Remember eBooks?

Oh, I know, you're probably thinking something like "eBooks are still a big deal, you dork, prissy articles about them get published all the dang time even though it's like almost 2014" but what I mean is remember when ebooks (and, eh, internal capitals) were like a thing in my life, and I had a Kindle and whatnot?

(If that's our standard, then remember blogs, those were a thing once upon a time and where did they goooo, is what you're thinking sarcastically (don't think I don't know) and I say to you

shameless Alice pandering

but also yeah, ok.)

BACK TO ME. So there I was sitting on the train the other day, fiddling with my phone and thinking about how I had Les Miserables in the Penguin Gorgeous Brick Edition sitting at home, when a lady got on the train with her Kindle and I had a wistful moment.

That was the nice thing about the Kindle, it made an excellent commuting companion because you didn't have to decide what to bring with you or whether or not your shoulder could stand it; it was just you and the text and a consistently dainty extra thing in your bag.

My Kindle is currently in my parents' basement after losing my page one time too many. Ultimately, I don't miss it that much. And I'm halfway through le brique and I've got a shelf of physical books I should get through, so, you know.

I do always like a good accessory, though, so here are some new e-reader cases from the British Library to ogle. They have a weird adhesive thing that sticks the device into the case (see it in action), and what they don't seem to have is any kind of closure dealie. But they have one that says "A Very Naughty Girl" on it so I guess you have to weigh it yourself.

especially about the way to end a post

I got yer GIFs right here

*phoo*phoo* Huh, I guess no one comes and dusts in here when I don't do it...

I always thought it was a wise rule not to start posts with "sorry it's been so long" but it's been months, so: yeah. The good news is, it's not like I was ever much of a book blogger to begin with. Low standards save the day!

Learn from teacher, kids.

I'd like to say that I've been reading, just not blogging, but the fact is that I haven't been doing much reading at all except spiritual reading and work reading. Work reading definitely doesn't get a post here, not least because "reading" is kind of an exaggeration in most cases.

"Right, the sooner I can bulk up this footnote, the sooner I can go take a nap"

Spiritual reading is a mild temptation because I do a fair amount of it, and I do love me some Catholic books, but then again I realize that's a limited audience (LOL, as if I had any audience). The thing is, spiritual reading is so personal: I like things because they help me with whatever I'm struggling with. Plus, I tend to dip in and out of things, and/or read three or four pages at a time. So really, bottom line, spiritual reading does not help me here and it would need its own blog.

Yeah, that's right: I need two blogs.

Anyway, the bottom line is: I feel like my fiction-reading is on its way back, and this blog with it, now that the Worst Time of the Year is almost behind us.

I'm not just saying that: just as crocuses suggest the changing seasons, I have had signs and portents indicating a revitalization of my reading habit. Namely: feeling stuck about what to read. I have a lot of unread books hanging around, however I am leaving the country (yes, again) in a week and I don't want to take up room in my luggage for what will be deadweight coming back (unless a book is really awful I want to keep it, for hoarding purposes).

We all come back!

"That's easy," you say, "buy ebooks." YOU THINK YOU'RE REALLY SMART, HUH. Last time I used my Kindle, I felt like its age was starting to show and the whole thing was feeling kind of buggy. The magic is gone there, I'm afraid, and I'm honest and shallow enough to acknowledge that I just don't wanna. And what puts the kibosh on basically any solution to this problem is that I've given up buying books for Lent.

Second Catholic reference in the post: I'm not sorry

"Well that was stupid," you say, and I ignore your sarcasm because I had a very good reason. I was giving up buying clothes and makeup and shoes, since those are my usual mindless frittering purchases, and it struck me that books were also a problem. In fact, possibly even more of a problem because while at least I know I'm mindlessly frittering when I buy a new blush on a whim, when I books I tend to justify it as... well... it's a book, of course I need it! When in fact I not infrequently spend sums on books as a way of scratching that spending itch in just as mindless a fashion. So it seemed like a very good candidate, in itself, but also as a way of closing a loophole.

Now I just cut checks for charities, which is better for all concerned.

So anyway, the bottom line is, I'm sort of weirdly between various things at the moment, but I'm fairly sure things will be moving again shortly.

And hey! I've just used up almost an hour I was supposed to be spending dissertating on this post! Ah, blog, I forgot just how great you are.

In which I ramble my way across a book

It's a major pet peeve of mine when Jane Austen gets referred to as a "Victorian" novelist. It's one of those line-in-the-sand things, like referring to Obama as a "socialist": either you know what those words mean or you don't. (Oooh, edgy!)

Jane (reporting from this rad mug) and I are unimpressed by poor periodization skills

But, y'know, I can sort of understand the inclination. Austen is not only super-famous, she sort of stands apart, time-wise. It's been ages since I've taken an English Lit class, so maybe I'm off base, but who else from the early nineteenth century do we still really read, eh? Scott, maybe. Burney's earlier and only nerds know about her. Radcliffe if you're a suicidal nerd. There are the Romantic poets, but they're poets. Mary Shelley gets treated as a genre author. For all the Austen family's novel-reading it doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of survivals from the period.

Well, here's a book to help round out that picture: Marriage, by Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, published in 1818. I downloaded this for freeeee through Manybooks.com. This is the Project Gutenberg edition, which obviously gets the job done but is slightly annoying in various ways. There's a fairly extensive Victorian introduction that has all kinds of background about Ferrier and the novel, but the lack of formatting obliterates the footnotes and block quotes and makes it sort of a headache. So I skipped it, although probably I would enjoy it if I made an effort. (Bah, effort.)

This is clearly a didactic novel, meant to illustrate good and bad approaches to girls' education and how these lead to success or misery in marriage. At the center are twin baby girls and their three mother-figures. Their birth mother, Lady Juliana, is a spoiled, air-headed London beauty who elopes with her Scottish suitor in the name of love; she keeps one of the twin girls with her when she returns to London from Scotland. The other twin girl is adopted by a saintly aunt by marriage (mother figure #2), Alicia Douglas, who is also English but thoroughly intelligent and virtuous. The third potential mother figure is Aunt Jacky, a spinster aunt who represents the other end of the bad mothering spectrum, being completely small-minded and ultimately almost as empty-headed as the birth mother despite being more useful around the house. Ferrier is pretty scathing about Miss Jacky and her brand of "sensible woman":

Miss Jacky, the senior of the trio, was what is reckoned a very sensible woman--which generally means, a very disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men, women and children--a sort of superintendent of all actions, time, and place--with unquestioned authority to arraign judge, and condemn upon the statutes of her own supposed sense... At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighbourhood. As sensible woman she regulated the family, which she took care to let everybody see; she was conductor of her nieces' education, which she took care to let everybody hear; she was a sort of postmistress general--a detector of all abuses and impositions; and deemed it her prerogative to be consulted about all the useful and useless things which everybody else could have done as well. She was liberal of her advice to the poor, always enforcing on them the iniquity of idleness, but doing nothing for them in the way of employment--strict economy being one of the many points in which she was particularly sensible. The consequence was, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on amongst the ladies themselves. And, by-the-bye, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the poor into the employment of the affluent.

I thought that economic point was rather interesting. The contrast is that Alicia pays the boys and girls of her neighborhood to take care of her garden rather than doing it herself.

Ferrier is an entertaining writer, and so even though most of her characters represent some precisely mapped combination of [good/bad] nature and [good/bad] nurture, they're still interesting personalities. Plus it's just fascinating to see what she saw as plausible "types" of her day. For instance, saintly aunt Alicia, we are told, was a poor cousin raised in a well-bred family, and when she and her titled cousin fell in love -- you know the fall out here, right? The two are separated, forbidden to marry, etc etc. But! Alicia, though heart-broken, accepts that this is totally reasonable, that her high-born aunt has every right to forbid her son to marry a poor cousin, and steels herself to get over him. When he's super-persistent, she marries the nicest of her suitors and goes to live with him in Scotland, and is very happy with this. Contrast this with her sister-in-law Lady Juliana, and you get the feeling that Ferrier has some doubts about this whole "love match" business.

Aside from historical perspectives on education and marriage, Marriage also paints a delightfully nineteenth century picture of Scotland. The contrast between the Scottish highlands and London's highlife (eh, eh? see what I did there?) provides a geographical contrast as background to the moral/intellectual contrasts in the book. Plus it offers lots of colorful scenery and characters.

"It's impossible the bagpipe could frighten anybody," said Miss Jacky, in a high key; "nobody with common sense could be frightened at a bagpipe."

On descending to the dining-parlour he found his father seated at the window, carefully perusing a pamphlet written to illustrate the principle, Let nothing be lost, and containing many sage and erudite directions for the composition and dimensions of that ornament to a gentleman's farmyard, and a cottager's front door, ycleped, in the language of the country a midden--with the signification of which we would not, for the world, shock the more refined feelings of our southern readers.

