Laurie King and Sherlock Holmes

My introduction to Laurie King was the first book in her series starring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (!). Now there have been many authors lately who have tried writing books that include Sherlock Holmes, either as a main character or in a supporting role – and most of them have just not (to my mind) captured the essence of that wonderful Conan Doyle character. So it was with much hesitation that I began reading The Beekeepers Apprentice.

What a wonderful surprise. King has managed to create a brilliant young woman in Mary Russell, and her meeting and partnering with the great Detective Holmes is natural, believable and spot on. Holmes has retired from the detective business and is keeping bees, of all things, in the Sussex countryside.

Mary is a precocious and very bright 14 year old who lost her family in a terrible automobile accident in California. She has come to England to live with her only living relative, her mother’s sister – NOT a very bright woman and not a woman very sympathetic to a bereaved, but very independent teenager. Mary stumbles (literally) into Mr. Holmes while he is observing a group of bees – and they soon discover they are, despite their age differences, quite birds of a feather. And they begin to solve crimes together – first some very small, local problems and then a major kidnapping. It is a joy to go with them on their adventures.

The Women’s Rights movement in London forms the backdrop of the second book in the series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and also further develops the characters of Russell and Holmes (as they refer to each other). They are a wonderful fictional pair – almost as fun as Holmes and Watson – and I highly recommend them.

Other titles in the series are:
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
O’ Jerusalem (a prequel, of sorts)
Justice Hall
The Game
Locked Rooms
The Language of Bees (set to be published in April 2009)

It is better, by the way, to read the books in order. Have fun. Meg

Off On a Better Foot - Readings for the New Year

Resolve to do better, feel happier, be satisfied, help others – these books might help get you started.

Happy at Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Finding Joy by Richard O’Connor.
O’Connor is a practicing psychotherapist who first assesses the reasons why Americans are not happy and content with their lives, and then shows us how to change. O’Connor tells us that happiness is not only a matter of mood, but a direct result of brain chemistry and physical development. And we can choose to develop the part of our brains directly related to happiness and satisfaction. I am not sure I am totally convinced, but it sounds worth a try.

Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman.
Friedman, also the author of The World is Flat, writes about the absolute necessity for America to “go green” and to do it immediately and aggressively. The book includes case studies and will hopefully provide the inspiration we need to tend responsibly to our own consumer culture and the waste it engenders.

What Matters: The World’s Preeminent Photojournalists and Thinkers Depict Essential Issues of Our Time by David Elliot Cohen.
A photographic journey like no other, What Matters brings together photos – many of which are not easy to look at – that Cohen hopes will raise awareness of the many issues addressed and ultimately change the world. Broad topics that are represented include Man vs. Man (picturing issues of global warming and safe water); the Distribution of Wealth (picturing poverty, child labor and immigration); and Man vs. Disease (picturing those affected by AIDs and malaria.)

He ends with a chapter on one amazing man, Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani, now 80 years old, who has devoted his life to helping those in need. This chapter is entitled What One Person Can Do. Meg

So This is Christmas?

For the last several Christmases, it’s been a tradition in my house to listen to a recording of David Sedaris reading his belly-shakingly hilarious essay “Six to Eight Black Men” (collected in Dress Your Family in Courdoroy and Denim). If you haven’t read it, you must; I particularly recommend Sedaris’ own reading of it on the audio book version. In less than ten pages, Sedaris does a hilarious send-up of Christmas traditions and legends in the Netherlands. The author’s mock outrage, especially when he hears that, for the Dutch, Saint Nicholas used to be the bishop of Turkey and now resides in Spain, is priceless: “Santa chose the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No one can spy on him, and he doesn’t have to worry about people coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in that outfit he’d most certainly be recognized.” And anyway, he says, “Santa didn’t used to do anything.”

As funny as Dutch traditions are to us, Sedaris really makes me think about the ridiculousness of my own ideas about Christmas and Santa Claus. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t give up my Santa Claus for anything. But I always wonder where these different traditions came from and what they mean.

So I dug around our library’s folklore and holidays section to see what I could find out. It turns out we have several excellent books on how Christmas as we know it came about. First I opened the copiously illustrated Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be, by Jock Elliott. I’d often heard that Christmas is a 19^th century invention, but I never knew the whole story; like Sedaris, I figured kids just always hung stockings, wrote letters to Santa at the North Pole, and opened presents wrapped in paper.

Boy was I wrong.

Our country, especially the New England region, has a long history of suppressing the celebration of Christmas. The Puritans thought it was an abomination, and the Massachussetts colony actually outlawed the holiday back in 1659. Another book in our collection, The Battle for Christmas, shows how the holiday as we know it today—chubby, jolly Santa Claus, greeting cards, presents and treats, etc.—is to a great extent a deliberate invention of upper class New Yorkers. These gents, among them the prominent Manhattan landowner Clement Moore (who wrote a poem called “The Night Before Christmas” which I bet some of you have heard of) were trying to change the holiday from a riotous carnival of public intoxication (think Mardi Gras) to a family-centered, domestic celebration that kept folks indoors.

It’s a fascinating story, even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, and there’s a lot more insteresting stuff to discover in our folklore and holiday section, way in the back corner of the library.

