Bookish Quotes #19

 "I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised."
     ~ Wislawa Szymborska
"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book."
     ~ Jane Smiley

Bookish Quotes #18

 "He that loves reading has everything within his reach."
     ~ William Godwin

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
     ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Waxing Poetic: The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road by Muriel Spark

 

     Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was an award-winning Scottish author most often remembered for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  She was born in Edinburgh and attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls, the model for the Marcia Blaine School in The Prime of Jean Brodie.  She briefly taught English herself before marrying and moving with her husband to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  When the marriage ended in 1944, she moved to England and lived in the Helena Club in London which later became her inspiration for the May of Teck Club in her novel The Girls of Slender Means.  She worked in intelligence for the remainder of the war. 
     In addition to her 22 novels she also wrote poetry.  In 1947, she became the editor of the Poetry Review.  She had a long writing career, publishing her last novel, The Finishing School, just two years before her death at the age of 88.
     This poem ponders a question most of us have asked:  "Why only one shoe?"

The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road

One sad shoe that someone has probably flung
out of a car or truck. Why only one?

This happens on an average one year
in four. But always throughout my
life, my travels, I see it like
a memorandum. Something I have
forgotten to remember,

            that there are always
mysteries in life. That shoes
do not always go in pairs, any more
than we do. That one fits;
the other, not. That children can
thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion
chuck out someone's shoe, split up
someone's life.

            But usually that shoe that I
see is a man's, old, worn, the sole
parted from the upper.
Then why did the owner keep the other,
keep it to himself? Was he
afraid (as I so often am with
inanimate objects) to hurt its feelings?
That one shoe in the road invokes
my awe and my sad pity.

Bookish Quotes #17

 "My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."
     ~ Alberto Manguel

"What are books but tangible dreams?  What is reading if it is not dreaming?  The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading."
     ~ Rikki Ducornet

Waxing Poetic: Black Butterflies by Olive Custance

    

     Olive Custance (1874-1944) was a British poet and a part of the aesthetic movement of the 1890's.  The imagery in the following poem is so lovely.  Anyone who has put pen to paper can identify with this.


Black Butterflies


O words of all my songs . . . black butterflies!
Wild words of all the wayward songs I sing . . .
Called from the tomb of some enchanted past
By that strange sphinx, my soul, they slowly rise
And settle on white pages wing to wing . . .
White pages like flower-petals fluttering
Held spellbound there till some blind hour shall bring
The perfect voice that, delicate and wise,
Shall set them free in fairyland at last!
That garden of all dreams and ecstasies
Where my soul sings through an eternal spring,
Watching alone with enigmatic eyes,
Dark wings on pale flower-petals quivering . . .
O words of all my songs . . . black butterflies!

The Jalna Series - Mazo de la Roche

     Mazo de la Roche was a Canadian writer who wrote a series of novels set at Jalna, the home of the Whiteoak family in Canada.  In all there are 16 novels.  The first novel, Jalna, was submitted for a contest in American Monthly magazine and won the $10,000 prize.  It was published in 1927, when she was 40, and became a bestseller.  It was originally intended to stand alone but because of its popularity she then penned prequels and sequels.  The series tells the story of one hundred years of the Whiteoak family covering from 1854 to 1954.  Today her work is admired for its strong, optimistic characters and sense of place.
     I read a number of the Jalna novels as a teenager but never completed the series.  I have decided to revisit them and read through the whole saga.  They are not great works of fiction but they are wonderful light reading.  I am currently reading the (chronologically) first novel, The Building of Jalna.

