A Month, a Hobby, and a Mythical Creature

I haven’t posted an update on the treasure hunt reading challenge for a while, but I have read a couple more books, crossing off two clues.

The first, for the clue of “a month” was a crime novel called “Elegy for April”, described as:

April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly patriarchal society of 1950s Dublin. Though her family is one of the most respected in the city, she is known for being independent-minded; her taste in men, for instance, is decidedly unconventional.

Now April has disappeared, and her friend Phoebe Griffin suspects the worst. Frantic, Phoebe seeks out Quirke, her brilliant but erratic father, and asks him for help. Sober again after intensive treatment for alcoholism, Quirke enlists his old sparring partner, Detective Inspector Hackett, in the search for the missing young woman. In their separate ways the two men follow April’s trail through some of the darker byways of the city to uncover crucial information on her whereabouts. And as Quirke becomes deeply involved in April’s murky story, he encounters complicated and ugly truths about family savagery, Catholic ruthlessness, and race hatred.

Both an absorbing crime novel and a brilliant portrait of the difficult and relentless love between a father and his daughter, this is Benjamin Black at his sparkling best.

I don’t read a lot of crime novels these days, as they scare me too much . This one, however, I found so dull as not be worthy of any scared feelings. It is set in 1950s Dublin and my main impression was of lots of descriptions of rain, dingy bars and people smoking cigarettes. Not sure about this being the author at his “sparkling best”. Perhaps if I had read the previous two books in the series I might have felt more empathy for the characters, but as it was I struggled a bit. Ah well, that’s the “month” category ticked off. And I read something I probably wouldn’t otherwise have read, so a success in that respect.

Second up was for the “hobby you have” category, for which I read Marie Duenas’ fine novel “The Seamstress”.

Spain, 1936 and the brink of civil war.

Aged twelve, Sira Quiroga was apprenticed to a Madrid dressmaker. As she masters the seamstress’s art, her life seems to be clearly mapped out – until she falls passionately in love and flees with her seductive lover.

But in Morocco she is betrayed and left penniless. As civil war engulfs Spain, Sira finds she cannot return and so turns to her one true skill – and sews beautiful clothes for the expat elite and their German friends.

With Europe rumbling towards war, Sira is lured back to Franco’s Nazis-friendly Spain. She is drawn into the shadowy world of espionage, rife with love, intrigue and betrayal.

And where the greatest danger lies. . .

This was much more gripping. There’s history, espionage, doomed romance, wonderful friendships and even beautiful descriptions of fabrics. Yep, a much more satisfying read and definitely recommended, if you can face picking up a book of 600 plus pages

I have now started reading Tracy Chevalier’s “The Lady and the Unicorn” which should nicely fit the clue of “mythical creature”.

If you don’t have a “clue” what I’m talking about, read my first post about the challenge here.

And as always, if you have any recommendations for any of the categories I have left, then feel free to share them. These are the remaining treasures to hunt:

Something you’d find in space
Geological formation
A colour
A farmyard animal
A type of building
An illness
A country
A girl’s name
A boy’s name
A body of water
A mode of transportation
A kind of food
A kind of drink
A flower
A hobby you don’t have
Something made of metal
Something made of wood
Something made of plastic
A toy or game
A family relationship
A number
A shape
Something you don’t like
Something scientific
A question mark
A bird
A time of day

Checking Off More Treasure Clues

I am chugging away at the Treasure Hunt Reading Challenge, and have checked off two more “clues”.

For the profession clue, I read Memoirs of a Geisha. It’s possible that I am the last person in the world to have read this! Here’s the blurb on the off-chance you haven’t read it:

In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.

We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child’s unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old. In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha’s elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival. Surviving the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war, the resourceful Sayuri is a romantic heroine on the order of Jane Eyre and Scarlett O’Hara. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a triumphant work – suspenseful, and utterly persuasive.

Although I am not sure of the authenticity of a white American male writing in the first person as a geisha in the 1930s/40s, I did find myself quite immersed in Sayuri’s world, and ended up enjoying the novel more than I expected, although I did find the ending a little unsatisfactory.

The second clue I checked off was “something you would wear”, and for this I read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Here’s the blurb:

Berlin 1942

When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance.

But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.

I read this book in two days (it’s been a while since I’ve done that!). Although the grim inevitability of the ending was hanging in the air right from the outset, I still found it difficult to put down, and still found myself deeply affected by the conclusion. I liked the sparse writing style, and thought it was perfectly paced. The horrors of the Holocaust were not spelled out in any explicit way but somehow that made it all the more arresting. My main criticism of the book would be that the character of Bruno seemed at times to be just a little too immature and naive, even for a 9 year old. I appreciate that this is a children’s book, but it does seem rather patronising to kids at times. So, a recommendation, with some reservations. I have heard that, in this case, the film may be better than the book but I haven’t seen the film (of this, or of Memoirs of a Geisha as it happens) so I can’t comment, though I would be interested in your thoughts if you have!

I haven’t decided what to read for my next clue, so you will just have to watch this space!

