Monthly Archives: June 2024

Bookish Nostalgia & Wishful Desires

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Readers are among the most nostalgic people in the world. And re-readers are even more nostalgic: they seek to capture the meaning and mood of the first reading.

Nostalgia often doubles as a word for sentimentality. But that is not quite its meaning. It comes from the Greek word nostos, which means “homecoming” or “return,” and from the word nostew, “to go home” or “return home.“ The  English definition, too, centers on home: “a wishful desire to return in thought or in fact to one’s home, homeland, or family friends.”  Another common meaning:  “a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.”

The Betsy-Tacy books

Nostalgic readers stand out at bookstores. They not only wish to return to and reread their favorite books, but they seek multiple editions, or the original edition in which they read it.  In 2011 HarperCollins reissued four paperback omnibus editions of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, with forewords by Judy Blume, Anna Quindlen, Meg Cabot, and Laura Lippman. I swooped upon them, not because I intended to read them, but out of nostalgia.  My best friend and I loved this series about best friends Betsy and Tacy, who live in Deep Valley, Minnesota (actually Mankato, MN), in the early 20th century. (We had Betsy-Tacy revivals.) And when I mentioned these books to a student, he dashed out to the bookstore to buy them for his wife, because she, too, is a fan.  Nostalgia and word-of-mouth are great sellers of Betsy-Tacy.

And then there is Zola’s Germinal, one of my favorite novels.  Can you have too many copies?  Well, you probably can, because it is a very dark book.  I briefly had three editions:  a Penguin translation by Roger Pearson, an Oxford by Peter Collier, and an old illustrated Heritage Press copy translated by Havelock Ellis.  Of the three, Roger Pearson’s  translation for Penguin was my favorite and the most readable, though all are good in different ways. Oxford has reissued new translations of Zola over the last 20 years, many of which had not been in print in English for a long, long time.

Many readers are nostalgic for Angela Thirkell’s distinctive 1930s and ‘40s humor. There is an Angela Thirkell Society and an Angela Thirkell listserv group. But much as I enjoy Angela Thirkell’s nonsensical Barsetshire series, I have not been impressed by the covers of the newish Virago editions. Why? The cover of The Headmistress looks more Jane Eyre-ish than Pomfret Towers-ish.  Cover art isn’t everything, but I am satisfied with 1990s used copies of Carroll & Graf paperbacks, which are sturdy, have bigger print, and pretty good cover art. Still, kudos to Virago, because a friend looked for Thirkell’s Pomfret Towers in vain for years! And now there’s a Virago.

Did you struggle over the Doctor Zhivago question?  It is one of my favorite novels, but in a way it is two books: the two English translations of Pasternak’s masterpiece are so different. I prefer Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky‘s lyrical translation (2010) to the spare first translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958). But there was quite an uproar over the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation by those who preferred the Haywar-Harari. Out of nostalgia, I hang on to both, and also because who knows?  Maybe I’ll want to return to them, out of nostalgia.

When the public library weeded Gladys Taber’s hilarious novel, Mrs. Daffodil, I was likely to have a conniption fit.  It is funny and endearing, and the writer heroine raises recalcitrant chickens. But the cheapest edition I can find online is $100.  I would have happily donated that to the library for a copy, but it seems a rip-off online.

The heroine, Mrs. Daffodil, lives in the country and writes for a living, just like Gladys Taber. In addition to her syndicated column, “Butternut Wisdom,”  she writes short stories about young love:  readers are not interested in stories about older people like herself, she has learned.   As a prolific writer, she supports herself, her married daughter and graduate student husband, and presumably her housemate, Kay, a widowed college friend who agreed to share Mrs. Daffodil’s country house after her husband died.  When, when will I be able to read this book again? Maybe Persephone could publish it…

Who isn’t nostalgic about books? My rediscovery of James Wilcox’s Tula Springs series has recaptured one of the happiest times of my life. Books bring out the nostalgia in all of us! So rock on!

What to Read on a Camping Trip:  James Wilcox’s “Mrs. Undine’s Living Room”

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Every weekend we cogitate on taking a camping trip in a state park.  We have a tent, though other camping gear must be replaced.  For instance, my sleeping bag is an old-fashioned “mummy” bag, which I have never slept a wink in.

A friend and I once camped off-trail in a park where camping was forbidden.  We were teenage renegades who mockingly called ourselves a “girls who dare,” but we could not figure out how to put up a tent. Two boys in our class, both Boy Scouts, did it for us. Then we walked around, fell in the creek, walked back to the tent, and dined on Ding Dongs.. We complained bitterly about having to pee in the woods.   We got up early, after sleeping very little, and vowed never to go camping again. 

