I Read Minor Frances Hodgson Burnett Novels So That You Don't Have To. Also, Audiobooks and Poverty!

Ethan asked me recently why I choose to read the fiction books I do. Crunching my "read" list, I discovered that I mostly choose to "read" fiction when it's less than five hours or seven discs long and available on audio. How's that for literary discretion? There is good stuff out on YA audio nowadays. Incredible stuff. Specifically, listen to The Vine Basket by Josanne La Valley. Seriously. It's good. It has a Uyghur narrator. You'll spend five hours in your car listening to words like Uyghur (wee-gher; you've heard them say it on the BBC) pronounced correctly. Uyghur is a language with uvular vowels. As an English language speaker who didn't know that humans could gain control of their own uvulas until last year, listening to this lightly-accented audiobook was a pleasure and an education about the sounds of language from the region of the world where people do throat singing. And the story is fantastic. The Vine Basket is a modern day book about a Mehrigul, who's been pulled out of school to work on the family farm. (That was another tangentially important thing about this book: it is still really hard for me to conceptualize pulling a child out of school for the family's economic gain. A realistic presentation of the effects of global economic circumstances in northern China underlay this book.) Mehrigul's brother ran away for political reasons and Mehrigul, as the next oldest, needed to help on the farm and bring the family's produce to market, because Mehrigul's family is poor. (The snobby girl in her class with the pretty red shoes has borrowed some learning English CD's from the teacher because her family has electricity and some disposable income.) Mehrigul is minding her family's market stall when an American lady asks, through her Uyghur translator, about the pretty but non-functional vine basket Mehrigul made last year and stuck for decoration on the market cart. The lady is a buyer for an ethnic handicraft store in San Francisco and she offers Mehrigul one hundred yuan for the basket and another hundred yuan each for any more she can make in three weeks time.

When Mehrigul gives her father the hundred yuan and explains what happens, he is drunk and he thinks it's ridiculous and the lady can't be trusted and she's a woman anyway and Mehrigul is better off helping on the farm, but she'd earn more if he sent her south to work in a Chinese factory, which he might do. Mehrigul negotiates between a strong sense of filial piety and a trust that her potential basket-making earnings will benefit her family and her future more than any of the other options available to her in constrained circumstances. She makes baskets secretly in her sparse free time, between farm work and caring for her happy little sister Lyali, who just doesn't get it.

I liked that this book reflected a nuanced understanding of global and local economics. The Uyghur people used to be economic players on the Silk Road, until a combination of Mongols and improved sailboat technology, and later, Communists, ruined that for them. Lately, they are governed by the Chinese, who seem bent on destroying them. Mehrigul is a fiercely proud Uyghur and you should learn about Uyghurs by reading this book.

Speaking of poverty and the vicissitudes of economic privation, being poor in medieval France would be even worse than being rich in medieval France, although both would be terrible by modern American or Uyghur standards. Mehrigul at least, is literate and began the book with an eighth grade education, and if she had spinal tuberculosis, would receive passable care at a Chinese medical facility, whereas Amelot de Chambly went out begging literally bent double with her face about eight inches from the ground every day for two years until she was miraculously cured at the tomb of Saint Louis at St.-Denis outside of Paris. Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor by Sharon Farmer is an academic book, and as such it's part of a long conversation between academics and loaded with footnotes that look kinda interesting. Surviving Poverty compares the surviving accounts of miracles done by Saint Louis, formerly King Louis IX, after his death in 1270. Louis the deaf-mute was sent or left on a country estate when he was eight years old. He learned how to do a number of tasks and to clasp his hands in prayer, although he did not know what it meant. At twenty, he was sent to a different, less amiable, estate. When the procession carrying King Louis IX's remains back from the Holy Land went by, he decided to follow it. He walked over a hundred miles to Paris, living on alms, then stayed outside the chapel at St.-Denis until he was miraculously cured of his deafness. Sharon Farmer says this is an example of boys, even disabled boys, being sent out to make their own way at earlier ages than girls. Many of the people cured by Saint Louis are migrants to Paris, and the migration patterns show more men and younger men than women, some from as far away as England but most within one hundred miles of Paris, most migrants settling in the same neighborhoods as others from their rural districts. Sharon Farmer doesn't go into the details of surviving poverty in medieval Paris, one assumes that it was a constant battle to stay warm, but she does explain the general economics of the situation. A man with no property working with his hands did not make enough to support a family, consequently a wife would also be engaged in productive labor. A disabled wife of an employed husband would go out begging if she could do nothing else. A single woman or widow doing a woman's job like seamstress or laundress would not make enough money to support herself, but Nicole of Rubercy relied on her friends Contesse and Petronelle when she was taken with a paralysis for two months, and there are other traces of women's mutual support. The poor are always with us, and they are always being judged by the affluent. Sermons and other surviving writings from the 1200s describe them as lazy, dirty, and unworthy, although there were alms and charitable pushes, including hosting of meals at funerals and the delivery of money and clothing, a tradition carried on centuries later by pious maiden aunts:

Aunt Clotilde, in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories, lived a secluded life of prayer, fasting, and charity, at her chateau in France and she brought up her orphaned niece Elizabeth in the same holy seclusion until she died and Elizabeth went to live with her gay uncle in New York City. "As Bertrand de Rochemont was a gay bachelor, fond of pleasure" busy with his affairs, he thought Elizabeth queer, but he let her be until his very good friend came to stay. The friend, a doctor, described his charity work in the poorest slums while Elizabeth was at the dinner table. Elizabeth prayed all night, and in the morning, snuck out to do good works, but she wandered far afield, into the notorious Five Points. She bestows a bit of charity on a deserving poor mother, has her cloak stolen by an undeserving poor, and collapses from exhaustion (she was up all night praying, remember?) just as her uncle, who has been convinced by his friend to come and look at the people he could be charitablizing, walks down the street and sees her swoon. She is taken home and, in proper FHB fashion, everyone learns Moderation. Uncle Bertrand learns to help the meek when he is not busy being fancy free, and Elizabeth learns to romp and play like other children and not stay up all night in prayer and fasting quite so often. The other stories in the collection, The Story of Prince Fairyfoot (the small-footed heir to a crappy monarchy where merit is based on foot size), The Proud Little Grain of Wheat (arrogant carb) and Behind the White Brick (a girl meets the main character in the book she is reading, Santa Claus, and her a talking version of her pre-verbal baby sister) aren't worth mentioning beyond what I just did.

