A Certain Slant of Light

Tomorrow evening I am off to Paris! I will be meeting littlerhymes there, and we will be traipsing through the City of Light for a little over a week. We will walk the paths in Giverny! Admire the art in the Louvre! Eat one extremely fancy lunch! Probably also eat our weight in various French pastries!

I'm not taking my computer, so I won't be posting till I return, but I look forward to regaling you all with stories of our adventures when I get back.

Have just discovered that I have misplaced my adaptor plugs (?!), so if they don't turn up I suppose I will be going to Target tomorrow to buy a replacement. Annoying! But such is life. And while I was searching for them I found a beautiful notecard that I thought I had lost forever, so this wee little cloud had a silver lining.

***

Also, in the interest of clearing the decks of all before-the-trip book reviews: I finished Herbert Best's Garram the Hunter: A Boy of the Hill Tribes, illustrated by Best's wife Erick Berry, author of Winged Girl of Knossos, one of my favorite finds in the Newbery Honor Project.

Garram the Hunter is not destined to join the list of favorites. It's a boy's own adventure story in that classic mode where there's a lot of adventure and very little character development, which is not my thing. However, kudos to Best for writing, in 1930, an adventure novel set in Africa featuring all African characters (from a couple of different ethnic groups that are clearly quite distinct), no white people at all, and almost no racial theorizing behind the offhand comment "Cruel the African native may be, but he loves a joke." (Does this not simply describe humanity?)

There's also something of a theme about The Importance of Maintaining Military Preparedness Even After Years of Peace, in which the modern reader, blessed with hindsight, sees the looming specter of World War II. But 1930 is perhaps too early for Best to be worried specifically about another war with Germany.

Greetings from Philadelphia! This is the final major stop of the trip, for skygiants and genarti's wedding. Then back to Indiana, although not quite back to real life as I am tacking on the brief stops in Indianapolis and Bloomington that I had to cancel earlier because I was sick.

On my final day visiting asakiyume it rained, although politely not until we had returned from our long forest walk, during which we discovered (a) beautiful horses (there is a sign along the road near asakiyume's house that says "horse lessons," and I believe these are the horses), (b) delicious mushrooms, and (c) a tasty fruit that grows on a specific variety of ornamental dogwood tree. So despite the lateness of the season we got to forage a bit after all!

And then we returned to asakiyume's house and baked our croissants! We began work on this recipe on the first morning of my visit, and finished it up on my last, as the croissant dough needs to rise and rise and rise again; and they were very creditable for a first attempt! Delicious, soft, buttery, perhaps not as flaky as a croissant made by a true professional, but after all one does not wish to achieve perfection on the first go. There are mountains still to climb!

Then the rains came, and we had a nice quiet afternoon, reading, writing, recovering from our perhaps over-indulgence in croissants (but WHEN will we have another chance to eat fresh-baked croissants hot out of the oven?), and in my case gathering strength for a weekend of wedding festivities.

Said festivities began yesterday with a cupcake-decorating party! I have met many people that I hitherto knew only online, sometimes through Zoom theater and sometimes only as a username, and many more people that I had not even known in that capacity! Also Freya Marske, who introduced herself simply as Freya, and murmured that she wrote fanfic... Hannibal, Captive Prince, nothing recently though... and it was only half an hour later when she mentioned she was here for a book release that the dominoes fell and I yelled "You're Freya Marske!"

Also I've met a lot of people who have read my books! People who read my books long before they met me, I should say. Which has been nice! Although I'm still working out what one says in response to this, as presumably "oh God I hope you liked it" is not the Author Vibe I wish to project.

This morning, I have visions of the Rodin Museum: it's a lovely sunny day, perfect weather to stroll around the sculpture garden. Then wedding! Then dancing?! Wish me luck!

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...

My last evening in Boston! The last few days with genarti and skygiants have been jam-packed. We went canoeing on the Charles, and saw geese and ducks and two blue herons and a cormorant and a kingfisher. Then apple-picking, at a hillside apple orchard girt round with forest, where they not only allow but all but demand that you climb the apple trees: there are ladders provided, and spreading branches which all but cry out to be climbed.

We suspect that the place is under the protection of the fae - a suspicion that rose to a near certainty when we found a grassy lane of dotted with golden apples like will-o-the-wisps leading you up the hill toward the dark hopeful trees - but the fae were merciful, or sated, and took none of us, but let us go away with a golden apple plucked from the top bough of a tree.

Also we returned to the Boston Public Library to make use of their Reading Room, a beautiful vaulted space with classic green-shaded reading lamps, where I worked a bit on Sage and also a bit on titles that might be a bit more likely to bring readers to the yard. My favorite right now is Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.

And we had an afternoon tea in Lexington, a three-tiered plate bearing little sandwiches, and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, and tiny pastries: eclairs and macarons and the littlest fruit tarts, and tart little lemon squares. Afterward we walked two blocks to the Lexington battlefield, where we had the good luck to catch a tour that had just begun, and the tour guide showed us where the militia gathered on the green, and how close the redcoats stood, shouting for the militia to disperse, when an errant shot started the shooting war.

(I think I've mentioned before my hazy childhood vision of battles as something akin to a soccer match? This is very off-base for the Civil War, and probably for any number of Revolutionary War battles too, but this actually is about the size of the battlefield at Lexington, although the British team unsportingly brought about a hundred players to the militia's forty or so.)

We also very much enjoyed a commemorative plaque erected in 1799 and written in the full glory of 18th century prose. It begins, and I reproduce the capitalization and punctuation verbatim, “Sacred to Liberty & the Rights of mankind!!!”

This is not the only place on the plaque featuring multiple exclamation points. I love it. If you tried to punctuate a plaque like this today, everyone would think you had run mad.

***

A couple of mini-reviews of things that we watched:

A Spy Among Friends, a six-episode miniseries based on Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. I believe someone read the book and said "What if we really lean into the bad break-up vibes of this story?", and the mini-series focuses tightly on Nicholas Elliot's friendship with Kim Philby, which is of course shattered by the realization that his dear friend and long-time spy colleague has in fact been a Soviet double agent ever since the day they met. (Here is an excellent in-depth review by skygiants.)

Also Night Witches in the Sky, a 1981 Soviet film directed by Yevgeniya Zhigulenko. In her youth, Zhigulenko was one of these "night witches" who flew fighter planes for the Soviet Union in World War II; I don't know if the film is based directly on her own experiences, but it surely draws on them for, say, the hijinks of the young pilots as they skylark like schoolgirls, sneaking out of hospitals, stealing goats, frolicking in the water when they're sent to a plum landing field near the beach.

None of us have watched many Soviet war movies, but if this is at all representative, they must be built on a very different set of rules than American ones, which usually signal clearly if this is a boys' own frolic or Very Serious war movie where any character foolish enough to show off a photo of a sweetheart will certainly be gunned down soon.

And possibly Night Witches did indeed have those signals, in a Soviet context. But we don't know how to read them, and were fascinated to realize that it's a little bit of both. The film doesn't have a plot exactly, it's a series of vignettes, and some of them are beach frolics and some of them are "these pilots have left behind their parachutes so they could fit in more bombs, and now their plane is going down in flames and they cannot jump."

***

Tomorrow will be a long driving day, ending on Prince Edward Island, where I will spend a week basking in the land of Anne of Green Gables. I am hoping to buy many L. M. Montgomery novels in the various Anne-themed museums, but just in case my quest proves futile, I've loaded my Kindle with a stack of Montgomery's novels.

Obviously I have to reread Anne of Green Gables, but otherwise I'll follow my whims. Will they lead to a complete Anne reread? A return visit to the Emily Trilogy or Pat duology? Might I branch out in new directions, and finally read Kilmeny of the Orchard and A Tangled Web? Heck, I might even read a non-LMM book! Ah, well, we shall see.

Greetings from New York! This is actually my last morning in the city (soon I will be on my way to visit skygiants and genarti!), but I'm making a leisurely morning of it to spend a little bit more time with my hostess's cat Bagels, so I thought I might also post about my NYC adventures.

It has been a glorious trip! Some highlights:

DINNER AT DELMONICO'S. This is the umpteenth reopening of the oldest restaurant in America, and my God was it delicious. They make their own butter, in house, lightly sprinkled with black salt, we were forced to request a second basket of bread to ensure that no butter was left behind. Then I had the short rib tortellini, the short rib filling so perfectly tender, and a brown butter foam for a sauce - so rich and yet so light! - and everything sprinkled with hazelnuts, which drew all the disparate delicious flavors into one grand symphony. And for dessert, baked Alaska made with walnut cake and banana gelato and sweet meringue, and a tart apricot jam on the side to cut all the sweetness... to be honest I would have switched out for a different gelato, a classic vanilla or perhaps (this was Elena's idea) a hazelnut, but it was still very good.

