Month: September 2012

Composition For Four Hands–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Composition  for Four Hands—Hilda Lawrence–1947-OOP

“They wheeled her chair to the big bay window in her bedroom. She’d been fed and bathed. She’d had what they called her forty winks.  They said it was such a beautiful afternoon and wasn’t she lucky to have such a nice window? Then they left her.”

This is the ominous beginning to a story that builds in suspense. Unusual, that it’s not told in the first person, considering the main character is completely paralyzed. I would have probably gone with Nora Manson telling the story from her personal point of view, of her terror in the unknown and the fact that she was being targeted by someone in her own home, someone wanted to kill her.

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The Battle of the Royal Biographies

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This is a guest post from Will Noble

Queen vs. Empress

One of them is a living queen; the other is a dead empress. But which has the better biography? We
take a look at critical response to Elizabeth the Queen and Catherine the Great to decide which is the
royal write-up you should take home this fall.

Royal is in at the moment. What, with the wedding of Will and Kate last year, Elizabeth II’s Diamond
Jubilee in June – not to mention the bizarre wedding of the 85 year-old Duchess of Alba last October
– everyone wants a bite of the bling. Two of the latest titles to capitalize on this are Sally Bedell
Smith’s Elizabeth the Queen (a portrait of England’s current monarch that hopes to shed new light
on her), and Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great, an historical account of the 18th century Russian
empress who was notorious for her many lovers.

They may both have enjoyed long reigns (Elizabeth’s is still going of course), but if critic ratings
are anything to go by, it’s the Russian’s which is by far the more fascinating. Elizabeth the Queen
earns just 57%, compared to the 79% of Massie’s biography, with Bloomberg comically stating
that “…prose comes at you like a spray of saliva, its reverence bordering on rapture…” and My
SanAntonio fully deriding the bio as belonging “…in the same category of sleazy tabloid journalism
that prowls for opportunity to make quick, easy bucks.”

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Songs For The Missing

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One of our ferrets disappeared. One minute he was in the Queens apartment, the next I couldn’t locate him when putting the ferrets back in their cage at night. I’d not made them go into the cage for a couple of days, so I didn’t know when he actually went missing. The entire apartment was ferret proofed, meaning, all areas of danger were closed up, no holes in walls, or in back of the stove or refrigerator. At first, I had no misgivings–ferrets sleep deeply in burrowing spaces–so my husband and I started our routine of checking all the typical spots–in clothes left lying around, under the bed sheets, below the chairs or sofa, and in closets, although they usually weren’t open. When these didn’t pan out and after we had checked and rechecked, we then took the entire place apart, becoming more and more alarmed when he didn’t turn up. By around 4 in the morning, we realized he just wasn’t there.

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Positive Shelf Image

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by Jas Faulkner

Some fans refer to it as a grown up version of the big, thick Wish Books that arrived in the mail sometime around Thanksgiving (in the US.)  Other followers use a racier term for the category of websites and social media gathering places where people share ideas and pictures about their passion: shelf porn.  The names really don’t matter.  The rows by any other names are still breathtaking in their creativity and their ability to speak to the deepest wishes of book lovers.

They give us images of  the grown-up versions of dream houses that align more closely with our desires than the prototypes we were offered as children.  Barbie’s dream house, the Brady’s split level ranch, and the Huxtable’s brownstone had beautiful furnishings and rooms any kid should envy.  The one thing that made them seem lifeless was the absence of any kind of library.  Dream homes should have dream shelves.

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Post Office Problems & Forging Ahead

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I am not ashamed to admit how little I know about the business I am starting, but my ignorance of some things even surprises me. I learned this week that, though my address is in the downtown center of a busy county seat, the U.S. Postal Service will not to deliver mail to me. It turns out that several blocks of downtown Pittsboro have been excluded from mail delivery for many years. We used to have a post office one block from the main street, but some time ago the post office moved a mile away, leaving downtown businesses no way to get mail other than by driving out of town to collect from a post office box. Not only that, but mail correctly addressed to me is being returned to sender, including my first power and water bills.

