Richard III, William Shakespeare

I looked up Richard III, and Wikipedia says that scholars consider it one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.  Well, you know what, Wikipedia?  Scholars apparently did not read The Daughter of Time at a young and impressionable age and acquire an emotional stake in the innocence of Richard III!  I have a framed portrait of Richard III in my house, and one of these days I am going to borrow a drill to do a guide-hole, and hang the damn thing up.  In my last apartment it hung right next to my bookshelf.

Let me just say, Parliament had already passed through a bill declaring all of Edward IV’s children illegitimate (that was how Richard became King in the first place), so there was just really no point in Richard’s killing them.  Hell, I’d have declared them illegitimate too, with their father dead and all the kill-you-to-get-ahead Woodville relatives around preying on their little minds.  Oh, and when Henry VII took power (HUH), Parliament passed through a Bill of Attainder about how wicked and evil Richard was, and it never even hinted that he had killed any little princes.  Which makes Josephine Tey – and Elizabeth Peters – and me – think that they were probably not dead yet at that point.

And you know what else?  Henry VIII was not a bad king, despite his shocking wife-beheading ways, and that little incident with St. Thomas More, and I just want to say, he really spent very little time with his (Tudor) father growing up, but was very close with his (Plantagenet) mum.  I ONLY MENTION IT.  I DO NOT POSIT ANY CAUSAL CONNECTION.

Is Richard III one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays?  Dude, I have no idea.  I was too busy stewing over the injustice of history.

No, wait, I’ve not done this right.  Let me give it another go.  The Duke of Gloucester – I’m calling him that as a means of separating him in my mind from Actual Richard III, who I AM SURE would never hurt a fly – the Duke of  Gloucester is an excellent character.  As evil as he is, it’s a bit seductive.  (I liked Satan as well in Paradise Lost.)  We’re the only ones in Gloucester’s confidence, and he’s tipping us an enormous wink with practically every line:

They do me wrong and I will not endure it:
Who are they that complain unto the king
That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his grace but lightly
That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours.
Because I cannot flatter and speak fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused
By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

Delicious.

I am, by the way, justly paid out for urging Shakespeare to fudge history to make it a better story.  Gloucester takes the throne by declaring his brother’s sons illegitimate.  And to make Gloucester really wicked, Shakespeare has him cast doubt on the legitimacy of Edward IV too; i.e., Gloucester implies that his own mother was unfaithful to his father.  “But touch this sparingly, as ‘twere far off,” he says, “because you know, my lord, my mother lives.”  Oh, he’s so evil!  This is a better story than sticking to a possibly legitimate gripe about Edward IV’s bigamy, and I cannot really complain about it.

I love it how Gloucester and his cohorts plan how to make him appear noble and religious when he is ready to get crowned, how his (temporary) BFF Buckingham describes him as the antithesis of the womanizing Edward IV (darn it, I keep writing Edward VI by mistake – he’s the one who died without knowing the love of a woman).  When offered the crown in a nicely staged ceremony before the people and the gullible Mayor of London, Gloucester nobly refuses – shades of Caesar, and a plot device that Shakespeare will, of course, use again when he writes Julius Caesar.

(In his cups (I’m assuming they have pubs in heaven), Plutarch is probably all like, “Shkspeare din’t think of that himself, y’know.  I was the originin – I was the orin – I was the one who wrote that story down first.  Evrybody thinks he’s so great but iss me that he got that story from.  I’m a great historian!”  And then he probably slaps his beer down really hard and sloshes it everywhere, and then Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably all, “Let me take you home; you’ve had enough” and says apologetically to the bartender, “Sorry about him, he really was a great historian,” and then Plutarch probably throws his glass at the bartender and hollers “I usedta work for an ORACLE!” and Emerson props him up and says, “I know you did, man, let’s get you back to your cloud, come on.”  And on the way home Plutarch laughs derisively and says, “He said Brutus was an honorable man like – like fifteen thousand bazillion – it got rully lame – I don’t feel so good,” and then is sick into someone’s heavenly geraniums and then he’s like “Hahahahaha, I ralphed – get it, get it, cause your name – I love you Ralphie,” and then he probably cries and says “Willm Shkspeare never visits me – nobody reads my stuff except stupid Latin students – why doesn’t anybody love me anymore?” and drunk-dials Herodotus to commiserate.)

