Books Read: May 2011

FICTION

The Alpine Christmas (Mary Daheim).   Third in the mystery series featuring newspaper owner Emma Lord in small-town Washington.  Quirky, well-developed characters and a great sense of place.

A Cold Day for Murder (Dana Stabenow).  First in the mystery series set in remote Alaska.  Former park ranger Kate Shugak is drawn into an investigation of missing rangers.  Gripping.

Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons).  Delightfully wacky, enduring tale of Flora Poste’s efforts to bring sense and order to the gloomy residents of Starkadder farm.

Five on a Treasure Island (Enid Blyton)

Five Go Adventuring Again (Enid Blyton)  I like to revisit my childhood favorites from time to time.  Three siblings, their cousin, and her dog have unlikely adventures, both of these set in Cornwall.  There’s an island.  What can I say – they’re not very well-written, but I love islands, and kids having fun-filled adventures on islands. 

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette (Jeanne Birdsall).   Third in the charmingly old-fashioned books about the Penderwick sisters, this time creating fun and a little havoc on a Maine vacation.

Requiem for a Mezzo (Carola Dunn).  A murdered opera star keeps 1920s heroine Daisy Dalrymple busy.

The Winter Garden Mystery (Carola Dunn).  More Daisy Dalrymple, solving crimes with aplomb among the well-heeled in 1920s Britain.

Sketch Me If You Can (Sharon Pape).  Police sketch artist solves crime with help from a 100+-year-old ghost.  Definitely different.  Enjoyable, though not strong enough make me continue with the series.

NONFICTION

North with the Spring (Edwin Way Teale).  Naturalist Teale and his wife Nellie travel 17,000 miles by car from Florida to Maine following the season in this companionable adventure with nature.

Wandering Through Winter (Edwin Way Teale).  The winter trip across country with Teale and his wife, who always find something intriguing to tell us about in the landscape, the animals, and the people who love nature.

I'd Rather Be Here...

The Oregon Coast...sigh.  Friends just returned from Newport, where they reported tens of thousands of Common Murres in a breeding colony on the rocks by Yaquina Head Lighthouse.  Sigh.  They stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, where each room is dedicated to an author (and suitably decorated).  They had the F.Scott Fitzgerald room.

Birds.  Books.  Beaches.  The only thing missing to make this my idea of heaven is a wiener dog or two!

Oh, and yes, that's my work -- watercolor study done in a class taught by Molly Hashimoto, whose wonderful blog is listed here -- right over there on your right.  She's a great teacher and her art is fabulous.  Go check it out!

Currently Reading

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, published 1932.
"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic, and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."

North with the Spring, Edwin Way Teale, published 1951.
Teale, a naturalist, and his wife Nellie travel 17,000 by car from the tip of Florida to the northern Maine woods during the three months of Spring.  Teale is a companionable writer who pays great attention to landscape, animal and plant life, and the people who love nature. 

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, Jeanne Birdsall, published 2011.
If you haven't met the Penderwicks yet, you are in for a treat.  Start with The Penderwicks, which introduced four sisters who are experts at having old-fashioned fun using their imaginations, and in getting into exciting spots of trouble and adventure which always have wonderful outcomes.  The second book is The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, and the one I'm now reading is the third. 

What are you reading?

The MacKenzie Scale of Things That Truly Matter

Here are some random things which happened over the past 48 hours:

1.       The sun came out in Seattle. 

2.       Two Mariners-Indians games got rained out in Cleveland.

3.       Two Red-breasted Nuthatches visited my bird feeder.

4.       My friend Connie and I sat on our camp stools by the alder grove at the Union Bay Natural Area and chatted amiably while watching Yellow-rumped Warblers, Black-capped Chickadees, Bewick’s Wrens, and American Goldfinches forage for their breakfast.

5.       I took my dogs into the University Bookstore where they were universally admired.   I was pleased to see that my fantasy novel, which was published last September, was still prominently displayed by one of the registers, and that the number of copies had decreased since the last time I was in there.

6.       I went for a swim.

7.       I read a lot.  The books I read all existed in a thoroughly three-dimensional fashion.

8.       While trimming the plants back from the house, I noticed how lovely my garden is right now, with forget-me-nots and johnny-jump-ups blanketing the ground.

9.       A gazillion and one people self-published their novels electronically, priced them at 99 cents, and went on publicity rampages all over blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

Okay, now guess which of these items I paid the most attention to, the ones which were important to my life, my well-being, and my continued sanity.  And now guess which one wasn’t.

Yeah, you got that right.  Of course, I also spent nearly zero time anywhere near a computer over the weekend.  Now that I’m back here online, I see Item #9 everywhere again.  But lo! I have the power of the Delete Key, and the ability to avoid URLs at my very whim.

