My New England "LiteraTOUR"

Well, we did it! Husband Steve and I took our little Tab trailer, bikes, and two-seater kayak across the country and found the roots of some of my favorite American authors I've been reading lately in my Lifetime Reading Plan. We went almost 7,000 miles in 3 weeks. The leaves were just changing and the weather was balmy (although a bit unseasonably warm and humid at times. Luckily we have AC in the Tab).

When we got home one of my first thoughts was of my Little Free Library and how to share my  experiences. So I decided to use my book bin to highlight treasures from my New England "litera-tour." (Don't I have a nice husband to take me on wild-goose chases while listening to me read aloud and rave on? He did this for me when we spent some time in England, too, which I should write about later.)

This was a long-dreamed-about trip, but actually came to be on the spur of the moment. We decided to do it only two days before we left. This was because we had to get to the Value Voters Summit in Washington D. C. in five days. Our daughter and her family live near there and we always fly and stay with her for this conference which we have attended every year since it started 11 years ago. At the last minute we decided to combine everything into one road trip.

Beyond getting to Maryland to our daughter's house our plans were not concrete. It was more like me saying, Hey, do you think we can go to Orchard House or Walden Pond? And my husband saying, Sure! It ended up being more than I ever dreamed.

The conference was very good (Matt Walsh had me at C.S. Lewis), we took in Shenendoah's gorgeous Skyline Drive one day with our family, and then said goodbye and headed north-ish. (We saw a lot on this trip, as in Niagara Falls, but for the purpose of this post I will highlight the author sites.) Pulling into the Minuteman campground near Concord, Massachusettes, hidden in a beautiful forest of tall trees, we unhooked the Tab and headed for perhaps the most author-dense pinprick in the nation.

First up, Orchard House, plain and brown, where Louisa May Alcott lived and where she based Little Women. We enjoyed a nice tour of the house which included a lot about U.S. history and Louisa's family and life. Little Women came to life. I must read it again keeping in mind how autobiographical it really is. We stayed a couple hours and then took to our bikes on the nearby Minuteman trail for several miles. Next, the Old Manse, across the street from Orchard House, so named by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose book Mosses From an Old Manse I had read less than a year ago and so loved. This creaky 300-year-old house once belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose glorious writings I also read recently, who invited Hawthorne to stay. I was invited to play a few bars on the parlor grand piano and saw these great writers' rooms and views from their windows, even love-poem etchings on the window glass done by Hawthorne's wife with her diamond ring. I soaked in as much as I could of the times and souls and thoughts that had passed through that house. We didn't have time to tour Wayside House nearby, where Alcott, Hawthorne, and a little later, Margaret Sidney (who wrote The Five Little Peppers series) lived. But we weren't done with Concord yet.

September 19 dawned very muggy and wet, the very day we planned to visit Thoreau's Walden Pond. I had read Walden not long ago and found it spiritual and moral and uplifting, perhaps contrary to the purely granola way it is represented today. Ever since I read it I have tried, as Thoreau advised, to appreciate the sunrise/sunset as one thing that can be relied upon to help keep hold of one's sanity. I also use wonderful quotes from him on my Blue Hill Books bookmarks. "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention." And "Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage."

Thoreau being in a state of mourning at the death of his brother, Emerson offered his land as a retreat. Thoreau decided to build a tiny cabin, write, and live off the land, which he did for two years. The original cabin is long gone, but a charming facsimile has been constructed, as per his detailed description in Walden. And rain or not, after we delightedly learned that the pond (part of the state park) is available for recreational use, we went to the pond (which is more like a lake) and launched the kayak. Even in the rain the verdant, isolated place felt blessedly serene. We had it practically all to ourselves except for a few intrepid swimmers. After rowing its circumference, I decided to

take a swim myself. The rain had abated, the air was warm, the water was only a bit cool, and I swam the half mile across with Steve rowing the kayak alongside. See what I mean about better than I ever dreamed? Can soaking up the atmosphere of the place get any better than swimming in quiet soft glassy cool Walden Pond?

Due to intermittent tour hours we missed seeing the inside of the stately white Emerson house, where he also lived, but walked around the charming gardens. Next was Concord Museum where we saw Thoreau's green desk and so many other interesting things that we were late checking out of our campground and had to pay a late fee!

On to Hartford, Connecticut. We had been to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's childhood home, years before, but since viewing Ken Burns's wonderful documentary, I really wanted to see the big fancy house Samuel Clemens built for himself and his beloved family when he finally settled down.

Set downtown on a bit of a hill, surrounded by towering leafy trees, what a dark house it is, a man's house I'd say, with dark walls, dark floors, dark furnishings, dark staircases, dark carved embellishments and, among some white marble sculptures, even dark works of art. They had the lighting set as if gas-lit as per the times, and I felt I was going a bit blind. Even the children's schoolroom was dark and full of dark furniture, toys, and books. The children's bedrooms were lighter and sunnier. (Sorry, no photos were allowed inside.)

Twain's third-floor man-cave fit him to a T, with its billiard table and masculine writing desk and accoutrements. His happiest family times and most productive writing took place in this house. But I felt its darkness was an omen of the sadness that was to come. He failed financially because of speculations in a printing machine, had to leave the house, worked hard to make back his fortune by lecturing around the world, and outlived his cherished wife and all but one of his four beloved children. The museum next door was the biggest, fanciest museum I've ever seen built for one man. Did you know that in his time he was the most famous American on earth? I have a goal to read everything he wrote. So far I've read and reread: Tom, Huck, Joan, Yankee, Prince, Pudd'nhead, and some stories. Innocents Abroad, here I come.

Next door was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe's house. Here was the little woman who started the big war, as Lincoln put it, by writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. We were running out of time and did not take the house tour, but wandered the gardens a bit. At least we had visited the Harriet Tubman house just days before in Auburn, New York--what a great tour and lecture they have there.

My husband made a valiant effort to get us to Sunnyside House, the home of Washington Irving in Tarrytown, New York, but when we finally got there a scary woman in the back of a truck loading up garden refuse warned us off. It was closed on Wednesdays! I think I'll read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow again anyway. Somehow it fits.

So there's our New England Literatour.  I've stuffed my special book bin in my little library with books from these great authors. As soon as we got home I read a thin volume of Louisa May Alcott's short stories. What beautiful writing and how firm her foundation in goodness. Remember, what we read matters. Be careful what you feed your mind!

Books are the best of things, well used: abused, among the worst. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Great Tales of Ships, Seas, and Islands

Ahoy mates! I have had a little lending library breakthrough! I like to have special collections in my library but it takes a while to collect up enough books on a certain theme to fill it up. So . . . I thought of having a book bin inside the library that contains the collection (it fits up to 15-20 books) while the rest of the box is stuffed full with all sorts of other good books. It's much more doable and offers more variety. Yay!

My new collection is one that I have been excitedly working on:  great books about ships, seas, and islands. Here are my titles on hand, all great reads:

The Odyssey
Gulliver's Travels
Robinson Crusoe
The Voyage of the Beagle
Treasure Island
The Old Man and the Sea
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Billy Budd
Moby Dick
Lord of the Flies
The Swiss Family Robinson
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Sea Wolf
Life of Pi
A Night to Remember
Mutiny on the Bounty
The Borrowers Afloat
The Cay

That's all I can squeeze into my bin for now. Meanwhile I am scanning my local thrift stores for copies to lend of these additional favorites:
A High Wind in Jamaica
Blue Skin of the Sea
The Island of the Colorblind

On my personal want-to-read list are:
Master and Commander
Horatio Hornblower
Two Years Before the Mast

Summer is a great time to weigh that anchor and set sail, bookwise!

The Mind Eclectic

It seemed like a good time to again take inventory of the books on my night stand (that is, the books I’m currently in the middle of reading). I had to laugh. This could be one of the most multifarious assortments of books for one person to be reading at the same time ever.

Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Ramona and Her Father by Beverly Cleary
Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne Du Maurier


I mean! Could any stack of books be more unlike?

The Voyage of the Beagle is for Classics Club. So far I am pleasantly surprised, although it doesn’t seem to hurt to do some skimming. It’s essentially a travelogue of an early nineteenth century South American sea voyage by an enthusiastic amateur naturalist who colorfully describes everything from the cowboy Gaucho life to octopi to rocky salt caches. I am keeping my humongous atlas and magnifying glass handy so I can see where he is and pick up a little much-needed geography knowledge on this voyage. (Next is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species which I am not real excited about—much as many people insist on still taking his theory as fact, it’s been disproved by the lack of evidence in our now vast fossil record, new technology-based proofs disputing the notion of  a magma-centered earth and deep time, and the discovery of DNA, to name just a few of the many problems. I think Darwin's theory has been and is still used pretty much as an excuse not to believe in God, and yet you need great amounts of blind faith these days to believe in the debunked theory of evolution!)

My kids, grandkids, and I are reading Cleary books this year so I’m starting with the Ramonas. Very funny and cute so far.

The other day I watched the docu-movie Experimenters on Netflix. It was so fascinating I immediately ordered Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority, which is also fascinating and fits right in with my views. His post-WWII study, although I believe shockingly unethical (no pun intended--they use electric shocks) showed that yes indeed, man is fallen, prone to do the wrong thing, morally lazy, eager to sluff off responsibility for moral and religious beliefs onto any sort of authority-type-looking or acting figure. Sad but true. We have to admit this fact or we won’t strive to overcome it.

With all this assigned and technical reading, I have to read some Agatha Christie. I recently discovered her for myself and can't get enough. She’s always good for some mentally stimulating R&R. And I like anything by Du Maurier. By the way, the short story "The Birds" is way better than the Hitchcock film made from it ( and I usually love Hitchcock movies).

