A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend. -Author Unknown

Wow, I cannot believe that it’s been a month and a half since I last blogged! It’s kind of funny actually; things have been way crazy-busy in my life as of late, yet I’ve actually been finding more time to read (probably because I’m on the subway more often going here-there-and-everywhere).

Let’s see…I’ll begin where we last left off. I finished up Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I don’t really know what to say about it since I’ve read it before, and Jane Austen is always amazing. I will say that I find a lot of people think that Jane Austen is old-fashioned (the number of people who think this is probably directly proportional to the number of people who think Jane is sheer awesomeness), but I don’t think Jane Austen is old-fashioned; I thinks she’s witty and intelligent, and I find that even though circumstances are different now, her plotlines still hold a strong resonance with the modern situation. I can’t rank Mansfield Park; Pride and Prejudice is my favourite, Emma is my least favourite, and all of Jane’s other writings are tied in the middle.

After Mansfield Park I read The Coffee Trader by David Liss. Liss sort of has his own unique niche-genre; he writes (for the most part) suspenseful historical fiction that revolves around the stock exchange, and commodities trading and speculation. The Coffee Trader is set in 17th-century Amsterdam, and centres on a Jewish immigrant named Miguel Lienzo. Miguel loses all of his money in a sugar scheme gone wrong, and wants to regain his position in the community. Being Jewish, in 17th-century Amsterdam, Miguel is directly under the influence and power of the Ma’amad (the Jewish governing council), and must keep his money-making scheme, and dealings with the Dutch, secret in order to not incur their wrath. Miguel becomes involved in coffee futures (coffee was a little known commodity in Europe during this period), and must lie, plot and connive in order to get what he wants. The whole complex story is way too involved to get into here (plus, I don’t want to give it away since it’s so good), but it’s quite a bit different from anything I’ve read before. The book was a little longer than I thought it needed to be, but I also think that it would have been very confusing and difficult to enjoy if Liss had shortened it and not spent the time plotting out the steps. I really did enjoy it, and look forward to reading his other books (which are on my Christmas list).

After finishing up The Coffee Trader, I felt that I needed some non-fiction so I decided on False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes by Thomas Hoving. Hoving is the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has some great stories, but dude (and I love him) he’s got a huge ego! His ego however is a major part of the reason that I find him so enjoyable to read. Hoving styles himself a fakebuster, and in this book he recounts how he started in his career, the fakes and con artists that he’s encountered, and how museum politics affect the world of art forgery. I just love Hoving; the fact that he uses words like “chicanery” makes me love him even more! Hoving is definitely not a born writer; he has a tendency to jump around a bit whenever something pops into his head, but all of his stories are so interesting! I also have another book by him, Making the Mummies Dance, that I have to read; it’s sort of a memoir about his time at the Met.

Now onto my traditional Christmas reading! I didn’t read Dickens’ Christmas Books this year, because I just wasn’t in the mood, but I fed my yearning with three others. First off was The Christmas Tree, authored by Julie Salamon and illustrated by Jill Weber. It’s a cute little tale about finding the Christmas tree for Rockefeller Center, and the special relationship that a nun, Sister Anthony, has with her Norway Spruce (which is eventually picked to be the Rockefeller tree). It is a very sentimental story, I really like it, but it doesn’t have a lot of real substance; the pictures are cute though!

No Christmas would be complete without a little Lucy Maud Montgomery! Every year I read Christmas with Anne and other Holiday Stories, which is a collection of Maud’s holiday themed stories and holiday chapters from the Anne books. There are two chapters taken from Anne books (one from Anne of Green Gables and one from Anne of Windy Poplars), the rest of the stories are ones that Maud had published in turn-of-the-century magazines. My favourites are “Aunt Cyrilla’s Christmas Basket” and “The Josephs’ Christmas”. These stories (I know it sounds cheesy) fill me with warmth, and happiness, and just pure bliss! I love Maud, I love Maud!

