P.D. James’ Advice for Book Reviewers

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from Time to Be in Earnest

1.  Always read the whole of the book before you write your review.

2. Don’t undertake to review a book
if it is written in a genre you particularly dislike.

3. Review the book the author has written,
not the one you think he/she should have written.

4. If you have prejudices…
face them frankly and, if appropriate, acknowledge them.

5. Be scathingly witty if you must and can,
but never be deliberately cruel […]

6. If you absolutely hate the book
and have nothing either interesting or positive to say, why review it?

7. If you are given a book to review by a close friend
and you strongly dislike it, don’t review it.
We none of us like hurting our friends
and the temptation to be over-kind is too strong.

8. Resist the temptation to use a review to pay back old scores
or to vent your dislike of the author’s sex, class, politics,
religion or lifestyle. Try to believe that it is possible
for people of whom you disapprove to write a good book.
 

::     ::     ::

What would you add to this list?

I appreciate personal interactions with the book.
I like to get to know reviewers, especially bloggers.

Hans Brinker – A Sterling Story

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Hans Brinker is a sterling story. 

Like a meal at a four-star restaurant it is delicious, beautiful and nourishing.  But a taste for delicious, beautiful and nourishing must be cultivated.  I would not serve Mary Mapes Dodge’s classic  Hans Brinker to a child who has been fed a steady diet of literary Happy Meals.  But a boy or girl who has tasted Laura Ingalls Wilder, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louisa May Alcott or Ralph Moody would eat this story up.

The setting, the time period and cultural references are foreign, and thus require some work to read.  Published in 1865, the story is set in the Netherlands.  Imagine weather so cold that the canals froze.  What would American families do?  Stay inside and watch TV.  In nineteenth century Holland every able bodied person laced on his skates, bundled up and had fun skating! 

There are benefits to reading it slowly, using tools such as Google Earth, search engines and maps to explore areas of interest.  Rabbit trails abound!

• Were the telescope and microscope invented by the Dutch Jacob Metius and Sacharias Janssen or by the English Roger Bacon? 
• A group of boys skate to Leiden and The Hague: look it up!
• Why did the art of curing and pickling herrings revolutionize the economy of Holland?

Any reader with a whiff of curiosity could learn a fair bit about Holland by reading Hans Brinker alone, in concert with other reference tools, or alongside other books like The Wheel on the School.  References to art abound; use Hans Brinker as a springboard for studying Dutch artists.  

Some favorite quotes:

Never had the sunset appeared more beautiful to Peter than when he saw it exchanging farewell glances with the windows and shining roofs of the city before him.

It is no sin to love beautiful things.

A tamed bird is a sad bird, say what you will.

Although the sermon was spoken slowly, Ben [English boy] could understand little of what was said; but when the hymn came, he joined in with all his heart. A thousand voices lifted in love and praise offered a grander language than he could readily comprehend.


Who will be the fastest skater in the race and win the Silver Skates?  Read Hans Brinker to find out!

Mako Fujimura, Illuminator

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Makoto Fujimura – The Art of “The Four Holy Gospels” from Crossway on Vimeo.

We, today, have a language to celebrate waywardness,

but we do not have a language, a cultural language,

to bring people back home.

~ Makoto Fujimura

As a reluctant, incipient appreciator of nonrepresentational art, I find this somewhere between intriguing and exciting.  I plan to save up for The Four Holy Gospels. 

Here is a link to a preview.

Thoughts?

Provence with MFK Fisher

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If you were to ask foodies who the best food writer of the twentieth century is, MFK Fisher would show up on everyone’s list.  She is on my short list of food writers I’ll never tire of reading (along with Robert Farrar Capon, Ruth Reichl, Julia Child, and Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin). 

Since I’ve only read one book by MFK Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, I picked up Two Towns in Provence, two books bound into one.  The two towns are Aix and Marseilles. But there is precious little about food here. These memoirs focus on the people in Fisher’s daily life in Southern France: the waiter at her favorite cafe, her doctor, the proprietress where she boarded,  taxi drivers, a couple whose window faced theirs, fish wives, mendicants, students, even strangers whom Fisher repeatedly sees. 

