I'm a little sad as my postal reading group is coming to an end. There are fourteen of us in the group. Most of us are either in the US or the UK, but one member is in Germany. Each selected a book for the rest of the members to read and sent it off in July 2008! As the books made the rounds each member had a chance to read each book, and now I have the last book to read before it will be sent off next month to return home. Unfortunately I didn't write about the books I read here (with a couple of exceptions), as part of the fun was knowing you would be getting a mystery book in the mail every couple of months. In the off chance that one of the members of the group happened by I didn't want to give any surprises away.
I thought I would mention my last book, as Winifred Eaton is a new to me author, and I am happy to have encountered her. This is why I've enjoyed the group so much. The members tend to have very similar tastes in books, yet each book has been something unexpected (at least for me). In only a few cases would I likely have come across the book and read it on my own, however, I've found some wonderful new books and authors. I may have to do a wrap up of the books I read at some point when this last round is over, though I wish I had kept some sort of written record of the books I read (this blog is my reading journal these days).
Winifred Eaton was born in Montreal in 1875 of Chinese-British ancestry. She wrote a number of popular books in the 1920s and 30s under a Japanese pseudonym (Onoto Watanna). It sounds as though she had an interesting life, traveling at age seventeen to Jamaica to work as a journalist and then later moving to Chicago and then on to New York City and Hollywood. Me: A Book of Remembrance was published in 1915 is a novel that is autobiographical in nature.
As I'm just starting to read, I thought it would be the perfect choice of book from which to share a little teaser. The novel opens with Nora Ascouth leaving a cold and blizzardy Quebec for Jamaica to begin a job on a newspaper. Her family was large and very poor, and Nora hadn't been especially happy at home. Her father, an English-Irishman, had been an adventurer. The son of rich parents he traveled to China when few white men had done so. There he met Nora's mother, a tight-rope dancer, and they emigrated to Canada, where she always felt an outsider.
"This story is frankly of myself, and I mention these facts merely in the possibility of their proving of some psychological interest later; also they may explain why it was possible for a parent to allow a young girl of seventeen to leave her own with exactly ten dollars in her purse (I do not think my father knew just how much money I did have) to start upon a voyage to the West Indies!"
"In any event, the fact remains that I had overruled my father's weak and absentminded objections and my mother's exclamatory ones, and I had accepted a position in Jamaica, West Indies, to work for a little local paper called The Lantern."
"It all came about through my having written at the age of sixteen a crude, but exciting, story which a kindly friend, the editor of a Quebec weekly paper actually accepted and published."
"I had always secretly believed there were the strains of genius somewhere hidden in me; I had always lived in a little dream world of my own; wherein, beautiful and courted I moved among the elect of the earth. Now I had given vivid proof of some unusual power! I walked on air. The world was rose-colored; nay, it was golden."
Sorry, longish teaser there, but I think it gives a sense of Nora's character. I'm curious to see how she makes her way in the world.
By the way, this is a University Press of Mississppi book, and although the red and green cover illustration is somewhat glaring, the book is well designed and fits nicely in the hand. I find I appreciate portable books more and more these days.