My last Christmas-themed read for the season was Maeve Binchy’s This Year It Will Be Different and Other Stories. Maeve Binchy is great; I haven’t talked about her books here yet, because she’s only released one book since I started blogging and I haven’t read it yet. I’ve read everything that she’s written, except for Silver Wedding (only because I bought it, but the pages were all screwed up and I haven’t found another copy yet). Maeve Binchy’s stories and books are always about people and situations that could be real, but she writes in such a wry and witty manner that even mundane daily details become amazingly interesting!

I started reading Measuring the World: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann (translated from the German) and found it intensely boring from the beginning. I tired to get through it, I really did, but just couldn’t. I’ve put it back on the bookshelf for now, and maybe I’ll try it again someday. Maybe it’s better in German.

After that boringness, I decided on Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Marquez is never boring! I just finished it yesterday, and it was fabulous. I know that I’m reading him in translation, so I can only imagine how poetic it would be to read him in Spanish; everything he writes is so wretchedly beautiful that I don’t really know what to say. It’s more of a feeling that I get when I read, it’s nearly impossible to put into words, but it’s as if Marquez knows something I don’t or has seen something beyond beauty that I will never see. I loved this book (even more than I loved Love in the Time of Cholera, and that’s saying something!); I know I’ll read it again.

I’ve been shuffling along through Return to Treasure Island and the Search for Captain Kidd by Barry Clifford (with Paul Perry). It’s one of those books that I can only read when a certain mood strikes, so I grab it whenever it does. Clifford is an archaeologist and he’s pretty famous in the marine archaeology community for his devotion to finding shipwrecks. He is best-known for finding the wreck of Black Sam Bellamy’s Whydah (Black Sam was a pirate), and the Whydah is the only shipwreck discovered that has been conclusively identified as a pirate ship. In Return to Treasure Island, Clifford and his team go in search of the burnt and sunk remains of Captain Kidd’s The Adventure Galley. Clifford and his co-writer Perry also give a thorough background history on the islands themselves, how Kidd came to be a pirate, and how his story inspired Stevenson’s Treasure Island. So far, so good.

After I finished Of Love and Other Demons last night, I grabbed Toby Young’s memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People off my shelf. I’ve heard some really good things about it and got it used, so I figured I’d give it a shot. He’s hooked me already: he mentioned Evelyn Waugh twice, Woodward and Bernstein, and the Whaleship Essex all within the prologue and first ten pages. So far he’s a man after my own heart, if he wasn’t my Mother’s age…anyways; I think it’s going to be a good one!

Okay, I’m done for now (and out of [metaphorically-speaking] breath). Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivas/whatever-holiday-you-do-or-do-not-want-to-celebrate to everyone!

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.-Edward Gibbon

Tuesday, on the subway, I finished up Owen Chase’s The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex. It’s an absolutely crazy account, although I guess not that crazy since it did actually happen. Basically, the case of the Essex is the first recorded incident of a whale purposely ramming a whaleship (twice actually). After the second ramming the whaleship foundered, and the crew was left to survive in three whaleboats. Over the course of months spent at sea, the three boats end up separating from each other, rations run out, members of the crew start to die, and the remaining members resort to cannibalism to survive.

Chase’s account is very to the point and factual, without any frills or over embellishing, but that’s part of what makes it so great. Even though the reader knows that it must have been an absolutely harrowing experience, we are spared the crews inner thoughts and spoken words, and thus the work doesn’t begin to take on the veneer of fiction. I believe that it would be very difficult for a reader (at least me anyway) to stay attached to this story if there was too much detail; it would be just too graphic and desperate. However, if you like that sort of thing, there is also Nathanial Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. I’m not sure I can read that one though.

I began reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen again (third time, I think), but yesterday I was at the thrift store and spotted Sophie Kinsella’s latest Remember Me?. I read the entire thing last night (it’s near 400 pages), and I liked it. Kinsella’s books are great when you just need a breezy, upbeat, good-ending type of read. I’ve read everything by her now, except the stuff she has under another name. I really liked this one because it had a different kind of struggle for the heroine than any of the others. This one is really about being your “authentic self” (as Oprah would say), and what happens when you change who you really are for other people, money, ambition, etc. I liked it, although I would have liked a slightly different ending, but that’s just me. I really needed this type of book right now, it’s been a rough few days since my Grandmother had a heart attack on Tuesday and has been in the hospital since. I hope she’ll be okay.

