So Many Books...

Here now (also Nowhere and New Hero)*

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:05:25 GMT

Have been to Massachusetts east and west, and met internet friends older and newer, and it was fantastic. Did not manage to read LJ/DW at all while away, and probably won't catch up now, so any ignoring of newses is completely unintentional.

This is definitely the fast and dirty way to do this, but I will attempt to clean up later: I need to know how friends who have helped in any way with The History Book would like to be acknowledged. There'll be a section in the acknowledgement for those on LJ who helped with suggestions of texts for us to look at, discussion about those we were already looking at, etc. steepholm and I will go back through our posts and make a list of everyone who did so, and write asking about name preference, but that might not happen until after the book has been sent off. If you want your username rather than your "real name", let me know in comment or PM. Er, if I know your real name, of course, otherwise default will obviously be username.

*(Just the ramblings of a Fire and Hemlock fanatic.)

Just call me Harriet the Spy

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:39:15 GMT

It's been a frantic few days, and haven't managed to keep up with friends' posts at all, but it's for a good reason, for once: I'm on my way to the States! (Yes, as I write, but only on the coach to Dublin Airport for now.) haven't been back since 2004 and haven't crossed the Atlantic by myself since before I was married. Will be seeing friends I haven't seen for far too long, and some I've never seen outside a computer screen, and relatives as well.

I have wonderful beta reading with me, and a C.J. Cherryh packed in my bag, along with my new 3 Euro reading glasses so I have a hope of being able to read it.

And last night, when I went down to our beloved local health food store to get tofu for dinner, I mentioned that I was going away the next day. Oliver (one of the family owners who lived in San Francisco for some years) asked me where I was going. I told him it would be around Massachusetts and he asked if I might be going into a certain health food store of some repute. I had already planned to, and he asked me if I could check out the deli section for him! And get menus! And maybe take pictures! And if the one in Cambridge was especially nice, to let him know, because he "wouldn't mind visiting it" himself!

My mission, should I choose to accept it....

Catch y'all on the flip side! (Assuming the plane isn't washed right out of the sky by the miserable windy rain we're having now.) [Insert other generic jinx-avoiding utterances here]

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

Even the red umbrella couldn't help with these rains

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:09:57 GMT

Those of you who live in relative proximity to Ireland may have heard that we had flooding here yesterday, especially in Dublin. Serious flooding. Real, no messing, don't travel if you don't have to, cars abandoned, scary flooding. When Younger Daughter left the house to go to Trinity yesterday morning, it was all set to be a rainy day. She left prepared for said rainy day. But later in the afternoon I heard that the trains were suspended past Dun Laoghaire, some 3 to 4 miles between us and the city centre, so I texted her and told her. Suspension of services like these aren't that infrequent and are usually fixed fairly soon, so she decided to stay in town, have dinner, and wait for the promised end of the rain. And sure enough, by the time she'd finished dinner the Irish Rail website was saying the trains were running again, with some delays, and she got on a train with rejoicing. (Though drenched, as the rain hadn't even slowed at all.) But then the train stopped after just two stations and there was an inaudible announcement, so I checked the website again, couldn't see what was wrong, and saw the train before hers had made it all the way to our station. They started again, three more stations and they stopped, telling everyone there was something like 3 feet of water on the line ahead so no point waiting. When she phoned me to tell me this, she was shaking with cold, so badly I could hear her teeth chattering.

I tried ringing a couple of taxi companies, to see if anyone could get a taxi there, but was told there wasn't a hope, because of bad flooding just near the station where she was stranded. No trains, no taxis, presumably no buses, so I got into my car. My plan was to see if I could find a taxi at a rank nearby, park and get the taxi to go as close to Booterstown as possible, which I communicated with Y.D. as I set off. I knew some likely trouble spots on the roads from previous floodings, but was stunned at how bad it was even around home, with sand bags at the bottom of a road right in the main part of Dalkey, torrential rain still pouring down and half of the roads badly flooded. No taxis, of course, so I told Y.D. to start walking along the main road and I'd drive towards her and if she saw a bus to hop on it and I'd meet her wherever. A few roads I hadn't expected to be bad were closed, but I got through okay until I was nearly in Blackrock, where there was a shopping centre where whichever one of us got there first could wait safely. And then just a bit farther and I saw the road was completely impassible, and hadn't been closed off yet, and Y.D. was the other side of this massive flooded area. The woman in the car stopped in front of me came over and said there seemed to be nothing to do but drive over the road divider to turn around, unless they could clear the road behind us, but then she didn't seem able to get up on the divider, with a few tries. At which point a construction worker came walking towards us, talked to her and came over to me, and said "You're not getting through THAT", which I well knew. I asked about the woman in the car in front of me and he said "She's afraid of the car being mumble mumble" and walked off into the night.

Eventually she got over and turned around and I rammed my car at the divider with more desperation than wisdom, perhaps, but got over it. I pulled in as soon as I could, around the corner from the flooded area, and phoned Y.D. again. She'd walked to that part, saw it was totally flooded and then gasped in horror as someone walked into it and went up to their waist in water. I was saying "DO NOT GO IN THAT WATER", and told her where I was and to cut down to Blackrock village if the road was safer there, and she agreed and then her phone cut off. I went in - through ankle deep water - to the house whose driveway I was blocking to ask if I could leave the car there while I tried to meet her. They were lovely, lovely people (and had a lovely dog, too!), and asked where I was trying to go - the husband had just got back from Dalkey, picking up one of his kids, and said it was "completely mental" out there. Which was an odd coincidence, though I agreed with him about how bad Dalkey was. A slip road was also impassible, but finally Y.D. and I managed to meet on a back road from Blackrock. Much to both our relief. At that point, it mattered less that the car started and we drove home, as we could have left her bag in the car and walked, if we'd had to. But barring one road closure that forced an interesting detour through parts sort of unknown, and another hasty re-routing because of an obviously bad road, we got home with much less bother than the trip out had been, and it was only drizzling by the time we got here.

Once Y.D. was warm and dry and had stopped shivering, I was feeling a combination of traumatized and SUPER-MOM TO THE RESCUE last night. I've driven through Tucson during a monsoon flood - the kind that carry cars away on a regular basis - and that wasn't half as terrifying as last night's drive. But this morning I woke to hear that a young garda had died while trying to direct traffic safely in Wicklow, and later heard that a woman had been found drowned in a basement in Dublin. Which put everything into sad perspective.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:08:16 GMT

So, I realised the other day that a certain light had gone out of my life, now that I'm not reading ALL THE BOOKS -[just channeling Hyperbole and a Half there, I never read anything like all the books] for our History Book, and enjoying venting spleen in rants that pretty much wrote themselves. So, must stop being lazy and start talking about more of the books I'm just reading, especially when they're books everyone else has read and I want to join in the conversation - or ones I want to get other people to consider reading.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns is pretty firmly in the former category, at least in the YA-reading world. I'd been waiting for it for ages, because of its pre-publication praise by people I trust. Because I'm still pretty lazy, here's the inside jacket description, copy 'n pasted from Goodreads.

Once a century, one person is chosen for greatness.
Elisa is the chosen one.
But she is also the younger of two princesses, the one who has never done anything remarkable. She can’t see how she ever will.
Now, on her sixteenth birthday, she has become the secret wife of a
handsome and worldly king—a king whose country is in turmoil. A king who
needs the chosen one, not a failure of a princess.
And he’s not the only one who needs her. Savage enemies seething
with dark magic are hunting her. A daring, determined revolutionary
thinks she could be his people’s savior. And he looks at her in a way
that no man has ever looked at her before. Soon it is not just her life,
but her very heart that is at stake.
Elisa could be everything to those who need her most. If the
prophecy is fulfilled. If she finds the power deep within herself. If
she doesn’t die young.
Most of the chosen do.

Okay, "not just her life, but her very heart" isn't how I'd have put it, which is actually significant for one of the things I think is pretty cool about the book - Elisa is very definitely concerned about a lot more than her romantic feelings. Another thing I like also seems somewhat misrepresented in the description, and that is that being the chosen one is not so much being chosen "for greatness" as being chosen for service, as Elisa says many times. When she eventually learns certain things about the chosen ones that have been kept from her, that distinction becomes even clearer, to the point that some chosen ones may die without apparently having had any success at all in life, let alone having achieved "greatness".