If you like historical fashions, this book is worth looking at: there are plenty of intriguingly detailed descriptions of the Scottish women's practical clothing as compared to Lady Juliana's finery. For instance, one highland lady arrives at the house with her skirt "carefully drawn through the pocket-holes" and wearing "a faded red cloth jacket, which bore evident marks of having been severed from its native skirts, [and] now acted in the capacity of a spencer."

In re education, "true religion" seems to be the magic bullet. Here is Alicia summing up the take-home lesson:

"Oh, what an awful responsibility do those parents incur," she would mentally exclaim, "who thus neglect or corrupt the noble deposit of an immortal soul! And who, alas! can tell where the mischief may end? This unfortunate will herself become a mother; yet wholly ignorant of the duties, incapable of the self-denial of that sacred office, she will bring into the world creatures to whom she can only transmit her errors and her weaknesses!"

I'm only halfway through; the twin raised by Alicia has just arrived in London to meet her sister and her mother, and that's going about as well as you could expect. I'm considering not finishing, just because I'm a little frustrated with how long I've been reading this already. It's not the book's fault; I no longer have a daily commute which means I have to figure out some other way to get reading time into my day. So I rate this: Worthwhile, if you like old books.

(There's no reason for that to be there, but I think you'll agree, it had to go somewhere.)

Oh hey, it's a book I read

I find it orders of magnitude more difficult to pick a book to read when I'm not currently reading something. Or maybe I should turn that around and say, when I'm in the middle of something I have no trouble at all queueing up three more books with a sense of enthusiasm. My favorite theory (of the five minutes I've spent thinking about it) is that it has to do with a perceived level of difficulty. When I'm currently reading something I'm aware that it doesn't actually take me that long to read a book, and I don't feel like I'm condemning myself to a potentially boring week every time I set a book on the stack. Whereas when my hands are empty, I'm picking something for right now, and right now I want something good. At such moments I am particularly susceptible to recommendations; the possibility of blaming someone else if the book turns out to be a stinker is always attractive...

As you may have guessed, I have recent experience with this dilemma. I got back from Paris (lovely if damp and intimidating) having finished the scholarly Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe (predictably uneven and ultimately disappointing, although containing invaluable insights into national histories usually overlooked in the English literature). What to read, what to read. Nothing on my Amazon wish list looked any good of course. Finally a blog I read mentioned Evelyn Waugh's Scoop in a recommending kind of way, and off I went.

Sadly there is very little Waugh available on Kindle. As long as I'm complaining about this, I'll note also that Amazon has volumes 2-4 of Sigrid Undset's Master of Hestviken for Kindle... yes, 2-4. This is the kind of moment that makes me feel impatient with "OMG e-readers are killing books" articles. Don't worry, people; the sellers of e-readers are not in danger of making the experience too attractive. But: Waugh's complete stories are available, and for the sake of getting on with something, I bought it.

 
Now, short stories are not my favorite thing. The format lends itself to more insinuation and ambiguity than I usually like. Furthermore, I tend to think that collections of a novelist's short stories are a bit more for the completist or literary scholar than for Jane Reader. But although that latter assumption was more or less borne out, I did enjoy this quite a lot.

There are some really wicked little stories here, in which people are the victims of monumental irony. There are a couple are are simply howls of rage against contemporary social trends. There are also two chapters of an unfinished novel that are so good I was sad to remember it was unfinished. The sad thing about the Kindle is that it's difficult for me to go back and tell you anything more specific about the stories; but I enjoyed the collection.

After the unfinished/fragmentary works comes the juvenilia -- if there is a better argument against becoming a famous author than the possibility of having your juvenilia published, I don't know it. For the most part this stuff is not particularly good reading, although there is a pretty awesome introductory letter in which the (teenage?) Waugh congratulates himself on overcoming the handicap of a literary family to write a novel. There are no notes or anything on these pieces to indicate when they were written or how old he was when he wrote them, which I thought was disappointing. Sure, maybe there aren't dates attached to the manuscripts but surely some scholar out there has a theory and it would be better for the average reader to offer something rather than nothing.

So there we are; back on the book-horse. Although all this rain is really putting a cramp in my reading-on-train-platforms style.

In dulci jubilo / Let us our gifties show (off)

Alice has decreed that we should all post about the books we got for Christmas, and when Alice says "post" I jump, so here it is, a photo of the books I got for Christmas:

Artist's rendition

Of course it's just what I asked for and I am very grateful and look forward to feeding my Kindle, but I admit it was a little anti-climactic. Especially since my family exchanged a lot of books this Christmas (which is unusual; I don't think a single person got a bottle of brandy or a weapon this year). Boo hoo hoo.

