Tag Archives: bookreview

Fine Art Friday – Degas

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This week I read The Monument, a young adult book by Gary Paulsen.  In it a recently adopted 13 year old girl encounters an artist, Mick, and it changes her life.  She looks at her small Kansas town through Mick’s eyes and sees everything in a new light.  Her leg brace and coffee-colored skin set her apart from the other kids her age so that a tag-along dog she adopted, Python, is her only companion.  Mick gives her a book about Degas to study.

But even with that, even with the beauty, I was still trying to work, trying to see the colors and the way Degas had drawn things until I turned the page and just stopped, stopped dead.

It was a painting of a group of young women practicing ballet, called The Dance Master.  The wall in the room was green and there was a big mirror on one side for the dancers to see themselves.  In the background there is a raised platform or bleachers for people to sit and watch and dancers are everywhere, practicing, stretching, fixing their costumes.  On one side there is an older man leaning on a cane–an instructor–and he is watching them, studying them, and still I would have been all right except for the girl.

She was standing to the side of the dancers but almost in the middle of the painting and she is watching them, worried about something, with her hand to her mouth, and I looked at her and started to cry.

She looked like me, or sort of like me, but that wasn’t it–at first I didn’t know why I was crying. Then I thought of what they were, all of them, dancers, and that all of what they were was gone.

The painting was done in the late eighteen-hundreds.  They were all gone.  All dead.  I wanted to know the girl, wanted to watch them practice.  I wanted to see the dresses move and hear the music, wanted to know which ones the dance master picked for performance and if the girl who looked a little like me was one of them.  I wanted to talk to them and ask them how it was to wear the costumes and dance and dance and dance without one stiff leg.  I wanted to know their dreams and hopes…


The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

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Curt and I have been having a little tug-of-war with this book.  I started it and read two chapters before I left for Chicago.  While I was gone, he read five chapters. 

When I had returned and after our kids went back to college, we both reached for it one night. “I’m reading it,” he exclaimed. “Well, I’m reading it too, and I started it before you did,” I retorted. (I promise I didn’t stick out my tongue.) So we compromised: he went back to the third chapter and read it aloud but — alas! — I fell sound asleep.   A few nights later I had read through the fifth chapter and started to read the sixth chapter aloud to him.  Alas, he fell asleep!

Since I am quite simply a selfish person, I broke the unspoken covenant and read ahead. Last night I had one chapter left and he was occupied with his bow and arrows (archery hunting season begins today).  All day I enjoyed the anticipation of completing a good book.

What a quirky, wonderful, strange, charming, odd little book!  I wish I had the opportunity to re-read it this week, and catch more nuances and clues the second time through.  Chesterton has challenged me to think of the playfulness of God.  It’s a quite different way of thinking. I plan to pick this Chesterton gem up a few more times in my life. Random quotes:

The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

I don’t often have the luck to have a dream like this.  It is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster.  It is commonly the other way.

“I have a suspicion that you are all mad,” said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; “but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.”  [wouldn’t you like to make up greeting cards with this quote on the front?  I can think of several select friends who would get a hoot from it.]

“Who and what are you?”  “I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.”

Milne Goes Mysterious

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I finished A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery this morning (hat tip to Diane at Circle of Quiet). If you love P.G. Wodehouse, Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh this book is tailor-made for you and I promise that you will feel jolly glad you picked it up.  Humor is infused in this mystery: the take-offs on Holmes and Watson kept me smiling.

“My dear Watson,” he said, “you aren’t supposed to be as clever as this.”

“I love being Sherlocky,” he said. “It’s very unfair of you not to play up to me.”

Here’s another laugh – a brief jab at writers.

“Oh!” He looked round the room. “What d’you call this place, eh?”

“The office, sir.”

“The office?”

“The room where the master works, sir.”

“Works, eh? That’s new.  Didn’t know he’d ever done a stroke of work in his life.”

“Where he writes, sir,” said Audrey with dignity.

