interesting stories, the Henshaws' prosperity annoys me. Susan spends gobs of cash on pricey Christmas presents, she shops at Saks and Neiman-Marcus, her friend gets a Jaguar as a holiday gift, they all wear designer clothes and expensive shoes, they can afford to hire caterers for big parties, the house is absolutely gorgeous with slate kitchen floors, imported tile, and expensive woodwork. I feel like I'm the Little Match Girl peering in the windows at the opulence.

The other irritating thing is Wolzien's penchant for starting action in the middle of a scene at the beginning of a chapter and then "flashing back" to what happened next in the sequence. It gives the book a very cinematic feel, but if I wanted a movie, I'd go see one. For instance, at the end of one chapter Susan is trapped on a widow's walk of a house she's attending a party at after the door shuts and locks behind her. The next chapter starts with Susan in bed, enjoying the warmth and talking to her husband about the party. She then tells her husband how she got out of the predicament. One or two times is a nice change of narrative pace. But in The Old Faithful Murder, for instance, almost every chapter is written this way. In one, Kathleen and Susan start to go somewhere. The next chapter starts and they are coming back from wherever they'd gone, talking about what they did. The rest of the chapters are similar in structure. It about drove me mad.

These books get good to excellent reviews on Amazon.com, so maybe I'm just being a crank. But after constant exposure to the Henshaws' lifestyle, I have this irresistible urge to go live like the Waltons.

Ooops, Been Reading...

I'm still here. I've polished off The Adept: Lodge of the Lynx one more time, plus the rest of the library books: I loved the book about Gilbert and the erector set, Paris 1919 and Benjamin Franklin were both good, although I didn't read as deeply as I probably should have.

I also was quite absorbed by Everett Allen's A Wind to Shake the World, which I mentioned in Yet Another Journal. The combination of Allen's prose and a dark rainy day were quite extraordinary!

Also have finished Leo Laporte's 2004 Technology Almanac, The Science of Harry Potter, and James Burke's The Knowledge Web (I'm now starting his Circles). Sigh, so many books to read and so little time to do it in.

I mentioned Trixie Belden in Yet Another Journal--has everyone seen the republished versions Random House is doing? I hate the covers; Trixie looks like a simpering blonde bimbo of the Jessica Simpson school--not to mention she's supposed to have "sandy" hair, which is usually the equivalent of some shade of red. But I love the reprint, which has used the original text--this means you'll find Trixie riding on the running board of her dad's car in the first few pages of the original novel, The Secret of the Mansion--and the original 1940s-1950s illustrations, which show the girls in dresses and pedal-pushers and rolled-cuff blue jeans. Cool.

A Book Meme

Tuesday Twosome

Reading

1. Do you prefer: Fiction or non-fiction?

That's a hard one. I probably have as many nonfiction books as fiction ones. I think I prefer fiction because it's usually written in a more lively manner.

2. Do you prefer: Magazines or books?

Books. I don't like most magazines and I'm down one: it looks like the Borders at Akers Mill doesn't carry Best of British anymore. [Later today: No, they haven't. I must have missed the March issue while I was in the hospital.]

3. Do you prefer: Biography or autobiography?

Biography most of the time. Most people don't talk about themselves well. However, my favorite biography of all time is an autobiography, Rosalind Russell's Life is a Banquet.

4. Name your two favorite books:

I don't have two favorite books; I have lots of favorite books! How does one expect me to pick two????

5. Name two books you haven't read, but plan to:

Paris 1919, which I have from the library, and A Wind to Shake the World, Everett Allen's book about the Hurricane of '38, which I ordered recently.

Suffering from a Surfeit of Books (What a Way to Go)

I got a library visit in this week and and am now happily wallowing in new books. I practically devoured the first three. I started with Sue Henry's Cold Company and Death Trap, which feature Henry's heroine, independent musher Jessie Arnold, in a series of books that began with Murder on the Iditarod Trail. I had started collecting these in paperback, then got pissed off about four books ago when Henry dumped Jessie's love interest, state trooper Alex Jensen. Jessie can't seem to keep out of trouble, with or without Jensen around; in the "six months" (four books) since he left, she's been stalked innumerable times, involved with killers, and in the last book, left in a trap that would require her to kill her favorite dog, Tank, to save her own skin. Henry's next book is about a supporting character she introduced two Arnold books ago, which leaves Jessie time to--hopefully--rest up. I'm surprised the woman is not stark raving mad in a rest home by now. (Incidentally, we find out why Jessie is so self-reliant and reluctant to depend on anyone in Cold Company, but it reads as a bit of a cliche.)

I also got my mitts on a copy of the hottest fiction book of the last few months, Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. As you remember, I didn't think much of Angels and Demons, which is the first Robert Langdon book. This one is a bit less improbable. I find it surprising the sudden interest in DaVinci and his "codes." I've watched two different specials about it already. Had folks not heard of the Gnostic gospels and the theories about Jesus' family, which have included brothers and sisters as well? Also had not heard the terms "Divine Principle" or Fibonacci numbers or even "phi," but do remember this ratio being discussed in history--or maybe math--class as "the Golden Mean."

At the moment I'm in the middle of two other books, last year's highly publicized--they did a story in Time, as I remember--Walter Isaacson biography of Benjamin Franklin and Bruce Watson's great The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made, the story of A.C. Gilbert, the man who gave the world the Erector set.