I'm planning to hold onto the card and buy books as I want to read them, how boring is that? I've already sketched out some of the things on the table for me in the New Year; the only addition I have to make is that I, shamefully, still have to buy and read Mindy Kaling's book. Apparently $13 is too much for me. But I'm going to bite the bullet as soon as I've cleared the decks.

The only other book-related present I got was a booklight. I adore the Kindle's non-backlit screen, but even so, there are times when one wants to read in bed without having to get up and switch the light off. The one I got has a big clip to go on a paper book, so I think I'm going to try and return it for one that's more e-reader friendly.

I hope everyone's having a cheery holiday season! The only slight spot on my Christmas has been mom's obsession with HGTV -- who are all these early 20-somethings buying condos?!

Books on the horizon

It's a dangerous thing to be the book I bring with me on a trip. I usually finish it pretty early in the proceedings, so that by the time I have to decide what's coming back with me, it's looking kind of old and dull next to the shiny exotic new foreign books.

Probably the only book I'll be bringing with me to London next month (other than missals) is my Kindle. Now praise we all our Kindles! This is precisely why I got the Kindle, and let's hope it doesn't have any kind of technical issue while I'm over there. The only potential non-ebook I might have with me is Bel Canto, which I bought at the Open Books sale and is just about the only book I bought there that isn't three inches thick.

The first thing that will probably be on the Kindle for my reading pleasure is Doctor Thorne, by my old friend Anthony Trollope. Being in the public domain is a pretty good argument for picking this series back up, huh?

Also in the free books realm, I've been meaning to re-read some Jane Austen, although my thoughts are a little too nebulous about that to translate into actual reading at the moment. I find that it's best to wait until I'm really, really interested in reading something or else it just drags.

Another possible re-read, crossing over into books that cost money, would be The Lord of the Rings. I've been itching to re-read this for about a year and I think the time might be right. I'm only hesitant because I already own three paper editions (yes, yes) and spending $23 for an ebook version makes me a little... cringey. I'll probably start reading the paper version before I leave and see how far I get.

I'll certainly have Norwegian Wood on there, since Alice is doing another read-along.

The Time in Between is another one that's on my radar. I don't know anything about it except the publisher's blurb -- and that it's got a gorgeous cover/endpaper design in hardback. You know, sometimes you just have to read things because they're intriguing. Aside from the subject matter and art direction, my interest is piqued by the fact that it's been translated from Spanish and brought to the US market. That's kind of a vote of confidence, right?

So that's sort of my reading plan for the next couple of months. Such as it is.

The War of Art

Another quick Kindle read, but diametrically opposite to How to Quit Twitter, Steven Pressfield's The War of Art has been sitting unread for a while. I read about it on the Conversion Diary blog (not normally where I get book recommendations, I guess), and then I think I picked it up on deep discount. At any rate, seeing that the book is about overcoming resistance to produce creative work, I figured it was something I should read. Over my years in grad school, I've discovered in greater and greater detail the ideas and problems I find interesting, even as my ability to sit down and focus and work and write seemed to be evaporating. Very worrying, going into the dissertation. So I read The War of Art.

The first part of the book is about Resistance. Yes, it's always capitalized. Pressfield informs you that your self-doubts, your procrastination, your self-sabotage, and your general feeling of despair are all part of Resistance: a negative spiritual force that is actively trying to prevent you accomplishing the things that will help you better yourself and the world. Pressfield catalogs all the forms and characteristics of Resistance and throughout this, I was like the Samaritan woman of the Gospel.

"Come and see a man who has told me all things whatsoever I have done." (John 4:29 - the rest of the verse is "Is he not the Christ," but note that in the interests of not blaspheming I have cut that out)

Pressfield just nails it. The "chapters" aren't even chapters, they're sort of zen-like blurbs, little nuggets of all the troubles and anxieties and whatnot you've been feeling but unable to articulate for ages. By the time I finished this first section, I was pretty much sold.

In part two, Pressfield argues that the one way to defeat Resistance (however temporarily) is to "be a pro", and again he catalogs the traits of the professional and how these counteract Resistance. Although "being a pro" is an act of the will, something you have to decide to do, in part three, Pressfield describes the angelic forces, the muses, the inspiration that will start to help you once you decide to put your head down and do the work. The third part gets a little... out there... but it still has plenty of good concepts.