Camping with my husband, another former Boy Scout, is more enjoyable, though I am not really the camping type. And so while we debate the pros and cons of the trip, we compile a“campable” reading list, i.e, books we can concentrate on outdoors. 

So let me recommend a delightful comic novel, Mrs. Undine’s Living Room, by James Wilcox, published in 1987.   

Mrs. Undine’s Living Room is the third book in Wilcox’s series of Tula Springs novels, and my personal favorite.  Wilcox has been compared to Anne Tyler, and, indeed, Tula Springs, Louisiana, is as quirky as Tyler’s Baltimore. 

This novel is so funny that I can hardly turn a page without laughing.  One of the main characters is Olive Mackey, a bossy secretary at City Hall who spends little time at the office.  In the beginning of the novel, she has left the office to check up on Uncle L.D., a 91-year-old man who lives in an apartment above Sonny Boy Bargain Store and prides himself on his perfect memory.

While Olive struggles to change his diaper, she reminds him not to pay Mrs. Undine, a volunteer who is scheduled to visit him.  He has no intention of obeying Olive.  “In my dull, retarded way, may I suggest that I am able may be able to make up my mind about paying Mrs. Undine?”

We cannot help but empathize with L.D., who is practically bedridden and wants to talk to someone more on his level than Olive.  He also annoys Olive by refusing to wear the Lacoste shirts she has given him, and insisting on dressing up for Mrs. Undine in “his vest and the hundred-percent silk coat from Marshall Fields in Chicago, where he was from, or somewhere near there.” 

Although Wilcox is so witty, and his characters are close to caricatures, he conveys their underlying loneliness. L.D. begs Mrs. Undine to stay and make him a grilled cheese, but she refuses – he didn’t eat the last one she made, and she is supposed to stay only 20 minutes. 

Mrs. Undine is low-key but fascinating. A former civics teacher and now a Ladies’ Society volunteer, she also works as a substitute teacher at a fundamentalist Christian  private school.  She doesn’t believe in creationism, and doesn’t intend to go near evolution in her lessons, but is so grateful to be teaching again that she ignores the school’s peculiar philosophy.

And Mrs. Undine, though in her 60s, is surrounded by men who need her in one capacity or another. Martin Bates, her ex-son-in law, an incompetent dental student, lives with her (even she finds this odd) and is always in her way.  She urges him to go out and meet women. “Would it have killed you to go to that social?”

Like most handsome men, Bates is used to women doing what he wants. He gets on his high horse when he hears Mrs. Undine will be teaching science, because of the creationism issue.  He threatens to move out.

 “Well, dear, if that’s the way you feel about it.  I put your suitcase in the hall closet… And I believe there’s some of your underwear in the dryer.”

Never has a man so quickly backed down!

 There is even a possible murder.  Why did L.D.’s paid caregiver fall out of the window?

 Yes, even the mystery is comical. I can’t wait to reread the other Tula Springs  books.

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Impulsiveness: What It Takes to Quit a Job & 10 Books about Work

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There is always bad coffee in the teachers break room.

Impulsiveness runs in the family.

 One of us (a man) quit his job and moved to California when he did not get the promotion he wanted.  It’s a sad story: he never got another full-time job, but worked as an adjunct and at a varety of other part-time job jobs. 

California is expensive – and, my God, there are wildfires, getting worse all the time – so he lived in a run-down ranch house, basically a shack, in need of paint, a new roof, electric wiring, and “extensive remodeling.”  Should one live in a yurt instead, or move back to Nebraska, where it is cheap? One good thing happened: he started to write poetry.

I, too, am impulsive.  There was the year I swore I would quit my job if Clinton were elected.  (I’m a Democrat.)  Nobody took me seriously.  They thought I was joking about workplace burn-out.

I was completely in earnest. During a poetry reading I had been recruited to work at a posh prep school. Really.  These things happened to me.  Poetry readings, coffeehouses, 10K races:  these are the places where intellectuals persuade you to take bad jobs.

At this school, I encountered full-scale sexual harassment for the first time.  I don’t mean flirtatious colleagues. Among my teacher friends there were flirtatious Latino men, who were kind, helpful, and not in the least threatening.  They were good guys.

But three nasty boys dominated one of my classes, among them a football star on a scholarship. During a unit on Ovid, I gave them a writing assignment to retell a myth, setting it any time or place, with dialogue.

I read and enjoyed the papers on the bus.  I scrawled:  “Very creative!” “Brilliant!” “You made me laugh.  Thanks!” 

