Tag Archives: Reviews

A Year in Books/Day 55: Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Posted on February 26, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Girl in Hyacinth Blue
• Author: Susan Vreeland
• Year Published: 1999 (Penguin Books)
• Year Purchased: 2006
• Source: A bookstore in Buffalo, New York
• About: Another book revolving around the Dutch painter, Vermeer. This is a lovely, intimate novel with a surprisingly large, sweeping historical scope. It is, more than anything, the story of a single painting as seen through the eyes of its creator and subsequent owners. It jumps through time yet is seamless, never jarring.
• Motivation: Jan Vermeer is one of my favourite painters. I was looking for a brief, well-written novel to read while on vacation.
• Times Read: 1
• Random Excerpt/Page 82: “Now, it’s not wise to be shocked. It makes one’s face blotchy and you don’t want that. I wouldn’t tell just anybody, because there are parts, there are parts-but since you asked for counsel in such matters, I will tell you. The truth, that I did not love the husband my father chose for me, I had concealed more carefully than a breast.”
• Happiness Scale: 7 1/2

 

A Year in Books/Day 53: The Illustrated History of the 19th Century

Posted on February 25, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: The Illustrated History of the 19th Century Month by Month Year by Year
• Year Published: 2000 (Hackberry Press)
• Year Purchased: 2002/2003
• Source: Unknown
• About: This is a thick encyclopedia devoted to the century that gave us Victoria and Dickens, Edison and Bernhardt, Lincoln and Eliot. It maintains a nice balance between text and illustrations.
• Motivation: I love history, reference books and arcane data.
• Times Read: Cover-to-cover:2/As reference tool: countless
• Random Excerpt/Page 118: “A food scare is caused by an English chemistry professor, Frederick Accum, who publishes ‘Adulteration of Foods and Culinary Poisons’, showing that food on sale in Britain is usually adulterated, some with poisons, and has to flee to Berlin to avoid prosecution.”
• Happiness Scale: 8 1/2
  

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A Year in Books/Day 51: Gainsborough

Posted on February 23, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Gainsborough
• Author: Nicola Kalinsky
• Year Published: 1995 (Phaidon Press Limited)
• Year Purchased: 2010
• Source: My lovely Momma.
• About: What starts as a dynamic and fully fleshed biographical monograph becomes a detailed analysis of his entire oeuvre, painting by painting. If you’ve ever wanted to explore deeper than ‘The Blue Boy’, this volume is a wonderful jumping off point.
• Motivation: I’m my Mother’s daughter, which means that there are just some things I was born to love; literature, art and tea being the most important and enduring. She knew that I would appreciate this book. She was right!
• Random Excerpt/Pages 14 and 15: “Gainsborough took a professional pride in his business and his pictures were well-made objects which have generally survived in a good state of preservation. His apprenticeship in London, to whoever it was, clearly served him well in the craft of painting. Comments in his letters attest to his care in selecting materials; he chose his pigments with a view to both beauty and permanence, unlike Reynolds, who was notorious for using fugitive colours. He was unusual in his insistence on normally painting all parts of a portrait himself, rather than employing a drapery painter; his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, was his only recorded assistant and pupil.”
• Happiness Scale: 10
  

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A Year in Books/Day 50: Free Love

Posted on February 23, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Free Love
• Author: Annette Meyers
• Year Published: 1999 (Mysterious Press)
• Year Purchased: 2002-2004
• Source: Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company
• About: This period murder mystery (the best kind, in my opinion) features an Edna St. Vincent Millay-esque heroine. She composes poetry, acts for the (Provincetown) Playhouse, is shockingly frank and solves a crime. Sounds familiar, except for that last bit. After reading this book, I could pretty well be convinced that the flesh-and-blood inspiration was a bad-ass detective, too.
• Motivation: Although I’m rather picky when it comes to mystery novels (I don’t like them except when I love them), the blurb on this one sucked me in: The era. The main character. The atmosphere. Sold, sold and sold.
• Times Read: 1
• Random Excerpt/Page 2: “It was a mistake; the water was cold and sloshy. Still, there was no way I was going to impart this and have him say “I told you so,” so I took my time sloshing through it. Oh, prig or not, he probably wouldn’t have gloated because he’s a better person than I am.”
• Happiness Scale: 8

 

A Year in Books/Day 49: Hollywood Dressed & Undressed

Posted on February 18, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Hollywood Dressed & Undressed A Century of Cinema Style
• Author: Sandy Schreier
• Year Published: 1998 (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.)
• Year Purchased: 2002-2004
• Source: Unknown
• About: With the attention to detail of an insider and the adoration of the most giddy fan, designer Schreier takes us on a 100 year tour of film-land’s most famous and enduring costumes.
• Motivation: I’m an ex-actress (stage) and write extensively about early cinema. I’m just one ridiculous movie nerd. I also love fashion in all of its iterations, from the silly to the avant-garde to the iconic.
• Times Read: Countless
• Random Excerpt/Page 2: “Costume designer Edith Head, Hollywood’s most prolific designer, reflected on the Golden Age of costuming: ‘Then the designer was as important as the star-when you said Garbo, you thought Adrian; when you said Dietrich, you thought Banton. Their magic was part of selling a picture.'”
• Happiness Scale: 10
  