The most prominent metaphor Pressfield uses is that of warfare, and even before he talks about his time in the Marine Corps, you can tell the guy's a Marine. This is more a slap-in-the-face sort of self-help book than a healing circle, and the bottom line is: you need to get to work. As I read this, I could feel myself becoming more energized. My problems felt more concrete, and I felt more motivated to address them. I felt harder, meaner, ready to fight. I draw the veil over whether any concrete action or productiveness results (but you'll know if you see me announcing my graduation in fall 2013).

What I definitely take away, though, is my further conviction that "being a writer" is a tough, unpleasant, terrible vocation. As a kid, I always said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, and my parents took me to various writing workshops and local how-to-be-a-published-author events. What I took away from these was that (1) the vast majority of aspiring writers suck in a completely irredeemable way, and (2) writing is a path full of grotesque levels of suffering. By the time I got to high school, I was telling people I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. Pressfield only confirms that impression, but I think he does a valuable thing in arguing that the suffering is there to be fought.

Twitter is for twits

I don't remember when I started Barchester Towers, but it feels like a long time ago and I've milked several posts from it, so when I finished I felt the need to take on something quick and easy. Enter Grace Dent's How to Leave Twitter - because what could be quicker and easier than Twitter?

This book was strongly recommended to me by Alice. Oh, yeah, she wrote a blog post in which she strongly recommended it to all of you, too, but she also mentioned it to me ("Dude. Read How to Leave Twitter. Do it.") at least twice in real life. Alice is my Twitter Pal, a.k.a. one of the few people who actually talks to me on Twitter, so it seemed appropriate to give in. Thus:

 

Anyone who has succumbed to the lures of Twitter really ought to read this book. It's hilarious. As far as Dent is concerned, Twitter is for aimless chatter and spying on other people's lives, and that's precisely why it's awesome. She has no time for your sanctimonious concerns about privacy and shortening attention spans, much less -- spare us -- your social media strategies.

I'm a really boring tweeter -- I think to myself a lot, so Twitter ends up being an extension of this, with lots of "got to put on clothes" and "when will I learn not to take this bus" -- so I'm not in the position to criticize anyone, but thank goodness Grace Dent is. She goes through not only the various stages of Twitter usage, from newbs to full-blown addicts, but also the various breeds of insufferable tweeters and their insufferable tweets. You will recognize these people, and also the withdrawl Dent writes about in her steps for quitting.

You have not left Twitter if you pop back on to Twitter to tweet about your success.

Guilty as charged; whenever I decide to take time off from the internet I almost instantly think of ten witty comments about the situation, which totally ruins it. I said that anyone on Twitter should read this, but really anyone who finds it difficult to take the high road about social media ought to enjoy it. I am neck deep in social media and I have no one but myself to blame. I lived on message boards and AIM in high school, so I guess it's not surprising that I have a higher tolerance to "living online" than other people, but it seems like more and more of my friends are becoming once a week Facebookers, holding themselves aloft from Zuckerberg's increasingly troubling cesspool of personal data. I know, I know, I know, but meanwhile I can't help myself; I'm Facebooking, I'm Twittering, and yes, as someone accused me the other day, I am indeed Google-plus-ing.

Dent (no fan of Facebook, to be fair) blasts through this uneasiness, proudly declaring her love of the Twitter format and whatever creepiness it might involve. Have I mentioned it's a funny book? It's a really funny book, and it totally makes me jealous of her obviously very fun Twitter life.

It's rather menacing, isn't it? 'Hello, I'm FOLLOWING you,' you're whispering electronically. 'Don't be alarmed. I've decided to silently observe your life for my own personal gratification.'

 I especially liked her description of "Desktop Multi-application Spiralling Circle of Hell Syndrome" which basically is what happens to me whenever I try to do more than two hours of work in a row.

One more addition: so I said anyone who is on any social media should read this, but actually anyone interested in the issue of women's voices in the media, or in the democratizing potential of the internet should probably have a look, at least at the chapter about women on Twitter. It's funny and fascinating. Dent writes that when she joined Twitter she discovered

millions of women being sharp, wise, practical, amusing. At the age of 35 I felt like someone had opened a gate into a fantastic secret garden full of gobby Amazonians.

She gives a funny critique of women's magazines that feels ancient but is sadly still very on-the-nose, and runs down the (British) TV schedule to point out the lack of the kind of honest female voices that are present in abundance on Twitter. Gender on the internet is always an interesting subject, and Dent's testimony (which includes some really eye-opening examples of how print editors have edited her writing to be "more feminine") is especially so.

