In the fall of 1969, the year we moved to Vermont, when I was in the eighth grade, 12 years old, our English teacher handed out simple mimeographed forms on which we were to record the books we read outside of the class over the course of the academic year. I dutifully did so. My choices ranged from young adult lit (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Across Five Aprils, and those Kate Seredy books set in early twentieth century Hungary that I still adore and have read, reread, and read to my children: The Good Master and The Singing Tree) to more mature choices (Profiles in Courage, Rebecca, Gone with the Wind). We did this again in ninth grade, when, although barely a teen, it appears that I fancied myself a pretty adult reader (The Good Earth; Cry, the Beloved Country; The Secret of Santa Vittoria) I even included that bestselling novella, Love Story, on my list -- it went through the girls of my set like wildfire; I can still see Janice E. holding the book under her desk, surreptitiously reading it during class.
And then, after ninth grade was over, I just kept adding to the list, until this very day.
From tenth grade until I finished my first year of college, I kept a continuous list, and then starting in the summer of 1975, I dated the list by years. Through 2005 I handwrote the lists, and since 2006 I have typed them. (I actually typed the list in 2002, but for some unknown reason reverted to longhand in 2003 and 2004.) The lists are in plastic sleeves and collected in a looseleaf notebook imprinted with Just Manufacturing Company, Stainless Steel Sinks, on the cover (absolutely no idea where that came from). They are not in a database and cannot be searched, except by manually looking through the lists book by book.
This lifelist of books is not 100% complete. It does not contain any books I read for school or any academic pursuit (that would have made a nice separate list), nor does it contain the books my husband and I read aloud to our children at bedtime over the course of many years (a list which I genuinely regret not keeping). And it is missing the names of four or five books after we suffered a computer crash in 2007 and realized one of our children had wiped out our backup. I didn't care about anything we lost except my booklist, about which I was pretty distraught. I racked my brains, searched my library checkouts and book group picks, but there remained a few missing titles. The list does, however, include books I have read for my book group since I joined in 1993, as well as audiobooks I have listened to.
Today is New Years Day, and I have just updated, printed, and filed my 2015 list in the Just Manufacturing notebook. A bird's-eye view:
Favorites: The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (can't do it justice in a parenthetical: the subtitle is A Family's Century of Art and Loss, about a wealthy European Jewish family; a collection of Japanese netsuke miniatures that miraculously survived World War II intact and is still in the family serves as an organizing principle); The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (about the Washington crew team that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 -- great book and great audio); the opening 75 pages of Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie, where she paints a vivid picture of life in Fairbanks in the post-gold rush early years of the last century, when mail was delivered weekly by dogsled.
Books I reread: I went on a mini-Shaker rereading binge, including June Sprigg's Shaker Gifts: A Memoir of a Shaker Village; Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede, published in 1969, about a successful businesswoman who becomes a cloistered nun; a descriptive passage about a year in the monastery told through the changing seasons is as about as lyrical a passage as I have ever read; and Love Story (see above, ninth grade) -- I found a copy at the thrift shop for a quarter or 50 cents and zipped through it in about 90 minutes; at some point I want to write about the careless and shocking sexism of the book.
Biggest disappointment: I 'm not sure I have a true disappointment, maybe the final book in Updike's Rabbit series, Rabbit Remembered, which he wrote in 2000 but I somehow didn't realize existed until this year. Is it me or did this not quite live up to the four books that preceded it?
Books I am in the process of reading: Dan and I have been reading Middlemarch aloud together since 2014. We're about halfway through. Maybe we'll finish it in 2106. In addition to Middlemarch, right now I'm listening to Jeffrey Eugenides' (of Middlesex fame) The Marriage Plot, and reading The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler for book group.
Book I meant to read in 2015: My Brilliant Friend, an English translation of the first of four volumes of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. I received the book as a birthday gift nearly a year ago from my friend Susie, whose taste in books I trust, but it seemed dauntingly dense. Over the holidays, it was again recommended to me by my cousin's son Peter, who assured me that it is not daunting but wonderful. Intriguingly, "Elena Ferrante" is a pen name and the author's true identity is not publicly known. A reading resolution for 2016, then.
Saturday, January 2, 2016
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
"The Artist's Garden" at Reynolda House
Today I went to the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem to see the exhibit The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement (1887-1920) before it closes on January 3. What a stunning exhibit! I was, however, disappointed when I saw an icon of a camera with a slash through it at the entrance to the exhibit, Absolutely No Photographs, full stop, as I was hoping to put together a little illustrated essay about the exhibit.
The unpleasant surprise of no photographs was counterbalanced by the pleasant surprise of walking into the next-to-last room of the exhibit and seeing an oil of irises in shades of blue and purple, white and yellow, nestled among deep-green spears of leaves. Before I could stop myself, I gave an audible gasp and exclaimed, "I know that!" Reading the object label posted on the wall, I saw it was Iris at Dawn by Maria Oakey Dewing, a favorite of mine from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, a collection I have visited a number of times. Favorite works of art are like old friends, and I was delighted that this one had traveled to North Carolina to visit me. I shall content myself with a reproduction from the public domain:
It turns out that Maria Oakey Dewing and her artist husband Thomas (a younger man who she did not marry until she was 36) spent many summers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the artists' colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she cultivated a large garden that served as inspiration for many of her paintings. Here is one from the Smithsonian called Garden in May.
A Bed of Poppies, below, lives at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (the gallery being a part of tony prep school Phillips Andover, not to be confused with tony prep school Phillips Exeter).
Delicious. I love the Smithsonian's description of Garden in May, which seems applicable to all three paintings:
"Dewing places the viewer among the living stems and blossoms that she knew so well. She has cropped a section from the larger bed for intense study, as if she had held a frame in front of the garden and painted only what fit in the rectangle."
I staggered out of the exhibit, art-drunk, watched the video about the history of Reynolda AGAIN (I'm obsessed with the Reynolda House, Gardens, and Village, as well as RJ and Katharine Smith Reynolds, but that is for another day), and went into the main house for a while to see it decorated for the holidays, lingering in RJ's study and the lake breakfast porch.
On the way out I treated myself to something from the gift shop, a long, heavy string of pearls that can be doubled -- very Coco Chanel -- once I overheard the stylish manager (today she was wearing a chic turquoise wool pencil skirt) say to someone else, "This is the best value in the store! Hand-knotted, cultured pearls!" I can hardly wait for the Ansel Adams exhibit to arrive in the spring.
The unpleasant surprise of no photographs was counterbalanced by the pleasant surprise of walking into the next-to-last room of the exhibit and seeing an oil of irises in shades of blue and purple, white and yellow, nestled among deep-green spears of leaves. Before I could stop myself, I gave an audible gasp and exclaimed, "I know that!" Reading the object label posted on the wall, I saw it was Iris at Dawn by Maria Oakey Dewing, a favorite of mine from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, a collection I have visited a number of times. Favorite works of art are like old friends, and I was delighted that this one had traveled to North Carolina to visit me. I shall content myself with a reproduction from the public domain:
It turns out that Maria Oakey Dewing and her artist husband Thomas (a younger man who she did not marry until she was 36) spent many summers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the artists' colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she cultivated a large garden that served as inspiration for many of her paintings. Here is one from the Smithsonian called Garden in May.
A Bed of Poppies, below, lives at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (the gallery being a part of tony prep school Phillips Andover, not to be confused with tony prep school Phillips Exeter).
Delicious. I love the Smithsonian's description of Garden in May, which seems applicable to all three paintings:
"Dewing places the viewer among the living stems and blossoms that she knew so well. She has cropped a section from the larger bed for intense study, as if she had held a frame in front of the garden and painted only what fit in the rectangle."
I staggered out of the exhibit, art-drunk, watched the video about the history of Reynolda AGAIN (I'm obsessed with the Reynolda House, Gardens, and Village, as well as RJ and Katharine Smith Reynolds, but that is for another day), and went into the main house for a while to see it decorated for the holidays, lingering in RJ's study and the lake breakfast porch.
