A Work in Progress

On Pepys and Other Interesting Diary Facts

Thanks to Litlove (and anyone else who may have mentioned her) for introducing me to Alexandra Johnson and pointing me in the direction of her little gem of a book.  I recently started reading A Brief History of Diaries: From Pepys to Blogs, and it is turning out to be the perfect introduction to diaries.  It forms yet another reading pair alongside Revelations: Diaries of Women which I have been very slowly making my way through.  A book about diaries and a book of diaries, what more could I ask for?  A Brief History of Diaries is published by the wonderful Hesperus Press (which has put out a series of "history of" books that are now looking very interesting).

With just over a hundred pages it may well be brief, but the book is chock full of interesting information and I have been making little notations and marking pages as I go.  Johnson has written other books on diaries and journaling, notably The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life, which I also have on hand to read when I finish the brief history.  I'm sure there will be some overlap but I expect she'll expand on the theme, as the Hesperus book is really just a very general overview of the subject.

There's lots of name dropping, which I fully expected and like but it's going to make for an even longer list of writers/diarists whose books I'd like to look for to peruse and perhaps read.  I'll have to share my findings soon as I have been (gulp) buying and borrowing books as I go.  Such enthusiasm is fun, but boy does it make for towering piles of books that are beginning to look a little worrisome next to all the other books I want to read.  In a case like this, buying is good as the books will wait patiently for me, but the borrowed titles flaunt those due dates at me every time I look at them.

There is so much information in A Brief History of Diaries, I thought it might be a good idea to post about it a few times rather than share the highlights all at once.  Johnson has divided the book into chapters covering the various types of diaries and the corresponding periods when those sorts of diaries flourished.  She begins with the innovators, moves on to travel diaries, then writers, artists and creative diaries, and a chapter I'm looking forward to--war diaries then on finally to modern diary keeping for the twentieth century--cyberspace and digital diaries.

A few interesting facts about diaries.  We can thank the Chinese for giving us paper around about AD 105.  What would diaries be without paper?  Although diaries prior to the invention of paper were kept, paper revolutionized diary-keeping.  The earliest diarists recorded history rather than the personal.  Even from earliest times one of the motivations for keeping a diary was to create a record of having lived.  Some of the earliest diarists came from the Arab world and you won't be surprised to know that the opening of international trade routes helped facilitate and give a reason for keeping diaries.  Initially diaries were tied to accounting and official business, but by the Renaissance there was a shift from public to private diary keeping.

It wouldn't be until the 17th century when diarists began moving from recording daily life to becoming more introspective and personal.  As Johnson notes, the shift was from "Eye" to "I".  And a man I want to mention here: Samuel Pepys.  He was a diarist extraordinaire.  His first diary entry was in 1660 when he was 27.  He kept a diary almost continuously (missing only two weeks in 1668--don't you think he would have made a great blogger?) for nine years.  That's 3,102 pages to you and me.  And he wrote them all in a secret shorthand.  It sounds as though if you want to learn about Restoration London, Pepys is the man to read since he was a witness to it all.  "Pepys used his opportunities to move diary keeping from confession to self-expression and then into the realm of literature."    

After Pepys came James Boswell.  Whereas Pepys was a "brilliant amateur" as Alexandra Johnson calls him, Boswell was a Professional.  He was the first celebrity diarist.  His diaries weren't just confessional in nature, as he wanted to impress and had in mind posterity.  He began his London Journal at the age of 22 in 1762.  He's probably best known as the biographer of author Samuel Johnson who was his literary mentor.  His diaries provided the material for his books, and he was a chronicler of the literary and social world of the period of which he was a fixture.  Once again, to get a feel for the period I suspect Boswell's diaries are pretty enlightening, and it seems as though he has an ear for the humorous.  In a diary entry from 7 April 1779, "he records that Johnson disliked being reminded that Boswell often had a headache after drinking with him."

"(Johnson) 'Nay, Sir, it was not the wine that had your head ache but the sense I put into it.'
 (Boswell) 'Well, Sir, will sense make the head ache?'
 (Johnson) 'Yes, Sir, when it is not used to it.'"

Next up I'll be reading about diaries kept by travelers and explorers, which is good as I need a nice change of scenery (even if it is only of the literary sort).

Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness, published in 1993 when she was 40, was her first adult novel.  Dunmore had previously published short stories and books for children, but the two novels she had written in her twenties weren't good enough, she felt.  According to an article in the Guardian, she had been working on a short story and something clicked.  She notes she had "taken off the brakes".  "I wanted to write about a particular person, a particular time, a particular place."  The person is D.H. Lawrence, the place Cornwall and the time is WWI. 