I am only human; and while I have a Twitter account I can't help but have low expectations of a book about Twitter. This one, though, is great, and as I hope I've conveyed successfully, it's not "just" a book about Twitter. It's also super-funny and a great commute read.

Clara and (her boss) Mr Tiffany

This book first caught my eye at a closing-out Borders store, where it was on a big display at the front of the store. As I stood in line (I know Alice thinks anyone who buys books at a closing-out Borders is a chump but I had good reasons both times) I thought how sad I'd be if I were the author of a book so prominently displayed in a dying store. Also I thought about how pretty the cover is:

Because we are nerds, my family did not go to Disney World etc during our recent trip to Orlando, but we did visit the Morse Museum in Winter Park. I don't really understand why the Morse Museum of American Art is called that because really its focus is an extensive collection of Tiffany stained glass (and related items) collected by a couple by the name of McKean. Anyway, naming complexities aside, it's a very nice museum and I enjoyed it a lot. I had never seen Tiffany windows up close before, and I hadn't realized that they have the most beautiful, complex textures. Many of the windows have big chunks of glass in them or multiple layers of glass bolted together. If they had allowed photos I would have taken one at an angle to show you. Anyway, I saw Clara and Mr Tiffany in the giftshop, which reminded me of it, so that when I needed a test subject for the library's Overdrive/Kindle service, this is what I downloaded.

In the afterword (or the acknowledgments or somesuch) Vreeland explains that the main character, Clara Driscoll, was a real person, and that the book was inspired by an exhibit at the pretentiously hyphenated New-York Historical Society about the women workers at Tiffany Studios. Driscoll worked for Tiffany before her marriage, and at the beginning of the book, she is returning to work after her husband's death.

I opened the beveled-glass door under the sign announcing Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in ornate bronze. A new sign with a new name. Fine. I felt new too.

It is a cliche of writing advice that you ought to have a really good first sentence. These are conspicuously good first sentences, if you ask me, and so I am calling them to your attention.

Having opened the door and felt new, Driscoll goes in and meets with Louis Comfort Tiffany, seeing his current projects and asking for her job back. And then, in their first meeting, mind you, this happens:

I was struck by a tantalizing idea. "Imagine it reduced in size and made of translucent glass instead. Once you figure how to secure the pieces in a dome, that could be the method and the shape of a lampshade. A wraparound window of say--" I looked around the room--"peacock feathers." He jerked his head up with a startled expression, the idea dawning on him as if it were his own. "Lampshades in leaded glass," he said in wonder, his blue eye sparking. "Just think where that could go," I whispered.

Yes, that's right, folks, that just happened. Argh, seriously, I thought to myself as I read this. In the afterword or acknowledgments or whatever at the end of the book, Vreeland explains that among specialists, there is a theory that Clara Driscoll was actually the inventor of the Tiffany lamp, and she (the author) chose to adopt that theory in writing the novel.

Now, let me be clear: I have no beef with the theory that Driscoll rather than Tiffany came up with the lamp idea. It gives Vreeland some very, very interesting themes to do with creativity, attribution, etc, through the rest of the book. However, I find that particular little eureka paragraph really hamfisted. At the very least, I think it's a mistake to introduce this before we've seen Clara in action. The reader doesn't know yet that she's a skilled and experienced craftswoman; she just waltzes in and drops a bomb. It's annoying.

In fact, my major beef with this book was the handling of the History. There was a lot of stuff shoehorned in, sometimes as awkward exposition, and sometimes for period flavor (I guess):

"There are a few things I know that might explain his behavior. I've been researching his family history for an article to come out during the Chicago Fair." "Please, tell me everything."

"You're not going to be here for New Year's Eve? The big celebration of the consolidation of the boroughs at City Hall Park?" He hesitated on the brink of agreeing, so I went on. "Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx all one city, the second largest in the world." 

He asked, "Do you know this poem? Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free [...] A woman named Emma Lazarus wrote that poem as a donation to an auction to help fund the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It's not well know, but I believe someday it will be.

"Someday, when women are considered equal to men, it will become known that a woman of great importance created those lamps. This isn't the Middle Ages, Clara. You will not be lost to history like the makers of those medieval windows in Gloucester are. Someone will find you."

How prescient! This stuff, along with the name-checking of basically every super-famous person, song, work of art, etc, of the period, is on just about every page. The clippings file on my Kindle is overflowing with it.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but it's like if, instead of having a set and costumes, the actors just came and smacked you in the head and said "We're in the past, ok!" If good historical novels evoke the ambiance of an era, this one is full of old-fashioned London "pea soup" fog.