In a brutally honest and less twee novella, Mrs. Burnett tells of a man about to shoot himself in the face in such a way that his features will be unrecognizable so that none of his servants or colleagues (he has no family or friends) will identify him, and he will be buried in a pauper's grave and erased from this earth. In his crippling depression, he has seen doctors and been prescribed 1880s antidepressants, and tried, but nothing has helped, and he is going to buy a pistol from a pawn shop and end it all. He stumbles out into the London fog, that choking yellow stuff that makes finding one's way impossible, and ends up taking a wrong turning and finding a river to jump into, when a bundle of rags at his feet reveals itself to be a cheerful beggaress who says, "Are you going to do it, mister?" The man has some money to give away so that he can be buried a pauper without the things being investigated too closely, and his new friend Glad tells him that she would like some money to help Polly, a country girl cum fallen woman cum prostitute who was at home crying because a john knocked her about last night. Mr. Suicidal says he would like to meet this Polly and, in this weird Edwardian story where depression and sex are treated like they exist and happen, Polly says, "Are you going to keep company with her, mister?" and when they are arrive at the rented room, Polly starts crying the harder, because she assumes Glad has found her a customer. Bread, cheese, soup, coffee, and coal later, Glad starts to tell a story about Mrs. Montaubyn, who professes a mystic brand of Protestantism. Suddenly there's a commotion, Drunken Bess has been knocked down by a cab!, and Mrs. Montaubyn herself holds her hand through her death throes. The curate is summoned and a whispered conversation with the only gentleman in the room tells our hero that Mrs. Montaubyn has a faith the curate cannot rival with his learned insecurities and doubts, and that these are good people in need. The curate is quietly passed a pistol, with instruction to take it away and drop it in the river. Back in the sad little lodging room, with Glad, Polly, Drunken Bess' newly orphaned baby, Mrs. Montaubyn, and the curate, the depressed man reveals himself to be Bill Gates! (or the fictional, Edwardian equivalent) and helps everyone because he is wealthy enough to do so. This is a surprising good story in its predictability and uncanny honesty. The women get pregnant, the beggars smell awful, and depression wipes out everything good. Even the London fog is a terrible choking cloud and not a romantic inconvenience. Well done again, FHB.

And, hiking, I read Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, because you can't bring a book that might not be good into the forest, as you would then be stuck with nothing to read. Monstrous Regiment is naturally good. There's a little Joan of Arc flair, some gender politics, and a little bit of Sam Vimes.

Last blog, I promised you a theme of the letter C. That didn't happen. C books are long and boring, but I will keep you updated.

Tales from the Recycling Bin

We recycle books at work. Some of our customers wonder why we don't donate the books instead. Short answer: No one wants them. Some of the gently used James Patterson and Nora Roberts could be donated, true, but no one's asked us for them. And I promise you, nobody wants to be donated anything water-damaged, business books from the '80s (watch out for Japan, guys), novels that nobody's ever heard of, and four out of five copies of Twilight. But occasionally, something good goes into recycling. Not earth shattering good, but something that's worth bending slightly and extending my arm for. If, on holding the book, I decide it's worth not throwing back into the bin immediately, I carry it all the way to the break room, where I decide if I actually want to read it or just leave it sitting on my hold shelf for months until I decide I won't read it anyway and finally send it to its reincarnation as cardboard.

I pulled The Shelter Trap out of recycling because it was clearly a novel about a nuclear fallout shelter, and I have a thing for those. It all started when I saw the movie Matinee in junior high. What could be better than being trapped in a fallout shelter with a cute guy? And the planet will need repopulating. Tee hee. And once you got out of the shelter, there would be all sorts of cool looting and survivalist opportunities. My dreams were somewhat dashed when I read Z for Zachariah. The girl is all alone after the nuclear holocaust and that man shows up and he is creepy and not her soulmate. What's the point of a nuclear holocaust if that's going to happen? Then my ideas were dashed completely when I read an aside somewhere that said imagining being stuck in that fallout shelter with the cute boy was everyone's fantasy during the '50s, and I learned that my idea wasn't just weird, it was unoriginal and forty years too late. I still read and reread Alas, Babylon in high school, even though the characters are slightly disappointing Floridians. It's a good book. The nuclear holocaust (not to be confused with the zombie apocalypse) is still interesting even if, like my ideas, the experience is slightly disappointing, even to those who have never imagined an exciting fallout shelter, or whose fallout shelter reality is so boring that they disown their old ideas.

Lester Hendrix is the hero of The Shelter Trap. The book has an odd rotating point of view. Lester takes 70% of the chapters, Miss Barrett has a few, and Dorothy, a girl, has one random chapter towards the end. It's a queer shifting and there's not much point to it, except, in Dorothy's case, to reveal that she's taken a fancy to Lester and is competent enough to bust out of a fallout shelter on her own. How Lester, Dorothy, Miss Barrett, and the rest of the gifted and talented class who couldn't weasel out of the multi-day field trip to the Education Festival get into the fallout shelter is a bit unlikely, but everyone needs to be in the fallout shelter or there wouldn't be a book, would there? The gifted and talented class is browsing around the booths boringly and Beulah Battlebro and Stanley "Tub" Snell assume the fallout shelter is an educational demonstration of a fallout shelter. Beulah climbs in, Tub fats his way in after her, Miss Barrett tells the other youths that they "must stick together," and Lester climbs in last, late enough to hear a workman shout, "Anyone down there?" and close the hatch. Lester tries to shout, but Miss Barrett rushes back into the decontamination chamber and reprimands him. Miss Barrett is basically a Victorian by wont and upbringing. There are still uptight teachers out in the world, but they haven't made them like Miss Barrett since the '70s happened. Once she's ascertained that she and her seven gifted students are indeed trapped in a fallout shelter, she orders the kids not to turn on the TV because it doesn't belong to them. Slow hours later, she allows them to try it, but because they are trapped underground in a concrete chamber, they can only get Education Festival closed circuit television, which broadcasts a documentary called How to Read a Book, then a documentary on California ground squirrels, loops to How to Read a Book, and another viewing of ground squirrels. After three viewings of both documentaries, Miss Barrett agrees that, circumstances being what they are, the gifted youth might eat tinned salmon and survival biscuits in a tidy and organized way. Dorothy, who has had home ec as well as academic training, is allowed to superintend the sandwiches. Lester suggests they try to escape the fallout shelter, but Miss Barrett is convinced that the authorities will rescue them in due time. Miss Barrett is extremely confident in the authorities.