So, of course I had to rent a P.O. box this week, adding to my list of unexpected expenses. And changing my business address on many new accounts is added to my list of unexpected time wasters. I am not going to rant about the post office, or how (with all the paperwork I’ve completed for local officials) someone might have saved me a lot of trouble if they had mentioned this bizarre condition, but I could.

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How I Opened my Bookstore

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I can’t remember when I thought that it might be fun to have my own bookstore. I know that since my teens I have enjoyed going to book stores. The first “book” type stores I remember going to was the comic book store that was operated at the building that housed the local taxi service. I grew up reading “Classics Illustrated” and DC comics.

The Marvel Universe

I was blown away when Marvel came on the scene with comics like “The Fantastic Four”, “Tales of Suspense”, “ The Hulk”, “Strange Tales” and the like. I don’t remember going to many bookstores when I was a child, but I had lots of books nonetheless. My mother bought books for me, I got books from the library at school and relatives gave me books. I really started acquiring books when I got out of high school, went to college for a while.   I got a car and my aquisitions exploded. It quickly became apparent that I needed a bumper sticker that said, “ I brake for book stores”. By my early 20’s I had accumulated a thousand or so odd books. Most of them came from bookstores, but many of them came from going to the flea market. This was 40 years or so ago and the nature of bookstores has changed dramatically since then. When I was in my late teens and 20’s and went into a bookstore and saw a book I really liked, I generally bought the book. In those days you didn’t know when you might see a particular book again. Today if I visit a book store and find a book I like, I am not quite as likely to buy the book on the basis that I might not be able to find that book again. Armed with my cell phone I can quickly determine if most books are readily available by doing a simple search on my favorite -site ABE Books. I have wondered the hall of nostalgic memory and have digressed from my story.

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The Big Sleep–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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The Big Sleep—Dashiell Hammett–1939–in print

I admit, the film is one of my all time favorites. I will watch it each and every time it plays on Turner Classic Movies. Happily, Mr. Turner didn’t colorize this film–or if he did, they don’t bother ruining our viewing pleasure by showing that version. I can enter at the middle, and become glued to the set, or even at the very end, when there’s just a few more moves to be made, and I’ll still opt to watch it rather than some first run program. I love it for the very reason some critics hate it–the convoluted plot. So layered, that even Chandler was hard put to explain whodunit for one of the murders in the book and on screen. I love the actors, naturally–I mean, how could one not love Bogart and Bacall–and wow–the sister to Bacall’s character, Martha Vickers, steals the show–which is why they went back and added more scenes for Bacall to shine in. Character actors galore, and an early Dorothy Malone add up to the perfect mystery film. And lest I forget, the biblio aspect of the story is just the scotch in old man Sternwood’s glass, he can’t drink.

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The Words–The Movie

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A bunch of us ‘girls’ went to see this film the other night. Naturally, I was interested not only because a cute man was the lead, but because of the literary aspect of the film. I wasn’t exactly sure what that aspect was, but from the promo I got the impression the cute lead stole someone’s manuscript and passed it off as his own. Well, not exactly, but close. Bradley Cooper plays–a character in a book. A character who finds a manuscript in an old leather briefcase while honeymooning in Paris. He’s a struggling writer, trying to write that perfect literary work.  He’s been told he’s talented, but not commercial. He’s had rejection slips run like the faucet through his mail slot. His lovely wife believes in him, his father, not so much. Dennis Quaid is the man who is writing this fictional account of a man who cannot get published. He’s doing a huge book reading–supposedly two sections of the book are being read aloud. Quaid meets up with a lit student, stalker–well, that’s what I would call Olivia Wilde’s character–she pursues Quaid with a fervor. And she questions him about the novel, his writing, etc etc.

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