Belles-Lettres: Brilliant, Blue-Ribbon Books 2013

Biggest Surprise of the Year -  I Loved This Book! 

So Big by Edna Ferber; published in 1924

Top Three Non-Fiction Books That Were Entire Educations in Themselves: 

At Home by Bill Bryson; How to Live, Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell; The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

Top Three Fiction Books (not mysteries): 

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster; Equilateral by Ken Kalfus; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

Author Most Read: 

Donald Westlake - Six of his Dortmunder capers

Most Delightful Reread: 

Counting My Chickens... by The Duchess of Devonshire

Brothers I Would Most Like to Meet: 

Reggie and Nigel Heath of The Baker Street Letters, The Brothers of Baker Street, and The Baker Street Translation by Michael Robertson

Best Foreign Location: 

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Most Laugh-Out-Loud Dysfunctional Family: 

The Spellman Files and The Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Dreamiest Tale: 

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Best Road Trip: 

The Lost Continent - Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson

Mystery Writer I Am So Glad I Found: 

Peter Lovesey - The Last Detective, Diamond Solitaire, The Summons, and Bloodhounds. 

As If I Needed More Reasons Not To Go On A Cruise: 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

Proof That The South Shall Rise Again: 

Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White.

Authors I Have Met and Their Books I Read This Year: 

Duffy Brown (Killer in Crinolines), William Zinsser (The Writer Who Stayed), and George S. McGovern (Abraham Lincoln)

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel by Bailey White

I was glad to have Bailey White by my side this past weekend. It was a pleasure to dip in and out of her second book of stories about her home and her people in Southern Georgia and its environs. 

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home (1995) finds Ms. White traveling one July to the north to escape the 'green-ness' of the South in summer when even the humid air is tinged with the color and "anything that doesn't move sprouts a blanket of moss." In another episode she explores a cave and ponders that a death underground would be "gray and damp." She gathers with family members in Virginia to reunite ten Chippendale chairs for her nouveau riche cousin Mandon who wants to purchase the entire lot. She visits a one-room school house in Vermont. She and a fellow teacher ditch a series of boring computer classes and take in the dog races instead. She attends a wedding and spends the entire reception sitting on the sidelines in an effort to hide the purple sandals she wore, "because I had suddenly decided my feet looked big and strange."

Oh, yes, Ms. White is still very funny and spot on with her descriptions and characterizations. And although I found this series of vignettes to be a bit more wistful and bittersweet than her stories in Mama Makes Up Her Mind (that I wrote about here), I still want her to be my BFF. 

Stash from the Stacks

Vintage postcard featuring my lovely library in 1919

Here are the books I scored in today's trip to the library:

School of Fear by Gitty Daneshvari - In an effort to overcome their fears, four children enroll in the creepy school run by a slightly crazy ex-beauty queen, Mrs. Wellington. Madeline's fear of bugs has her wearing a beekeeper's netted hat and carrying cans of insect spray on her belt. Lulu has a fear of enclosed spaces and avoids elevators. Then there are the two boys: Theo is afraid of death (his own and any family member's), and Garrison fears large bodies of water. 

Each chapter opens with the definition of a different phobia. For example, did you know that logizomechaniophobia is the fear of computers?

The story was recommended to me by a fifth-grader and has adorable illustrations by Carrie Gifford.

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home by Bailey White - More Southern delights from my new BFF and a perfect way to get in the mood for my upcoming Grand Southern Literary Tour 2013.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester - I mistook this book as a re-titling of Winchester's The Professor and the Madman which I read a couple of years ago and enjoyed. A commenter, Tullik, set me straight on this misconception, and in light of the recent explorations of my own stash of dictionaries (here and here),  I am really looking forward to digging in to this book about the famed OED. 

Finding Oneself

Bailey White
My New BFF

I am going to ask author Bailey White if she would like to be my new best friend. She makes me laugh out loud and there would never be a dull moment in her company. Here, in Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living, she offers up this snippet of what happened when her cousin Lou Ann left her home in Georgia and moved to Santa Fe to 'find herself.' 

Then Lou Ann came back home for a visit. She was driving a Jeep Cherokee filled with huge, wild-looking dogs (three-fourths wolf, Lou Ann said); at least a ton of beautiful, multicolored rocks; dozens of crocus sacks full of strange-smelling herbs; and a big, slow-moving, silent man who was said to speak three dead languages fluently.