And then we walked back to Elena's place over the Brooklyn Bridge, which is all lit up in the night and oddly peaceful up above the cars.

The Cloisters. This is the Met's medieval art outpost, a small castle of a building set at the top of a park in Upper Manhattan. One of the most peaceful museums I've ever visited, built around four cloisters, each with its cloister garden (although one of the cloisters is enclosed to protect the limestone pillars, so that garden is some pots of ferns, haha) and its fountain and its fruit trees. I took a garden tour (I've gotten very into tours this trip; the docents are so fun), which included not only the gardens but a discussion of plants in medieval art, particular the Unicorn Tapestries with their flower-strewn backgrounds, so meticulously woven that art historians have managed to identity more than 80 species of flowers... and also a little tiny frog in the lower right quadrant of The Unicorn Rests in a Garden. Love all the animal details, too.

A talk by Jane Goodall! Elena nabbed the tickets for this, and it was fantastic, the audience so pumped that we surged to our feet in a standing ovation when Goodall walked on the stage. The talk had an interview format, and the questions were mostly about her life. How did she get into studying animals? "When I was ten, I was in love with Tarzan." How did scientists react to her work early on? "They said National Geographic wanted to photograph me for my legs. Nowadays this would result in a lawsuit, but at the time I thought, if National Geographic wants to fund my research for my legs, *smacks legs* go legs!"

And a trip to the Tenement Museum. In keeping with the general literary theme of this trip, I took the All-of-a-Kind Family tour. Okay, there is no All-of-a-Kind Family tour, it's just the tour of a Russian Jewish immigrant family's apartment in 1911, but still, thematically appropriate. This family had six children and three rooms - not three bedrooms, three rooms total. The parents slept in the bedroom, the girls in the kitchen, and the boys in the front room, where they also sometimes put up a boarder, although unless he hung from the ceiling like a bat I'm not sure how he'd fit! But the oldest girl married one of the boarders so presumably he slept in the normal way, as it would seem to be a bit of a red flag if your suitor sleeps hanging from the ceiling.

(I can see real advantages to marrying the boarder, tbh. You'd already know all about his domestic habits. Does he snore? Will he pick up a dish cloth once in a while to help out?)

All in all an excellent visit. And now onwards! Boston awaits!

With a flying update I burst across the internet like a meteor! A small, sniffly meteor, laid low by a head cold, but nonetheless hopeful that the cold will subside in time for the next leg of my journey.

In the days since I have posted, I have been camping at the Indiana Dunes, with a side jaunt to the Art Institute of Chicago on the South Shore Railway (the last of the interurban railways that once laced Indiana, insert rant here about how I could have been taking the railway between Indianapolis and West Lafayette for years if the car companies hadn't bought the railways up in order to run them into the ground decades ago). Delightful! One of my favorite things is the Tiffany window as you go up the main stairs, which will land you right at the Impressionist exhibit, where you will be greeted by Caillebotte's Rainy Day, Paris Street, one of those paintings that it looks like you can walk right into.

Then it was up to Michigan to visit my old friend Micky (I've known her since fifth grade! How long ago that seems now), with a side jaunt to John K. King Books in Detroit.

My friends, this bookstore is perfection. It is an old warehouse, four stories high, a maze of books so vast that there are maps by the entryway, and as you explore the breezes drift through the open windows, for the place still has no air conditioner, so stepping inside feels like slipping through the cracks into the past. (I concede that this is a more pleasant thing to do on a cool September day than it might be in, say, July.)

I spent four hours there, and could have stayed more, but (1) I needed to be back in time for dinner (Detroit style pizza! Which appears identical to what the pizza parlor of my youth called a deep-dish Sicilian, which was my favorite, so I was glad to be reunited with it), and (2) I was struggling to carry all my books, so it was time to call it quits. Until next time, sweet John K. King...

My finds! My hoard! My precious treasure!

1. Doris Gates' Little Vic, another horse book, illustrated by Kate Seredy! Apparently I've decided to try to ferret out all her books if I can.

2. TWO Mary Stolzes: Bartholomew Fair (historical fiction) and Good-bye My Shadow (no idea what that ones about, but hey, the title is promising). Hopefully I'm not trying to find all of her books, as she wrote SO MANY, but all signs point in that direction.

