Category Archives: Meme

The Small Rain

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by Madeleine L’Engle

It seems fitting, with her death still so very recent, that my next book for the 11 Decades challenge is Madeleine L’Engle’s first published novel.

It takes place in a slightly romanticized New York, and traces the story of Katherine, a brilliant pianist, and Sarah, and aspiring actress, friends of a sort, though the latter is painted rather unsympathetically.

L’Engle delves in to all sorts of subjects: sex, religion, love, growing up, and the artistic personality – as she shares with us Katherine’s journey from teen to young adult.

The story does not end with all romances happily tied up, but it does continue in the sequel, A Severed Wasp, which holds resolutions that are satisfying, if not perfectly tidy.

Booking Through Thursday: Sunshine and Roses

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Imagine that everything is going just swimmingly. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all’s right with the world. You’re practically bouncing from health and have money in your pocket. The kids are playing and laughing, the puppy is chewing in the cutest possible manner on an officially-sanctioned chew toy, and in between moments of laughter for pure joy, you pick up a book to read . . .

What is it?

It really depends on my own mood on beautiful days, what I read just for kicks. It might be a decorating book by Alexandra Stoddard, though my favorite work of hers is Gift of a Letter, or it might be something by the always hilarious Christopher Moore. If it’s hot, and I’m missing the beach, I’m likely to go outside with a glass of cold water (with lemon) and a juicy Anne Rivers Siddons novel or a really good mystery, or I might feel like traveling to a new world with some great fantasy or science fiction, or Jen Lancaster’s latest snarky memoir.

Prompted by Booking through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday: Comfort Food

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Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.

What do you read?

For me, comfort reading, like comfort food, involves things that invoke a cozy setting, and have descriptions of either food or clothing, or are somehow familiar – a favorite author, for example.

Madeleine L’Engle’s works A Live Coal in the Sea and Certain Women are comfort books for me. Laurell K. Hamilton’s work, as much as I love it, is not. Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries, the really early Nero Wolfe and The Cat Who… books, and almost anything by Maeve Binchy or Marian Keyes qualify as well.

Possibly my favorite ever comfort novel, though, is a book called Mothers, by Jax Peters Lowell that I picked up ages ago, decades even, and fell in love with it. It’s about Claire, a photographer, and Theo, a caterer, both young women who identified as straight, who fall in love, and eventually manage to have a son using artificial insemination. It’s a candid account of two women falling in love in the 60’s and 70’s in New York, and it has food and photography and sweet domestic moments, and a trip out to the beach – all my favorite things – but what I like about it most is that it isn’t a gay novel or a straight novel. It’s just the story of a family who love each other.

What could be more comforting than that?


Booking Through Thursday

Five for Friday: Back to School

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I haven’t been in school for years – almost decades – but in honor of most students being back at school by now, my list this week is books that involve school.

  1. Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet’s entire plot involves the reactions of her schoolmates to her spy notebook, after all. Plus, I always wanted to go to a school where being in the play involved being an onion.
  2. A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeleine L’Engle: Technically this is a sequel to a much earlier novel, Camilla, but it stands on its own as well. Most of the action takes place in and around a university campus.
  3. The Anne of Green Gables series, by Lucy Maud Montgomery: While it’s true that not all of the wonderful stories about Anne’s life in and around Avonlea involve school, education was a prime motivator in Anne’s life. From student, to teacher, to wife and mother, Anne Shirley progressed through life surrounded by books and words.
  4. Mythology 101, Higher Mythology, Mythology Abroad, and Advanced Mythology, by Jody Lynn Nye: a delightful light fantasy series about a group of elves living in the sub basement of a university library, and the human students who interact with them.
  5. The President’s Daughter, White House Autumn, and Long Live the Queen, by Ellen Emerson White: Well-written, if slightly dated based on characters’ television choices, series about the teenage daughter of the first female president of the United States. There’s apparently a fourth book coming out next month, and while these are YA, I plan to read it anyway.

Booking Through Thursday: 6 September 2007

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So, this is my question to you–are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?
Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

While I agree that there are some environments that are more comfortable for reading than others, if the book is good, I have no trouble getting lost in it no matter the location. At home, I read a lot in bed, the bath, and on the porcelain throne. Elsewhere? I’ve found it perfectly easy to lose myself in the written word while in class, on a bus or train, on a plane, or sitting in a bookstore, library, or cafe. I didn’t generally bring books to work, however, because I knew I’d lose track of time if I stopped to read, even over lunch.

Booking Through Thursday website.

Thursday 13: Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Thirteen Things about Laura Ingalls Wilder

The images in the Wordless Wednesday post below are from De Smet, South Dakota, the real “Little Town on the Prairie.” De Smet is the town where the last half of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, and Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years take place. Here are thirteen quotations from Laura Ingalls Wilders’ books, from those years.

  1. It was a big house, a real house with two stories, and glass windows. Its up-and-down boards were weathering from yellow to gray and every crack was battened, as Pa had said. The door had a china knob. It opened into the lean-to over the back door.

  2. This house had board floors; not as comfortable to bare feet as the earth floor of the shanty, but not so much work to keep clean.

  3. The surveyors had left their stove! It was a larger stove than the one that Ma had brought from Plum Creek; it had six lids on top and two oven doors, and it was all set up with its stovepipe in place. Spaced on the wall beyond it were three doors. All of them were shut.

  4. Laura tiptoed across the wide floor, and softly opened one door. There was a small room, with a bedstead in it. This room had a window, too.

  5. Softly, Laura opened the middle door. She was surprised. Steeply up in front of her went a stair, just the width of the door. She looked up and saw the underside of a slanting roof high overhead. She went up a few steps, and a big attic opened out on both sides of the stairs.

  6. That made three rooms already, and still there was another door. Laura thought that there must have been a great many surveyors to need so much space. This would be by far the largest house she had ever lived in.

  7. She opened the third door. A squeal of excitement came out of her mouth and startled the listening house. There before her eyes was a little store. All up the walls of that small room were shelves, and on the shelves were dishes, and pans and pots, and boxes, and cans. All around under the shelves stood barrels and boxes.

  8. All day long, except when he went through the storm to do the chores, Pa was twisting more sticks of hay in the lean-to.

  9. Laura picked up all the hay her hands could hold and shook the snow from it. Then, watching Pa, she followed his motions in twisting the hay. First he twisted the long strand as far as his two hands could do it. Then he put the right-hand end of it under his left elbow and held it there, tight against his side, so that it could not untwist.

  10. Laura’s stick of hay was uneven and raggedy, not smooth and hard like Pa’s. But Pa told her that it was well done for the first one; she would do better next time.

  11. She put the button in the center of the square of calico. She drew the cloth together over the button and wound a thread tightly around it and twisted the corners of calico straight upward in a tapering bunch. Then she rubbed a little axle grease up the calico and set the button into the axle grease in the saucer.

  12. “Give me a match, Charles, please,” Ma said. She lighted the taper tip of the button lamp. A tiny flame flickered and grew stronger. It burned steadily, melting the axle grease and drawing it up through the cloth into itself, keeping itself alight by burning. The little flame was like the flame of a candle in the dark.

  13. “I was wondering…” Almanzo paused. Then he picked up Laura’s hand that shone white in the starlight, and his sun-browned hand closed gently over it. He had never done that before. “Your hand is so small,” he said. Another pause. Then quickly, “I was wondering if you would like an engagement ring.”
    “That would depend on who offered it to me,” Laura told him.
    “If I should?” Almanzo asked.
    “Then it would depend on the ring,” Laura answered, and drew her hand away.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

Wordless Wednesday – #1

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Surveyor’s House – Front, originally uploaded by Ms.Snarky.

 

Booking Through Thursday: 30 August 07

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There was a widely bruited-about statistic reported last week, stating that 1 in 4 Americans did not read a single book last year. Clearly, we don’t fall into that category, but . . . how many of our friends do? Do you have friends/family who read as much as you do? Or are you the only person you know who has a serious reading habit?

I am fortunate in that I come from a family of readers, and married into a family of readers as well. Some of us have overlapping tastes, some of us don’t, but no matter where we are, there’s something interesting to read, and probably a cozy corner in which to do so.

I’m also pretty selective about my friends – most of them are readers as well. It’s hard for me to comprehend a life without reading for pleasure.

Five for Friday: Beach Reading

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Welcome to a new weekly post here at Bibliotica: a list of five books on a theme, each Friday. This week, to usher in August, I’m sharing five of my favorite beach books.

While some people think of beach reading as anything light that one might read at the beach, for me, beach reading involves books that are set at or near the shore. Here are five of my favorites, alphabetically by author:

Beaches, by Iris R. Dart
We all know the movie, but the novel it was based on is richer, as novels tend to be.

The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd
Vivid imagery, and an excellent depiction of a coastal town.

Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, by James Patterson
A quiet, sweet, sentimental little novel. The movie (direct to DVD, I think) couldn’t approach it in tone or poignancy.

Three Sisters Island Trilogy, by Nora Roberts
These three novels, Dance Upon the Air, Heaven and Earth and Face the Fire all take place on a cute and charming fictional island, with each novel focusing on one woman, though their stories are interwoven. It has everything I love in novels – a cafe/bookstore, the beach, and romance.

Up Island, by Anne Rivers Siddons
Actually, Ms. Siddons has written many beach books – Colony, Low Country, and Outer Banks are three others – she’s amazing at capturing the Carolinas, and the Gullah culture, as well as just general beachiness.

Your Turn: What does “beach reading” mean to you? What are some of your favorite beach books?