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A Year in Books/Day 48: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors

Posted on February 17, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Vol. II Great Britain and Ireland Part Two
• Editor: Francis W. Halsey
• Year Published: 1914 (Funk & Wagnalls Company)
• Year Purchased: September, 2010
• Source: Springfield (OH) Antique Show & Flea Market
• About: This tiny book was one of a ten-volume compilation series culled from previously published travel essays by famous authors. On hand are pieces by Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Boswell, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and others. Even in 1914, some of the essays were decades old. Now, they all read like history as well as travel-they remain fascinating word-gems of a time long ago surpassed by the frantic rhythms of our modern world.
• Motivation: I bought this perfectly preserved first-edition copy while shopping for vintage lovelies for my December 2010 nuptials. It was too adorable and cheap ($3.00) to pass up. History and literature is a heady mix for this girl.
• Times Read: 1
• Random Excerpt/Page 54: “It is doubtful whether the name of any lighthouse is so familiar throughout the English-speaking world as the “Eddystone.” Certainly no other “pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day,” can offer so romantic a story of dogged engineering perseverance, of heartrending disappointments, disaster, blasted hopes, and brilliant success.”
• Happiness Scale: 7 1/2
  

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A Year in Books/Day 47: The Girl from the Fiction Department

Posted on February 17, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: The Girl from the Fiction Department A Portrait of Sonia Orwell
• Author: Hilary Spurling
• Year Published: 2002/This Edition: 2003 (Counterpoint)
• Year Purchased: 2010
• Source: My Mom
• About: A thoughtful, even-handed biography of George Orwell’s controversial second wife (and widow). Although it was written by a later-in-life friend of Sonia’s with the stated goal of setting the record straight, it’s the real deal: well-researched, compassionate and honest.
• Motivation: My Mother knows me well! Biography + complex woman + literary theme= winner!
• Times Read: 1
• Random Excerpt/Page 87: “This was the Sonia who bewitched others all her life, and whose abrupt disappearance invariably came as a shock. Maurice didn’t care for the second self who replaced the first, the wary, reticent Sonia whose uncertainty made her overbearing, the Sonia who could never trust herself or anyone else, especially not someone who seemed in retrospect to have surprised her into an intimacy she feared and could not sustain.”
• Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 44: Good Old Index

Posted on February 13, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Good Old Index The Sherlock Holmes Handbook
• Author: Thomas W. Ross
• Year Published: 1997 (Camden House)
• Year Purchased: 2002/2003
• Source: Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company
• About: Every single thing you could ever want or need to know about Sherlock Holmes, except, perhaps, which actor best embodies the timeless sleuth.
• Motivation: Although I am not an obsessive Holmes fanatic, I am quite the ardent reader. I also love lists and encyclopedias.
• Times Read: Cover-to-cover: 1/As consulting tool: countless
  

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• Random Excerpt/Page 62: “Epithets, for Holmes, hurled at him by scoffers: see busybody; cocksure; jack-in-office; theorist; clever.”
• Happiness Scale: 7

A Year in Books/Day 35: Ford Madox Ford

Posted on February 5, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Ford Madox Ford
• Author: Alan Judd
• Year Published: 1990 (Harvard University Press)
• Year Purchased: 2004
• Source: Unknown
• About: A biography of the great, prolific and mostly forgotten English writer who was so closely associated with Joseph Conrad.
  

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• Motivation: Although I mostly concentrate on dead female writers, I am always eager to add to my collection of literary (auto)biographies. I especially love those obscured by time or circumstances; the more out of favor, the better! I actually bought this volume as a vacation read for a 3-week trip to Canada in the summer of 2004.
• Times Read: 1
• Random Excerpt/Page 168: “Goldring adds that he cannot vouch for the accuracy of the story ‘but if it didn’t happen it ought to have done. Events of this description occurred daily, almost hourly, during the twelve month’s of Ford’s editorship of ‘Review’. Looking back, it seems amazing to me, that so much could have happened in so short a time. It was only a year: but what a year!’ “
• Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

A Year in Books/Day 33: Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers

Posted on February 3, 2012 by maedez

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• Title: Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers
• Year Published: 2004 (Barnes & Noble)
• Year Purchased: 2005
• Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
• About: A dense, delightfully thorough history of every American writer of merit, popularity or notoriety since the 17th Century.
• Motivation: I gobble up data like Wheaties or mac and cheese. I write about dead writers. I love history.
• Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/As reference tool-countless.
• Random Excerpt/Page 65: “Grandson of the inventor of the adding machine, Burroughs was born into wealth and graduated from Harvard University in 1936. While living in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and became one of the early core members of the group that would become known as the Beats. He became addicted to heroin around 1945 and would remain a junkie for almost 15 years. While living in Mexico in 1951, he killed his second wife in an attempt to shoot a glass off her head at a party. He fled Mexico and wandered through the Amazon region, continuing his experiments with drugs, experiences described in ‘The Yage Letters’ (1963), his 1953 correspondence with Allen Ginsberg.
• Happiness Scale: 9
  

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