Okay, having given myself some emotional distance by calling Shakespeare’s character Gloucester, and by thinking of him as a character instead of a historical figure of whom I am protective – I have to admit that Richard III is a damn good play.  I want  to tell you about every single amazing scene – like the one where Margaret (“Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”) makes fun of Edward IV’s queen, who has just lost her husband and sons; and the one where Richard screws around with Buckingham just because he can.  Oh, and the scene where Gloucester (now King) is telling his sister-in-law how nice he’s going to be to her, and she bitch-slaps him in iambic pentameter:

Be brief, lest that the process of thy kindness
Last longer telling than thy kindness’ date.

And then there’s the big battle, and despite a lot of brave fighting, Richard is slain.  It’s sad, and I couldn’t maintain this separation between the Gloucester character and the real Richard III.  I remember from The Daughter of Time what the City of York put in their town records after Richard III was killed, and I’m pretty sure I remember it word for word.  So while Shakespeare was sucking up to the descendents of Henry VII, I was thinking of that.  “This day was our good King Richard piteously slain and murdered; to the great heaviness of this city.”

Onward now to Comedy of Errors.  I really do not want to read Comedy of Errors.  I was in it in high school and it’s idiotic.  Preview: There are two sets of twins resulting in lots of HILARIOUS MISHAPS.  God, I can’t wait for Twelfth Night.

Have you read Richard III?  Or have you seen it performed?  Is there a good film version I should investigate?

The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell

The Wordy Shipmates is about the Puritans, John Winthrop and his lot, who came to America, and all the stuff they did.  Vowell admires their courage and intelligence without giving them a pass on all the things we don’t like about Puritans – the intransigence, the praying for American Indians to die of plague, etc.  It’s more of an essay collection than a history book, with Vowell speaking to her own life and how she has found strength in the writings of the Puritans, plus some fairly predictable party-line remarks on American politics.  Plus all the stuff about the Puritans.

Disclaimer: There were no chapter breaks.  I may have been put in a bad mood about this book by the dearth of chapter breaks.  I depend on chapter breaks.  Not because my attention span is short – it may be, but this doesn’t prove it – but because I need chapter breaks to have a stopping point at which to go to bed.

That disclaimer made, I didn’t like this book.  I found it cutesy, condescending, and unreflectively simplistic at the beginning, so much so that even when it got more interesting I couldn’t be bothered with it.  I inspected Amazon to see if anyone agreed with me, and the people who agreed with me mostly seem to feel that Sarah Vowell is anti-Christian and anti-American and advancing a liberal agenda in order to brainwash our kids.  I don’t think any of those things.  Just that, whether you share her politics or not (and I expect I often do), The Wordy Shipmates is not very funny, and not very original.

(S. Krishna, Fyrefly’s Book Blog, and Sandy Nawrot seem to have liked it better than I did, by the way, so listen to them really.)

Never mind all that!  Here is a picture that I feel perfectly expresses my mum’s family.  We did this one time at Thanksgiving.  Every time I walked by the table, someone had made additions.  I feel the pitchforks were particularly inspired.

Love

Go watch “The Waters of Mars” and then come back here so we can have spoiler-filled comments about all how bleak and scary and crazy it all was, and how excited we all are that John Simm is coming back again.  (I am very very excited.  I would even go so far as to say very very very excited.  I love me some John Simm.)

You may think that you have seen David Tennant put on some crazy eyes previously, but in fact you have never seen David Tennant do crazy eyes until you have seen “The Waters of Mars”.  I recommend you get on that as soon as possible.  Russell Davies does his best work when he’s not afraid to get dark with it (see also Midnight).  Although the premise of humans exploring space nobly, causing the Doctor to want to hug them and bury them in a cairn of compliments has been done before on this show, it’s never been done this well.  The monsters are scary and the Doctor is – well, he’s the Doctor, as he gets when there’s nobody around to stop him.

On my scaryometer, I would rate this probably on a level with “Silence in the Library“, which is to say, a bit less scary than “The Empty Child“, less scary than “Midnight” by a comfortable margin, and nearly half as scary as “Blink“, Scariest Single Episode of TV Ever™.

