Chance's Corner: #JesusTakeTheStone

Late last Friday (Jan. 22nd), I was sitting back, relaxing and watching an early-access digital copy of Spectre. James Bond was racing down the streets of Rome, attempting to escape the clutches of the big, brutish henchman named Mr. Hinx, and suddenly... a sharp pain struck me in my lower left back. I rose from my seat and nearly collapsed in the floor. I have a very high tolerance of pain, but this time tears were shed as I wallowed. I knew 007 couldn't even save me.

A Kidney Stone

I was taken to the ER in Mount Pleasant, where I sat in the waiting room for two hours in agony. I started divvying out my personal possessions to my loved ones as I took my dying breaths, until, finally, I was called back. I had a CT scan done, had some blood taken, gave a urine sample and was hooked up to an IV. As the last hydrating drips entered my veins, the doctor entered the room with a solemn face and hit me with the facts. I had a kidney stone (a built-up calcium deposit) ripping the lining from the tube between my kidney and the bladder to shreds. Luckily, it was almost to my bladder, and I was promised the pain would end very soon. 

After sitting and sleeping in the fetal position for three days, the pain has finally subsided. I'm a little sore and drowsy from the painkillers, but my appetite is back and I'm feeling much, much better. I'm not going to be participating in the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janerio this year, though.

Tom's Two Cents: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Who is Penelope Fitzgerald?  You don't know?  Well I didn't either until sometime last year, when I became acquainted with her biographer, Hermione Lee, who is president of Wolfson College, Oxford, England, and a distinguished writer and teacher herself.  Born in 1916 in England, Fitzgerald spent most of her life as a wife, mother and teacher.  She began writing in her sixties and published nine novels, three biographies, and numerous essays and reviews.  Fairly late in her short career, she moved from the traditional to the historical novel, writing four such, one set in Florence, Italy, one in Russia, one in Cambridge, England, and the final one, "The Blue Flower," set in Saxony, Germany, in the late 18th century. 

"The Blue Flower" is the story of a short period in the youth of the young German poet-philosopher, Fritz Von Hardenburg, later known as the poet Novalis, and his courtship of a young girl, Sophie, whom he falls madly in love with, when he meets her (she is only 12) in her mother and stepfather's home.  We follow only a few years in his life as he attends multiple colleges, starts to train for a position as director of salt mines, and waits for his bride-to-be to grow up to a "marrying age" of fourteen or fifteen!  (I am reminded of my great grandmother, Eliza Minerva Webb Killingsworth,  married at fourteen and a widow with five children at twenty-one, who it was said, cried that she was an "old woman"!  Remember Scarlett O'Hara's famous consignment to widowhood at the ripe old age of 16?).  Lest you immediately draw the conclusion that this is a "they lived happily ever after" kind of story, it, like my great grandmother’s, is not.

Fitzgerald has her hand metaphorically on the pulse of life, and in this work at least she seems drawn to both its tragedy and comedy.  Family life especially appeals to her, and her insights into those dynamics are both delightful and heartrending.  Witness the opening chapter of the book, entitled "Washday," (each of the short fifty-five chapters has its own title, as in most novels of the 18th-19th centuries), in which a visitor to the Hardenburgs arrives unannounced to witness a panorama of bedding and underclothes floating from upper story windows into the waiting baskets of the servants below!  Sophie herself is a semi-charming, adolescent nitwit, whom no one can quite understand why Fritz has fallen in love with.  Sound familiar?  Well, there surely is a ring of contemporary truth in this old-fashioned story, and Fitzgerald has surely found it.

Fitzgerald also practices what Robert Frost would call "the art of omission," so one must be ever prepared to read between the lines.  This is a short book, as were all her novels, less than 250 pages.  Written in her eighties, "The Blue Flower" was also her last work and her only big American success, thanks to her American publisher, Houghton Mifflin.  Hermione Lee, her superb biographer, describes her as giving "a misleading impression in public of a mild, absent-minded old lady... [but] she wrote in a quiet voice, slipping unpredictably between comedy and darkness."

New Books!

If you come into the library today you'll see us hard at work, putting new books in the system. 

Some of the titles are:

Dumplin'

Strong and Kind

Paula Deen Cuts the Fat

Blue

Grounded

The Only Pirate at the Party

Pete the Cat's Groovy Guide to Love

Owl Diaries

Lenny & Lucy

The Bitter Season

.... and many more!

We expect another shipment today, so check back over the next few days for more titles!

Chance's Corner: The Passing of Alan Rickman

The news washed over me like a wave this morning and knocked me to the ground. Alan Rickman, age 69, died from cancer. My first thought was, is this just another cruel viral death hoax? As I checked more and more news outlets, I knew that it was the truth. Actual tears leaked from my eyes.

Beginning his career on stage and in a few made-for-television movies, Rickman skyrocketed to fame playing the unforgettable villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Audiences across the world were introduced to his signature charm and accent, an accent that puts him in the same prestigious league as James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman and Christopher Walken.

Throughout the years, Rickman went on to star in Quigley Down Under, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Galaxy Quest, but the role he'll most definitely be remembered for is Professor Snape in all eight Harry Potter movies. He played mean and slimy to perfection, but in the end he made your heart ache with sorrow.

Alan Rickman was a tremendous actor that will truly be missed.

Poet's Perch: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

                          

Tom's Two Cents: Charles Dickens' Bleak House

Hovering on the edge of Dickens' late, mature works, "Bleak House" is not a novel for the casual reader or the faint hearted.  It is very long--over 800 pages--there are many, many characters, with multiple plot lines, most intersecting, but not all.  It is, among other things, a murder mystery, but the murder takes place far into the book, so far that a pure mystery fan would have long since fallen by the wayside before he or she got there.  Written in monthly installments for a periodical that Dickens owned and managed, it was very successful in its time and has since come to be judged critically as one of his finest.

That said, I yearned for the earlier days of "David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations," where characters like young David and Pip were immensely accessible, and others, like Miss Haversham and Aunt Betsy Trotwood, were towering in their eccentricity.  "Bleak House," of course, is not a coming-of-age novel.  It treats the legal, moral, and social conditions of its time with powerful accuracy, and, as always with Dickens, addresses the poor and downtrodden with empathy, sympathy and immense compassion.

The major thrust of the story involves a legal entanglement of a will that has been tied up so long in the courts that there seems little chance of its ever unraveling.  But unravel it finally does, and to the detriment of almost everyone involved, including the aristocratic Lady Dedlock, whose early pregnancy out of wedlock later brings her to the brink of ruin.  The other side of that tragic coin, Lady Dedlock's illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson, manages not only to survive her mother's disgrace, but ultimately to find happiness in marriage to an upright Doctor and children of her own.  Set amidst the broad social panorama of mid-19th century London, "Bleak House" brilliantly captures that time and place.

2016 : Bookish Resolutions

Entering a new year always seems to symbolize new beginnings and new opportunities to reach our goals.  If you are a librarian, some of those goals are bookish in nature.

Our book resolutions are as follows:

Lisa:  To read more biographies. 

Julie:  To finish the book challenges mentioned here. 

Chance:  To read his pile of To-Be-Read books and to succeed in selling a screenplay.

Debbie:  To venture into new genres in her reading.

Christian:  To discover 10 new-to-her authors and to read at least 100 books over the year.

Tom:  To read more books to the end. 

Do you have any book resolutions/goals for the new year?  Let us know in the comments!  We can help you reach your goals!