Category: books

News Flash from Things that are Not Important! I was thinking of a book some time ago and just came across it as I slowly organize bookshelves in our new house. It’s The Hollow Tree by Albert Bigelow Paine.

There are other paperbacks with more stories, but from looking at the publishing history I think that the original book from the 1890s which likely contained them all. And I just found the original on Project Gutenberg, so I’ll read that next and report back.

The edition I have is a paperback from the 70s, probably from a book from the Scholastic Book Fair in my elementary school in Detroit. It’s illustrated by Cyndy Szerkeres. In its short chapters – discrete but connected stories – we see Mr. Possum, Mr. Coon, and Mr. Crow, roommates in The Hollow Tree, as they meet up with friends and their sometime adversary, Mr. Dog.

The illustrations to these folksy animal fables are incredibly charming! I love them!

The book popped into my mind because my partner has a hat that I think of as Mr. Dog’s hat. It isn’t exactly like it or like Mr. Possum’s hat but you can definitely see the similarities.

It’s wholesome without being nauseating – The animals play tricks on each other that can be a little mean, but that they end up resolving in friendship – They have dinners, picnics, and poetry readings. The poems are funny and express each animal’s personality perfectly.

As I read the stories over this morning it hit me that this is where I learned there aren’t any easy rhymes for “silver” or “orange”. Weird facts that seep into your brain early and stick there!

The author, Albert Paine, wrote biographies and children’s stories. He edited St. Nicholas Magazine (for children). In the early 1900s he worked with Samuel Clemens (ie Mark Twain), wrote several biographies of him, and became his literary executor.

I also looked up the illustrator, Cyndy Szekeres. What an interesting career she has! I am very curious which Little Golden Books she illustrated – I read a ton of those, including all the ones my mom and aunts had as children in the 1950s. A cursory search shows me a lot of fluffy, happy little mice and so on, good, but far from the disreputable joy of the patched-trousers Mr. Possum!

The original illustrations were by J.M. Condé. I think I have other books with his drawings, somewhere. Szekeres stayed very true to the characters in her later illustrations!

Of all the books I’ve been reading it is silly to write about one of the most irritating, but that’s where I’m at this morning. I realize people love this series but everything about the first book grated on me! It is “Murder with Peacocks”, set in a small town. Our heroine is a blacksmith but took the entire summer off to go live with her mom and sister and do a professional job for free (planning three very large, complicated weddings and all the parties leading up to them).

Everyone is supposed to be quirky and funny, which is kind of cool, except they are all horrible with horrible boundaries and the gender politics are from like, the bad part of 1980 that voted against the ERA. Multiple (witnessed!) sexual assaults are treated as mildly humorous! The heroine just doing a shit ton of work for free for her horrible, entitled family is supposed to make them all extra charming. She’s so independent, strong, and liberated, but for fun she cleans the houses of strangers and her own (rich, I guess) family’s SEVEN BATHROOMS. I am over her, and everyone around her!

It’s also written in the weird twilight zone where everyone should have a cell phone, but they don’t, because the writer hasn’t figured out how to do a mystery with cell phones yet – let’s not forget that era of books and TV that were so strange!

Let’s also not forget the weird racist sweatshop (owned by the male romantic lead) in this tiny town with Mrs. Tranh (the heroine THINKS she MAY be Vietnamese – hello – perhaps the name and them speaking Vietnamese could be a clue) and the unnamed, unnumbered Ladies who don’t speak any English and sew wedding outfits 24/7 apparently and also no one in town knows them or invites them to anything despite the town all going to the weddings and knowing all of each others’ business.

But that is not even my most persistent quibble. There is a guy whose wife died and her sister, his sister-in-law, comes to stay, and (bad boundaries alert) Meg our heroine keeps ending up searching the sister-in-law’s room and suitcases and comenting on how she finds more and more “expensive knick-knacks” in the suitcases, so the sister in law was stealing, which is treated (like every crime, including murder) as mildly humorous. (Maybe they were her sister’s or family heirlooms, anyway!)