Fisher is a sculptor and words are her tools.  She chips away the banalities and highlights the quirks and mannerisms unique to her subjects.  Her characters are not wooden; they were warm and vibrant. 

Both books would have benefited from stronger editing.  Sections could have been cut, leaving a tight, cohesive memoir.  I had to push myself through parts, knowing Fisher’s characters and turns of phrase would eventually reward me. 

The few people that used [the only bath in the hotel] evidently felt that this price [$0.10] included full maid service, but the two overworked slaveys in the hotel did not, so that I usually cleaned the tub in self-protection. I decided then that many people are latently swinish and that I would rather work anywhere than in a hotel.

I am intrigued by the skilled synthesis of fast and slow people in this description of the Two Sisters restaurant in Marseilles (emphasis mine).

What we see is the top of the iceberbg, as in any good restaurant. Beneath it is the real organization: the staff, both seen and invisible, the provisions, constantly checked and renewed; the upkeep of the whole small tight place, with all its linens, glasses, table fittings, and its essential fresh cleanliness. Above all, there is the skilled synthesis of fast and slow people, that they will work together on bad days and hectic festivals, through heat waves and the worst mistrals.

If you are a Francophile, you should probably read this book.  For the rest, pick up one of Fisher’s other titles.

Simple Pleasures in February

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Brothers (Gavin and Preston) in harmony


Smiles, freely given by Ethan.


Living in a region with many bronzes
(Pendleton Round Up)


The only thing I’ve learned on my new camera is the Macro focus.
I need to lean into the learning curve!


At five months, Levi takes great gulps of life through his eyes.
He is the unblinking baby.
We call this look The Levi. 


Noah is so much like his Daddy.
I can only chuckle. I should be praying.
Praying for his mama.
The simple pleasure with this kiddo is singing.
Twinkle, Twinkle, Jingle Bells, Doxology, and whatever we make up.
He wakes up singing.

 
The bamboo forest.
Scope for a boy’s imagination.

The Peterkin Papers

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The Peterkin Papers reminds me of a young child who tells a joke that makes everyone laugh. Then she tells the same joke again and again and again and again, looking for the same satisfying response. 

The Peterkins–Mr. and Mrs., Agamemnon, Elizabeth Eliza, Solomon John, and various unnamed younger brothers–are a family with lofty aspirations and nothing to ground them.  If the Christmas tree is too tall for their living room, they raise the ceiling instead of cutting the tree down to size. In short, they are silly fools. The lady from Philadelphia is their salvation. After they’ve exhausted their harebrained ideas, she solves their problem with one sentence of common sense.

The foolishness is funny at first blush, but gets tiresome quickly.  On the plus side, the illustrations are well done, complementing the text.  The chapter on Agamemnon’s education entertained me because it was close enough to the truth to be very funny. This is the best taste of the book I can offer.

Agamemnon had always been fond of reading, from his childhood up. He was at his book all day long. Mrs. Peterkin had imagined he would come out a great scholar because she could never get him away from his books.

And so it was in his colleges; he was always to be found in the library, reading and reading. But they were always the wrong books.

For instance: the class were required to prepare themselves on the Spartan war. This turned Agamemnon’s attention to the Fenians, and to study the subject he read up on Charles O’Malley and Harry Lorrequer, and some later novels of that sort, which did not help him on the subject required, yet took up all his time, so that he found himself unfitted for anything else when the examinations came. In consequence he was requested to leave.

Agamemnon always missed in his recitations, for the same reason that Elizabeth Eliza did not get on in school, because he was always asked the questions he did not know. It seemed provoking; if the professors had only asked something else! But they always hit upon the very things he had not studied up.

Mrs. Peterkin felt this was encouraging, for Agamemnon knew the things they did not know in colleges. In colleges they were willing to take for students only those who knew certain things. She thought Agamemnon might be a professor in a college for those students who didn’t know those things.

