My news update e-mail from The Globe & Mail newspaper landed in my e-mail box this morning with an invitation to “Watch more than 300 videos in the Globe Life how-to library“. Thinking I might find some tips on shocking the well water or even wood heat, I clicked through.

Hmmmmm…categories are Fitness, Chef, Wine & Spirits, Beauty, Hair & Fashion. If I want to know how to pair wine with take-out meals or what three coats every woman should have (definitely need that bejeweled evening number to wear to the fracking meeting), I’m set.

But since there is no take-out within 30 miles except chicken balls or donairs not worth wine, and an appropriate “investment” coat for the country is more likely to a ski jacket to be hung on a rack than a camel hair trench, I’m feeling a little out of the loop.

Not enough to move back to the city, mind. Just a little.

In the first part of this article, I discussed the cost of heating our house with wood or oil through the Maritime winter. But we have other spaces that require heating too.

When we moved here, we renovated part of the large garage/barn on our property into my husband’s home office, and a hobbies room. Both are fairly high ceilinged, and represent about 700 square feet of living space. It’s necessary to keep at least the hobby room heated at all times. Since the building is a short city block from the house, it wasn’t feasible to install a wood burning stove out there, since we wouldn’t be available every day or night to tend it, and heat needed to be constant. So we installed electric baseboard heaters.

Keeping the temperature about 65 degrees F (about 18C) costs us about $250 per month in the coldest winter months. That wouldn’t be so onerous if it was our main heating space, but add it to the cost of heating the house (and the added granny flat/visitors’ suite that is also heated with electricity) and we’re looking at a desperate situation.

What are our options?
1) Geo-thermal heating. Geothermal heat pumps use heat from the ground to heat the home. This would be the ideal system since one installation could heat both buildings at a very low cost and with almost zero impact on the environment.

However, since geothermal heat pumps are considerably more efficient than air-source heat pumps, they are also more expensive to purchase and install. To have an adequate system installed here would cost us about $30,000.

2) An outdoor wood furnace or wood boiler system.These heat water by burning wood very efficiently and can tie in to existing hot water baseboards, forced air, or in floor heating. This unit could also possibly heat both buildings and has the advantage of needing to be fed only once every 12 hours or so. In addition, the firewood pieces can be much larger than what would fit into a wood stove (or even the basement wood furnace) and would save on chopping/splitting – either in time or money.

To heat the outbuilding, though, would require installation of ducting and so the cost of installing one of these would be about $12,000.

3) An indoor wood stove on the main floor. This would seem a quick and easy solution except for the fact that we can’t use our existing chimney for it because of the oil-burning backup unit in the basement. (Insurance regulations prohibit a wood burning device above an oil-burning device on the same chimney.) We would have to install another chimney and also take down some inside walls on the main floor to allow for better heat circulation. I’m not sure of the cost of all this – renovations, installation of a hearth, the stove purchase and installation and the new chimney, but I’m sure you get the idea…and that doesn’t address heating the rooms in the barn or the suite.

Either wood-burning solution still leaves us vulnerable to the rising cost of firewood and to guilt whenever we see a clear-cut hillside.

4) Wall mounted air-exchange heat pump. Again, this doesn’t help with the heating of the granny flat or the barn, and would require renovations to the inside walls of the house for air flow. Add that to the cost of the pump and installation and we’re likely in the $10,000 range – and we’re not confident that the lay-out of the house would allow adequate heating on the second floor.

As you can see, we must spend money to save money and right now the capital for any of these isn’t available. That was definitely something we overlooked before we bought.

LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKE. Pay attention to the heating system if you’re moving outside the familiar infrastructure of a town or city. And don’t be swayed by the romance of heating with wood.

Do you have any other suggestions we might consider for heating our buildings? I’d love to hear from you.

Between 1939 and 1941, architect Frank Lloyd Wright oversaw the construction of a house in the Arizona desert for artist Rose Pauson.

In April 1943, the house burned to the ground and this marvelous example of Wright’s work was lost.

Told in the form of more than fifty previously unpublished letters written between 1938 and 1943–alongside rare site photographs and Wright’s architectural drawings–Building the Pauson House: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rose Pauson chronicles the design and construction of the house, as well as the architect-client relationship.
Although Wright and Pauson were friends, there are plenty of disagreements about the bills, design changes, and the copious leaks that riddled the finished project, as beautiful as it may have appeared.

A lover of written correspondence (letters!), I found Building the Pauson House fascinating. Beautifully laid out, it is a feast for the eyes and will be pored over for much longer than the evening it takes to read.

Building the Pauson House: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rose Pauson

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Last week, we were on a road trip to southern Ontario where (then) it was balmy and spring-like. While we were gone, most of the snow here melted too and the first three days this week were wonderful and left me full of hope. Then I woke up this morning to this–and still snowing.

Will winter never end? It makes me so down….

