frumiousb

I have several bad habits. I like reading old and obscure books-- particularly those that came from the collections of my late grandparents. I also like keeping track of old advertisements that are found inside.

I picked up this book:



Sylvia: The Story of an American Countess by Evalyn Emerson. It was published in 1901 and I got it from my grandmother's collection of books after she died. She, in turn, was not the original owner. That was Margaret H. Holmes:



Not terribly surprising. My grandmother loved books, but never had much money. Much of her collection was second-hand.

The book had some really fascinating stuff at the front-- a contest-- kind of a promotional action. I found this short description of the marketing stunt in the archive of the New York Times when I was trying to do some research on Evalyn Emerson:


They published the vision of the title character as conceived by 12 contemporary illustrators, and left it to the audience to choose which one was "really" Sylvia.

(Note: I didn't locate much about Emerson. She seems to have been an actress as well as a writer, but her life left very little trace on the Interwebs.)

And then from the book:

( the contest )

( the prize coupon and the list of illustrators )

And then, of course, there were the Sylvias themselves. By way of example, without a cut, here's Sylvia Number 1, by Alice Barber Stephens:



( the rest of the Sylvias )

It's too late to send our coupons in to Small, Maynard & Company, and I can't think of any way to figure out which was the most popular Sylvia. But given how much standards of beauty have changed from then to now, I'm curious to hear what you all think.

Who is the real Sylvia? (Note that she's supposed to be the most beautiful woman in both the US and Europe.)

Poll #1373539
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

Which is your choice?

I'm still reading the Tacitus (Annals of Imperial Rome) in the midst of all my packing. It is *dense* with images and taking me forever to get through. At this rate it will take me another couple of weeks to finish the thing. There are so many absorbing little scenes that I find myself deep in the book for quite some time before I realize that I've only gotten through a few pages. Normally I'm a natural speed reader, but some books just hit me this way.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not reading it as it is meant to be read. No pretense at erudition. I'm actually reading it as a great collection of little Roman anecdotes. I suppose that I should be caring more about the Big Picture history of it all, but I'm absorbed with the murderess who was found with poison in her hair.

Lots of packing today as well-- so a busy day!

Scanned in from a 1926 book.





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Writing about Eight Cousins this morning made me realize how many of the books that I loved as a child had a plot that could be at least loosely described as "child with bad upbringing/orphaned child with mistakes corrected by other adults".

It's probably obvious to all of you, but it had never occurred to me before how many books seem to fit this formula. Just with a quick think, I came up with the following list:

• Eight Cousins, Louisa May Alcott
  
• Heidi, Johanna Spyri
  
• Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield
  
• Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling
  
• Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis
  
• The whole Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
  
• The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (thanks to atheenah)
  
• Sound of Music, the film
  
• Harper Hall Series, Anne McCaffery
  
• Arrows of the Queen, Mercedes Lackey

I'm sure that there's more, but this is all that I can think of from the top of my head. I'm leaving out orphans who begin the book in relatively good circumstances like Taran of Caer Dallben or Belgarion.

What makes this trope so appealing? For both readers and writers? Are we all so convinced as children that our upbringing is faulty? Or do we take pleasure at seeing children rescued? Do writers all want to teach us how to raise our offspring? Or is this just a good and convenient way to introduce character movement in (often) female characters who could not be expected to have enough plot moments to provide good reading otherwise?

Thoughts? Additions to the list? Just curious...

I'm currently reading The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle and still trying to get through reviews for the books that I read during my vacation.

I find the Doyle difficult to read, despite being well-written. I know where the story is going to go, and although until now he has handled the predictability with delicacy, spousal abuse isn't a subject that I enjoy. I also find myself wondering what motivated Doyle to write from the perspective of an abused cleaning woman. So far, it seems to work, but I have trouble not finding it somehow suspect. This is unfair of me. I realize that. But still.

I haven't read any Doyle before this, and I'm enjoying the texture of his writing.

Full review when I'm done and have had a chance to digest.

*****

Reviews this week of quite a few genre books:

Entombed, Linda Fairstein
Forest Mage, Robin Hobb
South of Hell, P.J. Parrish
Hell to Pay, George P. Pelecanos
Triptych, Karen Slaughter

(thanks, albadore)

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

p.s.

this is actually kind of a weird list and it repeats itself. and what is The Big Read anyhow? I just did this because I like book memes.

It seems a lot of you folks out there in the Sunday Salon are able to keep your reading a relatively private ritual. You curl up with a book on a Sunday, and spend a sleepy day with cat and tea.

I'm a little bit different. Since I travel so much for work, reading is a largely public affair for me. Most of my books are consumed in trains, planes, automobiles, and buses. I read them in hotel breakfast rooms. I keep them tucked in my laptop bag.

I'm not going to go so far as to claim that this somehow makes reading into a dialogue with the unknown public. However, I probably find much more than others that certain books seem to provoke a reaction.