The Re-reading Files #2

More books for the list:

Esther Forbes: Johnny Tremain. I've been in love with this book since fifth grade and our student teacher Miss Greenberg "insulted" the lot of us by starting to read it to us after lunch. I mean it. Now there are books about reading aloud for all ages and if you read older books, you will see that reading aloud was old-fashioned family entertainment in the last century. But we were 1960s children who read on our own; only "little kids" got read to. Anyway, we didn't spurn Miss Greenberg long; in fact in less than two weeks you couldn't get a copy of Johnny Tremain in the school library. I still love the entire cast of characters, including egotistical Johnny--and especially his horse, Goblin.

Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris: The Adept. Oh, the reviews I've read of these books online--"Mills and Boon romance with the occult thrown in" is one of the common ones. Chill, folks. That's what I like about them, and I'm generally not a fan of the romance genre: they have heroic, attractive heroes fighting the forces of darkness. Yeah, okay, the breathtaking beautiful and doelike Julia Barrett is a bit wet, but she exists only as a love interest for Peregrine, not as a real person and she doesn't appear much. These are fantasy books, after all. I love the descriptions of the beautiful homes, horses, grounds, and landscapes of Scotland in storm and fair weather, too; Kurtz and Harris draw everything in high detail.

Obligatory New Book:

Lynn Truss: Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Entertaining British bestseller about the death of proper punctuation--her chapter with the listing of misplaced apostrophes is hilarious and should not be read by those still hospitalized after surgery for fear of popping open staples. The title, by the way, comes from this anecdote:

A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why did you do that?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

...now back to our story:

Dorothy L. Sayers: The Nine Tailors. The Anglophobe who reviewed No Graves as Yet on Amazon.com would find this Lord Peter Wimsey offering even worse than Murder Must Advertise. The titles and epigrams on the chapters, plus part of the plot, all center around the English custom of change-ringing of church bells. How horrid for this poor woman; something not strictly American that she can't easily understand. [End sarcasm alert.] Richly textured novel about small-town English fen-country life in the 1930s, an unsolved robbery, clues including a fantasy cipher and French underclothing, and delightful characters--besides Lord Peter and Bunter, of course--such as the Reverend Mr. Venables, "Potty" Peake, and "Nobby" Cranton.

Kate Seredy: The Chestry Oak. Absolutely wonderful, compelling story about a young Hungarian prince whose proud father pretends to be a puppet of the Nazis during World War II and how the boy, with the help of his motherly nurse, helps the cause and later escapes from the enemy, but at a stunning cost. It's illustrated with Seredy's own beautiful creations, but her words are pictures all in themselves. I dare you to get through the conclusion of this touching book without having tears in your eyes.

The Re-reading Files #1

Well, if I wasn't looking forward to surgery I was looking forward to recuperation to wander blithely through the bookshelves and pick out things to re-read.

I watched the film version of My Friend Flicka the day before I had surgery, so one of the first volumes I tasted was Mary O'Hara's lovely novel. The movie adaptation is really not bad--it tells the essential parts of the story well, except for that little twit girl they substituted for Ken's brother Howard. The descriptions of Wyoming in the novel are so vivid and beautiful that you want to pack up the moment you finish and move. I saw Wyoming many years after first reading Flicka and indeed found it as beautiful as Ms. O'Hara said.

I also re-read L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light in a last-ditch effort to get the bad taste of the Disney television movie out of my mouth. Granted, I knew Disney couldn't have made the original into a movie. About half the story is Vicky's introspection over the events of her life: the differences in the boys she is friends with, her relationships with her parents and siblings and dying Grandfather, her thoughts about the "unfairness" of life in general, etc. However, Disney could have taken the essentials of the story as the makers of My Friend Flicka did and made a good film; they instead standardized and politically corrected and simplified the issues until it was just a banal story about "bad" industrialists hurting dolphins and "good" teenagers trying to help them. Even the marvelously dislikeable and complicated Zachary Gray ended up as a one-dimensional misunderstood teen.

And the always delightful Dorothy Sayers, of course, has supplied another volume: Murder Must Advertise, which, again, has been adapted as a television story. This one, like most British productions, pared down some characters and situations to fit into a four-hour timeslot, but kept the spirit of the book. The book, of course, has many more layers. I did smile, recalling the annoyed review of Anne Perry's No Graves as Yet on Amazon.com, in which the reviewer complained that the author used too many British terms--the novel takes place in Britain--and that several pages were taken up with a "boring" cricket match. I assume this reviewer will never partake of the delights of Sayers and Advertise in which lots and lots of British terms--some of them slang from the 1930s, when the novel is set--are used and an entire pivotal chapter takes place during a cricket match!

Her loss, not mine!

"Let's See What's in Johnny's St. Nicholas..."

The classic Christmas scene is, of course, the small boy not being able to play with his electric trains because Dad has commandeered them.

The joke goes back a long way, even into my collection of St. Nicholas children's magazines. One or two children are liable to write to "the Letter Box" and mention how Dad sneaks away the issue once they are finished with it, and testimonials from mothers appear frequently.

So I wondered what the adults were reading while the children were happily perusing the new month's issues, since St. Nicholas was the offspring of Scribner's Magazine, which later became The Century. I had my chance: someone had a reasonably priced copy of the bound issues May 1890-October 1890 of The Century on e-Bay sometime back.

Over a year later, I'm still trying to slog through May 1890.