In 2006, I volunteered briefly with our wonderful local reading festival Read By the Sea, which invites Canadian authors to the North Shore of Nova Scotia to read excerpts of their work to appreciative audiences. That year, my husband and I had the pleasure of accompanying the authors to lunch, and so I ate chowder in the company of Steven Heighton, Janet Lunn, Lisa Moore, Harry Thurston, Catherine Safer and Deborah Ellis.

Since that summer, I have wanted to read Lisa Moore’s Alligator: A Novel and cannot fathom why I have not done so before this. Ah well, the wait was worth it.

From the dust jacket:

Meet Colleen, a seventeen-year-old would-be eco-terrorist, who barrels down the rocky road of adolescence while her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. Frank, a benevolent young man without a family, believes that his success will come from his hog-dog stand–a business he’s desperate to protect from socio-pathic Russian sailor Valentin.

Set in modern day St. John’s, Newfoundland, the book tells its story through alternating chapters about one of the main characters mentioned. Moore’s word pictures shine. Through them, and many seamless flashbacks, she provides character development, background and plot advancement simultaneously.

There’s a housefly near the jar, bluish and iridescent, cocooned in a spider’s web and dust. The fly has been there, lying on the cracked paint of the windowsill, since Frank moved in a few months before Christmas, two days after his nineteenth birthday.

Although most of the characters are satisfactorly developed, to me, Frank was the most clearly drawn of them. Having lost his mother recently to cancer and being left truly all alone in the world at eighteen, he is a sympathetic figure. His loneliness becomes palpable when his thoughts at seeing Colleen dance in a bar emerge:

He wants to tell her about his hot-dog stand and how hard he’s worked to get it and how much money he makes. He wants to say I can make this much money in a night. He doesn’t want to say it, but he wants her to know it.
He would like to say, I don’t do drugs.
He would like to tell her about the Inuit guy who hanged himself in the apartment over his at Christmastime…
He would like to tell her, or have her intuit, how much respect he had for his mother and how empty the world is without her. He would like to explain how he feels like he has a hole in his chest. He would like her to put her hand on his chest and show him once and for all there is no hole.

More than a plot, the book holds a slice of the characters’ lives and their interactions, although there is a climatic event that affects several of them. The prose in this book sings. Moore’s writing style is fresh and seems to move swiftly.

Alligator is a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year award. I look forward very much to reading Moore’s latest novel February

This is a stop on my Literary Road Trip through Atlantic Canada.

Solid four of five stars.

Links for my Canadian readers:
Alligator
February

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: Alligator: A novel, Lisa Moore, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Literary Road trip, Read by the Sea

Intrigued by Nicola Upson’s stylish mystery An Expert in Murder featuring Josephine Tey, and memories of reading The Daughter of Time as a teenager, I decided to give Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant series a try.

The first book in the series, Man in the Queue, also known as Killer in the Crowd, was written by Elizabeth MacKintosh (who later wrote under the names Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey) and first published in 1929 under the name Gordon Daviot. It concerns the murder of an unknown man, apparently struck down as he stands in a ticket queue for a London musical comedy.

Inspector Grant is presented with a body that no one claims and that has no identity. From this, he builds a case, discovering who the victim was, and tracking down a prime suspect. The casework is fascinating. There are no dramatic breaks yet, bit by bit, the case comes together.

I was intrigued by how the legwork was carried out in 1929: officers reporting by telephone often using the only phone in the area–one at a post office, no squad cars-just the trains and foot, the cultural prejudices evident, and the attitude that “it isn’t any of our business to fit psychology to people or to provide motives or anything of that sort…Fit them with watertight evidence and provide them with a cell, and that’s all we have to bother about.” Not surprisingly then, the police charge the wrong person. Only a last minute confession from the real killer saves the case.

I found the pacing to be consistent throughout and, as I’ve said, the details come together smoothly as the case is steadily built. However, the plot device of the unbidden confession stretched the limits of credibility and didn’t really put Inspector Grant in the best light. Although he had a “funny feeling” that all was not right, without that confession he would have proceeded with the charge against the wrong person. I will make allowances, though, as this was Tey’s first mystery — and I will definitely continue with the series.

3.5 stars out of 5

Links for my Canadian readers:
The Man in the Queue
An Expert In Murder: A Josephine Tey Mystery
The Daughter of Time

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.
Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: Josephine Tey, The Man in the Queue, Alan Grant, Inspector Grant, Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot

Here in Atlantic Canada, winter goes on and so do the heating costs. In fact, we’ll likely be heating through the month of May. It’s a constant search for an affordable method of doing that.

In southern Ontario where we spent the first fifty years of our lives, I always lived in houses heated with natural gas. It was just always there and I admit that I didn’t give heating in Nova Scotia the thought it deserved before we moved here.

Our Nova Scotia home is a renovated, but still old and draughty farm house built in 1878. It’s heated by an old wood furnace in the basement, and backed up by an oil-burning unit down there as well. The oil furnace is necessary and kicks in when we’re away for the day–or more–, when I’m too sick to negotiate the cellar stairs to feed the wood fire, sometimes in the wee hours of very cold nights, and for heating in the shoulder season when wood is just too warm.

When we moved here in 2003, firewood was $90 a cord. Since there is no ambient heat from the furnace the way there would be with a wood stove on the main level, we found we needed eight to ten cord to get through the winter. Clear cutting is allowed here so our hillsides are quickly being denuded of their woodlots and this year the price of firewood has crept to $200 a cord. Wood heat seems worth it, though, as it is a toasty warm.

In addition to the cost, wood heat is a lot of work. The basement will hold three or four cord but first the wood has to be thrown through the basement window one junk at a time. Then, of course, it must be stacked in the cellar. The wood that’s left outside has to be stacked & covered until such time as the basement needs to be filled again and the wood restacked once more. More than once, we have been caught short with no wood in the basement and no access to the woodpile because of snow and ice.

When that happens, we fall back on oil. We have a small (half) tank that holds about 300 litres (approximately 80 gallons). At the time of last week’s fill-up, oil was $1.02 litre (about $3.85 U.S. gallon). Translated, that means that a tank of oil that costs $295. will last 7-10 days. That’s anywhere from $900 to $1,100 per month–and it’s not even a comfortable heat.

Are there alternatives? Oh yes – and other parts of the property to heat. I’ll explore that in another post.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by real-life writer Elizabeth MacKintosh in the mid twentieth century. Although she also wrote books and plays under the name Gordon Daviot, it is her mystery novels–particularly The Daughter of Time–written mostly as Josephine Tey that are best remembered today. Nicola Upson has cleverly placed the real-life character of Josephine Tey in a new mystery series featuring fictional Detective Archie Penrose.

In the first book of this series, An Expert in Murder, Tey becomes involved in a murder that seems connected to her popular play, Richard of Bordeaux (which actually launched the career of young John Gielgud). Traveling to London from her home in Scotland for the last week of her play’s hit run, she befriends a young fan who is murdered shortly after the train arrives in London. Another murder within the theatre itself seems linked and the race is on to find the murderer before (s)he strikes again.

The details of 1934 England, especially the behind the scenes theatre atmosphere, are intriguing and seem true to life. The characters are engaging and the story’s pacing is even. Despite the fact that it might be a little easy to figure out who the murderer is, motive is harder to make out until it’s revealed, and this is an absorbing read.

I will definitely read more in this series – and it’s also inspired me to read through Josephine Tey’s Detective Grant mystery series, beginning with Man in the Queue. I’ll be posting a review of that later this week.

Link for my Canadian readers:
An Expert In Murder: A Josephine Tey Mystery

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.
Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: An Expert in Murder, Josephine Tey, Nicola Upson, Archie Penrose, John Gielgud, Richard of Bordeaux, Gordon Daviot, Elizabeth MacKintosh

We’ve had a lot of snow and ice–particularly ice–the last little while and everyone I know is ready for spring. Today is cold but SUNNY, and the forecast calls for temps above freezing tomorrow through Tuesday.

Today’s photo is really about the shadows caused by the sun as it swings to the west. You may also notice that the big evergreen tree looks a little different than last year. Nova Scotia Power was “kind” enough to send tree trimmers along our road last summer. The piece that came off the top of this tree was 10 or 12 feet high. I know the trimming is necessary to protect the wires, but I mourned this cut.

A double dose of the ‘flu and lots of snowy weather combined to give me tons of reading time last month. Here’s what I got through.

1. The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
A psychiatrist attempts to solve the puzzle of a non-communicative patient arrested for trying to attack a painting in the National Gallery

2. Stanley Park: A Novel by Timothy Taylor
Set in Vancouver’s iconic green space, and in a trendy restaurant across town, and centred around the relationship between anthropologist father and chef son.

3. The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove by Cathy Erway
In the heart of NYC, where restaurants are ubiquitous and eating out is simply a part of the culture, Cathy Erway decided to eat at home for two years – and blog about it.

4. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
First in the Millenium series, this thriller by Swedish author Larsson has enjoyed top-seller status.

5. The Hard Detective by H. R. F. Keating
First in the Harriet Martens series by this prolific author of mysteries.

6. Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith
This is the first in what promises to be a delightful series: brothers Old Red & Big Red Amlingmeyer are cowboys in the American west of the 1890s, but Old Red harbors a deep admiration for the exploits of one Sherlock Holmes.

7. Amy and Isabelle: A novel by Elizabeth Strout
In the very hot New England summer of 1969, mother and daughter learn about life, love, and each other.

8. Drawing the Line (Lina Townend Mystery) by Judith Cutler
First of the mystery series featuring twenty-something ex-troubled youth Lina Townend, a budding antique restorationist.

9. Cat on the Edge: A Joe Grey Mystery by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
First in the mystery series involving Joe Grey, a talking cat.

10. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Translated from the French, this novel about the concierge of a condo building and her interaction with her tenants is currently a bestseller.

Links for my Canadian readers:

The Swan Thieves: A Novel
Stanley Park
The Art Of Eating In
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Hard Detective
Holmes on the Range: A Mystery
Amy and Isabelle: A novel
Drawing The Line
Cat on the Edge
Elegance Of The Hedgehog

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.

Technorati Tags: The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova, Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, Cathy Erway, NYC food blog, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, The Hard Detective, H.R.F. Keating, Harriet Martens, Holmes on the Range, Steve Hockensmith, Old Red, Big Red, Gustav Amlingmeyer, Otto Amlingmeyer, Amy & Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout, Drawing the Line, Judith Cutler, Lina Townend, Cat on the Edge, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Joe Grey, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, Paloma Josse, Renee Michel

Disclaimer: All of these links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

It’s winter here in the Maritimes and that means lots of long, dark evenings for reading. Here’s what I made my way through last month. Reviews for some will follow.

1. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Set in Australia in the late 19th century. Made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes.

2. The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley
The second in this great mystery series featuring 11 year old Flavia de Luce. Eagerly anticipated (I was on the reserve list for our local library’s copy for six months) and did not disappoint.

3. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler
Set in Paris, Montreal and the Laurentians, this novel by Canadian icon Richler has been made into a recently released movie.

4. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Not at all what I expected. Set in modern-day Britain.

5. Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
Set in Vermont and across America, beginning in the early 1940s. Fascinating but left me feeling bereft.

6. An Impartial Witness by Charles Todd
The second in the wonderful Bess Crawford mystery series. Set in England during WWI.

7. Billy Boyle by James R. Benn
Also a mystery, the first in this series. Set during WWII, in London England, but from the point of view of an American character.

8. Stratton’s War by Laura Wilson
First in the mystery series featuring London England police officer Ted Stratton. Also set during WWII.

9. An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson
Another first in series, also a mystery, featuring the writer Josephine Tey and fictional Detective Archie Penrose. My review here.

Links for my Canadian readers:
Oscar And Lucinda
The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag
Barney’s Version (Movie Tie-in Edition)
Postcards
An Impartial Witness: A Bess Crawford Mystery
Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery
Stratton’s War
An Expert In Murder: A Josephine Tey Mystery

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.

Technorati Tags: Oscar and Lucinda, Oscar & Lucinda, Peter Carey, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, Flavia de Luce, Alan Bradley, Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka, Postcards, E. Annie Proulx, An Impartial Witness, Bess Crawford, Charles Todd, Billy Boyle, WW2 mystery, WW1 mystery, WWI, WWII, James R. Benn, Stratton’s War, Laura Wilson, An Expert in Murder, Josephine Tey mystery, Archie Penrose, Nicola Upson

Disclaimer: All of these links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Yesterday, I reviewed the captivating new book A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition by Madame Leon Grandin. (Be sure to enter to win your own copy.)

Today, the translator, Mary Beth Raycraft talks about her research into the personal life of Madame Grandin. By means of this research, Mary Beth, who teaches French at Vanderbilt University, has brought this real nineteenth century woman to life in the twenty-first century.

Looking for Madame Grandin by Mary Beth Raycraft
As someone who has lived through a successful PhD dissertation, I must admit that dusty old books and grand European libraries are welcome companions. Spending days perusing nineteenth-century French etiquette books in Paris’ Bibliothèque nationale was my idea of the perfect research adventure. All of that changed, however, when Madame Léon Grandin’s lively travel account of her stay in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fell into my lap.

A colleague had recommended that I consider translating the unusual memoir so while at the Paris library, I took a look at it. The sense of humor and breezy tone Madame Grandin uses in her descriptions of American women, food, fashion, homes, and city life in New York and Chicago, immediately caught my attention. But I was frustrated at the lack of biographical information available about this energetic young Parisian woman. So began an archival adventure that took me from museums and cemeteries in Paris and New York, to the French Archives nationales, to Ellis Island ship manifest records, and finally to an obituary notice, as I tried to uncover information about the elusive Madame Grandin.

A stumbling block, however, was that she had published her book under her married name. Tracking her husband’s career as a successful Parisian sculptor was the most logical first step. During a visit with a sculpture specialist at the Musée D’Orsay, I learned that Léon Grandin had worked on the Columbian Fountain for the World’s Fair in Chicago. At the Montparnasse Cemetery, I found his gravestone but no mention of his wife. A trip to the Paris Archives was daunting as I wondered if I would discover any useful information. As Linda Colley points out in the introduction to her remarkable biography The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, A Woman in World History, “women seldom left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event.” Fortunately, Madame Grandin did indeed find herself in a sticky situation that merited a handwritten note on her birth certificate.

The scrawled handwriting on the birth certificate indicated that she had remarried in New York in December 1901. It quickly became clear that two parallel plots were at work in her story. While Madame Grandin was commenting on relationships between men and women in Chicago, her own marriage was apparently starting to unravel. Less than two years after her return from Chicago, she left both her husband and France behind. A ship manifest in the Ellis Island records revealed that she returned to New York in July of 1895 in the company of a young French man named Alexandre Ferrand and was expecting a child. Through New York census documents, I discovered that the family first lived in Manhattan and later moved to Staten Island. Upon discovering her last address, I was able to track down a copy of her death certificate and obituary. It turns out that I had been looking in a cemetery on the wrong continent, as she died and was buried on Staten Island in December 1905 at the age of forty one. At the time of her death, she was the president of the Staten Island branch of the Alliance Française and an active participant in the French-American community.

Although I had hoped to find a photograph of the author, the only portrait that remains of this woman is the one that emerges from her account and from ship manifests, census records, and birth and death certificates. In the end, the back story of Madame Léon Grandin’s cross-cultural journey through late nineteenth-century Paris, New York and Chicago revealed itself to be every bit as intriguing as her memoir and worthy of the international scavenger hunt.

*********

This article was reprinted with permission from the University of Illinois Press blog.

A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition

During the summer of 1892, a twenty eight year old French school teacher traveled to America with her husband, who was contracted to work on his country’s exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition being held in Chicago in 1893. Monsieur and Madame Grandin spent a total of ten months in America, and visited New York, Niagara Falls, Philadelphia, Milwaukee (“sightseeing” during the great fire there), and Washington D.C. in addition to their extended stay in Chicago. Throughout her journey, Madame Grandin took notes that formed the basis for a travel memoir which she later published in France. Now we are able to read Madame Grandin’s account in English.

As the translator Mary Beth Raycraft points out, Madame Grandin’s perception of what she encountered in America was shaped by her experience as a citizen of Paris. For example, while Americans were awed by the newly invented Ferris wheel which occupied the center of the Chicago fair’s midway and could hold two thousand passengers, Grandin saw it as “a failed attempt to upstage the Eiffel Tower of the (last previous World’s Fair) Paris 1889 exhibition.”

Throughout her notes, Madame Grandin compares the two cultures, noting differences in such diverse topics as marrying (love versus a dowry), child-rearing methods (rewarding versus punishment), art (“in general..not the natural tendency of [America]”), and construction methods (“In America, saving time is more important than saving lives.”)

She also found humor in comparing the two cultures. For example, she says:

When you take the train (in Chicago), you can buy an insurance ticket in case a catastrophe interrupts the trip. All of the men get insured and their wives count on it. In France, all the husbands count on the death of their in-laws.

It is a combination of Grandin’s wit, her passion for her subject matter, and those very subjects that made A Parisienne in Chicago captivating. As Arnold Lewis points out in his Introduction to Chicago, the account “is ultimately a coming-of-age, or, more accurately, a coming-to-realization, story.”

This edition of A Parisienne in Chicago is so much more than the translation of Madame Grandin’s material. Mary Beth Raycraft has written a fascinating introduction that you must read to get maximum enjoyment from the book. (I found even the informative footnotes to Grandin’s text very interesting.) Professor Raycraft’s inter-continental research provides not only information on how other French travel writers of the day perceived America, but also a personal back story that brings Madame Grandin to life and provides proof of her “coming-of-realization”. Tomorrow, I’ll be publishing an article by Professor Raycraft explaining how she found this intriguing material.

This book is a “must-read” for history enthusiasts and travel buffs. In addition, I recommend that you read the last sub-heading in the introduction, “Madame Grandin’s Life after Chicago”, after you’ve read the rest of the book. By doing this, you will find there is enough “plot” to satisfy even fans of historical fiction (even though the account is non-fiction).

There are a score of black and white illustrations such as the one below (“Bird’s-Eye View of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893”) included in the book. You can find many of these images on the book’s web-site. The publisher’s site has a list of the blogs that are hosting this blog tour in April.

Although I received my complimentary copy of this charming book from the publisher, that has not influenced my review in any way.

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
by Eva Rice

From Publishers’ Weekly:
An impulsive taxi ride with a stranger in 1950s London indelibly changes Penelope Wallace’s life in Rice’s sparkling debut. At 18, Penelope lives with her younger brother, Inigo, and her terribly glamorous, young widowed mother in a drafty, rundown, English estate house in the countryside. With the loss of the man of the house, financial pressures mount, threatening sheltered Penelope’s family manse—and what’s left of her family’s place in society. She finds a kindred spirit in the outspoken posh Londoner, Charlotte Ferris, who has a “great gift for circumnavigating normal behavior,” when they both reveal their passion for American singing sensation Johnnie Ray. After agreeing to accompany Charlotte’s aspiring magician cousin, Harry Delancy, to his former girlfriend’s engagement party to make her jealous, Penelope begins her journey through a world of smart parties, fashionable teas and simmering romance.

When I was thirteen in the late 1960s, I came upon a stack of my mother’s old records. They were 33s but they looked like 78s, so their “quaintness” immediately intrigued me. But more important than how they looked, was how they sounded: from them came the dulcet tones of a man of whom I had never heard–Johnnie Ray.

I loved listening to those records but despite my best efforts, my friends never came to share my enthusiasm for Johnnie. Even their parents gave me odd looks. So I was delighted to be able to share the thrill of Johnnie with the two young protaganists of The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Penelope and Charlotte, who eventually score front row seats for Johnnie’s London concert.

I greatly enjoyed this book–and not just for Mr. Ray’s high-jinks.

English society, with its class system, has long fascinated me. It was interesting to see how far removed from its center Penelope was, living a train ride outside of London. Despite the fact that her family no longer has any money, she’s accepted into this society on Harry’s arm because of her family home – Milton Magna, the albatross that shapes the future of Penelope, her brother and her mother.

Rice makes the contrast between the glittery parties and simple country life, between having money and having a name, between English and American class systems. She shows how American music and culture overtook England long before the “British Invasion” of America in the 1960s.

My mother’s older sister, Loretta, had married an American soldier…and had moved to the United States after the war….My mother liked to give the impression of being appalled by her sister’s willingness to embrace a country she considered deeply vulgar, but secretly she was envious as hell, and who could blame her? She and I were fascinated by stories of refrigerators in every kitchen, proper washing machines and spin dryers, drive-in movies and Coca-Cola. (My brother) Inigo (was) obsessed by the new wave of American music…

The only complaint I have is that, after making me salivate at the dresses on the cover of the book, there was very little detail about the party clothes. I’d really liked to have known more than just it was “sparkly mint green dress”!

But don’t let that minor problem stop you from reading this delightful novel. Four stars.

P.S. If you want to see & hear Johnnie Ray, there are some videos on YouTube under several misspellings of his name. Coincidentally, we just finished watching the 1954 movie There’s No Business Like Show Business (we found it at Zip.ca, Americans might try Blockbuster.com ) in which Ray has a couple of solo numbers.

Reading Challenges: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets satisfies five of my reading challenges: the Typically British Reading Challenge, the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, the New To Me Authors Challenge, the Support Your Local Library, and 100+.

Chapters-Indigo link for Canadian readers:
Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Or better yet, buy from a independent book seller.

Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Eva Rice, Penelope Wallace, Inigo, Milton Magna, Charlotte Ferris, Marina Hamilton, Rocky Dakota, Johnnie Ray

Can you see them? I finally figured out how to enlarge the detail and now I can show you the animals in the field across the road.

We see deer there nearly every day. Every delivery person who comes comments on seeing them there. And I often see cars stopping just in front of our place and backing up a bit to get a better look.

They are such gorgeous creatures and I never tire of seeing them or admiring their beauty.

P.S. Do you mind that I cheated a bit and took this picture this morning?

The Body in the Belfry
by Katherine Hall Page

This is Book One of the Faith Fairchild series

This book is the beginning of a growing list of “Body in the _____” series. Its heroine is Faith Sibley, a native New Yorker who has started a gourmet catering service. She meets and falls in love with Tom Fairchild, a young minister who whisks her away from her beloved home town to a much different life in rural Massachusetts. Faith is trying her best to fit into the role of pastor’s wife in a small town where everyone’s family goes back several generations and where everyone knows everyone else’s business. While taking a walk with her baby son, Benjamin, Faith discovers a dead body in a belfry. The body is that of Cindy Shepherd a young, willful girl who had made plenty of enemies in their small town. The suspects include Cindy’s fiance, and several men with whom she had had affairs and was subsequently blackmailing. Faith’s curiosity and unofficial investigations eventually lead her and Benjamin into grave danger. (Karen Potts on Amazon.com

This is the first Katherine Hall Page work that I’ve read and, once again, I praise the web-site Fantastic Fiction where I can find out what series an author has written and the chronological order of the books in each; and our public library system which allows me to borrow from other library systems in our province – in this case, it was the Halifax Regional Library that lent me this book.

I recognize that The Body in the Belfry is not great literature. Maybe it’s not even great mystery. But I liked it.

I liked Faith Fairchild, whom various reviewers have called unlikable, a meddler and a snob. A snob she may be–especially about food and clothes–but she is not unlikable. And if she and her ilk didn’t meddle, how would we have the mystery?

Having left the city to live in the country seven years ago, I identified a little with Faith on that score. Faith has just moved and is in that difficult transition period that befalls all who make that move. Maybe she’ll mellow with time. If not, then her “snobbery” will continue to highlight the charming and not-so-charming idiosyncrasies of her fellow townspeople.

Despite the red herrings, the mystery wasn’t overly tight. I guessed the killer half-way through, although I had a harder time nailing the exact motive.

Despite the flaws, I really enjoyed this time with Faith and I’m quite sure I’ll read at least a couple more in the series (there are 18 now–it’s certainly a busy little town with a lot of dead bodies). Hall Page has a wicked sense of humor: for example, Faith reflects that her catering business Have Faith had initially been mistaken by some as “an escort service for the guilt ridden”, and perhaps as the series continues, the mysteries will be more polished.

I’m willing to give it a go. Three and one half stars out of five.

Reading Challenges: The Body in the Belfry satisfies four of my reading challenges: the First in a Series Challenge, the New To Me Authors Challenge, the Support Your Local Library, and 100+.

Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Body in the Belfry, Faith Fairchild mystery, Katherine Hall Page, Aleford, Fantastic Fiction

In addition to the challenges that must be completed in 2010, I’ve taken on some more ambitious projects that have no deadline and are ongoing.

These are:

The Amy Einhorn Perpetual Challenge, to read all books published under the Amy Einhorn imprint.

Amy Einhorn started Amy Einhorn Books with the goal of hitting that sweet-spot between literary and commercial. Over her 20+ year publishing career, she has worked in very literary houses and very commercial houses—but what she found is that she enjoys a mix of both—smart, intelligent writing coupled with a page-turning story. She intends her books to be just such.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett was the first book she published under this imprint. There’s a list of all of the titles published so far here. This, of course, will grow over time. The Challenge will keep up.

The Reagan Arthur Books Challenge: Reagan Arthur Books is a brand-new imprint from Little, Brown & Company. Currently, there are three books available, but another 16 are coming in the very near future! You can check them out here.

The hosts of this challenge noticed how many awesome books and authors were going to be published in the upcoming months, and found themselves wanting to read most (if not all) of them. From there, it was an obvious next step to create the Reagan Arthur Books Challenge!

The Pulitzer Project
The goal of the participants of this site is to read all 82 books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Talk about a challenge!

The National Book Awards Project
This project is very flexible and can be accomplished in a number of ways:

1. Read all the winners of the National Book Award for fiction from 1950 to present.
2. Read all the winners and finalists of the National Book Award for fiction from 1950 to present.
3. Read the winners and finalists of the National Book Award for fiction of one year.
4. Read the winners of the National Book Award for fiction of one decade.
5. Read all the books that were winners or finalists by a single author (there are several authors who were finalists and/or won in multiple years).

The Orange Prize Project
The Orange Prize recognizes notable women writers. A panel of five women, all passionate readers and at the top of their respective professions, choose the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. Meanwhile, three women with a proven interest in new fiction, who work at a senior level in the book world, select the winner of the Orange Award for New Writers

This reading challenge is a long-term project in which the participants will read all books that have won or been short listed for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction AND the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. There is no time limit.

The Newbery Project to read all books that have received the Newbery medal.

The John Newbery medal is awarded each year since 1922 for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature. There’s a complete list of the winners here.

Technorati Tags: Amy Eichorn, Reagan Arthur, imprints, pulitzer project, National book awards project, Orange Prize Project, The Newbery Projecy, reading challenge

Beside a Burning Sea
by John Shors

From Hilary Hatton at Booklist:
It’s the fall of 1942, and the U.S. hospital ship Benevolence is cruising the waters of the South Pacific when it is torpedoed by the Japanese. Only nine people survive, and they eventually wash up on an island: the captain Joshua, and his wife, Isabelle, a nurse; Isabelle’s sister Annie and a woman named Scarlet, both nurses; Ratu, a teenage Fijian stowaway; Jake, a black engineer; Nathan and Roger, two officers; and Akira, a wounded Japanese soldier.

Okay, first of all, let’s look at the survivors of this accident. One: the captain of the ship. The captain. Don’t they go down with their ships anymore? Two: three nurses. One just happens to be the captain’s wife. The captain’s wife, even though they were not together on the ship at the time of the torpedoing. What are the odds?

The next nurse just happens to be Annie, the captain’s wife’s sister. The captain’s wife’s s….you get the idea. )The third nurse is a “throwaway”: the character that can be killed off by the danger that stalks them all.)

While it is only a matter of time before Japanese naval forces reach the island, the more immediate danger is Roger, who is a ship’s officer, but also a spy for the Japanese. It’s Roger who tipped the Japanese that, unbeknownst to the captain, the hospital ship was carrying ammunition and other supplies of war.

Roger is drawn as a mentally unstable, sadistic, misogynistic, and overly proud man. No explanation is needed: after all, he’s the traitor.

The captain Joshua, the engineer Jake (the token black, who just happens to be the one who had befriended the ship’s stowaway – who also survived) and the other officer Nathan are, of course, kind, helpful, chivalrous, co-operative and generally nice guys. No explanation is needed: after all, they’re Americans.

Then there’s Akira, a wounded Japanese soldier who was on the ship because the rules of war were that hospitals treat all wounded, regardless of nationality. Because Akira’s Japanese, the author spends the entire book explaining and justifying how it is possible that he might be human; a decent and kind human who is in love with Annie. (And how Annie could possibly love him.)

The Japanese who land on the island are all wicked, wicked. The Americans who come and bomb and kill the Japanese are heroes. Are we twelve years old?

Beside a Burning Sea is a romance and, really, I shouldn’t have been venturing into this territory. I have no patience with such juvenile characterization and plot coincidences. The roster of survivors reminded me of a (quite bad) story that I wrote for a seventh grade English composition.

If that’s romance literature and you enjoy it, then have yourself a read. But this is nowhere near being literature. I know I sound like a book snob when I say that, but I find that as I get older and realize that my time to read is running out, I want to read solid fiction (and my snackies of cozy murder mysteries). If I’m going to read romance, at least let it be disguised in a half-decently written story (such as The Diplomat’s Wife.)

How about you? How important is the writing–the plot development, the characterization, the style, the objectivity of the author–to you, if you like the genre?

I borrowed Beside a Burning Sea from my public library.

Beside a Burning Sea satisfies six of my reading challenges: the What’s In a Name Challenge, the 10 Categories Challenge, the Historical Fiction Challenge, the New To Me Authors Challenge, the Support Your Local Library, and 100+.

Buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

Technorati Tags: Beside a Burning Sea, John Shors, WWII hospital ship

I know I’ve vowed to join no more challenges this year, but Rose City Reader just posted these first two and they’re only three books each. They run from 01Feb10 to 31Jan11.

The Battle of the Prizes American Version pits winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction against the winners of the National Book Award.

The first book must have won both prizes (6 books meet this criterium), the second book is a Pulitzer Prize winner only and the third book is a National Book Award winner only.

These are my selections, subject to change:

1) Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Proulx has followed Postcards , her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction.

2) one of:
March by Geraldine Brooks (ready for pickup at the library)
Brooks’s luminous second novel, after 2001’s acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves.

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (has been on my own shelves unread for years)
The true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty. Gilmore, a violent yet articulate man who chose not to fight his death-penalty sentence, touched off a national debate about capital punishment. He allowed Norman Mailer and researcher Lawrence Schiller complete access to his story. Mailer took the material and produced this immense book…What unfolds is a powerful drama, a distorted love affair, and a chilling look into the mind of a murderer in his countdown with a firing squad.

or

Empire Falls by Richard Russo (just sounds great)

In his biggest, boldest novel yet, the much-acclaimed author of Nobody’s Fool and Straight Man subjects a full cross-section of a crumbling Maine mill town to piercing, compassionate scrutiny, capturing misfits, malefactors and misguided honest citizens alike in the steady beam of his prose.

and

3) Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (in my pile of TBR library books)

McCann’s sweeping new novel hinges on Philippe Petit’s illicit 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives. It is the aftermath, in which Petit appears in the courtroom of Judge Solomon Soderberg, that sets events into motion.

The Battle of the Prizes British Version pits winners of the English Man Booker Prize against winners of the Scottish James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The first book must have won both prizes (only 3 books qualify), the second book is a Man Booker Prize winner only and the third book is a James Tait Black Prize winner only.

These are my selections, subject to change:

1) Last Orders by Graham Smith
a quiet but dazzling novel about a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. When one of them dies, the survivors drive his ashes from London to a seaside town where they will be scattered, compelling them to take stock in who they are today, who they were before, and the shifting relationships in between.

2) Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

This is a story of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time and therefore permeated with modern consciousness. Oscar is a shy, gawky, Oxford-educated Church of England minister with a tortured conscience; Lucinda is a willful, eccentric Australian who sinks her family inheritance into a glass factory; and the basis for the star-crossed love that develops between them is a shared passion for gambling; and

3) The Secret Scripture by Sebastien Barry
The latest from Barry (whose A Long Way was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker) pits two contradictory narratives against each other in an attempt to solve the mystery of a 100-year-old mental patient. That patient, Roseanne McNulty, decides to undertake an autobiography and writes of an ill-fated childhood spent with her father, Joe Clear, A cemetery superintendent who is drawn into Ireland’s 1922 civil war.

AND

Since I’m reading books for the British Battle of the Prizes, I thought I may as well enter the Typically British Challenge hosted by Book Chick City.

It’s likely that I’ll read 8 British novels this year, but I want to enter at the Bob’s Your Uncle level because I love that phrase, and every time I hear it, I think “No, Bob’s my father.” It’s sort of bittersweet.

Bob’s Your Uncle requires me to read 6 novels by British authors in the 2010 calendar year.

1. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

Mrs. Q, Book Addict, is hosting (for the first time) a challenge of her invention: The Canadian Authors Challenge 2010.

I love CanLit and think I’ll fairly easily be able to complete the 10 books. (Mrs. Q: we need some titles on these levels. From the heart of Nova Scotia, I’ll contribute Bluenoser. What do you think?)

I’m looking forward to this one. And while we’re on the subject of things Canadian:

Chapters/Indigo link for Canadian readers:
The Shipping News
March
Empire Falls
Let The Great World Spin
Last Orders
Oscar and Lucinda

Or, even better, buy from an independent book seller by searching this site that has links to independent booksellers across North America.

P.S. If you click through the affiliate links in the book titles, you may notice a different cover. I like to see the cover that’s on the copy I read – and it’s usually different than Amazon.com because they display the American release, and I read the Canadian. Again, the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

We’ve had rain and temps above freezing all week, and last night when I went to bed, there was no snow to be seen. I thought I’d show you a real contrast from last week.

Alas, this is what I awoke to. That’s a main highway out there. There’s a wind gusting to 50 mph from the south (?!), which is the other side of the house, that blowing a icy mist of snow across the roads.