Picture this

Last Sunday Stuck in a Book came up with a challenge to find one image that sums up your reading tastes but doesn't have any direct association with books. I think maybe I've managed it. This is Design for a poster, by Alphonse Mucha, from 1897. I love this style of art, and I think it sums up my reading tastes in that there are definite hints of the magical in it, but it's also very calm and symmetrical. Nothing wild, but still with hints of the otherworld.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Sometimes, you read the right book at the right time. I got The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, for Christmas, but it's been sitting on the shelf over my desk since, unread. When I finished reading The Doctor Trap I wanted to pick up something new right away, and though I'm still in the middle of Victorian Visitors, I wanted fiction. The Physick Book was the natural choice.

It tells the story of Connie, a Harvard graduate student in history, who goes to stay in her grandmother's ancient house in Marblehead, Massachusetts to clean it out in preparation for selling it. The house has no electricity and no telephone, and it's been empty for twenty years. Connie is meanwhile supposed to be figuring out a dissertation topic for her PhD. Her first night in the house, she opens a 17th century Bible and out falls an old key, with a bit of paper in it that bears the name Deliverance Dane. Deliverance proves to be one of the women accused in the Salem with trials of 1692, and the story unfolds from there.

I loved this book for much the same reasons I love Tam Lin--its elements of the academic world and hints (or more than hints) of fantasy and romance. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane has so many wonderful strands of plot, clever foreshadowing, and characters who are not quite who they seem, which are finally drawn together in a clear and interesting way. This is not literary fiction, and in fact has many qualities of a thriller, but it is well-written and well-told, and it's a very good story. Thoroughly satisfying, so much so that I read most of it in great chunks over the holiday weekend. It's a good holiday book, is what it is, and it helped remind me how much I love sitting and reading for hours on end.

Book meme

Here's a meme which as been floating around the book blogs.

What is your favourite drink while reading?
Tea if it's just after breakfast. Water or maybe lemonade any other time of day.

Do you tend to mark your books while you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I post-it note sometimes. I don't write in books, though I sometimes wish I did. I like buying used books which other people have written in.

How do you keep your place? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book open flat?
Bookmark. Periodically I always seem to come by big stacks of bookmarks from some promotional thing, so currently I'm working my way through bookmarks from the first Narnia movie, and a few left over from the stack of Lord of the Rings bookmarks I acquired when I was about twelve. If I don't have a proper bookmark to hand I use scraps of paper.

Fiction, non-fiction or both?
I love non-fiction, but always kind of forget about this in between reading it. Probably most of what I read is fiction.

Do you tend to read to the end of a chapter or can you stop anywhere?
I can stop anywhere, but I like to read to the end of a section or chapter if I can.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?
I'm pretty sure I've never flung a book. I can usually tell pretty fast if I'm not going to like it, and then I give up on it. There are too many good books to read the bad ones.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?
Only if I have a dictionary easily accessible. Usually I have a vague enough idea of what the word means to carry on without looking it up.

What are you currently reading?
I'm in the middle of Victorian Visitors, but I haven't read it in a while. Having just finished The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, I have yet to start anything else.

What is the last book you bought?
It might have been The Post-Office Girl, by Stefan Zweig. Not sure.

Do you have a favourite time/place to read?
I often sit in my bean bag chair just before bed time to read, when I'm getting all sleepy and comfortable. I don't mind much where I read, though.

Do you prefer series books or stand-alones?
I like series, but find them vaguely stressful sometimes. Mostly I read stand-alones. The only series I'm trying to work through at the moment is the Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?
I recommend Tam Lin endlessly, and I seem to have recommended To Say Nothing of the Dog a lot lately.

How do you organise your books (by genre, title, author's last name, etc.)?
Erm, I sort of don't... I mean, I have a Tolkien shelf, and all the Jane Austen is in the same place, but other than that...

Background noise or silence?
At home NPR is nearly always on in the background, which I'm kind of immune to. It depends on my mood, the music, and the book, but I don't mind background noise.

The Canon of Doctor Who

This week I finished reading The Doctor Trap, by Simon Messingham. It's one of the tie-in novels for Doctor Who, which is one of my favourite TV shows, and I got it for my birthday, and I knew it would be a fairly undemanding sort of read, so it seemed like a good choice of reading material. And that was pretty much exactly what it was. There's this fairly crazy guy on a planet full of robots, who's brought a club of people who hunt rare species together to hunt the Doctor. Which in itself is kind of a neat premise, but then they felt the need to overcomplicate it. The Doctor had a double running around, who was all but indistinguishable from the real Doctor, and at one point a whole other double might have turned up, but I was never sure because it just got too convoluted. The writing was reasonably serviceable, though it occasionally had moments that sounded like something I'd have written at age 12. So it was an entertaining book, but it was by no means great literature.

All of which leaves me wondering something. Tie-in novels for TV shows are obviously just another bit of marketable merchandise, and I guess they don't feel the need to recruit good writers if that's all it is. The good writers get to write actual episodes for the show--like Neil Gaiman, who's written an episode for next season. But despite the general (though not entirely universal) mediocrity of these novels, we read them anyway because it's another glimpse of the Doctor. We always want more of his story, and tie-in novels can provide it. Further, because they've got an official stamp of approval, they get to be considered more or less part of Doctor Who canon.
I've read Doctor Who fanfiction that is better than most of these novels. I know fanfiction gets mocked a lot, and I know a lot of fanfiction deserves it, but some of it genuinely explores possibilities in storytelling and character development that the show never has time for, and some of it is written by good writers. I've read fanfiction that I thought was better than the original material. And in a way, Doctor Who tie-in novels are essentially fanfiction.