The first article is "Archibald Robertson and His Portraits of the Washingtons," a profile of an artist who did many paintings of George and Martha Washington. Perhaps only in a modern painting magazine would this many pages (11, in 9-point type) be devoted to an artist. The story begins with the minutae of Robertson's early life, including the English royalty he was related to (British royalty seemed to obsess Victorian Americans; this subject comes up several times within the magazine issue, along with other Victorian novels I've read), with depositions from various owners of these portraits to "enliven" the text.

Another article about George and Martha Washington follows, this "Some New Washington Relics," about memorabilia of our first President and his wife, including fans, firestands, and candlesticks, again with affidavits from the people who own them. Ten pages are devoted to this subject.

The next article is "Two Views of Marie Bashkirtseff." Who? Apparently the young woman was a recently celebrated artist, but the article begins by asking if the lady's lifestyle and her "absence of reserve" does not "seem a very abdication of womanhood"! Evidently the artist in question...gasp!...expressed strong opinions as well as led an unconventional lifestyle. Wonder what the opinonated writer would think of today's celebrities pregnant out of wedlock and wearing next to nothing?

Next, a fiction offering, chapters twelve and thirteen of "Friend Olivia," which is a classically overwritten Victorian romance involving a Quaker woman, another woman named Anastasia who is forced into an arranged marriage with an older man although she is in love with someone else, founder of the Quaker movement George Fox, a gentleman named Nicholas, Oliver Cromwell, and pages of descriptions of brocaded gowns and the English countryside.

Following this potboiler is...I kid you not..."Chickens for Use and Beauty," 14 pages of descriptions of the various breeds of domestic chickens, their laying abilities and feather details, etc., and then we have a four page (with illustrations) poem about the bravery of a minister who fought during the Revolutionary War.

I've made it as far as "Blacked Out," a 8-page dissertation on censorship in the Czarist Russian press. Upcoming seems to be such exciting subjects as "The Women of the French Salons" (and we're not talking about beauty parlors here!), "Institutions of the Arid Lands," and "Valor and Skill in the Civil War." Plus the autobiography of the great actor Joseph Jefferson and a few shorter pieces of fiction.

One can certainly view the times, however, within the pages. Interspersed within the articles are other poems, which either seem to be about the death of a loved one or are memorials of the Civil War.

I can't stand the mindless drivel in today's magazines like People, but if this is the sort of "interesting and instructive" articles that 19th century adults had to wade through, I'm not surprised they swiped Johnny and Janie's St. Nicholas for more lively reading!

Which Classic Novel do You Belong In?

Darling, it seems that you belong in Gone with the
Wind; the proper place for a romantic. You
belong in a tumultous world of changes and
opportunities, where your independence paves
the road for your survival. It is trying being
both a cynic and a dreamer, no?


Which Classic Novel do You Belong In?
brought to you by Quizilla

"Dear America" -- Some Less Dear Than Others

So since I'm into this "history thing," as some of my puzzled former schoolmates might put it, when I first saw the "Dear America" novels, I was intrigued. These small hardbacks are published by Scholastic and are supposed to be the diaries of girls in various points of American history. They started with, appropriately, Winter of the Red Snow, which is a Revolutionary War girl.

Of course, being written for the modern girl, we have no shrinking violets here. Our heroines are not the meek, prim little women they were supposed to be back in those days of "seen and not heard." Oh, each of the girls usually has a weakness, but they are usually strong characters in general.

The darn things are so expensive, though ($10.99 each), that I've been loathe to buy them except on sale or with a coupon.

I have six now, and they range from very good to annoying. Evidently there are others of the latter opinion: I read a scathing review of the volume that deals with the Carlisle Indian School. The reviewer is a Native American and not only dealt harshly with an experience which for the tribal children was harrowing and traumatic but which the "Dear America" book views as, although hard, eventually a positive experience, but who takes the writer to task for giving the female lead initiatives and characteristics, which, they say, a properly brought up female child in that particular tribe in that era would not have had. She would have not aspired to a boy's position or played boys' games, or done other things out of character with a female in that particular tribe at that time. Strictures on Native American girls were just as rigid as those of white girls.

Anyway, my favorite "Dear America" is still Christmas After All, the 1932 diary of Minnie Swift, although the improbable ending--shades of the Kings and the Five Little Peppers!--still makes me laugh. It was written by Kathryn Lasky, who has written some of my other favorite children's books, including the East Boston-based Prank, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The characters seem very true to the 1930s and Minnie's observations are funny--and occasionally touching. Her cousin Willie Faye is unforgettable.

The only thing that bugged me was...the reviews of this book on Amazon.com! There is a scene in the book where a chicken--the family keeps chickens as a source of food in the lean Depression years--has its feet frozen to the lid of a garbage can after a winter storm. Multiple reviewers seemed to consider this event hilarious. What kind of people think an animal getting its feet frozen is funny????

I also have West to a Land of Plenty, Voyage on the Great Titanic, and When Christmas Comes Again, all which I found on clearance, and the two World War II stories, Early Sunday Morning and My Secret War, which I got on coupon.

Of those five, the Pearl Harbor story is my least favorite. Never mind Amber Billows has a first name that is totally wrong for the era; she's an annoying, whiny child who sets my teeth on edge. Not to mention that the one bigoted person in the story comes to such a bad end that it's ridiculous, like those old-fashioned tomes where little kids who did bad things were eaten by bears or died and went to Hell. Please. Or that Amber, to be really Politically Correct, has a best friend who's Japanese (and of course has her family accused of all sorts of horrible things after the attack).