There's also a bonkers, bat-shit crazy romantic plot that I can hardly even tell you about. I just sort of decided to forget about it after it happened, but it did involve some deeply anachronistic attitudes and deeply terrible dialogue about sex. E.g:

"I'd like to work on your lower east side. Do you think we would both feel tingly? We might both find cause for applause."

YES REALLY.

All of this is a real shame, because (what ought to be) the core of the book, the story of women workers in the arts and particularly Clara Driscoll is fascinating stuff. The book encompasses both Driscoll's developing attitudes toward her own work and the emerging women's labor movement. This is a good story, and I enjoyed it even as I was highlighting some awful obvious piece of CONTEXT HELLO THIS IS SOME HISTORY on every other page.

If I'd been the editor, I would have put in a little historical introduction up front to inform the reader that Driscoll was a real person, which is, after all what makes it interesting. And secondly I would have cut this book waaaaay down. There was no need to shoehorn in the contents of the Dictionary of Turn-of-the-Century America. "Women working in the arts" is more than sufficiently interesting.

Almost like magic... almost.

Hip-hip-hooray! Finally, ebooks are available for Kindle through Overdrive, which provides ebooks for the fantastic Chicago Public Library, of which I am a patron. I love my Kindle, and I love getting books delivered near-instantly, but instant gratification in my case also means instant credit card bills -- or something like that, I don't know. Anyway, I've spent way more than I ever meant to on Kindle books, and the prospect of getting my library books in Kindle form was super exciting, and now it's here!

The easiest way to find ebook is to search for them in the "downloadable media" section of the ChiPubLib website. They come up in the main catalog, too, but there's an extra click needed to send you from the library catalog to the Overdrive catalog. As you can see, there are limited numbers of digital copies, and you add the format you want to your "cart". After I checked out, the page now shows 1 copy available but you can still pick ePub or Kindle, so thankfully the publishers don't appear to be so dumb as to limit numbers of copies in each format.

Once you click "add to cart" you get the option of doing more browsing or continuing to the checkout, although the cart clears out after 30 minutes. To check out you log in with your card number and zip code, just like you do to place a hold on a physical book; no need for a special Overdrive password or anything. HOORAY.

I was really pleased with the amount of information you get at each step, including the lending period and limits. It's nice to have that kind of detail in front of you, especially when this is your first time dealing with this aspect of the library's services.

Once you've clicked "confirm check out", Overdrive's end of the business is pretty much done. You've now checked out the book and once you click "get for Kindle" you get thrown over to Amazon.

Wooo!! How exciting is this right?! At this point Amazon assures you that your notes and bookmarks in this book will be saved automatically, which I interpret as: even though we're going to snatch this book back the second it goes overdue, you'll be able to pick up where you left off when you check it back out. Awesome. But then I start to think, I don't remember ever setting up my Kindle for wifi...

And indeed, I haven't, because my old Kindle 2 apparently doesn't have wifi. Sad trombone.

Oh, this kind of kills me. Amazon updated the Kindle a matter of weeks after I bought mine (and they lowered the price too, IIRC), but I didn't mind (mostly) because I was so happy to have it that I was just glad to have had the extra couple of weeks with it. It's a pretty simple, stripped down device; I've always been pretty confident that Kindle 2 functions as well as Kindle 3 for the one thing I use it for. Plus, the semester was starting so even if I had waited like a responsible person until my first paycheck, I would have been too busy to read and wouldn't have wanted to buy even a newer cheaper model. And now I find that poor old Kindle -- Kindle Antiquior -- is apparently unable to cope with the newest and latest.

Ok, it's not that big a deal. I still got the book. I downloaded it and transferred it via USB, the way we used to do in the stone ages (I guess). So here it is, and you'll be hearing more about it soon enough, I'm sure:

I don't know why the books have to go over wifi (except that it costs Amazon less than over the data network, which is probably all it is). Does the fact that I had to download it over USB mean that it won't update/sync over the data connection? I hope not. I've been pretty good at reading and returning things within the loan period lately but that hasn't always been the case (see: the $10 overdue fee I racked up in the spring), and the prospect of having your place still marked seems too useful to want to miss out on.

All in all, I'm really pleased that Overdrive and thus the ChiPubLib is now serving up ebooks for the Kindle. Yes, it is officially now

The Future

Spinsters getting things done

Agatha Christie's The Murder in the Vicarage was free for Kindle, so of course I snapped it up. Of course it was good. Liking an Agatha Christie mystery is like, I don't know, enjoying a symphony by Beethoven or admitting that the French make some pretty decent wine. I liked that the story was told from the first-person perspective of one of the by-stander characters; that was pretty neat. Also, sunsets are profoundly beautiful.