I assumed that fallout shelters were openable from the inside. How else are your fully inbred grandchildren supposed to emerge into the pale light of a red sun and start the world anew? In The Shelter Trap there is no push-handle to open the shelter hatch, which seems like bending truth for fiction. If the Russians win the war, don't you want the only door handle on the side of the Americans? Regardless, this is an entertaining forgotten minor 1960s teen novel and I have rescued it from the recycling bin and will keep it for always, or at least put it in a wee free library so that someone else can enjoy it.

The Kids of the Polk Street School: The Beast and the Halloween Horror by Patricia Reilly Giff went straight back into the recycling bin. It's a good book, but the spine was warped and crumbling. I have no pain in throwing away children's books that are falling apart. Yes, we could donate them to a school library, but isn't it insulting to give poor kids books so thrashed that the pages are falling out?

I've been reading The Kids of the Polk Street School series as they come through work. I loved it when Mrs. Gonzalez read these to us in second grade and, as eighty-page chapter books, I can read one in about forty-five minutes. In this thirteenth in the series, Richard "Beast" Best is quickly doing his spelling homework because he forgot it the night before, while Ms. Rooney reads the class a Halloween book. (I wouldn't have forgotten to do my homework in second grade, but I get it now.) Next day, Ms. Rooney gets out paper and tells the class that they will all write letters to the author. I was surprised by this, as the author I know doesn't love it when whole classes of dispassionate children write her forced fan mail. Sending a personal note to every child exacerbates her carpal tunnel. But maybe Patricia Reilly Giff likes getting mail in bundles of thirty. Regardless, Richard and his best friend Matthew weren't paying attention when Ms. Rooney read the book. Richard writes in his letter, "I liked the dog named Rufus. I am going to dress up as Rufus for Halloween." After the envelope is licked, Matthew says that maybe there wasn't a dog named Rufus in the Halloween book. Then Ms. Rooney announces, oh no!, that the author will be visiting her class on Halloween.

Richard is sure he'll be expelled and jail is possible. His fear is real. His childish morality is strong, and he knows that telling lies is wrong and he will be punished. He goes to extreme lengths to mask his lie. He trades his scary Halloween mask for Matthew's crappy dog costume, and thinks about faking sick even though he was really excited about the Halloween parade. His sister Holly, a fourth grader, says that's even worse, and she comes up with a plausible story, that Richard likes dogs so much he made up a dog because he wished there had been one in the book.

Halloween is more horrible than Richard could imagine. The author asks Ms. Rooney if Richard can help him bring in a box of signed copies from his car. Richard is quaking in his boots and knows he's busted, but the author only tells Richard to watch the falsehoods and gives Richard an inscribed copy of his book, which is so underwhelming for a second grader. So Richard marches in the Halloween parade, sins forgiven, head high. All in eighty pages. This is good. There aren't many books that address that intense sense of right and wrong that kids have and the resultant perpetual shame. For some reason, shame and fear are constantly recurring themes in The Kids of the Polk Street School. I don't know if, as a child, on some level, I liked The Kids of the Polk Street School because I was troubled by sins like, well, one time there were multiple worksheets in stacks at the front of the classroom and we were supposed to take one of each, but I didn't hear that part, so I just took one worksheet and then, when I didn't have the first worksheet that the teacher was talking about, I had to go get the rest of the worksheets in front of everybody, and it was terrible. The truly salient part of The Kids of the Polk Street School for little me was that Richard's friend Emily Arrow had the same initials as me, and a plastic unicorn like I did. These books are being reissued by Scholastic with less attractive covers, but the illustrations are the same.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog was only in the recycling bin because nobody wants it ever. I got it coming out of clearance in pristine condition, probably because it had never been read. This is the book that baby boomers who had nuns as teachers give each other as gifts. I was going to give it to my mom because she was taught to diagram sentences by nuns, but she already had a gift copy. I actually did read it. I was hoping to learn how to diagram sentences, as that's one of the few arcane grammatical skills I don't know, and I learned the basics here, but this book was not instructional, more of a reminiscence on sentence diagramming itself for the baby boomers who loved it. However, it was an interesting wee bit of a didactic instructional history and rather charming, although the chapters on celebrities who enjoyed diagramming sentences at school ran a bit long.

Remember, you can be notified every time I post a blog entry if you type your e-mail address into the box on the right. Next blog: Things that begin with the letter "C."

More Books

Box of Matches is a quiet novel like I've never read. It was a delight. Emmett gets up at 5:00am every day and lights a fire in the fire place while his family is sleeping.

“Good morning. It's 5:36am. I'm finding that a flat slab of junk mail dropped in the mail-slot created by two hot logs can sometimes get an unwilling fire to take the next step.”

“Good morning, it's 4:03am, early, early, early. I did something new while the coffeemaker was snuffling and gasping: I washed a dish that I'd left last night in the sink to soak.”

“Good morning, it's 5:44 am, and I'm up late again, but I've got four big old logs on the fire, each with a layer of burn-scabs from yesterday evening that break off when I arrange them.”

Somehow, it's great. It's so simple, so kind. This book demands nothing but our willingness to sit by a fire and watch the logs crackle. Emmett has things in life that he thinks about while he's sitting in the dark in front of the fire: his wife, his daughter and son, his cat, his duck, his 1700s Vermont house. He is an editor of textbooks. He once tried to write a mystery novel. He is a thoroughly ordinary New England person, and New England is a foreign country. I don't think about New England very often because they don't vote wrong and they're quiet folk, but New England is a land of three-hundred year old houses on winding roads amid maple forests where people keep to themselves and the only thing surprising about them is their affluence and the way that they manage to find extraordinarily gainful employment in the hinterlands of Vermont or New Hampshire. I've yet to figure that out.

Emmett stares into his fireplace, contemplates, describes, breathes, drinks coffee, wonders about the circumstances that brought him to this quiet life.

Mariko, a Japanese housewife who was 45 in 1993, also lives quietly in print. But Mariko is real. The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family by Elisabeth Brumiller, honestly, I knew it would be good because books about Asian women always are: Factory Girls and A Tiger's Heart. Read them. Japan is interesting. And I mean that Japan is famous for its deviant sexual exports, but Mariko was not of the Japan that dresses up like sexy Pikachu on weekends. Mariko is the older generation, and her family is culturally conservative, so Mariko is something of a traditional Japanese throwback. She says when she first married she used to bow and lay three fingers on the floor when her husband came home from work every day. She stopped doing that pretty quickly, but it was a reasonable demonstration of respect for her husband that she would have kept on doing if he wasn't annoying her.

Ms. Brumiller stopped seeing Mariko as a typical Japanese housewife early on, but Mariko did the jobs of a Japanese housewife perfectly, her attitude was atypical. One of the questions that came up: Who is worse off in Japanese society, men or women? Women have limited social status, limited career opportunities, almost no chance to maintain both career and a family, they do all household chores, and they are responsible for educating their children when they're not at school, including teaching them to read the hiragana alphabet before they start kindergarten. Men work the same job at the same company their entire lives. They leave for work at 7:00am and get back between 10:00 and midnight, and their leisure time is spent drinking with colleagues. Mariko had two part-time jobs: meter reader and typist for a tourism firm. She was a PTA mom, and baseball mom, an American football mom, on the junior high graduation committee, on the God-carrying committee for the neighborhood festival, she took samisen lessons. Her husband would never have time to take samisen lessons.

Ms. Brumiller spent time in her book talking to people of national influence in Japan about the factors that shape Japanese lives, Mariko's included. The only problem with this is that the book is from 1993. What was a study of the modern Japanese woman is that it's now a study of the Japanese woman in the early '90s, and most of the studies Ms. Brumiller cites are from the late '80s. In 1993 a Japanese parliamentarian called Americans lazy, Americans said, “No, we're not,” and there was an international kerfuffle about it. Does anyone remember that?

The Secrets of Mariko and A Box of Matches are middle-aged lives, quiet and calm. The passions are over but they still have spirit and a self-determination unachievable by the young. As I drift through my thirties, maybe the calmness of a life well-lived will guide me in my reading to more mature books about adults and their meditations, but it hasn't yet. I read Tangled. Not the novelization of the Disney movie, but Carolyn Mackler's recent one. Carolyn Mackler won a Parent's Choice Award for The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things and she did Vegan Virgin Valentine. Tangled is her best ever. Carolyn Mackler is an adolescent's YA writer. She's great. Tangled has four protagonists telling the story in four chronological segments, and each one of these teenagers is the most alone person on the planet, they all have unspeakable pain that no one else could possibly understand, and everyone around them is cool, adept, and has it all together while they, Jena, Dakota, Skye and Owen, are all alone fumbling through a cruel universe. So it's realistic. Jena starts the book off when her mom makes her go on an island vacation with her mom's friend and her beautiful, actress daughter Skye, who Jena's always getting put with because they're the same age. Dakota is a jock, wracked with guilt because the girl he was about to break up with died in a car accident. Skye is a teen model/actress who is not doing so well. Owen is Dakota's little brother with a pain-of-being-me blog. The narrative is impressively structured. All the characters are heartbreakingly well-written, and some characters plot resolutions come as asides in other characters' stories.

Carolyn Mackler knows that teenagers do not have sex on the 90210 model. For those readers who did not watch Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD last year because they weren't allowed to when they were nine: Brenda and Dylan decide to do it. They make an assignation for a hotel during prom, start closed-mouth smooching, Dylan takes off his suit jacket, and the camera fades. Then there's a consequence episode where Brenda's mom finds a pregnancy test in the trash. I have no personal expertise in the area of sexual conquest, of course, but from what I've heard third-hand and read on fornication blogs, sex happens in a gradual and unscheduled way. Jena and Owen sure as hell nervously think about doin' it when they're alone together in Skye's empty apartment, but Jena finally says, "Do you think we could save some stuff for next time?" Owen, who's never touched a girl before, is over the moon because there's going to be a next time. Then they canoodle and probably get to second-and-a-half base. I was thrilled that Mackler doesn't present sex as a sitting-next-to-each-other-in-chilly-silence/vaginal-penetrative dichotomy, as sex is presented to teenagers that way too often.

Going in reverse chronological order by age of character, I listened to Navigating Early by Claire Vanderpool on audiobook. I can't recommend this book, but I did finish it and that's saying something.

In 1946, Jack Baker meets autistic savant Early Odden (I couldn't decide if the kid was named Early to make the near-pun in the title) at a Maine boarding school and helps him go up the Appalachain Trail in a boat to find Early's dead brother, who isn't. This book has literary themes crawling out of its ears. Some of the themes are: fathers, friendship, World War II, the Appalachian Trail, boats, brothers, bears, autism, astronomy, astrology, π, pirates, reading, lost & found, timber rattlesnakes, and the quest for belonging. If your sixth grade teacher tells you to write a book report using themes in literature, Navigating Early is your obvious choice. In the end, everything is resolved through a series of unlikely coincidences, including the Swedish ex-pugilist outdoorsman who went to the woods after losing his lady love the librarian who taught him to read; Jack has to go back to school to find out that librarian Miss LeFleur's first name is Belle and she has been waiting for Sven in a maiden state since 1928 or so.

Up next: Good books from the recycling bin.

Poor, Sad, Mediocre Books

It was a cold and dark winter in England, 1977.  Rain fell nearly every day, making the sidewalks slippery and the houses damp, especially the ones without central heating. Old age pensioners went about in tatty sweaters and complained about the price of coal. The war was long over, but they still remembered the Blitz, the rationing, the boys leaving for France, never to return. They needed comfort and solace that the 1970s could not give them. They were old. They shook their canes at the nascent punk scene. They wanted something safe and quiet. Something amusing. Something to read by the light of a 50-watt bulb. James Herriot released Vet in a Spin that year, but it was a skinny volume, not like the American Herriots, which are each two British Herriot books put together in a single volume (If Only They Could Talk, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, etc.). So what were the elderly of Britain to read? Mr. Smith, who ran the bookshoppe on the high street, recommended it to them: Bless Me, Father by Neil Boyd and blurbed by James Herriot himself.