Plenty I picked up because the lead girl, Teresa, is Italian. She's a bit feisty--read: she complains a lot--but she's thankfully not as much a whiner as Amber, and becomes a more likeable character as the story progresses. Also, there are amusing interludes where her pesty little sister writes in her diary. The story ends with a big punch as well.

When Christmas Comes Again keeps being stocked as a Christmas novel and it's not. It's the story of Simone, who volunteers as one of the "Hello Girls" (telephone operators on the front lines) during World War I. I'd never heard of the "Hello Girls" and found that part of the story extremely interesting.

Titanic is told by Catholic orphanage-educated Margaret Ann Driscoll, who gets a job as companion and helper to a rich American woman sailing on the Titanic alone. "Maggie" gets to experience the splendor of the Titanic first hand--but it's all old stuff: opulent staircases, grand dining rooms, dropping names like Molly Brown and John Jacob Astor. I would have been much more interested in a book about the second or third class passengers on the ship. Still, she's a likeable character, so the voyage isn't so bad after all.

Last is My Secret War in which Madeline Becker is about the most ordinary of the lead characters. She's your typical 40s schoolgirl with a crush on a male classmate and close encounters with a snobby classmate, who is then involved with the war effort. Later in the book, some bad news fells her, which felt very natural against the heroic effort of some of the other girls in the series. The hook in this one is that the author worked a real World War II event--German U-boats trolling the East Coast--in with Maddy and Johnny's shore patrols. Of the two WWII books, this is much better. Avoid Amber at all costs.

Reading Children's Books at the Tender Age of ... Well, Pushing 50

My dad used to worry about me because I was still reading children's books well into my 20s. I didn't know how to explain it to him because I wasn't sure how to explain it to anyone else. But basically I like a good story, and when a story is good, it doesn't matter what age group it was written for.

There's another thing about children's books--unless you are reading the "problem" books which address things like teen pregnancy, drug abuse, etc., most of them lack the conventions that populate popular adult novels lately, which include sex, excessive violence, and enough abnormal psychology to slather on bread. It's like the old Oprah's Book Club, in which the book's lead character always was a woman who had, as a child, been a victim of verbal/physical/sexual abuse by her father/stepfather/guardian/trusted relative and who grows up to get involved with an abusive boyfriend/husband/lover and who is further verbally/physically/sexually abused by that person--or she has a mentally challenged child and a neanderthal of a husband/boyfriend/father/guardian who wants her to toss the kid into an asylum. I'm not making light of any of these situations. These horrible events go on every day--and I don't want to read about more of them.

And this is not to say that children's books that are not "problem" books don't have their share of hard knocks. There is death in Old Yeller and Bridge to Terabithia and A Ring of Endless Light, cruelty in Anne of Green Gables and Black Beauty, poverty in Little Women and The Five Little Peppers, personal challenges and threats in the "Dark is Rising" novels...well, you get the idea. But in general the children's book world seems to be free of the excesses that drown the adult market.

Which is the long way of saying I picked up the latest History Mystery, Betrayal at Cross Creek, today. This one takes place in 1775 among the Scottish pioneers in North Carolina, people who escaped Scotland after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, as did my father-in-law's family, and examines the problems arising between the Patriots and the Loyalists. Pretty good. Although I guessed what the clue was, I didn't realize until the heroine, Elspeth, did who the "betrayer" was. It's pretty surprising for a children's book, too.

Camping With the Winnebagoes

I could read Hildegard Frey’s Campfire Girls books all day, judging by the two I’ve read via e-book. As you remember, I had a "corking good time" with The Campfire Girls Go Motoring, as much for the portrait of automobile travel in 1916 as for the mystery involving the separated car and the mysterious girl they pick up. The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin which I just finished, has no such compelling narrative, but I found it interesting just the same. (Yay! There's another one waiting at blackmask.com!)

It is mainly the story of "Agony" (Agnes), a nice, honest, athletic girl who longs for popularity. Innocently, she is caught up in a lie, which she perpetuates because it gives her the longed-for popularity, but it weighs upon her soul all season and eventually comes to a bad end, from which she emerges truly "sad but wiser." It's one of those stories where you keep mentally advising the lead character to do something to get herself out of the mess, because except for this one fault, Agony is really a nice kid.

What is more fascinating in the book is the glimpse of 1920s girls' camp life--canoe trips, swimming contests, practical jokes, good and bad councilors, crafts, plays--especially the idea of "crushes." From the other books of the era, even boys' novels, it was apparently very common in those days for younger teens to hero-worship older ones. Oh, this still happens today, but the "crushes" are described in the books then in a way that today would smack to most people of lesbianism and homosexuality. Intimate sharing of a sleeping bag with a special friend is made a point of, or sharing glances with a fellow girl or boy. However, in those days it was all quite innocent and people would have been shocked and outraged had an accusation of homosexuality been leveled at these "crushes." It was considered natural for a girl to idolize an older girl who was popular and pretty, or a boy to admire an older companion who was good at sports or in leadership.

Funny how today we can make admiration and friendship into something that many people consider unsavory--and into something sexual when it's not.

Anyway, here is Jo Anne's Girls' Book Web Page, which has short and long reviews of different old girls' series books, plus a few in-general essays about them at the bottom of the page.

