Miss Garnet's Bad Gay-Dar

Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before.
Miss Julia Garnet is a rather stupid woman who becomes fascinated by a story from the Apocrypha when she could be enjoying the endless art of Venice. She also has very bad "gay-dar." Vickers tries to interweave these two stories but as the outcome of the older one had already been laid out for the reader, I wished it would just go away. I've read pseudo-biblical novels and actually enjoyed them (The Red Tent by Anita Diamant) because they were saying something interesting on two levels: this is the way it was, this is us looking at it from behind the screen of the laconic biblical version.
In the end, I think this is someone who actually does write better than Dan Brown trying to write something similar to The da Vinci Code or such, but running up against the same problems: the straining of credulity chief among them. While I welcome this in cheezy mystery fiction, I expect something better from this sort of book.
The angel business is telegraphed all over, Miss Garnet (not sure if I can blame the author directly on this) makes a silly error over the usage of "Signore" [no, my dear, they aren't calling God by the homely title of "Mister" - Signore means "lord" and it and mister/master have been watered down to apply to all men], and the Apocrypha story contains such an egregious ball of lard as: "In your language, if you spell dog backwards ... well, you are not stupid, I guess, or you would not be reading this." So, this Jew in Assyrian exile knows English? Wow, how magical is that.
And I think: really, am I not stupid? Why am I reading this? Because I was ordering "Barbarella" from amazon.com and this would only be another $2.22?

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The Book That Came To Dinner

The Portable Woollcott, by Alexander Woollcott


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a compendium of over 700 pages of essays, legends, true crime, radio transcripts, reviews of plays and books (supplying me with some new reading material!), which took me a couple of months to finish relishing at bedtime. It includes an old favorite, "Entrance Fee" wherein a cadet at Saint-Cyr wins the pool to spend the night with France's most desirable (and expensive - to the tune of 5,000 francs) femme and when learning of this scam, the woman, delighted by the compliment and stricken by the expense for a poor student, graciously "returns his money." Wonderful story! I remember laughing at it at a surprisingly young age - perhaps 13.
Also in here is the Holy Grail of the "Believe It Or Not"s - perhaps inspiration for that Indiana Jones thingie, an essay on how in his own land the architect/philosopher gets no respect - "The Prodigal Father," "I Might As Well Have Played Hooky" - about success without formal education (and Harpo's first and only harp lesson), "Perfectly Gone" - a paean to youth's wide-eyed wonder, and the story of "The Sage of Fountain Inn" that intrigued me because I live quite near a town of that name - only to discover that it was that self-same town!
All of this is in Woollcott's sweetly tortured and antiquated prose that lends a mellifluous nostalgia to the whole biz. Does anyone write like this anymore?
I return this musty and fragile volume to the library, fearful that it will get the axe for not being pretty enough, never to be replaced, and our town will lose a (if tattily) beribboned box of bon-bons that continues to satisfy even if you get one of those horrid coconut ones I always hated. Ummm, block that metaphor.

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What Me Cognitive Dissonance?

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I forget, was there some evolutionary advantage to this? We choose our parties and then adapt our philosophies to fit it. Maybe this is all a part of Belonging to the Group.
Reading something else very much interested me in cognitive dissonance and this is the book to read for us lay folk! Don't try to change what someone believes, they're only going to cling to their beliefs more tenaciously. Me, I think I'll take Ben Franklin's lead and borrow a book from someone who disagrees with me vociferously and then return it promptly with a nice note. See, then that person will think, "Oh, I did marfita a favor - it must be because she's a nice person" and let it go from there, like the noise cancellation on a helicopter (that I wish could be transferred to dental drills). And I will do this over and over again until everyone thinks I'm a nice person and that my ideas must also be okay and then I can manipulate them. 'Ya think George W. has a book I can borry?
The book was very entertaining as well as informative, but I don't see anyone with some serious cognitive dissonance issues looking inward just from reading it.
Me, of course, I don't have any CDIs. Heh!

This was read in the Kindle edition. There was a typo somewhere.

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Under the Magnifying Glass

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Wha-at? You mean there was no Carolyn Keene? As a child I devoured the Nancy Drew books, like most girls, re-reading them and demanding more (to my mother's horror - she wanted me to go to a library and get them, but how could you read and re-read as I did with books if they weren't right there on your shelf? I have solved this problem in adulthood by working in libraries!). I remember hearing that there was a woman behind them, or maybe a man who started it and his wife (turned out to be his daughter) who ground them out under the name of Keene. After that I lost track of the whos and wheres and now have learned that there was a hard-writing, tough woman reporter in the midwest who did the fleshing out of book outlines provided. The syndicate then edited them or suggested edits.
This book is certainly more than one would want to know about the making of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and other older series books. I guess you could then call it "thorough." It's disheartening to read about family squabbles over money when your associations with these books hearken to mythologies like the Easter Bunny. Harriet's sister Edna married and bowed out of the day-to-day running of the syndicate, but managed to pinch pennies from a distance. Having had a sister, I can just imagine ...
I was also right in preferring the oldest versions, the blue books with the orange print on the outside. Later editions of Nancy Drew were dumbed down, eviscerated for political correctness, and even later reduced to advertising for the shallowest of consumerism. The love of the oldest versions led me to historical fiction and period mysteries. I now prefer a little more distance in my reading. Also, the educational bits in the books (which I actually noticed as a child reader and appreciated, "Oh! I'm learning something, too!") were intentional insertions.
Disdain for series literature started early and still exists, but the nay-sayers still don't learn the lesson: kids enjoy reading them, want to read them, and they actually help young readers develop the fluidity of reading, which prepares kids for the meatier stuff they will also have to read. Whether they go on to enjoy more serious "litticher" later is up to them, but they will already be hooked on the printed word.
The book climaxes in a courtroom smack-down (if the meeting of the two long-separated, elderly ladies can be so described) when the original writer (Mildred Wirt Benson) and the Stratemeyer Syndicate head (Harriet Stratemeyer Adams) face off while Harriet attempts to defend her split from Grosset and Dunlap. They each believed themselves to be the originator, the writer of the Nancy Drew stories. Harriet went so far as to refer to Nancy as her daughter. Grosset and Dunlap had stupidly mined the Syndicate's catalog and resisted sharing even a little bit more of the gold with the Syndicate. Harriet left them for a better deal with Simon & Schuster (who virtually raped and pillaged the Nancy Drew franchise after Harriet's death, relentlessly launching watered-down series after watered-down series and never achieved the same 50 year success of the originals).
The "original" Nancy Drew series (as well as Hardy Boys) have been published in facsimile form by Applewood Books, and Good on 'em!
Long live the Nancy Drew in all of us, the real one, the one that captured our hearts in our youth, the time when our hearts were there for the taking.

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