Bless Me, Father says “hilarious bestseller” on the cover, and I'd believe it. It's the sort of wholesome memoir that old people like. Those old people are dead now, and so are the memories of Bless Me, Father and its sequels. More people might know the TV show Bless Me, Father, broadcast on the BBC from 1978 through 1981, but I'd never heard of it until I googled the book just now. It's available on DVD, if you're curious. It might be one of those rare TV shows that's better than book. Bless Me, Father would benefit from the episodic structure and quick pacing of a television re-telling. Each chapter is an anecdote and each anecdote runs for twenty pages, leaving plenty of time for the antics to wear thin and the reader to get bored. It's not a bad book by any means. If you know any old people, Catholics especially, this book would make a great gift. A young curate comes to the parish of St. Jude's in South London where he meets Father Duddleswell and the housekeeper, Mrs. Pring. Father Duddleswell and Mrs. Pring have an antimony that's never as funny on paper as it must be in the author's head. Take this, when Father Duddleswell is feeling unwell:

“I'd be much obliged if you would be after keeping to yourself your untutored opinion on the state of me health.”

“And who'll lay you out if you cop it, tell me that?”

“You should humor him, Mrs. Pring,” I whispered.

“Let his back go on itching, I say.”

Another outburst. “Leave the lad be, or I'll shoot you to shivers.”

Confusing, kind of mean, not particularly witty. But then the book has its moments. Father Boyd's first time hearing his first confession, his first confessant says, in a high-pitched child's voice, “Bless me father, for I have sinned. This is my second confession ever. I've committed adultery three times.” Father Boyd wonders if the person behind the screen is a midget, or putting on a false voice. “No, wait. Adultery's that funny one. I stole three pennies from me mum's purse.”

Bless Me, Father also reminds one of the mysteries of faith. Not the nature of God, but the weird stuff we do. In one story, a Dominican priest rings up to ask if he and some students can celebrate mass at St. Jude's on their pilgrim's way between Tonwell and Our Lady at Walsingham. Father Duddleswell poo poos the Dominicans' heretical ways and goes off to do whatever priests do on weekdays. When the Dominicans turn up, Father Boyd invites them to use the chapel for their mass. The Dominican priest says, “No, no,” and leads the pilgrims into the parlour, along with a loaf, not Communion wafers. Scandalized, Father Boyd retires to his study for reflection and prayer until he hears the Dominicans banging out and goes down to check on the damage. The parlor is in disarray and, to his horror, there are crumbs, crumbs!, on the table. He gathers them up one by one, making a particular point to separate the crumbs from the normal dust. And then he looks down and realizes that there are crumbs on the floor as well. He has been walking on the literal flesh of Christ! Hoover in hand, he makes plans to vacuum it all up and burn the vacuum bag in a sacred fire, but, after vacuuming, Father Boyd looks at the bottom of the vacuum and realizes that it has crumbs in the brushes. He's a priest, how was he supposed to know that vacuums have brushes? There's only one thing to do. He waits until cover of night, digs a hole in the back garden, and buries the vacuum cleaner in freshly consecrated ground. The next day, while Mrs. Pring is banging around wondering what happened to her vacuum cleaner, the Dominican priest calls up to say, “Sorry we left a mess last night. The lads were famished from all the walking and we needed a place to eat our sandwiches.”

Still in the category of books that are okay but not great and might make good gifts for the elderly in your life (old men, this one), I present to you Explorers of the Nile by Tim Jeal. I was inspired to grab it out of the backstock audiobook flat at work and check it out because I had just seen James May discover the source of the Nile on Top Gear and I wanted background. Explorers of the Nile is about those who came before, but mostly about James Hanning Speke and his rightful, right-track thinking that the led to Livingstone's discovery of the source, at the expense of Richard Burton. To put it another away, I'd never heard of James Hanning Speke until I listened to this book, and Tim Jeal thinks that's a damn shame.

(“Discovery” is a strong word for these white men. These explorers travelled, with unspeakable hardship, true, from village to village, and traded trade goods for food and passage from the people who already lived near the bodies of water they were discovering, assisted by tens and hundreds of porters, many of whom had already been there assisting Arab-Swahili traders who had already travelled there. “Mapping,” I would call it, and there's nothing dishonorable about mapping.)

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” was most of what I knew about Nile exploration before I read this book (and watched this series' Top Gear Africa special). I did learn a lot, but I could have read something more basic and comprehensive. This book reminds me of Robin Okey's Eastern Europe: 1740-1985,which also assumes previous knowledge while addressing a broad topic with a title that makes it look introductory. Explorers of the Nile did have raw anecdotes about horrible things that happened to various people, and the ending wrapped up nicely with a rundown on modern Sudan, Niger, and Togo and what European exploration and conquest did to them.  (To be fair, Jeal stresses that Europeans helped to end the Arab-Swahili slave trade and most of his explorers would have been horrified by the results of colonization.)  One could read this book, if one were so inclined, but there are other books out there. I haven't read it, but King Leopold's Ghost seems like a better bet for African history books. It's been a bestseller, so people who don't much about Africa are reading it.  And I'm going to recommend The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia. I've been reading that off and on for a while. It's one of those unfortunate books that's fantastically interesting while also being an powerful soporific. If you start reading it now, you will probably beat me to the end.

N.B. I did handle a first edition book by Dr. David Livingstone several weeks ago and was surprised to find that it was only selling for $6. 1880s, beautiful cover, plates, nice shape, and it still wasn't fetching a price. Once a bestseller, always in excess. You're not going to retire on that first edition DaVinci Code.

Off to read better books.

Here I am copying Missie and doing a Top Ten Tuesday from the Broke and the Bookish.  Here is my list of Authors Who Deserve More Recognition:

Hilary McKay.  Of course.

Rumer Godden. The author of over 60 books and the only one you've probably handled is Holly and Ivy.  I've never read her adult novels, but the kid books are fantastic, especially Miss Happiness and Miss Flower.

Elizabeth Gold. Author of only one book (and a poet by trade). Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School is the only book to read about the failure when good intentions rub up against teenagers.

T.H. White. At least George R.R. Martin's been telling people to read Once and Future King. Everyone needs to.

