Category Archives: Project 366

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

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

A Year in Books/Day 116: The Thin Man

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  • Title: The Thin Man
  • Author: Dashiell Hammett
  • Year Published: 1933/This Edition: 1989 (Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage Books Edition)
  • Year Purchased: 1990
  • Source: Doubleday Book Shops
  • About: Oh, Hammett. Hammett. Dashiell Hammett. I had such a teenage crush on you. This book, right here, this exact volume, started it all. This is where phrases like ‘hard-boiled’ and ‘tough as nails’ usually come into play. His characters are certainly that, but Nick and Nora Charles are so much more besides: sly, witty, elegant, sophisticated, sexy, bewitching. His prose is streamlined, sleek, purposeful, entertaining; as you would expect from a good crime story, there is not one unnecessary word or action to be found. He was a master of dialogue, real-world, genuine, fresh dialogue. Hammett was a very fine writer-and not just for a detective novelist. The Thin Man is a quick read in the best sense: it’s intelligent and fast-paced, with a smart plot and interesting characters. He knew how to hook you and, just as importantly, he knew when to let you go.
  • Motivation: The 1934 film version. I like to read books before seeing film adaptations but I was introduced to The Thin Man in reverse order; I caught it on television when I was 14 or 15. Instant love, of course. Who can resist William Powell and Myrna Loy? No one I’ve ever met.
  • Times Read: 4 or 5
  • Random Excerpt/Page 12: “That afternoon I took Asta for a walk, explained to two people that she was a Schnauzer and not a cross between a Scottie and an Irish terrier, stopped at Jim’s for a couple of drinks, ran into Larry Crowley, and brought him back to the Normandie with me. Nora was pouring cocktails for the Quinns, Margot Innes, a man whose name I did not catch, and Dorothy Wynant. Dorothy said she wanted to talk to me, so we carried our cocktails into the bedroom.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)

    Dashiell Hammett, teen idol (1894-1961). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 115: James Williamson Studies and Documents of a Pioneer of the Film Narrative

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  • Title: James Williamson Studies and Documents of a Pioneer of the Film Narrative
  • Author: Martin Sopocy
  • Year Published: 1998 (Associated University Presses, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 2002
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: Be warned: This book is so dry and bland that you could crumble it up and toss it in a bowl of soup. It’s so slow-paced that I had to put it away and pick it up again a few months later. Twice. That was a new experience for me, as I relish slogging through even the most dry-toast academic volumes. To have that happen with a book on silent film was almost unbearably disappointing. Yet, it is significant in its way: it’s a book about English filmmaker James Williamson; it offers painstakingly detailed breakdowns of films long since lost; the photographs and images of slides are of critical importance to film history.
  • Motivation: I have a sizable library of books on silent cinema. Since I write extensively on the subject, I’m always eager and excited to add a new volume (this book is possibly the only time I have been disappointed) to my collection.
  • Times Read: 1 (barely)
  • Random Excerpt/Page 61: “An overall view of the history of the film narrative could tempt us to suppose that motion photography, that cinema itself, has an inherent affinity with realism. Yet in actual practice such an affinity exists only to the extent that the filmmaker rejects the camera’s capacity for illusion and uses it instead with the conscious purpose of recording the world around him as he sees it, and the incidents within that world that have actually happened or could plausibly happen.”
  • Happiness Scale: 5

A Year in Books/Day 115: Pompeii The Living City

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  • Title: Pompeii The Living City
  • Authors: Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence
  • Year Published: 2005 (St. Martin’s Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2005
  • Source: History Book Club
  • About: History should be a living, breathing, laughing, squirming thing. Alive, thought-provoking, uncomfortable, enlightening. Not boring or stilted. When presented in book form, you shouldn’t want to skip ahead to find the good bits; it should all be good bits. Fortunately, Butterworth and Laurence agree. Their Pompeii The Living City is as vivid, varied and fast-paced as the subject itself. The result is an indelibly engaging volume that pulls on your senses until it feels-almost, if only in the back of the mind-like a real-time experience.
  • Motivation: I’ve loved ancient history since I was a kid and dreamed big dreams of being an anthropologist or archaeologist when I grew up. Well, kind of; I never seriously wanted to do anything but write. Kid me envisioned the anthropologist/archaeologist thing as kind of a side-line or hobby. Ah, youth!
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 130: “In all respects, the beauty industry was big business in Pompeii. Affluent women struggled to emulate the idealised femininity of the frescoes on their walls, who stared into polished bronze or silver mirrors with justified self-regard, their dressing tables bare of any artificial means of enhancement. Yet the great range of ingeniously wrought bottles that have been found testifies to the lengths to which some women in the real world would go to preserve or improve their looks.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9
    House of the Faun in Pompeii, Italy

    House of the Faun in Pompeii, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 114: Camille Pissarro Letters to His Son Lucien