Tucked in the bottom of the stack were three horribly obscene papers, myths rewritten in the form of violent rape scenes.

We are not talking Ovid here.  Scholars argue about Ovid’s intentions in myths like Daphne and Apollo.  Does Apollo try to rape Daphne?  An out-of-shape, ridiculous Apollo runs after Daphne begging her to run more slowly so he can catch up. Daphne seems more pissed off than frightened when she prays to her father and begs to be transformed into a tree. She is, after all, an acolyte of Diana. Is it tragic, or wonderful to turn into a laurel tree?  The real culprit in this myth was Cupid, who shot an arrow of love at Apollo and an arrow of repulsion at Daphne.

The violent scenes written by these three boys were the stuff of horror movies and aimed at me. I was sickened.

Here’s what happened.  The assistant head was indignant and apologetic, and took me into the headmaster’s office.  He, too, apologized to me, but took no disciplinary measures against the boys, much to the horror of the assistant.  And then a few days later I was called in to the head’s office to talk to the football player’s mother, who did not apologize for her son, but blamed me. 

“You shouldn’t have given them that assignment.”

“I didn’t give them that assignment.”

The teachers were horrified.  They apologized to me and were shocked that the boys weren’t expelled.  And they mentioned a comparable school where students were expelled for lesser crimes than this. 

And then I made the mistake of showing the papers to a “friend,” a person I didn’t know very well.  She turned immediately frosty. “I hoped you would be happy at this job.  Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

“No.”  I got up and left.

And then Clinton got elected.  I was overjoyed.  I quit my job. 

An impulsive win!

10 Great Books about Work

Looking for Work, by Susan Cheever

Selling Ben Cheever, by Ben Cheever

Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West

Work, by Studs Terkel

Green Dot, by Madeleine Grey

The Employees, by Olga Ravn

Villette, by Charlotte Bronte

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Odd Women, by George Gissing

Frankenstein’s AI Monster:  Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity”

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You will be astonished to learn that I have read no articles about AI.  That’s because I have read all I need to about AI in fiction.

Dino Buzzati’s satiric dystopian fable, published in 1960 and translated from Italian by Anne Milano Appel, is an AI dramady, reminiscent of the satire of Gogol or Bulgakov. Buzzati satirically exposes the menace of an AI monster, created by Endriade, a modern Frankenstein. Having never recovered from the loss of his charming but unfaithful first wife, Laura, he decides to endow his giant military-funded AI computer – which appears at first to be a giant white wall – with her personality.  And so he calls her Laura.

No one, not even the Department of Defense, knows what Endriade is up to, and Ermanno Ismani, a meek professor of engineering, wants no part of it.  But the Ministry of Defense recruits him with an offer of a two-year job in the “top secret” military zone for a fantastic salary.  His wife Elisa is eager for him to take the job.

Their trip to the military zone is high Gogolian comedy, with everyone, from highest rank to lowest,  using the silly phrase, “Top Secret.” Finally the Ismanis and Olga Strobele, another scientist’s wife, are chauffeured to the site of the mountain laboratory. Olga is skeptical about the project. And she thinks that everyone is taking it much too seriously.

Olga’s husband, Stobele, informs them:  “ To put it simply, this gigantic installation that so far has cost of well over ten years of effort is… it’s related to us, it’s human.”

But is it human?  Or is it what Olga calls “an electronic brain”? And why do they think this burbling, humming wall is a woman?

Like a scientist in an old black-and-white movie, Endriade hopes to establish complete power over Laura, and then power over the whole world! In life he had no control over Laura, but he thinks he can control AI.

Near the end, Laura says to one of the character, “If I let you go back, he’ll invent other evil things. He wants me enslaved, he’ll tell me about the birds, he’ll keep talking about ‘love, love, love.'”

In this brilliant novel, Buzzati warns us about the future of AI. And he shows us the terrifying hubris of the scientists who develop AI. Better a power plant than an AI wall. Olga may have had the right idea.

Summer Reading:  Veronica Raimo’s “Lost on Me,” Anthony Quayle’s “Eight Hours from England,” & Shannon Bowring’s “The Road to Dalton”

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In this unexpectedly cool weather, I spend a portion of each day reading outdoors. It’s pleasant to bundle up in a cardigan and flop into a lawn chair: I’ve abandoned writing about books. Here is a catch-up post on three novels I’ve enjoyed.

Lost on Me, by Veronica Raimo, translated from Italian by Leah Janecko

Every sentence in Veronica Raimi’s charming coming-of-age novel, Lost on Me, is pitch-perfect.