Okay, I have to admit I am stagnated somewhere about a third of the way through Ivanhoe. But I’m determined to finish it just because I'm sorry I've never read it, so there it sits in prime real estate on my night stand.

Oh but there's more. Underneath the above, are two bright green books. One is the biography of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch I’ve been wanting to read. (I've read all of Flannery's stories over and over.) The other is The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley recommended by one of my daughters.

Am I lucky or what? Who could ask for a more varied, interesting, and active internal intellectual life?

The Year for Cleary

Guess what? Beverly Cleary is turning 100 years old this year on April 12! Let’s read her books!

I missed out on Cleary books as a child. I have a few theories as to why this happened. Her first book, Henry Huggins was published in 1955, a year after I was born, so her books were still quite new when I was a young reader but not so new that I wouldn’t have seen them at the library or had them read to me by my very bookish elementary school teachers. Yes, my teachers, especially my third and fifth grade teachers, read lots of books aloud to us, but no Cleary that I can recall. Believe it or not, in the early 60s her books were considered too radical. Were they? Are they still?

I think one reason I didn’t pick Beverly Cleary off the library shelf was that I always turned my nose up at a book that looked as if it were going to be about boring regular life. No, I didn’t read the Little House books or even Nancy Drew. And I didn’t play with Barbie; I played with those little troll dolls with the colored hair that sticks straight up. I discovered that I liked the magical toys and the magical books, such as those by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and E. B. White, what I came to think of as those magic E authors.

I first read Cleary as an adult when I had reading children of my own and was writing articles and stories for children’s magazines. I think the first one I read was Dear Mr. Henshaw, which won the Newbery award. The first half is laugh-out-loud funny. Humor is definitely her forte. But then it goes oh-so-dark. There are some problems with it, which I have written about on this blog. After that I tried the Ramona books and they hit the spot and probably influenced some of my own magazine stories. I still remember the trouble she had with her owl art project and the time a dog took her shoe on the way to school so she made one out of paper towels from the school rest room. Ha-ha! 


No, my teachers did not read Cleary books to me. They had not yet stood the test of time. Let’s find out if they do, and which ones, a half century later. I’m going to start with the eight Ramona books for girls and then the Henry Huggins for boys, then, if I feel they are worthy classics, put them in my little library in April to celebrate Beverly’s 100th birthday. Clearly, I better get reading Cleary!
   
Here’s a handy booklist to get us started. By the way, I went to the local thrift store and easily found six Cleary books I didn't already have for 75 cents each.

    Henry Huggins, Morrow, 1950 †
    Ellen Tebbits, Morrow, 1951
    Henry and Beezus, Morrow, 1952 †
    Otis Spofford Morrow, 1953
    Henry and Ribsy, Morrow, 1954 †
    Beezus and Ramona, Morrow, 1955 ‡
    Fifteen, Morrow, 1956
    Henry and the Paper Route. Morrow, 1957 †
    The Luckiest Girl, Morrow, 1958
    Jean and Johnny, Morrow, 1959
    The Hullabaloo ABC, Parnassus, 1960
    The Real Hole, Morrow, 1960
    Beaver and Wally, Berkley, 1960
    Here's Beaver!, Berkley, 1961
    Two Dog Biscuits, Morrow, 1961
    Emily's Runaway Imagination, Morrow, 1961
    Henry and the Clubhouse, Morrow, 1962 †
    Sister of the Bride, Morrow, 1963
    Ribsy, Morrow, 1964 †
    The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Morrow, 1965
    The Growing-Up Feet, Morrow, 1967
    Mitch and Amy, Morrow, 1967
    Ramona the Pest, Morrow, 1968 ‡
    Runaway Ralph, Morrow, 1970
    Socks, Morrow, 1973
    Ramona the Brave, Morrow, 1975 ‡
    Ramona and Her Father, Morrow, 1977 ‡
    Ramona and Her Mother, Morrow, 1979 ‡
    Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Morrow, 1981 ‡
    Ralph S. Mouse, Morrow, 1982
    Dear Mr. Henshaw, Morrow, 1983
    Ramona Forever, Morrow, 1984 ‡
    The Ramona Quimby Diary, Morrow, 1984
    Lucky Chuck, Morrow, 1984
    Janet's Thingamajigs, Morrow, 1987
    A Girl from Yamhill, Morrow, 1988
    Muggie Maggie, Morrow, 1990
    Strider, Morrow, 1991
    Petey's Bedtime Story, Morrow, 1993'Bold text'
    My Own Two Feet, Morrow, 1995
    Ramona's World, Morrow, 1999 ‡
    Two Times the Fun (omnibus containing The Real Hole, Two Dog Biscuits, The Growing-Up Feet, and Janet's Thingamajigs), Morrow, 2005

Postscript: I have now read all eight Ramona books. So funny, real, and good. Ramona the Brave is my fave. The three Mouse books are cute, too.