Taking a Breather & Reviewing Some Books
Sep. 11th, 2023 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 07:49 pm (UTC)As someone who owns twelve physical books by D K Broster from the first half of the 20th century, several of which are first editions, I congratulate you! : D There's just such a satisfaction in having the physical books, and not just the Gutehberg ebooks.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-11 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 12:45 pm (UTC)That was why I turned back, after all. The book was calling for me.
You had to answer its call!
no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 02:26 pm (UTC)Of course I had to answer the book's call! Last night just before bed I picked the book up to read just a bit, and accidentally read two-thirds of it.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-13 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-14 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-16 08:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-17 05:48 pm (UTC)And YES, that bookstore find truly felt pre-ordained.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-17 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-17 05:55 pm (UTC)And the brunch was amazing! So delicious. Really sold me on the whole B&B concept.