Lunaea Weatherstone's Blogue

Learning to give back

When I was a little girl, I loved the library. Walking out with a big stack of books was like having my arms full of treasure, the richness of new stories and worlds to be discovered. Over the years, I stopped going to libraries, mostly because I didn't like to give the books back! After paying big fees for lateness or just to replace books completely, I accepted that I was not a library sort of person and just bought books instead.

Now that I am in Portland and not in my permanent home yet, so that all my books are still in boxes, I decided to go get myself a library card. I am delighted to find that going to the library is just as much fun now as it was when I was a girl. But the big surprise is that it feels good to give the books back, too. Dropping off a book that I actually read cover to cover, so that someone else can have that pleasure too, helps to make me feel part of my new community.

I've also found that librarians are still as helpful and friendly as ever -- far more than bookshop employees, who all too often have a cooler-than-thou attitude. Librarians are more like keepers of the temple of knowledge. They like it when you ask questions and they get to use their skills to find what you want. I've been visiting the smaller neighborhood libraries, but yesterday I went to the magnificent central library, and three lovely folks in the periodicals section helped me find some old magazine articles I wanted (more on those later). It was a pleasure to watch them give careful attention to their work, bringing excellence to it and making sure I had exactly what I needed. They too are giving back.  

Sweet serenity

My plans for moving to Portland continue, as I dream myself into the new homeland and look for the perfect house to rent. I'm adding energy to that intention by starting to pack, especially books. If it looks like I'm going to be here into the chilly rainy season, I'm going to put most of my books into a nice dry warm storage facility, to avoid a repeat of last year's tragic mold situation. It's interesting to go through my bookcases and decide what books I can do without for a while (an undetermined while, at that), and which books I need to have near me for the duration. So far, those seem to be mostly classics, essays (good for the jitters and lack of long attention span), and escapist bathtub reading like Amelia Peabody books and cozy mysteries that require very little brain and leave me feeling contented. A giant volume of Daphne du Maurier novels, and similarly huge Edith Wharton and E.M. Forster tomes. Wodehouse to help me lighten up, and E.F. Benson, and E.B. White. Maybe I should start a theme collection: writers with initials that start with E.

As I pack and sort these book companions, it feels like I'm packing my hope chest. I envision unpacking them and welcoming them back into my life in the new home. As my Goddess books, Pagan books, Celtic books go into boxes, I dream of my new office where these old book friends will emerge again to inspire my writing and teaching. I'm packing quite a few books I haven't read yet, since realistically I'm not going to read them now, in my current state of between-the-worlds restlessness. I look forward to curling up beside the hearth fire on a rainy night in the not too distant (I hope) future, with one of these new book friends. I wonder what other friends will also be part of my life then, and maybe I will lend them some of my books, share what is important to me in this way and in other ways too. "All the sweet serenity of books," says Longfellow... and as I touch each book with care and place it either in a box or back on the shelf for the present, I ask the Goddess to grant me that sweet serenity as well, right here, right now.

Literary summer vacation

Well, it's that time of year again -- time to plan where I will be spending my literary vacation. The nice thing about literary vacations is they are journeys in time as well as space. Last summer I spent my holidays with Bohemians and the Bloomsbury crowd and the summer before I was in Egypt with Amelia Peabody Emerson. This summer has started off with a wonderful biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (the subject, more or less, of the far less wonderful film The Duchess, which did NOT do her justice in any way). Today is Georgiana's 252nd birthday. Happy birthday, your Grace! Georgiana was a superstar in her day, celebrated for her beauty, charm, and (especially) political influence, yet privately tortured by destructive relationships and personal losses, insecurities, and often despair. She had much in common with her descendant, Princess Diana. Reading her biography (alongside that of her equally fascinating sister Harriet Spencer) gave me much to think about regarding the roles of women in society and how they wax and wane. In Georgiana's 18th century England, women had remarkable freedom compared to what the following century would offer them.

Anyway, back to my summertime book trek. I'm going to spend a few more weeks in 18th century England and France, reading biographies of Louis XIV and Madame de Pompadour that I've had hanging around here for a couple of years. Both are by Nancy Mitford, so following that lead, I'm going to time-travel forward and spend the rest of my literary vacation in the world of Mitfordiana: a couple of volumes of letters by Nancy Mitford, re-reading her delicious The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, and other assorted books by and about the six fascinating Mitford sisters, the youngest of whom, Deborah, is the present Dowager Duchess of Devonshire! So it all goes full circle and should keep me busy for a while. I'll be sure to send postcards along the way!

What's on your summer literary itinerary? 

What I'm reading and what I've read

Continuing with my birthday intention to have more fun and bring more fantasy into my life, I'm finally getting around to reading the trilogy His Dark Materials, re-inspired by re-watching the movie The Golden Compass over the Christmas holiday. This is my second or third try at this series, so we'll see how I do this time. I love to read series (serieses?) because I tend to do my recreational reading in short bursts each day, so getting into works of fiction can be challenging. With a series, once I'm in, I have a lot to explore that is familiar and can be picked up and put down without losing the whole sense of what's happening. (This is also why I love to reread books, for that sense of entering familiar territory.) One series I just finished, or at least, finished as much of it as there is so far, is the fabulous Fables series of graphic novels. The premise is that the characters from fairy tales and other stories have been exiled to the mundane world when their homeland is taken over by an evil adversary. Calling themselves Fables, they have established themselves in a secret Fabletown, located in New York City, with the animal Fables (and others who can't pass as mundane) living on the Fabletown farm annex. I wasn't sure I was going to love this series upon reading the first book, but by Book 3, I was hooked. The stories are quite funny, but also mythic and moving, and the artwork is almost always gorgeous, in many styles done by different artists. There's a lot happening in the background and corners, with visual jokes galore (for example, a dancing scene featuring a cat playing a fiddle and a dish dancing with a spoon). I like that the art is easy to comprehend for people like me, who are only dabblers in the comics realms, and yet is rich and complex enough to explore for all the details and symbolism. The way the characters have evolved from what we know about their primary stories is smart and imaginative. One clever idea is that a Fable's strength depends largely on how popular he or she is with readers in the mundane world, so that Cinderella, for example, is practically indestructible! I've added links to the first three books in the bookshop (right) along with 1001 Nights of Snowfall, a standalone book (though you will appreciate it more once you are familiar with Fables) about one of Snow White's adventures. If you're looking for a great escape on these long winter nights, leap into the Fables world. I'll meet you there!

And so to bed...

I found a battered little book from the 1940s recently, entitled And So to Bed, by Edward Sackville-West. It's a compilation of poems and short prose pieces drawn from a BBC radio program that was broadcast in England during World War II. The program was on three nights a week between 11 p.m. and midnight, and its purpose was simple: to provide a peaceful, comforting end to the listeners' day. The book is divided by the seasons of the year, and its purpose is the same: a bedside book to "compose the mind," and "to provide a few minutes' quiet reading for those who are neither too tired to submit themselves to the enchantment of poetry, nor too disturbed in mind to hope that sleep will quickly follow the laying aside of the book."

I love the old-fashioned idea of choosing books specifically to live on the bedside table, books to quiet the mind, to offer soothing imagery, bits of beauty or wit or fantasy, but nothing too enthralling or engrossing. Books that can be picked up with pleasure and laid back down with a happy, sleepy sigh. With that in mind, I culled a few for my own bedtime collection: Sense and Sensibility; Wild Honey, by Alison Uttley (anything by Alison Uttley would do, as she is sublime, and I really must blogue about her soon!); and an odd little book dated 1890 called Little Flower Folks: Stories from Flower Land. It's a botany book for children that also contains myths and poetry and folk lore about the plants, which is of course how everyone should learn about them. I feel more peaceful and contented already.

What books do you have at YOUR bedside?

Literary vacations

Maybe this is a Virgo thing, but there is something very satisfying about thinking of a particular book, knowing right where it is on my bookshelf, going to look, and by gosh, it IS there! This doesn't happen nearly enough in my crowded bookworld, but I'm determined to make it happen more often (both the looking and the finding). Summer reading is such a different flavor of pleasure than winter reading. Last summer I "vacationed" with Amelia Peabody. This summer my bookshelf search for a gardening book led me to Vita Sackville-West, and from there to Ottoline Morrell, and Virginia Woolf, and hence, I find myself consorting with the Bloomsbury group, a few Bohemians, and their fabulous friends ... country manors and tea on the lawn and passionate art and scandalous affairs and fabulous hats. I've added some of my favorites to the blogue bookshop.

Where are you spending your literary vacation?

A Book Lover's Meme

I love memes. I love the randomness of the topics and the lightheartedness of it all, yet with an opportunity to maybe find a hint of wisdom here and there too. Joanna just meme-ed me with this one:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book's page 123 was all about an invasion of ants, so I will spare you that. But the next-nearest book is Garden Open Tomorrow, by Beverley Nichols. All of his books are delightful, so I am very happy to share a snippet with you. From page 123 (I'm a notorious rule-breaker, and I can't stop at three sentences):

One sees a woolly caterpillar having an expense-account luncheon off the leaves of a Super Star rose; and one's hard clever hands go out to squash it. And then, suddenly, one does not feel so hard or so clever, and one's fingers falter and a thousand moral problems present themselves. Here is this small furry creature, which has something faintly kittenish about it, and perhaps this may be the crowning moment of its life. It may be saying to itself, 'All is well, God's in His heaven and all's right with the world. The flavour of these leaves is delicious, I am storing up strength, and soon I shall be able to hurry back to Mrs. C, bursting with vitality and glowing with hope. . . the hope that by the time summer comes we shall all be safely and gloriously attired in the dresses that Nature is keeping in store for us, fluttering over these roses in the guise of butterflies.'

I'm going to break one more rule, and only tag one person, not five. Julie, you're up! Feel free to tag nine people to make up for my lapse. And I invite anyone else who reads this to comment with your own page 123!

Books about Books

I just finished a most delightful little book, called The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett. It's a novella, easily read in one sitting (or if you're like me, over a period of several nights when you read just a few pages before falling asleep). The premise is that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II suddenly discovers the pleasure of reading books. She was always a "doer" and reading never felt like "doing" to her. I smiled all the way through this book. I've always been fond of books about books, books written by avid readers for other avid readers. Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, for example, which create a quirky little alternate-universe Britain where everyone is mad for books, where vending machines dispense bits of Shakespeare, where inventions allow you to enter into the bookworld and even change the plots, so that everyone else who happens to be reading Jane Eyre might suddenly say, "Hey, where did Jane go??" (The first book in the series is indeed The Eyre Affair. I have the latest book, First Among Sequels, but haven't started it yet, as I'm saving it for a treat once some boring work is done.) Here's just a few more books about books: Book by Book, Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World, and The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, which has a great section on audiobooks that really opened my eyes to this being a new way of "reading." There are dozens and dozens of great books about books, about gathering and maintaining a personal library, about bookstores, about the joys of public libraries, about personal reading lists and books that have changed people's lives... enough to keep you happily browsing for a lifetime. In Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede, one of the nuns says, "I wish I knew when I was going to die," and when the other nuns ask her why, she says, "Then I should know what to read next." Maybe we should always live like that, loving what we are reading enough that it could be the last thing and that would be just fine!

Bookstack 1

Poking around on other people’s blogs and picture collections, I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon — photographs of stacks of books, with no explanation beyond “Here’s my bookstack for this week. . .” or something similar. Apparently, this is something we are already supposed to understand! So I’m just taking my own guess, that the bookstack symbolizes where you are at these days, what’s going on in your mind/spirit/imagination. If that’s NOT what it’s all about, it is now! And I invite you to do the same and link to your own bookstacks in my Comments section.

I’m starting my own bookstacks with a Stack of Intentions for Autumn. From the bottom up:

Two Fat Ladies Obsessions: I intend to cook more, enjoy food more, and have a great sense of humor about my own physical form. I love the Two Fat Ladies, and hope the late Jennifer Paterson is happily feasting and tippling in the afterlife.

Stardust: I intend to read more fantasy and escape into the fantastical realms more often. I wasn’t crazy about the Stardust movie, but the book is lovely.

Amphigorey Too: I intend to make Edward Gorey rosary-necklaces for Halloween, and further intend to continue to be inspired by his originality and eccentricity. What’s so strange about collecting doorknobs, after all?

Time for Tea: I intend to make time for tea, every day. I will make space for Tea Mind to put things in perspective, especially on days when I think there is no time for tea. There is always time for tea.

The Ode Less Travelled: I intend to write poetry, just for my own pleasure, and to read more poetry too. This charming and witty book by the ever-charming and ever-witty Stephen Fry will be an excellent companion for that.

Dreams Underfoot: I’m just about done with reading all the Amelia Peabody books and intend to dive into a new series. I’m thinking the Newford series, by Charles de Lint, may be just the ticket.

A Spell Is Cast: This book represents two intentions. The first is to continue finding and rereading books I loved in my childhood, like this one by Eleanor Cameron. The second intention is to work more magic in my life! And setting intentions is always the first step. This will be a magical autumn indeed!

Vacationing with Peabody

Other than being out of school for the summer when I was a child and occasional family trips then, I’ve never really had a summer vacation. My work has always been year-round, whether it’s editing, writing, or my work as priestess. I’m hoping to change that pattern a bit and take a week or two off later this summer to do just nothing for a while — or at least, nothing productive. (I’m a Virgo, so this is more radical than non-Virgos can possibly imagine.) In the meantime, I’ve been using my snippets of leisure time to take a mental summer vacation with the wonderful Amelia Peabody Emerson. Amelia is the heroine (and narrator) of a series of delightful novels by Elizabeth Peters, set in Egypt for the most part and taking place between the years of 1884 to 1920. Forthright, energetic, courageous, and very funny, Amelia is married to the dashing and cantankerous Radcliffe Emerson (always called simply by his last name), “the most distinguished Egyptologist of this or any other era.” Along with their son, Ramses, and various other family members and friends, Emerson and Peabody (as he calls his beloved wife) solve mysteries, uncover tombs, explore the beauties of Egypt, and undertake entertaining adventures of all kinds. As Peabody says, “Most men are reasonably useful in a crisis. The difficulty lies in convincing them that the situation has reached a critical point.”

The books are well-written escapism and after picking up one now and then over the past few years, this summer I decided to read straight through the whole series to date. The romance of ancient Egypt and the charms of Victorian/Edwardian travel are an irresistible combination! I love the relationships between the Emersons and their Egyptian assistants, who are like an extended family — extended families and communities being one of my favorite themes in books. If you’d like to join me on my mental summer vacation, the first book in the series is The Crocodile on the Sandbank, in which we meet both Amelia and Emerson. If you are already a Peabody fan, have you seen this fabulous book?

The artwork alone is worth the price, along with a delightful mixture of fact and fiction, with Egyptian history, language, lore, and biographies of the books’ characters (some of whom really existed, like Howard Carter, credited with finding the tomb of Tutankhamen, though Emerson has another opinion about that). The Peabody series is also largely available on audiobooks, narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, who does a fantastic job of capturing all the characters, including the men — I can never read Emerson saying “Good Gad!” without hearing Ms. Rosenblat’s voice in my mind.

While I may never actually make it to Egypt in person — and frankly, the Egypt I would like to visit is circa 1907 anyway — I’m always happy to lose myself for an hour or two aboard Peabody’s dahabeeyah: “The canopy had been rolled back, and the great vault of heaven, spangled with stars, formed a roof finer than any oriental palace could boast. . . The soft lapping of the water against the prow and the gentle sway of the boat . . . the balmy night breeze . . . the indefinable, austere perfume of the desert itself. I knew I would never be free of its enchantment, never cease to desire it after it was gone.”