All Things Bookish

Bottger Mansion of Old Town

Victorian bed & breakfast in historic Old Town Albuquerque, New Mexico
110 San Felipe Street NW, Albuquerque, NM   87104
(800) 758-3639      (505) 243-3639
www.bottger.com

The Cheshire Cat's Eye

February 2008—The Cheshire Cat’s Eye by Marcia Muller. A guest left this one for us. It was a fast, easy read with a simplistic plot. I think I’ve read some of the female detective Sharon McCone stories before; the back of the book says this is the third one. The story is set in San Francisco among the ”Victorian painted ladies” and the antiques world. I found the most interesting aspect of the book to be the resistance of purists to the multi-color schemes of the siding, gingerbread and ornate details on the houses, because when the Victorian homes were built, they were originally more monochromatic. What we take for granted today—the many colors on all the details—is actually a modern phenomenon. I had also read elsewhere that the ability to coordinate all those multiple colors without it looking like a monsterpiece is a true art, so the murder of the painter who is well-known for creating the color schemes is the very heart of this book.

Empire Falls

January 2008—Empire Falls by Richard Russo. If you grew up in a small town, you will completely identify with Empire Falls, a small town in Maine with its special cast of characters. Doesn’t every small town have its “first family,” either the founders or the ones who rule or own nearly everything? The Empire Falls Diner is now the hub of the dying mill town, which remains optimistic that someone will re-open the mills and restore the town to its former economic glory. The book is a study in small-town dynamics and relationships, as its main characters are swept up in events stemming from history that are only now being disclosed.

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict

January 2008—Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler. I am not the kind of Jane Austen addict who reads every single book 200 times. I have read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility several times, and the movie versions of these with Emma Thompson and Kiera Knightley are among my favorite films. I decided last year I was going to read all six of her novels to see what all the hoo-ha was about. I had read Persuasion since several had speculated about similarities between the novel and the movie The Lake House, which similarities I failed to see. I slogged through Mansfield Park and wondered when it was ever going to get to the point. I have yet to attempt Emma and Northanger Abbey. 

An interesting phenomenon is the number of modern spin-offs based on Jane Austen, such as Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and Becoming Jane Austen, and even Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners. So Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict is yet another.

The story itself is engaging and it goes along at a good clip, unlike Austen’s novels, unencumbered by the English vocabulary and grammar of the early 1800’s. In this time-travel version, the heroine of the story, herself a Jane Austen addict who finds comfort and solace in re-reading all of Austen’s novels, finds herself transported into the body of Jane Mansfield in around 1813. She must use all of her knowledge of the history, social behavior and morals of the times to figure out how to survive until she can figure out how she got there and how to return home to her own time and body. However, I found myself arguing with the book as time after time she violated all the rules she knew and did completely inappropriate things, such as “secretly” meeting a manservant in the park unchaperoned. No, no, no! Back then there was no such thing as a secret meeting, since eyes everywhere were always watching for the slightest misbehavior as fodder for gossip or ruined reputations. 

Overall, it was a good vacation or beach book and certainly fit the bill for escapist fiction.

no posts for a while

It's not that I haven't been reading; I just haven't been posting.  We get very busy in the fall, and this blog fell to the bottom of the list of things to do. 

I was also participating in the NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) challenge in November, and I was posting on my personal blog.  That gets hard after a while, especially trying to think of something to write about every day.  I was reading a number of business books, which I thought people might not find very interesting.

But, hey, it's a new year.  "Every day is a fresh chance to start over." 

The Pawn

October 2007—The Pawn by Steven James. I was delighted to learn that this well-written thriller was the first “Patrick Bowers” book, obviously the start of a series. The best writers are able to weave many seemingly unrelated characters and incidents through the plot until they all come together at the end, and that’s exactly what Steven James does. While The Pawn was a quick read, I did spend several nights reading far later into the night than I should have trying to finish the book. I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series due to be published in 2008.

Harry Potter series

October 2007—Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling. Yes, I read the entire series from start to finish starting in July and ending last week. Amazing, incredible, creative beyond belief.  It's not that the writing is complex; it couldn't be, otherwise all those kids wouldn't be able to read them.  It's that the plot builds over the entire series, and every seemingly insignificant detail is carefully woven into the fabric to become an important point later on.

Obviously, J. K. Rowling either took Latin in school or has made a careful study of it.  The incantations and spells are completely believable because they come from Latin roots and make perfect sense for what they mean.  Expelliarmus is the incantation to disarm someone by taking their wand away ("expel"); lumos is for creating a light source; and levicorpus allows a wizard to levitate someone ("levi" means "raise" and "corpus" is "body").  Even most of the characters' names immediately call to mind some characteristic or mnemonic trait: Snape is close to "snake" and Malfoy contains the phrase "mal"--French and Spanish for "bad."

One of the most intriguing things about reading the series is that somewhere around the third book, I found myself thinking it would feel normal in our world to whip out a wand and be able to do some of these spells.  In some respects that would be good.  Imagine the time and fuel saved by being able to apparate instantly from one place to another.  The morning commute takes on a whole new meaning.

