Books & Mags

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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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 Paginated Babysitter

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by Jas Faulkner

Theresa* is a middle school librarian in Tennessee.**  When budget cutbacks hit her county, she didn’t mind taking on the additional hat of media specialist.  Doing so meant that she wouldn’t have to do circuit administration, meaning that she would be responsible for only one school.   She understood that all of that was part of working in public education.  And like many educators, she found that in the past five years, her job has turned into a constant battle and it has nothing to do with scrabbling for her share of the shrinking budget.   Her biggest opponent is not student apathy or parental antipathy, but the ubiquity of handheld gadgets.

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Missed Opportunities

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Harleian Miscellany is an extraordinary compilation. It purports itself to be a “collection of scarce, curious, and entertaining pamphlets and tracts as well in manuscript as in print found in the late Earl of Oxford’s library interspersed with historical, political, and critical notes”. It was first published at the end of the 18 th century. I have a set from 1794 – 8 large leather bound volumes full of curios lore. I first saw the Harleian Miscellany over 30 years ago. I always wanted a set and about 2 years ago I finally acquired one. The contents and the set are subjects for some future story.

What is of interest to me today is something connected with this particular set. Inside the front cover of each of the books is a bookplate from one Thomas Savney L. L. D. Of Richard’s Castle Salop.
Richard’s Castle exists to this day. It is one of the few castles that survive that is thought to have been build before the Norman Conquest. Salop still exits. I am hoping to find the time to determine if the Salney family survives and to find out something about Thomas Salney, but his memory persists in this bookplate. Across more than two centuries it says, “Hello – I was here”. To which I say” Wow”.

The Harleian Miscellany is very collectible and somewhat “rare”, but it is not in the class of books that I would consider to be truly rare.

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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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Laura. Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Laura—Vera Caspary–1943 (it ran as a serial in a magazine in 1942 before being published as a novel)–used paperback

I recently read another Vera Caspary title, Bedelia, and the only similarity to Laura is the author. Bedelia is a nice character study of a beguiling black widow, whose latest husband finally catches on. It holds neither the suspense or surprise that Laura does. Since a great deal of the impact of the novel, Laura, is intertwined with the plot–I’ll need to give a general *Spoiler Alert” for the entire article! That’s assuming you are one of the few people who never heard of or saw the classic film starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, nor saw the billion rip-offs on episodic television.

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Chick Lit Of The Sea

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By Jas Faulkner 

For a long time, popular wisdom dictated that genre fiction for girls consisted of dainty prose about the vagaries of friendships and horses that no one else could tame.   There were exceptions:  the intrepid sleuths and a few other heroes who occasionally saw print. There were even a few girls in R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series who didn’t mind  taking on whatever was growling at the foot of the basement stairs or becoming monsters themselves.  Love it or hate it, this would change in 2005 when the first of a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer dominated nearly every sales indicator.  In spite of tepid to unabashedly negative critical response, in 2005, seventeen million people, mostly mothers and daughters, bought copies of Twilight.

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