BRP = Blatant Relative Promotion

It's a rainy, windy, dark November day here, and I'm not up to much. I am making a black bean soup with a hambone for supper, and later I'll probably do the cranberry sauce that will be one of my contributions to Thanksgiving dinner. I'm listening to my Thanksgiving playlist (see last year's Tunes for November posts for a list). Although I generally celebrate Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving, I know that there are people out there thinking about Christmas shopping; and other kinds of shopping as well. We're all in a bit of an ambivalent mood about shopping right now. On one shoulder sits a creature whispering in our ear "Save your money! You're going to need it later!" and on the other sits another creature whispering, "Go out and support your local businesses, they need you!" Which is the angel and which is the devil? Who knows?

So, today I'm promoting the businesses of three relatives. If the things they're selling happen to be things you would like to buy (and in one case, you'll have to be in a certain geographic location), give them a try!

My cousin Pam "down to the shore" has had a thriving seasonal business for many years making wreaths for residents and businesses in the area. Now she's taking it to the next level and offering her beautiful wreaths online all over the country. I received one of her wreaths as a gift from her mother last year, and it was lovely. I believe there's a picture on one of last December's blog posts. Despite a cold, snowy, blowy winter, it lasted far beyond the time Onkel Hankie Pants deems acceptable for having a Christmas wreath up. Go to Pam's Maine Wreaths to see and, perhaps, order. Tell your friends and colleagues!

Speaking of OHP, his cousin Julie is the next relative I'm promoting here. This summer her second book for children, My New Best Friend, was published, and the first one, My Last Best Friend, is now available in paperback. Both books deal with the adventures of fourth-grader Ida May, who lives in a small town in Wisconsin. For anyone who has had or been a fourth-grader, these stories will ring true. The books are geared toward readers age 7-10, so if you have a gift recipient in that age group, give 'em a try.

Last but not least, my cousin Erica is involved with a fine little BBQ restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. It's right across from Marden's! (Mainers will know what this means). Here are some visuals from our most recent visit:

Onkel Hankie Pants and I both had the Two-Step Sandwich, in which one gets to choose two of the three available barbecued meats (beef, pork, chicken) and a side. OHP had beans and I had a really good potato salad. I greedily ate some of my sandwich before I remembered to photograph it. I have two sauces, spicy and mild, to mix.

I took some of my sandwich home so I'd have

room for dessert. This peanut butter pie was

extremely delicious, covered with a chocolate

ganache (I think that's redundant and ganache is

always chocolate).

Here is the lovely and talented Erica, chef, hostess,

and even waits tables at least for relatives. (By the way, as you'll see from their websites, Pam and Julie are also lovely and talented).

And here's the smokin' locomotive by which you will recognize the place.

So if you're in or near Lewiston, this is the place to go for some fine barbecue. They do catering, too!

My Alphabet: C is for Children's Literature

    I can't remember learning to read, nor a time that I couldn't read anything that came my way. My mother said that she taught me to read when I was 2 1/2 (probably in self-defense, as Brother #1 was imminent). So I've been reading for almost 58 years, and in each of those years I'm sure I read at least one children's book.  I've also read quite a bit of the history and theory of children's literature, and had many opportunities to hear writers and illustrators, particularly when I had a student job at the Kerlan Collection.

    My favorite book when I was small was called Dr. Goat.  It was a rhymed tale of a goat physician and his animal patients, and what happens when he himself gets sick.  It was a Tell-a-Tale book (published by the Whitman Co. in Racine, Wisconsin, and I believe, less expensive than the Little Golden Books) and probably cost 15 cents or less in 1950. Now? Copies in varying conditions, some pretty bad, go for $72 and up -- close to $300 for a copy in very good condition. I'll probably never see it again. (My copy was lost, either to the depredations of siblings or the exigencies of multiple military moves.)  You can see a picture of it above.

    During my first few years in elementary school, my parents enrolled me in the Junior Deluxe Editions book club, which brought me everything from Myths Every Child Should Know to Black Beauty to Oliver Twist.  Here's a picture of what those editions looked like (I still have most of those I got and have picked up others whenever I saw them at sales). Actually, the picture is above. I'm using Chrome, the new Google browser, and its interface with Blogger isn't as seamless as one would have wished yet. 