But THAT is not even my quibble.

WHAT are these expensive knicknacks? I can’t imagine what they ARE! Are they bookends made of GOLD?! What? What are they? Are they snuffboxes previously owned by Louis XIV?! Are they, like, a gem encrusted robot nightingale that sings, like some Caliph gets for a present in the 1001 Nights?

So, I am not like, filthy rich but I am comfortably well off and buy myself nice things sometimes. Here are some of the knick-knacks I can see from bed.

(They are there on purpose since I am in bed a lot and enjoy looking at them!) These non-valuable objects include:

* A lava lamp. Would fit in a suitcase.
* A small china triceratops
* A fist-sized chunk of green glass I got in an estate sale
* A copper bud vase with gold and enamel inlay
* Another bud vase, art deco, painted
* A decoupaged tray my grandma made
* A glass cube with laser etched diagram of the known universe

They are valuable only to me, though maybe you could resell the bud vase for thirty bucks or so on ebay. (I looked, for reference!) The rest of it? Not valuable.

So much for the madcap mystery. All the characters need to go read Captain Awkward for at least 2 years and think hard about their life choices.

Please send help and tell me what these small town valuable small objects might be!

From a Twitter thread the other day on odd books no one has ever heard of, I made a list and read through a few young adult and children’s books. One of them, Redwork, was described as the quintessential situation where a young person has a weird bond with an old neighbor who is witchy & mysterious. I read through it – the 14 year old protagonist becomes fascinated with his downstairs neighbor who was a WWI vet and has become both a hoarder and a backyard alchemist – And there is some light psychic phenomena –

But the odd thing about this book is it had the vibe of a book that would have been out of date even in the 70s. I mean, maybe? Did movie theaters have double features, and (teenage) ushers that actually ushed, showing you to your seat with a flashlight, and supervised, and would kick you out for talking or throwing popcorn or smoking in the non-smoking section of the theater (!?!) I don’t think so but correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe it was by an author who grew up in like, 1940, trying to make his story seem current by having the kid’s mom be a single mother trying to get her Ph.D. (or something, though that part was as unreal as the alchemy) And nothing ELSE about the book situated it in time, really. Paying for a gallon of milk with pennies would have been more than difficult in 1990. Maybe we can date it from the wages – 4 hours times 3 nights a week brought take home pay of 40 dollars (no taxes mentioned and it seemed to be pay in cash)

Anyway, the worst bit was that the mean bullying head usher sexually harasses and assaults the young women and girls who work at the popcorn counter and everyone who works there knows it and a sexual assault on a young teenager was clearly described (in the mop closet, horrors) And the characters describe it as the bully “making a pass at her”. It didn’t feel like the author making any sort of point but more like that is the language HE was using about the incident.

What the ever living fuck and how was this book published like this in 1990?

People are so gross sometimes. It was also a totally mediocre book of the genre of “kid meets witchy old neighbor”. One star.

Just a quick note on my reading and activities lately.

Son of the Storm – Very interesting fantasy novel about climate change across a continent where the world building has roots in West Africa. There is a magic rock
called stone-bone or ibor (which I keep imagining as dinosaur fossils, but, I’m sure more will be revealed in book 2) A somewhat reckless and privileged mixed race university student, his rather horrible and power hungry girlfriend who has her own battles to fight, and an invader from the Nameless Islands. Complicated politics!

Travel narrative of Rabban Sauma from around the 1290s – I read Wallis Budge’s translation and his honking big preface which was extremely boring but that the book exists at all is very cool. Sauma and his student or acolyte or fellow monk, whatever, travel from China (Mongolia? anyway China adjacent central Asia with a free pass from the Khan) to Persia, Rome, and then further west visiting I think a French and English king but I’ve already forgotten. Charles somethingth…. The point was to get the Pope to agree to join with the Mongol Khan to attack the Arabs in Jersusalem and elsewhere (this plan did not come to fruition). The writer adds they removed many of the trivial details (probably just what we would want to read today). Lots about splendid churches, fancy tile, vestments, a peaceful interlude of prosperity and close ties to various Khans, then our hero gets his ass kicked and it’s very sad.