Two More Treasures

As you may remember, this year I have embarked on a Treasure Hunt Reading Challenge from the blog Doing it the Open Way. There is a list of “clues” and the idea is to read a book with a title that fits each clue. I posted about the first two books I read for the challenge here (Girl with a Pearl Earring for the gemstone clue; and The Tiger’s Wife for the zoo animal clue). I have now read two more books towards the challenge. First up, for the clue “weather” I read

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets–an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

For me, there are two categories of great novels. The first type are the ones where you race through because you can’t wait to find out what happens next; the second you want to read slowly because you want to savour every line, every sentence, every word. The Shadow of the Wind was the second sort. This is a beautifully written (translated) novel. There is humour and poetry and sadness. It has some of the most exquisitely drawn characters in any book I have ever read. And the story itself is intriguing and entertaining. It has mystery; it has love; it has gothic horror; it has dark humour. This is just a fabulous, fabulous book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The second book is for the clue “a feeling”, for which I read

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

I am not sure how I felt about this book.  I found it easy to read and zipped through it in no time.  I thought it was very original but also very, very strange!  Maybe because it mixed the mundane with the magical so seamlessly, I don’t know.  At times it was sad; at times it was funny; at other times it was just peculiar.  I do think it’s worth a read and I would be intrigued to know what you think of it if you do.  I’m still shaking my head when I think of it

Corks, Matches, Hairpins and…Lightbulbs?!

I have to share with you my latest wonderful library sale find. For the princely sum of 10p, I became the proud owner of 365 Games to Make and Play, published in the 1970s.

It is *somewhat* different from modern craft books for kids

I guess it was aimed at the kids of heavy-drinking, chain-smoking parents as nearly all the projects involve corks or matchboxes or matches (including some that call for spent matches!)

There’s some pretty dubious racial stereotyping:

And then there’s the gender stereotyping:

And I’m not sure cock-fighting is something that would appear in a kids’ book today:

Best of all, for me, is the flagrant disregard for safety. Look! We have kids’ craft projects made from glass lightbulbs:

Can you tell I am a little bit in love with this crazy book?!

Reading Treasures

I have made a start on the Treasure Hunt Reading Challenge (see original post here). I have read a couple of books towards it so far.

First up, for the category of “a precious stone” I read The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.

Although I didn’t think this would be my sort of book, I really enjoyed it. I loved the descriptions of the painting process, and have always had something of a fascination with maids (maybe since knowing that my own great grandmother went into service at the age of 14). There was an edgy feel to the book, in as much as there was a certain dreadful inevitability about Griet’s fate, and I felt Chevalier paced this beautifully.

The second book I have read so far for the challenge was for the category of “a zoo animal”. I read The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht.

You know when you read a book and you feel like you ought to like it, but just don’t – that’s how I felt about this one. While I could appreciate the language, the imagery, the integrated fables, I just didn’t feel any kind of emotional connection with the characters. The book left me a bit cold if I’m honest.

I am now starting on my third book for the challenge, for the category “colour”, and it’s My Name is Red by Orham Pamuk. I have high hopes for this one, but have only just started it, so it’s too early too call

For more ideas on books with colours in the title, check out Daire’s post here.

Thanks to my husband, I now have a few more books lined up for the challenge. He came home last week and mentioned that a colleague had cleared out their bookshelves and brought in a box full of books they no longer wanted. Naturally, I sent him off with my list, and he came back with these gems:

For the category “profession” was Memoirs of a Geisha.
For the category “a kind of food” or “number” was Five Quarters of the Orange.
And, my favourite interpretation of all, for the category “something you don’t like” was Voices After Midnight! I am definitely no owl

Charity Shop Treasure Hunt

This morning I had a couple of hours in town to myself. I took the opportunity to trawl the charity shops for books for my treasure hunt reading challenge. I was pretty pleased to find a few:

So, I’ve got
The Girl with the Pearl Earring (clue: a precious stone)
Love in the Time of Cholera (clue: an illness)
The Fifth Mountain (clue: a geological formation)

Nice

For the most part, the fiction I read is from the library. However, because I like to read in the bath, it’s good to have a few owned paperbacks on hand too! Looking forward to reading these.

I also picked up a pretty flowery sheet, which I am going to use to make the muslin for my next garment:

The pattern I am planning to use is New Look 6095, a simple shift dress.

I am also planning to have another go at McCalls M5050. Hopefully this spotty green fabric will be perfect, and nothing like a milkmaid

Hunting Treasure

Regular readers will know that I looooove books.

Like many people, I suspect, I do tend to read books that I know are “me” – that are by authors I know, or are similar to other books I have read. So, when I saw this challenge by Daire of Doing it the Open Way, I thought this might be just the thing to get me reading a wider variety of things, and taking a risk on books I might not otherwise have tried. Here’s how Daire describes the challenge:

Basically I’m going to give you a list of topics, and you have to read a book with each of those things in the title. (I’ll be doing it too). There is no time limit for this challenge, and there will be no prize, it is simply a whimsical way to get through those stacks of books you’ve ‘always’ intended on reading.