Lou Ann did seem happy - if placidity to the point of torpor can be called happiness. Her eyes saw things slowly, her once-nervous hands lay in her lap as still as cold lizards, and her frantically curly hair, which in her unhappy days had seemed to be yearning to leave her head to settle somewhere else for a life of its own, now lay on her shoulders as peaceful as drenched seaweed.

They came into the house trailing a wake of patchouli and sage and sat around eating macrobiotic rice while in the backyard the wolf-dogs neatly and systematically killed all our chickens. After a week they loaded the dogs and the rocks back into the Jeep Cherokee and drove off in a cloud of inner peace.

See what I mean? BFFs!

Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White

Reading Mama Makes Up Her Mind (1993) is as refreshing as drinking a big ol' glass of sweet tea on a hot summer day. In these autobiographical sketches, Bailey White has captured (and more than likely embroidered on) some of the outrageous eccentricities of her Mama and a front porch full of relatives all living in rural Southern Georgia.

Mama uses her walking stick to kill any errant rattlesnake that has the misfortune to crawl out from underneath the porch. Ms. White's sister Louise buys a dress for a family wedding only to discover it makes her "look like a zipper." Aunt Belle (no relation) trains an alligator to crawl out of the pond and bellow on cue. Cousin Lucy was memorizing Pride and Prejudice at age seven. Another cousin, May, has a morbid fear of cows - something to do with their lips.

In Ms. White's world there are beds that fold up in the middle of the night trapping unsuspecting house guests in a tangle of sheets and terror. There is the Porsche parked permanently on the front porch. There is a typewriter that lives under the kitchen sink not far from the bowl of night crawlers that Mama keeps. There are ghosts, UFOs, buzzards, vicious swans, a county fair, and a train trip involving fifty pounds of daffodil bulbs.

Just your everyday portrait of Southern living!

Ms. White herself is a first-grade schoolteacher. She discovers that the secret to teaching children to read is maritime disasters:

Give me a man overboard or a good sinking ship, and I can teach a half-witted gorilla to read. I start with old sea chanties. The children rub their fingers under the written words on their song sheets as the singers on the tape recorder yowl out the tales in a dirge-like pace -- exactly the speed beginning first graders read.

When children get the idea that written words can tell them something absolutely horrible, half the battle of teaching reading is won.

And that's when I turn to the Titanic.

Pour yourself a glass of iced tea, add a sprig of mint, and enjoy reading this book.

Summer Used Book Sale 2013 - The Softcovers

I showed much restraint (for me, anyway) at yesterday's Summer Used Book Sale at historic Locust Grove. I showed up with a shopping bag holding six books to donate and left with the same shopping bag holding eight books bought. A net gain of two. 

I try to stick with hardcover editions, but this time I came away with five quality paperbacks and three hardcover books. 

The books on display are so well sorted. There is one section of the room filled with antiquarian and specially priced books that I just browsed through after I had made my other picks. The rest of the room is filled with hardcovers for $2 and paperbacks for $1. I hit the Literature section first - lots of older books in hardcover - then Fiction, Travel, and a brief browse at the Children's display. I bypassed Gardening, History, Cooking, and Art. 

I try to stay focused.

My hand reached out to many books before I realized that either I already had a copy of that title or I at one time had had a copy of it and had given it away. 

This was the first time I remembered to take my own shopping bag and boy, was that convenient. Much easier than carrying heavy books in the crook of my arm. 

Here are the trade paperback books I nabbed:

Best American Essays 1994 edited by Tracy Kidder and Best American Essays 2000 edited by Alan Lightman - I can't resist a book of essays and within these two collections are pieces by Adam Gopnik, Nicholson Baker, Louise Erdrich, John Updike, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Gordon, Cynthia Ozick, and Terry Tempest Williams.

Mama Makes Up Her Mind (1994) by Bailey White - Ms. White is perhaps best known as a regular contributor on National Public Radio. This book contains a collection of essays and anecdotes on Southern eccentricity, of which there is plenty. Ms. White grew up and lives in Georgia so she has a lot to say, I'm sure.

A Walk in the Woods (1998) by Bill Bryson - I adore Mr. Bryson and would gladly walk with him anywhere. The woods in this book happen to be along the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail. Just a small hike that Mr. Bryson took and wrote about. 

Hotel Pastis (1994) by Peter Mayle - A piece of fiction about a English advertising executive who moves to Provence and transforms an abandoned police station into Hotel Pastis. As always, I am sure Mr. Mayle will delight.

Tomorrow: The hardcovers.