It's unpredictable, really. I might have expected Uncle Tom's Cabin or Blood and Guts in High School to spark a conversation. But instead, eyes passed over the title and out the window. Some books get a reaction from the aficionado only. Janet Frame, for instance, is really good for smoking out kiwis on a train. I remember that I once had a conversation about The Tunnel (William Gass) with an Israeli PhD student who found it very difficult to believe that a businessperson read such things. (& I probably confirmed his worst fears in the process, since I found the book both pompous and grotty)

Certain books, however, get very strong and occasionally quite odd reactions. I will recommend to other ladies that reading Gödel, Escher, Bach on an airplane is to become as a man magnet to any male computer genius who may be in the vicinity. I still receive the occasional email from a University researcher who confessed to me with great longing that he didn't know that there were women who read books like Gödel, Escher, Bach.

I'm currently reading Wealth of Nations, and it is too early in this big book for me to have very much to say about the text itself. But I will say that it is already evident that it provokes some very strong reactions in people who see me reading.

"Why are you reading that?" snapped a Dutch businessman on the train.
"Are you studying economics?" asked the Danish business administration professor.
"Excuse me, why are you reading that?" asked a curious student.

Others restrict themselves to staring, but do so with clear surprise.

To all and sundry I give my very humble explanation-- Wealth of Nations is one of those books that everyone discusses, but seems to hardly ever be read. I had read large sections of it in college, and had decided to circle back and pick up the text itself.

This explanation helps somewhat, but only somewhat. The Dutch businessman informed me icily that there were very good summaries available, and it was perfectly unnecessary to read the original text. The professor looked ashamed and said that he should really do the same thing. The student just shrugged, seemingly unconvinced about my sanity.

So do you have any experiences with public reading? What's the best conversation that you ever got started from reading a book? Any books in your experience draw a strong reaction from other people?

This Sunday Salon does not find me home on a lazy Sunday for time to unpack over a stack of books for reading and processing.

Instead, today's Sunday Salon finds me at Seattle International Airport in the NW Lounge sucking down the free diet coke and waiting for my flight back home to Amsterdam.

I am reading The Poem of the Cid, which I have been meaning to read since walking Santiago de Compostela. I was in Cid country up there, and got curious about his exploits.

So far, I don't have very much to say about the book except that I wish I had a literature professor here to explain to me what I should be reading for in the book. The introduction was pedantic and unhelpful and I suspect only really useful if you already knew a lot about Cid. I'll let you know another time what I end up thinking.

By the way, I was planning to buy a real airplane book here at the airport, but I was absolutely *floored* by the prices. $9.99 for a cheap paperback?! What are the publishers thinking? If in coming months they complain that customers don't want to buy books, then they should be smacked repeatedly with an old codfish. It was bad, but acceptable, when the price jumped to $7.99. But $9.99 is just high enough that I am no longer willing to buy. And this should be frightening, since I am a confirmed bookaholic.

Happy trails to you all, and see you on the other side!

The Frumious Bandersnatch.

It's been a few weeks since I participated in the Sunday Salon. I was traveling with the holidays-- first in Rome and then in Ghent. I had been thinking last week about how many nice long posts I could write, and which books I would curl up with first.

I'm curling up with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. This is my fourth Murakami novel and I have had a really nice sleepy day reading along. Unfortunately or fortunately for you, I am sick with what appears to be a sinus infection. I am accordingly unwilling to stay away from my warm bed and book for long enough to write deep thoughts about the reading experience.

I'll leave you with a question:

Of the Murakami novels which I have read, I like Norwegian Wood the best so far. I understand that real fans find it the book most unlike his usual writing.

I often find myself on that end of the stick. I tend to like the books best out of a writer's body of work that the author's serious readers view as a digression. (This also applies to music by the way. I'm in the sad minority of people who consider Almost Blue my favorite Costello album, for example.) Anyone else out there have that experience? Do you also tend to like the book that you shouldn't the best?

I'll let you know next week how it went to the Murakami. Please think good thoughts for my poor running nose. Have a good night!

Last week in The Sunday Salon I was feeling kind of like a muppet because of all the erudition spread around in its participants. There were the long well thought out posts about Josipovici in The Books of My Numberless Dreams. The group got mentioned in The Guardian. And me? I was banging away about bookshelves and a literary detective novel. Not so very impressive.

This week, I vowed, this week was going to be different. I was going to be smart, and read something worth discussing.

And I swear to you that I almost accomplished my goal. I have been reading, or trying to read A Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and Public Good by Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. I had run across the reference to the book in an essay by James Carey and was interested in the subject. I have to confess, I often tend to be a bit overly confident about my ability to sail through anything despite a lack of corresponding academic credentials. I generally figure that if I get into deep water then I can take the How To Read A Book approach-- go through it quickly in a superficial way, pick up what I can, and then circle back around to go in deeper to any bits that I only kinda got the first time around.