In 1916-1917 D.H. Lawrence bought a cottage on the coast where he and his German-born wife Frieda settled.  Of course the tumultuous period with the war and Lawrence being such a controversial figure makes for interesting reading.  Zennor in Darknessis an ambitious novel, which I quite enjoyed though it was perhaps not (for me) a perfect novel.  Still, it's an impressive start for a woman who later goes on to win the Orange Prize and be nominated for both the Booker and Whitbread.  This first novel garnered her the McKitterick Prize (an award for a first novel for someone over 40).

The D.H. Lawrence Dumore writes about is not the author.  Not exactly anyway.  Although it goes unmentioned in the story he was at the time writing Women in Love (a novel I started reading but didn't finish.  I wasn't ready for Lawrence, I think, but now really feel I must try harder to read him).  Rather the Lawrence in this story is someone who is escaping the tensions of London.  His novel The Rainbow had been published in 1915 and had been prosecuted in an obscenity trial resulting in all copies being removed and destroyed in England. 

Zennor is meant to be a refuge, but it's a small place and the people look on outsiders as near-foreigners.  A Londoner (though Lawrence was born in the Midlands) would be bad enough let alone a German woman who wears red stockings and hangs multicolored curtains in her windows.  Surely a sign she must be sending signals to the U-boats stalking the Cornish coast.  Lawrence spends his time working in his garden and lending a hand at a local farm.  Frieda is slightly older and an unusual woman--passionate and bohemian without a care for what others think of her, which is enough to cause a stir amongst the people of Zennor. 

Sharing the stage in this novel with the Lawrences is Clare Coyne, the only daughter of a widowed Catholic man born a gentleman but a lesser son.  He married a lady's maid and returned with her to her native Cornwall where she died of TB when Clare was just a baby.  Francis Coyne raises his daughter mostly alone.  Their relationship is not exactly a close one, but they get on well enough.  Clare cares for the house and cooks the meals, and Francis works on his book about local plant life, but they lead a starched existence with each other.  She feels she can only relax with her mother's family, of which there is an abundance.  Aunts and uncles and cousins. 

And it is with her cousin Hannah and another friend, swimming in the sea one afternoon where the story begins.  There's a celebratory feel in the air as Hannah's brother John William is coming home on leave.  Clare is particularly close to both Hannah and John William, the three having grown up together and spent many happy hours in each other's company.  Friendship blossoms into something more between Clare and John William, but there's the war which is consuming and destroying so many young men, even the ones who come home apparently so safe.  Their romance is intense and secretive.  So usual is it to see them together that no one, especially Clare's father, even realizes they share something more than everyday family ties.  John William, despite his working class upbringing, has dreams and talents that he hopes to pursue.  He has even risen in the ranks to become an officer, but no one understands that even after two years of war experience, coming through seemingly unscathed, he is not undamaged by it all. 

As I was reading I couldn't decide whether this was Clare's story or D.H. Lawrence's, and therein lies the occasional disjointed feeling that I had while reading.  I can never decide in a case like this whether it's fine to insert an actual person into a story or if a fictional creation would work just as well and facts were simply borrowed from reality.  The characters are so inextricably linked, however, that the story could not play out without one or the other.  The Lawrences befriend Clare, and prying eyes make assumptions that aren't always correct--especially when they see Clare with Lawerence who encourages her in her talent for drawing.  There is rumor and innuendo in the air already because of the war, and there is also fear and mistrust.  Young men are dying and some families, like Clare's uncles, are doing their best to keep their sons safe at home, but always the army's reach is long.  Several years into the war and now even the rejected men are being called up.  Into this swirl of family drama comes a misunderstanding that has repercussions that affect not only the Lawrences but Clare as well.

Despite that occasional uneven feel to the story, I really liked this book.  The descriptions of Cornwall are lush and vivid and the place comes alive.  I also loved the lyrical feel to the prose and it wasn't until well into the story that I realized that Dunmore writes in present tense, which I know some readers find irksome.  For me it didn't detract or call attention to itself but I simply fell into the story and into the minds of the characters.  Some of the best passages describe the rhythms of the sea and often the characters actions reflect that rhythm.  There is much to like about this story, definitely one to look for if the place and period appeals to you.

I read Dunmore's A Spell of Winterin my pre-blogging days, which I recall liking, and hope to read more of her books eventually.  I'm sure I have several more by her on my reading pile.

This was the first book in Caroline's 2012 Literature and War Readalong.  You can read her thoughts on the book here.  Next up is Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way for February 27.

Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively

There is so much to like about Penelope Lively's Oleander Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, a memoir of growing up in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s.  I wonder why I ever waited so long to read her.  I had already heard many good things about Lively's Booker winning Moon Tiger (which has been bumped up to the top of my reading pile now), but it was this small volume of reminiscences that has been sitting on my bookshelf for perhaps a decade or more that finally prompted me to begin reading her work.  I say begin, as I have every intention of reading everything else I can get my hands on by her.

Lively approaches her memoir from an interesting angle.  This isn't a straightforward volume of biography written in a neat linear fashion.  She tries instead to recapture her childhood as she lived and saw it.  It's as much about a child's perception of the world as a simple revisiting of her childhood from the distance of adulthood.

"I have tried to recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood--in so far as any of us can do such a thing--and use this as a vehicle for a reflection on the way in which children perceive.  I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable.  All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.  But it has seemed to me that it might be possible to take these pictures in the mind--those moments of seeing--and, by turning them into language, to look both at the way in which a child sees and at how this matches up with what it was that was seen."

She writes not just about her perceptions and experiences but also of the realities of living Egypt at that time.  She writes..."I was the product of one society but was learning how to perceive the world in the ambiance of a quite different culture. I grew up English, in Egypt."  We were all children once but once that innocence is lost it is hard to remember just how the world once appeared.  Lively tries to recapture that world when she viewed and experienced it without preconceptions.  She sets off her recollections by a return visit to Egypt much later in the 1980s when she tries to find a glimmer of the Cairo she knew as a child.

Lively's father worked for a bank and her mother was quite active in the Colonial social scene to the point that she had very little interaction with Penelope.  As a matter of fact Penelope was by and large raised and educated by her English governess, though for the time and place not all that surprising.  She spent her early years mostly in Egypt until she was about twelve when her parents divorced and she was sent home to England to attend boarding school, very much a let down for her after a childhood spent traveling up the Nile by boat and having picnics in the desert, seeing snake charmers visit her home to remove errant snakes, and feeding hippos at the Cairo Zoo.  A bookish child, Penelope was disconcerted to find out that in her school sports was more valued than an inquisitive and bookish mind.

In one particularly poignant passage Lively notes how devastated she was when Lucy, her governess, chastised her by warning her she would leave if she didn't behave.

"She was my entire emotional world.  I lived alone with her, locked into a reassuring arrangement of solicitude and dependence.  My parents were satellite figures--occasionally stimulating or provocative, but of a different order.  Peering backwards, I cannot really see them.  Lucy is vivid.  She seems in retrospect to have been ageless; I know now that she was in her thirties."

Whatever the transgression, it was serious enough to have angered and appalled Lucy.  A remark like this is tantamount to pulling the rug out from under a child, since Lucy was her world and the idea of her leaving Penelope was more than she could bear.

"I can retrieve that emotion quite clearly.  The horror, the desolation of abandonment.  Goodness knows what I had done.  In fact, Lucy threatened to pack her bags quite frequently, but this occasion must have been of a different order.  And I see now what lies beyond it, why it is so potent.  I see what it is about--the insecurity of children brought up by those who are not their parents.  And I see too that Lucy was wrong to trade on this, however fearful my transgression."

Of course as an adult she knew Lucy wouldn't leave, that Lucy probably knew what had been going on with her parents and likely stayed only for Penelope.  However peripheral her parents were, parents don't walk out, but Lucy could have and it would have been heartbreaking.

I really enjoyed reading this and as much as I loved the bits about how memory works, it is perhaps reading about this very exotic place and this particular period that I found utterly fascinating.  Lively was born into a reasonably wealthy family with what seems to have been a high social ranking.  She happened to be in England when WWII broke out (and had returned by V-E Day in 1945).  Her mother and other relatives were vacationing in Europe without a care in the world in the fall of 1939 when they realized they needed to return with haste.  Alternately, near the end of the war when she was in Cairo the German advance seemed particularly threatening she and her mother and Lucy traveled to Palestine.  She notes how unconcerned everyone seemed.  Although it was the waning days of Colonial life in that part of the world, there was still a strong sense of entitlement.

Returning to England Lively must have experienced a huge sense of dislocation, and certainly the Egypt she knew of the 30s had long since vanished when she returned half a century later.  This was a real pleasure to read and I'm not sure that I've conveyed everything this slim volume contains.  If you're interested in that particular part of the world this is a book to keep in mind.   

