Daily Archives: April 28, 2012

A Year in Books/Day 119: I Care About Your Happiness

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  • Title: I Care About Your Happiness Quotations from the Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell
  • Selected by: Susan Polis Schutz
  • Year Published: Seventh Printing-February 1979 (Blue Mountain Press)
  • Year Purchased: I have no idea. This is a hand-me-down book from my mom.
  • Source: My mom
  • About: Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell lived at a time when communication was more meaningful and deliberate. Their love letters are intense and a bit flowery (as was typical of that period) and beautifully unrestrained. The intervening century has not dimmed their effectiveness.
  • Motivation: I read everything I could get my hands on when I was growing up. This first made its way into my hands when I was 10 or 11. When I moved out as a young adult, it *accidentally* came with me. Ahem. It was well worth it, though, as one of Gibran’s poems was incorporated into my wedding vows in 2010.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page 30: “What difference does it make, whether you live in a big city or in a community of homes? The real life is within.”
  • Happiness Scale: An unabashed, soppy, sentimental 10

Inspiration Strikes…in the Strangest Places

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The women in my family have a saying. At least four generations have been caught up by the idea, so it’s definitely a thing. “Warm, sudsy water cures all”. Yep, this is whipped out any time someone has a headache, the ‘flu, is in the throes of grief–or when there are dishes to be done. Especially that last one. (This is 2012, so the men aren’t immune from being roped into doing the after-meal washing up, either.) It’s often thrown around with more than a bit of sarcasm by the conscripted scrubbers; yet, when I think about it, there’s more than a bit of truth contained beneath the ruse. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 118: The Garden Party and Other Stories

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  • Title: The Garden Party and Other Stories
  • Author: Katherine Mansfield
  • Year Published: 1922/This Edition: 1997 (Constable & Co./Penguin Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: It’s almost enough to state that “Katherine Mansfield wrote short stories. The end.” It’s fitting that the genre she helped make a singularly modern medium was, largely, her only medium. If you require action (fast-paced or otherwise) from your fiction, then her quiet, introspective, internal and often plotless stories aren’t for you. The book is just long enough to help pass a lonely afternoon; its perhaps best read with a cup of tea to hand and feet up, on a languorously rainy Saturday. You probably won’t walk away any happier, but you’ll be richer for the experience.
  • Motivation: I’m that rarest of creatures: a fiction writer with no real ambition to write the Great American Novel-or any novel. Short stories are my talent’s natural home. Katherine Mansfield should be respected by any writer of short fiction.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 114: “On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present-a surprise-something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9
    Alumna, Katherine Mansfield

    Katherine Mansfield (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 117: Miss Cranston’s Omnibus

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  • Title: Miss Cranston’s Omnibus
  • Author: Anna Blair
  • Year Published: 1998 (Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd. for LOMOND BOOKS)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: What is it about old folks reminiscing that cuts straight to the bone, brain and heart? Is it because there’s no excess of thought, no emotional grandstanding? There’s a realness that remains-sometimes raw and sorrowful, sometimes light and joyous-but no heaviness. Whatever it is, it’s on stunning display in Miss Cranston’s Omnibus. Author Anna Blair interviewed hundreds of aging Glaswegians about their lifestyles and experiences during the first half of the twentieth century. She wove that material into a larger historical narrative, allowing for as true and clear a picture of the place and time as we’ll ever have. This edition is comprised of two earlier volumes (Tea at Miss Cranston’s and More Tea at Miss Cranston’s), originally published in 1985 and 1991.

    drawing, poster design for Miss Cranston's Tea...

    drawing, poster design for Miss Cranston's Tearooms. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Motivation: Glasgow! History! Nostalgic old people!
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 11: “The photographer of the 1880s swoops under his dark velvet cloth and snaps his fingers at the family group. Breaths are held and, as the cliche says, a moment in time is captured for ever, and with it an array of that era’s fashion from infants’ to grandparents’. Repeat the process every decade and you have a century of change from bonnet to Princess of Wales’ feather, button boot to pink sneaker. Well…You’d have the gamut right enough, as far as the bien-provided were concerned, but for much of that hundred years there was a broad swathe of Glasgow folk a world away from wool and velvet and starched pinafores.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8