Now we’re back to Mansfield Park again…again.

How vain it is to sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.-Henry David Thoreau

I finished up reading Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse on Saturday. As I said in the previous post, of course I enjoyed it since it’s Jeeves and Wooster. Nothing is better than Jeeves and Wooster when one feels the need for a little mayhem and a good laugh.

After finishing it up, I decided that a trip to the bookstore (or two bookstores as was the case) was what I needed. First, I went to see the man who always sets books aside for me since I haven’t seen him in about a month due to the amount I had been working. He hadn’t found anything new to set aside for me, but I grabbed a couple of Nancy Drew books. The first was #24 The Clue in the Old Album in yellow hardback, with the 2^nd cover art, and with 25 chapters instead of 20 (meaning that it’s the unrevised text). The second was #37 The Clue in the Old Stagecoach in yellow with the back cover picture adapted from The Secret of Red Gate Farm. I *heart* Nancy Drew.

After leaving the first bookshop, I went next door (yes, right next door) and got a copy of E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I had been wanting to read. I read it all in about an hour and a half yesterday, curled up in my chair next to the heater, listening to City and Colour’s CD Sometimes on repeat. All in all it was a very pleasant time. I really enjoyed the book, which I hadn’t read as a child, unlike a lot of people I’ve talked to. It’s about a sister and brother who run away from home, hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a week, and try to solve the mystery of whether or not a recently acquired statue was carved by Michelangelo. The premise of running away from home and staying in the Met for a week was what really got me, and made me want to read the book. It’s like a dream for me; kind of like why I went and saw Night at the Museum in the theater – because it’s always been a fancy of mine that museums really do come alive at night. I really enjoyed the book, and sometimes it’s really nice to just pick up a children’s book like that and fall into another time.

Now I’m reading The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex. It’s an account written by Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex, and one of only five men to survive the months spent adrift after the wreck. Basically this is the true story that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I’m not very far in yet, but I like that I have read to this point.

The beginning is always today.-Mary Wollstonecraft

I finished reading Lost by Gregory Maguire on Tuesday night, it was pretty good. I was surprised though, because many of the reviews I read said it was better than the previous books, but I actually liked all of them better than this one. I think though that it’s because none of the other books were set in modern times, and because they weren’t it made it much easier to believe the fantastical things that happened. Also, I think I enjoyed the others more because they all had their basis in previous stories, i.e. Wicked and Son of a Witch (and consequently the newest book A Lion Among Men, which I haven’t read yet) have a basis in L. (Lyman, hehehe) Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and subsequent sequels), Mirror Mirror is a retelling of Snow White, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is based on Cinderella.

While there are a few references to Scrooge, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, being based on a member of the main characters family and a couple of references to Jack the Ripper, this one really isn’t based on any other previous literature. I thought it would be, and so I guess that is the real basis for my disappointment.

I also found that there were a lot of loose ends that weren’t tied up, and the novel ended up seeming untidy in consequence. Maybe that’s why it was called Lost…hmmmm. As always though with Gregory Maguire it was well-written, and considering the fact that it took me less than two days to read, I really have no other faults to nitpick.

I’m currently just finishing up Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse, and will be done shortly. Of course I’m enjoying it because it’s Jeeves and Wooster!

On a side note I bought (for $1.00) an uncorrected proof copy of Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne…now I own three copies…dude, I have a serious problem.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.-Robert Frost

So since I'm not finished The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egyptians to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh, and I'm also currently reading Lost by Gregory Maguire, I thought that today I would mention some of my favourite poets/poems. Here ya go:

Robert Frost: Acquainted with the Night

Lord Alfred Tennyson: Crossing the Bar

Edna St. Vincent Millay: What Lips my Lips have Kissed

Dylan Thomas: In my Craft or Sullen Art

Gregory Orr: Insomnia Song

William Falconer: The Shipwreck

Heinrich Heine: Die Lorelei (The Lorelei, or The Siren)

Omar Khayyam: The Rubaiyat (Edward FitzGerald translations)

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.-William Shakespeare

Okay, so it’s basically been forever since I’ve written, mostly because I have no time now (just got a new job two weeks ago) and because my home computer is broken so I can only write while I’m at work.