Quick little very rough summary of my own, to supplement the book-supplied one. Elisa's feeling that she's a failure is a fairly jumbled consequence of her being fat; being younger sister to a perfect looking and acting princess who (so Elisa thinks) hates Elisa because she (the perfect sister) should have been the chosen one instead of Elisa; she knows lots that you can get from reading books, but nothing much about acting like a ruler; and she's fat. (I'll be coming back to that one, unsurprisingly.) When she meets this king, who's older than she is, a widower and father and very handsome and is nice to her, she's immediately smitten. They set off back to his country, encounter serious danger on the way, at which point Elisa rises to the occasion admirably, while the King - not so much. But when they get to his palace, he won't let her tell his people he's married. Not nice. Then there's a lot of political stuff (both national and international - the marriage having been to form an alliance against a joint enemy which threatens war) in which Elisa becomes involved and is able to use her smarts to good purpose, until she's kidnapped. Dragged off on a massively dangerous desert-crossing by a former maid in the castle and her brother, whose situation relates to the political manoeveuring going on in the castle because their people are the ones already being killed and nobody gives a toss about them. A little romance ensues, though only of the admiring looks variety, and at the end of the trip Elisa realises to her amazement that she's lost a lot of weight. (Coming back to this too.) She also continues brave and wits-using, and is the only one in a position to help her kidnappers' people get some kind of justice. And that's the end of the summary, as I'm not going to give away more.

So, as I said, the very good is the world-building and the serious treatment of politics. Also, a point I liked a lot was made in the Kirkus review of this book: "it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle." Couldn't agree more. The enemy's mages were scary in themselves and because of the question of where they get their enormous destructive powers, and the religion was engaging too. On the face of it, a chosen one whose distinguishing feature is a stone in their navel, which sends off soothing heat or warning cold, could be rather laughable, but the spiritual dimension is handled so interestingly that I didn't find it so. I was very glad to see the reappearance of a favourite character toward the end, and might be induced to lay a small bet on his role in the sequels, though it would be a small one, as this wasn't a predictable book for the most part.

And then there's the fatness issue. When I read descriptions of the book that mentioned "pastry-loving Elisa", I was really worried that this book might turn out to be as awful as Princess Ben, which it isn't at all. I think it's been long enough since I've written anything about fatpol that it's time for a quick summary of what I've learned from jadelennox and diceytillerman. (Please correct/refine/add as desired, you two!)   If this were a better world, it would be one in which fatness had not been used as a signifier of a variety of undesirable traits running from immaturity and inability to cope emotionally (at best) through laziness through slyness and nastiness to out-and-out evil, repeatedly, unthinkingly, and harmfully. I don't have any idea of stats on this, as to whether or not this happens especially often in children's and teen fantasy, non-fantasy versus adult ditto, but it sure the hell happens way too much in children's and YA. If we were in this world, then A character in a children's book who HAPPENED to lose weight as a natural consequence of something unrelated to weight loss and possibly also HAPPENED to gain more confidence as a result of the something unrelated to weight loss, wouldn't be any kind of a problem. But we don't have that world, and in this one, that character only adds to all the other characters who tell kids that they're fat BECAUSE of their negative character traits, and would be better people if they only lost weight.

I found The Girl of Fire and Thorns a bit frustrating in this respect, because I felt it came a lot closer to being fat-accepting than many books do, without actually managing to be so. One of the things that made it closer, to my mind, is that Elisa discovers that the reactions to her she saw in people around her at home, which she had attributed to her being fat, had nothing to do with that, but with knowledge quite unrelated to her appearance or character, that they believed they had to keep from her. How true does that ring? Well, obviously most of us don't have the experience of being a chosen one, but that someone might think everyone disdained them for being fat when they in fact didn't at all. And of course Elisa has already commenced her achievement of emotional maturity by midway through her journey from her home to her husband's home, long before she loses any weight. But those two mitigating factors don't overcome the treatment of her weight loss. Here's the passage where Elisa realises the effect of that long desert march: [I apologise for the lack of indenting - rich text no longer seems to offer blockquote/indent and it's late to switch to HTML posting]

   I've been wrapped in shapeless robes and camel-hair chaps for nearly a month. Breathing hard, I peer -- hesitatingly -- at my navel. I'm shocked to see the winking blue of my Godstone peering back. I raise an arm and admire the curving shape of it, the way my upper arm tapers so naturally into my forearm, like they were meant to live together. I run my hands across my breasts, down my sides, over my buttocks, around to my thighs. Then tears spring to my eyes as I do it again.
   I am not even close to thin. Certainly not beautiful like Alodia or Cosmé. But I don't have to part my breasts or press into my stomach to see my Godstone. I still crave honey pastries, but my head doesn't pound to think of them. I can walk all day without getting a rash.
   I can walk all day.

This would have been perfect if everything except "I can walk all day" had been cut, and that had been the realisation that brought tears to Elisa's eyes. And that would have worked, beautifully. The food on this march could have been unpalatable but designed to pack in sustaining energy for the rigours of the journey and Elisa wouldn't have to have lost an ounce to feel happy about her body's hard-won ability to move. The fact that the two wonderful male characters who admire Elisa's looks (though not only her looks, of course, or I wouldn't consider them wonderful) admire her before she loses weight is further evidence of the book's being closer-than-many to fat positive, but again, the admiration of others isn't enough to compensate for the positive depiction of weight loss.

[LJ is being obnoxious, and I may have to post this unedited - apologies for rough-draftness. I think it's the third day I've been trying to work on this and now the keyboard seems to be packing it in too.]

In case it's not clear, there was much I loved about this book,and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel, due out next October.

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:44:44 GMT

The other day I happened to see a large sign in a shop window in the city centre advertising ice grips in stock AND that evening found there were thermal socks with a tog rating for sale in our local (small) grocery store. I'm still pondering the question of whether such early Irish preparations for a winter even worse than the last one are the equivalent of animals growing extra-thick fur and storing more food than normal or conversely represent the Great Irony of -- well, Sod's Law. If I had to bet large sums of money on it, I'd go for the latter, though I do have to admit that in our hall sit three neatly packaged pairs of ice grips. (Hold them cheap may who ne'er slipped in Dalkey last winter!) Moneyless bets taken anytime from now until the first snow. Or spring.

On the same lines, I was talking to the man who was our landlord for the first two years after we moved to Ireland and found out he was THE person who fell onto the tracks in Dalkey train station last winter during the second or third Big Snow. (A minor local celebrity, for obvious reasons.) He'd been six months in hospital, and you have to admire the spirit of someone who could say of the experience that he'd made a better recovery than they'd expected, so it was all good. (Except for the glorious summer he'd heard so many predictions of as he lay in his hospital bed, which didn't happen.)

In more cheerful vein, I've recently been reminded that no matter what life throws at you, Jane Austen never disappoints. I'm sure I've quoted one of my favourite lines from Northanger Abbey before here, but, just to set it up again, here's what Catherine Morland says about "real solemn history", which she cannot be interested in:

"I read it a little as a duty,
but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.
The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences,
in every page; the men all so good for nothing,
and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome:"
Great stuff, but what I realised with some excitement as we were editing a section on alternate histories, is that when Catherine goes on to say:

."..and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull,
for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches
that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts
and designs--the chief of all this must be invention,
and invention is what delights me in other books."

Jane Austen was anticipating the concept of history as narrative by well over a hundred years. And here I'd thought that the famous defence of the novel passage was the best bit of brilliantly cheeky genius to be found in the novel! Honestly compels me to admit that I'm with Catherine at least in being totally ignorant of real solemn history, and the critical material on history as narrative was all provided by steepholm

Saying Yes to Gay YA (and its authors)

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:12:33 GMT

Probably everyone knows what the subject line refers to, but for any who might not, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown posted their experience with an agent who offered to take their co-written YA novel *with* conditions, on Genreville. Many other spec-fic authors came forward telling of similar experiences with manuscripts containing gay characters, and notable figures in the field of "genre" writing (generally speaking, science fiction and fantasy) talked about how underrepresented LGBTQ characters were in the literature. And then the backlash came, with the agency -- unnamed by Sherwood and Rachel -- denying Sherwood and Rachel's account, and explicitly accusing them of "exploiting" the agent. I didn't manage to read much of anything online over the last few days, and became aware of the accusations levelled at Sherwood and Rachel only a bit after the fact. And, to be honest, I was as frustrasted as I was stunned, because I didn't see how I could do anything except make the kind of impassioned "I KNOW them, and they WOULD NOT behave like this" statement which is (rightly) viewed with skepticism by those who don't know the people involved. The number of communities in which I don't have any kind of clout or respect and in which I'm not known is very large. I'm not an author, an editor, an academic or a professional, and a couple of retweet (which I've done) may get a few readers, while an LJ post will mostly be read by those who already know Rachel and Sherwood and the situation, plus a few others wandering by, with no reason to pay attention to my impassioned statement.