I loved country life, and my dream was to have a farm, which conflicted with my other dream of becoming a rock star.

The narrator, Vero, blends humor and gentle hyperbole in vignettes about daily life. She has a bemused attitude toward her childhood and family relationships as she connects her history to her career as a writer. 

Raised by hypochondriac parents with strange hobbies, Vero and her older brother grow up to be writers. Their father builds walls in their apartment, so the rooms get smaller and smaller.  This is not a source of contention, yet their mother often escapes to her shrinking room with migraines where she listens to Radio 3.

While their father builds walls, their mother is melodramatic. She reminds me of Mrs. Glass in Franny and Zooey, wanting everything to be normal, but having no idea how to achieve this in her family of brilliant eccentrics, especially after Seymour’s suicide.  As an adult, Vero gets almost daily calls from her mother claiming her brother is dead (he hasn’t returned her calls). Her mother’s hysterics are comical, but at the same time there is an underlying panic, a fear of death. She does not worry about Vero. Her son is at the center of her thoughts.

Vero’s  mother is a larger-than-life figure. She nags them about how to write successfully.“My mother is convinced my brother and I have never become successful writers because we use too many swear words.  She sees our vice as an act of self-sabotage, but in it she also sees the last glimmers of our youthful rebellion toward her.”

The author, Veronica Raimo, won the Strega Giovani Prize for Lost on Me and has also won the Strega Prize.

Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle. Anthony Quale was an English actor known for his roles in Lawrence of Arabia and The Guns of Navarrone.  He also acted on the stage and was the director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre for eight years. 

Who knew he was a writer?

Eight Hours from England is an autobiographical novel set in the Balkans during World War II; it focuses on intelligence work rather than battles. The narrator, Major John Overton, is sent to Albania to run a special operation as a liaison between two factions in Albania, the Partisans (Communists who fight the Germans) and the Ballists (pro-German: they believe life under the Germans would be better than Communist rule).  John  cannot persuade the Albanian factions to compromise, because their feuds are too long and complicated.

John Quayle

In this beautifully-written novel, there are sharply-observed descriptions of the mountains contrasted with the men’s exhausting hikes in battered footwear; a wry observation of their weariness of eating goat meat; and the uncomfortable realization that they must huddle together, lice, fleas, and all, to keep warm in a cave where they must hide.

The dialogue is excellent: there’s something a bit movie-esque about it, perhaps because of Quayle’s background. I enjoyed and recommend this novel, the second I’ve read in the Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics series of Second World War novels.

The Road to Dalton, by Shannon Bowring (Europa). This moving debut novel, set in a small town in Maine in 1990, is very light for Europa, but becomes more complex as the novel continues. Dowring sketches the closely intertwined lives of four families in Dalton. Richard, a doctor who took over his father’s clinic, has lived in the same town all his life and no longer enjoys his work. His wife, Trudy, director of the Dalton Public Library, is in love with Bev, the director of an old age home, but neither can be open about her sexuality, because not only would they be pariahs but so would their families.

The drama of daily life spins out of control when Bridget, the depressed mother of a colicky baby, commits suicide. Her husband, Nate, a police officer who is Bev’s son, was madly in love with Bridget and had no clue about her state of mind. He rapidly descends into self-destructive drinking, while Bev quits her job to take care of the baby.

Bridget’s suicide is a cloud over the whole town. Her mother, who lives in the rich house in town and liked lording it over others, is so shattered she barely leaves the house. And others are uncomfortable: they think suicide is for people with cancer.

Bowring’s quiet, present-tense prose has an underlying vigor that keeps you reading. She breaks up paragraphs with lyrical fragments that turn bits of prose into poetry. This is a fast-paced, perfect summer book, and, I might add, most probably a women’s book.

A light read for a summer’s day.

Prep School Manners:  A Poetry Slam on Cape Cod

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Hyannis Port, MA

First, I should tell you that we did not meet the Kennedys on an off-season trip to Cape Cod.  It was not for lack of trying:  we hoped to spot Joe, Jr., Robert F., Jr. (currently running for president on a conservative anti-vaxxer ticket), or John “John-John” Kennedy. Jr.  (still alive then), or a random Kennedy playing touch football or yachting, we didn’t care which. 

After a day in beautiful Provincetown, we drove to Hyannis Port, home of the Kennedy compound.  Our first stop was a store that specialized in vintage magazines that featured many, many photos of the Kennedys.  I was familiar with these because John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president, and my Catholic mother, a Democrat and a political science major, collected Life and Look magazines with photos of the family.