(Also checked for books by Vivien Alcock, Penelope Farmer, and Anne Lindbergh, but no love on those quests. And forgot to see if they had any Naomi Mitchison! A fool, a fool...)

3. Mary Renault's Return to Night, which I never thought to see in the wild! Also The Praise Singer, which I definitely have seen in the wild before, but they had a nice copy and that you don't always see; used Renault books often look like they've been read to bits.

4. MANY books by Audrey Erskine Lindop! This is a quest I have undertaken on behalf of skygiants, who has been seeking Lindop books for many a year... and apparently in those years, Lindop's works have been quietly congregating in John K. King Books! I found Journey into Stone, The Self-Appointed Saint, The Singer Not the Song (the extremely gay bandit & priest book), and the ACTUALLY gay Details of Jeremy Stretton, published in 1955, and possessed of a forward written by "a Consultant of Psychiatry," who assures us that "it is written with understanding and compassion, yet without any false sentimentality; and, from a lifetime of experience in medico-psychological work, I can add that it is written with sincerity and truth."

Naturally I've started with that one. Will report back!

5. LAST BUT NOT LEAST. I found not one, but TWO D. K. Brosters! The Yellow Poppy - and The Flight of the Heron!

All in all most successful, a fine and excellent day. Someday I shall have to go back! For now, however, it is enough to gloat over my spoils.

Yesterday was once again devoted to Betsy-Tacy things. First, a trip to the modern library, on the theory that I must have missed the display case of Maud's things that the Betsy-Tacy Society website assures me is there. (In particular, I wanted to see the little glass pitcher that Tacy/Bick gave Betsy/Maud on her fifth birthday party, when they became friends.) However the website must be out of date, because there is no such display case! Alas...

However, the historical society does has a corner devoted to Maud Hart Lovelace, with the statue of Betsy on her wedding day from the promotion of Betsy's Wedding, and photographs of Maud and her family and all the Crowd, and her high school scrapbook - in terribly rough shape now! - scrapbooks are a conservation nightmare, after all.

And then Betsy's Carnegie Library, the Carnegie Art Center now, so the books and the bookshelves are gone - but the fireplace is still there, the fireplace in the children's room where Betsy sat to read about ancient Greece. The kindly curator obligingly set up a chair, and I sat (I had read right up to the library scene that morning, so I would be prepared) and read about Betsy's library trip, and when she looks up from her book and smiles at the fireplace and then around the room, I looked up and smiled too.

"Was that wonderful for you?" the curator asked, as I was leaving.

"Oh, yes!" I told her.

Then up the hill for my tour of Betsy & Tacy's houses! They are right across the street from each other, and I am delighted to inform you that each house has a front-facing window on the second floor, and just as you might hope those are the windows to Maud and Bick's bedrooms!

Actually the tour only takes in Betsy's house, which is mostly done in books and furniture from the period but not actually from Maud's family. Tacy's house is half a display of artifacts from Maud and her Crowd, and early editions of all of Maud's books, and half a gift shop, in which I lingered for ages deciding what to buy... and then after I left, I came puffing back, having decided that this is a case of penny wise and pound foolish, so I might as well buy a few more books, and also ask whether they might have tucked away a couple booklets which are listed on the website, but not as far as I could tell in the store?

And indeed they did! One was "Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Ocean," which is a short story based on Maud & Bicky's 1968 trip to Europe, after they had both been widowed. They find themselves in Madrid, and decide that they must try to visit the King of Spain, since they fell in love with a photograph of him when they were children! ("But didn't Spain have a different king by then?" you ask. "Did Spain have a king in 1968?" Shhhhhhh.)

The other is "Betty and Bick Meet a Hermit," which Maud wrote in high school, and it's fascinating as a proto-Betsy-Tacy story! Betty is Maud (and it's interesting that she'd already settled on a name so close to Betsy for her fictional alter ego), and Bick is simply Bick, her best friend, named unchanged. They go over the Big Hill and meet the hermit, who happens to be a magazine editor, who asks to see some of Betty's stories! (This house also mentions a "telegraph" between Betty and Bick's bedrooms, a string with a basket hanging between their windows. Did Maud and Bick set up such a system, or was this a flight of imagination?)

