All the cool kids (skygiants, troisoiseaux, qian...) are posting hundred book lists, so I thought I'd do one too. Here it is! See how many you've read!

Another round of five questions meme! If you would like questions, say "Questions, please!"

Questions from lucymonster.

1) For the next six months, your reading is restricted to a single genre of your choice. What do you pick?

Oh, this is cruel. Do “children’s books” count as a genre, or do I need to be more specific? It would probably be children’s fantasy or children’s historical fiction, and you would have to rip the ones that blur the lines between the two out of my cold dead hands.

2) What’s a once-embarrassing childhood memory that you’ve come to look back on more fondly?

Oh, gosh, so there was one time in high school that I vigorously accused my friends of STEALING my PEPPERMINT PATTY at lunch, only to realize to my horror that said peppermint patty was in my hand the whole time. At the time I had NO idea how to walk this back and simply sat there clutching my peppermint patty praying that no one would ask me to open my hands or I would have no choice but to die on the spot (thankfully no one thought to ask), but looking back, this is hilarious.

I can’t remember the ultimate fate of the peppermint patty. I assume that I clutched it in secret until I was alone, then gobbled the evidence.

3) Best dessert you’ve ever eaten?

No, I take it back. THIS is cruel. How can I pick just one dessert out of the galaxy of delicious desserts in my life?

One of the most memorable desserts of my life occurred when my parents and I visited Sydney when I was seventeen. We walked down to Cabbage Tree Point, where we ate at a restaurant called Le Kiosk, and for dessert I had what must have been a flourless chocolate cake - I believe my first ever flourless chocolate cake - with a luscious fruit compote. I loved it so much that I immortalized it in my scrapbook as “THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!”

4) What’s the first movie you can remember seeing in a cinema?

The first movie I know for sure that I saw in a cinema was The Lion King, and I was deeply scarred when Simba’s daddy died. He died. HE DIED!

I also felt that the sudden appearance of Timon and Pumba and all the fart jokes lowered the tone of the movie, although I didn’t find them quite as annoying as Mushu in Mulan a few years later. You’re going to make a perfectly good movie about a cross-dressing soldier and ruin it with a TINY IRRITATING DRAGON?

5) How often do you write by hand, and are you proud of your penmanship?

I actually write by hand pretty often, as one of my hobbies is penpalling. The best that can be said of my penmanship is that it’s mostly legible, but to be honest I think most people these days are so pleased to get a handwritten note that they don’t mind if it’s a bit messy.

My Anne of Green Gables odyssey continues! On Wednesday I went to the Anne of Green Gables Museum, partly because the gift shop was far less tchotchke oriented and, indeed, had copies of many of Montgomery's books! Not to mention the Megan Follows' Anne of Green Gables miniseries on DVD! Which of course I bought, so now I have a copy of my very own, plus copies of Pat of Silver Bush and A Tangled Web, which are the two books that they had in the edition I wanted (a.k.a. the edition that I grew up with, and I foresee many happy hours in used bookstores as I track nice copies down).

Also, the museum itself is more book oriented: there's a glass case containing first editions of, I believe, every Montgomery novel (I didn't actually count), and another case containing novels that Montgomery inscribed to her cousins, the descendants of whom still own this house - which also means that there are some fun Montgomery artifacts here, like the crazy quilt she made. PLUS there is a museum cat! Her name is Jilly and she just showed up one day and she likes to sleep in a cradle in one of the rooms, and to my great delight she was sleeping in her usual spot when I passed through.

After the museum, I headed down to Dalvay-By-the-Sea. Miniseries aficionados will know this as the White Sands Hotel. I am so sorry I didn't book at least a night there, because it is so beautiful and also it is possessed of absolutely the perfect lounge, full of soft comfortable chairs and a fireplace with an actual wood fire which would be the perfect place to sit and read on a rainy day...

Of course the trick would be managing to book for a rainy day, now wouldn't it. When I came to PEI the forecast suggested rain every day of the week, and today is the first day that we had sustained rain of any kind, and even that was only for a bit in the afternoon! Which of course is great, I'm so glad that my vacation has been mostly non-rainy, but it does undermine one's belief in the forecast, now doesn't it.