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  • Title: Camille Pissarro Letters to His Son Lucien
  • Edited by: John Rewald
  • Year Published: 1943/This Edition: 2002 (MFA Publications)
  • Year Purchased: 2006
  • Source: Half Price Books
  • About: Camille Pissarro, the “father of Impressionism”, was the heart and soul of that loose collective of friends and acquaintances. Every week for twenty years, he wrote his son Lucien a letter. Read together, they are better than any art history class on Impressionism could ever be. His intelligence, dedication, humour and wisdom burst from every page. He was a quiet rebel who deliberately chose to live outside the bounds of acceptable society, knew everyone within the art community that there was to know, was never complacent in his search for artistic growth- all while remaining a rock for his (slightly) younger artist friends. The landscape of art history (ha!) would be entirely different without his very serious contributions.
  • Motivation: Starting when I was a girl-very young, just a few years-I would spend hours flipping through my Mom’s books. My favourite was a handsome folio of Impressionist paintings. It was then that I formed a connection to the work of Camille Pissarro that has never waned. He remains the only Impressionist painter whose work I truly love. Bonus: We share a birthday.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 132: “I had a long conversation with Renoir. He admitted to me that everybody, Durand and his former collectors attacked him, deploring his attempts to go beyond his romantic period. He seems to be very sensitive to what we think of his show; I told him that for us the search for unity was the end towards which every intelligent artist must bend his efforts, and even with great faults it was more intelligent and more artistic to do this than to remain enclosed in romanticism. Well, now he doesn’t get any more portraits to do.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Landscape at Pontoise, 1874

    Landscape at Pontoise, 1874 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 113: Maria Callas

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  • Title: Maria Callas an Intimate Biography
  • Author: Anne Edwards
  • Year Published: 2001 (St. Martin’s Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: I’m always skeptical about any biography with the word ‘intimate’ in the title. It holds scuzzy connotations for me, as if I’m about to read the unnecessarily shameful details of a dead person’s life. If you’ve been following my Project 366, you know that I love, love, love a good biography; just not the sordid kind. As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about: there is no enumeration of distressing personal habits or focus on gross minutiae. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything to celebrate either. This book is entirely middle-of-the road. It is neither offensive nor illuminating. It’s a quick, surface study of the great singer. If you don’t know much about Callas , it’s probably a perfectly utilitarian introduction. The photo section is the best part.

    Publicity photo of Maria Callas (December 2, 1...

    Publicity photo of Maria Callas (December 2, 1923 – September 16, 1977) as Violetta in La Traviata by Houston Rogers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Motivation: I needed 7 or 8 books for a long vacation. I bought this to round out the more intellectual fare I’d already purchased. This was my “easy, fun” read. Maria Callas was a diva when being a diva was something more complex and less hollow than it is now: talented, dynamic, demanding, always-changing, never boring. A great subject for the dull leg of a long car trip.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 53: “Maria knew no one on this boat, or the SS Stockholm, and had not yet learned where her father or Dr Lantzounis lived. She could think of no one else to contact in New York. In her purse were $100, her entire personal wealth. Yet she felt free for the first time in eight years. She was saying goodbye to Maria Kalogeropoulou. As her American passport stated, she was now Maria Callas.”
  • Happiness Scale: 7

A Year in Books/Day 112: Louise Bogan A Portrait

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  • Title: Louise Bogan A Portrait
  • Author: Elizabeth Frank
  • Year Published: 1985 (Alfred A. Knopf)
  • Year Purchased: 2000
  • Source: The Book Harbor, Westerville, Ohio
  • About: Louise Bogan was the fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. That’s probably news to all but the most passionate poetry fans. This needs to change*; although more than a quarter century old, this biography is a fine start for anyone wanting to learn more. This fascinating, meticulous study was my crash course on the life and work of the New England poet. Prior to that, she was merely a name and a footnote to the more famous greats of twentieth century literature. Whatever your approach to the subject-as a fan of poetry, literary or social culture, history, women’s studies-you will find much to admire in the sad yet triumphant voice and life of this too-neglected talent.
  • Motivation: At the time I bought this book, I was just beginning to write about one of my now-favourite subjects: female wordsmiths of the first half of the last century.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 5: “In 1884, when May was only nineteen, a son, Charles Joseph, was born. The years between his birth and Louise’s are a blank, except that in between there was a second boy, named Edward, born nobody knows what year, who died at the age of four or five months.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Louise Bogan (1897–1970), US-american Poet

    Louise Bogan (1897–1970), US-american Poet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    *Nameberry.com recently listed their choices for the best poet-based names for 2012 babies. First on the list? Bogan.

A Year in Books/Day 111: 1700 Scenes from London Life

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  • Title: 1700 Scenes from London Life
  • Author: Maureen Waller
  • Year Published: 2000 (Four Walls Eight Windows)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: History Book Club
  • About: This is a biography/history of a very specific time and place. What was it like to live in London at the start of the eighteenth century? If you had walked its streets and slept in one of its tall, cramped terraced houses, what could you expect from life? What did you eat and drink? What did you do with your scant leisure time? What did you wear and how did you worship? Waller addresses as many of these questions as possible, bringing us several paces closer to knowing what life was like as a Londoner three centuries ago.
  • Motivation: History. London. Rinse and repeat; you’ve all read this explanation before.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 57: “For babies of poorer parents left behind in the disease-ridden capital with its smoke-choked skies and contaminated water, life was just as perilous. Many died from neglect, the unsanitary conditions, and from being smothered in bed by their mothers-whether by accident or intent it was never easy to determine.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8 1/2