It's Shawl Weather Inside the Library

I spent a semester in college living in Bath, England. When spring break came around, my family visited and we spent the time driving around England and Wales. My mother had an itinerary a mile long and included innumerable historic sites--among them Haworth, home of the Brontës. This was before I spent hundreds of hours thinking about Emily Brontë's poetry for my senior thesis, but I was still very excited to visit the parsonage and walk on the moors where they lived.

While we were there, we also visited a mill where we bought some lovely yarn, which my mother subsequently crafted into the "Charlotte Brontë shawl" (not, as I understand it, something she actually wore but something she might have worn) pictured above. I use it at work when it's particularly cold in the library, and it feels like mom is giving me a nice warm hug.

Thanks, mom. You were so good to me.

Reading Roulette: Eighth Pick

I read a bunch of books last month that were connected to this project when I was working my way through National Book Reading Month. The way things are going, though, this may be the last pick of the year!

The Laughter of Dead Kings, Elizabeth Peters (2008)

Who stole the mummy of King Tut? The brazen crime bears the earmarks of one Sir John Smythe, the international art thief. In fact, John Tregarth is the longtime significant other of Vicky Bliss. Innocent, he vows to clear his name by hunting down the true criminal.

Vicky loses faith. But her boss, Munich Museum director Anton Z. Schmidt, "the finest swordsman in Europe," pays their luxurious way from London to Munich then Cairo, also to defend his own reputation. Once Schmidt deflects his new paramour Suzi, who only wants his body to spy on John, the entourage swells with the Egyptian officials responsible, cousins - wealthy Ashraf and poorer Feisel - plus mummy-expert mistress Saida.

The Arab security guard, then a female middleman, both turn up dead. Dead hands, from her and from Tut, separately accompany notes, his is a ransom demand for millions. Kidnappers, murderers, and danger dog their way.

This is the sixth (and final, presumably) book in the Vicky Bliss series, which was one that my mother and I read with the same enthusiasm. When this book came out a few years after my mom's death, I immediately purchased it, thinking of her. Since then I've found myself unable to sit down and read it, knowing that I can't really share it with her. But I think that maybe it's been long enough. Maybe I can read it for both of us. RIP Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Mertz.


The Last Policeman, Benjamin Winters (2012)

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

I'm pretty sure I came across this as part of my collection development work, and added it to my list. That happens quite a lot.


Old Man's War, John Scalzi (2005)

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-- and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve two years at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets. John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine--and what he will become is far stranger.

I've seen Scalzi speak at two conferences now, and follow his Twitter feed and blog, but haven't managed to read any of his books yet. That changes now!

Why am I doing this?

Meditation on Mother's Day

I have a bit of a conflicted relationship with Mother's Day. It's been five years now since my mother was alive on this "holiday," and thinking about mothers and hearing everyone else's mom appreciations always makes me miss her terribly. My grandmothers are no longer around either, creating a bit of a vacuum where once cards were mailed. We weren't exactly avid about celebrating Mother's Day in my childhood. Sure, we did the usual mandatory homemade cards and breakfast-cooking attempts, but after breakfast in bed it was pretty much business as usual. The idea of a day especially to honor mothers is both sweet and . . . kind of like Administrative Professionals Day. If we knew what was good for us, we'd probably make sure moms and office supply gatekeepers were soundly appreciated every day. However, since that doesn't happen, I feel that Mother's Day is a whack-upside-the-head kind of opportunity to reflect on the awesomeness of parents in general and moms in particular. I'm also going to take this opportunity to say an extremely early Happy Father's Day to my father, who was there every day when I got home from school while I was growing up, and who did the laundry and a great deal of cooking and other tasks traditionally assigned to mothers. I haven't remembered Father's Day for the past many moons, so this is likely the best he's going to get! And I am proud to have been raised by two people so adept at co-parenting.

My feelings about Mother's Day have recently been even more complicated by the fact that I became a mother a little less than two years ago. My son is lucky enough to have two mothers, in fact, so he will have to do double-duty on Mother's Day in the future. As with many landmarks in my life, my son's arrival makes it difficult to be cranky about the commercialism of holidays, because it's just fun to have him around. I can't be as sad about my mother's absence when he looks up and smiles so brilliantly at me or gives me a sweet kiss on the cheek as he did this morning. I do wish that my son and my mother had the opportunity to get to know each other and spend lazy Mother's Day mornings together, but since that's not possible, we'll do the best we can with what we have and try to approach every day as if it were a special day for parents and children.

In honor of my mother, some of the posts I've written that feature her:

Meditation on Hair Loss
Sports I Love: Figure Skating
Meditation on the Answering Machine
A Meditation on Dead Mothers (in Books I've Been Reading)


Meditation Index

A Meditation on Dead Mothers (in Books I've Been Reading)

I omitted one vital thing when I was recapping my 2010 Year in Reading: I forgot to talk about the dead mothers. At the beginning of 2010, in my Very LeFreak review, I noted that

It seems like I've been reading a ton of books lately that feature dead mothers (despite my great dislike of that trope), so I'm making that statistic an official part of my book reviews for 2010. At the end of the year, we'll see if I managed to read more books with living mothers than dead.

(drumroll)

Reader, I did manage it! Only nineteen (40%) of the books I read featured a dead mother. You would think that it probably helped that I read some nonfiction and some romance novels, rather than all young adult or children's books, where it is expedient to get parents out of the way before the real action starts. However, if I consider only the YA and children's books that I read, the 40% statistic still holds true. And while nearly half of the books I read had dead mothers in them, there were only a few (I'm looking at you, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) in which a mother's death was the pivotal point of the story. There were, however, three books in which at least two mothers died or were dead: The Scorpion, The Drowning City, and The Virgin Bride Said, "Wow!" Books in which it seemed likely that mothers would die, but surprised me by keeping them alive, included [Spoiler Alert for the remaining few] The Help and Catching Fire/Mockingjay.

As I read, I refined my definition of "dead mother"--as a statistic--to mean books in which the existence of a dead mother had some material bearing on the plot or a main character's growth. There were some books (The City & The City or Above Temptation, for example) where it simply was not mentioned whether the main character had parents at all, much less whether they were alive.

In conclusion, I feel that it is vitally important for me to keep recording this statistic as I read. I obviously need to expand my sample size as much as I can by reading as many books as possible in 2011 (that may possibly have been my goal anyway) that are chosen through my usual random selection process. I am a big fan of completely non-scientific and subjective studies that require me to read for fun. On a more serious note, as I have said before, it's a good thing for me to have to deal with the uncomfortable emotion that can be caused by the "dead mother" trope. I have a feeling that my own mother would have read silly posts like this one and smiled.

Meditation Index