Unable to stay at Dalvay-By-the-Sea, I did the next best thing: dinner in their round dining room overlooking the water, gazing out the window and reading The Blue Castle in between courses, as I ended up ordering a succession of appetizers and then dessert.

First, a bread basket with little strips of focaccia, perfectly salted. Then a single fresh Island oyster, with mignonette and horseradish. Smoked duck crostini, with goat cheese and caramelized onions. "Square" soup (no idea why it's called that), butternut squash & pear soup lashed with creme fraiche. And the piece de resistance, the Platonic ideal of a sticky date pudding, rich and yet light, with the rich layered caramel sweetness of toffee sauce and the softening influence of vanilla ice cream; and a pot of Earl Grey tea, a dangerous indulgence so late in the evening, but I drove back to my B&B and slept like a top.

Today I went to Charlottetown, grumpily prepared to spend all day reading in the library if it rained, but in fact the rain held off, so I visited the exhibit about the 1864 Conference of Confederation in Charlottetown, which eventually led four provinces (not including PEI) to confederate in 1867. (As it turns out, the conference occurred in Charlottetown because PEI was so uninterested in the whole idea that they refused to attend if they had to actually travel anywhere. PEI didn't join till 1873.)

And the rain still held off, so I drifted down to poke around St. Dunstan's Basilica. And the rain still held off, so I wandered through Confederation Landing, where I learned that the original Confederation Conference was completely upstaged by the fact that the circus was in town. Then up through the downtown area, and hit up three (!) bookstores all on one street - and then it did begin to rain a bit, so I repaired to the library to catch up on my correspondence, and by the time I was caught up the rain had stopped again, so I set out in search of Red Island Ciders, for I had been informed that they sold hand pies.

(Also, get a load of this Reader/Cider fic. "This Golden Russet cider will take you by the hand, walk you through an apple orchard in autumn, and when an unexpected rain shower appears, this cider will give you a warm hug.")

When I walked in, there were four chaps sitting at the bar, and they all looked up like the regulars of a pub in some show like Ballykissangel: not hostile at all, just astonished that an outsider should appear. Meekly I explained my yearning for a handpie, and the proprietor explained that they were mostly frozen but they had one warm, braised beef and mozzarella, would I like that? Yes I would, and could I buy this Golden Russet cider too, and the handpie popped out of the oven just as I was paying, which leads me to believe that I more or less took it out of the mouth of one of the regulars - but after all he would be there all evening, they could just heat him up another one.

And my god, it's the handpie of all handpies. A flaky crust, a melting filling, the beef tender and soft with the right amount of onion. A delicious warm thing to eat as you drift through the faintest spit of rain on a trail through Charlottetown, pausing at a sign that explains there is a round-the-island trail that takes a mere 32 days to walk, and sighing wistfully at the thought. (One envisions, of course, handpies at every stop.)

And now I am drinking my cider and catching up my DW on all these exciting happenings. Hoping to finish Pat of Silver Bush tonight. Finished Kilmeny of the Orchard a couple days ago; review perhaps forthcoming? I would like to write systematic reviews of Montgomery's work, as I did of Betsy-Tacy, but I'm afraid that a road trip is perhaps just not the time...

The B&B in Mankato promised a gourmet four-course Sunday brunch, so I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed yesterday morning, ready for a delicious brunch to set me up for the long drive home. Savory smells came from the kitchen… a cutting board full of fruit reposed on the counter…

And then the power went out!

Fortunately, the brunch was delicious anyway - and very atmospheric for Betsy-Tacy, as I pointed out to my table companions, for Betsy would have eaten breakfast in the sunlight through the windows just like us. And, as the house was built in the 1880s (it belonged to Winona Root’s uncle, who co-edited the local paper with her father, for Betsy-Tacy fans), the windows let in plenty of light for the purpose.

And brunch was delicious! A fruit course, including honeydew fresh from the garden (not usually a big honeydew fan, but who turns down garden-fresh fruit?). Thick slices of blueberry loaf with rhubarb compote. A stovetop course created on the fly by the B&B owner when the power outage forced a change of plans: cheesy polenta, sausage, and scrambled eggs with cherry tomatoes and basil, also fresh from the garden. And to top it off, a tiny desert course of ice cream bonbons with almond cookies. Delicious!

