First Lines: September 2024 edition

Clever mailbox, seen
while canvassing recently

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in September.  I’ve had less time this month for book-reading, partly due to the crossroads mentioned in the first lines of Book 1 in my list.  It seems fitting that four of the five books this month are rather dark.  That reminds me, I still haven’t put up any Halloween decorations.  Maybe next week.

 

 

Book 1

Foreword 

America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.

 

 

Book 2

Siobhán O’Sullivan hurried through lush green fields, adjusting every so often for the bumps and dips of the terrain, imagining that from high above, Kilbane, County Cork, Ireland, must look like an ocean of green, rendering her a mere speck at sea.

 

 

Book 3

One day, when he was naughty, Mr. Bunnsy looked over the hedge into Farmer Fred’s field and saw it was full of fresh green lettuces.  Mr. Bunnsy, however, was not full of lettuces.  This did not seem fair.   – From Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure 

 

Book 4

Catalpa Tree

Catalpa speciosa

A catalpa can give two brown girls in western Kansas a green umbrella from the sun.

 

Book 5

The Girl in the Mirror 

Mary Jekyll stared down at her mother’s coffin.

 

 

 

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America

By Heather Cox Richardson

304 pages • first pub 2023

 

 

Book 2

Murder in an Irish Village  (Irish Village Mystery #1)

By  Carlene O'Connor

334 pages • first pub 2016.

I guess this qualifies as a cozy mystery, although some details were a bit gruesome.  Thank goodness there was a pronunciation guide for the names, and a glossary in the front of the book for Irish expressions used.  But still, I struggled with the names. I liked the characters.  For some bizarre reason, the acknowledgements were at the beginning of the book. I probably will not read more in the series, at least not soon.

 

 

Book 3

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld #28)

Terry Pratchett

256 pages • first pub 2001

YA lit.   My husband and kids LOVE LOVE LOVE all books by Terry Pratchett.  I have not been able to tolerate the ones for adults, but seem to like some of Pratchett’s YA lit.  Even the children’s lit is quite dark.  This one takes place mostly underground. Pratchett is definitely a clever writer.

 

 

Book 4

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

Aimee Nezhukumatathil with Fumi Nakamura (Illustrator)

184 pages • first pub 2020

Second time reading it, this time for book club.  Thoughtful and delightful.   Not all sweetness and light (perhaps only recipe books should be such), but definitely more uplifting than the other 4 books I read this month.

 

 

Book 5

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter 

(The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #1)

By Theodora Goss

402 pages • first pub 2017.

A wild story reworking the fates of female characters from various horror/dystopian stories of the 19th century and early 20th century.  I was a little bit out of my element, since the earlier stories are not in my favorite genre.

 

* * * * * * *

 

Okay, reader, whatcha got?  What’s on your reading shelf right now?

Creepy door decoration, seen
while canvassing recently

A Sinking Feeling

 On Sunday the Common Household Husband said to me, “Did you see the sinkhole in our driveway?”

I said, “You mean, the driveway is uneven.”   I imagined a small divot in the asphalt – inconsequential.  I did not go anywhere on Monday so I thought nothing further of it.

On Tuesday morning I had to go out to fetch something I had left at a friend’s house. I drove out of the driveway and then thought, Wait, did I just drive over a hole?!

I parked on the street and got out of the car to examine the situation.  There was a hole about a foot in diameter in the asphalt of our driveway.  I tried to look down in, but didn't want to get too close.  Maybe it is like a BLACK hole and would suck me in!  I could not tell how deep it was, but there was definitely at least several feet of space in there below the asphalt.  I feel lucky the car didn't plunge into it when I drove over that portion of the driveway.

I have had no life experiences with sinkholes, other than making fun of when the city bus got stuck in a giant sinkhole in 2019 in Pittsburgh.  We shouldn’t have made fun, because that sinkhole formed at the exact spot I and a huge crowd of people had stood on the week before at a political rally.  The bus literally took the fall instead of all of us.   

I was quite distressed about our sinkhole, and asked around on what I should do.  A friend said to call "PA One Call" - an entity that checks on what utilities lie under the ground before any digging occurs.  I did that, and the woman there calmed me down a bit, taking down all the info.  Then, with disturbing visions of piles of cash poured into the sinkhole, I nervously drove off to fetch the thing I had left behind at the friend’s house.

Our decidedly less dramatic
but still alarming sinkhole.

On the way home I started imagining the neighborhood kids falling into the hole.  I decided I should go to Lowe's to buy a traffic cone and some "Danger" tape.   But I thought I had better take another look at the sinkhole first.  As I arrived home, Andy, the person from our town's Department of Public Works, also arrived.  Andy examined the situation and said, "It's definitely the township’s sewer pipe that has collapsed."  This is, or was, a 15-inch-diameter pipe that runs under our lawn from one end to the other.  Andy showed me on a cool map with all the township’s underground infrastructure.  He said the hole was at least 5 feet deep.  Yikes!  Andy covered it with two orange traffic cones and said the township would be back soon. 

Andy takes a photo inside our sinkhole.
I feared for his well-being the whole time.

A friend sent me a link to this timely opinion by Alexandra Petri. A fine piece of satire, sobering up at the end to deliver the true tragedy of that person's evil and heinous behavior. 

It didn’t occur to me until later that day that our sinkhole lies directly in the path of the Common Household Husband’s access to the EV charger in the garage.  The CHH started calling the sinkhole “the gateway to hell.”   And further asked, “Is it a divine punishment?”

In the middle of the night, we woke up. The CHH said to me, “Do you think the house has fallen into the abyss while we were sleeping?”  Gee, thanks.  Now I will not be able to get back to sleep.  I read my book, a chapter about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, definitely not material designed to help me sleep. 

There are some things to be thankful for.  The house has not slid into the abyss.  Yet.  As my older brother pointed out, at least it’s not one of those underground coal fires that sometimes occur around here.

My younger brother helpfully said, “You should drop Cheerios down into the hole.”  This is a reference to this childhood memory:  When we were kids, our parents got us a globe because they were all into education and stuff.  It had all the latest countries on it – Yugoslavia, the USSR, East Germany, to name a few.  At some point the family globe developed a ½” diameter hole.  I think it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Of course, we kids thought it was a brilliant idea to put Cheerios into that hole.  That was highly educational.  It taught us that once a Cheerio went in there, it was dastardly hard to get it out.  My father was disgusted with our flippancy toward geographical knowledge.

Eastern Europe in the 1970s, about the era of our 
family globe.

On Wednesday, The Director of the town’s Public Works Department Himself and three other Public Works employees showed up at our house.  While the workers installed a steel plate over the sinkhole, The Director explained to me that the township needs to entirely replace the pipe running under our yard. This means much of that side of the yard will be dug up, and three of our trees will need to be removed.  

THREE TREES!  This is devastating.  We will be losing two pin oaks and one red maple.  They were already mature trees when we moved in about 30 years ago.  I wanted them to go on existing forever.    

The Director said the township will pay for all of it, and will even plant new trees for us. I wonder how much time we will have to decide on how many and what kind of trees to plant, and where.  I have an inkling that trees vastly affect the heating and cooling of the house but I don’t know the particulars.

The Dept of Public Works won’t start doing any work until next week at the earliest.  In the meantime, no kids, pets, adults, wildlife, or cars will fall in the hole.  We might be able to get some Cheerios in there, but I am not going close enough to find out.   

I will never feel the same again when I am standing on the driveway to shovel the snow. There will always be the feeling that the driveway could swallow me up at any moment.   

The whole (!) thing reminds me of one of the very best YA novels I have ever read.

First lines: August 2024 edition

 

I am declaring this past month to be “Fall of the Patriarchy” month for me - it was in my reading and my life.

For my birthday I bought myself some artwork that says “My Favorite Season is the Fall of the Patriarchy” and compostable garbage bags.  Somehow those two things go together.  And a friend made her own design with the same saying, and put it on a t-shirt, just for me!  All month I have been in the throes of planning a public rally for reproductive rights.  

 

The first lines of the six books I read this month:

 

Book 1

Mister Robert Roberts Hitt, the well-known steno man, arrived in Springfield late on the sweltering afternoon of August 28, 1859.

 

 

Book 2

The Slogan

Some time ago a former student e-mailed me from California: “You’ll be delighted to know that you are quoted frequently on bumpers in Berkeley.”

 

 

Book 3

Stuff Happens

Pat stood before the door at the bottom of the stair, reading the names underneath the buttons.

 

 

Book 4

THE PAST PERFECT

Le Plus-que-parfait

I hadn’t wanted to live in Geneva.  In fact, I had decisively wished not to, but there I was.

 

Book 5

Kentucky

They still call her Book Woman, having long forgotten the epithet for her cobalt-blue flesh, though she’s gone now from these hills and hollers, from her loving husband and daughter and endearing Junia, her patrons and their heartaches and yearnings for more.

 

 

Book 6

I was not sorry when my brother died.

 

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency.  By Dan Abrams, David Fisher.

320 pages • first pub 2018.

It was fascinating to see how the law worked back then.  I read it for book club; everyone in the club liked this book.

 

 

 

Book 2

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

284 pages  • first pub 2007.

This excellent historian examines the writings of three women who made history, one from the 1400s in France, one from the mid-1800s in the US, and one from mid-1900s in England.   Good stuff that fits with my personal theme for this month.  The title is a sentence that Thatcher Ulrich wrote in a research paper, which was then picked up by the public and put on t-shirts and bumper stickers.

 

 

Book 3

44 Scotland Street (#1 in the series)

By Alexander McCall Smith with Iain McIntosh (Illustrator)

325 pages • first pub 2005

I finally read the first one in the series.  Not remotely related to any fall of any patriarchy.

 

 

Book 4

When in French: Love in a Second Language

By Lauren Collins

256 pages • first pub 2016

I really enjoyed this book, especially the parts on the history and quirks of language.

Since I have declared this to be Fall of the Patriarchy month, I’ll leave you with this moderately-related quote:

The Malian language Supyire has five genders (humans, big things, small things, groups, liquids), while the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri has fifteen (males, females, groups, animals, vegetables, body parts, canines, trees, liquids, fire, strikers, digging sticks, woomeras, two different types of spears).

 

 

Book 5

The Book Woman’s Daughter (2nd in a series) by Kim Michele Richardson

338 pages.  Published 2022.

For book club.  In which a teen and her friend in Appalachia struggle to overcome the entrenched patriarchy and racism of their time and location.

 

 

Book 6

Nervous Conditions (#1 in a series)

By  Tsitsi Dangarembga

204 pages (my print copy has 298 pages) • first pub 1988.

A coming of age story, in which a teen and her cousin in Rhodesia struggle to overcome the entrenched patriarchy and racism of their time and location. (Content warning - eating disorder.)   Recommended by my daughter.   

Wikipedia says that this novel, “which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world.”  The third book in this series, This Mournable Body (2020) was short-listed for the Booker Prize.   My daughter has read all three in the series, and says Nervous Conditions was her favorite.

 

Dear Reader, what have you been reading?  What is your favorite season?

 

 

How Do I Love Books? Let me Count the Ways.

The Common Household Husband forced me to look through these six boxes of books that have been sitting in our garage untouched since we moved to this house thirty years ago.  They smelled so musty that I will likely suffer the allergy effects for the next three days.  He thoughtfully put them on a card table in the basement so that I wouldn’t have to bend down while looking through them.

  

The first box had some old work papers I had written in the 1990s.  Look, folks, words and numbers printed on paper is how commodity research used to be disseminated!  How quaint!  These will all be consigned to the recycled paper bin.

The first box also had numerous tomes on the Soviet economy.  Let’s hope that is a topic for the permanent past.  All will be going to the dustbin of history.  

Love and grief came rushing in when I saw these two books that belonged to my mother when she was a girl:  The Bobbsey Twins and The Outdoor Girls.  There used to be a whole set of some of these.  These particular volumes were first published in 1917 and 1921, well before World War II.  What  I cherished about these books is finding the words “7 day” handwritten inside.  As a girl my mother loved to play library, which included forcing her younger sister (my aunt) to borrow the books for 7 days.   The books were in very poor condition, so off to the discard pile they went.

In another box there were more books about Russia.  There will definitely not be a next time I go to Russia - that one was easy to discard. 

One box, labeled “Good Literature” in my husband’s writing, included giant classics of Russian lit (some in English, some in Russian), plus some steamy paperbacks (not pictured).  We each have our idea of what is Good Literature.  The novels in Russian were purchased aspirationally but I never read them.

Another box had some really great children’s books. 

It was agony to get rid of these books.  The decision was made a little easier by the overwhelmingly musty odor.  Nevertheless, I chose to keep six books.  There is probably a one in a thousand chance that I will actually read these.

This blog post serves as proof to my adult children that I saved them from having to go through six boxes of dusty books.  I told the Common Household Husband to cart the six boxes away, and not to tell me what he did with them.  Any sane person would have snuck them into a dumpster somewhere,  but he took them to Goodwill.

I felt a sense of relief seeing the empty spot where the boxes had been.  When I went down to the basement the next day, the card table was refilled, with 8 more boxes of musty books to go through.  Sigh. 

Sonnet 43: How do I love thee?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day’s 

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for right. 

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death.