Hops, News and Awards

Friday is for blog hopping! I imagine white rabbits with numbers taped to their backs like jockeys hopping though the blogosphere knocking at rose trellised, faded green doors and hopping into cosy rooms where books, tea and chocolate are laid out in expectation.

I have discovered wonderful, wonderful blogs over the last few weeks. Readers and writers: readers who write and writers who read, reviewers who write and reviewers who read--it is heaven for people who enjoy living in a culture of words. There are readers reading Hardy, Bronte, Tolstoy, Keats. Readers reading historical fiction, literary fiction, chick lit, sci fi lit, ya lit, mg lit, classic lit, and poetry. It is a lovely way to sail through the trees on swings built of language.

So, news. After changing my ticket seven times I am flying home to Hawaii. No one there believes that I will actually turn up. I seem to have become the girl who cried 'plane ticket'. But I am going as I have to have my author photo taken--yikes. From what I gather for the author photo I: do not smile, do look friendly, don't wear white, do wear something I am comfortable in, do not wear a sundress, do wear shoes, do look at the camera, do not look too serious, do look professional. Umm. How does a person who does like sun dresses and does not like photos manage this? Tuesday is the big day. Will let you know how it goes!

And happily, Sarah, at the wonderful "Loving Books" blog (http://always-books.blogspot.com/) gave me an award! The Prolific Blogger Award!

A prolific blogger is one who is intellectually productive, keeping up an active blog with enjoyable content. After accepting this award, recipients are asked to pass it forward to seven other deserving blogs.

Yipee! Thank you Sarah! And if you have not visited Sarah's lovely blog: hop hop right away!

Seven blogs I love...

bibliophiliac at http://bibliophiliac-bibliophiliac.blogspot.com/
She has the most wonderful posts about Keats's heartbreakingly beautiful broken poetry.

Carin at http://carolinebookbinder.blogspot.com/
This wonderful woman has tried so hard to teach me to link properly and as you can see I am failing miserably. A former Editorial Assistant her take on books and the publishing world is fascinating.

Missy B at http://missysbooknook.blogspot.com/
Her reviews are incisive, personal and beautifully written and the elfin drawings on her blog will make you happy every time.

Lindy Lou Mac at http://lindyloumacbookreviews.blogspot.com/
From Alice in Wonderland posters in Hong Kong to wonderfully written reviews, her blog is always fun.

Mademoiselle Poirot at http://mademoiselle-poirot.blogspot.com/
Her delicately wrought photographs feel like breakfast in Paris.

Grad at http://thecuriousreader.blogspot.com/
She loves letters and Wolf Hall and that is so much more than enough for me!

Faith E. Hough at http://faithehough.blogspot.com/
Read her post about the brilliant, brilliant Oscar Wilde.

Hop, white rabbits! Hop!

Mothers Day

I have been thinking about Mother's Day. My mother loves to read. I have never met anyone who reads like she does. She reads six books at once, cross references, looks up, Googles, consults the gigantic, antique pulpit dictionary that stands in her study, laughs out loud, keeps a Jane Austen novel in her purse, remembers, re-reads, looks more up, finishes a book, starts a book, waits patiently while the animals sleep on the books and then reads some more. It is an extraordinary thing to watch my mother read.

She reads to music. There is always music in our house. My family is musical. Well, my mother and brother and sometimes my sister are musical. I am not. There is always music. As she reads she will stop and hold absolutely still to hear as Butterfly dies in Puccini's opera, the Count apologizes at the end of Figaro, Tosca kills Scarpia or Colline sings goodbye to his coat. She will play the trio of Rosenkavalier back to back twelve times and then re-read the history of Strauss. When I get into the car and discover the CD player volume is turned all the way up I know my mother was the last to drive the car.

My mother taught me to write. All along this funny, twisty, larkspur lane that has brought me to writing she has been in the background. When we were in the mountains in India my mother understood that we had to walk the long walk to the bazaar to get the next Nancy Drew because The Crumbling Wall had coughed up the clue sooner than expected. We were allowed to stay up all night reading. She knew it was important for me to find out if Scarlett ever wins Ashley and it just couldn't wait until tomorrow. A former professional editor, she would carefully sift my writing with ferocious, kind, precision, helping me to pull through the strongest threads. Looking back on it now I marvel at her patience. She wanted my fourth grade twenty-two page report on Sparta to be well written rather than just finished. "Is that what you really mean to say?" "Sort of." "Would you like to say it again?" and off we would go. I hear myself asking that exact question of my students in that exact cadence.