 I grew up with the Kennedys.  I had Jackie and Caroline paper dolls, who sometimes got together with the Lennon Sister paper dolls for a sock hop, because it was difficult for me to think of things for celebrities to do.  And over the years the Kennedys were in the news.  Whatever people might think of the Kennedys, we were lucky to have Teddy in the senate, who sponsored many liberal bills and fortunately lived to old age. 

 I am bold, but I could not bring myself to buy any magazines at the shop (it would make me look trashy) or ask the proprietor if the Kennedys were in town (it would make me look crazy).  Nonetheless, I was glad to be in Hyannis Port, because it was a beautiful town, and the Kennedys had figured so largely, if absently, in my life.

And then we went to a bar for a poetry slam, and  I brought in my laptop in so I could take notes in the dark.

We approved the ambience of what we called “a rich person’s bar.”  The wooden floor was not sticky with beer, the menus were not greasy, the clam chowder was good, and the bar stocked perhaps 100 imported beers, so we did feel it necessary to tease the server and ask if they had Genesee Cream Ale, a cheap beer made in upstate New York.

While we waited for our order, I typed notes.   Laptops were popular but not ubiquitous then, so a girl doesn’t walk into a bar and… let alone a middle-aged woman….  So we were surprised when a young man as handsome as a Kennedy stopped to admire my Mac laptop.  We had an animated conversation about the superiority of Macs, and he admitted that he had five different models.  (“The rich are different…?” But, no I had two.)

Though “handsome as a Kennedy” does not mean an actual Kennedy, his preppy style was very correct, his clothes an upscale version of L. L. Bean gear:  the slightly grimy polo shirt, the elegantly-made jeans, and the scruffy boat shoes without socks, as if he had graduated from Phillips Exeter a couple of days ago, then gone on a flying visit to Harvard, and now spent all his time going to poetry slams when he wasn’t working at an elite law firm.

He said he was there because his sister had signed up for the slam.  “Very embarrassing, but she says she needs support.”

“How sweet!”

“What a nice brother you are!”

And then the slam began and he excused himself to join his good-looking friends.  We were in suspense to learn her last name.  Would it be Kennedy? Was he a Kennedy?

Alas, she did not have a last name.  This fragile person called herself Hera of the Sands, and her strange little poem was about sand, salt, sexual infidelity, and walking into the the waves with rocks in the folds of her robes, a la Virginia Woolf.  Then she segued into a rendition of a sexist Beach Boys song from the ‘60s, “California Girls.”  It was satiric, the song better than the poem, but she was young (on a break from Bryn Mawr or Sarah Lawrence?) and she would improve with education.

After the performance, we joined her brother in cheers and applause.  “Go, Hera!”  “Yeah, Hera!” 

“Thank you for that,” he said as he passed our table. “She’s thrilled. Her poetry means the world to her.”

And what meant the world to him, I wondered.  Sports? Books? Computer programming? Were things were working out for him? Was the law firm a good fit? Was there a law firm? I don’t know much about jobs.

It was sweet to see a young man fill a bar with friends, however briefly, to cheer on  Hera, the fragile poetess, his sister, on a cool autumn night. Worth coming to Hyannis Port for, in the long run…

Because the world is brutal.

Gen Geranium: A Garden Diary, Essays, & a Gardening Novel

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I am the third generation of a clique of geranium lovers.  And I am the last, because I did not have offspring.  Three is a good number, though. A lucky number: my grandmother, mother, and I.   Possibly post-apocalyptic, though, since two of the gens are gone and God knows what’s going on with the weather, and what will happen to geraniums and the gens of the future.

Here’s what I want to know:  is there still a Generation Geranium?

My mother and grandmother loved geraniums because they were easy to grow. And the women in my neighborhood liked them for the same reason. I cannot remember any of the stay-at-home moms having time to do more than plant geraniums or marigolds. The women stayed in the pods of their houses reading Georgette Heyer or the Pulitzer Prize- winning housewife poet Phyllis McGinley.  There were also the magazine readers:  McCall’s, Time,  Newsweek, Life, Reader’s Digest, often with cigarette burns on the pages.

I see few geraniums in gardens nowadays, but these hardy annuals are pretty in an old-fashioned way (with a historical connection: they were introduced into the U.S. by Thomas Jefferson who ordered some from France). You can plant them in pots or in the ground, take them indoors in the fall, and they will bloom off and on all year, more off than on, but perk up again in the summer. 