David Tennant, presently my favorite actor of all the actors, is starring in an NBC pilot about a lawyer with anxiety problems.  As anxiety problems of various kinds hold synchronized swimming competitions in my family’s gene pool, I am pleased about this whole idea.  IF they can write a therapist that’s any good, which is something I’ve noticed films and TV shows struggle to do.  Is it because all screenwriters have crappy therapists themselves?  Is it because they need the therapists to be idiots in order to allow the characters to carry on being dysfunctional?  Is it because the media hates social workers?  I DO NOT KNOW, but I yearn for David Tennant to come make his crazy eyes on American network television.

Plus, this.  My mum introduced us to Shakespeare with the films of Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing; and that seems to have worked, because I love Shakespeare like I love my family, and I have renewed my long-abandoned Shakespeare reading project.  Previously I have disliked Hamlet A LOT, but I feel like, come December of this year, all that could change.

Henry VI, Part 3, William Shakespeare

Okay, I did actually forget all about my project to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, but DO NOT WORRY.  I have remembered it now and I shall carry right on with it.  I just finished reading Henry VI, Part 3, which is nice because I’m all done with Henry VI and can move along to my boy Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Remember how I said Part 2 was more like it than Part 1?  Not exactly like it, but more?  I regret to report that I can’t say the same thing of Part 3.  It’s all, Okay, now Edward is the King!  No, Henry!  No, Edward!  I know that’s how history went, but sometimes history is silly.  Sometimes when you are making a story out of history, you have to make it more cohesive than it actually was, and run the risk that history buffs will shriek THAT IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENED at you the next time they see you at a bear-baiting.  Shakespeare does not manage to do this, and indeed makes the story even sillier than it has to be.

You may recall that a character in Part 1 wished that he could shoot his eyeballs at another guy’s face.  In Part 3, Warwick says this:

I had rather chop this hand off at a blow,
And with the other fling it at thy face.

Now, is that the kind of thing a Kingmaker would say?  He wants to chop off his hand and fling it at Edward VI’s face.  All because Edward married the widow Woodville and made Warwick look like an idiot in front of the King of France.  Some people are grudge-holders.

Then at the end of the play, it’s suddenly Richard III: The Prologue.  I now expect that Richard III, which I have never read, will start out with, Previously, on Shakespeare’s Version of English History.  Richard (not yet the Third) gets down with the evil monologues; he murders Henry VI and starts chattering about how evil he is and how many other evil things he’s going to do.  He’s going to kill his brand-new nephew, and both of his brothers, because he is just that wicked.  (This doesn’t count as a spoiler, by the way, because none of that ever really happened.  Bah.)

There was this one line I liked, though.  They’re talking about whether to kill Queen Margaret, who has managed to be the most consistently bad-ass character in this trilogy of mediocre plays, and Richard says, “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”  I love this as an acknowledgement of how dangerous this woman can be.  Why should she live, to fill the world with words?

Okay, I did actually forget all about my project to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, but DO NOT WORRY.  I have remembered it now and I shall carry right on with it.  I just finished reading Henry VI, Part 3, which is nice because I’m all done with Henry VI and can move along to my boy Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Remember how I said Part 2 was more like it than Part 1?  Not exactly like it, but more?  I regret to report that I can’t say the same thing of Part 3.  It’s all, Okay, now Edward is the King!  No, Henry!  No, Edward!  I know that’s how history went, but sometimes history is silly.  Sometimes when you are making a story out of history, you have to make it more cohesive than it actually was, and run the risk that history buffs will shriek THAT IS NOT HOW IT HAPPENED at you the next time they see you at a bear-baiting.  Shakespeare does not manage to do this, and indeed makes the story even sillier than it has to be.

You may recall that a character in Part 1 wished that he could shoot his eyeballs at another guy’s face.  In Part 3, Warwick says this:

I had rather chop this hand off at a blow,
And with the other fling it at thy face.

Now, is that the kind of thing a Kingmaker would say?  He wants to chop off his hand and fling it at Edward VI’s face.  All because Edward married the widow Woodville and made Warwick look like an idiot in front of the King of France.  Some people are grudge-holders.

