Wrapping up Fall Reading

I'm just wrapping up my Fall reading before diving into Holiday books, so here's a quickie look at what I read this Fall.

I Am the Chosen King, by Helen Hollick - read this one with the GoodReads True Book Talk Group. November was historical fiction month, and while this wasn't the book I voted for, I really enjoyed it. It's about Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, who was defeated by William the Bastard in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. Having visited Bayeaux last summer and viewed the Bayeaux Tapestry and listened to the French side of the story, it was a story fresh in my mind and was cool because I had visited many of the places in Normandy mentioned in the book. It was well-written and detailed and covered a period of history that I want to learn more about.

An Infamous Army, by Georgette Heyer - this was my second time listening to the audio version of this incredible book. It is a mashup of a Regency Romance and a very detailed narrative of the Battle of Waterloo, with definite overtones of Vanity Fair. I really need to read it next time with a map in hand because listening to it in the car means I can't research all the place names. Thoroughly enjoyable, though.

Varina, by Charles Frazier - an exceptionally creative and well-written novel about Varina Davis, wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the African-American child who was part of her household during the Civil War but who was taken from her when the Union Army captured the Davises after Richmond fell. Varina reminded me of Frazier's Cold Mountain in that both books are journeys--in Cold Mountain, Inman is going home after the Civil War whereas Varina is fleeing Richmond and trying to reach Florida so she can escape to Cuba. One of the best books I read this year.  Now, I am very eager to read A Diary from Dixie, by Mary Chesnut, who was one of Varina's closest friends before, during, and after the war.

To Die but Once, by Jacqueline Winspear - the most recent (#14) in the excellent Maisie Dobbs series. I love these books, always listen to them as the actress is so good who reads them. It's set during the Dunkirk evacuation, and is an absolutely first-rate mystery. Loved it!

The Caves of Perigord, by Martin Walker - I really wanted to visited the Dordogne region of France on my trip last summer so I could go to the Lascaux caves, but I just couldn't fit it in. So, I did the next best thing...read a novel about the region. Martin Walker writes lovely mysteries set in the Dordogne region, but this one was a stand-alone that bounced between pre-historic times when the cave paintings were done, WWII (when British, American, and French soldiers were prepping for D-Day and encounter the caves), and modern-day (when a fragment of one of the paintings is part of theft). It was okay--I loved the pre-historic story about how the paintings were done, what they meant--all conjecture, of course, but fun to read. The WWII part was also good, but the modern-day was pretty weak in terms of story and characters.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson - another second listening of this favorite book. All about how the stuff we take for granted--light, toilets, kitchens, essentially everything in a house including its structure--came to be.  I love listening to Bryson read his own works.

Drums of Autumn, by Diana Gabaldon - I'm 75% done with this reread, which I am doing while watching season 4 of Outlander. I'm a fan of the whole series and never tire of reading about the adventures of Clarie and Jamie and their family that literally spans the centuries. Gives new meaning to the term "extended family."

Now, on to Holiday reading!

The Road to Little Dribbling

I am a Bill Bryson fan--I've enjoyed his travel books, social history books (At Home is one of my all-time favorites), and his book on Shakespeare is absolutely excellent.  I like his humor, snarkiness notwithstanding, and I love his appreciation for nature.  Politically, we're pretty well aligned too. And his walking treks always inspire me to do more.

So, I eagerly awaited the audio version of his latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling.  Like many, I have to give it a mixed review.  While so much of what I like about Bryson is still there--the love of walking, nature, Britain, and quirkiness in general, I think he indulges in a tad too much ranting at inanities, which makes him come across as a grumpy old guy, a persona he is wearing like one of his old sweaters, but that gets tiresome after awhile.

For the most part, I did enjoy the book--it's a tour, bottom to top, side to side, of Great Britain.  He revisits some places covered in Notes from a Small Island, but mostly goes to places he didn't get to yet but always wanted to.  Listening to his rambles made me want to book passage and pack my bags for a similar tour.  I really like to travel as he does, skipping the crowded tourist attractions and finding the local haunts and hidden gems.

One place in particular that I want to go is the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall.  It sounds enchanting.  I also loved hearing about Gilbert White and his naturalist writings--I ordered an abridged copy The Natural History of Selbourne.  I'm not up for reading 40 years worth of his journal entries but I wanted to get a flavor of his observations, especially now that spring is here and I really need to get weeding.

Nonfiction November

Sophisticated Dorkiness,  I'm Lost in Books, Regular Rumination, and Doing Dewey are hosting Nonfiction November.  

During November,  the co-hosts will be reading and writing about nonfiction, and encouraging other readers to join in through a series of post topics and a couple of readalongs.