Lost in the Stacks: Education of a Wandering Man

I never thought I would say this, but I am looking forward to reading my first Louis L'Amour book!  Many thanks to AJ for pointing me in the direction of L'Amour's memoir Education of a Wandering Man.  I don't think he is actually 'lost in the stacks', considering my library's copy of the book was checked out as recently as this past December, but it was completely unknown to me (I don't think I would have been perusing his books otherwise), so  maybe it is to you as well.  He is, of course, best known for his many Westerns, but it is a genre I have never been drawn to.  He wrote nearly 90 novels and I think he is much loved and well known (and probably still hugely popular?) as his books have been translated into more than twenty languages and appear to still be in print.  Education of a Wandering Man was published posthumously and chronicles his early life and education.

Born in 1908 in North Dakota L'Amour left school at the age of fifteen and spent his younger years moving about as an itinerant worker.  He traveled widely not only in the Western United States but also to Europe and Asia and the Middle East.  He led a colorful and adventurous life, which likely fueled his later writing.  And he was a voracious reader and autodidact.  It sounds as though he read at whim and read for pleasure.

"...Louis was anything but a systematic reader.  A spectacularly serendipitous reader, he enlists us in the joys of random reading--from Schliermacher's Soliloquies, Boswell's Johnson, Bertrand Russell's Marriage and Morals, Eric Hoffer's True Believer, Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies to Roger Baldwin's Liberty Under the Soviets--with an occasional dip into George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, and Rabindranath Tagore and some frolics by the way in Baudelaire's poems, Claude McKaye's Harlem Shadows, Frank Dobie's Longhorns, Polybius' histories, and Voltaire's Candide.  Good, bad, or indifferent, fiction or nonfiction, classic or ephemera--all were grist for his mill!  But unlike many self-educated men and other storytellers, Louis was a good listener, as eager to learn from the spoken as from the printed word."

It sounds as though he was an 'equal opportunity' reader as he "was utterly without intellectual snobbery or cultural pretensions".

"The love of books made him--like any other lover--sometimes excessively charitable to his authors.  And this, too, made him rare among copious readers.  In this volume you will find enthusiasm, excitement, and gratitude to the whole miscellany of authors ancient and modern, East and West.  That was Louis's way--to find or squeeze something of value from every printed page.

I like this as I find I am often a very forgiving reader, too, so am glad to know I am not alone in my approach to books.  It sounds as though he never worried about whether a book fitted into his reading plans and his reading was filled with an assortment of interesting juxtapositions--Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jack London's adventure stories or Rudyard Kipling and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  And in the Thirties when he was wandering there were a plethora of reading choices with so many excellent outlets for books and good publishers: F.N. Doubleday, Max Schuster, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Modern Library, Book-of-the-Month Club (when it was still quite distinguished), and the Literary Guild. 

"Louis gives us a lesson--too seldom offered by academic or professional critics--in open-mindedness and literary charity.  And he encourages us, too, to become Wandering Readers, joining his search for the joys and surprises in the pages of books."

Sounds good, don't you think?

Reading Pairs: Bagnold and Dunmore

I do like it when my books overlap, especially when it happens serendipitously.  I mentioned yesterday a few of the books I've been busy reading and two of them are books dealing with different aspects of WWI.  Enid Bagnold's A Diary Without Dates is a true account of her experiences as a V.A.D. nurse written quite literally in the thick of things.  It was published in 1918 just at the tail end of the war when it was still fresh in everyone's mind. 

She writes from experience and those experiences (and memories) must have been painful.  She saw first hand the suffering of wounded soldiers.

"'I'm in pain, Sister,' he said.

No one has every said that to me before in that tone. 

He gave me the look that a dog gives, and his words had the character of an unformed cry.

He was quite alone at the end of the ward.  The Sister was in her bunk.  My white cap attracted his desperate senses.

As he spoke his knees shot out from under him with his restless pain.  His right arm was stretched from the bed in a narrow iron frame, reminding me of a hand laid along a harp to play the chords, the fingers with their swollen green flesh extended across the strings; but of this hard his fingers were the slave, not the master.

'Shall I call your Sister?' I whispered to him. 

He shook his head.  'She can't do anything.  I must just stick it out.  They're going to operate on the elbow, but they must wait three days first.'

His head turned from side to side, but his eyes never left my face.  I stood by him, helpless, overwhelmed by his horrible loneliness.

Then I carried his tray down the long ward, and past the Sister's bunk.  Within, by the fire, she was laughing with the M.O. and drinking a cup of tea--a harmless amusement.

'The officer in No. 22 says he's in great pain,' I said doubtfully.  (It wasn't my ward, and Sisters are funny.)