However, there would be some disadvantages as well.  I'm sure we'd have as much trouble fighting those who would use the Dark Arts as much as they did.  We can’t go around using the avadra kevadra killing spell on people.  On the other hand, it could be highly amusing when confronted with an arrogant person to make her sprout a tail and snout!

Fear and Trembling

October 2007—Fear and Trembling  by Amalie Nothomb. It’s a good thing this is a short book, because reading about the treatment Amalie received from her employers was hard to endure. It’s probably because I’m an American woman of a certain age and therefore have some expectations about how I will be treated and how much I’ll take before I tell someone to take this job and shove it. Which is, of course, the whole point of the book—the fact that she continues to take more abuse and be demoted into more demeaning jobs. 

What she—or others—may consider a year-long learning experience in human relations, I would have considered a year wasted if I had stuck it out that long. If you read Fear and Trembling, you may find yourself asking, “why is she putting up with that?” And even more thought-provoking, “what would I do if I were in her shoes?”

Mansfield Park

September 2007—Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Mansfield Park is one of the few Jane Austen book I hadn’t read. Unlike Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, I have NOT read Pride and Prejudice two hundred times. Since most of Austen’s works date from around 1800, they were written in the English written and spoken at the time—dense and rich, complex sentences full of words now archaic and cultural references of the time that mean little now except to contemporary Austen scholars. 

The edition I chose was the Norton critical edition, so there were essays and comments by some of those Austen scholars. One of those pointed out that Mansfield Park is “perhaps the least representative of Austen’s works.” A summary on the web notes this novel as being her most “…complex novel and deals with many different themes, from the education of children to the differences between appearances and reality.” 

While quite challenging, Austen’s works are well worth reading, provoking thoughts on the tremendous differences in lifestyles, attitudes and expectations between the early 1800’s and now. 

Do read the foreword and explanations before reading the novel itself. The discussion of “Jane Austen’s novels and money” will open your eyes to the situations of the book’s characters. Everyone’s income—at least those in genteel society—was well-known and expressed in the number of pounds per year one received. For instance, a clergyman who received a “living” of 800 pounds per year was expected to live well but modestly. A girl who married poorly to a man who received only 300 pounds per year would have to learn to do without all of the luxuries and quite a few of the nicer things in life, but the young woman who married a gentleman receiving 20,000 pounds per year should expect to live in a mansion on a country estate, have several fine carriages, a house in “town” (London), and would spend nearly half of the year attending parties and balls in London with no more to occupy her thoughts than her wardrobe. We have that sort of general knowledge today—that a laborer who makes $8,000 per year probably receives public assistance just to survive, while an attorney making $300,000 per year most likely has a main residence, perhaps a home in the mountains or at the beach, several cars and maybe a boat. The difference is that we don’t know what each of our friends and neighbors make.

None of Austen’s works are page-turners or thrillers by any means, but you will spend much more time thinking about them, particularly the personalities of the characters, than any modern work of popular fiction.

Jane Austen lingers.

 

The Dip

May 2007—The Dip by Seth Godin. The Dip is basically that hard part in anything--a job, company, relationship, sales--where most people give up. Think about a hobby--at first it's new and exciting and you want to spend all your time learning it and doing it.  Effort goes up and results go up. Then you reach a certain proficiency and in order to reach that next level, it gets much harder.  Effort goes up more but results go down.  That's The Dip.  This is maybe not the greatest example, and Seth Godin would probably cringe at my analogy, but maybe this will pique your interest enough for you to go read the book and see how it applies to you. 

But wait, there's more.  If you can continue through The Dip, there is progress and success to be had.  More effort is required but the results can increase greatly. 

His point about writing The Dip is for you to learn about it, recognize it, see how it applies to whatever you're doing.

The Tipping Point

July 2007—The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It looks like I haven’t read anything for a while, but actually I am always reading—I just haven’t had time to post anything.

Now that it’s been a couple of months since I read The Tipping Point, I find it hard to remember specifics, but the basic premise remains. His theory is that for everything, from products to events to epidemics, there is a flash point, a tipping point. Remember pet rocks back in the 60’s? One day we’d never heard of such a thing.  The next day it was everywhere and everyone had—or had to have—a pet rock. Within months, the whole phenomena was passé, and we never heard about them again. Somewhere in the early stage, there was a tipping point—the right combination of circumstances, marketing, whatever, that made this happen.

His study concluded that there are also three types of people who can cause this tipping point to happen: Connectors, who know lots of people and can spread information, ideas and business from one to another (these people are masters at networking); Mavens, who know and retain all kinds of information and freely share it with everyone they know; and Salesmen, who have the skills to persuade people who may be critical or unconvinced.

Gladwell documents examples of people who excel in each area. Most of us have a little bit of these characteristics in us, but the folks he interviewed are super-endowed, like the man who sends out about 2,000 notes, letters and birthday cards every year to people in his personal address book. And that’s not counting business peers, associates and casual acquaintances. If you received a birthday card from him every year, I’ll bet he would be on your mind fairly often and you would be talking about him to other people. He’s definitely a Connector.

Are you a Connector, a Maven or a Salesman? How do you influence other people?