Category: Books

Fall Potpourri

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NEW BEGINNINGS

As the saying goes, you can’t go home again.  But you can go visit.  We spent a wonderful day in Bethlehem at Lehigh University celebrating the inauguration of Lehigh’s 15th president, Joe Helble.  The campus looked lovely, and the ceremony had the requisite pomp prompting misty eyes.  The Chief Penguin and I were pleased to see and chat with so many former colleagues and friends.  The experience was simultaneously a trip down memory lane and a day of optimism for the future.  Go Lehigh, cheers for the Brown and White!

RECENT READING–SUPER LIBRARIAN

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Belle da Costa Greene (history net.com)

Marie Benedict writes novels focused on strong women, usually ones who have been ignored by history or not fully appreciated.  I’ve read several of her works, but this one stands out as one of the best.  Bella da Costa Greene was initially hired by financier J. P. Morgan to catalog and document his library of rare manuscripts and books.  Over time, her role expanded.  She became his chief negotiator and agent in the purchase of new items, even traveling to England and the Continent solo.  Their relationship was a close one, both professionally and personally, and after Morgan’s death, she was named the first director of the library.  All of this would be remarkable enough for the early 20th century when few women had such prominent positions, but Greene had a big secret.  Born Black, she had lived as a white woman since her teens.  Benedict and Murray’s novel depicts the stresses and challenge of maintaining this façade at a time of more rabid racism.  

This book will delight my librarian friends and is a welcome tribute to one woman’s determination and accomplishments.  Partly due to her efforts, the Morgan Library transitioned from a strictly private library to a library and museum open to the public.  Now I need to make another visit!  (~JWFarrington)

COMPELLING LIVE THEATER!

To Kill a Mockingbird

After a long Covid hiatus, Broadway is back.  The other evening, we went to see To Kill a Mockingbird, and it was simply marvelous!  The entry lines for checking vaccination status moved along efficiently, and masks were required in line and everywhere in the theater.  Theater staff enforced mask wearing, citing individuals with a reminder if they weren’t complying.  We had third row seats and the hall was full.

Like many, I first read Harper Lee’s novel when I was a teen and then again later in life.  I recalled upright Atticus Finch and Scout, his curious, frisky little girl.  Set in the 1930’s in a small Alabama town, multiple strands are interwoven with the main plot.  Atticus’s willingness to defend an innocent Black man against death penalty charges is consistent with his belief in the goodness and decency in everyone.  Later, his belief is tested when events spin out of control.  His two children, Jem and Scout, and their friend Dill don’t always understand or agree with him, but they defend him.  It’s a powerful play, set in a different time, yet with messages that resonate today.  Despite its seriousness, there are occasional bits of humor, often provided by the children acting as chorus and interpreters.

Jeff Daniels as Atticus and Cecilia Keenan-Bolger as Scout are both superb, while Michael Braugher is convincing in his Broadway debut as the accused Tom Robinson.   Highly recommended!  (~JWFarrington)

CRAFT IN THE KITCHEN

Fanciful Halloween pumpkins

Clementines for Halloween

My older granddaughter loves to bake, but she also enjoys just puttering in the kitchen and inventing creative ways to make edible food items.  In anticipation of Halloween, she devised a clever way to showcase clementines as jack o’lanterns.  

Peeled clementines are decorated with a banana slice and some green colored yogurt for the top and the stem.  Eyes, nose, and mouth are devised from slices of prune glued on with molasses or honey.  Sprinkles or other decorative touches can also be incorporated.  This was a fun activity for both granddaughters and me.  E also has her own blog, but since it’s available by invitation only, I’m unable to share the link.  Suffice it to say, she wrote a detailed recipe complete with a photo. 

Note: Header photo of Lehigh’s University Center (Packer Hall) and clementines ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved). 

Tidy Tidbits: A Novel & A Film

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A FORTHCOMING NOVEL

INDIAN WOMEN AND RELIGIOUS POLITICS

Honor by Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar (esalen.org)

I received this novel as an Advance Reading Copy (ARC) through BookBrowse, an e-mail newsletter that I recently discovered.   It will be published in January 2022.  I devoured the book in a day and a half and loved it!