There are some beautiful gardens in my neighborhood. There are Empire State Building- tall sunflowers, unruly wild flowers, common daisies, hollyhocks, lilies, hostas, narcissi, impatiens, roses, bluebells, and chemically-induced perfect flowers (we earnestly told the owner that the chemicals poison the ground water, but he/she was unfazed). No geraniums.

Gardening memoirists don’t write about the common geranium, either. In Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898 and very popular, the garden was her sanctuary from the tyranny of social calls and from her husband, ominously called The Man of Wrath. At first the garden was a wilderness, she says. The gardener did all the work, but she began to give directions.  She writes a few pages later:  “If only I could dig and plant myself!  How much easier, besides being so fascinating,  to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by that long piece of string!”

Although I love von Arnim’s novels, particularly The Caravaners and The Enchanted April, I am irritated by her gardening diary.  Why can’t she dig and do the planting?  Too rich?  Sick?  She must conquer the gardener by the end of the book and do some work – I admit I did not reread it- but I flicked through the pages and the word “geranium” did not pop out.

Perhaps other garden writers fill the gap.  I would love to read Richardson Wright’s The Gardener’s Bed-Book:  Short and Long Pieces to Be Read in Bed.  He was the editor of House and Garden in the 1920s, and this collection of his columns is reputed to be charming and witty.  Apparently his wife never goes into the garden. He gives her the first flowers of every season, but the only flower she appreciates is the rose.

Did he write about geraniums?  Perhaps.

I also have a gardening novel on my list, Old Herbaceoous by Reginal Arkell. It is said to be the comical story of a boy who l steals wild flowers and grows up to be a head gardener at the manor house and judge of a prestigious flower show.  It is supposed to be very funny, and is compared to P. G. Wodehouse.

I’d love to be a gardener. I really would. But I’m too busy reading.

The geraniums are for my gardening what they were for past Gen Geraniums.

A Hotel Abroad & Novels about Hotels

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Only without the pictures on the wall!

The taxi dropped me at a London hotel.  It may have in Holborn, it may have been Chelsea; it wasn’t Mayfair. I was excited to be there, though the hotel did not resemble the photo on the website.

I could live with that, but I was not prepared for the neighborhood’s night life.  As a fan of The Closer, I am accustomed to watching Brenda Lee Johnson and the Major Crimes unit, sometimes accompanied by her FBI agent husband, Fritz, bust criminals.  So I wondered, Was that a drug deal going down over there?  Or was it a group of drunken young people staggering home after a night at, well, I would say a poetry reading, wouldn’t you?  At the pub, I guessed.

The taxi driver seemed a little spooked, too, as he carried my suitcase up the steps.  “Be careful.”

I checked in, relieved, but was dismayed when the hotel clerk told me I would be staying in a building around the corner. He gave me two keys.  “This is for the front door. Be sure it locks behind you.” 

I was taken aback. “Will you walk me there, please?”

“Okay, ma’am.”

Armed with a ring of keys he accompanied me.  The hotel clerk was more nervous than I as we scuttled past a small group of people who seemed to be dispersing.  I wished I could walk him back, but it wasn’t possible.

I need not have worried about unlocking the front door. It was open!  I locked it  behind me, though not all of the guests bothered.  As soon as I double-locked the door of my room, I put on my cozy jams, checked my e-mail, and retired to bed with a copy of the TLS.  

And then… Someone rapped at the door. 

I don’t know about you, but at 3 a.m. I am not accustomed to strange guests in a foreign country.  I did not even phone the hotel clerk.  What could that poor man do?  I turned off the lights and pulled the covers over my head.  Yes, that should work…

Soon I heard the person treading down the stairs.  

After that initiation, I fit into the neighborhood. We all ignored one another.   And I enjoyed my life as a tourist. I checked off 10 things to do in my guidebook and looked at some very expensive books at Cecil Court, an alley of several antiquarian bookshops. 

Did I come home with an English accent?  Huge disappointment.  No.

But I have made a list of novels set in hotels, or with scenes in hotels

Novels about or in Hotels

The Hotel, by Elizabeth Bowen

The Little Hotel, by Christina Stead

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brooker (Booker winner)

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster

The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving

The Grand Babylon Hotel, by Arnold Bennett

Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum

Winter Solstice, by Rosamunde Pilcher

The Holiday, by Stanley Middleton (Booker winner; the protagonist stays in a hotel on holiday)

Reading Gear & Book Series:  What You’ll Need This Summer

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This looks uncomfortable! A woman reading in the woods, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE Magazine, 1959

They tell you that you don’t need gear. They think they know, but they do not. “You’ve got a book.  What else do you need?”