On the way out I treated myself to something from the gift shop, a long, heavy string of pearls that can be doubled -- very Coco Chanel -- once I overheard the stylish manager (today she was wearing a chic turquoise wool pencil skirt) say to someone else, "This is the best value in the store! Hand-knotted, cultured pearls!" I can hardly wait for the Ansel Adams exhibit to arrive in the spring.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
What's in a Name?
With time running out on my New Year's resolution for 2015, to start blogging, my son Quentin and his fiancée Mary helped set up this blog as their Christmas gift to me, less than a week away from the new year. What did I want to call the blog, they asked me? For inspiration in making this decision I turned to my commonplace book.
Commonplace books, which have been used for centuries (Marcus Aurelius apparently kept one) are simply personal compilations of quotes and notes and thoughts, perhaps pictures and images too. I started mine in back in 1976, in an undistinguished blank book I picked up at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Although some people use their commonplace books for their own words and thoughts, I use mine mostly for quotes and passages from my reading, both poetry and prose, sometimes written in longhand, sometimes typed and pasted in its pages, supplemented with articles tucked into the front and back covers. Forty years later, my Dartmouth book is a treasure whose precious contents I have read and reread many times over.
Leafing through my book, I scribbled down ideas on scratch paper, only to reject them, until I came upon a passage from Thoreau's Walden that I had not read in a long time:
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring. . .
I learned to love lilacs in Vermont as a child, and have always missed them terribly over the years since moving south. My husband and I were fortunate to be in Vermont this very year during lilac season, and I was enchanted anew with their "sweet-scented" aroma, their purple and white flowers. We even visited Walden Pond this summer together for the first time. Thoreau's meditative words on time and transience, embodied in the lilac itself and energized by the word vivacious, resonated with me. The next thing I knew Quentin and I were scanning the web for images of lilacs to use on the title page.
I also liked the idea of a pithy quote underneath the blog's title, and I knew immediately what I wanted, a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that I have committed to memory:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
This, too, I had recorded in my commonplace book, and to make sure I had remembered it correctly (I had, as it turned out) I searched again through the book until I found the place I had written it down. According to Wikipedia -- and I have no qualms about relying on Wiki for this sort of thing -- Rukeyser was "an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism." All quite auspicious as far as I am concerned.
So here I start, thinking about the lilacs of New England on a Christmas night in North Carolina, listening to the wind as it gently moves the blossoming flowers and the heart-shaped leaves.
Commonplace books, which have been used for centuries (Marcus Aurelius apparently kept one) are simply personal compilations of quotes and notes and thoughts, perhaps pictures and images too. I started mine in back in 1976, in an undistinguished blank book I picked up at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Although some people use their commonplace books for their own words and thoughts, I use mine mostly for quotes and passages from my reading, both poetry and prose, sometimes written in longhand, sometimes typed and pasted in its pages, supplemented with articles tucked into the front and back covers. Forty years later, my Dartmouth book is a treasure whose precious contents I have read and reread many times over.
Leafing through my book, I scribbled down ideas on scratch paper, only to reject them, until I came upon a passage from Thoreau's Walden that I had not read in a long time:
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring. . .
I learned to love lilacs in Vermont as a child, and have always missed them terribly over the years since moving south. My husband and I were fortunate to be in Vermont this very year during lilac season, and I was enchanted anew with their "sweet-scented" aroma, their purple and white flowers. We even visited Walden Pond this summer together for the first time. Thoreau's meditative words on time and transience, embodied in the lilac itself and energized by the word vivacious, resonated with me. The next thing I knew Quentin and I were scanning the web for images of lilacs to use on the title page.
I also liked the idea of a pithy quote underneath the blog's title, and I knew immediately what I wanted, a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that I have committed to memory:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
This, too, I had recorded in my commonplace book, and to make sure I had remembered it correctly (I had, as it turned out) I searched again through the book until I found the place I had written it down. According to Wikipedia -- and I have no qualms about relying on Wiki for this sort of thing -- Rukeyser was "an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism." All quite auspicious as far as I am concerned.
So here I start, thinking about the lilacs of New England on a Christmas night in North Carolina, listening to the wind as it gently moves the blossoming flowers and the heart-shaped leaves.
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