Indian American journalist Smita reports on gender issues and travels the world to do so.  As a favor to a colleague, she returns to India after 20 years away.  Initially she does not realize that she will be covering the verdict in a trial of two Hindu brothers who maimed their sister and murdered her Muslim husband.  Through her main characters, author Umrigar presents several differing perspectives on India.  The reader is kept wondering for most of the novel why Smita has such a scornful, negative view of her native land.  Affluent Mohan, a professional man, lives in Mumbai and loves it despite its complexities.  Meena, the severely injured wife and mother, lives in a poor village and chafes under her brothers’ dictates.  She challenges what is deemed allowable behavior for a Hindu woman by working in a factory and then marrying Abdul.

The novel unfolds slowly as Smita travels with Mohan, filling in as driver, to interview Meena and several others.  Smita questions why she feels so hateful toward her country while simultaneously both resenting and appreciating Mohan’s decency and kindness.  The concept of “honor” and what it means whether one is Hindu or Muslim plays out against violence, corruption, love, and sympathy in a multi-faceted society.

Some years ago, I read The Space Between Us, another novel by this author about class differences between two women.  I thought it was very good, but this new novel is more powerful.  (~JWFarrington)

A RECENT FILM

LOVE IN THE 1960’S

Last Letter from Your Lover (Netflix)

Jennifer & Boot (refinery29.com)

Based on a novel of the same name by JoJo Moyes, this romantic drama is schmaltzy, but good entertainment.  Jennifer Stirling is trapped in a loveless marriage, controlled by her husband and constrained by the times.  Enigmatic throughout, but elegant in dresses, hats, and gloves, she attracts the attention of reporter Anthony, aka Boot, O’Hare, and they begin an affair.  Decades later, one of his letters turns up in a newspaper archive.  Young reporter Elly Haworth makes it her mission to identify the correspondents.  

Of the principals, Jennifer is the least substantial character, and one wonders what other than her beauty has kept Boot’s interest.  I watched this while on the treadmill and it kept me moving!  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header image of woman reading courtesy of readersdigest.co.uk

Tidy Tidbits: Gander, Oxford, New York

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This week’s blog brings together several compelling works. One is a musical related to 9/11 while the other two are books. One book is a wonderful novel about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, while the other is a cancer memoir, painful yet ultimately redeeming.

POWERFUL VIEWING: Remembering 9/11

Come from Away (Apple TV+)

Plane on the tarmac at Gander (appleinsider.com)

I doubt there is anyone of a certain age who doesn’t recall where he or she was on September 11, 2001. Come from Away (2013) is a musical about the passengers whose planes were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, and how they were embraced by the local residents.   Unabashedly energetic, even boisterous, it is also a compelling and heart-tugging perspective on five days of confusion, chaos, and community.  Folks of different religions, nationalities, and cultures were thrown together at a tragic, uncomfortable time.   

Members of the cast play multiple roles, switching back and forth from Gander community leaders to one of the many passengers.  Standouts for me were the female airline pilot played by Jenn Colella based on the real Beverley Bass; Joel Hatch as the mayor of Gander; and Beulah Davis, chief organizer and comforter, played by Astrid Van Wieren.  There is conflict, craziness, and coming together.  I found watching it an uplifting experience.  A live Broadway performance was filmed for this production and is aired with no breaks or intermission.  Highly recommended!

RECENT READING

THE LANGUAGE OF WOMEN

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams 

Author & her book jacket (betterreading.com.au)

I loved this novel and read it in just a day.  If you love words and their meanings and how they are used, you too will be fascinated.  Author Williams wondered how gender affects the use and understanding of words.   Given that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was largely the work of older white Victorian men, she crafted a novel that reflects first a child’s, then a young woman’s participation in the creation of the dictionary.  Some of the characters such as Dr. James Murray, the chief architect, and several of the male lexicographers are historic figures. So is Edith Thompson, a historian who contributed definitions and quotations for many thousands of entries.

The novel focuses on Esme, a child of six, who hides under the sorting table collecting the occasional stray definition slip of paper. Over the course of publication of all the fascicles from A-B to Z , Esme becomes a woman.    Esme spends hours in the Scriptorium where the work is carried out.  As she gets older, she becomes involved in sorting mail, then checking quotes at the Bodleian and other libraries, and eventually taking on some editing and correction duties.  Lizzie, the household maid of all work, takes care of Esme and a friendship develops.

