In Which I Make a Plan to Keep My Spirits Up

My Happy Pile

This past year I have been disappointed in my reading. I spent way too much time perusing 'stuff' online leaving my once robust reading routine in tatters.

On the upside, I did attend many author events in 2016 - more than I wrote about - and am grateful to my library for inviting so many outstanding writers to speak here. At least I brushed against some fine writing. 

I rarely seek out new books anymore although I do occasionally stumble across one that piques my interest.  I am especially put off by book reviews that use words such as 'sweeping', 'saga', 'multi-generational', 'dark', 'violent', 'tragic', 'downfall', or 'dystopian'. And it seems as if most reviews do. 

Sigh. I do believe I am in a grand reading funk.

Maybe this is what "a certain age" looks like. I long for the comfort of a book I know is well written, entertaining, and if it makes me laugh all the better. 

To combat my despair - not only about my reading but other things as well - I made a plan to read books that will Keep My Spirits Up. (OK, I know it should be Keep Up My Spirits but it sounds better with the preposition at the end.)

So, to make it easy to grab one, I have created My Happy Pile of books that I know will make my spirits soar:

Merry Hall trilogy by Beverley Nichols - One cannot be blue when in the company of Mr. Nichols, his cats, and his house and garden restoration schemes.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson - A book I bought when it was first published but has languished on the shelf. Mr. Bryson is guaranteed to make me laugh out loud.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne - What could be more pleasant than spending time in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield - I feel my spirits brightening just thinking about this delightful book.

My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber - Things that go bump in the night are sure to bring on a smile or two.

Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland - A refreshing defense of naps, bacon, martinis, and other indulgences.

Simple Pleasures - British writers look at 'the little things that make life worth living' - published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Of course there will be the gentle mystery or comic crime caper at bedtime.

In case my choices leave you cold, I have received responses to my call to bloggers and commenters with suggestions for their own Happy Pile and will be putting them together for you next week. 

Let's all hang tight and Keep Our Spirits Up.

A Walled Garden Full of Tame Dragons

Barbara Holland
1933-2010

The final essay in Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures is entitled Books. Not that books are endangered but that reading for pleasure might be. Children, she writes, are encouraged to read not for joy but for profit. Read to succeed.

"Still," she writes, "there are books, other books, that will never lead to success but that provide an odd, separate, impractical pleasure not offered by anything else on earth. I don't mean noble ideas or philosophical insights, since I seem to be immune to them both, but the books that move permanently into one's head and construct their own space there, a kind of walled garden full of tame dragons, that we can walk around in whenever we want."

I love that image. I find I have a garden that holds Scout dressed in her pumpkin outfit walking home through the rustling leaves. Another garden contains Zuckerman's farm and a clever spider named Charlotte endlessly spinning her web. Still another is a garden within a garden - a Secret Garden discovered by lonely orphan Mary Lennox.

Who or what inhabits your walled gardens?

Endangered Pleasures

Here is another book on my List of 10 (#9) - Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity and Other Indulgences by Barbara Holland.

How can you not like a woman who writes on:

Waking Up
Obviously the best possible time to wake up is in the June of our tenth year, on the first day of summer vacation. Failing that, another good time is in winter, facing east on the only bright morning in a long string of dark ones.

Clothes
Long ago, for purely practical reasons, we took to wearing a bit of something over the skin, a grass loincloth, maybe, or a scrap of tiger's hide. These tended to look the same every day, except for the grass getting dryer and the tiger stripes fading in the sun. When they wore out completely we got new ones, and I suppose others noticed and commented, and gradually the idea of variety took hold.

Working
Being at work justifies the day. We needn't curse ourselves for wasted hours, even if we spent them all in pointless meetings or in a slow season, frittered them away with gossip, the newspapers, and computer games

Talking
Recreational talking is, along with private singing, one of our saddest recent losses. Like singing, talking has become a job for trained professionals, who are paid considerable sums of money to do it on television and radio while we sit silently listening or, if we're truly lonely and determined, call the station and sit holding the phone waiting for the chance to contribute our two cents' worth.

Those are just a sampling of the astute thoughts and opinions that Ms. Holland expresses in this book of some 66 essays. Like other essayists that I enjoy reading, she takes the ordinary, puts her own spin on the subject, and makes it extraordinary.

Ms. Holland was born in 1933 and grew up near Washington, D.C. Her other collections of essays are Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: The Case for Cows, Orchards, Bake Sales & Fairs (1997), and Wasn't the Grass Greener? A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories (1999).

She would be a wonderful luncheon companion - even though she smoked. Unfortunately, one of her endangered pleasures was smoking. She died of lung cancer in 2010.