And then I realised that while I can do nothing about getting more people to see this, I can do more than just say "Here's my personal - relevant - experience with these two authors"; I can say that and add "But you don't have to take my word for it". (Yup, read that in LeVar Burton's voice, if you ever enjoyed the fabulous PBS Reading Rainbow.) I can tell you where you can see evidence that backs up my experience. And having done that, I can - as others have done already - point out a logical problem or two with the accusations being made against Sherwood and Rachel.

So, I've been reading and loving Sherwood's books since I ordered Crown Duel and read it to my older daughter many years ago. I found her LJ account (sartorias) a few years after that, and have read her riffs on writing, reading, life, the universe and everything with great appreciation. The relevant part though, is that I have had the privilege of being a reader for her for some six or seven of her adult novels, starting with The Fox (second in the Inda Quartet). Remember all those professional credentials I don't have? Right. So if Sherwood were at all likely to respond to an agent offering to represent her novel by essentially throwing a hissy fit at the suggestion she & Rachel have to make some changes for purposes of tightening up the novel or the like, when a reader with no creds whatsoever suggests changes, there should be heads rolling, right? Of course, Sherwood couldn't have responded more differently. I never suggested as big a change as losing a character, obviously, but these are relatively big novels for the most part, and there are a lot of emails between us; I can say with total honesty that Sherwood was always deeply appreciative, never in the least bit defensive or stroppy about any suggestions I made, and was always working so hard at revising and re-revising on her own account (and with her other readers) that I often fell behind and she'd send me the new (or new new) version of chapters I was about to read. And yet people have assumed that she (and Rachel) both heard "You'll have to cut this gay character or make him straight" when the agent actually said "You're going to need to have fewer POV characters" because, y'know, they're so deeply prickly about what they've written and suggestions for changing it.

Rachel I haven't known as long, nor have I been (yet!) a proper reader for her - I read her memoir, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, after a few people raved about it, and thought it was wonderful. I started reading her LJ (rachelmanija) after that, and then Sherwood sent me the manuscript at the heart of all this, saying that they were just looking for a quick reaction, which I was happy to give, having liked it a lot. Other stuff in my personal life have led me to consider Rachel a friend as well, but that isn't relevant to this topic.

So where is the "You don't have to take my word for it" stuff? It's in both Rachel's and Sherwood's blogs, in Sherwood's publishing history and in Rachel's memoir. Sherwood certainly doesn't blog only about her own writing, but when she does it is invariably in a way which admits what she sees as her own flaws as a writer. In fact, she's fiercely critical of her writing, and you don't have to look far to see this, along with her determination to improve by sheer hard work. I wanted to see if I could find an example of this, and the second page of her LJ at the time of writing popped up this post, which isn't even as self-critical as many, but gives an idea. Rachel's memoir says so much about her compassionate response to her family in light of her abusive childhood (but with humour!) that even a quick skim through it would lead anyone to understand she's not the type to yell victimhood only because she resented someone making editorial suggestions. Similarly with her posts about her return to university to qualify as a therapist and her volunteer work with a crisis response team.

In the logic and common sense category, it shouldn't need to be said when the timeline of events is there for all to see, but Sherwood & Rachel did not name the agent. In fact they clearly stated that they were not naming agent or agency in order to focus attention on the problem rather than pointing the finger at one 'villain'. Yet the post by Joanna Stampfel-Volfe accuses Sherwood and Rachel of lying, of exploiting one of the agents in the agency, and - most seriously of all - of exploiting the issue. Here's where the logic comes in: if Rachel and Sherwood did NOT name the agent with whom they had the phone conversation, Stampfel-Volfe can only claim they are lying about the conversation if she were privy to every single communication had by Rachel and Sherwood from the time they started looking for representation for the manuscript. And even if she did have records of every single communication, she could still only give negative proof of their claim, which as we all know, isn't proof at all. Yet even without that negative proof, she's accusing them of outright lying.

Finally, another author whom I also admire but don't know, linked to her agent's response to this, calling his words "sense". Frankly, when it comes to one agent's assurance that he can almost guarantee that "there’s no one censoring gay content", set against, for example, Farah Mendlesohn's report that of the *700* YA sf books she read for The Intergalactic Playground, *5* had a positively portrayed gay character, my money would be on Farah's being the more likely to describe the truth of the situation. And then there's what Michael Bourret said about the realities of the marketplace: "There are fewer gay readers than straight readers. 'Gay books,' on average, sell less than 'straight books.'" Right, if we link those two sentences as logic suggest they are linked, that says that only gay readers will read "gay books" (scare quotes his, in fairness), while straight readers will only read "straight books". We all know how happy it makes those of us in the world of children's literature when we hear that boys will ONLY read "boy books", meaning books with male protagonists and nice boyish covers. But back to the LGBTQ arena - what defines a "gay book" and what a "straight book"? What proportion of gay characters is enough to tip a book over into the "gay book" category? Will straight readers put the book down if a friend of the (straight, obviously) protagonist comes out? Or is encountered as openly gay a few chapters in? And even if a deeply scientific method for calculating the "gayness" or "straightness" of recently published books had been used to chart the relative sales of the (supposed) two categories - does that constitute proof that it's "the gayness" that hurt sales? Of course not. Besides this, the agent's rather odd conflation of an argument that there's NO censoring of gay content in publishing and one saying that publishing is after all a business and "gay books" don't sell as well as "straight ones" is telling.

I respect and admire Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown enormously, not least for their willingness to take what they knew in advance to be a costly stance about this issue. I am entirely convinced that neither of them would be capable of fabricating a story like this had it not happened the way they reported it. My reputation is admittedly negligible, yet such as it is, I'm staking it here; anyone who looks at Rachel's or Sherwood's public writings will see a pattern of behaviour consistent with what I've shared here of my own experience. It seems a pity that more people didn't expect Joanna Stampfel-Volpe to back up her claim that Rachel and Sherwood lied about what they experienced, instead of just taking her word for it.

[Disabling comments on this, as for whatever reason, it's getting ALL the spam. In the unlikely event that someone wants to comment about this, a comment on the previous entry will be moved over.]

Back now (and cranky as usual)

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:26:44 GMT

It's been a while, and I've realised that I'll probably never catch up properly on everyone else's posts, so better to dive back in than stand confusedly on the shore like the little critter in the userpic. I'm not returning with a proper rant, but flagging an issue that recurred in two articles, a character in a book and someone on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends: food intolerances and their accompanying dietary exclusions. (All right, I'm ranting a bit.)

One article was on the Rodale website ( I saw it via a Care2 newsletter) and titled "Is Gluten Bad for You?" The other probably came the same way into my inbox, and is called "What We're (Not) Eating: A Potential Danger of Gluten-Free". The character is in Sarah Dessen's latest, What Happened to Goodbye, a book I liked, if maybe not quite as much as the previous one, Lock and Key. I'm not sure who it was on Loose Ends (I missed a bit while cooking dinner), but he'd written a book which seemed of the grumpy comic complaining about everyone type and one of the things he said from the book was that he hated people claiming to have food intolerances. (Possibly he just hated people who HAD food intolerances.)

Before-the-cut disclaimer: I have at least one food intolerance, so I'm not campaigning against intolerance intolerance solely on others' accounts. All the same, there are several friends whose experiences with dietary issues and the rubbish other people dish out around them are also very much in mind.

For the record, I love dairy products as much as most and more than many. I brought cheese sandwiches for lunch to school every day of secondary school and for a lot of university too. I loved Brie, Cheddar (if only the mild type) and blue cheese dressing - ice cream, frozen yogurt, unfrozen yogurt, Mozzarella melted over pizza, and oh, how I loved freshly grated Parmesan. I was NEVER of the school dismissing milk as only fit for baby humans or cows. The discovery of lactose intolerance and lactase tablets to take care of it was a wonderful thing, until they started working less and less well, and I started needing them not just for a healthy hunk of cheese in a sandwich or salad, but for milk in tea, and then needing to double up on them even for the small amount of milk in tea. And then they stopped working altogether. This is a very typical story, and I'm telling it not to claim special victimhood, but just to ask: what on earth can anyone possibly think they can deduce about my character from this inability to tolerate dairy?

That said, back to the articles, the character and the hater (his words!) The Rodale article was fairly balanced, really, and I probably wouldn't have been as annoyed had it not been for having previously read "What We're (Not) Eating", talking about an emerging problem of people (primarily young girls, it seems) with eating disorders claiming they'd been told to go gluten-free as an excuse for not eating. But still and all, saying that just 10 years ago "barely anyone knew what the word gluten meant, let alone gave any thought to avoiding it" is ridiculous - and it's in both articles (the same source is quoted, though whether the info was lifted from one article for the other or not I've no idea). And I got annoyed at this line: "And with this popularity push, people have latched on to avoiding gluten as a cure-all for many conditions aside from celiac, including migraines, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. While some have found relief, that doesn’t mean a gluten free diet will work in all cases." Well, really? If there was something that worked "in all cases" for any of those three conditions, everyone suffering from one of them would just be doing it, wouldn't we? And look at the language: "popularity push", "latched on", and "cure-all". Yup. It's all it takes to make me aware that I've only fallen for the old band-wagon hopping.

"What We're (Not) Eating: A Potential Problem with Gluten-Free" actually *isn't* a problem with gluten-free, potential or otherwise. It's about the way some people suffering from eating disorders are using a supposed diagnosis of coeliac/gluten sensitivity as a cover-up for not eating. That's a matter relating to eating disorders, specifically anorexia. The line, "some 25% of Americans are concerned with gluten consumption" is a bit meaningless, really, and even if there were actual evidence that 25% of the US population was totally cutting gluten out of their diets totally (which I don't believe for a second), that's an entirely separate matter from the girls this Tucson coach found, or the quote from the pro-ana site. Anyway, 1% of the US population is not really a "scant" figure, and most experts now believe many of those are undiagnosed too.

The character in What Happened to Goodbye is Dave's mother, and I knew from the second she appears, bearing a plate of brownies made without nuts, gluten or sugar to welcome the new neighbours (whose potential food allergies she didn't know), that the brownies are going to be awful and that she was going to be, not awful exactly but rigid, joyless - generally as much fun as the tasteless brownies. Which she was. Dave's father seemed at first to be of the same ilk, but much later in the book he and Dave come over to watch a basketball match on TV and end up having a surreptitious orgy of *real eggs*, making him appear more a victim of the mother's dour tofu-loaf serving than anything else. I won't bother protesting on behalf of tofu, as that's not the point, but Dave says they don't eat real eggs because of a combination of "certain dietary intolerances" and "ethical misgivings". Okay, those are two very different concerns, but the possibility of any sympathy with either (and FWIW - battery farming? I think it's perfectly reasonable to have ethical misgivings about those kinds of eggs, while surely anyone could understand egg allergy) is pretty effectively removed by the way they're combined, so you get the impression that neither is the real reason, and therefore neither is a real reason. We've also seen the one family in the book that eats together *properly*, and is warm, loving and welcoming, and the meal is a coronary delight, fried chicken, "creamy mac and cheese and the green beans cooked with pork fat".

Now I'm perfectly aware that the fact that one character in one book is written as both an overbearing parent and emotionally distant and has "certain dietary intolerances" and is a rubbish cook making tasteless meals her family doesn't enjoy doesn't mean that anyone can deduce an authorial statement that -- oh, I don't know - people who can't eat foods are all emotionally stunted. Or vegetarians or those who are concerned about eating healthily are necessarily unable to take joy from food. But from this book and this character, it certainly looks very, very much as if the food "issues" and dietary choices are being used as a handy shortcut to fill in personality.

Finally, the guy on Loose Ends. I've already reported on what he said, but when one of the presenters laughingly (everyone laughed at his hating people with food problems, of course) said something about "all the coeliacs listening to this..." he immediately replied that he didn't mind if someone actually had a disease, that was different. It was just intolerances he, er, couldn't stand. Well, I'm delighted he's so broad-minded as not to have hatred for anyone with coeliac disease, but, you know, really? What, I'm up my own arse because I can't eat dairy products? Or all those kids who have allergic reactions to eggs or nuts or seafood - clearly just little attention seekers! We deserve to be hated, now I've thought about it.

Okay, end of rant. I will finish off by saying two very cheery things. First is that the other day Younger Daughter and I were in the city centre and I urged her into the not-very-new-but-none-of-us-had-been-in milkshake place. They had organic soya milk and ice cream for those who don't eat dairy, everything containing gluten or nuts was clearly marked, and I had the first milkshake in literally decades. Cherry. It was fabulous. And tonight, as on many other occasions, Becca, who's a vegetarian, made us rice and beans in a sort of curry variant, which was delicious - brown rice, legumes and all. We both relished every bite.

Yet another request for book help

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:56:51 GMT

When working on the Arthur chapter of the History Book - which is totally steepholm's baby, BTW* it occurred to me that it would be nice to have a couple of books that didn't have any mention of Arthur to set against the ones we were discussing. Not just out of the pool of all books in the world that are not in any way Arthurian, obviously. What we were looking for is books set in the period where the historical Arthur is placed, whenever an historical Arthur is postulated. We couldn't come up with one, which seemed significant but not in any way conclusive. So, this is where we look to our extremely well-read flists. Again.

The specs are:

1) Children's or YA
2) set in Britain
3) late 5th to 6th century
4) no mention of Arthur, Arturos, Idris, Pendragon, etc.
5) We're primarily looking at books that are still being read by kids today, but it would still be useful to hear about older, more obscure ones too.

* The chapter on Arthur, that is, to which I have essentially contributed only by reading a couple of books I hated and telling steepholm they weren't going to be of any use to us. Negative reading is almost as useless as negative proof, but not quite!

48 HBC - Inconvenient

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:27:21 GMT

All right, it's taken me forever to finish writing up the small number of books I read over the weekend, but this at least is the last.

My goal of noting where I saw a review, recommendation or just passing mention of a book when adding it to my Goodreads to-read shelf is clearly not being met, and I've unfortunately no memory where I heard about Inconvenient, Margie Gelbwasser's first novel. I can see why I'd be interested once I did hear about it, as I generally love YA about the experiences of immigrant communities in the US (or UK), and Inconvenient is about a girl whose Russian-Jewish parents moved to the States when she was very young. The community is a hard-drinking one, and Alyssa's mother has been slipping from drinking hard into drinking too hard - the inconvenience of the title for Alyssa's family.

I almost put this one down after a few chapters - the prose wasn't doing much for me, and it seemed like a lot of pages and hours since I'd read anything that had really grabbed me. But I'm glad that tiredness didn't stop me from reading on, as I was really pretty impressed by the end. Alyssa's only real friend, Lana, has been her friend since they were little, and both are pretty much outsiders because of their background. Alyssa really doesn't care to be accepted by the cool gang, happy enough with Lana and a friend on the track team, but Lana is increasingly turning herself into someone else in order to be accepted, especially by 'the king' of their class. All this was pretty well done, and Keith, the guy on the track team turned out to be neither the unequivocal boyfriend Alyssa wants nor the jerk he seems as if he might be at times.

The greatest impact, however, comes from the portrayal of Alyssa's mother and her drinking problem, which is quite powerful. I didn't love the mother the way I loved the mother in Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost, but it was easy to see how moving from one country in which you were discriminated against for being Jewish to another, in which you're discriminated against for being Russian, with a hard-working but emotionally distant husband, in a culture where heavy drinking is just what you do, could be a disastrous mix. Especially as every time she really starts to become successful in writing magazine articles, the magazine folds, or a new (horrible) editor takes over who cuts her down continually.

Of course, despite that understanding of the factors that lead Alyssa's mother to problem-drinking, our sympathy is completely with Alyssa. Her mother goes through the typical cycles of denial, remorse and promises to stop abusing alcohol, dragging Alyssa through the again, all-too typical pattern of the family of an alcoholic. Her father is big on telling them they have to be tough, Lana increasingly excludes her, and she's not quite sure where she stands with Keith. The loneliness Alyssa feels, and the need to cover up for her mother, despite her growing frustration and desperation, are very moving.

I was telling Younger Daughter about the book when I'd finished, and she said wisely, from the sink where she was washing dishes, "Ah, the old button strings, eh?" It took me a minute to notice that something was wrong, but I quite like the phrase, combining buttons and heart-strings, very appropriately. When thinking about it afterwards, I did the usual 'this isn't my button, really' sidestep; perfectly true in one way, as certainly my mother never had a drinking problem. Of her own. Neither did my father, but yet as a child, I lived with two parental figures who did. Not my button, I thought, but only because I didn't realise that their drinking problems were problems - or rather that they were the kind of problem anyone ever did anything about. One thing about that, of course, is that you don't have the torturous see-saw of hope and disappointment Alyssa experiences. That part of the book was all too convincing, all the same.