    They would also pick up books for me at used book sales. The first of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books I read was The Long Winter, because it was the one they found. It's still my favorite. One of my cousins recently returned my copy to me (it had been passed on to her and her boys consider themselves too old for it now).  Mine is the original edition illustrated by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle, not by Garth Williams as most of us are familiar with.

    School libraries and, starting with the Mary Taylor Memorial Library in Milford, Conn., public libraries, supplied me with still more books.  I spent some of my first post-college earnings at the Old Corner Bookshop in Boston on boxed paperback sets of The Little House Books and the Chronicles of Narnia.  When I was in the Army in Monterey, California, I got to visit the wonderful children's bookshop, The Magic Fishbone.  And, of course, once I had children of my own there were still more excuses to buy new books, old books, signed copies, library discards, and to read them all out loud.

     Children's literature has enriched my life and continues to do so. My most recent children's book purchase was My New Best Friend by Onkel Hankie Pants' cousin, Julie Bowe. It's the sequel to My Last Best Friend, her first novel. I highly recommend both!

     Of late, I've been more involved in mystery stories, and have slacked off a bit on keeping up with children's literature. So I've decided to add a little reading project to my two others (the Edgar Best Novel Winners and the A Mystery for Every State project), and read the Newbery Medal Winners and Honor Books, starting with this year and going back to 1922.  I've just finished the first one, Good Masters! Gentle Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Amy Schlitz, with wonderful illustrations by Robert Byrd.  The author teaches in what sounds like a really neat school, where the kids were studying the Middle Ages. She wrote these dramatic monologues (a few are parallel monologues for two actors) featuring the young inhabitants of a medieval village, so that each child could be the star of a playlet.  The book also includes sidenotes and occasional two-page essays on aspects of medieval life. Schlitz doesn't sugarcoat some of the more repellent features of the Middle Ages, but her characters have a universality that would help young readers and actors see what they and the medieval young people have in common. This was a really good choice for the medal, and different when compared to the usual novel or occasional non-fiction title.  I'll be posting my reviews of the other books on Goodreads as I finish them.  I have the same sobriquet there as here so it shouldn't be hard to find them.

I'd like to know your thoughts on favorite children's books and whether as "grown-ups" you still read some.

The Reading List

I got this from Crimson Rambler, who got it from Singing Owl.
I was going to do a real blogpost tomorrow (and still am) but couldn't resist this easy way out.

The instructions are to cut and paste it into your blog, and "embolden" the titles you've read...so far!

Comments welcome! (Comments irresistible, I suspect). Enjoy!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I've read lots of it but not all)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Read the first two, didn't feel like continuing)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Have read a lot, but not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (but I saw the TV series)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (actually, this is part of #33, The Chronicles of Narnia)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

66 out of 100. There are a few more that I've read parts of, but not all. The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo I read for a children's literature class. Tried to read Wuthering Heights as a young person and found the opening too frightening. How about you?

A few farewells in the arts

I heard from Onkel Hankie Pants the other day that U. Utah Phillips had died a couple of months ago. This was a great loss to the folk music and activist communities. Long ago, back in 1979, we saw him at a Twin Cities Folk Festival and have never forgotten it. Later I bought one of his albums, which includes this piece:(Warning: a little rough language)


If you can get hold of the Priscilla Herdman album Darkness into Light, listen to her sing "I Remember Loving You" with Utah Phillips. Never fails to make me cry.

Then the other day I saw in the paper that Tasha Tudor has gone to her reward. One of the first books in my now-extensive collection of Christmas books was her Take Joy! which gave us many hours of reading-aloud-and-looking-at-the-pictures when the children were young.

Today there were two deaths announced -- one of a person and one of a theater. George Carlin died. He's one of the few comedians I've ever seen in person, once when I was visiting my old college roommate and her then-spouse in Oakland. We went to some big auditorium and heard the famous "Seven Words" bit, and others. Years later you could have knocked me over with a feather when George Carlin showed up as the host on "Shining Time Station."

And I was much saddened to see the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune.
Whether it was a victim of the economy, mismanagement, changing artistic visions, or whatever -- it will be missed. I've seen several productions there over the years, but the one that sticks in my mind (I may have written about it before) was THE NIGHTINGALE, which we saw as a family in December '90 or January '91. Based on tales of Hans Christian Andersen, featuring gospel singer Eddie Robinson as the nightingale, magical costumes and sets -- it's definitely at the top of my Top Ten Theater Performances of All Time.

Truly, art is long, but life is short.