Do we perceive them as more legitimate because they're in print? Because they're tied to the BBC? They're not objectively better. And with a universe as long-lasting and multimedia as Doctor Who, which first aired in 1963 and is the longest running sci-fi show, with books and radio plays attached, enormous numbers of writers and producers have contributed to build the canon. There's no ultimate authority about what rules Doctor Who is going to follow. In a way, this is perhaps the one fandom in which the lines between fanfiction and canon have become most blurred. So we have to question how we think about what is true in the world of Doctor Who, and how we value one contribution to the world over another.

Friday Ephemera #38

This chair was designed by Valentina Gonzalez Wohlers. Photo courtesy of her website. Note the spiky bits on the seat.

Greenery Street

So it's a week since the end of Persephone Reading Week, but I've finally finished Greenery Street, by Denis Mackail. It's a lovely, lovely book, my third Persephone read, definitely confirming my love for these books.

Greenery Street is a road full of identical houses inhabited by newly married couples, who inevitably have children, find their homes too small to accommodate them, and move away. These are houses which no one these days would find too small for a family, and which might even be split up into flats. But in 1925, they were impossibly small for husband, wife, two servants, and children. Greenery Street is sort of its own character, with little gobliny gods who sit on the mantelpiece and laugh at all the couples who think they'll live there forever.

It's an interesting book because it's told in such a variety of styles. Sometimes it's just ordinary prose, sometimes it looks like a script, complete with stage direction. One section is an itemized list of 23, Greenery Street's library, which contains 24 books.

"Item. Cheap edition of The Three Musketeers. Still cheaper edition of Twenty Years After. Bought with present owner's pocket-money, and read almost to pieces.
Item. An exquisitely-bound volume with a gilt lock. Owner was given this by her grandmother, and intended to keep a diary in it. May have actually begun it, but lost the key about seven years ago and so cannot be sure. A very choice specimen." (pg 147)

Felicity and Ian Foster are the very young newly married couple who live at 23, Greenery Street. They have small domestic disputes, money troubles, servant troubles, encounters with family and neighbours, and a continuing inability to retrieve the fish-kettle (whatever that is) or the step-ladder from the neighbours, who borrowed them and never returned them. Few of their difficulties are particularly dramatic, but they're all entertaining. Denis Mackail has a lovely turn of phrase, which can make the most ordinary things very funny. Here is one passage I particularly liked:

"But in Felicity's mind, as she waited to hear his voice on the line, it was Ian's office and Ian's office alone. A composite picture which drew something from her mother's bank, something from the stationery department at Harrod's, and a great deal from the business scenes in American films. Ian would thus be sitting at an enormous roll-top desk, covered with telephones and paste-bottles and cardboard boxes, in a vast apartment with a quantity of glass-panelled doors. A tape-machine would be disgorging into a high, narrow waste-paper basket, and a number of minor characters - vaguely identified as 'the staff' - would keep running in and out of the glass-panelled doors, rather like people in a farce. As for the atmosphere of the place, that would be charged with a tense, electrical excitement. The words 'My God, I'm ruined!' or 'Thank Heaven, we're saved!' would be heard there twenty times a day, but in either case Ian himself would remain imperturbably at his desk, calm, serious and - and perfect. The last adjective was for private consumption only." (pg 2a)

As Rebecca Cohen's preface tells us, Greenery Street is semi-autobiographical. Denis Mackail obviously has a very personal connection to the story, though he also sees the ridiculousness inherent in Greenery Street. This combination is, I think, what makes this book so good.

My life in shoes

This is the story of my weekend, told in shoes. This weekend is the University District street fair, which I went to yesterday. I needed my walking shoes (which are getting rather sad) for that.It's been hot out lately. Yesterday my shoulders got a bit red. Good weather for these.Then I went to Goodwill and had to buy these fabulous shoes, though I have no idea when I'm going to wear them.In the evening, I went to UW's quarterly swing dance. Live band, lots of dancing, fun performances. My legs and feet are going to take today to recover from all the walking and dancing.Today I'm going to sit around in my slippers, doing homework and finishing Greenery Street.I suppose I've revealed my shoe-hoarding tendencies now, haven't I?

Links

Just stopping by with a couple of fun links. This is an entertaining blog in general, and here are two particular bits of it.

Modern technology preserved as fossils.

Folded paper art.

In passing

I'm meant to be writing a paper on John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, but starting is always the hardest part. I haven't even chosen a topic yet. But it's due Friday and I've done all my other work for the week, so I should be all right.

I spent most of yesterday outside, and even got a little sunburnt. It was like summer. Did my German homework, read more of John Stuart Mill. Today it's grey and rainy, though.
I promise some time I'll finish Greenery Street and review it properly.

Friday Ephemera #37

Today is my birthday! I meant to post a picture of a birthday cake or something, but I wandered through my picture file and this photo stuck out. (Also, if you do a google image search for "birthday" you get a lot of photos of naked people holding birthday balloons in front of the pertinent areas.) It's the painting "Frau am Fenster" (woman at the window) by Caspar David Friedrich. I like it because it looks like the month of May always makes me feel. Though I'm usually much busier than she looks.