Lest this sounds too bleak to be bearable, I don't think there's much harm in saying that towards the end, Inconvenience suggests that the hope of being okay can be uncoupled from the need for the other person to be okay. I certainly couldn't have loved this book if Alyssa hadn't had that much, at least.

48 HBC, Wrapped

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:45:30 GMT

Wrapped was both the weirdest coincidence of the Challenge, and the biggest disappointment. The coincidence was that brandy_painter and I both started reading it just before bed on Saturday night, getting approximately the same amount read before going to sleep. It was the biggest disappointment, not because I disliked it most of the books I read (it didn't come even close to being the most disliked), but because it sounded great in itself and also useful for the History Project. I thought it might fit well for the formerly-called-Romp category, as a sort of YA Amelia Peabody. Regency Amelia Peabody.

There isn't much reason to repeat Brandy's list of 'Historical Liberties' taken, almost every one of which I'd flagged while reading as well. So you can read that here. There is a spoiler, but I agree that it's not one that's likely to surprise many people. And having lazily piggy-backed on her work, I'll add some of the other problems I noticed.

Lord Showalter is said to be the matrimonial catch of the year, and Agnes' father is a member of the House of Lords. This is the upper layer of Regency society, clearly. And yet at Lord Showalter's big party there's a physician, a solicitor and Agnes' best friend (and reluctant 'rival' in the pursuit of a good husband), Julia, whose father is a merchant and manufacturer. Not so much. (Think of the Bingley sisters jeering at the Bennets because one uncle is an attorney and the other lives 'somewhere near Cheapside' - who is in fact, 'a man of business'. Mr Darcy doesn't join the jeering, but does agree that it must 'very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world'. And neither he nor Bingley is even a peer.)

The language is a mess. It's meant to be 1815. Yet here's just a selection of the anachronistic language Agnes or the other characters use:

-suss out (first used in the 1960s)
-chat up (also well into the 1900s before the phrase is used)
-anti-imperialist views (when Agnes says she's not sure it's right to have all these foreign treasures in the British Museum)
-taxi (Just ??)
-Bollocks we will! (OED gives first use as 1940)

More problems:

-Agnes suggesting Caedmon call her by her first name at the end of their first real meeting.
-Lord Showalter quotes the opening line of Pride and Prejudice as an explanation of why he HAD to get himself a wife in order to carry on with his masquerade of a society dude.
-Near the end, after Agnes and Caedmon have saved England from a plot which might have caused Napoleon to win the war, she thinks there are no fireworks for her or Caedmon. 'Perhaps that's what it meant to be a servant. Only if you failed or performed sloppily did people pay attention. When you were successful, you were invisible.' Yup, your experience is *just* like that of a real servant.
-Word will be spread that Agnes is recovering from the scandal and heartache she supposedly suffered by 'residing in a convent in the Swiss Alps'. (A convent? In the Swiss Alps??)

It could have been SO much fun, and a lot of the worst mistakes could have been avoided just by a good reading of Jane Austen. Admittedly, that's true of many mistakes in life, I guess.

48 Hour Book Challenge - Flip

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:35:51 GMT

I'm feeling much more tired today than I was at any time during the Challenge itself, which is odd - and also rather flat, which is less so. But, I do want to write up the remaining books read before running out of steam altogether. Speaking of steam, the girls should be kicking off soon in the Mini Marathon, though with some 40,000 people signed up for it, it'll be a while before they actually start walking. (It's a bank holiday here, BTW.)

I can't remember where I heard about Flip, but I picked it up at the summer fair. Reading it right after The Penderwicks at Point Mouette was tough, and initially I thought I was going to find the voice too irritatingly teen boy. But body switch stories can be fun in a terrifying way if well done, and I liked most things about this one, so ended getting pretty well engrossed. Alex, the protagonist, is 14, not very attractive or popular, not very well-off and from a not great area of London, a pretty good cello player and student and not at all sporty. Philip, generally known as Flip, is from a much wealthier family living in Leeds, cool and good-looking and a star of his school's cricket team. (With two girlfriends and not very good performance in school.) When Alex wakes up inexplicably in Philip's body, he's as horrified and baffled as you would be, and only wants to get home so someone can help him figure out what has happened and change him back. It would have been easy to play the 'wealthier, cooler and much more popular isn't happier' card in a rather dull way, but Flip doesn't do that, although Alex does have moments of thinking it's great to see his hair in the mirror looking perfect., and definitely enjoys being able to run without wheezing from his asthma. Needless to say, it's not as simple as just ringing his mother and being picked up and fixed.

Although the explanation for the switch didn't bear too much thinking about in terms of plausibility (what theory of body-switching would, though?) I liked the way it wasn't tied to any kind of fate or universe's intervention in order to save one or two special souls or the like. Although Alex was forced to think really hard about questions of identity and self, as well as some pretty tough moral issues, he wasn't switched in order to learn anything, which is a major plus.

A really petty thing, which must show something of how small-minded I can be in responding to books. The term used in explaining how Alex's soul/spirit/whatever had been switched into Philip's body was 'psychic evacuation'. Which reminded me how I'd sniggered at hearing a politician accuse the UK government of organising a 'sluggish evacuation'. Maybe a bit too much psychic fibre?

Finishing line, quick stats.

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 16:47:35 GMT

Added up my reading time, rang my mother, talked to the girls about dinner, and as the official finish line doesn't seem to be up at MotherReader's yet, will have to remember to clock in there later. I'll also be coming back to do at least quick write-ups on three of the books read during the Challenge.

So. Sixth Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge stats:

Total hours spent reading & reviewing (or in the allowed proportion of audiobook listening and reading/commenting on other participants' blogs) 32 hours, 15 minutes.

Books read: 7 and about a quarter of an audiobook.

Donating €50 to Barnardos.

Interesting connections between the books? None jumped out at me this year. Will think about it as I walk down to buy groceries.

Degree of challenge? It seemed surprisingly easy this year! I'm still slower than most of the world, and finishing a few of the books demanded my trademark iron discipline (for anyone who doesn't know me, that's 100% sarcastic), but being able to switch from iPod and audiobook to print book so I didn't waste time while feeding the dogs or myself helped a lot, and as always, it was great that there were so many people participating. Also, glasses instead of contacts for the weekend made continuous reading much easier. A detail I'm sure everyone finds deeply fascinating.

48 Hour Book Challenge, last day.

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 09:34:01 GMT

Finished Lady Macbeth's Daughter last night, quite late, and went into the next book up instead of trying to write anything then. I'd ordered it as potentially useful for the History Book, and in a way it is, but in another way, not so much. A slightly odd thing about several of the children's/YA books I've read that are strongly intertextual (in an apparently-homagey way) is that they blunder into appearing to suggest that the author of the modern book is cleverer/more inventive than the author of the original. I don't want to take up the remaining Challenge hours finding links to my old posts, but for examples, one book that I read and thought pretty bad suggested this about Chaucer, one I never wrote up did so with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and the audiobook I'm currently listening to just tipped over from confused to almost saying it outright about Dickens. (Seriously? Dickens the character just told the heroine of the book that if he'd known her before writing Little Dorrit, it would have been a better book.)

Lady Macbeth's Daughter doesn't come close to implying that it's better than Macbeth. I think the premise - that Lady M had a daughter, and was driven mad by grief of losing her, (all that nasty Macbeth's doing, obsessed as he was with having a son) long before she went mad from guilt - is an interesting one. Whether you go the old-fashioned way and consider Macbeth a story of pure evil unleashed or all-out Marxist criticism and read it as a story of a man destroyed by being at the changing-point from feudal to modern economic systems*, or somewhere between the two, there is still a fair amount of space left for a bit more motivation. The only problem I found with that in Lady Macbeth's Daughter is that Lady M isn't portrayed as woman made evil by grief consistently enough for it to work. Okay, I also thought Fleance was a bit of a jerk, Albia's love for him not too engaging, and the end a little hacked-off seeming. And I've got a completely irrational thing about girls getting their periods first time and its being explained to them in mystical terms. Here: "You're not dying, my friend. The goddess Banrigh has visited you" made me more than a bit queasy.