Esme is curious and full of questions and begins to wonder why some words, particularly those spoken by the lower classes, but not written down in books, are not to be included in the OED.  She gets a graphic education in colorful language from Mabel, a down-at-the-heels vendor in the local market and creates her own slips with quotations for these less than polite terms. An only child whose mother has died, Esme leads a sheltered life until she meets actress Tilda and her brother Bill, encounters the suffragist movement, and delivers pages to the typesetting room at the press where she meets Gareth, a handsome young compositor.

The novel relates the laborious process of releasing the letters of the alphabet in sections from 1888 to completion in 1928 alongside the coming-of-age of Esme from age six to middle age.  For Esme, the treatment of the suffragettes is disturbing, while the exodus of men to war means more work coupled with an all-consuming worry for their safety. How Williams weaves in the suffrage movement and the impact of WWI add to the richness of this story. But, some readers may be surprised at the ending and question if the author wraps things up too neatly.

Esme is not a common name. I wondered if Williams chose it as homage to J. D. Salinger’s notable story, For Esme with Love and Squalor, about a 13-year-old girl and a soldier during the Second World War.  

Like the process of compiling a comprehensive dictionary, this novel unfolds slowly and gradually.  I was committed to it from the first paragraphs.  Highly recommended!  (~JWFarrington)

CANCER AND BEYOND

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Author Jaouad (latimes.com)

Cancer memoirs often take one of two forms.  Either they are an account of battling and surviving the medical aspects of cancer or they are one individual’s experience and reflections which end just before death.  Ms. Jaouad’s memoir is somewhat different in that she was diagnosed with leukemia at age 22, just after completing college.  It was a delayed diagnosis, and she was by then very sick. She underwent massive chemotherapy treatments, endured numerous hospitalizations due to infections, and ultimately required a bone marrow transplant, a long and arduous process involving months of isolation.  

The medical details in the first part of her memoir are graphic, frightening and often unpleasant.  Yet she writes about them with candor, humility, and even occasional humor.  She was blessed with loving parents and an unbelievable new boyfriend who re-arranged his life to be her primary caregiver.  

What is perhaps more appealing is part two in which she attempts to regain a sense of normalcy.  All treatments are over, and she’s deemed able to travel and work again.  Yet her immune system is still, and may always be, fragile.  She tires easily and finds it difficult to focus and apply herself without the goal of the next medical procedure.  How to be normal again is not something the medical team has covered.  

Probably what saves her, or at least provides emotional and intellectual sustenance, is a solo cross-country journey she undertakes.  Dubbed the One Hundred Day Project, it is to visit individuals who wrote or e-mailed her after she published a regular column in the New York Times. Meeting these almost strangers, Jaouad gains perspective on herself and reflects on how she was often self-centered and needy in some of her relationships.  I found this section of the book satisfying as she finally goes beyond her four years of treatment and comes into her own as a more well-rounded person.  I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone, but some readers may find her journey amazing and her sprightly writing a gift.  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photo of morning clouds ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

Maine Writers: Yesterday & Today

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Addendum to Part 1: Contemporary Authors

Richard Ford

Richard Ford (theguardian.com)

The author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction, Richard Ford is probably best known for his four novels featuring Frank Bascombe.  Bascombe first appears in The Sportswriter (1986) and next in Ford’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Independence Day, published in 1995, then in two later novels.  I read and very much enjoyed Independence Day.  Richard Ford lives in Boothbay; fellow Mainer Richard Russo lives in Portland.  In my last post, I erred on Russo’s residence, and it was Ford who was recommended for inclusion in my blog by my friend.

Lily King

Lily King (panmacmillan.com.au)

When browsing in Print, a Portland bookstore I like, I discovered that another favorite author, Lily King, lives in Maine.  In Portland, in fact.  Her earlier award-winning novel, Euphoria, loosely based on Margaret Mead and some of her colleagues, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times.  I loved that novel of relationships and more recently, enjoyed Writers & Lovers, a coming into age and love story set in the familiar, to me, Cambridge environs.  King’s first book of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, comes out this fall. 