I nodded and almost said “Amen” aloud when I read:

Anthony could never resist another person’s bookshelves. As soon as he went into the room, he found himself wandering round it to see what books the owner read, or (more likely) did not read, but kept for the air which they lent to the house.

~      ~      ~

I’ve been thinking about music and memory this week.  My sister has lost much of her mobility (brain cancer and a stroke) but her memory is just fine, thank you.  We’ve had the leisure to amble around in the memory vault and pick out good ones to polish and shine.  Since I’m nine years younger, some of our memories don’t overlap; which happily means I get to hear new stories.  Any new story about my mom is a precious gem – another opportunity to better know the mom I lost when I was ten.

Old songs are like old stories. My spiritual pilgrimage from Plymouth Brethren to Presbyterian means I now sing much less Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby and more Hans Shulz and Vaughan Williams. This week I’ve been hearing, singing, and playing songs from long ago. Revisiting obscure Plymouth Brethren hymns, and attending the chapel of my childhood has transported me back to the sixties – the whole family in one pew singing parts a capella in the Breaking of Bread service. It’s amazing how clearly it all comes back and how pleasant an emotion recognition is.

Madeleine L’Engle wrote about her mother in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, 

“Music has always been part of the fabric of her life, so it is not surprising that it is the last thing to reach her.”   

Music can find areas inside of us that words can’t make it to. Places beyond language. The hows and whys of this fact is one of the interesting mysteries of life. 

A Nice Bonus

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Summer Reading Challenge….eeeyeahhh.  I’ve gotten a little sidetracked, but in my mind the other books were always considered addendums not substitutions, and there were certainly good reasons to read them.  This week I got back to my SRC list and started The Tolkien Reader.  I was given a very nice bonus.  A bonus as in an unexpected gift.

[aside for a rant: I work one afternoon/week in a pharmacy as an accountant.  I get sooo annoyed when employees approach me in a buzzard-like way wanting to know exactly when the Christmas bonus will come.  A bonus is not an entitlement.  Really.]

As I read Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories, I realized I should have read this before I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.  It was impossible for me to keep characters in their right category because none of categories made sense to me.  I remember asking our Latin class what an elf was.  They all knew.  My youngest son, who was practically a Tolkien scholar by age nine, was very patient with his mom. “Now what is Aragorn, again?  Is he a man or one of those other…things?” 

The first bonus last night was the sense that I was actually doing some very helpful teacher preparation for studying medieval literature this year.  Tolkien made many references to Beowulf, Chaucer, Spenser and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  There are many reasons to read a book (entertainment, education, pleasure, information, curiosity, because someone knows you are a reader and pressed a book in your hand begging you to read it) but when those reasons intersect it is truly a blessing. I didn’t choose The Tolkien Reader because it would help me teach; I chose it because it was an unread book on my bookshelf.

The second bonus:  a question I had 10 years ago was answered.  Readers often come across references that are meaningless on first reading, and just skip over them.  About ten years ago as I was reading through Charlotte Mason’s The Original Home Schooling Series, she mentioned Queen Mab in such a way that assumed the reader would “get it”.  I didn’t — and didn’t have Google at my fingertips.  My set of World Books didn’t help and so the reference was a dangling loose end in my brain.  Tolkien spends half a page explaining why Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia, the story about Queen Mab, isn’t a true fairy-story.  It was a gift to read, recognize and to finally understand.

The third bonus?  A chance to read an excellent writer with an excellent mind. 

What’s An Austen Reader Supposed To Do?

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Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

So you love Jane Austen.  You’ve read all her novels and plan to re-read them with great pleasure the rest of your days.  When you come to the end of Austen, you always have an appetite for…more!  You start in with the Brontes and read through their works.  This is a good thing.  There are many, many good books in different genres, true.  But there are times you want a nice cup of tea and a little touch of Britain in the night. 

