Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson

FAST FACTS:
First Published: 1934
Source: Suburban Library
How I Found Out About It: Initially discovered it through the Persephone Books’ website, but was intrigued after reading bloggers’ reviews (most notably, Teresa’s review)
First Sentence: “One fine summer’s morning the sun peeped over the hills and looked down upon the valley of Silverstream.”
Reread: No.

THOUGHTS:
There is a word that just keeps popping into my brain every time I think about Miss Buncle’s Book. The word jumps up and down in my head. Pick me, pick me! it says, but I keep searching the nooks and crannies of my brain, hoping to find another word that is as apt of a descriptor as the word that longs to be picked. The word is the perfect word but I fear if I use it, people won’t be tempted to pick up this book the way I want them to do. The pity is, the perfect word is overused in our bookish culture, and I’m afraid we’re all becoming immune to it. The publishing companies stick it on the front and back covers of their books with alarming frequency, and after walking around the public library today, I spotted it in no less than three displays.

What can I say about this book without using that word? Miss Buncle’s Book was first published in 1934 by D.E. Stevenson, who Goodreads has informed me was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. The book is set in Silverstream, a fictional English country village, and concerns the misadventures of the town’s townspeople after one of them, Miss Barbara Buncle (an “old maid” – I think she’s in her 30s) writes a thinly veiled novel about them under a male pseudonym. None of the townspeople of Silverstream are left untouched by the characterizations of them in Miss Buncle’s book, including Miss Buncle herself.

Each character is finely drawn, and even though they are quite quirky, they possess some of the same traits and concerns of real people, particularly those in small communities. I’ve never been to an English village and have always lived in small- to medium-sized cities where I couldn’t possibly know everyone. Nevertheless, I can definitely pinpoint a few Mrs. Featherstone Hoggs and Vivian Greensleeves in my acquaintances (unfortunately), and one or two Mrs. Walkers and Sally Carters too (thankfully). The book has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it, especially considering that it was published in an age preceding the current one, but its themes still ring true. (If I were describing this book to a non-reader, which I don’t think any of you are, I’d liken it to Gossip Girl.) Miss Buncle’s Book is a cozy story but it’s also an intelligent story, with just enough satire and meta-ness to compensate for too much sweetness or quaintness.

This book reminds me somewhat of other books. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons comes to mind, as do certain elements of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. But this book is really its own thing, and it is utterly – here’s the perfect word, no getting around it – delightful.

Language Freak Summer Challenge

This is my sign-up post for the Language Freak Summer Challenge, hosted by Ekaterina at In My Book. I love the concept for this challenge, and it fits in perfectly with one of my career advancement goals for 2013, so I had to sign up!

Here is the challenge in Ekaterina’s own words:

Do you love learning foreign languages?
Have you ever suspected that something is lost in translation when reading a book?
Do you feel ashamed of not practicing some foreign language enough?
Are you an unbearable snob who tells everybody that they haven’t read a book if they have read it in translation?

If your answer is yes to any of these questions, this challenge is just for you! As a seasoned linguist myself, I can answer in the positive to all of them, so I’ll be the one to organize a challenge for all of you foreign language lovers!

The idea is simple: read books in a foreign language, enjoy it and be proud of yourself! I will collect whatever you want to post about your experiences from now till the end of August and hopefully we will all have some progress in languages by the beginning of September!

This challenge fits perfectly in with my current goals because I’m in the process of trying to relearn a language (more about that below). Additionally, one of my reading goals for 2013 is reading translated fiction, but I’m excited about taking it one step further and reading a work in its original language.

A bit about my language background: my mother tongue is Urdu. It’s the national language of Pakistan, but I’m not Pakistani, I’m Indian-American. Urdu is similar to Hindi in the way it’s spoken, but its written script is more similar to Arabic and Farsi. My parents spoke Urdu to me and my siblings when we were growing up, but at around a certain age (I think when we started school), we started answering back in English. I understand it but I’m not always comfortable speaking it, though I’m getting more practice now because we use it to talk to my nieces. I can’t read or write Urdu, though, and the leap from conversing in Urdu to reading in Urdu is one that I don’t think I can attempt in ten summers, let alone one.

My second language – and my main language – is English. Normally, everything I read is in English.

My parents taught me to read classical Arabic, the style of Arabic in which the Qur’an is written, from a very young age, but I didn’t understand the meaning of the words. Even now, I know what some words mean because they are repeated often throughout the Qur’an, but I lack knowledge of both grammar and vocabulary to fully understand. And reading modern Arabic is quite different from the Qur’anic Arabic because it doesn’t include all the diacritical marks that indicate vowel sounds. I’m not going to attempt learning to read Arabic in a summer either.

Spanish is the language I’ve chosen for this challenge. I took Spanish in high school and after taking a language ability assessment exam, was able to pass out of the language requirement in college. Unfortunately, after high school, I didn’t have a need to use Spanish beyond brief travel in Latin America. Now, more than 10 years later, I’m on a career path where any language skill – but especially Spanish – would be an asset, so it’s my goal to relearn the language. I recently purchased a Spanish language course, and I’m trying to get in at least 30 minutes of Spanish practice with the program each day. The focus of the course is learning conversational skills but I don’t think it would hurt to improve my grammar and vocabulary by reading as well.

One of the aspects I like most about this challenge is its flexibility. The term “book” is loosely translated (no pun intended) – short stories are okay, adapted works are okay. I don’t have a firm list of what I want to read, just some general ideas. I am signing up for the Beginner level and hope to read at least one original Spanish-language work, but I’ve heard that reading books like the Harry Potter series in Spanish can be helpful, so I may give that a try too. I’d love to read some short stories in Spanish too, maybe Jorge Luis Borges? At this point, I’m kind of intimidated to read Borges in English, let alone Spanish, but that’s where I’d like to end up eventually. I’m also signing up for the Subs Fan category because films are fun.

So those are my lofty aspirations. Hope to get started on this challenge soon! Suggestions on Spanish-language books, short stories, and films are most welcome!

Reading Notes: How is It Almost Already May?!

(Photo Credit)

How is it almost already May?! And think about what comes after that – how is it almost already the middle of 2013?! Just can’t get my mind around it. Five months gone, seven months to go. I thought I’d use my first real post back to explain what I’ve been reading in this first-almost-half of 2013.

January and February were extremely slow months for me, at least in terms of pleasure reading. I took a three-day exam at the end of February, and spent the prior two months studying long hours for it. In the beginning, I tried to include some pleasure reading in my life by checking out a few poetry collections. My intention was to read just a few poems every night or whenever I had a chance.

The goal was abandoned as I got closer to the exam, but I did read two collections, Evangeline and Other Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey. The Longfellow was a random pick off the library bookshelves. The story centers on Britain’s forced removal of the Acadian people to the American colonies during the French and Indian War. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan of Evangeline – the romance was just too overwrought and predictable. However, the book wasn’t a total loss as I liked some of the shorter works that were included in the book.

I discovered Natasha Trethewey while doing research for my poem-a-day project on Twitter last year. My experience with Trethewey was the inverse of reading Longfellow: I loved the title piece but wasn’t as enamored by her other poems. The title piece is narrated by a former slave who guards Confederate soldiers in a fort near Gettysburg during the Civil War. The depictions are unsettling and based on the talent she displays in this poem, I’m willing to overlook the others that didn’t speak to me.

Once the exam was over, my reading picked up. In March, my favorite book was definitely We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. There’s so much in this short book: an unreliable (but bewitching) narrator, mob mentality, psychotic disorders, and what’s more, impeccable writing. It’s been awhile since I read a climax chapter and could not just see it but also *hear* it in my mind, but I did with this book. I definitely need to read more Jackson.

The major disappointment of March was Lost in Austen by Emma Campbell Webster. I loved the concept of a Choose Your Adventure! take on the works of Jane Austen, but the book wasn’t as creative as I had hoped. The major problem is that it doesn’t take risks. Choices don’t come along often enough and even when one deviates from the main plot, the result is basically the same. I “won” by ending up with Darcy, but I was aiming for Henry Tilney, who apparently was never an option. Had I known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have even bothered.

Even though April isn’t over yet, I think I can safely pick a favorite and a disappointment. The favorite is In the Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan. In late March, my family and I had traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah (pilgrimage to Makkah, the “express” version of Hajj). We spent most of our time at the Kaaba in Makkah and Masjid-al-Nabawi (the Prophet’s Mosque) in Madinah, but we also spent one morning visiting some of the historical Islamic sites in and around Madinah. After we returned, I wanted to spend some time refreshing my memory of the details of Prophet Muhammad’s life, in light of all that I had seen. Ramadan’s book was a perfect way to do so. He highlights major events and the character of Muhammad, and extrapolates lessons for the modern-day Muslim. This would be a good read for those unfamiliar with the life of Prophet Muhammad or for those Muslims who are also in need of a refresher and some spiritual guidance.