This was a little detour from an edition of Ibn Battuta’s travels (much abridged but very good).

Annals of the Cakchiquels – Another nifty old book, a Mayan history from 1571. If you are going to read something Mayan then go for the Popol Vuh, but if you’ve read the Popul Vuh and want more depth and want to know about first contact with the Spanish (spoiler, everyone dies of various diseases and society collapses), try this!

Accounts of China and India:55 (Library of Arabic Literature). This was a good anthology with a ton of footnotes.

The Mill Town Lasses (a series). Fairly light fiction, a family saga set in a Lancashire cotton mill town (pretty much exactly where a good chunk of my ancestors worked in the mills and mines.) Well written and researched! I enjoyed these!

The Open Society and its Enemies – Karl Popper. I read this if I have trouble going to sleep. Works every time.

The Lost City of the MOnkey God – Douglas Preston. Interesting non fiction story of various searches for “lost cities” of Honduras. (Spoiler – Using LIDAR, they find a crap ton of archeological sites in jungle so thick and remote it has been uninhabited for hundreds of years).

Botchan – Natsume Soskei. Famous Japanese novel from 1906 about a sort of bumbling dork, I don’t know how to describe him but he is earnest and mediocre and unambitious, a bit spoiled by a nanny, half assees his way through school and goes off to the provinces to become a teacher – Suddenly embroiled in the politics of small town life – Always fucking up but in a kind of endearing way ! I loved this book.

Victories Greater than Death – Charlie Jane Anders. What can I say, this was fabulous. Young adult space opera that has crucially cozy “chosen family” moments while also having a lot of ass kicking and a fast moving action plot and complex, interesting politics. I love the aliens and the scariest villain with the scariest superpower you have ever seen.

The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett. Recommended enthusiastically and it was ok but basically the sort of book a lot of book clubs are going to read this summer or maybe already did in some recent year. If you like twins who go their separate ways and one lives as black and one passes as white and then their very dark and very pale children meet, this book is for you. It’s good but kind of like if current day Nella Larsen hit you over the head with a hammer.

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace. Fabulous! YA dystopia, perpetual war, extreme water rations, war orphans living in bombed out city dorms ekeing out a living by streaming their VR gaming in a simulation of the actual war zone they’re in. Highly recommend!

The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez – Another cool history “primary source” about a Puerto Rican guy from the 1600s who goes off to sea and kind of ends up a pirate. Actually written by Carlos Sigüenza de Gongora who is very interesting indeed! I love him! So, I heard you like prefaces, ok, if you don’t, then maybe stay away, but if you really like longity-ass explanations of a fairly short primary text then look for all the books about Alonso Ramirez, because there’s years of scholarship about how this is a novel by Sigënza and is Mexico’s first novel and then it actually turns out it is an amazingly provable mostly-true story, or at least, Alonso is a historical person whose movements we can partly trace.

The World of Alphonse Allais – This is a tiny, charmingly printed hardback that I somehow had on my bookshelf & hadn’t read till just now. It’s little humorous vignettes of Paris life that were printed in I guess a newspaper or journal, and the preface here (ALWAYS READ THE PREFACES AND INTRODUCTIONS! BEST BIT!) goes into a long funny ramble about how Allais isn’t THAT amazing, but hits a perfect note of just amusing enough to be amusing. (True) If you like whimsical nonsense, absinthe, the hijinks of of a little light adultery, and Paris bistro life from I guess around 1890, go for it.

In 1965 – Albert Robida. Ok this is wild – it is French science fiction from 1920 – kind of lighthearted BS about the future of aircars and spires (fabulously reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s zepplins and towers) along with a powerful feminist manifesto (which sadly must be defeated but which has some cool potential) . Then a Gulliver’s Travels-ish novella about a guy who is shipwrecked on a Centaur Island. My favorite bit of that story is how the centaurs finally force him to wear a prosthetic horse butt so he won’t look so deformed, and they never understand that he can’t just gallop several miles with them especially with a giant prosthetic wooden horse butt strapped to him. Kind of awesome read from a disability perspective.

