Tag: Jacqueline Winspear

Tidy December Sunrise

December Diversions

JWF Leave a comment

ON THE SCREEN

Holiday Cooking Class 

The other evening, we enjoyed a cooking demonstration.  Clarkson University, the Chief Penguin’s alma mater, invited alumni to see and join their campus chef in the preparation of several dishes.  They included a colorful cranberry and whiskey cocktail, baked brie, baby potatoes wrapped in bacon, and julienned root vegetables with pistachio butter.  

One example of baby potatoes (serious eats.com)

The ingredient list was shared ahead of time and full recipes after the event.  The chef was very well organized, moved efficiently through the steps, and we could almost taste the results!  This was a different kind of viewing experience and a very successful one!  We haven’t yet bought any ingredients, but we will likely try at least one recipe.

The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)

Young Beth (Netflix.com)

The Queen’s Gambit, the name for an opening chess move, is a suspenseful seven-part series, even if you don’t play chess or understand the intricacies of the game.  It’s the 1950’s and when Beth Harmon’s mother dies in a car crash, the eight-year-old is sent to a very strict orphanage.  Lonely and feeling out of place, she lingers in the basement where the custodian plays chess by himself.  Observing and later learning from him, she demonstrates a real aptitude for the game.  

As a teenager, she is adopted by a childless couple. With the encouragement of her new mother, Beth enters a state chess championship, mostly to earn the prize money. As the 1960’s advance, Beth’s prowess takes her across the country and around the world.  She stands out as female in a very male world  One wonders if and when she will stumble.  

At first, I thought her character was based on a real person, but this is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Walter Tevis published in 1983.  Good entertainment!   

RECENT READING

CHILDHOOD IN POSTWAR BRITAIN

This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear

Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the popular and award-winning Maisie Dobbs mystery series.  She has now put her hand to writing about her childhood growing up poor in rural Kent.  Born in 1955, when asked if she considered herself more a child of the 50’s or the 60’s, she reflected that her childhood was really Edwardian.  Steeped in nature and the countryside, she and her brother John spent summers spent picking hops with their parents.  They also lived for many years without indoor plumbing or a telephone.  It was a spare life based on hard physical labor of all sorts.  

In sprightly prose, Winspear shares her delight in being outdoors in all weathers and her love of stories, stories told by her mother, but also by her many aunts and uncles.  Her parents started married life as vagabonds of a sort. Later, her father established a business as a home contractor while her mother rose in the civil service as a prison administrator.  The memoir is a collection of stories and reminiscences, many grounded in the horrors of WWI, with only a bit about how Winspear became a writer.  More than anything, it is a loving and candid tribute to her parents, both deceased, and to a way of life now gone.  (~JWFarrington)

A NOVEL FOR LIBRARY LOVERS

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

Writers of historical fiction often settle on a particular period and then create multiple works set in that era.  Fiona Davis focuses her novels on notable historic buildings in New York.  Earlier works highlighted the Dakota apartment building, the Barbizon hotel for young women, and the art school housed in Grand Central Terminal.  Her newest, The Lions of Fifth Avenue, takes place largely within the New York Public Library’s grand edifice.  In the early years of the 20th century, an interior apartment for the library superintendent was tucked away out of sight.  

Lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library (nypl.org)

In 1913, Jack and Laura Lyons, the superintendent and his wife, live in this apartment with their two children Harry and Pearl.  Jack is responsible for the safety and security of the building including its rare books.  When books go missing, he is a prime suspect.  Fast forward to 1993.   Sadie, a special collections librarian, is organizing an exhibit of rare first editions and other works in the Berg Collection, when several volumes go missing.  How the thefts in 1993 are linked to the events of 1913 make for an intriguing story of family relationships and the world of books.  

Davis has done her research, and it shows in her knowledge of the NYPL and the trade in stolen books.  She also brings in changing sexual mores and the constraints faced by women who desire more than just housewifery and motherhood.  The reader can assume there will be a happy or satisfactory ending, but how the author gets us there keeps us engaged.  (~JWFarrington)

Book Notes: Strout & Winspear

JWF 2 Comments

BOOK GROUPS

I have been a participant in a book group of some sort almost forever.  In my 20’s, I was part of a group that was made up of English professors and two librarians, me being one of the latter.  All members were female.  I can’t recall the titles we discussed, but I do know I felt intimidated by the intellectual heft of this assemblage.  Over time I came to realize that this feeling was due somewhat to the competitive egos of these women each one trying to outdo the other with her insights.

In my 30’s, a colleague and I co-founded a lunchtime book group with the possibly risque Fear of Flying by Erica Jong as our first title.  Still going strong, the group  is democratically run with everyone taking a turn selecting a book and leading the discussion.  Subsequently, I’ve been a member of two women’s book groups on the west coast, one with a paid facilitator and the other more casual where the members choose the book by consensus.  Having a paid leader was quite a different experience; she presented the options for what we might read and had some definite ideas about each work.  She was a skillful facilitator and her unique lens made for lively discussions.

In my last job, I convened and facilitated a book group for museum members which focused on books related to science and the natural world.  While there were a few regulars, different people showed up each time, making each meeting its own event with little in the way of a cohesive group.  One particularly noteworthy book was the graphic biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, Radioactive by Lauren Redniss.   This group expanded my own reading of science-related works—who would have thought it?