It was because Anthony Trollope’s name was said in the same sentence as Austen’s, and from a friend I trust, that I decided to go exploring.  I’ve only read one book (audio book), so I’m no Trollope expert.  But–BUT– I thoroughly enjoyed An Old Man’s Love, which was unfortunately the extent of our rural library’s Trollope collection.  This work seems a little obscure: Frank Magill’s Cyclopedia of World Authors didn’t list the title among Trollope’s principal works.

An Old Man’s Love was a sweet romance, a lovely love story.  Here’s the gist: A young woman, Mary Lawrie (20 something), is left orphaned.  A friend of her father’s, the 50 year old bachelor, William Whittlestaff decides to take her in and provide for her.   He  falls in love with her and asks her to marry him.  She hesitates and acknowledges to him that her heart is with a young man, John Gordon, from whom she has not heard a word in three years, and with whom no words of love were ever exchanged.  Whittlestaff presses Mary, confident that her infatuation was a childish one and sure that he can give her a good life.  She reluctantly agrees and decides to do her duty to the man who has been so kind to her, a man for whom she has genuine affection. Within hours of giving her promise to marry Whittlestaff, John Gordon, home from the diamond mines, knocks on the door asking for Mary.

The ensuing conflict between Mary’s love for Gordon and her promise given to Whittlestaff occupies the rest of the book. A promise is a promise! Trollope portrays so accurately that inner impulse to be a martyr  that seems so noble at night, but sticks like a bone in the throat in the daylight. Hearing the tale unfold was like riding a see-saw; it was impossible to guess how it would come out.  Each man is so certain that it would be in Mary’s best interest to be with himself. There are two Dickensian characters, the housekeeper and the vicar, which add comic relief to the drama.
 
From An Old Man’s Love:  “Here he was wont to sit and read his Horace.  And think of the affairs of the world as Horace depicted them.  Many a morsel of wisdom he had here made his own.  And to then endeavor to think whether the wisdom had in truth been taken home by the poet to his own bosom, or had only been a glitter of the intellect, never appropriated for any useful purpose.”

“A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos.”  Anthony Trollope

“His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.” Henry James on Anthony Trollope.

It isn’t the satisfying protein of Austen, but we still need some carbs in our life, and Trollope is a good carb.

Distracted, Again (But It Sure Was Fun)

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DH and I went on a mega shopping trip yesterday in a larger city two 1/2 hours away.  We go to Costco and get 3-month supplies of detergent, feta cheese, olive oil, etc.  The book table always draws me in and the latest Mma Romatswe book beckoned!  Blue Shoes and Happiness.  I  so much enjoy these stories of Botswana – the culture, the simplicity, the humor, human nature.  IMHO, Blue Shoes isn’t up to par with some of the earlier books.  I’m getting weary of the apprentices’ immaturity, and a certain je n’est sais quoi is missing.

However, it’s still worth a couple of belly laughs:

But he could not put to the back of his mind the extraordinary news which Mma Ramotswe had so casually imparted to him and which he would breathlessly pass on to Mma Makutsi the moment he saw her.  It was news of the very greatest import: if Mma Ramotswe, stern and articulate defender of the rights of the fuller-figured as she was, could contemplate going on a diet, then what would happen to the ranks of the traditionally built?  They would be thinned, he decided.

Summer Reading Challenge: Reading Slowly

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Sometimes reading slowly is beneficial.  The last chapter I read from Temperament gave the ratios (rate of vibration and inversely length of string) of different musical intervals. An octave (Somewhere Over the Rainbow) has a 2:1 ratio.  A perfect fifth is 3:2, a fourth (Here Comes the Bride) is 4:3; While a major third (Kumbayah) is 5:4, a minor third, 6:5, writes Isadcoff, “is associated in romantic  musical works with feelings of melancholy or passion; …Chopin’s achingly sad funeral march in his Sonata in B-flat minor is launched with the leap of a minor third.”

I couldn’t hear the funeral march in my head, so I picked up Chopin and looked through the index.  There it was!  I played it through, well, whittled my way through it – but it was a great diversion and gave me a connection with the text. 