I did like the descriptions of the landscape and scenery, and there were a lot of interesting touches, including a good author's note at the end, discussing Shakespeare's use of Holinshed's history of Macbeth.

* I could probably come up with the reference, if anyone wants it.

Devil's Kiss,

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 18:50:46 GMT

I know I still haven't written up my second book, Flip, but I'll get to it.

Devil's Kiss was recommended to me in a bookshop in town, when I said I was looking for historical YA set in Britain for the History Book. (All right, this was after I'd probably horribly insulted the woman in charge of the children's section, by reacting in dismay when she tried to recommend I, Coriander to me.) (I did behave well by going along with a compromise, which is that the history is rubbish in it, but the rest of the story makes up for it. Nothing could make up for the abuse of history in that book.) (I'm getting seriously sidetracked - a bit punch-drunk at this stage.)

Anyway, Devil's Kiss has the Knights Templar still active in modern London, and aside from a bit of backstory, which isn't even set in Britain, it's got nothing historical in it. But, it's not a bad story, so I'm not sorry for the false lead. There's quite a bit of good stuff in here, including Satan (how he's done, that is) and the different orders of Angels, and the fact that Billie's mother was Muslim, and the resistance to Billie's becoming a member of the Order is that she's a girl. The characters may have been a bit two-dimensional, but the story - of the tiny, beleaguered Order's fight against evil - suits that fairly well. Billie's more than a bit thick about how her father, Arthur (Master of the Order) actually feels about her, but her childhood's not exactly set her up for developing a great deal of emotional insight. It's a dark story, and the small group of Knights is a lot smaller at the end, but I didn't find it too wrenching, which isn't entirely a good sign, but I'll pick up the sequel all the same. Not *just* for the cover, though that does look good.

The Great Tree of Avalon

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 15:06:49 GMT

... or perhaps the not so great anything.

It's probably pretty clear by now that this book was not my cup of tea. There was no more fat-bashing, after that first chapter, but that might have been because we were in the company of figures of lofty birth (although they themselves often don't know it), elves, priestesses of the Order -- y'know, nobody who'd be fat.

We also seemed to be in the presence of Tolkien, with intermittent visits from Lloyd Alexander and George Lucas (in his Star Wars guise), but, shockingly, this book wasn't done anything near as well as they did their respective bits. The poetry! The Dark Lord! Stupid Elli shaking her stupid curls all the time!

I really wish I hadn't wasted so much of my Challenge time on this, but there's still plenty left, happily.

Quick reading pause for a growl

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 09:11:13 GMT

29 pages into The Great Tree of Avalon and already found it irritatingly over-anxious to make the point (the rocks changing colours with the seasons was nice, but then Tamwyn had to go and say that the idea of trees changing colours was really difficult to imagine) and obnoxious about fatness. Oh goody, more than 300 pages to go.

I'll come back to my second book after breakfast.

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:02:51 GMT

Well, the bakey, biscuity, cookieish things were delightful, and so too was the third outing of the Penderwicks. I loved it so, so much. Having seen reviews of it, I knew already that this installment takes Rosalind (the oldest sister) away in one direction, while Skye, Jane, Batty, Aunt Claire and Hound head in another. Their father and Iantha, along with Ben, are off to Oxford on a joint honeymoon and academic conference -- Ben being too young to be away from Iantha, no matter what the purpose of the trip. There wasn't any room for worry about how the story would hold up with the family separated (if only for two weeks) as everyone I saw talking about it said they'd worried about that and it had worked brilliantly.

Poor Skye, being forced reluctantly into being the OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick), is convinced she'll be inadequate for the job, leaving someone (probably Batty) dead and Rosalind and her father hating her forever. She doesn't even begin to imagine the things that she has to worry about as OAP though, with good reason. Jane in love, Jeffrey in serious trouble, and Batty showing signs of being musical among the disasters that manage to crowd in the two weeks in Maine. Even though the big reveal is obvious for quite a while, and even though it takes a gloriously large coincidence to bring it about, I still found the pacing of both this book and the three in the series just perfect. While making dinner (Becca and Y.D. are out for the evening, so no catered dinner for me tonight!), washing up and feeding the dogs, I switched over to the audiobook I'm currently listening to, The Haunting of Charles Dickens, and the comparison wasn't kind to it. Massive coincidences in it too, but not handled with the same deftness, they just seem senseless. And the heroine, Meg, is infinitely less likable than all the Penderwicks, with their loyalty, kindness and own brand of fiercely protective love. More about the Haunting if I finish it during the challenge, but for now, a few random Penderwick quotes that grabbed me.

The first, really for generalblossom and Katayoun, who'll understand why it made me so happy to see this reference on page 8 - great start. Jane asks Rosalind if she thinks Iantha would mind if she borrows some books to take to Point Mouette. Rosalind thinks the books are 'barely suitable for her, let alone for Jane' (a whole two years younger than Rosalind), and asks, '"Besides, why would you even want to read" --Rosalind picked a particularly odd title -- "Bilgewater?" "It's about love. They all are," answered Jane, as though that explained it perfectly.'

Aunt Claire gets a badly sprained ankle and Skye is bravely coping, cleaning house and trying to make good decisions for 'her troops'.

'The medicine the doctors gave her for pain has made her a little goofy,' said Alec after he'd gotten her settled on the sofa, with her feet propped up and the crutches beside her.
'Edelweiss, edelweiss,' sang Aunt Claire in several different keys, 'every morning you greet me.'
'Like I said, goofy. She's been singing a lot.'
'She never sings,' protested Skye. She wasn't ready for this. The crutches and the poor ankle--encased in yards of bandages, tape, and a white plastic boot--were bad enough, but if Aunt Claire had lost her mind, she was going to be difficult to care for.

'You know, maybe Jeffrey talks about marrying you because we're his family now and he's afraid of losing us. Because his actual family is an awful mother and a stepfather who hates him and a real father who's either dead or never bothered to meet him, and who knows which is worse?
'Maybe,' said Skye.
'What do you mean maybe? I know of what I speak. After all, I'm a writer, and thus understand human emotions.'
'Unless they're yours.'
''Touché.'

He'd been sitting there for such a long time without speaking or moving that the seagulls had decided he was just another boulder, or maybe an odd mound of seaweed. This, then, was what Skye saw as she carefully picked her way--a somber world of pale gray sky and ocean, dark gray rocks, gray-green seaweed, and proud and foolish gulls marching around their newfound boulder. Or was he seaweed? He, at least, added a spot of color, but only with the blue of his shorts and shirt--the rest of him was bleached with sadness and worry--and Skye hoped more than anything that he would be ready to talk to her.

Formatting is a bit askew here, and so also is comments' appearance on LJ. I do get notified, but the comments themselves don't show up anywhere I can see.

My biscuits are baked, I'm ready to go...

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:29:04 GMT

Yes, it's time to log in for MotherReader's Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge and hit the books! I realised I had no nice snacks for afternoon tea sustenance, and decided to make the very easy-sounding Oaty Flying Apron Biscuits from the Flying Apron's Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book, only I didn't read all the way through the recipe and failed to notice that the dough is supposed to chill for at least three hours. Never mind! I have a biscuity, barrish kind of thing which smells lovely and I'm sure will be the perfect tea companion. As will Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks at Point Mouette.

There's still time to consider joining me and the gang -- no prep work needed! Assuming you have books to hand, which is a pretty safe assumption for all readers of this LJ anyway. This year I'll be donating 1Euro per hour reading or per comment received (spam excluded), whichever is greater - up to a limit of €50, to Barnardos. It's not a literacy charity, but it is a children's one, and I'm giving to it because the girls are walking in the Bank Holiday Mini Marathon for Barnardos this weekend. Wish them luck too - and cooler temperatures than the scorching 22° we're having at the moment.

Expertise, please?

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:54:18 GMT

I'm completely and utterly baffled by the publication history - or something - of T.A. Barron's first book of the Great Tree of Avalon trilogy, Child of the Dark Prophecy. It's not even really important, as the book is listed on Amazon as either YA or ages 9-12, so we can definitely include it, but I'm just curious.