'I know,' she said quite decently, 'but I can't do anything.  He must stick it out.'

I looked through the ward once or twice during the evening, and still his knees, at the far end of the room, were moving up and down."

Imagine not being able to offer the men the slightest bit of relief.  It somehow seems callow to be laughing, however harmless the amusement, under these circumstances.  But perhaps the nurses and doctors would go slightly mad to be surrounded by so much pain and anguish and were in some need of relief themselves.

**********

Now Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness is a mostly imagined story set on the Homefront during the war.  The fighting is held at arm's length, though it is always present in the background.  Living on the Cornish coast there is the constant threat of U-boats, and every family feels the long reach of the war as their sons go off to fight.  And when the lucky ones come back, they are still damaged in some way, in mind or body.

"And now we need more enemies.  Even the Germans are not enough any more.  So many men are gone, so many men are wounded.  So many have their minds and spirits destroyed, and the news of this leaks from family to neighbor to acquaintance and spills into newsprint.  Look at this group photograph of wounded veterans.  Seven of them.  Count the limbs.  Between the seven of them they have one leg, and even that one leg lacks a foot.  Their faces stare unreadably at the camera.  Their hair is mostly parted to the side, but one has an exquisite, knife-sharp central parting.  Two are moustached, five clean shaven.  Their round collars are white and immaculate.  Behind them dense, heavy summer foliage stirs a little in the breeze which also ruffles the hair of the one man who looks upward, away from the camera.  He is perhaps the oldest of them, with a bony, vivid face.  He must be thirty at least.  He looks like a man standing on a cliff in the face of a sea-breeze, wondering if the weather is about to change.  He cannot bear to look into the camera.  On his far right there are two handsome legless boys, one with his hands folded in his lap, the other with his trunk perched on a high stool between wheelchairs, balancing himself with an arm round the shoulders of men on his right and left hand."

I'm sure I'll be reading more WWI novels and am looking forward to reading more from my list of primary source books about WWI.  More about both these books soon.  Next up will be Sebastian Barry and maybe Helen Zenna Smith.

January 25: Reading Notes

January is such a blah month, isn't it?  However, the weather here has been hugely cooperative (cold and grey days but not much in the way of snow...thank you Mother Nature), so I don't have much cause to complain and good books have mostly kept my mind out of the winter doldrums.  I'm never sad to see the end of January come (as then we're just getting closer to spring), but I've just realized there is now less than a week to go and I've not finished a few books I had such high hopes of completing before the month runs out.  It's time to crack down and get to work (okay, really it's almost all play for me when it comes to books), rather than my incessant book grazing of late. 

I think I may actually be ready on time for once for the first read of Caroline's 2012 War and Literature Readalong--always good to start off the year on track with one reading plan/group read anyway.  I've been enjoying Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness.  It's set in Cornwall in 1917.  Most of the characters are fictional, but D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda feature in the story.  I don't know enough about the Lawrences to know how they spent the war, but I suspect Dunmore based her story on actual events to some extent.   It's always a little risky to insert real people into fictional stories, but so far it has been working for me.  And then there are the wonderful descriptions of the seaside town of Zennor, which is where the story is set.  Discussion begins on Monday January 30.  Not to get ahead of myself, but next month's book is one I have long owned and have wanted to read so am really looking forward to, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.

I wish I could say I was ready for the Slaves read, also next week, which is The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen.  I have a library copy of the book, and I think I would really enjoy it if I would pick it up and start reading, but it's a cloth edition, which is slightly unwieldy to carry or read at the gym.  And the story is not a straightforward narrative, but has lots of diagrams and footnotes, which look interesting, but time consuming.  And now I've frittered away the month.  So I guess all this by way of saying, sorry to my fellow Slaves, but I think I will have to sit out of this month's discussion (hanging head in shame as my intentions were good).  I think I've left it too late now.

I did finish my postal reading group book just a day or so ago.  I read this book, which was a reread for me, and I loved it even more than the first time I read it more than a decade ago.  I don't usually write about my postal books here as I don't like to give anything away to any readers' in the grop who've not yet received the book and might happen by, but perhaps I'll share my thoughts on Goodreads.  I now, of course, want to binge on all her books.

Let's see.  I've also been spending time with and thoroughly enjoying M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me, which I  might just finish before the end of the month.  The essays are mainly short, but totally engaging.  I've ordered three more of her books.

And at the gym I've been alternating between Decision at Delphi by Helen MacInnes and Missing by Karin Alvtegen.  Both are perfect gym books, fast paced, suspenseful and absorbing page turners.  There can be so many distractions at the gym I need a good story I can lose myself in and that's been the case with both stories.  The MacInnes is reminiscent of Mary Stewart's work.  It is a story of international intrigue, this time set in early 1960s Italy and Greece.  Alvtegen is a Swedish author and her story features an unreliable narrator, a woman who has been living on the streets for fifteen years and makes the mistake of conning a man who turns up dead in a hotel room.  It won Sweden's Glass Key Award.  

And now I need to turn a little attention to my pile of interlibrary loan requests that I've been stockpiling from my library.  How did I possibly end up with so many books (half a dozen so far and counting).  I'm just starting Enid Bagnold's A Diary Without Dates, which is a memoir of the time she spent serving as a V.A.D. nurse.  It's an interesting read.  Very slim book, filled with Bagnold's impressions.  It's not what I expected but not in a bad way, and the more I read the more I like it.  Next up will be Blue Aubergine by Egyptian author Miral al-Tahawy and then Pure by Andrew Miller, this year's winner of the Costa Book Award.  Three novels that couldn't be more different.  Variety is good, right?

I had to insert the photo at the top of this post as that is what my current reading pile feels like at the moment.  I guess I had better go read now and see if I can make a dent in it before February rushes in.

Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

I always tell myself I like to read outside the box and broaden my literary horizons.  Try something new and different.  Then again, maybe I am not really as daring as I think I am.  I'm fine if the book broadens my horizons as long as it is still either within my comfort zone or a book that I think I'll like or simply a natural outgrowth of my reading interests at the moment.  I do want to be more daring in my reading choices, but I also want to love what I read, so choosing books can be challenging.  Do I take a risk on a book that I might not like or struggle with just because it is different or innovative or comes highly recommended by the experts?  Well, that's always the question, isn't it?  So many books, so little time to read and a desire to fill that time with the books I know I'll enjoy most. 

Last month Stefanie read a graphic novel called Habibi, which sounded interesting but upon browsing the book I decided that maybe it wasn't quite the right fit for the moment.  There was no hesitation in sending it back to the library unread.  Several years ago I read Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, an autobiographical story in pictures about the author's childhood growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution and subsequent exile to Austria.  Sadly I didn't write about it, though I recall liking it very much.  It was a safe bet, then, that I would probably enjoy Satrapi's graphic novel, Embroideries (Broderies).  And I was right, I did.  It had the added benefit that it was a natural outgrowth of of my reading, as I just finished another memoir set in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s, about which I'll share more later this week.  Curiosity has once again been piqued and my new reading trail (well, one of them anyway) veers off into Middle Eastern literature (more to follow on that one as well).  

I'm bending the rules a little since Marjane Satrapi now lives in Paris and her book, though you would be hard-pressed to tell from my edition as there's not much fanfare about this being a translation, was originally written in French.  She writes about her Iranian family, however, particularly the women.  Embroideries is a much lighter, even gossipy in tone, story compared to Persepolis.  It's also quite short and easy to read and can be enjoyed in one sitting.  It's illustrated by Marjane Satrapi in fairly plain black and white drawings, most of which take up whole pages rather than relying on a comic strip-style approach.

As Marjo tends the samovar (a proper cup of tea must cook for three quarters of an hour), the women attend to their favorite business--Discussion.  Led by her strong-minded and independent grandmother it's not surprising in which direction that discussion wends.

"To speak behind the others' backs is the ventilator of the heart."

Love, sex, relationships and marriage.  The tone is quite often irreverent, but the stories are all the more poignant for that reason.  Each woman has a story to tell--her own or that of a friend and Marji listens with rapt attention as does the reader.  How to fix the loss of virginity, or rather how to fix the appearance of the loss of virginity on a wedding night might be easily remedied, but only with a steady hand.  Love potions administered just right will guarantee the steadfastness of a lover, though they sound a little messy and timing is important.  In a society that reveres purity in women, there's a decided lack of reciprocal behavior in many of the men.  And it's hard not to feel bad for the woman with four daughters but scant understanding of the nuances of lovemaking and none of the little secrets that lovers/husbands-wives share in intimate moments.

I suppose you can tell a lot about a culture by understanding what does or does not happen behind closed doors and maybe even in the bedroom, so this is an interesting look into another world.  East and west have always seemed so different to me in their practices and world view, but the more I read I think maybe we're not so different in emotions and expectations of happiness after all.

I now have Satrapi's Persepolis 2 out from the library and ready to read and hope to get to it soon.  It's taken me far too long to see how her story ends.  Maybe I'll watch the movie as well.  This has reminded me how much I enjoy reading graphic novels.

