Books of the Year?

The book 1920: the Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza has been bothering me ever since I saw its cover, but I finally looked at it today. The crux of the book is that 4 eventual presidents ran in the 1920 election to replace Woodrow Wilson. "Six" is stretching the truth, since Teddy Roosevelt died in 1919, but he had been the Republican frontrunner till then.

Here's a timeline of a few similar books (thankfully I am not going to list all 32). See how much you can learn just from subtitles!

1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies

1603: the Death of Queen Elizabeth I, the Return of the Black Plague, the Rise of Shakespeare, Piracy, Witchcraft and the Birth of the Stuart Era by Christopher Lee (Whew! Did anything else happen that we could stick in there?)

1676: The End of American Independence by Stephen Webb

1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World by Frank McLynn, at least until. . .

1776 by David McCullough

1941: The Greatest Year in Sports : Two Baseball Legends, Two Boxing Champs, and the Unstoppable Thoroughbred Who Made History in the Shadow of War by Mike Vaccaro. This strikes me as a great conversation starter: what was the greatest year in sports? Now bookworms like me have an answer.

1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, who must have a dispute with the author of the following book (no typos here):

1969: The Year Everything Changed by Rob Kirkpatrick. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Art Books at the Library

Yesterday, a patron from another town complimented BHPL's collection of art books (or 700's as we in the biz call it.) BHPL's subject specialty is art, as disclosed previously on this blog. Each of the nine libraries in the cooperative entity known as M.U.F. (Morris-Union Federation of Libraries) has a subject specialty, which is not to say that other libraries don't acquire art books at all, it's just that at BHPL we have a separate room for the 700's which is a great resource for the local arts community as well as anyone interested in browsing a beautiful collection of arts, crafts, architecture and other fine arts books.



A random sampling of my favorite 700's now shelved in the New Non-Fiction area:


Book + Art, handcrafting Artists' Books by Dorothy Simson Krause (686.3 KRA)
and the closely related EcoBooks, inventive projects from the recycling bin by Terry Taylor (686.3 TAY); both these books show how to take common household materials to make books and give simple directions for binding. Taylor's book takes the reuse idea to a whimsical extreme with a book covered by an egg carton.


Masterpieces of Islamic Art, the decorated page from the 8th to the 17th century by Oleg Grabar. For sheer gorgeousness (word?) and ooh-aahing potential, this coffee table book inspires awe (709.53 GRA)

For escapism, take a look at Italian Rustic, how to bring Tuscan charm into your home by Elizabeth Helman Minchilli ((728 HEL) Strangely, it looks awfully expensive to rusticate a NJ home in the Tuscan style and I'm not sure chunky beams and terracotta floors go well with the many wood colonial revivals or pattern book houses which you see around town, but readers can dream. Maybe a pergola in the back yard?

And finally, two new how-to books, Painting for the Absolute and Utter Beginner by Claire Watson Garcia (751.426 GAR) and the Artist's Guide to Perspective by Janet Shearer (742 SHE) which is sitting on my coffee table at home where I hope it's mere presence will improve my grasp of 3 point perspective.

Last Night at the Lobster

The evening book group is meeting on Tuesday, April 13 at 7:30 p.m. to discuss Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster, a very short novel in present tense that describes the last, snowy day that a Red Lobster is open for business. Its manager, Manny, is a sympathetic hero, but it's evident from the start that his compulsion to do everything by the book (even signalling his turns in the deserted mall parking lot in the first pages of the book) isn't going to save him. As Stewart O'Nan explains,

Darden doesn’t sell franchises, so a manager of a Red Lobster or Olive Garden has all the daily responsibilities of an owner but none of the privileges. He or she can put all of his or her hard work and pride into the place and have it snatched away at the whim of the home office.

(from the Penguin interview with Stewart O'Nan. Another interesting part of this interview was whether O'Nan references The Old Man and the Sea when he describes the stuffed marlin Manny thought about taking at the end of the night).



Last Night at the Lobster is so exacting in every detail, it's like an anthropological study of Red Lobster, both the employees and the customers. I swear that Manny's old wrestling coach, a lunch regular, comes by BHPL afterwards to check his email.

You can find the discussion questions for the book here. Barnes and Noble interviewed O'Nan a few years ago here.

Keeping Reading Lists Online

For 20 years I've kept a handwritten journal of books I read and now I also keep the list online at Goodreads. You can see a screen shot of the titles I've recently read to the right.

Goodreads is a social media site where booklovers can become online friends, share book reviews and recommendations, join genre groups, take literary trivia quizzes and generally spend time online goofing off but feeling slightly superior because it's all about books, isn't it? Goodreads is free to anyone to use. My children joined it and invited me to join and "friend" them so we can see each other's reading lists and share our thoughts on what we've read. I know, it's all rather futuristic, like something the Jetsons might have done, but it works for us.
BHPL subscribes to a similar service called The Next Good Book which is linked to the library home page. Ellen discussed it on the blog here.
For a really low-technology way of keeping track of books you read, save your library checkout receipts and throw them in a shoebox.

Queequeg

I had to put Moby Dick aside for a while after I started to feel like Shel Silverstein's Melinda Mae ("She took little bites and she chewed very slow,/
Just like a little girl should.../ ...and eighty-nine years later she ate that whale/ Because she said she would!!!"). But Queequeg, Ishmael's friend who speaks pidgin and is from some faraway pagan island, has breathed some life into the sails.

According to shmoop.com, Queequeg was based on a Maori chief named Tupai Cupa, whom Melville read about in a book called The New Zealanders by George Lillie Craik.

Here is a picture of Tupai Cupa (the site I took the image from has an interesting explanation of how his facial tattoo was also the basis of his signature):



I love Melville's descriptions of Nantucket:

Look at it- a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you .........that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to the very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles.

or New Bedford, Connecticut:

On one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice- covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.