Frankly, and this is odd for me, I’m really in no mood to write about the various books I’ve read since I last wrote. I’ve actually read a few, I might not even remember them all, but I’m at least going to give it a shot.

I was just finishing up Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed up a Literary Classic by Irene Gammel when I last wrote. I really enjoyed the book, and thought it was fantastic. As I mentioned before, Dr. Gammel writes in a highly accessible way, and even though the book is rather scholarly, it is still thoroughly absorbing and an “easy” (not the right word, but my brain doesn’t want to work that hard) read. I did not agree with all of her observations, and at times found some of them reaching, but overall I thought it was brilliant. You could tell that she had spend a lot of time doing research (10 years I think it was actually), and she found some really interesting things. Actually, one very interesting personal part of this is that before my Mother knew that I had bought the book for myself she had already ordered the American version for me (different dust jacket). It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, so my Mum sent the copy she ordered off to Dr. Gammel, who signed it and send it back. She also sent me a birthday card, both of these I received last weekend. So now I have two copies of this book – very cool.

I also reread The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery. It probably is my favourite book out of all of them. I’ve mentioned it before (wandering the Muskokas with Valancy), and I just love it. It’s considered one of Maud’s “adult novels”, versus the juvenilia title that is usually attached to her writings (totally the wrong tag by the way, I don’t think they’re juvenilia at all). Anyways, it’s the only one of Maud’s novels that is entirely set in Ontario and actually is meant to reference Bala, where Maud spent a family vacation. A great companion book is Lucy Maud Montgomery and Bala: A Love Story of the North Woods, which was written by (KS) acquaintances of mine, Jack and Linda, who own and operate Bala’s Museum. I received Jack and Linda’s book as a gift last year and it is absolutely wonderful. The Blue Castle makes me believe in love, I know it sounds lame, but it’s true and that’s all there is to it.

Then, I believe, I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I really enjoyed the descriptive nature of Coelho’s writing, and I thought the story was very simple, pure and true, but, even giving all that, I don’t really understand why this book is as big as it is. I’m not knocking Coelho here at all, like I said it was very well-written, but it didn’t really grab me. Although I also didn’t like The Da Vinci Code or The English Patient, so maybe it’s just me, or maybe I’m just a little too cynical (a side of myself I really don’t share with others).

Okay, then I read The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse; it’s one of the Jeeves and Wooster books. I love the Jeeves and Wooster books, and although half of the time I don’t understand the mid-century British slang, I find them hilarious and they always make me smile. I didn’t find this one quite as funny as The Inimitable Jeeves, but I still really liked it and have another that I bought left to read, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen. There are actually tons of Jeeves and Wooster books, but I’ve been finding them hard to find. Wodehouse actually wrote something like 99 books during his career (not all J&W of course).

I just finished The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber, and I really don’t know whether I liked it or not. The story and concept were interesting, but it was just so overdrawn and I hated half of the characters. I think Gruber was trying to write characters that were anti-heroes or the opposite of those normally seen, but he really only succeeded in writing characters that were unbelievable. Or, conversely, he was trying to make it difficult to class people into the “good guy” or “bad guy” categories. However, the story itself was very good and engaging, but the book would definitely have been better if Gruber had fought against the urge to write as if he were getting paid by the word. I know, that was a little mean.

I’m currently reading The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egyptians to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh, and it’s really interesting so far. I like cryptography and ciphers and am enjoying learning more history about them. It’s very math-based and I think it’s interesting.

P.S.

P.S. Does anyone else think that W.O. Mitchell looks creepily like Einstein? Maybe it's just me.