This adventure at last pushed me to go over the Big Hill myself. The road from Maud's time no longer exists, so I found another route up, and it was QUITE STEEP! If Maud's road was anything like that, she and Bick must have had very strong legs. But I made it to the top, and looked down over the valley - from here you couldn't see the town, just the trees - did it look like that in Maud's day? One suspects that it might have been recently logged at that point. But a lovely view, nonetheless.

And then back to the bench, to read Betsy-Tacy and Tib (out of order, but I'd only just got the copy that afternoon in the gift shop). And a return to the bench after supper, to watch the sun go down, and imagine the girls playing in the street until dusk closed in, and their mothers opened the doors to their two houses, just across the street from each other, and called them in. "Maud! Bick!"

Greetings from Minnesota! It has been some time since I posted, but in my defense, travel has kept me quite busy...

Things that have happened in the last week!

1. I continued writing away at Bjorklunden! I wish I had gotten the draft up to the point where I needed to start writing new material before I went to Bjorklunden, as that might have been a better use of my time than minor revisions as I ported material from previous drafts into the current draft... However all work is good work, and I did get those revisions to the point where it's time to dive into new material.

2. After Bjorklunden, I spent a weekend in Appleton, the town where I went to college. The main downtown area has changed some (including the addition of one Voyageur Bakery, where I paid $2.50 for toast and jam and got a PILE of toast, with THREE kinds of bread, white and rye and raisin, and two kinds of jam too, spicy peach and raspberry rhubarb. My God, I would have lived on this as a student), but the college is much the same, and I was pleased to meet up with three of my favorite professors!

I gave each of them a copy of one of my books: my Russian professor got Honeytrap (as the Russian department is name-checked in the historical note), while the two history professors each got The Sleeping Soldier. One of them read the back cover and cried, "Anthony Rotundo!", which was extremely validating as I did indeed draw heavily on Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900"!

3. Then a quick visit to Pepin, where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. There is a replica cabin on roughly the spot where the Little House in the Big Woods stood, although now it's more of a Little House in the Cornfields, but even so I was so delighted to visit the place and walk through the cabin (it's so small! I mean, she calls it a little house, but... so small) and then take the road into Pepin afterward, the very road Laura took when she went into town to cross Lake Pepin on the ice to start out for the prairie.

(The gentleman at the desk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum gift shop kindly assured me that it probably is the very same road, although of course paved now: "There are only so many ways to get around the bluff," he explained. It's very hilly country around Pepin, which I hadn't realized from the book.)

4. Then on to Minnesota! And on and on, and onward still, for while the middle of Minnesota was 98 degrees in the shade, Duluth was a balmy 76... So I went to Duluth and drifted through the Duluth Rose Garden and had a delicious chocolate croissant from Duluth's Best Bread (I did not sample Duluth's Other Bread for comparison, but the chocolate croissant was A+) and at last visited the Lake Superior Railway Museum, where they had among other things vintage train menus!, and also a chance to take a 75-minute train ride, and one of the cars was a vintage 1918 Pullman coach, and no one else wanted to sit in it (they were either in the air-conditioned car or the open car) so it was MINE, ALL MINE.

I also greatly enjoyed the chance see the inside of caboose inside the museum, and clamber up a ladder that was basically just some giant staples in the wall up to some high seats! Not sure if they intended for visitors to do this, but it wasn't actually cordoned off....

5. And now I am in North Branch, where I lived when I first started writing Sage twelve years ago, and on which Sage's hometown is loosely based. (This book is - as Monica Dickens commented on her Mariana - "the novel that is everyone's second book (if it was not their first), based on my childhood and growing up," although transplanted into Minnesota, partly because I was living there at the time but also partly for reasons of plausible deniability.)

Tomorrow and the day after will be devoted to gathering some local color for the book. (In particular, I need to go hiking in Taylors Falls.) Then on to Minneapolis to visit the U and the Museum of Russian Art (again for local color, although the Museum of Russian Art is also just for funzies), and then--

Mankato! A weekend immersed in Betsy-Tacy!

I am returned from my camping trip! We had a fire and I successfully cooked a grilled cheese sandwich on a skillet over the coals, very slightly burned on one side, but the cheese was melty and the bread was crispy and overall it was quite a creditable attempt for my first try. And once the weather cleared up, I had a lovely walk through the woods and the marsh, and then on the last morning along the beach by Lake Michigan.

However, the first couple of days were rainy and cold, so I did LOTS of reading, including Carol Ryrie Brink's The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein. I always enjoy Brink's books, but the more I read the more I see why Caddie Woodlawn is the one that is remembered; her books are all fun but Caddie Woodlawn is the only one that has that certain extra something that lifts it up and makes it more than that.

Also I read E. D. E. N. Southworth's Hidden Hand. Southworth was a prolific and popular author of sensation novels in the mid-nineteenth century (immortalized in Little Women as S. L. A. N. G. Northbury), and this is her most famous book, and I am aghast! exasperated! to tell you that it's only the first half of the story, the second half being contained in the sequel Capitola's Peril (Capitola is our heroine, who first appears on the scene eking out an existence as a slangy newsboy in New York City), so when I reached the end of Hidden Hand I was left on TENTERHOOKS regarding... well, everything, really!

But particularly the outlaw who intends to kidnap Capitola. He has been hired to kill her! Then meets and falls in love with her! (Are we doing a redemption arc?) So he's going to kidnap her, keep her for a week, and THEN fulfill his contract to kill her. (NO we are not.) Will spirited, liberty-loving Capitola foil this plot? And will Clara manage to escape the machinations of her newly-acquired evil guardian (who is Capitola's evil uncle although Capitola doesn't know it because he had her kidnapped and sent away as a baby)? And is Capitola's evil uncle holding Capitola's mother captive??

Fortunately now that I have returned to civilization, I have downloaded Capitola's Peril, so I may soon know the answers to these questions!

I am returned from Massachusetts! As I was busy visiting Louisa May Alcott’s house, eating lobster rolls, plundering the bookstore at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art etc., I didn’t do a whole lot of reading on the trip, but I thought I would go ahead and post about what reading I did.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Delighted to inform you that in Concord (at Barrow Books, a delightful bookshop) I did indeed find one of Jane Langton’s Hall Family Chronicles - moreover, one I’ve never gotten my hands on before, The Swing in the Summerhouse! Happily I informed the bookseller that I had just that morning recreated Georgie’s walk from her house (based on an actual ornate Victorian house in Concord, 148 Walden Street!) to Walden Pond, (actually I did it backward, starting at Walden Pond and working my way in), and she gave me $10 off the purchase price and also a cup of tea.

This series is so variable. As a kid I loved and reread over and over The Diamond in the Window and The Fledgling, and although I didn’t find The Fragile Flag till after college, I remember it very well. Yet twice I’ve read books in this series and then entirely forgotten them: The Time Bike and The Astonishing Stereoscope (the book I was so pleased to find a few weeks ago!) completely slipped out of my head.

I suspect that The Swing in the Summerhouse might fall into this category, although on the other hand I may remember it because of the unforgettable tale of its acquisition.

I also listened to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu on audiobook! I understand that the main pairing in this book is controversial, but as littlerhymes can attest, I started calling Ged “dungeon boyfriend” the moment he showed up in The Tombs of Atuan, so all in all I was delighted by this turn of events.

Last but assuredly not least! My long Dracula journey is over, as Dracula Daily has come to an end. (It turns out that the ending is a trifle anticlimactic when you stretch it out over a week, but IIRC I found the ending abrupt in high school too, so perhaps it’s just like that always.) I am pining slightly, but I’ve signed up for Whale Weekly (a three-year odyssey through Moby-Dick) AND regular installments of Sherlock Holmes in 2023, so perhaps those will fill the Dracula Daily hole in my heart.

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants gave me Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair, and I’ve gotten just a few chapters into it, so I’m still sorting out the quirkily elaborate worldbuilding. Our hero has just had a chat with a toy that he accidentally brought to life, an incident that seems to encapsulate the atmosphere of the book in miniature.

And at Commonwealth Books, genarti recommended Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything, one of those fascinating nonfiction books with a subtitle completely at odds with the book’s actual thesis! Goodman is in fact writing about the introduction of coal into homes in Elizabethan London, and her argument is that Londoners’ familiarity with coal as a domestic product helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution; coal did of course eventually reach the rest of England (and thence the world), but the part that changed everything is way before the Victorian era. I suppose the publishers couldn’t stand to put the word “Elizabethan” in the title of a book about coal.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve figured out how to get my paws on the final two books in the Hall Family Chronicles, The Mysterious Circus and The Dragon Tree, and I’ve decided I owe it to myself to finish up the series.