Fortified by this excellent brunch, I drove back to Indiana, where I am visiting my parents and taking a brief breather after the western leg of the trip!

I have of course a backlog of books that I want to write about, so I thought I’d start with a couple quick reviews of books that I actually finished before the trip began. (One always ought to clear one’s plate of book reviews before the trip, but to be fair I wrote MANY book reviews in that last week as it was!)

The cover copy describes Monica Dickens’s Mariana as a read-alike to I Capture the Castle, but although both books are coming-of-age stories about young girls in interwar Britain, Mariana is a sharper book, without the charm and whimsy of I Capture the Castle, which was written during the war and already views the interwar period with a wistful nostalgia.

Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland is historical fantasy, or rather more of a historical fairy tale or folktale, an origin story for the horses of Iceland. A man heads out from Iceland on a trading voyage through Europe and Central Asia, and through strange and ghostly happenings (which give him a pain in the neck: he doesn’t want to get entangled with magic! Way too much trouble!) he comes home with a herd of horses.

I did also finish E. F. Benson’s David Blaize of King’s, but it’s going to get its own post.

***

Later this week, I’ll be heading off on a camping trip in the Indiana Dunes, followed by a visit to my friend Micky in Michigan, which will at long last include a visit to the massive Detroit bookstore John K. King books!

This trip has already featured many bookstores. The gorgeous public library in St. Cloud has a used bookstore on the first floor, where I found Phyllis Fenner’s The Proof of the Pudding: What Children Read, an enchanting book from 1957 full of book recommendations. Fenner was a school librarian, and each chapter offers a list of books that children have enjoyed about mythology, or adventure, or biography, or what have you.

She also includes a list of classics and books that she believes will become classics. Many of her guesses are spot on, and it’s also fascinating to see which books have fallen off the shelf in the years since, like Lucinda P. Hale’s 1880 The Peterkin Papers. These comic stories were evidently still popular with children in 1957, but I hadn’t heard of them till this year. In fact, I had started reading The Peterkin Papers just before I got The Proof of the Pudding, so it was a delightful moment of synchronicity when they showed up here!

However, the true find occurred in the middle of Wisconsin. I was driving through the cornfields along quiet little US-10 when from the corner of my eye I caught sight of KG’s Unique, Rare, and Antique Books. Already I was flying past, but at the next crossroads I executed a U-turn and went back…

Only to find that the store was closed! But as I was turning back to my car, the door opened: the owner was there, and he invited me in, and so in I went. I trawled the children’s books; I considered the shelves of leatherbounds; I sat on the floor to sort through a stack of books with that distinctive look of the first half of the twentieth century…

And there I found William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader! I’ve never seen a Heyliger book in the flesh before, and this is one of my favorites, the book that got me started on Heyliger in the first place when I read an excerpt in an old reading textbook.

So of course I bought it. That was why I turned back, after all. The book was calling for me.

I am returned from the Lilly Library! The Lilly has an extensive rare book collection, including first editions of many of the Newbery Honor books (not quite all of them yet, but that's the goal), which of course was the siren song that summoned me there.

As I've never been to a rare book library before, I vaguely expected to be handed a stack and beetle off to my desk, but in fact they brought each book out on a sort of beanbag pillow, tamped down in the center so the book opened in a shallow V, with a weighted cord to use to hold the pages down, either to provide some rest for your hands or to protect the pages from the oils on your fingers? Not sure. Anyway it felt very fancy, and the Reading Room is beautiful, the walls all lined with books that people have requested, and above the bookshelf a mural of Great Thinkers of History (I don't think that's it's title, but it appeared to be the subject matter) and a high window with a relaxing view of the trees.

And I read three books!

John Bennett's The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, which I'll write about in my post about the Newbery books of 1929.