The disappointment of April was Darkness Under the Water by Beth Kanell. I’ve been having a bookish craving for historical fiction lately, especially YA books. What I really want to read is the fourth book in The Agency series by Y.S. Lee (which sadly isn’t out yet…in fact, I think she’s still writing it). I thought I’d try Kanell’s book instead as it features a heroine of color, as Lee’s books do. I really wanted to love this book, and in some ways, I did. I loved Molly’s discovery of her Abenaki heritage, descriptions of walks through the woods, her quiet relationship with Henry. But even though the author references the racism the Abenaki experienced in 1920s New England, certain scenes weren’t explained well, either in text or in the afterword. Without any explanation of the historical facts, I feel as though the eugenics plotline was added with little research or thought.

I’m still in the middle of a YA-thon of sorts, still looking for books similar to The Agency, still searching for great historical fiction with strong heroines. I’m in the midst of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libba Bray. It’s not quite right (I could do without the supernatural elements…which I realize is its distinguishing feature) but because I hate leaving series unfinished, I’ve picked up book 2 from the library and will likely have to read book 3 as well.

And now you’re up to speed!

Which books have been your favorites or disappointments of the first-almost-half of 2013? What are you currently reading?

Hello, hello, hello

So…it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I had a rough end to 2012. It’s been a rough couple of years, actually, and the end of 2012 was just a clunker for me. I was all out of sorts and couldn’t really deal with any of it. 2013 has been a lot better. Not much besides my state of mind has actually changed. But I took a couple months off from Life, cleared my mind, and have refocused my attention on the path I need to take and the things that make me happy.

One of which is reading! And another is writing!

I don’t know where this blog will go, and I’m not planning any of it out. I thought about doing that, but planning another part of my life makes me feel tired, and I just want to feel invigorated, or at least, serene.

My goal this time around is personal happiness.

The Poetry Project: Edna St. Vincent Millay (October 2012)

This month’s theme for The Poetry Project is “Spooky Poems”, but I’ve never been a fan of the spooks. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched a scary movie and yet I still have dreams about the things I saw (or thought I saw) in those movies. As a kid, I liked Halloween because of the candy (what kid doesn’t?) but the one time I entered a haunted house, I left through an escape door in tears (the ghoul was actually very nice). And the only Stephen King I ever read is supposedly one of the not-so-scary ones (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon). In short, I’m a big scaredy-cat and this blog is spooks-free.

This month, I have been reading a collection of works from a new-to-me poet, inspired by another author I have been exploring. Earlier this year, I read the first volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s collected diaries and letters, Bring Me a Unicorn (I just posted my thoughts about it here). Lindbergh was the daughter of poet Elizabeth Reeve Cutter Morrow and would go on to write poetry herself. In her diaries, she often excerpted a few lines of poetry from her favorite writers to express her thoughts. I noticed that many of the chosen lines were from the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and as I found myself copying down some of the excerpts, I decided I needed to read Millay’s work.

Over the past few days, I have been dipping in and out of a Millay collection, an Everyman Library Pocket Poets edition. Millay was an accomplished poet and feminist, and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Apart from her poetry, she was famous for her countless love affairs with both men and women. Many of the profiles I read noted that her poetry embodies the modern, free lifestyle of the Jazz Age-era woman. She wrote all kinds of poems, short and long, and sonnets too. The edition I read also included at the end Millay’s one-act play, Aria Da Capo.

Here is one of my discoveries from the Everyman Library collection:

JOURNEY

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me – I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and signed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.
Yet onward!
Cat birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.
Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day, – sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs -
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.
–Edna St. Vincent Millay

Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

FAST FACTS:
First Published: 1972
Source: City Library
How I Found Out About It: Goodreads search after reading North to the Orient
First Sentence: “Dear Grandma: We have all just gotten Aunt Annie’s lovely letters and it has been wonderful hearing about everything at home.”
Pages: 288
Reread: No.

THOUGHTS:
In 1922, Anne Morrow was a wistful sixteen-year-old girl writing a letter to her grandmother. Just six years later, she became the wife of one of America’s leading celebrities, Charles Lindbergh. The circumstances of her married life continuously made headlines, from the “north to the orient” flight with her husband, the tragic kidnapping of their first child, and their controversial views about Germany prior to World War II. One would almost think that her life began with her marriage. Bring Me a Unicorn uncovers the early years of Anne Morrow before she became a Lindbergh, sharing her aspirations, observations, and thoughts through the diaries that she kept and the letters that she sent.

As I read Bring Me a Unicorn, I was struck by how sheltered the author and aviator was during this early period of her life, despite the elevated status of the Morrow family and the premium her parents placed on women’s education. Her father, Dwight W. Morrow, was a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co. Her mother, Elizabeth Reeve Cutter Morrow, was a poet and teacher with influential connections at Smith College. When Anne was twenty, she attended the opening sessions of the League of Nations as part of a summer tour across Europe. In 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge appointed her father the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Anne visited her parents there several times. Yet despite her travels, social standing, and college education, her diaries and letters contain little reference to the social, political, and cultural waves of the Roaring Twenties. As the author notes in her introduction,

With all this education and travel, how can one explain the haze of insulation which permeated our early years, our indefinable sense of isolation from the real world? It is clear that no matter what we read or where we traveled we were enclosed in the familial circle, confined, although also enriched, by the strong family bonds and strictly-defined child-parent roles. The great bulldozers of twentieth-century society: Freud, Marx, Henry Ford, and – I might add – Charles Lindbergh, had not yet cut their way through the brambled hedges that surrounded the sleeping princesses. Only in college did I begin to realize how much I resembled the “sheltered Emelye” of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, enclosed in a walled garden.

Though Bring Me a Unicorn provides little perspective on the people, events, and issues of the world beyond the walled garden, it does reveal Anne’s introspective nature. Anne was a reader. Several of her diary entries, in particular, are concerned with the books that she is reading. For instance:

A heavenly day: no deck tennis, no unnecessary people, no boredom.
I read Gilbert Murray – very beautiful.
And “The Art of Religion” in The Dance of Life – wonderful.
And a third of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Glorious! A whole week of this – no deck tennis, no men. Reading!

She was also a writer. She often despaired of her inability to write as well as her poet mother, but her diary entries especially divulge her talent, as she reflects on the simplest of moments and sees great symbols in the ordinary and mundane.

I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole – perfect. Is that, then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally, in moments like that? But flowers always have it – poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I, only occasionally, am like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.”

Anne’s writings have a rose-colored tint to them. Yet, for all her innocence and optimism, Anne’s personal writings are alive with feeling, honesty, and vibrancy. She internalized so much, kept so much to herself, that the diaries are eye-opening. She writes about personally-affecting events, such as the mysterious disappearance and death of a college friend, but also the everyday concerns of an adolescent. Her awkwardness around certain strangers (including one Charles Lindbergh), her envy tempered by love of her self-assured sisters, the moments of humor she finds in the smallest incidents, her constant striving to do better despite certain failings, her curiosity and thirst for adventure beyond the walled garden…all of these are timeless anxieties of growing up.

And this is what I loved most about Bring Me a Unicorn: Anne Morrow Lindbergh the celeb is replaced with the Every Girl…and that makes what’s to come more extraordinary.

Short Story: “Address Unknown” by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

Source: Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (stand-alone book)

Summary: This epistolary story explores the effects of increasing Nazi sentiment in the 1930s on the relationship between two friends and business partners. Taylor wrote it to spread awareness among Americans about the chilling reality and atrocities of Nazi Germany. To that end, the New York Times Book Review called it “the most effective indictment of Nazism to occur in fiction.”

Thoughts: I feel conflicted about this post. I want everyone who reads it to pick it up the way I did, with no knowledge beforehand. It’s a small book – the edition I read was just 64 pages – so it does seem like even telling a little bit will be giving a lot away.

But I also know that going into a book with absolutely no prior knowledge is difficult to do these days. Please avoid Googling and Wikipedia. Please find this little book and read it. It will take a half hour of your time and it is well worth it, I promise.

If you’ve decided to read it, stop here. For the rest of you who need a little more, here it is: it’s deceivingly simple. Little details start to make you uncomfortable but you keep on hoping. I read the book in 35 minutes and thought about it for a month. Taylor drew her inspiration for this story from a news article about similar letter exchanges, and just thinking about that makes the end even more haunting. Yes, the story was written about Nazism but the implications of its ideas are not confined to time and place. Such exchanges, insinuations, and accusations are still possible today, and that is quite scary.