Yes, you need the book. That is minimum gear.  You also need bookmarks, stickies, and a pencil. Some readers use popsicle sticks as bookmarks and highlight passages with lipstick. That’s their choice.  The rest of us need gear.

If you’re going camping, or reading outdoors, you’ve got to have gear.  Because any minute a herd of deer may trample on your campsite or enter your suburban yard WITHOUT PERMISSION and you have to clap your hands or feebly yell to drive them away and you may drop your book in the mud.  And a mosquito might choose to bite you. You need your Calamine lotion Nature is serious stuff.

GUYS AND GALS, THIS IS A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME READING OFFER.  YOU NEVER KNOW:  I MAY DECIDE TO DELETE THIS INFORMATIVE POST TOMORROW!

SUMMER READING GEAR!!!

Lawn chair, camp stool, or hammock.  Be comfortable.  It’s the first rule of living outdoors (which is basically what you’ll be doing).  A picnic table will never do. You need support for your back, and your butt will get sore from the wooden bench.  So head to the hardware store and buy the most comfortable chair and/or hammock you can afford.  There are old-fashioned lawn chairs, camp stools, plastic Adirondack chairs, plastic upright chairs, outdoor living room furniture, and outdoor chair cushions.  I fancy an outdoor chair cushion. 

Books.  You may think you need only one book for a day outdoors, but you are wrong.  What if you’re stuck in the woods and George Eliot’s Romola doesn’t suit? No, you need at least two books, possibly three.  Perhaps a classic, a mystery, and one of the award-winning books of the year.  At least three choices.

Tote Bag/First Aid Kit.  A national magazine sent me a free totebag for renewing my subscription. I have many totebags, but can always use one more!  Everyone needs ONE TOTEBAG dedicated to the survival kit.  It should contain:  Kleenex, Zyrtec (allergy pills), bookmarks, stickies, Band-Aids, Calamine lotion, Neosporin, sanitizer, wipes, sun screen, energy bars, water bottle, hat, cardigan (if it gets cold, which it will not), bug repellent, deer repellent, flashlight, an apple, and a cookie (or a madeleine to inspire you to read Remembrance of Things Past (which I hear is funny in French!).

Notebook.  Some readers like to take notes. And so one needs a reading notebook.  Notebooks can be cheap or expensive:  you can buy spirals or composition notebooks for 50 cents at office supply stores, or Moleskines and similar hardcover or softcover notebooks for $10 and up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other stores online.  I like some of the brands more than others, but IT’S ALL PAPER!

Pens.  Some like ballpoints, others like fountain pens, others prefer Bics.  Bics and cheap pens used to be great, but the quality has gone down, and they seem to run out of ink after a couple of hours.  Personally I prefer inexpensive ballpoints.  Newspapers and various websites run reviews of pens and notebooks at least once a year, if you want to pick an extpert’s brain.

Iced tea.  Wherever you go this summer, you will need iced tea.  If you’re on the road, you can pop into a convenience store and buy a bottle, but it’s easy to make at home.  Stick five or ten teabags (you can get special iced tea bags with specific directions on the box) in boiling hot water for five minutes.  Pour tea into an icy pitcher and drink.  Sugar and lemon optional.  N.B.  You’ll need a jug if you’re taking this on the road.

And remember to bring snacks!

THREE RECOMMENDED SUMMER BOOK SERIES!

Are you committed to reading a series this summer? Here are three recommendations.

Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence quintet. This semi-autobiographical five-volume series tells the story of Martha Quest, a heroine every liberal woman identifies with. Lessing takes us through Martha’s rebellious adolescence on an African farm, through two marriages and secretarial work in a nearby town during World War II, nightly Communist meetings and activism in the Black community, and finally a move to England at age 30.

This last novel, The Four-Gated City, differs from the others in that it is part realistic, part experimental. Martha becomes a factotum secretary/editor/housekeeper for her leftist employer, Mark, who lives with three generations of his family in a large London house. Martha and Mark discuss and chart politics in his study, try to create a safe living space for his mentally ill/psychic wife, Linda, and deal with the impact of Mark’s brother’s defection to Russia: his Jewish wife commits suicide, and their fragile son retreats into himself and is almost too rebellious even for a progressive school.

Not only are Mark and Martha children of violence, born in the World War I era, but Mark’s children of the ’60s have grown up in the shadow of World War II, and their emotional psychology is also shaped by violence. The book ends on a surreal note, after an unidentified accident destroys parts of the world. This unputdownable, intelligent novel is well worth reading, still very pertinent, even better than The Golden Notebook.

Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger trilogy. Arnold Bennett is a neglected 20th-century writer, best-know for his classic, The Old Wives’ Tale. The Clayhanger trilogy is also stunning, set in the Five Towns in the Midlands, the story of a dissatisfied man. The protagonists are Edwin Clayhanger, a young man who longs to be an architect but gets stuck running the family pottery business, and artistic Hilda Lessways, who eventually marries Edwin, but still has feelings for her ex-husband, who had gone to prison. Bennett is a consummate storyteller and we especially feel for vulnerable Edwin. Hilda can look after herself, but she is a strong woman character, capable of dealing with what comes her way.

Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, a Golden Age Detective Novel series. My favorite is Five Red Herrings, because I like the Scottish setting, but Gaudy Night and Murder Must Advertise are more entertaining and brilliant. These mystery classics are readable and entertaining. Tuck one of these in your totebag and you’ll never be sorry.

The Great Summer Read of 2024: E. Nesbit’s “The Wonderful Garden”

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The most delightful novel I’ve recently read is  E. Nesbit’s The Wonderful Garden (1911), one of her later children’s books.  I use the phrase “children’s book” loosely, since this little-known book is so whimsical that the humor might fly over the heads of its intended audience.  

In this charming novel, there is not only a wonderful walled garden difficult of access (there is a “secret passage”), but a quaint, faded book, The Language of Flowers, often consulted by  the three C.’s, Caroline, Charlotte, and Charles. They also discover two ancient hidden books of magic which have a profound effect on their Great-Uncle Charles’s research on the history of magic.

The thing is, Nesbit is very tongue-in-cheek here.  When the three C.’s leave their vegetarian aunt and uncle to spend the rest of the summer with Great-Uncle Charles, they choose bouquets via research in The Language of Flowers as gifts for Aunt Emmeline. 

Their reasoning is hysterically funny.

Caroline chooses balm, which means sympathy, because “those geography places you’re going can’t really be as nice as Uncle Charles’s.”

Charles’s bouquet was of convolvulus.  “It means dead hope,” he explained; “but it’s very pretty, too.”  He suddenly presented a tiny red cactus in a pot.  “I bought it for you,” he said;  “it means, ‘Thou leavest not.’”

Caroline, “who was almost hidden behind a huge bouquet of ivy and marigolds”:

“The ivy means friendship,” said Caroline, “and the marigolds don’t count.  I only put them in because they are so goldy-bright.  But if they must count, they mean cruelty – Fate’s, you know, because you’re not coming.  And there’s a purple pansy in among it somewhere, which means, ‘I think of you.’”

 Even if you are a Nesbit fan, you might have missed The Wonderful Garden. It was difficult for my mother to find when I was a child, and difficult for me to find a few years ago, too.  The paperback edition pictured at the top is published by Read Books Ltd. The hardcover was published by Ernest Been Limited, London, and was the one I had as a child. Both editions have the original illustrations by H. R. Millar.

You may also be familiar with  Nesbit from A. S. Byatt’s Booker-shortlisted novel, The Children’s Book, based loosely on the lives of Nesbit and her family, complete with gorgeous fairy tales by Nesbit’s fictional counterpart. 

There are three biographies of Nesbit, the latest being The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, by Eleanor Fitzsimons. The other two are also good, one by Doris Langley Moore, the other by Noel Streatfeild. 

Nesbit was a radical; she socialized with Kipling, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and many well-known writers who had radical politics. In addition to being a poet, novelist, ghost story writer, and a children’s fantasy writer, Nesbit was a socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society. 

And she was very unconventional in her married life..  Like many Victorian women writers, she supported her family:  her husband,  Hubert Bland, who was vivacious, popular, and a stylish dresser, their children, and Hubert’s mistress and her children by Bland.

Unfortunately, Nesbit’s adult books lack the charm and spontaneity of her other work. Her adult novel, The Lark, is the best by far of her adult books, and was reissued a few years ago with an introduction by Penelope Lively. It would pair nicely with The Wonderful Garden, because it is also about gardens.

Let me leave you with this witty passage from The Wonderful Garden.

If you are Jack Delamere, the Boy Detective who can find out all secrets by himself, pretending to be a French count, a young lady from the provinces, or a Lincolnshire labourer with a cold in his head, and in those disguises pass unrecognized by his nearest relations and by those coiners and smugglers to whom in his ordinary clothes he is only too familiar – if you can so alter your voice that your old school-fellows believe you to be, when dressed for the part, an Italian organ grinder or a performing bear.

I am sorry, but this sentence is too much for me.  I give it up.

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