                ~         ~         ~         ~         ~         ~

I flipped through Imitation of Christ and realized that this is not a book I want to sail through.  I plan to read one mediation a day, which will take me into September.  I am thankful to George Grant for stimulating a desire to read this book. Griffin’s notes about translating the Latin are worthy of any Latin teacher’s time, but even more they are just plain fun to read.  Here’s the opening sentences and a quote from today’s reading, which BTW, you can read with the Search Inside feature:

“Whoever shadows my every move won’t lose me in the dark.” At least that’s what Christ says, or what the Evangelist John heard Him say (8:12). He tells us to walk on, through the darkness, with Christ as our only torch.  That way, when morning comes, we mayn’t have gained a step, but we won’t have lost one either.  And on into the day we must pursue with dogged tread the life of Jesus Christ.”

“If you’re not humble, you make the Trinity nervous, and in that wretched state what possible good do you get out of standing up in public and disputing to high heaven about the Trinity as an intellectual entity?”

Walking on,

Carol

Working Out With Willa Cather

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The Song of the Lark is the story of a musically gifted young girl.  She is on vacation near Flagstaff, AZ after a grueling year of studying voice in Chicago. She spends time alone in the Cliff-Dwellers’ ruins.

She could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident whirr of the big locusts, and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up.  Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch up with her.  She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort.

A few pages later Thea finds fragments of pottery and reflects on the role of water and pottery in the lives of the women who once lived there.  “Their pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element itself.”

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still.  The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself–life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars.  In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion.  In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

I am enjoying this book immensely.  It is not a breeze through book.  I read it pensively, and often lift my head and just think about the words.  I come home from working out and want to read on, but I restrict this book to the elliptical machine.  It keeps me going back!!

Dealing with the Emotional Impact of Books & Movies

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I received an email from a friend asking me this question:  How do you deal with the emotional impact of difficult or depressing books?  She abstains from reading books like Cry, The Beloved Country  because it leaves her depressed and moody. 

Mmmm.  I finished that same book this morning and could not refrain from hiccupping sobbing during the last pages. It is a very sad book, but it tells what life is really like for those living in South Africa during the last century.  I would never advise someone to go against their conscience when deciding what to read or watch, nor would I deride their choice. 

I think I have built up a tolerance level for heavier things over the years.  The first time I had a TV in the house I could not watch reruns of  Hawaii 5-0 because it was too scary.  Having grown up without a TV in the house, any suggestion of violence was creepy for me. 

It’s a hard question, isn’t it?  There is brutality, gross brutality in the world today.  Our brothers and sisters around the globe experience distressing experiences daily.  There must be a balance between a compassionate heart that cries for the pain that is explored, and a joyful heart that is thankful for the blessings in our own life.  We can’t be mopey all the time; all the same we can’t live in isolation from the suffering that is out there. Do you have any suggestions or thoughts?

Special Flavours

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I’ve enjoyed reading Shadows On the Rock by Willa Cather during my half hour on the elliptical walker.  There is a nice shelf for a book, and the head bobbing doesn’t bother me.  Here’s a lovely excerpt from this morning’s read. Let me set it up. Cecile is a 12 year old girl who lives and helps her father, an apothecary.  She has run the household, since her mother died.  She spent two nights down the river, away from home for the first time.  The conditions were rustic, the bed she shared with four other girls was dirty (filthy) and she had a fit of homesickness.  She just returned home and is eager to prepare dinner for her father. The “dogs cooked with blueberries” refers to a dish the native Indians had cooked for one of Cecile’s friends. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

She put on her apron and made a survey of the supplies in the cellar and kitchen.  As she began handling her own things again, it all seemed a little different,–as if she had grown at least two years older in the two nights she had been away.  She did not feel like a little girl, doing what she had been taught to do.  She was accustomed to think that she did all these things so carefully to please her father, and to carry out her mother’s wishes.  Now she realized that she did them for herself, quite as much.  Dogs cooked with blueberries–poor Madame Harnois’ dishes were not much better! These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself.  One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,–the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.