Well, either I got my method wrong or my patience was in a bad phase or I just plain old do not have the right background to read The Cycle of Cynicism, because this book definitely beat me. Oh, I made it through to the appendix pages. I even got a little bit of smart stuff around classifications of political media coverage and how thinking and memory are triggered by different kinds of coverage. But I would say that around 80% of the book remained opaque for me. Lots and lots of statistical analysis and methodology supporting the main points. All entirely valid, I'm sure. Or rather, I'm not sure, because I just could not make my brain and eyes do more than stare at them wildly and slip away to thoughts of pretty much anything else. And so it goes.

Anyhow, this morning, I considered doing my circling back around thing and trying to consider the evidence of the book. But I just have to honestly admit that I do not have either the interest or the background to do that. I'm willing to live with the high level unsubstantiated 20,000 foot view-- and if that makes me a bad person, then so be it. Never before in my life have I felt quite so much like a useless English Lit major.

So what am I actually reading for The Sunday Salon? I'm reading A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt. A palate cleansing was in order, and this was it. Anyone want to discuss science fiction?

(I've also taken down some poetry that I have been reading lately, and if I recover sufficiently from my defeat, then I may get around to saying something about that.)

I'm actually reading The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl at the moment. I do not have too much to say about it, since I am still reading it. I never have too much to say about a book during the reading process. This may be my eternal tension with The Sunday Salon. Only posting reviews doesn't feel quite in the spirit of the idea. On the other hand, I never am ready to talk about books-in-progress.

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These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of whenever this meme started. The numbers in parenthesis mean something like the number of LT users who had this book tagged.) As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once.

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As seen in the journals of both intertext and rhythmaning.

( two lists of children's books and then the booker prize winners )

As noted, I'm unhappy these days with using Amazon to store my reviews. Every new site redesign puts a higher emphasis on reviewer ranking and competition rather than review community.

Amazon recently started testing a beta of the new product page design, and I pretty much hate it. (You can probably see it by clearing your cookies and logging in again, if you really want to do so.) Some feedback from Jim Robinson, a guy who works in the design of community and reviews at Amazon, really stressed that they're actually trying to foster competition among the reviewers. (Essentially, they only put the so-called spotlight reviews on the front page. Recent reviews go immediately to the back. Amazon's reply to reviewer concerns about this was "we'll give new reviews a chance to see if they can knock the spotlights out of place." Stupid. Anyhow.)

For those of you who don't know it, Amazon reviews are part of a strange world of fairly obsessive people. I'm a top reviewer (whatever that means) by virtue of reading a lot, and having used the site to store my reviews from the very beginning. My highest rank was 92 (back when you could only review books), and these days I generally hover somewhere between 160-165.

I have gotten a lot out of the system. It's been a good place to group and keep track of the books that I read. (Bear in mind, with all the traveling that I do, I generally read several hundred books per year.) I've had some great conversations with authors based on reviewing. I get the occasional free book offer (which I generally turn down since they are often bizarre. My most recent offer for a free books was from who I can only assume is one of Bill Bradley's aides for his new book). I've had great correspondences with other readers. Once I swapped books for a while with a doctor in Hungary who couldn't get access to Iris Murdoch novels. I'm not a very professional reviewer-- I have always used the system for my own purposes more than for anyone else. I did it for the reading record, for the convenience of it all, and for the friendly book community.

Over the last few years, Amazon reviewers have gotten crazy about rank. I guess that I understand why. Top Reviewers can end up getting an awful lot of free books. I get only the occasional offer because I live in Europe so it is expensive to ship over here. But the top 10 reviewers can have access to crates of free books every week. Tempting for a bookaholic, since books are a pretty expensive habit.

As a result, reviewing on Amazon got a lot more professional (?). There are a lot more fake reviews and reviewers and an awful lot of nastiness. Many of the top 100 actually send out little newsletters about what they've read lately and encourage people to vote for their reviews. It's kind of a complex system, because while those votes often don't count towards rank they do seem to count in terms of a review making it into the spotlight which can attract votes which genuinely do affect rank. And so it goes.

For me, it's gotten a lot less fun since it got so competitive. And the new site redesign makes it really clear that Amazon is de-emphasizing the review community part and is instead putting the focus on the competition. That's really not interesting for me. And actually has highlighted the fact that I have somehow put over 1000 reviews into a system run by a commercial company whose primary purpose is to sell stuff. That's pretty foolish of me, really.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm planning to switch my primary reviewing site to my lj. It makes more sense. I wish that they didn't have such strange limitations on tags here because it means that I can't use tags to reliably retrieve them. So I'm going to have to figure the tagging part out. I need to get the tags granular enough so that I get less than 100 per category. I'll probably still cross-post with Amazon for the time being, basically just to see if they bother to take reviewer feedback into account with the new site redesign. I honestly don't expect them to do so because of the way that they've reacted to communication about it so far; they've made it pretty clear that reviewer needs are not exactly interesting. On the other hand, pretty much all the more active reviewers who I have spoken to hate the new format. So perhaps they will take some of the feedback in account.

( anyhow, on to Geek Love )

Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

These are the Pulitzer Prize winners for the Fiction (since 1948) and Novel (to 1947) categories.

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