Dr. Who, TV Series Novels & Novelizations, and Other Ramblings

It's sometimes hard to believe that Dr. Who started as a children's historical series. The initial aim was to have the travelers on the TARDIS visit different points in history; a few fantasy episodes were thrown in for lagniappe. Which explains why the first "exotic" adventure involved going back to the Stone Age and helping cavemen develop fire.

And then Terry Nation's Daleks screamed "Exterminate!" and nothing was quite the same again.

Writer Bill Strutton novelized two early Who episodes, but it wasn't until Target started its paperback novelizations of the series that these took off. Novelized television episodes, along with original adventures based on television series, had a long history. Whitman's children's books had a long line of original titles based on series like Lassie, Fury, and the Roy Rogers Show, among others. Novelizations of popular or upcoming movies began showing up in paperback during the 1960s. In some cases, like Terrance Dicks' workmanlike Dr. Who episodes novelizations, the author simply made a narrative out of the basic script, adding descriptions as needed. In other cases, the author expanded or added characterizations and incidents to the story with good effect: Harry Brown's novelization of the telefilm The Gathering took a superior product and added even more intriguing layering to it; Robert Weverka's Waltons books skilfully interwove two episodes into one story (Weverka's weaving even solved the "geography problem" in The Magic of Lassie in which Lassie fell off a hillside in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and landed in Zion National Park, Utah).

When the BBC's Michael Grade managed what every monster, meglomaniac, and the Master couldn't do, shut down the Doctor for good, fans still clamored for more. So was born the continuation novels, "The New Adventures," and later "the Missing Adventures," which used the previous Doctors.

These novels definitely provided the finishing touch in changing Dr. Who from a children's adventure series to a sometimes dark science-fiction series for adults. I have read only a handful of them and have been alternately interested in the clever ideas and disappointed in many things, including excessive violence, but mostly due to the writing style of most of these books. It seems that many of the writers cannot tell an imaginative story in simple, precise language anymore, opting instead for obscure points of view, stream of consciousness narratives, or a babble of words that less represents a story than a mishmash of hallucinatory prose.

The last book I finished, Downtime, wasn't actually a Dr. Who novelization. It is based on a drama that was presented using characters from the "Whoniverse": Victoria Waterfield, the Brigadier, and Sarah Jane Smith. I loved the story, but some of the convoluted prose describing people's takeover by the Great Intelligence I found hard slogging. It was, however, better than some of the books, including the one, title forgotten, that I finally forcefully tossed against a wall in frustration after 30 pages, and then bundled in the library donation box.

However, as obscure as some of the Who plots can get, I can say I vastly prefer them to the Star Trek books. I gave up on these several years ago after I read what looked to be a great adventure story in the TOS universe. After 350 pages, nothing had changed and no one had learned a thing. That was the last totally random Trek book I bought. There are a few exceptions. I loved Peter David's Imzadi books, for instance. (James stayed up reading the first one, and greeted me, bleary-eyed, next morning with the pronouncement, "I hate Peter David." "You thought it was that bad?" "It was that good. I was up until 3 a.m.!") I also loved Greg Cox's Eugenics War duology.

I also was reading the Buffy novels and finally gave up. The writers were good enough, but the characters didn't read to me the way they appeared on the screen. The anthology How I Spent My Summer Vacation finished me. I don't know who these people were, but they certainly weren't Buffy, Angel, and the rest of the "Scooby gang."

Not So Wild in the West

I polished off Robert Vaughan's second Wild Wild West novel tonight with a mixture of amusement and regret. (BTW, many people who review this book on Amazon.com are under the impression that the author is Robert Vaughn, a.k.a. the man from UNCLE. Sorry folks, note the difference in spelling. The last time I saw Mr. Vaughn, he had started a descent into squalor and degradation by doing a commercial for an ambulance-chasing lawyer. How the mighty have fallen. But I digress...) Mr. Vaughan is a fairly good writer who tried his best in three books to recapture the feel of one of the best of the 1960s adventure series.

The amusement came from a review on Amazon.com that chided Vaughan for not using the two things that WWW was always noted for: gorgeous girls and great gadgets. The reviewer was right: there are two beautiful women in this book, but neither Jim nor Artie ends up romancing either one of them, and the most technologically advanced gadget in the story is the locomotive pulling their train in a cross-country dash.

The WWW series sizzled with all sorts of Victorian-appearing, technologically-advanced machines and gizmos. It was always a surprise to see what modern gadget in 19th century garb the West writers and the able CBS prop department came up with, especially the ones created by series irregular favorite, Dr. Miguelito Loveless, performed con brio by the wonderful Michael Dunn. Vaughan's novels stick to more of the possible inventions of the time, and, alas, in this age, the babes that delighted 1960s audiences are considered trite and chauvinistic now.

Vaughan does point out some adventure clichès that we've all sat through in books and movies for years. For instance, one sequence in Night of the Death Train has that inevitable "fight on top of a moving train," this time taking place between Jim West and an assassin. Vaughan takes the time, in very descriptive language, to mention how darn hard it is to hold a fistfight/shootout on the top of a bouncing railroad car wooshing along at about 35 m.p.h., which may seem like a snail's pace on the interstate, but isn't when you're trying to duck bullets and keep your balance.