MAINE AUTHORS  Part 2: Writers of Long Ago

William Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Henry W. Longfellow (mount auburn.org)

There was a time when every 7th or 8th grade English class read Evangeline, one of Longfellow’s long poems.  And many school children also read or heard Paul Revere’s Ride as part of learning about the Revolutionary War.  Longfellow also wrote the epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), about a Native American chief.  A writer, traveler, and linguist, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an important figure in 19th century America.  Born in Portland, he grew up and lived for thirty years in a house that today is a museum.  The Chief Penguin and I toured the house several years ago and enjoyed learning more about his life and his family.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

Sarah Orne Jewett (peoplepill.com)

Sarah Orne Jewett was a novelist and short story writer known for literary regionalism.  She put more stock in descriptions of country life than in plot.  Her best-known work is probably the novella, The Country of the Pointed Firs, published in 1896. I read this book years ago with the library book group at Penn.  Other noted works are A Country Doctor and A White Heron.  She was born and died in South Berwick near the Maine coast and was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College in 1901.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

Rachel Carson (smithsonianmag.com)

A marine biologist, writer, and later conservationist, Rachel Carson’s most popular work is Silent Spring (1962) about the harmful effects of insecticide spraying.  An earlier work, The Sea Around Us (1951), won a National Book Award.  Carson was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Maryland for some years, but she summered for 12 years on Southport Island.  We have gone to Southport every year for the past 30 years.  I always pause to read the plaque to Carson at the Newagen Seaside Inn where she was a frequent guest.  After her death, her ashes were scattered into the sea from here.  

E. B. White (1899-1985)

E. B. White (historylink.org)

E. B. White, a noted author of essays and children’s books, also wrote poems and brief sketches.  He was a reporter and freelance writer before joining the staff of the New Yorker in 1927. Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., he lived and worked in North Brooklin, Maine, sending in his regular columns and pieces from there.  I have fond recollections of my father first reading Stuart Little to me.  Our third-grade teacher read Charlotte’s Web to us, and I read it again later for myself.  It’s my favorite of his children’s works.  White also revised Strunk’s The Elements of Style which became a bible for aspiring writers.  White was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom and also a special Pulitzer Prize citation.

May Sarton (1912-1995)

May Sarton (goodreads.com)

Belgian-American by birth, May Sarton was a poet, novelist, and memoirist.  When a child, she and her parents moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She lived there and in New Hampshire before spending the last five years of her life in York, Maine.  Sarton was a prolific writer and considered by some, Carolyn Heilbrun for one, to be a pioneer in the field of women’s autobiography. Heilbrun cited the publication of Journal of a Solitude in 1973.  Some years ago, I binge read quite a few of her novels and memoirs.  Ones that stand out are Shadow of a Man, The Magnificent Spinster, and Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-ninth Year.  Sarton brought a laser focus and a very personal perspective to issues of friendship and love and the vagaries of aging.

A NOTE ON PORTLAND BOOKSTORES

Portland, Maine supports three notable independent bookstores, each of which is worth a visit.  Probably the best known is Sherman’s on Exchange Street which is just one of about five stores in this group.  Sherman’s began in Bangor and has a big presence in Boothbay Harbor, with other stores in Camden, Damariscotta, and Freeport.  They sell lots of new books, but its larger stores are also a source for children’s toys and games, some housewares, along with stationery and other paper goods.  

(Facebook.com)

Longfellow Books, centrally located in Monument Square, has been around for about 20 years and is spacious and inviting with attractive storefront windows.  During the pandemic, they were closed except for curbside pick-up, but in recent months have more fully opened.  These folks are passionate about books and stock new titles plus used ones and have an especially colorful children’s corner.  When browsing, I always find a title here that I’ve not seen elsewhere.  Magazines and a good selection of note cards round out their offerings.

Print, located on Congress Street in the East End, is the newest sibling in the neighborhood, having opened in 2016.  Its co-owners bring a wealth of bookselling experience and are also the offspring of writer parents.  One, Emily Russo, is the daughter of Richard Russo. Print is cozy and welcoming (I was greeted as soon as I stepped through the door) with a well-chosen selection of current fiction and nonfiction, sections on Maine writers, and a slew of cooking and baking books, especially about pies. For its size, they have an impressive section of middle reader books.  My 9-year-old granddaughter is a voracious reader, so I’m always on the lookout for books for her.

Attracting readers and providing great customer service are hallmarks of what keeps a bookstore in business.  To some extent, each of these stores has book signings and author talks and will order books not in stock upon request.  Some also publish free e-mail newsletters. There is no requirement to live nearby to receive their e-mails.  I receive Longfellow Books’ weekly update on recommended new titles out in hardback and paper and also a quarterly e-mail from Three Lives & Company in New York.  These newsletters are a fun and easy way to learn about what’s new and get the opinions of various bookstore staff.

Note: Header photo of Maine’s waters ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).