When we started looking out for books for our chapter on Arthur, I initially ignored Barron, thinking this series at least was adult. Then Goodreads, ever helpful, showed the trilogy as sometimes tagged YA or children's, and I figured I'd better get a copy. I ended up with the Ace paperback listed here, which has a stepback cover, with blurb from Robert Redford on the outside, a picture of Orlando Bloom as Legolas (only missing some clothing on top and his bow) inside with further blurbs from Isabel Allende and Dr Jane Goodall. This is hardly a book aimed at children, although this edition is listed by Amazon as ages 9 to 12. Inside are pages of quotes -- some longer ones from Redford et al, and one from Robert Coles, another from "William Howarth, Professor of English, Princeton University, and author of Walking with Thoreau". Oh, and one from School Library Journal.

The hardcover, which came out a year earlier, is listed on Amazon as YA, and appears to have many of the same quotes as my paperback edition, though I can't check that thoroughly because only some of the pages are available for looking inside on Amazon (and the books weren't published this side of the Atlantic, as far as I can tell).

So, again, as far as I can tell, Penguin published it first in a children's imprint (Philomel is that, right?) but sent it for review to a bunch of -- Barron admirers? as well as both children's and general review sites - and then a year later decided to publish an adult version, which Amazon just got 'wrong' in its listing? Amazon certainly does get it wrong sometimes, though the information is supposed to come from publishers, surely? Maybe it all only seems confused to me trying to figure it out long after the initial publication(s), and if I saw the hardcover, it would be more obviously marketed at children or teens than it appears to be on Amazon.

As I said, none of this really matters at all, either for our book purposes, or for the good of the reading world. [Do I need to add that I think all adults should be reading children's and YA books? Oh well, as I appear to have done so already...]

Some successes, some irritations and a funeral

Sun, 29 May 2011 16:46:26 GMT

Funeral first. People never cease to amaze me, one way or another. In this case, the amazement is the good sort, as the wife and daughter of the man who had died made it through the funeral without obvious tears. *I* was in tears - not because I knew him that well, but out of sorrow for his wife (who is a lovely woman) and just - you know, funerals. Loss. Grief.

The music was a tiny bit different, in that I haven't heard "Onward, Christian Soldiers" sung for quite some time, and it was the only hymn not explained (as Bindon's favourite, or written by a friend, sort of thing). But we ended with "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind", which was apparently his school song, and was incredibly moving. Church was absolutely full, and we really raised the rafters on "Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire", to fade to a hush on the last words spoken or sung in the service:

O still, small voice of calm,
O still, small voice of calm.

Shortly afterwards, the church was once again buzzing, as we returned to put all the sorted books back out on the pews and tables. Saturday went well overall, and though we were down workers, Becca, Younger Daughter and I were just able to get our books better sorted than ever, and help everyone who wanted help.

This year we had TWO full boxes of Enid Blyton books - making her the winner in the Annual Most Books Here authorial race. It's between Blyton, Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl, pretty much, with the occasional mini-surge for books used in school, like Goodnight Mister Tom and Under the Hawthorn Tree. I was rather dispirited initially by the profusion of the Big Three, the enthusiasm with which people dove into those, while ignoring some other authors, and my failure to find any of my requested books. However, I cheered right up with the pushing of 2 copies of Magicians of Caprona and one of The Merlin Conspiracy, Arthur at the Crossing Places, a Gabrielle Zavin and our two Hilary McKays - and in a very last-minute rescue, The Thief and Queen of Attolia went to a good home with an adult reader.

The kids seemed even cuter than normal this year - I had one little girl walk in the back of the church, go as if magnetized to the box right in front of me, pick up a book and squee over it so hard I thought she might pass out when I showed her two more books by the same author. And the tiny ones passing over their 10 cents like real, big kids were delightful. Y.D. had one little boy ask her how much he could buy with 1 cent. When he showed her his 'cent' it was actually a Euro, and he bellowed out "Dad! The lady said I could get LOTS of books with my money!" in glee. My kind of kid! Y.D. also had a bunch of people (adults) gripe or use a nasty ignoring-finagling combo over the (incredibly cheap) price of books. Not so much my kind of people.

One of the fair organisers fell off a ladder, though I didn't see this, as we were re-boxing leftovers in the church. As he was fine, I can say that you'd have expected a bit more of an understanding of the laws of gravity from a lecturer in engineering! These were not short little ladders, either, as they were taking down the bunting and signs.

When I finally got to bed last night, I was in that too-tired-to-sleep state. Not quite managing to go to sleep, but obviously not really awake either, I kept seeing people come up to me and ask "How much for these books?"

If this is what it feels like 4 WHOLE DAYS BEFORE the fair...

Tue, 24 May 2011 19:39:19 GMT

For those who weren't around the last couple of years, I run the children's bookstall at our church summer fair -- which used to be our church 'fête', and no, I've no idea why the name was changed, unless everyone got sick of the numerous jokes about meeting our fate, as that is how 'fête' is pronounced around here.

Yes, having a bit of trouble getting to the point, for reasons I'll explain after the point!

The point: I will look out for any books anyone requests. (Not limited to children's/YA, but I'm unlikely to have a chance to see all the other ones.)

The caveat: I'm already engaged in the search for hardcover school stories of the Chalet School type, Rosemary Sutcliff, pre-Nick-whassit Jacqueline Wilson, Antonia Forest, and if I find anything valuable, I'll be getting as close to what it's worth as possible for the church.

The other caveat: No point in my getting a heavy hardcover published-in-US (frex) and posting it the US.

The problem this year: Since we moved the fair to the church grounds a few years ago, the books have been in the church itself. Odd idea, but it works surprisingly well. One tricky year there was some service mid-week that we'd to work around, but this year I was relieved to hear there was nothing of the sort. Until a parishioner died last Friday and his funeral was postponed till this coming Friday so family could get here from around the world. The tragedy is the family's, and I certainly am in no way unclear about that. But the thought of not being able to start arranging books in church until Friday midday for a Saturday morning fair is more than a bit terrifying. AND I went down there tonight for the first night of (faux) sorting to find the church locked. I was starting to worry there'd been another, more unexpected death, but when I eventually got hold of someone, it turned out just to have been that they forgot to tell me they weren't working tonight after all. We're off to a rollicking start, aren't we?

Progressive, eh?

Fri, 13 May 2011 21:59:34 GMT

I was sent a link to this upcoming anthology by steepholm, who hadn't really looked at it but thought Becca might be interested. The title, "Fat Girl in a Strange Land" struck me as pretty dubious, but when I looked at it, the whole thing struck me as highly dubious. Especially this: "Fat can’t just be a passing detail of the main character’s physical description." Now, they may think they get points for going on to explain that "Fat shouldn't be the only thing the main character has going on", which, admittedly is highly enlightened of them. /sarcasm But y'know - the idea that being fat MIGHT just merit only a 'passing detail' in describing a character is clearly so far beyond progressive as to pass into the realm of --. What? The truly inconceivable?

News flash for the eds: your 'progressive' sounds pretty damned unprogressive to anyone with the slightest awareness of fat acceptance. Or, I'd have thought, anyone who had more than a bit of cop on. A fabulous anthology is a possibility, but if it happened, it would be despite, rather than because of, the conception as it's worded here.

What's a name?

Tue, 10 May 2011 21:30:36 GMT

I have been useless at posting recently. Pretty useless even at keeping up with other people's posts, but definitely use.less. at doing my own. And now I'm not even back posting with a fun rant. I generally like Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes books quite well, and think they have a lot of very engaging elements. But in The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline there's a bit about 'invalids' that simply has to be challenged. (I'll put it behind a cut, shortly.)

In pleasanter names - the lovely asakiyume, who has one of the nicest RL names I know, sent me a jar of this honey, which is sweet in every way. (Okay, that's pretty cheesy - or corny, if you're in the US - sorry! Cheesy/corny-ness aside, it's the truth.)

And one of the highlights of the year in books has been announced - MotherReader's Sixth (Sixth!!) Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge. I can't wait to start planning the books - with any luck, the new Penderwicks book will arrive in time for it too.

Back to names, Younger Daughter has her last exam tomorrow morning (classical studies - Plato & Roman letter-writers) - it's been a fairly arduous stretch for her. I had a look at index cards she'd done for a module on Athenian drama and Roman comedy, and the Terence plasys were unreal - names were recycled constantly, and trying to keep track of the Pamphilas, Phaedrias (that one's not even a female character) and Philumenas is ridiculously hard. They all seem to have sets of prostitutes, main characters and fathers - though Y.D. says the mothers are at least easy, as they're usually Sostrata. I was very taken with the name Philumena (pronounced, as far as we know, more like voluminous than I'd have expected) and went around saying it for a day.There was a girl in my school named Philomena Mulligan - a name so rhythmic I think even my two will remember it till their dying day.