Agatha Christie novels seem like classic old-lady reading, which, I admit, is kind of a barrier for me, although I also avoid books that are very popular currently. I will need to get over that because Miss Marple is a very enjoyable character. Of course she's a kind of soul sister to Dorothy Sayers' Miss Climpson, another spinster using her snooping powers for good. And I suspect I'm drawn to both of them through my childhood love of Nancy Drew -- another series I burned through as quickly as possible. Sure, Nancy had Bess and Ned and her father (Mr. Drew, Esq.?), but for the most part her investigating activities were powered by her own snooping.

Miss Climpson, if you're wondering, first appears in Unnatural Death; another notable spinster of the Wimsey series is Miss Murchison, who appears in Strong Poison.

Of course (setting aside Nancy Drew, Yank of the first order) both Climpson and Marple also belong to a very particular moment in the history of women, and specifically of single women. The late Victorian and Edwardian period had seen the rise of professional women asserting their right to support themselves, often through serving the professional needs of other women. Although many scholars argue that the rise of Freudian theories, which cast suspicion on single women as "repressed" (see: Gaudy Night), put an end to this flowering of independent single women, the situation between the wars was still very significant. After all, it was widely believed that the slaughter of the First World War must leave many women single who would otherwise have gotten married. And, let's don't forget, women in Britain got the vote in two stages: in 1918 women who might be qualified as "older" or more stable received the vote, and in 1928 women got the vote on the same basis as men.

All of which is to say that in the 1920s and 1930s when Christie and Sayers were writing the characters of Marple and Climpson, respectively, we have a society that was thinking about the contributions women on their own could make to society, and had been thinking about this for some time. Of course this isn't all rosy. Both Marple and Climpson are obviously "marginal"; they're almost constantly being insulted directly or indirectly. Their detective activities are an outlet of useful activity in lives that would otherwise, by implication, be pretty useless. But I still think they're interesting characters that point up a contemporary interest in spinsters, and a wider sense that women were becoming important (somehow).

Setting the historical interest aside, I've always liked characters who use their Special Expertise to solve a problem. Maybe that's why I like mysteries so much: because I'm just waiting for the situation in which my knowing what guttae are or how to format a bibliographic entry in Chicago style makes me the hero.

I have recommended this book to strangers (before now, I mean)

Few things make me feel more guilty, more instantly, than using the wishlist on the Amazon app on my iPhone to bookmark titles I'm looking at in a physical bookstore. Getting the book from the library later makes me feel less guilty; buying it from Amazon makes me feel more guilty. So following that logic, this book amounts to a mortal sin since I saw it in Open Books (a charity used bookstore) and then bought it for my Kindle using the wicked phone. Oh dear.

Worth it though.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes drew me in first with the title and then the cover art. I don't think I bothered to turn it over, because the following quotation was on the cover:

"If Nick Hornby and PG Wodehouse conspired to write a book while strolling through Chekhov's cherry orchard, this might be the result." -- The Wall Street Journal

Sold!

Claiming that a book bears some resemblance to PG Wodehouse sets a pretty high bar, and I would say that An Evening of Long Goodbyes is the best possible result of such a comparison. The thing is that Murray's not trying to write the kind of goofy, fluffy entertainment that Wodehouse produced.

The book has two elements: a humorous and light-hearted part and a dark and tragic part. The first half of the book is less dark than the second, but both the bitter and the sweet are present all the way through. It has to do with the ways in which people try to cope with reality by avoiding it. The main character aspires to the kind of brainlessness usually reserved for Bertie Wooster's chums, but as the story progresses you not only see him raked over the coals for this, you also start to sympathize with him. I'm not describing this at all well, but Murray manages to make the book "uneven" in the best possible way.

When I first finished the book, my main reaction was "oh, so I'm done with this now"; then, about 15 minutes later I loved it. Two days later, I was in a Waterstones in London and saw a woman browsing the new books and looking at Murray's latest/second book, Skippy Dies and I actually interrupted her to awkwardly recommend An Evening of Long Goodbyes. And as if that weren't awkward enough I told her she might hate it. "Hello stranger, you really ought to read this random book that's not in front of us, although, on second thought you might hate it."

And so that is the message I send to you. Go read this book. You might hate it, but probably not (or not for long).