So, despite my earlier post in which I bemoaned the rise of 99-cent e-books, I have decided to ignore them.  They are not important to me.  Not in any way, shape, or form.   Birds and dogs and gardens and friends are important.   Books and writing are important.  The virtual world is about as important to me as dust bunnies.  I can’t see them, but I know they’re there, and that they are annoying.   But I don’t have to fret over them, because on the MacKenzie Scale of Things That Truly Matter, they aren’t really item number 9 – they are well and truly item number 9,999,999,999.

Meanwhile, go read this post about what it means to be a professional writer.  One clue:  it's not about how great your blog is.

Always Talk to Strangers

I swear that at heart I’m shy and antisocial and can tolerate only select people in short doses.  Yet in much the same way that a cat makes a beeline for the one person in a crowd who is violently allergic, I am afflicted by total strangers desiring to talk to me.  I feel like a bartender without a bar.

Despite my best attempts to project Cool Indifferent Aloofness to Others, total strangers often initiate chats with me at bus stops, in stores, at parks, pretty much any and everywhere.  I’m not talking about those short, meaningless interactions where folks comment on the weather, the lateness of the bus, or the rising gas prices.  Yes, those happen.  But more often than seems reasonably probable, people start telling me all about their lives.  Seriously.  It happened again a few days ago, when a technician came to repair my internet service at home. 

By the end of the 30-minute service call, during which he also repaired the connection, thank goodness, I learned that this fellow had served in the military spying out submarines ala “Hunt for Red October”, had lived in Japan for 20 years (and I learned a whole lot about his views of their culture vs American culture), had married a Japanese woman, had two grown kids, was going through a divorce because she left him for another woman (see what I mean?  Bartender talk!), that he loved animals and had three dogs and a pet snake, and that he considered himself a pagan. 

Whew.  And I’m telling you, this is not an unusual occurrence for me.  I used to consider it highly annoying (see above re: “shy” and “antisocial”), but now I realize how incredibly useful it is for writing fiction.  You can struggle for days trying to create an intriguing character or plot point out of whole cloth – or, you can think, “Hm.  Maybe my protagonist is a snake-loving divorced pagan who spots an enemy sub where it ought not to be.”  Though on the other hand, I’m not sure how believable such an outlandish character would be, no matter how much he was based on the truth.

All in all, it’s probably a fine thing that people insist on speaking to me against my will.  Writers should cultivate the fine art of talking to strangers.  You can pick up nuances of speech patterns, physical habits, opinions, et cetera that you might not normally encounter if you only stick to people you know.  And those nuances can make your characters more colorful. 

So don’t stick to the folks you know for inspiration.  Go out and talk to strangers – or if you’re as incredibly affable-looking as I apparently am, let them come to you!

Past Perfect

Why write historical fiction?  I'll give you one big advantage to it:  no cell phones!

Seriously, my first novel, though a fantasy, was set in contemporary Britain, and by the time I'd managed to find a publisher, the technology of "contemporary" had changed.  Did I need to go back through the whole manuscript searching for places where my characters were likely to use cell phones (or rather, since it's British, "mobiles"), which came into widespread use after I wrote it?  Would that change any of the characters' actions?  In the end, I opted not to, since it would have driven me crazy.

Thus my second book, happily set in 1921, where things are what they were and no editor can come along later and say, "Gee, shouldn't your police officer be using a Taser to subdue the criminal?  Get with the times!"

Sure, you have to do a ton of research.  That's fine.  I didn't get a college degree in Art History for nothing.  I remember how it works.  You read a whole bunch of stuff -- primary sources comprising the bulk -- and you take a bunch of notes.  Librarians are your best friends.  The research is fun and easy compared to the hard part.  The hard part is seamlessly weaving that background into...well...the background.  You don't want it to show too hard.  Historical fiction that dumps pages of information on the reader are boring.  Don't tell us how the radio stations got going, who set up the first one in Seattle, or the technical details you spent hours writing down at the library.  Get the characters involved -- how does the radio affect them?  In Seattle Sleuth, I had my character Helen complain to her husband that listening to the nasty-sounding newfangled radio would ruin the lovely evenings when she used to play the piano for him instead.  Enough said.

And I never had to fret over whether the radio would be outdated by the time the book found a publisher.  Whew.

If you write stories set in contemporary times, do you worry about the details becoming outdated before it's published?  I read a "contemporary" mystery recently and wondered at one point why a character didn't just call a person on her cell phone, and then checked the pub date -- it was 1992.  Sigh.  Are these things moving too fast for writers to bother worrying about? 

As for me, I'll just stick to the 1920s for now.