     The story starts in the 1850s when a British soldier, Philip Whiteoak and his wife Adeline, fiery and Irish, meet and marry in India where he is stationed at Jalna.  Shortly after, Philip inherits a house in Quebec from an uncle.  They decide to head for Canada with a baby, her ayah, a coachman, a goat, and a parrot named Bonaparte in tow.  Upon arriving and spending a short time in Quebec, they decide to sell the house and buy land in Ontario to build a family home.  They give it the Indian name Jalna after the place that they met and married.  This first novel tells of their trials and tribulations as they establish themselves on their land.
     Adeline is definitely the main character in this first novel.  She is willful, strong and devoted to Philip.  She is a beautiful redhead with a temper to match.  Her mothering skills are somewhat lax - she leaves the care of her children to others - but she makes no claims to the contrary.  Philip, an even tempered Englishman, while completely enthralled with his stormy wife, often finds her spirited behavior unsettling.  Although she's in the forefront, the novel is peopled with many other delightful characters.
     During the 16 novel series, Adeline becomes a 100 year old matriarch, who sees generations come and go.  Her children grow up and have children and grandchildren of their own, weaving a history of loves, losses, and dubious relationships.  Through it all, Adeline and the parrot, nicknamed "Boney", rule over them all.
     Here is a list of the novels in chronological order for anyone who might want to enter the world of Jalna:  The Building of Jalna, Morning at Jalna, Mary Wakefield, Young Renny, Whiteoak Heritage, Whiteoak Brothers, Jalna, Whiteoaks of Jalna, Finch's Fortune, The Master of Jalna, Whiteoak Harvest, Wakefield's Course, Return to Jalna, Renny's Daughter, Variable Winds at Jalna, Centenary at Jalna.

~ Frances

A Good Hard Look - Ann Napolitano

     When I find a book that I love I am eager to post about it and, at the same time, hesitant to do so, knowing that I can never do it justice.  A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano is such a book.  How brave and daring she was to write a novel with Flannery O'Connor as a main character.  As a Flannery fan myself, I feared the novel would disappoint me.  That it wouldn't do Flannery O'Connor justice.  Instead, it surprised me with its genuine portrayal of the writer who's voice rings clear throughout the book.
     The novel is set in O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia on Andalusia, O'Connor's family farm.  It spans the last years of her life when she returned home after being diagnosed with systemic lupus from which she died at the age of 39.  The novel is told from the point of view of several characters whose lives change in a second and whose fate hinges on small moments with haunting consequences.  As do O'Connor's works, the novel explores the themes of death, faith, grace, forgiveness, and redemption.  Like O'Connor's, the characters are deeply flawed and painfully real.  In the aftermath of the events of one afternoon, these characters are forced to take a good hard look at the choices they have made.
     The book begins with the cacophony of screaming peacocks (the birds O'Connor famously collected and who play a large role in the novel) on the eve of a wedding that send the bride, the most beautiful girl in the small Southern town, tumbling from her bed to bruise her eye on a stool.  The next morning the bride wears a beautiful dress but all anyone can see is her eye.  As heads turn from her to the groom, speculating on the explanation for the eye, the bride is thinking about "how everything had turned on its head," as everything ultimately does in the novel.
     When Flannery offers up a wedding gift of the largest of her peacocks, the General, to Cookie and Melvin Whiteside, the wheels are set in motion for the tragedies ahead.  As the book proceeds, Flannery and Melvin develop an unlikely friendship in spite of Cookie forbidding it, Cookie employs Lorna, the wife of a local policeman, to design curtains for the Whiteson's home, and Lorna begins a relationship with her teenage assistant, Joe.  These lives weave together and move to a tragic climax that will cause one character to reflect, "Everyone had, at best, only one big story in his or her life; a story that rendered everything else just a footnote."
     It is a beautifully written novel that is hard to put down - one of the best books I've read this year.

~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #16

 "I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not not run out before the small hours."
     ~ Dorothy Parker

"I am simply a 'book drunkard'.  Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee.  I cannot withstand them."
     ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

Waxing Poetic: To Losers by George Dillon

     George Dillon was an American editor and poet.  In 1928, at the age of 22, Dillon was asked to introduce Edna St. Vincent Millay, 36, at a her Chicago performance.  He attended a party afterwards where he recited some of his poetry.  Millay asked him to lunch the next day and a relationship developed which each of them immortalized in poetry.
     In 1932, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he and Millay went to Paris to live together (it was a trial separation from her husband).  But their relationship turned tumultuous and she returned to her husband.  They remained friends and he remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.  He inspired Millay's 52-sonnet sequence Fatal Interview. 
     The following poem by Dillon, although written before he met Millay, is about lost love.

To Losers

Let loneliness be mute. Accuse
Only the wind for what you lose.
Only the wind has ever known
Where anything you lost has gone.
It is the wind whose breath shall come
To quench tall-flaming trees and numb
The narrow bones of birds. It is
The wind whose dissipating kiss
Disbands the soft-assembled rose.
It is the wordless wind that knows
Where every kind of beauty goes.

And if you lose love in the end
Say it was taken by the wind.

Bookish Quotes #15

"A good book has no ending."
     ~ R. D. Cumming

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
     ~ Virginia Woolf