Dress Your Family in Courdoroy and Denim, by David Sedaris

The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum

Inventing Christmas, by Jock Elliott

More on the subject. LO

My Favorite Holiday Gifts....

are books! Here are some books that I seem to give over and over again.

Cookbooks
Cookbooks are always a good gift – especially if the giftee likes to cook. America’s Test Kitchen (the folks who publish Cooks Illustrated) puts out some excellent cookbooks. They are not the glitzy, glossy-paper cookbooks you often see, but the recipes are thoroughly tested, easy to follow, and in my experience, always result in some fabulous tasting food.

Julia Child and any of her cookbooks are always welcome. Julia got her start in television in Boston, Massachusetts and her cookbooks continually provide an excellent home dinner or an extravaganza for company. And the folks at Moosewood Restaurant have a newish edition of their very popular vegetarian cookbook out. This cookbook is entitled, curiously enough, The New Moosewood Cookbook.

Non-Fiction
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick is a fine choice for history-buffs.

Shadow Divers – an exciting account of the discovery of a sunken German submarine off the coast of New Jersey (in 1991!) – is a good choice for reluctant readers. This is non-fiction that reads like a novel and I, for one, could not put it down – despite the fact that I am not a huge fan of deep-sea diving.

Fiction
Ann Hood is a local writer and one of her best titles is The Knitting Circle, the story of how learning to knit begins the healing process for a woman who has just lost her young child to meningitis. (The Knitting Circle is partially biographical, as Ann lost her 5-year-old daughter, Grace, in a similar fashion. Hood writes about this real life tragedy in Comfort: A Journey Through Grief published in 2008.)

For Children
I always give Goodnight, Moon to my friends who have young children, even babies, as I am of the firm opinion that you are never too young to be read to. And the gentle cadences of Margaret Wise Brown’s book are simply delicious.
Another local author, Chris Van Allsburg, has written what I consider to be the quintessential holiday book, The Polar Express. I know there’s a movie around, too, but if you have never read the book, do yourself as well as your children a favor and read it.

For Older Children
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle is a fantasy appropriate for children in the 4th through 8th grade, though I read it for the first time as an adult and loved it.

Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card, is science fiction but don’t let that deter you. This is an action-packed adventure story about young cadets in training, pressed into service to fight alien invaders. Sounds a bit over the top, perhaps, but it is well written and Card draws you into the story almost in spite of yourself.

New and just for fun
Lemony Snicket’s A Lump of Coal is out just in time for the holidays. This is a small story about a small lump of coal and its search for a miracle. This book is for children of all ages.

All of these books should be available at your local bookstore. If you want to look them over before purchasing, they should also be available through the Newport Public Library. And don’t forget the Friends’ of the Library Bookstore – where you might be able to find some of these titles and certainly many other titles that would make wonderful (and inexpensive) gifts. Meg

10 Best Books of 2008

Whenever anyone (The New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly; Salon.com, etc.) puts together a list of the top 10 (or 100) books of the year, someone is going to be unhappy.

Well – the Times has done it again. Here are the New York Times’ 10 BEST books of 2008, and I am not sure I agree, at all, with some of their selections. What do you think?

Five best fiction titles
Dangerous Laughter, by Steven Millhauser
A Mercy, by Toni Morrison
Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill
2666, by Roberto Bolano
Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Five best non-fiction titles
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes
This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust
The World Is What It Is, by Patrick French

(For other reader’s comments on this NYTimes list, check out the Readers’ Comments page at the New York Times online.)

Let’s make a 10 Best Books of 2008 for Newport County. Just click on the word “Comments” at the end of this post and enter the titles you want to nominate in the Comment Box (at the right of the page). You do not have to leave your name. Just click on “Anonymous” and “Publish Your Comment” and you’re set. Meg

[Click on titles to check availability.]

War and Remembrance Book Display

Newport Public Library’s main book display for the months of November and December is Stories of War and Rembrance.

Displayed here are stories from the Civil War, World War I and II, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and even stories from some ancient, foreign conflicts. Also included in the display are some biographies of important wartime figures, photographic essays, books of wartime posters and some war poetry.

Come in and check them out. Meg

Art in America by Ron McLarty

Ron McLarty, best known in Rhode Island for his book Memory of Running (Reading Across Rhode Island selection for 2007) has done it again. His newest book, Art in America, has just been published and is as heart-warming and funny as the adventures of Smithy Ide in Memory.

Our hero is named Steven Kearney and he is an awkward, overweight, unpublished author. Kearney is finally offered a position as a “playwright-in-residence” at the Creedmore Historical Society in Colorado. They want him to create an historical play about the founding and history of the town. This simple task proves to be far from simple, and we are treated to battles of local ranchers, a haunted and ineffectual town sherrif and ecological activism at its extreme among other riotous happenings. Amid it all, Kearney manages to write quite a brilliant play.

Publishers’ Weekly said of Art in America, “This is the third novel by veteran character actor McLarty, and the third time’s a charm. A bighearted, wildly entertaining novel from a writer who just gets better with every outing.”

Mr. McLarty will actually be in Rhode Island, speaking at the Weaver Public Library in East Providence on this Sunday, November 16th at 1:30pm. This program is co-sponsored by the Weaver Library and the Rhode Island Center for the Book at Providence Public Library, and is free and open to all. Meg

[Click on titles to check availability.]