Then at the end of the play, it’s suddenly Richard III: The Prologue.  I now expect that Richard III, which I have never read, will start out with, Previously, on Shakespeare’s Version of English History.  Richard (not yet the Third) gets down with the evil monologues; he murders Henry VI and starts chattering about how evil he is and how many other evil things he’s going to do.  He’s going to kill his brand-new nephew, and both of his brothers, because he is just that wicked.  (This doesn’t count as a spoiler, by the way, because none of that ever really happened.  Bah.)

There was this one line I liked, though.  They’re talking about whether to kill Queen Margaret, who has managed to be the most consistently bad-ass character in this trilogy of mediocre plays, and Richard says, “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”  I love this as an acknowledgement of how dangerous this woman can be.  Why should she live, to fill the world with words?

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones

There are only a very few books by Diana Wynne Jones that I don’t own, and here they are and this is why:

1. The Time of the Ghost.  Written in 1981, right before Diana Wynne Jones went on her crazy winning streak made out of amazing brilliance and win, between 1981 and 1986, this is my very least by a lot favorite of Diana Wynne Jones’s books.  I have read it over and over, and I have never managed to like it.

2. A Tale of Time City.  Because I have only started liking it recently, and I have not definitely settled down to Like It from Dislike It.

3. Eight Days of Luke.  I.e., the book that apparently gave Neil Gaiman the germ of the idea for American Gods – it’s out of print and difficult to obtain, and I have not yet used it enough times to love it enough to take the time to bother finding it used.  I should really check it out of the library again.

4. Dogsbody.  No idea why.

Dogsbody is great.  See, the being that establishes Sirius, the Dog Star, is convicted of having killed another luminary with his Zoi, an immensely powerful object that has now fallen to Earth and been lost.  As punishment, he is placed in the body of a dog on Earth.  If, during his dog life span, he can retrieve the Zoi, he will be reinstated; if not, he will die as a dog.

Really I just don’t know why I don’t own it.  I own the entire Dalemark Quartet, which I like significantly less than Dogsbody (or Luke or even maybe Time City, now that I think about it.)  Dogsbody, it’s fun and interesting, and it’s from the perspective of a dog without being cutesy.  As a dog, Sirius cannot access his full luminary self – he wants to run around and sniff things and be a dog, and he has to fight these impulses and focus fiercely on locating the Zoi, the exact nature of which he struggles to remember.  Where has it fallen, and who has it now?  And if Sirius did not kill the luminary, then who did?

Also, Diana Wynne Jones?  Not afraid of a bittersweet ending!  Hello, Homeward Bounders?  And while I’m on the subject, you are probably wondering what I was talking about before, when I said the thing about Diana Wynne Jones and her insane winning streak.  Between 1981 and 1986, Diana Wynne Jones wrote all of my very favorites of her books.  She wrote The Homeward Bounders, Archer’s Goon, Witch Week, Fire and Hemlock, and Howl’s Moving Castle.  All between 1981 and 1986.  Yummy.

P.S. Nymeth and words by Annie also liked Dogsbody.  I bet you would too!

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Laurie R. King

Mary Russell is a (half?) Jewish (half?) American girl who takes up with Sherlock Holmes.  Like him, she is brilliant and unemotional; she becomes his protégé at age fifteen, and they solve cases together.  In The Beekeeper’s Apprentice they run up against a villain more villainous and clever than all the clever villainous villains heretofore encountered by Holmes (he says) (though obviously not because I have heard he got outwitted one time), and they work in tandem to thwart the villainously clever villain.  This did not bother me because I have hardly read any Sherlock Holmes stories (apart from Hound of the Baskervilles) and thus did not have any Holmes canon sensibilities to offend.  On the other hand, I expect there were oodles of things in this book that would have been more fun if I knew the Holmes canon.  I enjoyed this reading experience but did not find it necessary – i.e., I carried it around in my purse for nearly a fortnight before finishing it all the way to the end.

My little sister started watching Doctor Who with me when I was about halfway through the second series.  (Bear with me, it’s an explanatory anecdote.)  She became hooked almost instantly, and after a while, as they will, some Daleks appeared and I screamed “OH NO OH GOD OH NO WHAT WILL HAPPEN EVERYONE WILL DIE!” and Robyn said, “What what what what?” and I said, “IT IS THE DALEKS!”  A dramatic pronouncement that fell flat because Robyn had never seen a Dalek before (except in Breakfast on Pluto) and had no idea what they were.

I think The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was a bit like that.  Not having read the Sherlock Holmes books made the book less punchy than (I believe) it could have been.  But I liked Mary, and I shall revisit this series sometime after I have read some more Sherlock Holmes stories.

That’s all I got on the Mary Russell front.  Other things are said by other people, and I would be glad to add your link if I missed it here: A Striped Armchair, Presenting Lenore, Books and Cooks, Today’s Adventure, One Swede Read, Shermeree’s Musings, Age 30 + …A Lifetime of Books, What KT Reads, My Random Acts of Reading, Bogormen

And now for something completely different:

On to a holiday out of which I expect neither Sherlock Holmes nor Mary Russell would get very much: Christmas!  Christmas is coming, everyone!  I know it is because I went to several shops today that had Christmas displays up, and because I sang Christmas songs in my car really loudly.  Oh lovely Christmas, all red-and-greeny and cold (I hope) and full of delicious foods and lovely presents and my enormous family.  To those of you who do not like for Christmas preparations to begin before Thanksgiving, I do not know what to say.  The earlier I think about Christmas, the earlier I am filled with soaring sensations of joy and well-being, so for me, there is no point at all in waiting until after Thanksgiving.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Whoa, how did I not review this yet?  I thought I had – but apparently I only thought about it, A LOT, and then forgot to do it because I was reading through the Amelia Peabody books.  (Still fun!)

The Magicians is about a boy called Quentin Coldwater who is obsessed with a series of books about a fictional land, Fillory.  One day, he interviews for and gets into a school of magic, Brakebills, and he spends the next lots of years learning magic, and practicing magic, and eventually (is this spoilers?  I feel like no, because you see it coming from the beginning) it turns out that Fillory was real all along, and he and his friends go to Fillory.

I loved the Fillory thing.  Narnia obviously informed the idea of the Fillory books – the child protagonists, the magic alternate world, the talking animals, etc. – but very rarely did it feel like Grossman was borrowing too much from C.S. Lewis.  (The exception is that he swiped the entire idea of the Wood Between the Worlds with hardly any changes, which kind of bugged me.)  Mainly, though, this device works very well.  The idea of the book is sort of a growing-up of children’s fantasy.  Quentin’s obsession with Fillory makes him expect one thing out of magic, and he finds it works quite differently.  He grows into adulthood and cannot quite work out what to do with his life, and finally he gets to Fillory and finds it absolutely not what he was imagining.  It’s all pretty dark and difficult and messy, like adulthood is – the expectations kids have, and the difficult, compromise-y reality.

(Spoilers here.)  What worked particularly nicely for me, in suggesting the transition from childhood magic to the world of adulthood, is the episode where Quentin decides to play a tiny prank on one of his teachers.  The minor distraction he creates summons a Beast from another world, and a student who tries to save the situation gets killed.  BAM.  It was effective.

On the down side, I did find the book unbearably self-conscious at times, especially on the one or two occasions that the students of Brakebills made reference to Hogwarts and Middle Earth.  It was jarring.  Fillory was fictional Narnia, so the world of the book was obviously not our world; to make reference to a real-world book took me right out of the moment.  If there is Fillory instead of Narnia, Tolkien and Harry Potter can’t exist.  Does that make sense?

Another problem I had was that, although the book was a good exploration of the adulthood thing I mentioned before, it wasn’t tightly plotted.  Extraneous events and stories were easily distinguishable from plot point events and stories because Grossman was telegraphing his punches like mad.  Plus, the trip to Fillory didn’t happen until ages into the book, and it was so brief there wasn’t enough time to build up the necessary suspense.  (Though I did like the final revelation about Martin.)

I spoke a while ago about Neil Gaiman’s story “The Problem of Susan” and the problems I had with it.  Grossman’s story is as creepily effective as Gaiman’s at growing up the Narnia books, without being as disrespectful to Lewis’s writing.  On the other hand, given that it was novel-length rather than just a short story, The Magicians could have benefited by having a good editor.  It was uneven altogether – it dragged in bits, and raced in bits, and while some things worked spectacularly, others spectacularly did not (the niffin thing?  not so much).

I like for my life to be simple, and I have fretted about how many stars to give this book for a while now.  I decided on three as an average, though as I say, in parts it was a five and in parts a one or two.  What would you prefer – an all-bad book you can write off forever, or a book like this that’s inconsistent?

Other reviews: A Novel Menagerie, She Is Too Fond of Books, bookshelves of doom, OF Blog of the Fallen, Reading the Leaves, Books and Movies, Beyond Books, The Wertzone, The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review, Darque Reviews, Wordsmithonia, Strategist’s Personal Library, Stephanie’s Written Word, and tell me if I missed yours!

Bonfire Night

I like a bonfire!  Sadly, the American fall holiday is Halloween, which does not entail bonfires.  Candy, yes.  Slutty costume versions of really strange things like bumblebees, yes.  But no sparklers, very few sausages, and rarely fireworks or bonfires.  And no burning effigies at all, unless Bonfire Night happens to coincide with the Bama game.

Whenever Bonfire Night rolls around, I get nostalgic for the Little Grey Rabbit books.  Did anyone else read these?  They are charming – all about a rabbit and a hare and a squirrel that live together and have little adventures.  In one book they go to the ocean; in one there is a young fairy that gives Grey Rabbit an egg; in one they have a birthday party for Grey Rabbit, and Wise Owl swallows her thimble.  In one book, Hedgehog says that his little son, Fuzzypeg, is very smart.  Hedgehog says, “He told me once I was a quadruped, and I said No!  I’m a plain hedgehog.  Plain I am and plain I’ll be, but my Fuzzypeg, he’s a scholard.”

One of the Grey Rabbit books is about Guy Fawkes Day.  Hare sneaks into town and gets the cat in a village shop to give him fireworks, which is exactly the kind of thing Hare would do.  Wise Owl sings a song about gunpowder treason, and they light Catherine wheels.  The wicked Fox, who at one point tried to eat Speckledy Hen all up, creeps away because he is Guy Fox and doesn’t want to get burned all up on top of the bonfire.

At Easter I always want to read this one picture book, The Easter Bunny that Overslept; at Christmas it’s The Story of Holly and Ivy.  We’re still a ways off from “the holiday season”, but I am curious now: what are some books you like to read at the holidays?

(You like how I am cunningly getting book recommendations from you?  Subtly varying my questions to elicit more and more suggestions for comfortable rereadable books?)

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale

I was determined to finish this book before the end of Halloween which I have now done.  This is my bonus book to wrap up the RIP Challenge, which, along with everyone else, I thank Carl for hosting.  I’ve had fun reading all my spooky books and reading what everyone else thought of spooky books they read.  Lots of Shirley Jackson.  Lots of Wilkie Collins.  These are the books I read:

Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger
I’m Looking Through You, Jennifer Finney Boylan
The Seance, John Harwood
Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn

and this one, my bonus one; and I liked Her Fearful Symmetry best.  Obviously.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is about Victorians and detectives and manor house mysteries.  I like all of these things, though murder mysteries tend to be dramatically more fun when they are fictional.  In its essentials, this book is about a three-year-old boy who gets taken from his bedroom and his throat slit – though as the author notes at the end, the search for the resolution to this mystery distances us from the child, rather than making us think about him.

As a person who appreciates detectives and their ability to solve mysteries, I wanted more triumphs for the eponymous Mr. Whicher!  In fact altogether more Mr. Whicher!  I liked it at the beginning when Kate Summerscale – good name, eh? – was telling us all about the clever things that Mr. Whicher did.  I was saddish after the Victorian public decided that they didn’t like Mr. Whicher after all, despite his being extremely clever.

I don’t like the Victorian public.  They’re jerks!  They turned on Oscar Wilde in similar fashion, like rabid wolves!  Despite his being extremely clever also.  I am going onward to read some stories and watch some TV about people who are clever, and people who talk fast.  I talk incredibly fast, and I like it when other people talk fast, and that’s why, despite the obvious flaws of both, I remain fond of The Gilmore Girls and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  (But not West Wing – can anyone explain to me why The West Wing is in any way enjoyable?  I’ve found it so boring when I’ve seen it in the past!)

Other reviews of Mr. Whicher: an adventure in reading, things mean a lot, Farm Lane Books Blog, Savidge Reads, Stuck in a Book, Caribou’s Mom, my cozy book nook, A Book A Week, As Usual I Need More Bookshelves, Semicolon, The Bookling, Scribbles, Medieval Bookworm, Sandy Nawrot, Literary License, Lesa’s Book Critiques, Thoughts of Joy, Crime Scraps, A Writer’s Pen, 1 More Chapter, and let me know, won’t you, if I missed yours?

I love my grandmother

All of them actually.  I have three.  Because I’m just lucky like that.  And they are all fantastic in different ways.  But in this case I am referring to my mother’s mother.  For one thing she is beautiful – we are always inspecting her wedding pictures and things when we come to visit her, and then we tell her that she is more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman.   And she laughs at us but dude, it is so true.  Ingrid Bergman would cry like a little girl and slap on gallons of makeup if she saw how beautiful Grammy was on her wedding day.

Grammy loves books and old movies, and she is always telling us what we should read and watch.  She tells us about Lauren Bacall and how hot she was with Humphrey Bogart, and she does impressions for us.  “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” she says in a sultry voice.  She tells us how Forever Amber was one of those books good Catholics weren’t supposed to read, when she was a girl, but she had a friend who read it anyway.  She tells us how the nuns at her school used to sell rosaries and prayer cards at recess, and she used to tease them.  “Look at this necklace!  Look how pretty!” she would say, trying on a rosary, and the nun said gravely, “Oh my dear, that isn’t a necklace; don’t you know, that’s a rosary,” and Grammy said, “Oh Sister.  I have not yet embraced the One True Faith.”

Every Christmas Grammy sends us books, and she writes in them, “To Jenny, Christmas 2008, with lots of love from Grammy xoxoxo”.  One year – this was amazing – she sent me all of Edward Eager’s books.  All of them, in a big package, and she wrote inside them all, “To Jenny with love from Grammy and Grandpa, Christmas 1995, xoxo”.  She never forgets to put the kisses and hugs, and if you’re around when she’s thinking about them, she sings, “A lot of kisses on the bottom – you’ll be glad you got ‘em”.  She likes to sing while she is doing stuff, in an extra-dramatic voice.  “Rose,” she sings, folding laundry.  “Of Washington Squaaaaaare!”

This is the side of my family that really appreciates small details.  My aunt Fayne (my godmother!) used to always send us cards with confetti inside, in the shape of cows, or birthday cakes, or whatever it was relating to the card she would send.  My uncle Jimmy, who is a very cool painter, one time had a show, and my mother overheard someone saying, “Look!  I can see the face of Jesus in the soup spoon!” which my mother reported, giggling, to Uncle Jim. And he was all, “Yeah.  I put Jesus in the soup spoon.”

I’m bringing this up because I just read The Mummy Case, the third of the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and the copy I’m reading is a lovely hardback given to me by my grandmother for Christmas last year.  This is the first time I’ve read it, and I discovered as I went along that she had put one-dollar bills inside the book at intervals.  This is exactly the kind of treat that is so completely Grammy – it’s not the money, it’s the surprise.  And I felt all snuggly and affectionate and had to let y’all know, my grandmother?  AMAZING.

P.S. Her parents were amazing too.  Like the most amazing people ever.  My Nanny lived to be five days shy of 100, and still every time we visited her she would say to my mother, “Come over here and sit on my lap, honey,” and my mother would say, “Nanny!  No!  I’ll smoosh you!” and Nanny would look surprised and say “No you won’t!”  And my great-grandfather that I never met read Rafael Sabatini and P.C. Wren, and one time carved a little monkey out of a peachpit and put it on a chain.  I wish I had met him.  He sounds like he would have been the best great-grandfather in the whole world.

P.P.S. Do I include Oscar Wilde in that “whole world” business?  YES I DO.  Did Oscar Wilde read Beau Geste and carve monkeys out of peachpits?  Didn’t think so.