I am feeling sort of sad today after hearing the recent news the Robert
McCloskey died over the weekend. I read and reread Homer Price as a child
so many times I practically wore out the library copy. And then they got a
copy of Centerburg Tales and I read and reread that one.

When my son was born one of the first books I bought him was
Blueberries for Sal. He was probably a year old. We would
ponder the pictures and
shiver with anticipation when the Sal wanders off with the mother bear. We
would scream “Kerplink, Kerplank, Kerplunk” when Sal dropped her three
berries into the tin bucket and pretend we were eating her berries when we
had blueberry yogurt for lunch.

When he got a little older one of his favorite pretend games was called
“Buck’s Harbor.” We would build a small store out of blocks and legos, use
his plastic boat on a towel as the ocean to drive over to get supplies and
then have a pretend ice cream cone with Sal and Jane.

Of course, every spring when the ducks flew over we’d yell at the sky “Make
way for Ducklings!!”

My son remembers very little of this, of course. He was so young when I
spent my days with him and his little sister. The big yellow bus came and
took him away one day and somehow all that time disappeared. But I remember
the little boy who would snuggle next to me and listen intently and peer at
the pictures when I read him Robert McCloskey books. I miss him, too. Both
of them are gone now. I still have the books, tho.

This is the second book in the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series”,
and it feels very much like a continuation of the first book. As before,
the book concerns several investigations, some consecutive, some
simultaneous, and as before Mma Ramotswe goes beyond investigating to
meddling (for the client’s own good, of course). Her secretary, Mma
Makutsi, is promoted to Assistant Detective and given a case of her own;
this prompts several discussions of the moral issues involved in
detective work.

But the real focus is on Mma Ramotswe’s fiance, Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni,
proprietor of Tlakweng Road Speedy Motors–a man who is hard-working,
dignified, kind-hearted, generous to a fault, and not always particularly
observant. His kind nature leads him into several predicaments during the
book, including one particular case where he doesn’t know how to tell Mma
Ramotswe what he’s done but every hour he delays will make the revelation
more painful. I must award laurels to Smith here–some authors would have
stretched out the pain for most of the book, requiring Mr. J.L.B.
Maketoni to do progressively more idiotic things to keep Mma Ramotswe in
the dark. (I hate this.) (Except in P.G. Wodehouse, but
that’s farce, so it’s OK.) Instead, it’s resolved fairly quickly.

The Mitfordesque tone continues–indeed, strengthens. That said, I don’t
know whether Mitford fans will like these books. Being detective novels,
they must occasionally deal with the sordid…and Mma Ramotswe, for all
her goodness, frequently makes moral decisions that would raise even Fr.
Tim’s eyebrows. Mitford fans–if the Christian content is the primary
thing that draws you to Jan Karon’s books, be aware that though the tone is similar, these aren’t those.

Anyway, I liked this one too.

I’ve just posted Chapters 14 and 15 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia!.

For those who came in late: Zymurgia! is a ripping yarn, a fantasy adventure novel taking place in a world not so different from ours. It’s the tale of a scientific expedition to a remote and fabulous land, and those who have read it assure me that yes, it really is funny.

I’m publishing it here on the web in installments; a new installment is posted every Saturday.

As long-time readers know, Overlook Press (Everyman’s Library, in Great
Britain) is publishing a complete uniform hardcover edition of Wodehouse,
which is a great and glorious thing. Every so often four new books come
out, and I get them, and I read them with delight.

I’ve been a Wodehouse fan for years, and naturally I’ve read many of them
before. But once in a while they come up with something I’ve never seen.
Usually it’s a novel that doesn’t involve any of his regular characters.
And then I know I’m in for a treat.

Summer Moonshine is no exception. It takes place at stately
Walsingford Hall, where cash-strapped Baronet Sir Buckstone Abbott has
been reduced to taking in boarders–excuse me, “paying guests”–and has
therefore devoted his life to two things: avoiding his guests, and
attempting to sell the Hall.

Ironically, the same event that consumed the Abbott fortune also prevents
him from selling the Hall. It seems that the old family home burned down
in Victorian times, and was rebuilt at great expense by Sir Buckstone’s
progenitor, who exercised all of his ingenuity and eccentricity. The
resulting pile is perhaps one of the ugliest homes in England, and to
date only one person has expressed interest. The wealthy,
many-times-married American woman, the Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek.
The princess’ step-son Tubby is one of the paying guests at the Hall,
where he has conceived a passion for Prudence Whittaker, Sir Buckstone’s
secretary. Meanwhile, Sir Buckstone’s daughter Jane is engaged to
gold-digger Adrian Peake (can you have a male gold-digger?) who is also
engaged to the princess. And then the princess’ estranged step-son,
Tubby’s older brother Joe the playwright meets and falls for Jane. Stir
in Lady Buckstone’s brother Sam from America, and things get predictably
silly.

You get the idea. It’s one of those books where I kept having to stop
and read passages to Jane.

Deb English reviewed this some while back, and I was sufficiently intrigued
that I bought when I came across it in a bookstore in Pacific Grove.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is located in a small storefront at
the foot of Kgale Hill in Gabarone, the capitol of Botswana. It is owned by
Mma Ramotswe; she has precisely one employee, her secretary Mma Makutsi,
who got a grade of 97 out of 100 at secretarial school but had trouble
getting a job because she’s not slim and pretty.

This is not a typical murder mystery; it’s more the story of Mma
Ramotswe’s first cases, and how she came to be a detective to begin with.
Along the way we learn quite a bit about her childhood, and also about
her father’s life in the mines in South Africa. It’s got a dreamy,
detached feeling about it, as if to emphasize the distance between the
reader and Botswana. And for some odd reason, it keeps reminding me of
Jan Karon’s Mitford books.

Anyway, I liked it; it was charming, and I’ve already picked up the next
couple of books in the series.

Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has just started posting some WWII prison camp photos his father found in an army surplus filing cabinet. Go read the whole thing, and remember how evil the Nazis really were.

This is a book I picked up on a whim while at Tower Books in Sacramento.
The title caught my eye, as did the cover picture, of a little mop-haired
girl roaring like a lion; the words “National Bestseller” (Oh, really?
I’d never seen it before.) and “Reading Group Guide” did not.

It’s the author’s memoir of her own childhood in Africa–first in
Rhodesia, and later in Malawi and Zambia. Her parents were farmers;
tobacco, mostly, but also cattle. They were members of the white upper
class in Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe; later they were simply
members of the white minority wherever they lived.

It was a hard life, both before and after Zimbabwe came to be; I don’t
suppose the life of a farmer is easy in any country, and it was worsened
by circumstances; Fuller’s mother gave birth to five children, of whom
only two lived to adulthood. The second child, a boy, died of meningitis
at an early age; the fourth, a girl, drowned in a duckpond when she was
two years old (and that was a hard section to read, let me tell you); the
fifth was stillborn.

It was a hard life, and as the Fullers had little money and were white
besides, they could only farm the worst land. They stayed, despite the
death of their children, despite tedium, despite alcoholism, because they
loved Africa. Alexandra has married an American and moved to the United
States, but her parents are there still.

This is a poignant book, and is filled with all kinds of fascinating
details about life in Africa; Fuller neither preaches nor moralizes,
trusting that her story will speak for itself, which it does. I didn’t
enjoy it that much, however, for I didn’t like her family all that much,
and it’s not a happy story. Also, it was marred by a self-consciously
literary tone (at one point, the African morning clutters into the room,
which is jarring, though perhaps), and by a too-narrow focus on the
author’s own life. More background on the recent history of Africa and
the countries in which she lived would have been helpful, even if it was
information she didn’t have growing up.

Still, I’m not sorry I read it; it forms an interesting contrast to
several other books I’ll be reviewing in the next couple of days.

Recently a knitting friend of mine died after a mercifully short bout of
cancer, naming me in her will to inherit her spinning wheels and anything
of her books and yarn stash that I wanted. What a gruesome task. I’d
known her for years from our monthly knitting group meetings, workshops
and conferences we attended together. I still can’t believe she’s gone.

However, she left me this stuff to enjoy, read and use, not to pine over
or treasure as a relic so after a week or two of avoiding the pile in my
fiber room, I dug in. This was one of the few books she had that I hadn’t
managed to collect myself and I gobbled it right up in a couple sittings.

It’s not a pattern book exactly though it has some patterns in it. It’s
essentially a compilation of oral histories about the knitting tradition
in the fishing communities of the eastern coast of Britain. Sweaters
called “ganseys” were knit by the women of the communities for their
menfolk in the fishing industry and to sell on commission for a pittance
to dealers as a means of getting some income to stretch out the little
money they had to live on. The sweaters were traditionally made of a 5
ply fine wool in dark, navy blue with knit/purl patterning on them,
usually only from the chest up since the stomach area was covered by
heavy overalls worn to keep the seawater out. They were often knit with
three quarter length sleeves to prevent the saltwater and wool from
irritating and infecting the wrists. And each knitter had a distinctive
pattern she knit or each community had its own set of patterns that
defined it.

There are several books on this subject that talk of much the same thing
in Cornwall. What makes Pearson’s book so special is that he went into
the archives of the historical societies of the small towns and got
photos of the fishermen, the women on the quay knitting and the children
knitting on the sleeves or plain bottoms to help with the family income.
There are old photos of women gutting and packing herring after the
boats have come in and the same women sitting on the empty barrels
waiting for the catch, knitting. Pearson sought out the old people in the
towns and villages to see if they had specimens left from those knitters
and then copiously copied the patterns and took pictures of them. And he
points out that these women were not engaged in some charming folk
activity but were pushing starvation back from the hearth. The kids in
the pictures often have a pinched, hungry look about them.

It’s an interesting book filled with marvelous pictures and inspiring
stories.

Here’s a fascinating article by Clay Shirky about the social dynamics of groups of people, especially as mediated by software. I found it courtesy of Joel on Software.

The July Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available for your reading pleasure! Even if you’ve been reading Foothills all month, take a look at Craig Clarke’s reviews.