Today I follow the selections of my San Francisco book group virtually (and even occasionally read the book) as well as participate in a group here in Florida.  I like the discipline of reading a book for discussion, particularly if it is one that I wouldn’t otherwise have read.  I enjoy the give and take of a group and am keen to hear others’ perspectives—it enriches and expands the reading experience!

RECENT READING

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout.  The book group here is small and only meets five times a year, but it does offer an opportunity to share reactions to a work.  My Name is Lucy Barton was my pick for April.  I thought Strout’s earlier book, Olive Kittredge, was excellent and it’s a title I’ve recommended over and over and given as a gift.

My first reading of Lucy Barton left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed.  It’s a quiet book with an intriguing structure (a novel within a novel) that I didn’t fully appreciate until re-read it more slowly.  This time I was drawn in and captured by Lucy’s plaintive child-like voice and her slightly probing, but mostly unsatisfactory, conversations with her mother.  Her accounts of the abject poverty her family experienced (living for many years in a garage), her allusions to the abuse she suffered, her struggle to pass in a sophisticated Manhattan world, and her growing sense of herself as a writer and a person worth knowing, unfold during her mother’s nights at her hospital bedside and in Lucy’s reflections years after.  It’s a novel about a mother-daughter relationship weighted with love, need, and tension and about the mean-spiritedness of social class that divides and separates people.  It’s also a novel about what it means to be a writer and the story that person has to tell.

Here’s Lucy reflecting on her behavior:

“I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves.  I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.  I know faintly, even now, that I have embarrassed myself, and it always comes back to the feeling of childhood, that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced.  But still—I do it for others, even as I sense that others do it for me.”

Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear.  On a different note, I always look forward to the next installment in the Maisie Dobbs mystery series.  This one did not disappoint.  Maisie is given the assignment of going to Munich in 1938 in disguise as his daughter to rescue a man important to the British government.  Leon Donat is being held in Dachau and Munich is a tense and pall-laden city as Hitler tightens his grip on the country.  What happens in a Winspear novel is as much interior as it is overt action.  Maisie’s character is so well-fleshed out that her thinking and her pragmatic and philosophical approach to life ring true and provide a backdrop for the events that unfold.  For those readers who haven’t read the previous books, Winspear fills in Maisie’s history and the life-altering events that have shaped who she is now.

 

 

Booknote: Mysteries of Character

JWF Leave a comment

GEMMA, MAISIE, AND CLARE

My mother devoured mysteries.  I think when she was raising her four children they were pure escape.  She would read a Crime Club mystery in an evening and then read several more over the rest of a week—all of that required frequent trips to the public library.  I am more selective in which mysteries I like, but I do have a few favorite authors whose series I follow.   These are mystery novels featuring women detectives with these characters evolving over time.  Reading them in the order they were published enables the reader to share in how a relationship, whether it’s with a work partner or a romantic interest, deepens and changes.  For me, this is much more satisfying than a one-off crime novel. The books in these series are also well written.  Each author came to writing after some other career and with considerable life experience and each has won multiple awards for her writing. So, here is my first batch of favorites—for those who know me, there aren’t any surprises!

Deborah Crombie grew up near Dallas, Texas, lived in the U.K. with her first husband, a Scotsman, and then returned to the U.S. and Texas.  She loved England and her contemporary mysteries are set there and feature the Scotland Yard detective team of Duncan Kincaid and Gemma Jones.  The first books focused on Duncan, but then their relationship developed.  They became partners in life and often work together, whether officially or unofficially, on their cases.

The novels are rich with the complexities of children and stepchildren, ex-spouses, unreasonable bosses, challenging colleagues, and yes, murders with few clues.  One of her most recent titles which I just read and enjoyed is The Sound of Broken Glass.  There are at least 17 titles in the series—hard for me to believe I’ve read that many!

The Maisie Dobbs mystery novels by Jacqueline Winspear are mostly set in England in the period from WWI into the 1930’s.  Maisie is a psychologist and private investigator and a somewhat quirky woman taking advantage of the winds of social change.  Author Winspear was born and raised in the U.K., immigrated to the United States in 1990, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area.  Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting her briefly when she was also a guest at an author lunch.

I find Winspear’s evocation of this earlier time in history to be fascinating and believable.  Besides Maisie, her other characters—Maisie’s father, her mentor Maurice, and her friend James Compton—come off the page and I find myself savoring the details of their lives and their interactions.   Currently, I’m reading the very latest Maisie Dobbs, A Dangerous Place, this one set in Gibraltar.

Unlike the other two writers, Julia Spencer-Fleming has always lived in the U.S. and has not strayed too far from home.  She grew up in Plattsburgh, NY as an army brat, went to law school and then practiced law before becoming a successful writer.  She now lives outside Portland, Maine.  Her main character, Clare Fergusson, is undoubtedly one of the more unusual detectives.  An ordained Episcopal priest, Clare has her own church in a small upstate NY town, and previously was a helicopter pilot in the army.  The town of Millers Kill is almost as much of a character as police chief Russ Van Alstyne with whom Clare collaborates.

Almost every book title is a phrase from a Protestant hymn and some chapter titles too, but don’t be put off, there is some church politics in the mix, but these are not preachy tomes.  One aspect of Spencer-Fleming’s work I particularly admire is her willingness to tackle contemporary issues within the context of a murder mystery, be it abandoned babies or the struggles of returning veterans.  You may find, as I do, that her stories stay with you.  One such for me was One Was a Soldier published in 2011.