Nom de Plume

One of the footnotes in some book commended the great historical detail of Valerie Anand’s Bridges Over Time 6-volume series, so I put the three books they had at the library on hold. I read the second to last one first — and was instantly hooked. When the next two books came, I sucked those down. The library didn’t have the remaining three; I managed to find them all in online used book stores and order them (one from Australia), and I have finally finished the entire series.

They are fabulous.

In the first novel, Ivon de Clairpont is a pre-William the Conquerer Norman knight who is captured in battle and sold into slavery. Each subsequent book tells the story of selected descendents, and the entire series spans 9 centuries–from slavery to serfdom to yeoman farmers to gentry. These are not great literature, but the stories are riveting (most people are completely miserable, which is immensely gratifying in its own way) and the historical detail truly amazing. Anand also links all the stories so that what happens in one appears as history distorted by time in the next; we, as readers, are filled with a knowing glow.

I read these out of order, and enjoyed them immensely. However, if I had my druthers, I would read them in order:

The Proud Villeins (Bridges Over Time, Book I)
The Ruthless Yeomen (Bridges Over Time, Book 2)
Women of Ashdon (Bridges Over Time, Book 3)
The Faithful Lovers (Bridges Over Time, Book 4)
The Cherished Wives (Bridges Over Time/Valerie Anand, Bk 5)
The Dowerless Sisters (Bridges Over Time)

Well, maybe one and a half. There is masking tape residue and staining at the top, but it’s pretty localized and the tape itself peeled up easily.

I have coveted this one for a while.

Jakkou-in

I like this too.

Rock Garden

This one I wasn’t quite so wild about at first–it was part of the lot–but it’s now growing on me. Kind of like what appears to be a fungus on the upper lefthand margin.

Steve is being quite industrious in the kitchen today.

Awwww, look at that cornbread.

Emily’s mother is so overbearing that it’s no surprise that she agreed to marry Viscount Ashton to gain a measure of independence. After only six months of marriage, her husband dies on safari. It pains her to admit that she is not sorry. But as she discovers his journals and starts to explore some of his interest, she finds herself falling in love with her dead husband — even though it seems he may have been involved in some shady art deals involving ancient Greek art. Emily starts to investigate, and what she discovers keeps the reader sitting at the very edge of her chair. Add to this mix two more-than-eligible suitors, and you get a fun historical confection.

Colleen is watching the old safety and training videos her aunt Madeleine had made years before. In one, a man puts his head into an alligator’s mouth. The alligator snaps down on his head, twitching him back and forth as though he were spineless. Colleen assumes the man died. But no, her aunt tells her; he lived.

This first chapter sets the tone of Alligator perfectly; everyone in this novel has his or her own alligator. Colleen is trapped by rage, her mother by grief. In fact, all the characters in this Newfoundland town are yearning for something, for more, and they are all trapped by one thing or another. Moore conveys such rawness; she makes us, too, want more for her characters.

That was where she became who she was, Madeleine thinks, in that solitude. Everyone becomes who they are in a stark landscape of undiluted solitude and bad weather. It’s possible to go through life without becomin who you are, but it is better, in the long run, to come across yourself in an insanely ordered forest where nothing has been left to chance. She wishes every twenty-one-year-old girl a Black Forest of her own.

Or this:

At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered through a carboard box of junk for a lid to the sugar bown, he knew it should have a lid, and was surprised by how much he wanted a lid. He did not want to be someone without the lids to things. He wanted whole sets of whatever he had, or nothing at all.

He wanted, when he went to the pain store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. he wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had workin there, who said he coudln’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.

This is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time.

I like to take Harry on his tromples late at night, usually around 9 or 10. We drive to different (read: better than ours) neighborhoods; I slip on my podcaster and away we go. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Here on Earth. And that’s where I heard an interview with Steven Rinella. He was so enthusiastic that I placed The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine on hold. I read it over the weekend, while we were in Soap Lake.

Basically, the premise is this: Rinella has always been what he calls a scavenger. He hunts, fishes, and lives pretty close to the land. He gets ahold of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, and decides to spend a year gathering the ingredients for a feast, which will be held on Thanksgiving. The book is the story of that year.

It was an entertaining read. Rinella writes as one would expect; his prose is vigorously and colloquially straightforward. He writes about trying to catch pigeons and sparrows, hunting for antelope and sheep, frog gigging, and, most of all, trying to convert his vegetarian girlfriend into a carnivore.

It was this last bit that finally did Rinella in for me. Because frankly, I liked his book just fine — but I thought he was a jerk. Like when he takes his girlfriend home to meet his folks for the first time and his father automatically takes them out fishing. Diana looks ill, but Rinella says nothing. She does it. She’s served up a huge plate of fish at dinner, and Rinella says nothing. She eats it. And all he says is, “Goodie, she’s changing her ways for me.” Finally, at the end of the book, he realizes that it’s fine if she’s a veggie. Of course, by the time he was on the radio, they had broken up altogether.

But jerkitude notwithstanding, I still enjoyed reading this.

Steve left at 5 this morning as usual, but was back within an hour and a half. The freeway was shut down. Yay for snow days — we went for a quick jaunt around Kubota.

For someone who is unabashedly addicted to regency romances, this novel was a breath of fresh air, illuminating the era with multi-dimensional characters and rich prose. It offers fictionalized portraits of the actress Eliza Farren, her longtime swain Lord Derby, and their friend Mrs. Anne Damer. Amid the turmoil of their relationships, Donoghue also writes vividly of late 18th century England, a time when England and France seemed on the verge of collapse. I was expecting this novel to be like Donoghue’s novel Slammerkin, which I read years ago, but it was far denser and more satisfying.

Obviously, my soapmaking posts have gotten fewer and less frequent; I confess, my interest has waned. This is, in large part, due to the fact that my last three batches have used fragrance oils (sandalwood, some fresh linen thing, and honeysuckle). I don’t like them. At all. They smell cheap. I need to order more essential oils. And it’s probably a good thing, but no one surprised me with the still …

My excuse for buying this Noda Kyuho print is that it’s for Steve, who sails.

Kamisori in Hakutashijoro Rochin
From The Complete Works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon