Diane Plumley

Banned Books Week’s Timeline Titles

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I never remember when Banned Books Week is scheduled. I stumbled about online, and luckily realized it was happening, now, this minute, until October 2. 2012. My fascination with the convoluted and off kilter reasons for parents, townspeople, and school boards’ objections to certain titles never wanes. How could it? Every year a new title that may have been published centuries ago, is being challenged by someone somewhere. The American Library Association in honor of 30 years devoted to pointing out threatened and banned titles, created a timeline of banned books–from the year Banned Books Week began, 1982, until this year. Some not yet read titles are familiar to me because of being challenged constantly by the ignorant. Other titles I’v’e never heard of. A great deal of them are juvenile or grade school level.

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What Are Memoirs?

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I’ve struggled with separating autobiographies from memoirs. I’ve read slews of  autobiographies of famous classic movie stars, ghostwritten, of course.  Joe Shmoe, Big Movie Star, by Joe Shmoe, and Little Nobody. These bios supposedly encompass the star’s entire life, with anecdotes from all stages of career, DUI’s, lovers, divorces, etc. Dates are given to back up some of the stories told. Still, how many people can recall verbatim conversations they’ve had 40 years ago? Some of the books I’ve perused are written as if events are so fresh in the person’s mind, that you picture them chit chatting in real time–which of course is silly. So, how does that differ from a memoir? I know I’ve pondered this question before, and probably will again, until the differences are crystal clear.

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Wal-Mart vs. Amazon

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It’s hard to decide which of these two monopolies to dislike more. One wants to take over the retail universe, and the other strives to take over the retail universe. One is brick and mortar and treats employees less than admirably, the other is an online store and treats employees like a third world country. One sells various and sundries, the other sells various and sundries, and oh, yeah, books. One used to sell the Kindle pad, the other still sells the Kindle pad.

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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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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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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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Interview with Sara J. Henry-Author of Learning To Swim

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“If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. But I didn’t, and I saw something fall from the rear deck of the opposite ferry: a small, wide-eyed human face, in one tiny frozen moment, as it plummeted toward the water.”

From the publishers: When she witnesses a small child tumbling from a ferry into Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. Harrowing moments later, she bobs to the surface, pulling a terrified little boy with her. As the ferry disappears into the distance, she begins a bone-chilling swim nearly a mile to shore towing a tiny passenger.
Surprisingly, he speaks only French. He’ll acknowledge that his name is Paul; otherwise, he’s resolutely mute.
Troy assumes that Paul’s frantic parents will be in touch with the police or the press. But what follows is a shocking and deafening silence. And Troy, a freelance writer, finds herself as fiercely determined to protect Paul as she is to find out what happened to him.  She’ll need skill and courage to survive and protect her charge and herself.
Sara J. Henry’s powerful and compelling Learning to Swim will move and disturb readers right up to its shattering conclusion.

Winner of the 2012 Agatha Award for best first novel and the 2012 Mary Higgins Clark Award; nominated for the Barry, Macavity, and Anthony awards. The sequel, A COLD AND LONELY PLACE, will be out Feb. 5, 2013.

I had the privilege of sending Ms. Henry some questions regarding her writing, and the publishing industry in general. I was quite happy with the detailed and thoughtful responses she wrote. Here it is:

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