Thirteenth tale

I'm thinking about Diane Setterfield's mystery The Thirteenth Tale and RSSS feeds. The challenge is to tie these disparate things together! My angle is that they are both about collecting information to figure out what's going on.

The Thirteenth Tale is an old school gothic mystery about an English mansion full of eccentrics. If your book club hasn't done a mystery recently, it's a great page turner, similar to Daphne Du Maurier or the Bronte sisters' writings. The twist is clever, the characters are interesting, and the setting is evocative. A young writer Margaret tries to figure out the story of a famous old author named Vida Winter. What is the Thirteenth tale? Slowly you gather information and put it together to guess what happened.

RSSS feeds are a way of collecting information from your favourite websites. Instead of visiting your favourites to see what's new, you collect them into one place. In my case, I'm using Bloglines. I'm gathering information from book review sites like the New York Times book reviews and Publishers' Weekley bestsellers. I added a Bloglines option to this post, if you want to build one for yourself. Keeping up with it seems like a lot of work though, just another chore to add to my to do list. I'd rather be reading a happy book!

Ulaanbataar

I just like typing that word- Ulaanbataar... This blog's book is The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. It is a true story about a father with an autistic son. He discovers that his son is more communicative when he is on a horse. Rowan also responds to a shaman healer. Rupert decides to take Roan to Mongolia to visit the "reindeer people" and see if the combination of horses and shamanism will help his son.

Although not the greatest writer in the world, Rupert has an interesting story to tell. Different people in book club responded to different parts of the story: parenting, the religious angle, travelling in Mongolia, even the "husbands with crazy ideas" part! We mostly talked about what it would be like to have an autistic child, and Kristen who works with autistic children joined the club to tell us what her job is like. (not Kristin the wife in the story)

Back to Ulaanbataar, which is the capital of Mongolia. This week I'm playing with Google Earth. I swoop wide over Mongolia, finding the tree line that they crossed as they entered the forest. I can't find the shaman Ghoste's teepee, for which I am grateful. I like the idea that some few people are invisible in the digital world. I also enjoy the street level views made by video cameras positioned on cars. It is fascinating to swoop over the countries depicted in the books we read.

Snoopiness... or empathy?!

Dreams of trespass : tales of a harem girlhood by Fatima Mernissi.

Now the word harem sounds titillating, but really is just refers to being sequestered from the world. In this autobiography, eight year old Fatima contrasts her cloistered life with that of her male cousin, who is allowed outside the house walls. The house is in Morocco in the 1940's. Tradition versus change, colonialism, and the difference among womens' lives are explored. There are vivid scenes that I remember six years after we read this in book club. Recommended if you like descriptions of childhood, developing feminism, and different cultures.

This curiosity about others' lives. My favourite poem, The Waste Land has this line:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only

The same impulse that has me imagining lives other than my own leads me to novels, and to Facebook! Over time, I get a sense of what is important in peoples' lives by what they post about. I stay connected with people I wouldn't normally talk with. I'm hearing their stories.

Sixteen pleasures

Many years ago our book club read the novel The sixteen pleasures by Robert Hellenga. Margot Harrington is a young American book conservator who goes to Florence, Italy as a "mud angel" to help with recovery after the 1966 flood of the Arno River. In a convent, she finds a rare 16th century book written by Pietro Aretino. All the known copies of the Sonetti lussuriosi (Lewd sonnets) were destroyed because of their pornographic nature. Margot restores the book and tries to decide what to do with her life. The travelers and art fans among us particularly enjoyed the novel. There are some memorable scenes of Margot's Italian love interest rescuing pieces of art. Refreshing to read about a man rushing to save a fresco instead of a damsel in distress!

I looked in Wikipedia to find out about the real Pietro Aretino. He is credited with inventing "modern literate pornography". I compared the articles about him in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia appears to have the facts right, and they included some portraits by his friend Titian. Britannica said, "Aretino lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life." A Venetian happily-ever-after!

Wikipedia had hotlinks, such as this promising one: "[Aretino] is said to have died of suffocation from "laughing too much". This promising link leads to an article on Death from laughter, which includes a list of historical and modern people who died while laughing. The modern people were watching TV and movies, not reading a book, or I would have continued to follow this diverting chain of ideas for more book club ideas.

Wikipedia also mentioned that the composer Michael Nyman, who wrote the Piano movie score, set some of the sonnets to music. This is the kind of pop culture content for which Wikipedia is so useful.

As you read The Sixteen Pleasures, it's interesting to look on the internet for maps of Florence, images of frescoes, and information about the floods. And if you really engage with this book, Robert Hellenga returns to his characters in later novels.