Enola goes looking for the elderly Florence Nightingale, in order to try to find her landlady, who's been mysteriously kidnapped. She thinks she may be dead, in fact, but on going to the nursing school Nightingale established, is told she never leaves her home. And we get this passage:

"She's, ah, um, she's an invalid?" Bad news, or so I thought, for I knew invalids as peevish, malingering, demanding people who simply chose not to be valid, so to speak. Scarcely a household in upper-class England had not at one time or another suffered under the paradoxical power of the invalid. Many a lady thwarted had taken to her bed for the sake of ordering folk about.

When she finally manages to speak with Florence Nightingale, Enola realises that she's been wrong about her, because she's in fact, a 'rebel' like Enola - taking to her bed in order to avoid the time-wasting that is the daily life of most women of her class. But this does nothing to challenge what Enola has said about invalids, which is downright vicious.

It could be argued that most people reading won't equate Victorian invalids with people today with disabilities, but I simply don't think that's enough to excuse the kind of sweeping, generalised prejudice displayed here. This side of the Atlantic, we may have seen an upsurge in the talk about disability cheats, and people 'lazing' around at the expense of the hard-working in the last year, with David Cameron's attacks, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been a lot of rubbish voiced for many years, into which this diatribe fits all too neatly.

Alternates (of Days and Histories)

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:33:58 GMT

Well, last week was a bit of a write-off, and this weekend was brought down by a crashing headache yesterday. But today I was all set to accomplish everything. Yes, everything! Only then I got a text from Younger Daughter asking me to keep her updated on the DART (Dublin train ) situation, which I had only been dimly aware of because I'd just heard the tinny sounds of an announcement when out in the back garden. The website said that the service was suspended between Dun Laoghaire and here (or possibly between Dun Laoghaire and the city centre) because of a 'security alert', and Y.D. replied with one word text 'Bomb!' Everything's running again now, but trying to find out more than the fact that a suspicious object had been found on the tracks and the army's bomb disposal unit called in took up a good chunk of time and mental energy. (There should be more news to come, as they're now saying it was believed to have been a 'viable' device.)

Then, Doug, the dog in the userpic, had some kind of emotional crisis, precipitated by -- whatever. It was seriously sad though - for over an hour he was a panting, unable-to-settle, trying to climb into my hair, onto my neck, and generally all over me mess. He was so upset I couldn't get any computer work done, so instead I sat with him on the sofa trying to (re)read The Explosionist with sticky flags for the History Project.

Haven't finished the reread, but have got enough to have reminded myself of some things that are really puzzling me, and so wanted to throw out a few thoughts - or vague approximation of same - about alternate histories.
The Explosionist gives every indication of being a straight 'what-if' alternate history. The author's note at the back describes the world as having 'split off from our own when Napoleon beat Wellington at the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815'. Fair enough, and so is the consequent 'Hanseatic League' of northern European states, which includes Scotland, but not England, which fell to Europe during the Great War (roughly the same as our World War I, but lasted longer). But if the Battle of Waterloo is the point at which this world split off from ours, surely only *we* would be aware of this - or is that a false assumption? I've been thinking about this since reading how the protag feels nobody could be uninterested in modern European history, because 'Every one of the abuses and atrocities that filled the daily papers could be traced back to the fatal day in 1815 when Napoleon defeated Wellington and slaughtered the British forces at Waterloo.' Hmmm. I mean, it reads like a very awkward infodump rather than the real thoughts of a schoolgirl in this world. But I've been trying to get beyond that, and I have remembered way back in my own school history days, and being taught that the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Risings had -- essentially -- changed the course of history. There wasn't the amount of popular support for the rising one might have expected, but after the slow drip of executions, including the shooting of James Connolly, too injured to stand, opinion changed quite significantly. (Of course, Yeats said all this in poetry, in "Easter, 1916".)

Still, if one were to look at the events of today in the North, one would rather say that they're consequences of the whole history of British 'involvement' in Ireland, and never that everything can be traced back to the day on which, say, Connolly was shot. There are other problems even aside from this one quote anyway - for example, the telephone was invented by Aleksandr Tolstoy Bell, 'son of an eminent Scottish educator of the deaf and his glamorous Russian wife'. Or the protag's saying she likes talking about 'the theology of Count Tolstoy, the novels of Richard Wagner, the verse of Albert Einstein, or the operas of James Joyce'. I don't need to expand on how this has gone wrong, even if it's intended in a jokey manner. More significantly - far more significantly, I think - is the fact that despite the author's note, and all the exposition that's gone on, it's on page 238 that we suddenly find out (again through a school lesson) that the American War of Secession would have been won by the Northerners and the United States of America would still exist as a single entity if Delaware, with its munitions factories, hadn't joined the Southern cause.

Of course, another thing that's different about this world is that spiritualism - while still filled with charlatans - is true, in the sense that it's scientifically possible to communicate with the dead in a variety of ways. I actually quite enjoyed the excitement about new technology in the book, but it's still a difference in worlds that seems relatively unconsidered in the author's 'What if?' exploration. A similar thing struck me on reading the second Enola Holmes book: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady - while working on the whole Holmesian mindset and world, in this one 'mesmerism' - pooh-poohed by Enola as trickery - is shown to be completely effective in at least one case. As in a person totally under the control of another, and forced into slavery that is almost unbreakable. Again, I just don't quite see how this fits in with the world that's been established for the book, which is decidedly not a supernatural one, although it is unrealistic in the sense of being high adventure.

On the other hand, the time travel I mentioned a while ago, Dark Mirror, by M.J. Putney, presents, not an alternate history, but one in which an unlikely occurrence of 'real' history, with significant consequences, is given a supernatural cause. The unlikely occurrence in this case is the very much calmer-than-normal weather for the time of year, which allowed so many to be rescued in the evacuation of Dunkirk. It's not said to be enough to win the war, but rescuing so many of the Allied forces is, obviously, seen as having potentially had a pivotal role in the outcome of the war. What's rather pleasing, I think, is that it's not some good history fairy who brings the teens from the 1800s into their future to save the day, but a teen from the 1940s who has some magical ability himself and has met the heroine when she accidentally time travelled.

If The Explosionist is a counterfactual alternate history (or is supposed to be one), and something like Sorcery and Cecelia plays on the existence of magic's not changing history, I wonder what the word would be for what Dark Mirror is? A concurrfactual sounds like something a cat would hack up. Maybe it's really more like grouting between tiles. Or a dry-stone wall. The history is the wall which stands without mortar, but filling in the bits with a bit of fantasy time-travel doesn't shift the stones as it would in a counterfactual. I don't think this description will be taken up by critics somehow, but I like it nonetheless.

Timing IS everything

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:33:43 GMT

- Coincidentally, Sunday was both Mother's Day *and* Younger Daughter's 21st birthday. I had planned a post with a meltingly cute picture of Y.D. as a baby, and a bit of (strictly non-sentimental) a word about how awesome she is, while spending time reassuring her that the day should obviously be more about her birthday than Mother's Day. Becca, as she does, threw herself into both celebrations with enormous enthusiasm. Despite feeling rather awful from lunchtime on. Luckily we'd decided not to go out for dinner, because by then she was sick as a dog, and everyone was feeling bad for everyone else.

- I finally finished a cardigan I've been knitting for a while, done in a delightfully sheepy yarn, which is warm as can be - and yesterday it got up to 19° (66 in F). However, when I went in to look for buttons for it the other day, I got pulled into This Is Knit's forcefield, and came home with a lovely organic cotton for a summer hat for Y.D., which will probably cause the return of winter.

- I made a gingerbread-ish loaf from Flying Apron's book - Pumpkin Glory loaf is the name (I added the ginger, as it seemed to require it!), and it turned out very tasty but huge. Huge. Of course the next day was the first time I've seen a gluten-free, vegan (for dairy-free) baked goodie in Cornucopia that wasn't pure chocolate - how could I fail to reward them, and the universe! - for offering me such a delight by enjoying it?

- In GOOD timing, though, everyone who saw the video of the amazingly cheerful dog being rescued off the floating debris a mile out to sea, 3 weeks after the tsunami, will be delighted to know she's been reunited with her owner, who saw the video on the news.

And in the book-related sphere, I recently read Dark Mirror by M.J. Putney (the well-known romance writer Mary Jo Putney), an historical time travel in which the protagonist goes from 1803 to 1940. It's not a book I'd rave about in itself, but the time travel is fascinating, and much more successful than my last-but-one history fail book.