Anne Parrish's The Story of Appleby Capple, an alphabet book, although such a long and complicated alphabet book that it would have to be read to any beginning reader! It's a nonsense adventure story: Appleby goes missing in the woods while looking for a Zebra butterfly for his great-uncle, and then everyone goes to look for him, and a bunch of zoo animals are loose... If you like absurdist children's literature it's a fine example of the genre, but the genre is not my cup of tea. The thing that touched me most was the dedication, to Anne's brother Dillwyn (co-author of her previous Newbery Honor book, also nonsense stories, The Dream Coach), who had been dead for years by the time this book was published... but it was a story they had begun together long ago as children.

And Christine Weston's Bhimsa, the Dancing Bear, which I quite enjoyed. This is a running-away-from-home adventure story, all the good parts of running away without any of the icky realism. When Gopala and his bear friend Bhimsa drop by David's garden, David jumps the fence, and the two boys set off across India to find Gopala's home. (Gopala and Bhimsa were washed away from their high mountain village when the river flooded.) One presumes from his name and situation that David is English, but this is not a book that is at all interested in wider social issues: it's all about adventure and friendship and that time when your doughty bear friend rescues you from an attacking tiger.

I read MANY books on my trip (and also missed last Wednesday Reading Meme), so rather than do a proper Wednesday Reading Meme this week I thought I would start with the three physical books I read over the trip.

I began with the latest entry in Elizabeth Wein’s Girl Pilots of World War II series, The Last Hawk, which I’ve been saving since littlerhymes sent it to me (inexplicably, these books have not been published in the US) because it seemed like the perfect book to read on the plane. It was! Lots of gorgeous descriptions of piloting a glider in the mountains, maybe Wein’s best flying sequences since Code Name Verity.

Otherwise, this is solidly entertaining, although there’s nothing as delightfully off the wall as ( Spoilers for Firebird ). The Last Hawk starts with Ingrid writing her story for the Americans after flying over enemy lines to smuggle important information out of Germany (literally she tells us this on the first page), and the rest of the story explains how she got there.

I had intended to buy LOTS of books in New York, but as it turned out, I was cruelly misled (probably by my own hopes and dreams, because I can’t recall anyone telling me this) into believing that the Strand’s 18 miles of books include many USED books. Possibly it does on the fourth floor? But the fourth floor was CLOSED and so my carefully curated list of Ye Old Authors was for naught.

However, my luck improved at the delightful children’s bookstore Books of Wonder, where I found Penelope Farmer’s William and Mary and T. Degens' The Visit. Farmer is most famous for Charlotte Sometimes, in which modern-at-the-time-of-writing Charlotte keeps switching places with a girl who studied at her boarding school decades before, during World War I. This is the final book in a trilogy, the other two books of which are about children who learn to fly.

William and Mary has the same weird atmosphere, although the details of said weirdness are totally different. William and Mary are stuck at boarding school over break, and discover that William’s shell allows them to enter into a variety of sea-themed art objects: a painting of Atlantis, a photo of coral reefs, a sea shanty about fishing, and so forth and so on. It didn’t quite come together for me at the end, but it’s also not a book where the ending really matters. The weird magical happenings are the point.

T. Degens’s The Visit also didn’t quite come together, but unfortunately it is the kind of book where the ending matters. Every year, Kate’s buoyant, vivacious Aunt Sylvia comes to Germany for a monthlong visit. These visits used to be the highlight of Kate’s year… until she found the diary of her long-dead Aunt Kate, and realized that Sylvia was somehow implicated in the first Kate’s death at Hitler Youth camp.

The story is told in alternating chapters: present-day chapters in first person, in which Kate sulks through Aunt Sylvia’s visit, and past chapters in third person, which must be Kate’s imaginative reconstruction of the past based on Aunt Kate’s diary.

The structure really demands a final clash in which Kate confronts Aunt Sylvia about What Happened to Aunt Kate (and maybe also What Were You All Thinking with the Nazism). But the book ends before the confrontation: Kate decides she’ll ask Aunt Sylvia directly, and then the book cuts off. I can sort of see why, because Aunt Sylvia is exactly the kind of charming narcissist who would try to wiggle out of all responsibility, and that’s not a satisfying ending either - but it would be more satisfying than what we get.

I enjoyed all these books (even The Visit, though it's the most flawed of the three), but I don't feel the need to keep them. They are all free to a good home! Let me know if you would like one.