The task for this first week is to consider Your Year in Nonfiction: Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on some questions:

What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? 
Twelve of my 58 books so far in 2014 (that's 21%) were non-fiction. I was actually surprised to see so many as I don't feel I read enough nonfiction, but I guess it's relative as I love fiction too!

So, my favorite?  I guess I would have to go with One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson.  I enjoy Bryson's style, I love reading about history, and this time period is absolutely fascinating with lots of larger than life people doing interesting things and the society struggling to catch up with technology, which is changing age-old conventions at breakneck speed.

What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? 

It has to be Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman.  I've recommended this to fellow bloggers, family and friends.  So many people have been watching the TV series, and I found it really interesting to compare the book with the series.  Not only in terms of what works best in each media, but how a memoir can become fictionalized.

What is one topic or type of nonfiction you haven’t read enough of yet? 

I set out in 2014 intending to finally read up on WWI, since we're marking the 100-year anniversary of the start of the war.  I have a number of books on my shelf in this area, but haven't read any yet!  Must do in 2015.

What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I see this as a great opportunity to find new nonfiction books for my groaning shelves and meet some new book bloggers.   It's also a good way to start thinking about my reading plans for 2015--what I want to accomplish as a reader, and what areas/topics I want to learn more about.

Top Ten Tuesday: Gateway Books/Authors

This week's Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) is about those Gateway Books or Authors in Our Reading Journey who got you into reading, or into reading a genre you never thought you'd read, or brought you BACK into reading.

Definitely this was a fun Top Ten list to consider--I focused on authors because when I find an author who works for, I tend to try to read everything they come out with.  I also had a blast coming up with the right illustrations for my authors.

Donna Leon - Leon's series of books featuring Guido Brunetti sparked an interest in Venice that has taken hold of me and just won't let go.  Now I seek out books--histories, novels, memoirs--about Venice.  Hoping to make it there this fall.

Nevada Barr - I've always liked mysteries, but Barr's Anna Pigeon series which features a lot of National Parks and a lot of hiking got me interested in both.  Now I walk daily and hike weekly, and make a point of planning vacations around visiting National Parks...truly one of America's best ideas! 

Mary Stewart - I'm not much of a Romance reader but my mom used to get British women's magazines from our town's newspaper/tobacco shop in the 1960's and I learned to read by reading the serialized Mary Stewart stories, complete with stirring illustrations!

Bill Bryson - My love of travel and travel memoirs can be traced to reading Bryson's oh-so-snarky travel books.

Jane Austen - Classics don't have to be big, scary, or filled with political ramblings that are incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Daphne du Maurier - I love psychological thrillers and DDM is the mistress of the genre.

James Michener - I love historical fiction and Michener hooked me early.

Margaret Forster - I didn't really start reading literary bios until my dad gave me Forster's bio of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I fell in love with the genre.

Erik Larson - I love his histories that read like novels; Larsen's books made me go back and read In Cold Blood, the prototype of the genre in which Larsen shines.

Tracy Chevalier - Artifact-based fictionalized backstory. Love it!

One Summer - Bill Bryson

I've read and enjoyed a lot of Bill Bryson's books, but his latest, One Summer: America, 1927 is my favorite by far.  Much as I enjoy his travel memoirs (A Walk in the Woods remains an all-time favorite book), I love history even more, and in this book he tells the stories and backstories of a most remarkable summer.

This was the summer when Lindberg flew solo across the Atlantic, when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig slugged it out along with those amazing Yankees, and when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed without a shred of evidence against them.  It was the summer Al Capone ruled Chicago, before being indicted for tax evasion, the Mississippi River flooded,and Calvin Coolidge started wearing a cowboy outfit.  It was a time of speakeasies and Prohibition, talkies were on the cusp, and Broadway was booming.

I loved every minute I spent reading this fascinating book.  You get the feeling that Bryson had an absolute ball doing the research--the glee with which he points out incongruities is infectious--and you get the feeling he really did do his research.  He quotes newspaper articles, magazine articles, advertising slogans, and letters.  I loved the focus on one period of time as a way of putting into context the passions, interests, hopes and dreams of a generation.  He balanced political history with social history, and the narrative never lagged or dragged.

Much as I enjoyed At Home, which I listened to a couple of years ago, I do think One Summer is the stronger book and I really can't wait to see what will be the next topic Bryson tackles.

A Walk in the Woods and The Way

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a neighbor about favorite hikes in Boulder County and Rocky Mt. National Park and he told me about The Way, a 2010 movie starring Martin Sheen.  Sheen plays a stick-in-the-mud doctor who goes to Spain to retrieve the body of his estranged son after he dies just as he begins to walk El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, also known in English as The Way of St James, in the French Pyrenees.  The father, struggling with grief and guilt, decides to make the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain on foot. 

For the most part, The Way is a quiet movie, with the main characters often walking in silence or talking about, or trying to talk about, what has driven them to make the pilgrimage.  Some of the reasons are spiritual, some physical, some emotional, some undefineable.  I found myself thinking about this movie for days afterward, longing to go on pilgrimage myself.

Since that really isn't practical right now, I did the next best thing.  I reread Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, about his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail and which resulted in a wonderfully funny, interesting, and inspiring book.  I read it many years ago, shortly after if first came out and was my first Bryson.  Like most firsts, it remains my favorite of his books.

The big difference between reading it now and reading it a decade or more ago is that I now hike regularly, though I am not a backpacker and am still awed by thru hikers or go for days, weeks, or even months, hiking the AT and mostly camping along the way. 

Bryson's stories about his fellow hikers make for fun reading, and his history of the AT is interesting, though I think he unjustly gives the National Forest Service a bad rap. 

I was pretty excited to find talk of a movie, to be directed by Robert Redford, based on A Walk in the Woods.  The talk has been going on for a few years, but I think it would make a terrific movie and would be a nice point-counterpoint to The Way. 

Bill Bryson's "At Home"

I prefer to listen to Bill Bryson read his work, and so have been putting off reading his latest, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which I received in hardbound form for my birthday last November until I could listen to it. I wasn't disappointed. At Home was an absolutely marvelous book--chock full of fascinating information delivered with wry humor.

At Home is an excellent book for people like me who love history and historical fiction, particularly the Regency and Victorian time periods. Bryson uses his house in England, which was built in 1850 as a rectory, as the framework for discussing virtually all aspects of human life by visiting each room and discussing in a rambling, folksy, anecodote-laden way the facets of society and technology associated with that room over the millennia, but with a focus on the last 200 years.

In the Kitchen chapter, for example, Bryson discusses not only what people ate and why, but how the food was procured, prepared, and consumed. This means we are treated to information on farming, refrigeration and the use of ice, cooks and scullery maids, the East India Company, the quest for spices and the associated voyages of discovery, medicine, vitamins, and a host of other interrelated topics.

And so it goes, from the cellar to the attic, by way of the hall, drawing room, bathroom, stairs, nursery, bedroom, etc. with the axle of the book being the year 1851, the year of, among other things, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. In fact, a discussion of the building of the Crystal Palace is really the first in-depth story Bryson tells and I enjoyed this part so much that I listened to it a second time. I loved hearing about Joseph Paxton, the energetic gardener, who designed the Crystal Palace as basically a gigantic greenhouse, and how this was made physically possible by recent technological advances in the manufacture of both glass and cast iron, and financially possible by the dropping of a tax on glass.




The whole book is like this...from how salt and pepper became our seasonings of choice, to how the Eiffel tower was built, to how lighting in the home before electricity was achieved and at what cost, to clothing, wigs, cosmetics, lice, vermin, plumbing, and on and on.

Another favorite section, again near the beginning, was a dicussion of the role of the clergy in the development of science, technology, and the arts, but not necessarily in religion. The crux of the idea is that most clery in the 18th century through the mid/late 19th century had a comfortable income with not a lot of responsibility and so those who were motivated were able to pursue their pet interests with a great deal of energy. Many key contributors to archeology, geology, linguistics, and a variety of other endeavors were devoted and passionate amatuers who were also clergymen.

Speaking of archeology, I found absolutely riveting the section in which Bryson recounts the discovery of the neolithic village of Skara Brae, in Orkney, Scotland, in 1850 (yes the same year Bryson's house was built!). I never knew about this well-preserved village and now I'm trying to figure out how I can visit it.




Much as I love to read history books and historical fiction, it's been awhile since I was under any illusion that I was reading about the "good old days." Even so, At Home reminded me strongly that I am thankful to be living out my life in the 21st century. His discussion of the lives of servants, children, and the poor in particular provide a strong lesson in how far we as a society have come, even in the last half century. Hearing about living conditions, whether urban or rural, workhouses, and factories is sobering. So much of life in the past was neither pleasant nor easy...but it is endlessly fascinating to learn about.

Here's an illustration that I found in a San Franciscio Chronicle review of the book that will give you a further taste for the rich depth of interesting facts that Bryson delivers in this marvelous book.

Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way

A friend lent me a copy of Mother Tongue when I mentioned that I liked Bill Bryson. I made time for it, despite it not even resting any time on the TBR shelf, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The whole time I was reading this book I wondered how one individual could possibly write this book--it is incredibly dense with examples of English words and phrases, their etymology, and their usage. Interesting as the book was, I felt like the information was literally passing through me with no hope that I could actually retain much of it (in one ear and out the other, so to speak), but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of this word-wallow one bit.

Bryson spends most of the first part of the book discussing how languages and pronunciation develop and evolve over time. It is chockful of interesting bits such as this:

The broad a of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrims were from the old Anglican strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the pronounced r of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering consequence of the Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. p. 47

While the book as a whole was vastly interesting, by far the best chapters were those at the end that were devoted to names, swearing, and wordplay. With regards to names, Bryson covers a bit of the same ground he covered in Notes from a Small Island with regards to the English penchant for colorful, quirky place and people names. As he says, "A glance through the British edition of Who's Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P.G. Wodehouse novel..." His breezy style always makes me smile and nod, and I do have a weakness for names like Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax.

The chapter on swearing was truly educational for this devout reader of Victorian novels.

Finally, the chapter on wordplay had me interrupting my husband's own reading to listen to the interesting bits and pieces that Bryson kept on hammering me with. For example, did you know that "...the crossword is the most popular sedentary recreation, occupying thirty million Americans for part of every day." That fact alone makes me feel better about my fellow Americans than I have felt in awhile!

To close this post, I will share the single most astounding thing I learned in this book...the highest Scrabble score, "according to Alan Richter, a former British champion [of Scrabble?] writing in The Atlantic in 1987, was 3,881 points. It included the word psychoanalyzing, which alone was worth 1,539 points."

Off to find the Scrabble board...I have time off from work over the next couple of weeks, and I have some practicing to do!

Mailbox Monday...the birthday edition

Remember, remember, the fifth of November....cuz it was my birthday!

This week's Mailbox Monday features bookish gifts from my lovely family.

First up is my very own plush bookworm, courtesy of my clever sister-in-law, who finds the best stuff out there. This is from Giant Microbes, and makes a wonderful friend on my TBR shelf.




My sister-in-law also gave me Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks From Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West, by Shannon Mckenna Schmidt, Joni Rendon, and Matthew Pearl. I found this on another blogger's blog and promptly put it on my Wish List--Wish Lists are truly wonderful things. I'm planning on this being our family's travel guide for awhile...little do they know!



My brother gave me Bill Bryson's latest, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which he is currently reading and absolutely loves. I'm a Bryson fan anyway and recently heard him talking about this book on NPR, so yeah! This is from the Amazon blurb:

While walking through his own home, a former Church of England rectory built in the 19th century, Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing the extraordinary stories behind the seemingly commonplace, he examines how everyday items--things like ice, cookbooks, glass windows, and salt and pepper--transformed the way people lived, and how houses evolved around these new commodities.

And my son gave me Composed, a memoir by one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Roseanne Cash, daughter of the late great Johnny Cash. I might read this one first as it is so different from anything I've read recently that the change will do me good.




Stay tuned for reviews of all three books in the hopefully not-to-distant future!

Shakespeare Wrote for Money...according to Nick Hornby

Trolling my favorite blogs for airplane reading a few weeks ago, I pounced on a title that appealed to me on every level, Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money. I added it to my Amazon wish list and without really checking it out, I blithely spent my hard-earned Borders Bucks on it just before leaving for the airport last weekend.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that it was a collection of Hornby's columns in the Believer on what he read each month between August 06 and September 08. Not that the columns aren't interesting in and of themselves, and since this is my first taste of Hornby, though I did like the movie version of About a Boy (Full Screen Edition), it's not a complete loss. But, I wanted to read about Shakespeare!

Hornby got the book's title from his April 07 column in which he included notes about James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)
so I did get about a page of some Shakespeare discussion, mostly comparing it to Claire Tomalin's bio of Thomas Hardy.



Here's what Hornby had to say about Shapiro's book:

It's a brilliant book, riveting, illuminating, and original...full of stuff with which you want to amaze, enlighten, and educate your friends. 1599 was the year Shakespeare polished off Henry V, wrote As You Like It and Julius Caesar, and drafted Hamlet....Both Julius Caesar and Henry V are shown to be more about England's conflict with Ireland than we had any hope of understanding without Shapiro's expert illumination...The only thing you have to care about to love this book is how and why things get written. The "why" is relatively straightforward: Shakespeare wrote for money. He had a wife, a new theater, and a large theater company to support...the "how is more illusive...

I don't mean to 'dis Hornby, but the 1599 book is the one I really want to read. It's on my Amazon list and I may have to buy it before I've accumulated any more Borders Bucks.

An aside, having read a lot of Bill Bryson and none (up to now) of Nick Hornby, in his column on reading anyway, Hornby's voice sounds remarkably similar to Bryson's.