Below is the list of scavenger clues. I’ve already started thinking about books I might read for each of the clues, and these are in italics. If you have any great books to recommend that would fit into any of the categories, then give me a shout

Weather
Something you’d find in space
Geological formation
A colour My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
A farmyard animal
A zoo animal The Tiger’s Wife (Tea Obreht)
A type of building
A profession
An illness
A month November (Flaubert)
A country
A girl’s name Naomi (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki)
A boy’s name
A body of water Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
A mode of transportation
A kind of food Quite a Year for Plums (Bailey White)
A kind of drink The Color of Tea (Hannah Tunnicliffe)
A feeling
A flower Black Orchid (Neil Gaiman)
A hobby you have
A hobby you don’t have
Something made of metal
Something made of wood
Something made of plastic
A toy or game
A family relationship
A number
A mythical creature
A shape
Something you’d wear
Something you don’t like
Something scientific
A question mark
A precious stone
A bird
A time of day#

What fun!!

Learning Skills to Love What I Wear

You may remember that I signed up for the Love What You Wear Project a few weeks’ back. I made a commitment not to buy any new clothes from 1st November 2012 to 30th November 2013. In my last post, I talked about learning to sew my own clothes as a response to life on this new planet we have made. About time I got round to something then!

I was pleased to pick up a couple of old dressmaking books in a charity shop:

Both have lots of useful info, but the Batsford book is a particular gem. There are charts detailing which needles and threads to use with which fabrics:

Info on basics like facings and setting in sleeves:

And some very twee illustrations:

Next step is to actually make something!

After the disaster of cutting out a too-small-size pattern for Waif’s pyjamas, I decided that, rather than cut out the actual pattern for my skirt, I would trace off the size I need. This has the added bonus of reducing the number of confusing lines; plus I am less likely to put my thumb through the tracing paper as it is much thicker than pattern paper. My mum gave me a tip, which was to tape the pattern onto the window to trace it, which I did:

I have now cut out my pattern pieces, and washed my fabric, so hopefully this weekend I will be able to get to work on cutting out the fabric and actually sewing something!

Learning to Live on Eaarth

Have you ever read a book that affects you so deeply that your life for ever more will be separated into “before” and “after” reading said book? For me, eaarth is such a book.

I am certainly no climate change sceptic and some would consider our family to be quite “green” – we recycle and compost; we don’t take foreign holidays; we cycle and use public transport as much as possible; we eat organic food…

However, until reading McKibben’s book, I don’t think I had fully appreciated the scariness of the predicament that we humans have placed this planet in. McKibben gives example after example after example of the effects of global warming. And these are not predicted effects. These are things that are happening RIGHT NOW. This is not a problem just for our grandchildren. This is not even a problem just for our children. This is our problem. Now. Right now. As McKibben puts it:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists.

Although the first half of the book was seriously terrifying (it quite literally gave me nightmares), McKibben does go on to talk about solutions for the future and there is hope BUT only if we radically change things. A few green tweaks here and there are not enough. We need to do some serious scaling down. In McKibben’s words:

The project we’re now undertaking – maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm – requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about towns, about neighbourhoods, about blocks. Big was dynamic; when the project was growth, we could stand the side effects. But now the side effects of that size – climate change, for instance – are sapping us. We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down. We need to choose safety instead of risk, and we need to do it quickly, even at the sacrifice of growth. We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerabilities. It’s not just people in poor nations who are exposed to the elements now, but all of us. We’ve got to make our societies safer, and that means making them smaller. It means, since we live on a different planet, a different kind of civilization.

From a personal point of view, this has triggered some serious thinking about how I can prepare for this future, and as a home-educating parent, how I can help prepare my children for this new Eaarth. I strongly believe that compassion and kindness will become more important than ever. But I also think that we need to become more self-reliant and resilient. The skills for life on Eaarth are probably quite different to those emphasised in our current educational model. I believe that we need more practical skills. I undertake to help our family to learn skills like:

• growing and cooking our own food
• mending and making our own clothes
• basic property maintenance
• holistic health care

Our throw-away, consumer, growth-driven way of life must end soon. These forgotten skills (that would have been second nature to our forefathers & mothers) are in serious need of renewal. What better place to start than right here, right now?

How will you prepare for life on Eaarth?

Quiet Please! Introvert at Work

I would rather go to the library than to a nightclub.
I would rather stroll through the woods than the city.
I like books better than movies.
I like home cooking better than meals out.
I prefer emails to phone calls (and letters are even better).
I work better alone than as part of a team (though I may not put this on my resume).
I value my friends and family but I need plenty of time to myself too.
My idea of hell on earth would probably look a little like Disneyland.

My name is Viv and I am an introvert.

When I read Daily Prompt #57 One Word Journal Page I knew straight away what my word would be. I am reading Susan Cain’s book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” and it is both a revelation and a comfort. It seems that there is evidence supporting what I have always thought – open plan offices are an abomination, team brainstorming doesn’t work, not all good leaders are extroverts and most creative ideas happen in solitude . I’m not sure the cult of the extrovert is at quite the same level in this country as it is in the United States, where Susan Cain is based (there is still some room for the traditional British reserve), but I think we are increasingly headed that way, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. So this “quiet” page is my ode to introverts. There are plenty of us about and we have lots to contribute. Just don’t shout about it!