Needle & Thread: A Few Projects

Do you remember my marshmallow house?  It's been a while since this project has seen the light of day, but I was recently inspired to pull it out and get back to work on it.  I think it was the grapes that were putting me off--they are made up of eyelet stitches, which are not something I enjoy doing very much.  I'm not very pleased with how they are turning out, but I don't have the energy to unpick them and start over.  Besides by the time the whole project is done I don't think anyone will be scrutinizing them too much in light of the finished piece.  In case they are hard to see, the grapes are hanging over the roof of the house in a bunch--made up of purple and blue eyelets.  There will be two more bunches of grapes over the roof to stitch and another one hanging over the house.

This is a "Mystery Sampler" designed by Blackbird Designs.  It came out several years ago and the charts, I believe, are out of print.  There will be five stitched sections that will be sewn together to make one larger sampler.  This is part three, the largest section, and I am ready to finish it and move on to part four.  You can see the first two stitched sections here.  Aside from those eyelets I've been enjoying working on it again.  I guess like books, I just have to be in the right mood for it.

I told myself I wouldn't share my "February Sampler" until it was finished.  It's not.  Yet.  But here I am sharing the almost finished sampler anyway.  All I have left is to fill in the middle section under the house with white stitches.  I've started, though it's hard to tell from this photo.  I'm not a fan of white floss and working around all the motifs and letters is tedious going, but if I can just make myself do a few rows every night I'll maybe finish by the time February really does roll around. 

And what's this?  A new design you ask?  Well, yes and no.  I've owned it for years, and I am ready to work on something new.  Looking back at  my stitching progress last year is a little depressing (so let's not) as I accomplished very little.  Only a few small projects and work on a couple of larger samplers.  Before I started blogging I stitched quite a lot and would finish twenty or more projects a year.  There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that I want to do and how to squeeze in everything is always a problem.  So, this may be my project for 2012 and anything else will be a bonus.  And, yes, even with other partially started projects a new year calls for a new design.  It's a little boring always sharing progress reports on the same things. 

The design is called "Strawberry Fields" by Hillside Samplings.  It is a drawstring bag with accessories--needlebook, ruler and scissor sheaths, and pincushion.  Isn't it lovely?  It'll be done entirely by hand.  It looks a little challenging, but I think I can manage it.  I was browsing needlework blogs and another stitcher had completed this and it was gorgeous, so I was inspired to dig out my own chart and supplies.

And here is my very small start.  It's the lattice work band at the top of the drawstring bag.  Wish me luck on this one.  Updates to follow.

Lost in the Stacks: Wind, Sand and Stars

I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in French in high school.  Four years of French, five if you count a year of it in college, and I think my highest achievement (before forgetting nearly all of it it seems now) was reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his original language.  Not a feat I could pull off again anytime soon I'm sorry to say.  I haven't read The Little Prince in ages, but I recall it being a charming little story, a fable, ostensibly for children, but appreciated even more by adults. 

I sort of knew he had written more books, most published posthumously after Saint-Exupéry's, or Saint-Ex's as he is apparently known, disappearance in 1944 during a reconnaissance mission, but I had never bothered to look at any of them.  As so often happens with me, I started out looking at diaries, moved on to Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries, and then saw Saint-Exupéry's name and was hooked.  What I think I'd really like to do is reread The Little Prince (in English this time, of course) again, but my curiosity was very much piqued by Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes), too.

Wind, Sand and Stars won France's Grand Prix du Roman, and The National Book Award in the U.S. in 1940.  It also was listed as one of (No. 3 actually) the one hundred all-time best adventure stories by National Geographic magazine and No. 1 of the top twenty-five of the same type of book by Outside magazine.  Not too shabby at all it seems, and he probably doesn't need rescuing by me from the library shelves, but he certainly merits mentioning and seems deserving of a read/reread.  I don't see him mentioned much in the blogosphere, though I bet a lot of you have read him, too, right?

Wind, Sand and Stars is an autobiographical work about a plane crash in the Sahara Desert, where he himself crashed in 1935.  He had been working as an airmail carrier for Aéropostale at the time and both he and his copilot barely survived the crash.  More than a simple adventure story, though it's that, too, this is a philosophical work about how one should live one's life.

I seem to be attracted to a lot of thoughtful, introspective books lately.  Maybe it's just the time of year?  This one begins:

"In 1926 I was enrolled as a student airline pilot by the Latécoère Company, the predecessors of Aéropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa.  I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails.  We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in a freezing hangar.  We lived in fear of the mountains over Spain, over which we had to fly, and in awe of our elders."