Guys Reading Books

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There are legends about my father’s office.  Books on every wall, stacks of books covering the floors with only a narrow walkway between the door and the chair.  Forget overstuffed chairs, this was an overstuffed office. The most magnificent thing was Dad’s ability to navigate the chaos!  He could find a book within two minutes.  He’d stare at the ceiling for ten seconds, get up, scan a shelf, and pick out the requested title in nothing flat.

Very occasionally I would happen to be awake before my father left to teach his 7:00 a.m. class. He never exited the house empty-handed. Shoot, he never left the house with just one or two books. I believe that four was the minimum number he carried back and forth. Though he wasn’t what anyone would call athletic he was acrobatic when it came to balancing tottering stacks of books. 

One more Papa John story: at the time of his death, my father had moved into a larger office with more bookshelves than he’d ever before enjoyed.  No books on the floor. We estimated his personal library of books to be around six thousand volumes. Oh boy! that’s a knee-slapper! He double-stacked books; the number was over ten thousand volumes. 

He managed to pass a love of books and of reading down to all seven of his children. Every level of every child’s house has books. He converted many students into bibliophiles. He read books, he recommended books, he gave books.      

No wonder, then, that I find it attractive (and pathologically normal) to see a man reading a book.  Guys have all sorts of interests: cars, guns, gardens, sports, finance, etc.  But let a man initiate book talk and he becomes instantly more handsome. 

My dad died with thousands of books unread.  My dad lived, though, having read thousands of books. His love of the printed word is a heritage and a legacy which I cherish. 

JWH, October 3, 1922 – February 14, 1987

Other February 14 Entries:
Guys Holding Babies
Guys Reciting Poems

Going Steady

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Chicken broth and me: we’re going steady.

We’re mulling over a long-term relationship.

One of us has commitment-phobia.

Call it a honeymoon, but I can’t go a day without

chicken broth’s kisses.

(Butter is in cold storage. She will forever be my first love.
But I had to abandon butter.)

Garlic and paprika go on double-dates with us.

Basil brags about preempting paprika.

Lemon and dill sometimes feel left out.

Curry keeps begging for a place at the table.

Sage wisely stays silent.

I have no thyme to add to our romance.

Hilaire Belloc Sampler

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I picked up Hilaire Belloc’s book, Places, at a little bookshop tucked beneath Edinburgh Castle.  The book, a collection of travel essays, was spotty: some cogent thoughts that resonated and some essays I had to force myself to get through.  The essay About Wine is definitely the crowning jewel of the book.  Written from the vantage point of 1942, Belloc’s perspective on political shifts is intriguing.  Here are some passages I copied into my journal:

What a writing man should set down about his travels is what he saw or thought he saw, heard or thought he heard, and above all whatever struck him with the shaft of beauty.

I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

St. Paul said …”Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake.” But I say, take plenty of it for the sake of your soul and all that appertains to the soul; scholarship, verse; social memory and the continuity of all culture.

“How does one tell good wine?” “By the taste.” It is not the year, nor the vineyard that distinguishes good wine, exceptional wine. It is the taste.

I remember well one day when I walked, not of my own choice, over the hills from the Lake Bolsena to Orvieto  against so bitter a blast of sleet and driving snow that it needed all one’s courage to push on. It was like being in Scotland without the fun. (For I am one of those who always think it fun to be in Scotland.)

I find nothing more satisfactory than places which remind me of the Opera, with the added advantage that there is no blaring music.  (That quote is for my brother who sings in the opera!)

Who today would die for Babylon? To whom is the King of Egypt a divine incarnation of the people and of the River? So when you look at a fixed State of your own time always remember two things about it. First, that not so very long ago it was not. Next, that after some added generations of men, it will not be.

We are perhaps today at this very moment, the mid-twentieth century, about to see another change: either the resurrection of Islam, the reaffirmation of its power and a further assault from the East against the West, or what is less likely (because we Europeans have lost our unity), a return of the West Eastward and a European stamp set again upon the whole of the Mediterranean and its shores, even to Mesopotamia.