Probably what makes the novels--any Wild Wild West literature that I've ever read, really--less compelling that any of the filmed episodes is that I haven't seen an author yet who could capture the magic wrought by Ross Martin in the role of Artemus Gordon. Did anyone ever really watch this show for Robert Conrad? Okay, Jim West was handsome, resourceful, athletic, agile, and intelligent and Conrad did a great job with the "hero" role. But what made West different from any other run-of-the-mill adventures was Artie Gordon and his disguises. See that doddery professor of music? The pompous German general? The effete cook? The two-faced hellfire preacher? Presto-chango, and it's Artemus Gordon, who was also handsome (at least I thought so), resourceful, athletic, agile and even more intelligent--not to mention he was a good cook and a wine connoisseur! It was a treat every week to see Martin's new disguise. The few weeks when an ailing Ross Martin was replaced by other "agents" (played well but not as delightfully by Charles Aidman and William Schallert) revealed how much of the charm of the series was tied to Artemus Gordon rather than the titular hero.

Maybe Mr. Vaughan's readers felt that as well, because this revival series ended after three books which ended up on remainder tables quickly. The pen is usually mightier than the screen--but in this case it had a hard time living up to Ross Martin.

Standing Pat

I've recently made the acquaintance of Miss Patricia Fairfield via the realm of e-books, and so far it's been a lovely association.

Patty is the creation of novelist Carolyn Wells, who, if I'm permitted to judge Patty against the one Wells mystery I have read, Raspberry Jam, was a heck of a lot better children's book writer than adult novelist.

Patty Fairfield is the only child of an alternately serious and indulgent father. Her mother died when she was three, so Patty and her dad are very close. On her fourteenth birthday, after the two have lived like gypsies for years, Dad proposes that Patty stay three months apiece with four of different relatives while he winds up some overseas business deals. Then at the end of that year he will rejoin her and they will settle down in a place of their own choosing.

But first Dad warns her about having a sense of "proportion," which she understands better once she's on her travels. Patty's four sets of relatives turn out to be like the three bears' porridge with one place setting added: one is polite-but-snobby, one is so busy with clubs and good causes that humor and feelings are forgotten, and another is so flyaway and careless that accidents are always happening. Luckily the fourth family is "just right" and it's here that Patty finds her home--but don't just listen to my summation; download Patty Fairfield and join in the fun at the Hurly-Burly and elsewhere.

I'm now in the second book of the series, Patty at Home, in which the Fairfields have acquired not only a lovely house, but in which Patty is happily keeping house helped by two eccentric servants, young Pansy Potts the budding horticulturist turned waitress and Mancy Jackson, the cook. Mancy, is, of course, the standard stereotypical black servant of the day (her full name is "Emancipation Proclamation"), but thankfully she is not used for "humorous" racist comic relief. In fact it's Mancy's down-to-earth comments that try to quench Patty's high-flying ideas about keeping house, especially cooking.

There are a few more online and I hope more upcoming, for I enjoy Patty's company and can't wait to see what she's up to next.

Mixed Bag--with Poodles

I've been reading this and that the last few weeks, no bestsellers among them. Finally finished the huge WPA Guide to New York City, which is a delightful guidebook to what the Big Apple used to be. The guide was written in 1939 and has a preview of the World's Fair. I read the two Magickers books mentioned in an earlier entry, and in the last few days have been rereading some of my HTML books, which is my idea of fun. I have a few solid references I bought full price, but most of my HTML material has been gathered off remainder tables.

A good example is the web usability book I'm reading now, which discusses things as varied as alternative text for visually impaired people and using properly contrasting colors, including considering red-green colorblind persons when designing websites. I also enjoyed Wendy Peck's Web Menus with Beauty and Brains, discussing all types of website navigation, including text menus for faster loading, typography, color combinations, placement of menus, etc. I discovered in following one of her exercises that Earthlink does not support Server Side Includes, but Yahoo (my domain provider) does.

The one book I found most delightful this week was a re-read of a book I fell in love with in my elementary school library. I took this book out whenever I had the chance. The Christmas I was in fifth grade my mom went crazy trying to find a copy for me; alas, I think it was only printed for libraries or out of print. Most of the stores she inquired at thought she was crazy.

The book was Charlotte Baker's The Green Poodles. Nope, not psychedelic canines. The Greens are Aunt Lena and her wards, teenagers Ann and Charlie, and eleven-year-old Allan, who end up providing a home for the last member of the British branch of their family, eleven-year-old Fern, who brings her silver poodle Juliet with her. Aunt Lena's never liked dogs much, but Juliet provides them a good turn: it introduces them to a noted poodle breeder, who helps the struggling Greens by fostering some of her dogs with them. In the end, of course, the Greens make good, and a family mystery is even solved.

I found a copy of this book several years ago online and didn't realize until I re-read it for the first time since the 1960s that this is where I developed an early interest in dog obedience trials. Juliet and another of the dogs, Ravel, are not just bench (show) dogs, but obedience trial competitors. I remember now being fascinated by the concepts of heel off leash and stand for examination and long sit and long down, and when I wrote my own first story about a girl and her collie, she was training him for obedience competition.

My Life as a Book...

You're Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!

by Mark Twain

With an affinity for floating down the river, you see things in black and white. The world is strange and new to you and the more you learn about it, the less it makes sense. You probably speak with an accent and others have a hard time understanding you and an even harder time taking you seriously. Nevertheless, your adventurous spirit is admirable. You really like straw hats.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Half Magic

Just finished Emily Drake's The Magickers and The Curse of Arkady.