This seems to be a story to snuggle down with on a cold winter afternoon with a cup of hot chocolate while Saint-Ex's words take you far, far away.

A Sampling of Library Books

I've been pretty voracious lately with my acquisition of books--both new books and library books.  I probably should feel more guilty about them all than I do, but I've decided it's okay to be brazen about my books.  Books make me happy and there should be more happiness in the world.

I was so excited about Elspeth Huxley's Love Among the Daughters that I had to see what else I could easily get by her, and one of the books recently arrived via ILL.  The thing with ILL is that it can take a while between request and actually receiving the book, and I sometimes have moved on to a new project and then the poor book is just waiting for me and my attention has been diverted.  Hopefully that won't be the case for The Prince Buys the Manor.  The lone Amazon reviewer called it "extremely funny and charming" and given my experience with Huxley's writing I am inclined to believe them.  It is a story of English village life. 

I've decided this year I want to get back to reading short stories, which I thoroughly enjoy but don't do often enough.  I'm not going to try and read one a week and write about it as I've done in the past, but I want to try and read as many collections as I can this year.  I've started with Colm Toibin's The Empty Family.  I'd forgotten what luscious prose he writes, so I am savoring the stories.  There's no rush or number of books read I want to achieve--I just want to enjoy some good stories.  To that end Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel found it's way into my pile.  I've never read any of his work, but this collection happened to win the National Book Award. 

And somewhat out of character I also requested The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton, off the virtual new book list.  I lugged a stack of library books home with me last night!  I don't imagine I will read all the stories in the collection, but I'd like to try a few.  I don't really read science fiction or fantasy, but I do want to read more outside my comfort zone this year.  The only name I recognize in the whole collection is Neil Gaiman!  I will definitely try and write about any of the stories I read here, however, as I'm sort of excited about this now that I have it in hand.

Thanks to Litlove for the recommendation of Alexandra Johnson as an author who has written about diaries (and now that she's in mind I see her name cropping up elsewhere, too).  I had to have The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life right away but then haven't had a chance to really look at it since I brought it home.  Typical.  It seems to be a history of/overview, so I am very excited about it.  I can see my diary reading turning into a larger project all of a sudden.  And this may be my year to read more nonfiction, too.

Another nod in the direction of Litlove, who recently wrote about Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, a book I've never read.  As I plan on starting her first diary soon, this seemed a perfect little book to pick up.  It sounds like a really charming, introspective sort of book--perfect for January. 

And then we come to M.F.K. Fisher.  I love M.F.K. Fisher and have decided I need to read everything she's written.  At the moment I am very contentedly spending time with The Gastronomical Me.  It's made up of essays about growing up in California in the early 1920s and her time in Dijon with her husband and her love of food.  Gorgeous prose.  What a gifted writer she was.  I never thought I would be interested in reading about food, but this year seems to be the year for bookish surprises.  Always a good thing.  Anyway, my library has From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher, which is an omnibus edition of her three volumes of memoirs.  And it includes short stories as well.  Doesn't this just tie in perfectly with everything else I'm reading.  I've written about her before by the way.

And then we come to a couple of crime novels.  The last few crime novels I've read have been slightly lackluster or outright disappointing.  That happens sometimes, but I need something really good.  I started perusing the list of titles eligible for the CWA International Dagger Award for 2012, which has been very kindly put together over at Euro Crime (if you're not familiar with this website but read crime novels, you must check them out).  Maybe I'm just not in the right mood, but so many of the books sound sort of the same.  I'm sure there are some excellent books in that list, but how to sort through them.  Of course quite a few are out of reach in any case as they've not yet been published in the US (not that that stops me if they can be had elsewhere).  I've marked a number of titles down as well as new to me authors.   

Purely by chance two of the books I brought home from the library also happen to be on the Edgar nominees list.  An earlier novel by Norwegian author Anne Holt caught my eye.  1222 features a retired police inspector who is in a wheelchair.  The story takes place during a blizzard and in a remote hotel.  It seems quite promising at the moment.  And it seems I've heard good things about The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, a novel set in modern day Tokyo.  Perhaps one of these will be just what I am in the mood for? 

And last but not least is Wildwood: A Journey through Trees by Roger Deakin, an author who has come recommended by Catharina.  I really like nature writing, and while this is not the title that was suggested (haven't been able to get my hands on his diary Notes from Walnut Tree Farm yet), it still looks very good indeed.

All in all I think I have a nice mix of books to choose from.