Delicious books

We're learning about Web 2.0 at work, so this blog will combine happy book suggestions AND information about new web technologies for a while. (Sounds serious- so I added a delicious donut to keep your attention!) This week, I'm looking at the website bookmarking program called Delicious. At Delicious.com you can search for websites with keywords, called tags, and organize lists of favourites URLs.

I'm curious about reducing a book to a list of single keywords. As a librarian, I'm used to a controlled list of hierarchical subjects. This site is organized by random keywords supplied by the users. (That's not a judgement- I'm a big fan of randomness!) I'm going to try to boil down some happy book club choices to keywords...

Here are some happy nonfiction books:

The City of Falling Angels / John Berendt
Venice Italy Fenice opera arson characters MidnightintheGardenofGoodandEvil glassblower

Dropped Threads: What we aren't told / edited by Carol Shields
Essays women Canada young old discussion personal popular accessible

Outliers : The Story of Success / Malcolm Gladwell
Tippingpoint Blink success practice 10,000hours thoughtprovoking easyread

The Perfection of the Morning : An Apprenticeship in Nature / Sharon Butala
meditative nature lyrical Saskatchewan mixedreaction ranching spiritual nonlinear

Eat, Pray, Love / Elizabeth Gilbert
travel Italy India Indonesia Bali spiritual funny diary anecdotal easyread


I'm having a hard time describing what these books are about! How do I describe the mixed love/hate reaction of our book club to Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning? I like that you can include different information than the usual subjects you find in the library catalogue, like tone and read alikes. But, for my book reviews, I think I'll stick to sentences!


It makes me wonder about group think. If many people like a website, will I like it too? Do the tagging decisions of millions of people cause the best content to rise to the top? That's how I pick videos to watch on Youtube. Can I trust strangers, or might they have a business interest in what they're promoting? Sometimes word of mouth causes a book to expolode, and everyone reads it. Will digital word of mouth explode?

Delicious is a good place to keep track of your personal or work websites, but not the place to search for book reviews. At least not yet! Happy reading.

Blogging and food and time- oh my!

For work, I'm to write about blogging. That makes me think of reading Julie and Julia for bookclub. It's a blog turned into a book about a New York secretary who vows to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We all liked it, although as in the subsequent movie with Meryl Streep, we preferred the bits about Julia Child.

What I didn't like was cooking pastries for the snacks, although now I rather enjoy the anecdote about the two days it took me to prepare one single item, a cheese pastry. That pastry wasn't to be cooked all at once, no, it had to take regular vacations in the fridge to chill out.

A much luckier host landed Miriam Toew's A Complicated Kindness. Since it is set in a small Mennonite town our hostess served us Spam. Yes, she really made an effort. Actually no one would touch it. However, we did touch another Toew's novel, The Flying Troutmans because we enjoy her wacky fictional families. Plus it's our Canadian content, since most Canadians don't write happy, funny stories.

Really, the food is half the draw in bookclub. I am trying to think of a book to host which would feature some jello salads. We have some phenomenal cooks who lay on a spread. Which leads me to the topic of the time needed to prepare all that food, which leads me to what I am supposed to be doing with my time right now, which is to write about blogging for work.

I'm to write about what intrigues me about social media. It intrigues me how anyone has the ability to keep up with their email, their Facebook and Twitter accounts, their blog, and still cook fabulous spreads for bookclub. Oh right, I remember, it's because we don't always finish the books!

It's "happy" if I'm not responsible for the characters!

I am struggling with my definition of a happy book, because my book club is reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. Now this is definitely not a happy book, but somehow I don't feel it so deeply because it is set in another world, a world that I don't feel any responsibility toward! So perhaps my definition of a happy book merely means one which I can truly escape into without a sense of guilt at my own good fortune.



I promised the book title that everyone in the club enjoyed, and that is the most surefire recommendation you can ever make.... It's Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It's the story of a vet travelling with a circus during the Great Depression. If you listed the plot outline, a great many unhappy things happen, but it all turns out alright in the end.



On a related vein, I have been trying to think of adult fiction books that are truly funny. Aside from reliable Nick Hornby I am coming up dry. Why am I only finding humour in my son's bedtime stories? Captain Underpants, Greg Heffley, Fred and George Weasley: all the humourists are to be found in the kids' section. I thought the Twilight series was a hilarious spin on teenage angst, but I'm looking for something intentionally amusing that's aimed at adults. I challenge my readers to think of some novels that are laugh out loud funny.