Julia Voznesenskaya. In telling the story of Soviet Women, she tells everyone's story. With funny jokes as well.

Leo Edwards. You know how most books from the 20's and 30's are boring but some are so uniquely funny? Leo Edwards it the latter. (Except for the Andy Blake series. Those are boring as hell.)

Bjorn Kurten. Glyptodons roamed North America for millenia, you know. He will tell you about them.

Kevin Callan. He tells you how to camp with Canadian flair.

Judith Martin. I know she has a widely syndicated advice column, and you probably read her while holding your paper newspaper and sipping your morning coffee. But you need to own all her books and treat them as reference tomes.

Jane St. Anthony. Come on. Have you not read anything at all?

Where's My Elephant?

If an elephant falls from the sky, it is probably an allegory, but it still makes a splat. The kind of splat the elephant makes can help us analyze what the elephant means and why that elephant landed. If the elephant is large, as in The Fifth Elephant, then the elephant, metaphysical though it may be, accounts for the deep fat mines beneath Uberwald. If the elephant is small, it might land on the lap of the Countess Quintet during a magic show without crushing her torso, because that is what happens in The Magician's Elephant, which, full disclosure, was written by Kate DiCamillo. So what we have here are two books with “elephant” in the title that I read this June. One is madcap and hilarious and the other has no madcappiness nor hilarity to speak of. Both books made me happy.

The Fifth Elephant is part of the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, which everyone knows is awesome. It's one of the ones about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, but it takes place in Uberwald because, several books ago, Samuel Vimes, the captain of the Watch, married Lady Sybil, making him a reluctant duke. The dwarves are crowing a new king so Sam Vimes must attend as Ankh-Morpork's ambassador. Werewolves, dwarves, vampires, diplomatic negotiations, tumbling down a waterfall while being chased by said werewolves, and Sergeant Colon burns all the paperwork. Worth it. So while the elephants hold up Discworld and the dwarves mine the fat under Schmaltzberg, the elephant itself represents an ideal of economic-political cooperation between the republic of Ankh-Morpork and the feudal city-states of Uberwald, as well as a metaphysical splat.

And on to smaller elephants. Full disclosure, I listened to this book on audio so I may not have absorbed everything as thoroughly as I could have, and I missed out on stunning illustrations by Yoko Tanaka and one of the most attractive fonts I have ever seen. Ms. DiCamillo has brought us back to the bleak, Dickensian landscape that lives inside her own head. In the market of the city of Baltese, a gypsy tells an orphan boy named Peter Duchene that his sister lives and he must follow the elephant to find her. Peter says, “I am but a small boy in a fictional European city. Where would I find an elephant?” and just then an elephant comes crashing through the roof of the opera house, conjured by a magician who generally intended violets but had a moment of wanting to show the world what he could do. Landing on the countess, the elephant is jailed. Poor elephant.

The Magician's Elephant is an unusual book in that plot builds by characters, instead of the usual means where things happen to the characters. All the characters are sketches, and as each archetypal Victorian –orphan, soldier, beggar, countess, dog– is presented, the plot rolls forward until all eleven or so protagonists are standing outside in the falling moonlit snow watching the elephant dematerialize back to the southern climes, as she was both allegorical and homesick.

Kate writes a haunting, vivid book about relationships, families, and the need to belong. Some legs, crushed by elephants, will never heal, but we can build on those by moving in with a policeman and his barren wife, who will love us for ourselves and not encourage us to become soldiers because we're a weird fevered old man with PSTD. The plot by character made this a fantastic book, but a bit slower and experimental-er than Ms. DiCamillo's other award-winning books, my favorite of which is The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Some writers make you marvel at the beauty of their world even when it's covered in an eternal muddy snow. Some writers spend twenty solid minutes describing your personal failings on a piazza in Rome, and you still love them and their pig and elephant books.

Some writers make you sniffle in your car while pissing you off because their dying teenage characters are completely implausible. John Green's The Fault in Our Stars was the most popular and anticipated book of last year among people I know. I like John Green's vlog, but I can't read his books. I enjoyed the jacket copy on An Abundance of Katherines, but I had to put it down with disdain after two chapters. I did read Will Grayson, Will Grayson because Kate DiCamillo gave me the ARC, but I only managed it because John Green's over the top flamboyant unrealisticism was balanced by David Levithan's nihilistic kid of ennui. I was chuffed because I found The Fault in Our Stars at the library on audiobook months before I thought I would have the chance to read it, and by “chance to read it,” I mean months before we would have enough used copies at work that I wouldn't feel bad wresting it from the hands of people who actually like John Green.

Other people loved The Fault in Our Stars, and it is about youth with cancer, but John Green is constantly yanking me out of my suspension of disbelief with terrible dialogue. His characters go back and forth between normal English and over-written, non-standard, “Look at me, I'm using grandiloquent words” voice. The plot is formulaic to the extreme, especially the novel within the novel. I ended up resentfully grieving this unrealistic dead chunk of handsome, youthful dialogue named Augustus because he dies, and death is sad, and the other characters were sad, and it's sad when kids die, even when they are fictional and they keep on reminding you that they are such by holding an unlit cigarette in their mouth at all times to explore the metaphoric resonance of a cancer-causing agent unlit in the mouth of a cancer patient. There are other, better books about kids with cancer, namely Before I Die by Jenny Downham, and there are other, better books where kids don't inhale, like Call Me Heller, That's My Name. The hardcover cover, from 1973, has a drawing of Heller holding a long cigarette in a holder.

I had to read Call Me Heller, That's My Name because I actually know a woman named Heller. I bought her a copy, and then I read the library copy and was disappointed on my Heller's behalf to find that this Heller's name is actually Hildegarde, called Heller because she's a little heller. Character's nickname aside, this book has everything going for it. It takes place in the heady days of the 1920's when young men were called sheiks because of that Rudolph Valentino movie and women danced the Charleston and let little kids hold their cigarettes, all except for Heller's aunt who is strait-laced and upright and always after Heller to do things like not hang around the railroad tracks and wear shoes. Meanwhile, Heller's sister is getting married, her best friend is hanging around with someone else, and her world is generally crumbling. Heller ends up in a graveyard at midnight and then she tries to cross the train bridge as a means to impress her ex-BFF and chase her aunt back to where she came from. In the end, Heller is resigned to the life changes imposed on her, and it's a good ending. It has to happen, she has to grow up a little, but she doesn't compromise on the small, important things, like the name “Heller.” This is a great, small middle-grade book.