I'm starting my new job this week! My first shift is on Wednesday.

The one drawback of this job is that it has a half hour commute, so I've decided that obviously the best way to deal with this is - audiobooks! Which means that I am asking you to recommend to me your favorite audiobooks.

I'm looking particularly for books where you think the audio dimension adds something to the novel - a reading that is not just competent but makes the book even better than in book form. I really enjoyed the audiobook of Gail Carson Levine's Dave at Night, for instance, because the narrator did great accents for the characters - I probably would have liked the book anyway, but it wouldn't have made such an impression on me without the voices.

We're doing a Secret Santa at work, and my recipient made the mistake of requesting something "readable."

"TIME FOR A TRIP TO THE BOOKSTORE!" I yelled, silently inside my head, and hied myself to the nearest Half Price Books to get the most bang for the $15 spending limit.

I got three books! Including two beautiful hardcovers. One of which was a beautiful copy of Code Name Verity, ON CLEARANCE, and while it hurts my soul to see Code Name Verity clearanced at least I will be sending it to a new and hopefully loving home.

Other finds include The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - it occurs to me, rather belatedly, that this is a lot of World War II; I do hope she likes that - and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game, because everyone's life is improved by having The Egypt Game in it.

Also, it was the only Zilpha Keatley Snyder book they had. I have been trawling the stores for ages looking for a copy of The Changeling, without any luck. Also hard to find: Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. I have had this book stolen from me twice, because whenever I lend it out to people they fall so in love with it that (one can but presume) they forget that it isn't actually theirs.

The most important part of packing for a road trip, of course, is deciding which books you’re going to take along. As my road trip is too long to allow for taking books out of the library, I shall have to take a selection from the Unread Book Club already lined up on my shelves, which as you can imagine makes me feel most productive & efficient.

I’ve already made a few definite choices. Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane/Peter Whimsy quartet is coming: it will fulfill (indeed overfulfill) my next reading challenge, “three books by the same author,” and also I have meant to read these books for forever and expect them to be a treat which all in all makes them perfect for a vacation.

I’m also taking Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, because, aptly, I kidnapped it from the shelf of a friend and ought to get it back in a reasonably timely manner.

But I’m still happily contemplating my other choices. Should I, for instance, take along Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers? I feel like The Three Musketeers AND all those Sayers books might be a little too much.

On the other hand, one should never underestimate how much reading time one will have on holiday! And The Three Musketeers is just one big book to haul around, rather than a lot of little books, which is a point in its favor.

Other contenders:

Jane Langton’s The Astonishing Stereoscope. I hesitate because perhaps I ought to let more time elapse after reading The Fragile Flag before reading another Langton book? Otherwise it might lead to unfair comparison.

Sheila O’Connor’s Sparrow Road. I found this in a Little Free Library and took it because I was enchanted at having a book from a Little Free Library. No idea if it’s any good. Has anyone read it?

Nancy Bond’s A String in the Harp. Children’s magical time travel fantasy! A genre that has fallen sadly out of fashion in late years, as has portal fantasy. Yes, I probably ought to give this one a go.

Theresa Tomlinson’s The Forestwife. A Robin Hood retelling. Possibly a nitty-gritty retelling with plague and starving to death? Hmm.

Patricia Clapp’s Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth. Massachusetts is on my itinerary. Of course I ought to take this book along.

I have come into possession of a pair of bookshelves, so I decided it was time to move my books from my parents' house down to my apartment. And, as I was going to have to get them all off the shelves and box them up anyway, I figured that I might as well sort them.

There were a lot of books.

( All the books! )

What surprised me most was that I actually found quite a number that I haven't read. Now admittedly, some of these were children's books that my mother bought for us lo these many years ago and we simply never got around to reading them, but still. I now have an actual physical unread book pile!

( The untead book pile )

It is a bit intimidating. I only transported some of the unread books to Indianapolis with me, as I figured that having the whole pile constantly under my eye might give me vapors.

I haven not yet managed to transfer all the books from my car into my room and thence onto the bookshelves, but once I do I will probably post pictures of that too. There's already a shelf and a half devoted to Isobelle Carmody. Why must she write such very long books?