Blame Dorothy

In Which There are Pumpkins

Pumpkins for Obama! Courtesy of Yvette's Pumpkin Blog.

In Which I Read: Bleak House

Finished my first Charles Dickens. Woo hoo. Some more of that Victorian long-winded-ness. I could certainly see why everyone's still reading him centuries later.

Esther was sweet, but a bit passive. And Skimpole could go away anytime now. The point of the character would have been just as clear with half as much dialogue.

I'm going to get my hands on the BBC adaptation with Gillian Anderson and looking forward to that.

In Which There is Water

Leaking.

From underneath my fridge.

That would be bad, then. I got home last Thursday night to find a puddle. The prompt little repairman I called for Friday diagnosed a busted compressor and cheerfully informed me that it would cost eight hundred dollars to fix. (Sure, he's happy about the prospect of $800.) He took it equally well when I laughed a bitter laugh and observed that I could buy two new fridges for that much, pocketed $50 for five minutes in my kitchen, and took himself away.

So, the upshot is that I have a new fridge. I'm not entirely comfortable with the swiftness of the little man's diagnosis, but even I could tell the fridge and freezer were not staying cool and - let's face it - I am unlikely to manage the repairs myself.

I suppose I got seven years out the old one, and the new is much nicer in that it is actually a bit smaller. This makes it more likely that I will keep it full. From what I read online, fridges are happier when they are kept full. It also leaves me with a bit of floor space around that can be used for stashing brooms and laundry racks.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

Starting The English Church in the Eighteenth Century,  by Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton. This is a book written in 1896, looking back at the 1700s and what was going on in ecclesiastical matters two hundred years before the authors' lifetimes.

I'm only through the first essay, in which the author Mr. Abbey suggests that the English (National) Church during the eighteenth century suffered from being full of well-meaning but not terribly excited or exciting people.

I can see how that might be possible.

Goodness is this guy long-winded. I'm put in mind of Jane Eyre's failed suitor St. John (pronounced, apparently, as "Sinjin"). He was a very religious sort who proposed to her not because he was in love with her, but because he needed someone to come with him to India as a missionary. He thought - and actually told her this - that she was sufficiently docile and easily led, hard-working, and self-sacrificing to keep up with him among the heathens.

He was more than a little passive-aggressive and Jane was right to boot his sorry butt. He also went on and on and on. Never said something in three word when he could spend thirty. And yes, he had a point worth making when you got to the end... if you got to the end.

Mr. Abbey's larger point seems to be that the church leaders were more interested in pleasant uncomplicated lives devoted to abstract religious theories than in going out and drumming up the population and bringing them to God. And the ones who did were taking things in too radical a direction.

Which may well be valid, but I doubt that God would have been upset if Mr. Abbey had used a few more paragraph breaks. Just saying.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

With the Turks in Palestine, by Alexander Aaronsohn, is the personal narrative of a Jew living in Palestine (what is now Isreal, with detours into Syria) in the early years of World War I, as he falls afoul of the ruling Turks. At first, he's drafted into the army, but then it's decided that the Turks will fight with the Germans instead of against them, so anyone who wasn't Arabic was put on hard labor duty instead of being given a gun. After buying his way out of the "army," Mr. Aaronsohn made his way home, where he was arrested and tortured for information about his community.

Set free again, he then got a job with his brother and was sent here and there on various missions relating to an infestation of locusts. Finally, he managed to upset the local thug (not named "Thad") and was forced to flee the country by buying a fake passport and disguising himself and his sister as refugees.

It's an interesting read, well written, and certainly a lot happens. The writing is crisp and he doesn't dwell in exaggerated whining about all the crap things that happens to him. I mean, if you're already feeling persecuted and then the locusts show up?

I did, however, detect that 19th / early 20th century pattern of casual bias. Everyone who is like me is great and wonderful. Everyone who is "other" is beneath me and therefore dirty, ignorant and lazy. (Lazy is big with this. Always look for lazy on the list of complaints.)

It might have been nice to be able to put this story into a larger context, even though I know that's not the point of Project Gutenberg. World War I kinda gets overshadowed in popular culture by World War II, so I would have benefited from some historical annotation.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

The next Project Gutenberg book is Radio Boys Cronies, by Samuel Francis Aaron. I'm a little fuzzy on when this one was written, but I'm guessing early 1900's. So from an early girls book, we get an early boys book, wherein Brave Bill Brown and his pal Gus are devotees of the weekly radio broadcast of the lives of great scientists and inventors.

After listening - spellbound - to the early years of Thomas Edison's life for half the book, they are offered the opportunity to build a power plant on the land of a local businessman. (Yup. More child labor.) A pair of "boys" are set to work by their professor building a dam, water wheel, electrical plant, and wiring this contraption to someone's house.

That part actually goes pretty well, until they make an enemy of the local thug. The nephew of their boss, Thad (yes, Thad) feels threatened by their grasp of higher mathematics and is moved to violence by their achievements in demonstrating trigonometry to measure distance. Thad is so embarrassed, in fact, by their superior engineering that he turns to a life of crime and must eventually be turned over to the local police.

I know. It's a tragedy.

I did not read the sequel, "Radio Boys Loyalty Bill Brown Listens In". To what he was listening? I'm not sure I want to know.

In Which I Sort

I've started sorting my comic books and trying to find as many as I can a good home. Wish me luck.

In Which I Read Project Gutenberg

So, I found Stanza, an ereader for my iTouch. And I found Project Gutenberg, an online source for free books forever. Being rather overwhelmed at the choices and having no firm criteria beyond the book I'd just found, I decided to start at the beginning and see what they had.

Going alphabetically by author, we have Lisbeth Longfrock, by Hans Aanrud, written in 1907.

"Longfrock," by the way, refers to the nickname Lisbeth's brother gives her after a new dress is discovered to be far too long for the child, reaching all the way down to her toes.

This is your typical cute plucky orphan girl rises above her tragedies to achieve success story. I imagine it's very Heidi-esque, but I somehow never read Heidi, and avoided all the movies, so I don't exactly know if the plots match or if there are just a lot of mountains in both books.

Little Lisbeth is orphaned, after which she moves in with a kind neighbor woman who puts her to work, but treats her well. It's well written and has lots of interesting detail about the farming life in Norway (move the cows here, move the goats there), but doesn't exactly rise to the level of timeless literature.  The amount of work required is more reflective of the nature of farming at that time and place than any desire to put Lisbeth through some sort of formative cruelty.

Another reflection of time and place may be found in the way the book ends. It seems taken for granted that Lisbeth's story will climax as she a) gets kind-of sort-of engaged to a local boy, b) is confirmed in the local church, and c) becomes head milkmaid at the farm where she was taken in.

Head milkmaid? Yeah. That's all you got. That's literally the last words of the book. She gets to be head milkmaid. I mean it's great that she's gotten past her mother's tragic death, survived childhood, and found her place in the world, but milkmaid?

Although, when I think about it, a book ending today with, "Guess what? You were totally elected prom queen!" would have a similar ending, structure-wise. So, it really does come down to time and place again. Who knows? Maybe the little Norweigan girls who read the story got to the end and closed the book with a happy little sigh.

In Which I Discover a New Toy

So I was playing around on my iTouch and wandered into the App Store. Which puts me about a gazillion years behind everyone else, cool-wise, I know.

The first thing I looked at was the Books category, because I'm nerdy that way, and I noticed that they had a variety of books you could download for ninety-nine cents a piece. Thing is, they were all titles I knew that were in public domain and that I could get for free someplace else. So the thing to do - if I was going to pay for something - would be to pay for a book reader for the iTouch and download the books for free.

Poking about some more, I found Stanza, which is hands-down the coolest thing on my iTouch. For one thing, it's free. For another, it comes (provided you're connected to the Internet) with a long long list of free books from more than one source. The "download the book" part requires Internet access, but after that, you can pop it open anytime you want and start reading.

You can set font size and type, black font and white background or white font on black background (easier to read onscreen for me), and left or full justification. You can use the chapter bookmarks or place your own, and the program remembers where you were in any given book the last time you opened it.

The book list is massive, if limited to books that are out of copyright. This means that it's essentially a long list of those classic books that you always meant to read, but never got around to. I just finished Jane Eyre, and started on Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

Getting The Way We Live Now was a little complicated because it wasn't on the available booklist, but I wanted to read it because I'd enjoyed the Masterpiece Theatre version starring David Suchet and Matthew McFayden (Keira Knightley's Mr. Darcy). So I went looking a bit more and found Project Gutenberg, which is hands-down the coolest thing on the Internet. It's all the books ever! They've got 25,000 of them and they all free - allbeit a bit old.

But, come on, why read Twilight, when you can read Lisbeth Longfrock? Okay, there's a distinct lack of hot, sexy vampires in 19th century Norway. I admit that. But it's still cool.