DAW Books is billing these as "America's answer to Harry Potter."

Well...maybe. The few reviews I've read by children, who are, of course, the target audience, are mostly good. The few adult reviews I've read are universally bad.

Overall I'm not surprised. While Rowling is perfectly serious about her "Potterverse," there's a nice thread of humor running through all of her novels, whether it's with character names, situations, dog Latin spells, or pokes at Muggle politics and news. There is no subtle humor running through Drake at all, and her efforts to get us to believe that everything we're reading is real (Potter book references are scattered in the Magickers novels) just reinforce that this is a story, and her stereotypical characters (including your usual Native American character who "follows the old ways" and the bonny red-haired Irish lass who of course speaks with a brogue) don't make it any easier.

Not to mention that the books have some American conventions that have just gotten old.

For instance, Drake's adults are in general...well, stupid. There are good adults and bad adults in the Potterverse, but I can't really say any of them are stupid, not even the Dursleys. Drake's adults recruit our budding magic users from clever essay-writers, drop the ball ("Well, guess what, kids, you're potential Magickers!") on them when they get to camp (this after the kids are already suspicious from a really odd bus ride), and then don't even instruct them well enough when they first start magic use so that one of the students is lost in the ether for a week. And of course then it's not the adults who figure out what has happened, despite all their so-called skill, it's our hero, Jason Adrian. One can't imagine Dumbledore, McGonagal, or any of the Hogwarts staff being so thick.

Not to mention that in the second book, the children all believe they are victims of something called The Curse of Arkady. What is it? The author reveals this...in an interview which I read online. Is it mentioned in the book, even at the end? Noooo, we--and they--are supposed to figure it out for ourselves. (There is a surprise in the second book that I didn't expect, but it comes pretty late.)

Jason is a odd duck anyway. His mother died when he was small; a year or so later his father remarried, bringing him Joanna, his stepmother, and his stepsister. Then Jason's dad died and his stepmother married a building contractor, William "the Dozer" McGuire, leaving him in the odd situation of having two stepparents. Aha! you say. This sounds familiar. But no, the "Dozer" is not the evil stepdad, nor is Joanna an evil stepmother, yet the tiresome convention of our hero having to be in conflict with his parents is tossed in anyway. This kid spends two books agonizing if his stepparents even like him (this after they are willing to send him to an expensive soccer camp in the first book, just because he wants to go, and his stepmother fusses over him playing soccer because she's afraid it's too dangerous, and in the second book his stepdad purchases him a top-of-the-line computer although Jason only asks for something simple to do homework and get on the Internet with, plus also agrees Jason should get counseling when the school recommends it for the boy's well-being). It's as if the attitude is tossed in so that Jason will have something "in common" with the book's audience. Jason, hon, these folks do like you. I'm sure they even love you. Get a clue, okay?

Jason--surprise!--turns out to be a special type of Magicker, one whom the adults really need in their fight against the evil faction of their group. (Oh, goody, yet another evil splinter group.) He has a Potter contingent of running buddies, a girl named Bailey and a boy named Trent (who just happen to have a loving relationship with their parents, just like Hermoine and Ron), plus there's the awkward fat boy, the gorgeous girl, and the two Neanderthal types who actually do turn out to be good guys and a politically-correct racial mix of other kids who blend into the woodwork with astonishing ease. And lest one cliche be left out, there's also a cute animal character who appears midway in the first book.

Let's say I'm interested in enough of the plot threads and the characters to pick up the next one–when it comes out in paperback. Not sure if that makes me stubborn or just stupid. I am hoping Drake finally breaks the mold of predictable events and personalities and surprises me.

Angels and Demons

Despite the "hook" at the beginning, it took me a long time to get into this book, and by then things had started to sound familiar. I couldn't figure out why until Wednesday night. Half asleep in bed, I mused over incredible feats, clues and ciphers followed, mysterious buildings, staccato sentences, short cliffhanger chapters predominating...then it hit me. The Circus Boys, The Boy Aviators, The Pony Rider Boys, The Campfire Girls...all those old children's adventure series novels I've been downloading from Black Mask. Dan Brown's taken them all, mixed them together, added modern adult props--sex, graphic violence, computers, conspiracy theories, a touch of the (so-called) occult--tossed bits of Indiana Jones in, and come up with Angels and Demons. Somewhere along the line Phil Forrest of the Circus Boys and Robert Langdon have to be related.

Not that it doesn't draw you in with its theories about Illuminati, Masons, and the Catholic church--not to mention that twist at the end that's a doozy. It's a skillful juggling of plot in underground laboratories, underground vaults, underground libraries, hidden pyramids, hidden symbols, dark corners, dark chapels, dark squares and dark towers. I was told by someone that the revelations in this novel are "scary." What scares me is that, apparently according to reviews I'm reading, there are folks out there that think this rubbish is real. Good God, between Dan Brown and Anne Perry, you've got enough conspiracy theories to do another season of The X-Files. There's a reason they call this "fiction," folks.

Sigh. If you want to read a good novel with occult leanings and secret societies which is so well-written that you'll wonder if it was true, go find a copy of Katharine Kurtz's Lammas Night, okay? Angels and Demons works as pulp, but that's about it.

The Older Brother You Always Wished You Had

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had some problem with "classics" as a child because I preferred reading animal stories.