On the same trip to the library where I got Call Me Heller, That's My Name and the Lulu books, I grabbed Finding Fernanda by Erin Siegal. There's been a spate of good books about modern adoption corruption in the last couple years and I more or less missed it until Child Catchers. Guatemala stopped adopting out children in 2008 following allegations of kidnapping, trafficking, child selling, adoption-related murder, and other horrible things. Finding Fernanda tells one of those stories in an accessible way. I prefer the thick, academic approach in my adoption literature, but Finding Fernanda is something that adoptive parents will read without bitching in Amazon reviews that “it read like a textbook.” Well, yes, research books by academics put out by university presses do read like textbooks; that's why they're so good. Ms. Siegal drops the ball a bit: The titular little girl, Fernanda, is given by her mother, Mildred Alvarado, to a friend's church friend for “babysitting,” which turns out quickly to be permanent and irrevocable. On the same day, Mildred loans out her daughter and signs some blank pieces of paper that later to turn into surrender documents, Fernanda turns up on an American baby-shopping website. Betsy Emmanuel of Tennessee is planning to augment her family of seven (three biological, four adopted) with another orphan. A series of lies and weirdness from Fernanda's adoption broker alerts Betsy that something is wrong and meanwhile Mildred risks literal death to find Fernanda and her infant baby, who is cut out of her womb and offered for adoption on the same website. Betsy provides key evidence in finding Fernanda and her baby sister, who are being shunted around a network of foster homes, but her complicity in the mess remains and, sinking $30,000 into the corrupt adoption agency, Betsy ends up taking home a different Guatemalan infant of indeterminate origin. Mildred is reunited with her daughters and the well-documented case ends up prosecuted and leads to a major Guatemalan public outcry which contributes to Guatemala's signing of the Hague convention.

Then there's Lulu and the Dog by the Sea, the second of the Lulu books. Again, very British, and it brings Hilary McKay back to the seaside, her element (read Dog Friday), on holiday with Lulu's family. A feral dog, born behind the Chinese restaurant, is lurking about in the holiday town. The dog steals picnics and has long thirsty waits between drinks out of the stream in the golf course or the kiddie pool. Unlike the baby duck that Lulu returned to its wild mother at the end of Lulu and the Duck in the Park, this dog needs a home. The denouement is obvious.

Finally, I read Giles Milton's Big Chief Elizabeth, about the early days of American colonization. As we know, the first few attempts at planting Britishers in North America didn't go very well, but they did turn into swashbuckling stories with cannibalism (intra-and extra-European) and two thousand mile hikes to the random collection of European fishing vessels which were crossing the ocean regularly before anyone ever thought concretely about putting in a permanent settlement. Interestingly, American colonization was not mainly for its own sake or profitability (excluding the ever-rumored gold mines), but to screw the Spanish who were already set up in the Caribbean and Central American and exporting melted Aztec gold. England wanted a solid base in America from which to harass Spanish treasure ships. Spain, meanwhile, was using its vast new wealth not to build up Spain so much as to make a series of expensive wars on England. Remember the Armada? And tobacco. The eventual success of Jamestown was fully due to tobacco, although the colony continued to rely on forced emigration of British indigents and kept a mortality rate around fifty percent.

Giles Milton knows what happened to the lost colony of Roanoake! According to Jamestown settlers conversations with local Indians, recorded in their diaries but not widely disseminated, they moved to Croatoan Island and farmed for twenty years, allying with local Chesapeake Indians against Chief Powhatan until he had both the Indians and settlers massacred weeks before the first boat of settlers for Jamestown turned up. Mysteries solved, I will go off and read other books.   

In Which I Read Short Books

If J.K. Rowling hadn't written Harry Potter, would I have read what I read these last few months? Would “young adult” literature be the purview of children? Would I be forced, through my own ignorance, to read adult fiction? Jo created a new genre: good books that appeal to children and adults. There were thousands of good chapter books before 1997, but they were for children, and the only adults who read them were teachers and librarians. But now we can have a teen book about forced mass murder (Hunger Games) or rape (Speak) or more rape (Nicholas Dane) or meth (Crank) and it's okay because the majority of people who are going to read them are grown-ups anyway. But maybe sometimes an adult, a person, a reader, doesn't want the issues and the angst and the pain. Maybe they want simple, every day problems. Maybe humor and character development are all-important. Maybe good fiction has no age. Maybe I'm reading books for second graders. With pictures. And big print. Maybe Lulu and the Duck in the Park is literature. Actually, I know it is:

“Getting Class Three past the climbing wall without anyone climbing, and the candy shop without anyone darting in, and the lake without anyone getting wet, was the hardest part of Mrs. Holidy's week.

Getting them back to school again, wet-haired, starving, and weighed down by soggy swimming bags, was nearly impossible.

Mrs. Holiday didn't even try”

Lulu is great. It does lack a little something, namely words of three or more syllables. That said, I managed to read it in an hour and a half, so someone who reads at normal speed could do it in forty-five minutes.

Lulu and the Duck in the Park is the first in a series, followed up by Lulu and the Dog by the Sea, which I also have out from the library. Hilary McKay, my favorite living author, has teen books out as well and I love them dearly. Lulu is fantastic for the reading level that it is. I would gladly quickly read more of these. The titular duck lives in the park, you see, and Lulu and the rest of Class Three go past the park every Tuesday on their way to the town swimming pool (which may be heated by dead people ), and stop in the park afterwards to have a shivery bite. On this particular Tuesday, a stupid man lets his dogs off leash in the park and the dogs run amuck and terrorize the nesting ducks in front of third graders. Miss Holiday is calming the children when Lulu sees an egg rolling down the hill. She picks it up, puts it in her sweater, and the rest is spoilers.

One thing to mention is that Lulu is black. She is not, of course, an African-American, but an Afro-British person. It's nice to note one more character in the handful of books starring kids of African descent that aren't about slavery or the Civil Rights Movement. (Not that there's anything wrong with those, but would we white people like to be represented exclusively in books about, say, the Revolutionary War and the Roosevelt presidency?) I have a very short running list in my head: Drita, My Homegirl; The Kane Chronicles; Dear America: Color Me Dark; The True Meaning of Smekday, and The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm.