Once we could write our own papers she would try to stay up with us but fall asleep on the end of the bed with the dog. "So you don't feel like you are the only person awake in the world." She edited my novel. She is up to ears in research for the next one. She is endlessly fascinated by good stories and the people who tell them, write them, sing them, paint them, run them, dress them, and live them. It is an amazing way to read.

Letters

I love reading letters. It is a shockingly invasive idea if you think about it. I would not want anyone who did not already love me very much to go through my email 'Sent' box. I am not big on grammar in my emails. I do not always take the time to say exactly what I mean. An outsider reading my email written to a close friend or family member would not be able to make sense of the fragmented jumble of tangled references. An outsider reading an email from me to my mother would think I was a repetitive, unlettered but affectionate loon.

Letter writing is no longer an art. Correspondence is not something we make room for in our day. We squish lopsided, frothy emails into whatever negative space is left after we finish doing what we really need to do. The email often just reports the doing.

Rebecca. I remember reading about the Second Mrs. de Winter's first morning at Manderley. Du Maurier was wonderful about giving this sad, loving character just enough obstacles to trip over. The Second Mrs. de Winter did not know the routine of the house and so went to the Library. But the fire was lit in the Morning Room. Rebecca always went to the Morning Room after breakfast to do her correspondence. I imagined letters written at an efficiently organized, slender legged desk on stationery embossed with her long sloping "R". That normality of Rebecca's routine shows the shift in the twentieth century away from penmanship, skill, effort in letter writing.

My father writes in a beautiful slanting script with a heavy fountain pen. He takes fountain pens very seriously. I would have no idea how to write with a fountain pen. Virginia Woolf threw fire lit arrows of possessive prose out to her lover, Vita Sackville West. F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters to Zelda. Antoine de St. Exupery's letters to his wife, his rose. Byron's letters to his sister. Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne. Napoleon's letters to Josephine. They reek of thought, love, effort and artistry. Mmm. Must try that sometime.

Monday Reading

It is Monday and I am reading two wonderful novels, two wonderful poets, two wonderful research books and two wonderful books I have already read but seem to keep picking up. It is a week in twos.

The novels:

Jude Morgan's Passion: genius. Lyric, thickly layered genius. Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, Byron (I always forget he had a club foot), Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley (but as she has not met Shelley yet she is Mary Godwin), the Duchess of Devonshire, the Prince Regent, the French Revolution and Fanny Brawne have all taken the stage.

The other novel, Victoria Hislops's The Return is waiting in the wings. I read her first book, The Island. It is an unexpected mix of Greece, WWII, true love, community, isolation, and leprosy. It gripped me in a way I did not see coming. The lovable but not terribly well stocked Borders is the only option on the island where I live. Amazon will fly over the seas and find you but I like to pick up a book, meet it, weigh it, read it before I buy it. Our Borders often nudges you, with its dwindling stock, to read books you would not otherwise try. Often, as in the case of The Island, I have been very glad.

Poets:

Auden: always. I memorize two poems a month. It is a practice left over from college. At least six times a year, it is Auden.

Zbignew Herbert: another favorite. 'London Rain' is a never ending web of intricate, doubled over thought. You will find you are chasing your tail in the most wonderful way.

Already Reads:

Mistress of the Revolution by Catherine Delors. This book picked up ferocious steam in the third third. It yanked all the long ago laid down tracks together and built a thundering highway of an ending.

Glass of Time by Michael Cox. I find I am haunted by this man's Victorian, ghostly, ivy covered book. The atmosphere of it crawls and creeps and comes looking for you--as all Victorian Gothic novels worth their salt should do.

"Worth one's salt" by the way is a pre 900ad phrase that refers to the practice of paying Roman soldiers in "salarium" or allowance to buy salt.

Saturday Morning in Paris

Yesterday, the lovely Mademoiselle Poirot--who has a beautiful blog that is charming enough to make you feel as though you have just wandered through an early morning flower market in London and then zipped over the Channel to return to your Monmartre artist garret for breakfast--gave me a lovely sunny award! Her blog makes me want to get up early, buy an antique iron bedframe, eat macaroons from Laduree and put summer pink cabbage roses in pale green watering cans. Don't you love that?

Hopalong Friday

You really can't beat square dancing books with feet. I love the Friday Blog Hop, hosted by the wonderful Jennifer at Crazy-for-Books.com. In the last few weeks I have met bloggers who read everything, write everything and review everything--so much fun!

My blog is a little bit of reading--I read everything from classics to chick lit, a little bit of writing--my first novel comes out next winter and I am working on my second, both historical fiction, a little bit of reviewing--although much less organized and routine than some of the amazing blogs I have visited recently, and a little bit of the mad adventurous scramble of the everyday.

So on Fridays I hop down the rabbit hole and meet wonderful bloggers who read and write beautifully!

New Book Thursday

Don't some days feel longer than others? I don't mean individual days but a Tuesday is always less substantial for me than a Thursday. I am sure this is some leftover remnant of my schedule in middle school when a Thursday was a heftier day than a lightweight Tuesday or a half day Wednesday.

Whatever the case I tend to start new things on Thursdays: chapters, characters, new books, pilates classes, haircuts, new shoes--all work better on a spacious, endless Thursday. Today the new stuff includes writing a new thread in The Second Book, walking in the outdoors after being sick in bed all week, trying a new fruit combination for my smoothie (strawberry, pineapple, lemonade), and starting a new novel, well an old novel that I loved but have been wanting to reread and can now that I have forgotten it all--Jude Morgan's Passion.

Don't you love when you forget a book just enough to discover it all over again? It is like rediscovering the perfect pair of jeans in the back of your closet. I also recycleTwilight and old episodes of The West Wing just like this.

Passion is a lush imagining of the women behind the Romantic poets. Beginning in the turbulent Europe of 1789 it unfolds in rich, unbridled prose. I love books that weave around existing facts and paint a story that might have happened. Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley appear and disappear but the story is for the women. In terms of character, it is woven on a huge frame. I love that it is an expansive novel. I can move in and make camp. Love that.

The Passion and the Prose

"Only Connect" is one of my favorite epigraphs of all time. It is loose, chewy and simple, like crusty Italian bread. I love epigraphs. It is the little look through the keyhole, illuminating and distilling what the author wants you to see most. The moral, the heart, the center, the strength is always in the epigraph. It is sign and signifier at once.

When I was at Mount Holyoke, I was taught by a wonderful, wonderful poet. He was a celebrated, eccentric, genius, lovable, Russian Nobel Laureate, but more than anything else he was shot through with magic. After reciting a poem by Frost or Hardy or Cavafy or his beloved Auden, he would lean on the back of his chair and ask, "What is it all about?".

In prose, the epigraph always always hold the seeds to what it is all about. The epigraph to his own heartbreakingly well crafted essays is taken from Czeslaw Milosz's haunting 'Elegy for N.N.'. Once you meet that poem, you will keep it with you always. It begins "Tell me if it is too far for you" and traces a journey across the world that one lover did not take to meet another. The epigraph my professor used was "And the heart does not die when one thinks it should". It is an echoing, weighted truth.

In any book, I always read the epigraph first and last. 'Only Connect' hints at strung together depths to come and then after you have read Forster's geniuns novel, it means so much more.

Good Things on Monday

What am I reading? It is a funny mix of reading, researching, teaching, rereading and nosing through but not quite reading.

Teaching: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Matilda by Roald Dahl

Reading: Beautiful People by Wendy Holden, An Outrageous Affair by Penny Vincenzi

Nosing: Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell

Rereading: Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Book Notes: I am really enjoying the swift moving, no nonsense but tons of fun pace of Beautiful People. She is a really good example of 'show don't tell' writing, which I enjoy. I have been circling Claude and Camille at the bookstore but am loath to buy as it is hardback and the sun+sand+salt+damp equation of Hawaii is not kind to hardbacks. Instead I picked up Luncheon of the Boating Party to visit the same period through Renoir's eyes as opposed to Monet's. It is a lovely, subtle, summery book that makes you remember to love the loveliness of the Impressionists and takes you to the banks of the Seine on a June afternoon.


Other Good Things:

I figured out how to put the 'What Are You Reading Mondays' button on my post!

The utterly sweet Maybe Tomorrow blog gave me an award!

Well this I am choosing to see as good. I got a flu which went seriously on the boil last night (not a good thing) and I did not get on the plane at the very last minute. The bags were packed, the plane was leaving in four hours, I had a window seat, my dear friend Matt was all set to pick me up from the airport and then--nothing. Instead, raging fever, Theraflu and The Bourne Ultimatum with my boyfriend who is also sick. At least we are in it together--that is a good thing, isn't it?

Traveling

Books. Shoes. Books. Shoes. Going to Hawaii--books win. The current Hawaiian Airlines baggage restrictions are very irritating when I am endeavoring to travel with a small library of books. Books for the first novel (galleys arrive next month), books for the Second Novel (sooo many books), books to read next, books to read now, books I have already read but cannot quite bear to leave, books to teach, first book for the plane and second book for the plane in case I have a gigantic delay and finish first book. I always feel like I need a deep bench when I travel.

Airport security is going to think I am nuts.