MORE TO COME and I haven’t even mentioned all the stuff about moving, the new house, various house projects, etc. but that is taking up a lot of my thoughts and energy. Am writing some poetry but not a ton. Also reading for the Otherwise Award.

To fall asleep lately I’m reading Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, by Ibn Tufayl or Tufail, written in the 12th century. It’s about a child marooned on an island from infancy, raised by a doe, who figures out philosophy and spirituality from first principles. Before age 7, he invents clothing and modesty, as well as rudimentary weapons.

When his loving doe-mother dies, he tries to figure out how if he can find and fix what’s wrong with her by cutting open her heart, which has an empty chamber where he figures the intangible part of her that wasn’t her body, that loved him and that he loved, must have been.

Then he goes on to dissect and vivisect other animals of the island to figure out how Life works. I think he is going to discover the idea of the divine in his next 7 years.

Somewhere along the way the frame story narrated by Ibn Tufayl explains how we know that the earth and sun are both spherical and how from that plus the properties of light and heat we know that life can exist at the Earth’s equator.

This book was translated into Latin in 1671 under the title Phliosophus Autodidactus and it sounds like it was super influential.

Ibn Tufayl’s Wikipedia article tells us this was written in part as a response to al-Ghazali‘s Incoherence of the Philosophers.

By reading several locked room mysteries that refer to other locked room mysteries I have gone from The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, to The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, to John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, to Anna Katherine Green‘s Initials Only.

Initials Only is quite a trip. The murder victim, Edith Challoner, is a fancy society lady with a heart of gold. Unfortunately a heart pierced by a mysterious unfindable weapon though I am pretty sure I know what it is. No one even noticed the wound at first, since she was wearing a giant bouquet of poinsetta flowers pinned to her bosom. There was no blood – then after a few minutes…BLOOD. HMMMMMM. I leave you to imagine the bosom which could pull off a giant poinsetta arrangement.

An inventor, Orlando Brotherson — who is also a skilled, respected anarchist organizer and orator — is in love with Edith, but was scorned and may have sent her a threatening letter. Meanwhile there are some letters he wrote to her, and letters she wrote to someone but never sent, and some entirely different letters from someone else with the initials O.B. who turns out to be Oswald Brotherson, Orlando’s brother, who manages a mill or foundry or something.

No one knew in 1911 how comical this would sound since there is a brand of tampon called O.B. — Bless their hearts.

Sweetwater, the detective, is hot on the anarchist’s trail, becomes his neighbor while working as a skilled carpenter, and spies on him through a hole bored in the wall.

Oswald collapsed from typhoid fever on the same day as Edith’s murder – nearly dies — is nursed back to health by Doris, an 17 year old small town beauty – And Orlando shows up on his doorstep with truckloads of supplies to build his invention in a giant shed.

The invention turns out to be a helicopter (this is 1911, were there actual helicopters yet?!) which for no good reason at all they launch in a hurricane.

BTW I am not done but am pretty sure the inventor killed Edith with a gun that fired an icicle. Just out of arrogance? I mean, he decided just before he went up in the helicopter that really he never loved Edith anyway and 17 year old Doris is his real true love.

Huge props to this book for the poinsettas, dangerous anarchists, helicopter, and icicle gun (will update if that is really what the weapon was!)

Just realized I have no idea what O.B. stands for (the tampon brand) and so looked it up. “The product was named by the gynecologist Judith Esser-Mittag who also developed it. The initials “o.b.” are an abbreviation of the German phrase “ohne Binde.”

p.s. On helicopters: “In July 1901, the maiden flight of Hermann Ganswindt’s helicopter took place in Berlin-Schöneberg; this was probably the first heavier-than-air motor-driven flight carrying humans. A movie covering the event was taken by Max Skladanowsky, but it remains lost.”