So I am reading like a child, and the nice librarian let me into the children's stacks downtown (actually, they probably let me in because I'm not a child). I was there to pick up Call Me Heller, That's My Name by Stella Pevsner, more on that later, but, as I was in the Ps, I was distracted by the Soup books. Soup, Soup and Me and the other eleven, presumably good, books in the series by Robert Newton Peck (not to be confused with Richard Peck) are based on the author's own Vermont childhood during the Depression. However, by the fourteenth Soup book, Robert Newton Peck had clearly run out of small town Vermont memories to write about and Soup 1776 is set in a chaos. Soup 1776 rips off plot from the previous books and haphazardly recombines it to make a nonsensical mush. The main bent of Soup 1776 is that July 4th is approaching and Soup and Rob have volunteered to write the pageant script. Learning, Vermont, we learn, was the site of a Revolutionary War boondoggle led by Disability Learning, who is meant to have cowarded out of a battle. However, Soup and Rob meet an old recluse called Insanity Wacko, who tells them that he, Sanity Wacko, had a grandfather who was one of Ability Learning's soldiers and that Ability saved the lives of patriot soldiers by not getting involved in a skirmish for which they were unmatched. And then there are the local Indians, the Wahooligans: their leader Sitting Duck with his daughter Wet Blanket. Yes, this was funny several decades ago. In the pageant, the fat town nurse plays Bold Beaver and and Soup plays Spreadeagle. Peck is using his children's novel as a soapbox on which to complain about political correctness because, as his Professor P. H. Dee puts it, “Like any academic, I ignore factual trivia in order to be politically correct.” In 2013 I'm reading a book set in the 1930's ripping on the political trends of 1994. Soup 1776 is terrible, but it's the last in the series and Robert Newton Peck was certainly having his brain addled by his hemorrhoids when he wrote it. I will forget I ever read this, and keep my fond memories of my brother and me rolling on the floor laughing while my dad read us the Soup books when we were kids. I know Soup 1776 is stand-alone bad because I also have fond memories of reading a few of the earlier Soups when they came into work last year.

Speaking of memories, remember when Laura Ingalls Wilder was running around the sod house barefoot and a plague of locusts descended on her and ate all Pa's wheat fields and he had to walk east looking for work? It wasn't just her. Rocky Mountain Locusts destroyed fields in Minnesota, Iowa, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Manitoba, and there's a book about it: Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota 1873-78 by Annette Atkins. The hoppers descended, some farms were ruined, while others were randomly untouched. Harvest of Grief focuses on public policy response to the plagues in Minnesota, Minnesota being a very important state. Initially, most aid to farmers and others came from private donations locally and nationally. Governor Cushman K. Davis did allocate some, little precedented, state relief in 1874. In 1875 John S. Pillsbury was elected governor and his response to the grasshopper plague perfectly exemplifies ideas about the undeserving versus the deserving poor. Distributing aid to those begging for it would lead to “The demoralization of a class fully capable of self-support...” To quote Ms. Atkins, “Too often state help did not reach those he called 'the most worthy recipients' whom he defined as unwilling to ask for help.” Anyone requesting state aid was thus undeserving of assistance, while the deserving poor were to proud to request any help and thus went on with undetected dignity. Seizing his contradiction by the horns, Governor Pillsbury went on a winter fact-finding mission around the state and was humbled by the desperate and uncomplaining farmers. Pillsbury gave his own coat to a man who had none and walked back to town uncoated. Opinions confirmed, Governor Pillsbury signed a bill offering a loan of up to $25 in seed wheat and a postponement of property taxes to affected counties. Aid did get to some farmers; some, like the Wilders, packed up and left; others suffered through in hunger and cold until the grasshoppers mysteriously stopped. Honestly, the only comprehensive and lasting legislation of any particular help to anyone during the grasshopper plagues was an overhaul of the US Department of Entomology, which went from pure cataloging to studying the effects of insects. The Rocky Mountain Locust is extinct now and I don't regret that.

I said in a previous blog that A Fair Barbarian is my second favorite Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, and it continues to be, because A Lady of Quality... What the hell was that all about? Let me tell you. Spoilers ahead:

Sir Geoffrey's wife is dying giving birth to the third surviving child of ten while Sir Geoffrey is out hunting like the terrible husband he is and the useless midwife is off getting rags and the mother, in her last breath attempts to smother the infant, but she lives and becomes a lusty howling child named Clorinda, who grows up getting her own way with the coarse servants and stable boys and can sit astride a horse by the time she's six, when she toddles boldly outside and her favorite horse is gone from the stable and the grooms tell her “the big man took it,” meaning her father, who has never seen her, and little Clorinda tracks him down and horsewhips him and he is delighted by his strong little daughter and raises her as an uncouth boy, until she decides to start being a lady on her fifteenth birthday at which point Sir John Oxen, a rake, falls in lust with her and they have a scandalous affair, with letters and not touching, that could still ruin her if it was brought to light, but then she marries a kind old duke who dies within the year, leaving her money, so that she is rich and beautiful and lives in mourning with her subservient sister Ann, until His Lord of Osmonde proposes to her and they are to be married, until Sir John Oxen follows her home and starts making trouble in her parlor and Clorinda goes into a rage and accidentally hits him on the temple with a weighted horsewhip and he falls down dead, so she drags him into the deepest cellar and has it walled up “for the damp,” and she marries His Lord of Osmonde and seeks out, for charity, all the naïve country girls whom Sir John Oxen ruined, and Ann dies, revealing that she knew about the accidental murder, and everyone else lives long and begets lusty children who do not, thankfully, get their own sequels, although His Lord of Osmonde has a self-titled book about his side of the courtship.

When subservient sister Ann was watching her sister from behind a curtain at a party and His Lord of Osmonde struck up a conversation with her, and then the manslaughter happened, I thought that A Lady of Quality was going to go all of Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Ann would marry His Lord of Osmonde after Clorinda's execution. But, no, nothing happened. The book just went on, describing Clorinda and her imperious manner and proud carriage and eventual happy death by old age.  FHB may have been short on money when she wrote this.

Next on blog: The Magician's Elephant and The Fifth Elephant.