This didn't go for all classics. I adored Rebecca Randall, she of Sunnybrook Farm, and Rose Campbell, the sole girl among the Eight Cousins, for instance, and the Miss Pickerel and Danny Dunn books they had at school. But the moment the love story in a classic reared its ugly head--like Meg and John Brooke--I was outta there.

Which explains why I never got through Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles as a kid, even though my mom had bought me the Whitman copy. I thought Freckles himself was brave, having survived what was described as a brutal childhood and the loss of a hand, and the Limberlost sounded like a delightfully mysterious place. But oh, my, then came the mooning over the Swamp Angel and I was gone.

I finally got through Freckles after reading A Girl of the Limberlost, in which an older Freckles and Swamp Angel appear, as an adult. Elnora's story was more compelling that Freckles', I thought, especially the revelation and reformation of embittered Kate Comstock (I was particularly fascinated in the chapter where Kate "peels" her skin so she will look more like a respectable city woman), even if I skimmed a lot of the fulsome love story chapters.

Recently I finished my latest foray into Porter, Laddie: A True Blue Story, as an e-Book, which I loved. So far it is my favorite of her books.

Laddie is the eldest of the twelve Stanton children still left at home on the big sprawling farmstead in the Indiana hills. His story, that of his love for "the Princess" a.k.a. Miss Pamela Pryor and of his final decision to be a farmer despite his education, is told by the youngest member of the household, "Little Sister" as everyone calls her, who seems to be about eight. (She says she has an old-fashioned--and, presumably as religious as the family is, probably Biblical--name, but she is always called "Little Sister," Laddie's nickname for her.) Little Sister, in her delightful, exuberant voice, also addresses the problem of the cold spinster schoolteacher who boards with the Stantons, the mystery of "the Princess'" unfriendly father, her sister Sally's wedding, her musical sister Shelley's romantic problems, and the adventures of her other brother, mischievous Leon, who for one-heart stopping chapter looks like he might end up the family disgrace--not to mention the leitmotif of most Porter novels, the love of birds and nature.

Although it's as decidedly as old-fashioned as Little Sister's real name given its era, this is also a very funny and very sentimental book, with some moments of high adventure and drama, not to mention lovely descriptions of the beautiful countryside. Some of these older books appall me or bore me; Laddie is neither appalling nor boring. He's the older brother everyone wishes they had. Recommended.

Especially Gladys

I first met Gladys Taber in junior high.

Oh, not in person. She lived in Connecticut and I was just this kid in Rhode Island. But as I haunted the Hugh B. Bain library for something of interest, I found a copy of her Especially Dogs...Especially at Stillmeadow.

I was "the kid without a dog." That's how I thought of myself. Even into my teens, I didn't want a boyfriend--men required too much darn maintenance, I knew from dealing with my father and uncles--or a pretty dress. Well, maybe I wanted a bike, too. I finally got a bike in ninth grade after Dr. Sarni and I convinced Dad I wasn't going to get run over by some crazy driver. But I never got the dog because of my allergies. It would have to live outside if we had one, Dr. Freedman said, and even then he couldn't recommend it.

So I coveted everyone else's dogs and read dog books. And that's how I met Gladys Taber and her Irish setters Maeve and Holly, and the cocker spaniels Honey and Teddy and Kon-tiki and Sister and Star. While reading about her dogs I also learned something about her 200-year-old farmhouse, Stillmeadow. At some point, I did find one of her Stillmeadow books, but I wasn't quite old enough for it yet. I was still into animals and adventure, and her lyrical prose about country living was as yet too tame for me.

Yet something about her writing lurked in me for years. In May of 1998 we visited my mother and took James to Mystic Seaport. As I scanned the bookshelves in the gift shop a familiar word appeared before my eyes. "Oh, my ears and whiskers! Stillmeadow books!" James and Mom didn't get it. My heart did.

I took these paperback reprints home and devoured them. When I got done I hunted down a couple of her books at the library and realized I wanted all of them. The Good Lord gave us the internet for something wonderful: finding out-of-print books. And so I found them on Bookfinder.com and on E-bay for a few dollars each and felt rich as Bill Gates as I read Mrs. Taber's lovely prose: the hardships and happiness of country living, her lively dogs and eccentric cats, her friend Jill who shared the home with her after the death of her [Jill's] husband, the birds and other animals and also the plants of the surrounding countryside, her friendships, her views on the seasons and on life. Now with a home of my own, although decidedly suburb-bound, I was kin with her.

This essay on Gladys Taber was prompted by the fact that I picked up her novel Mrs. Daffodil in the library last week. She wrote a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal and later Family Circle, plus short stories--and also had several works of fiction published, none of which I had read.

What a delight to find then that Mrs. Daffodil is simply a novelization--all names filed off, of course--of her life at Stillmeadow with dogs and companion, with episodes sad and absurd...possibly so absurd that they were the reason they never made it into her Stillmeadow books. Mrs. Daffodil, like Gladys Taber, writes a monthly column called "Butternut Wisdom," shares her house "Driftway" with her friend Kay, an Irish setter and numerous cocker spaniels, greets unexpected visitors who admire her column (they always show up at the wrong time), deals with sad times in the community, her daughter's romance, endless attempts at getting hired help and starting yet another diet, and yet always, despite the disasters, finds joy in the surroundings and people around her.

For Stillmeadow fans, it's just another delight to read and enjoy.

Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow website