Wordless Wednesday: Playing With Your Hair

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Book Review: The Mill Mystery

I have really been enjoying the The Golden Age Girls challenge, one of the challenge levels in Bev’s Vintage Mystery Challenge at My Reader’s Block. And considering I joined that one late, I’m making pretty good progress so far. Partly that’s because I love having a mystery on my Kindle, so I can sneak a few pages in while I’m waiting for children at activities, or waiting for the pressure cooker to de-pressurize, or waiting for a doctor/dentist/hair appointment.* But my idea to read 5 different vintage authors made the Kindle a liability. Neither the Ngaio Marsh nor the Phoebe Atwood Taylor titles I wanted were available for Kindle. My search finally lead me to The Classic Mystery Collection, more than 100 complete mystery novels in one Kindle title. And the list of authors included two vintage authors I had never read: Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart. And the price? $2.99!**

I began with Green’s The Mill Mystery. Written in 1886, I would not call this a “detective” story – even an amateur detective story. The book is more mysterious than mystery, following Constance Sterling slowly piece together the reasons behind the seemingly unrelated deaths of a popular local minister and the richest man in town. When we meet Constance, she is “a young woman of twenty-five, without home, relatives, or means of support, having in her pocket seventy-five cents of change, and in her breast a heart like lead, so utterly had every hope vanished in the day’s rush of disappointments.” Before Constance’s kind and gentle roommate, the secret fiancée of the minister, dies within hours of hearing the news of his death, she begs Constance to clear her fiancée’s name from the inevitable rumors of suicide that will flow from his drowning in a vat at the abandoned mill.

The reason that I say the book is more “mysterious” than “mystery” is that Constance doesn’t actively set out to deduce a solution to the mystery. Most of the answer simply falls into her lap, in the form of an extraordinarily detailed letter. She did ferret out some of the details, but I think the long letter device was weak, and made the story look particularly antiquated. The book has some other problems from my personal perspective. There’s way too much Victorian feminine fragility for my taste – in fact, it’s the device that moves the main story along. The love story is rather predictable – once I was able to tell the two Pollard brothers apart, I was pretty sure who the “good” guy was.

So The Mill Mystery is a truly “vintage” title, more reminiscent of Wilkie Collins’ work than a classic Agatha Christie whodunit. It does have the virtue of being a very early mystery work by a female writer who was a best-seller during her own lifetime, and it certainly gives you an idea of how the mystery genre has developed since the Victorian era. In fairness, Green’s most famous work is The Leavenworth Case, and I probably should have started there. Still, if you loved The Woman in White, this might be up your alley.

Thanks again to Bev for hosting The Vintage Mystery Challenge!



*You get the idea. I do a lot of waiting. As in three books worth of waiting in the past two months.

**I’m going to admit that this is a poorly formatted Kindle title – each book is treated as a “chapter,” so searching is a pain. And I can’t figure out what to do about the “farthest page read” sync when I shift around from book to book. But for $2.99, it’s nice to always have a mystery I haven’t read waiting in the wings!

I’m a Guest Reviewer on Black Sheep Dances! The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Many of you are already familiar with Black Sheep Dances, a wonderful literary blog that focuses, among other things, on translated works of literary fiction. Amy is hosting The Eastern European Reading Challenge on Black Sheep Dances this year, and I have to admit it’s been a bit tough coming up with titles for an area about which I know absolutely nothing. Then finally I read a book this spring that just screamed, “Amy” to me, plus it was about Russian literature, and Amy said I could write it up as a guest post. So if you’d like to read my review of Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, head on over to Black Sheep Dances! Thanks, Amy, for letting me contribute! It was a lot of fun, and I am inspired to seek out some more translations this summer.

Sunday Salon: Penelopiad Read Along Invitation and Other Summer Fun

With yesterday’s graduation complete, Summer Reading Season officially starts today at Col Reads! I’m especially happy to be starting off this summer with two “buddy” reads. The first will be a foodie simul-blog with long-time friend Jess over at Desperado Penguin – we’ve both been reading Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, and we’ll be blogging about it this week. I think this is the fourth simul-blog we’ve done, and I’m always surprised by our differing takes on the books we read, despite being friends for about 20 years.

Next up is a Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. When we signed up for the Read-A-Myth Challenge way back in December, wonderful Bellezza at Dolce Bellezza noticed we both had the title on our lists, and suggested we might read it together. And we’d like to invite you to join us too! We’re planning on reading and posting any thoughts or questions during the week of May 23-May 28, with a wrap-up post on May 30. Atwood’s novella finally gives Penelope, the long-suffering wife of Odysseus, a chance to tell her own story. I’m looking forward to some good conversation about the “feminist” perspective on a classic tale. Please feel free to join us for any or all of the read – it’s totally informal, but we think it will be fun.

Aside from that, my summer plans include getting to work on the challenges I signed up for earlier in the year, which should make for a fascinating summer of reading. I’m behind on the GLBT, Book Blogger Abroad and Read-A-Myth challenges at this point, but the titles I have planned are very eclectic and diverse, and I’m excited to get back to them. My daughter and I will also be working on the What’s in a Name 4 Challenge together for her summer reading project, always a treat.

I’m also hoping to make plenty of time for something else I truly love this summer: photography. I’m hoping to master PhotoShop Elements, so look forward to lots more pictures – and maybe even a change in design of Col Reads. More on that later.

What do the next few months hold for you, reading and blogging-wise?

I hope to see some of your thoughts on The Penelopiad on May 30!

Saturday Snapshot: At the Arboretum

I recently spent a lovely afternoon goofing around with daughter number two and my camera at Penn State's Arboretum, while gardens were spewing forth tulips at full tilt. I was particularly intrigued by this unusual variegated purple variety.

To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme, bloggers are asked to post a photo that they (or a friend or family member) have taken, then leave a direct link to your post on the Saturday Snapshot site. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All she asks is that you don't post random photos that you find online. Thanks to Alyce at At Home With Books for hosting!

Book Review: The Paris Wife

I do not like Hemingway.

I was blessed with a fabulous high school English program, where we tackled the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Hesse and Faulkner. I loved it all. Except for Hemingway. The Snows of Kilimanjaro? Too dull. Hills Like White Elephants? Misogynistic. The Old Man and the Sea? I rooted for the sea. God bless Mrs. Dose, Ms. Mormile and good old Dr. Kelley. They did their best. They pointed out the vivid story arcs and the beauty of the spare language. But I never learned to like Hemingway.*

Which is my way of saying that unlike some readers of Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife, I was willing to dislike Hemingway the person as much as I had always disliked Hemingway the writer from the get-go. And that may have driven my reading of this book. Where his first wife, Hadley Richardson, saw charm and spontaneity, I saw oiliness and rashness. Where she saw genius, I saw vainglory. Where she saw bravery, I saw bravado. And from the perspective of the novel, I think it worked really well. Right from the beginning, I adored Hadley, and couldn’t see what she saw in the young and callow Ernest anyway. At least for me, McLain was able to conjure a sense of protectiveness about Hadley.

The book is heartbreakingly narrated from Hadley’s perspective, and we watch her slowly awaken to Hemingway’s insatiable nature. On her first trip to Italy, she visits the place where Hemingway fell in love with his nurse, only to be devastated when she rejected his marriage proposal. He says he’s glad they can visit together, but Hadley senses more:

I knew he was telling me the truth, but I also knew that if it were possible, he would have preferred to have me and Agnes both there – his past and his present, each of us loving him without question – and the strawberries, too. The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that. pg. 100

Hadley is extraordinarily sympathetic, but almost too saintly at times. She is that girlfriend that you just want to shake some sense into – “He’s treating you like garbage, for God’s sake! You’re better off without him!” And there were times when her forbearance bordered on the creepy, suffering through Hemingway’s flagrant adultery at an excruciatingly close distance. But her story of a life lived around genius is extremely compelling, and the characters of the Lost Generation – Alice B. Toklas, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos – come alive in this novel, as do the locations they visit in the interwar period, from Italy to Austria to Paris, of course.

Based on the title, I wonder if McLain is planning a sequel – The Key West Wife? That would be tricky, because Pauline Pfeiffer, the woman who stole Hemingway from Hadley, is pretty hateful in this book. I’m not sure I could read it.

I still hate Hemingway.

*I admit that I did learn to love John Donne, however, the other author that Dr. Kelley predicted would “grow on me” over time. One out of two isn’t bad.

Booking Through Thursday: Age Appropriate

Question: Do you read books “meant” for other age groups? Adult books when you were a child; Young-Adult books now that you’re grown; Picture books just for kicks … You know … books not “meant” for you. Or do you pretty much stick to what’s written for people your age?

The answer to that is “Yes” – with a qualification. When I was a child, I read everything on my parent’s bookshelves. The first time I read Gone With The Wind I was 9 years old – needless to say, a lot of it was way over my head. I remember reading The Crystal Cave not too long after that. I read it again and again. (It may be the reason I became a Medievalist in college. Practicality certainly couldn’t have had anything to do with it!)

As an adult, I have enjoyed reading with my two children (now ages 16 and 10) for closing in on two decades. And I really mean “enjoyed.” Some books are such favorites that the books are no longer necessary. After reading it so many times, everyone in our family can recite There Once Was a Puffin by heart, which has come in handy on more than one occasion when we forgot to pack a book for an overnight trip. From the earliest picture books, through the Madeline and Eloise phases, to chapter books like A Series of Unfortunate Events, I really have looked forward to bedtime most nights!

So here’s the qualification. What I I haven’t enjoyed as much are the YA novels my older daughter reads – and wants me to read too. I am just too impatient with them. The firstTwilight novel made me want to put Bella out of her misery – and mine. Pretties made me cringe. John Green’s novels are better, but he doesn’t write enough of them. I want to encourage her reading outside of her difficult AP English work, and I place a premium on being able to discuss books with my children, so I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when she started grabbing titles from my Kindle library – and finding she actually liked some of them. So far, we’ve discussed Dreaming in Hindi, Radio Shangri-La, and she even finished Bossypants before I did. She still doesn’t dig “old junk” (a.k.a. Classics) much, and won’t touch a mystery to save her life. But at least we’re finding a reading space we can share!

Booking Through Thursday is a weekly meme about (mostly) books and reading. To participate, just copy the week’s question, answer on your blog, and link the answer in the comments for that week. Thanks to Deb for hosting!