Updates, and piling it on

Reading update:

Finished Treasure Island! Yes, it was a shortish novel, but it felt good to finish anything at all in that horrid month of January. How did it compare with the Muppets film version? Plotwise, wildly divergent, as you might imagine (though incredibly, the part where Jim Hawkins sails the ship alone is actually in the book). No Miss Piggy or cannibal tribe on the island, only the half-baked Ben Gunn. More fighting, wounds, and actual death in the book. Interestingly, the Muppets nailed the character of Long John Silver, so much that I kept picturing and hearing Tim Curry as I read. A good adventure, though the end was a little anticlimactic. A writerly note: Stevenson used first-person narration; primarily Jim Hawkins, but switching to Dr. Livesey when he needed to convey action that Jim knew nothing about. Write up the alley of my current WIP.

Books-into-movies update:

We finally finished watching the HBO miniseries John Adams (based on the biography by David McCullough). We had many interruptions between the sixth and seventh parts, including Life, illness, the need to sleep, and a cracked Netflix DVD. But we persevered, and honestly, we could just have skipped the final installment. As my husband put it (before he drifted off), “too much personal drama.” The last part has Adams retired and at home, his children dying or being abandoned by their husbands, etc. Do I want to see, hear, or even imagine a woman suffering a mastectomy without anesthesia? No, thank you. Nor do I want to see old men dying in their beds, eyes staring, while their families weep around them. (Ah, Jefferson! Where are your elegant drawl, your satin waistcoats now?) I might just add here that I once saw a documentary on historic houses (with Bob Vila) that showed Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom, and the bed in which he died; and it looked nothing like the bedroom in the movie. The one saving grace (besides the stirring movie score), is that if you stick it out to the end, you hear an Adams quotation in voice-over: “Now posterity—it will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom. I hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.” I think that’s pretty good.

Writing update:

I finished interviewing two main characters (six single-spaced pages for the first and maybe three for the second), and am now working on one of the “villains.” What I love about this process is discovering the little details and idiosyncrasies that might never show up in the story, but which make the characters who they are. Once, at a Teen Writers Workshop, one of the kids asked, “How can you say you don’t know everything about your character? Didn’t you make him up?” Yes, and no. It’s a little like getting to know any flesh-and-blood person. There are layers there that need to be explored.

Piling it on:

Went to two different libraries yesterday. The top two are books I had requested through interlibrary loan; the rest are books that just caught my attention as I browsed (alone! sans children!) the stacks. Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, and Joplin’s Ghost, by Tananarive Due, are linked by a mysterious thread that will be revealed with the next edition of Lit for All. The Patriots is for novel research; the rest are for fun. I know, pretty ambitious for someone who finished reading a whopping one novel in all of January.

Reading is…

I was going to write, “the cure for all that ails you,” but that would have been too melodramatic. It is amazing to me, though, how having the right reading material can affect my outlook on life.

Two or three days ago, I was suffering from a strange malady. Perhaps it was only a serious attack of the January blahs, or what the sophisticated would call a malaise. One of the most painful symptoms was, I could not find a book to capture my interest. I have been from youth an obssessive reader (if there is no book, I read the cereal box, yes?). For me, books are breakfast-lunch-dinner AND dessert. And suddenly I wasn’t hungry.

It wasn’t lack of choice (many shelves full of my own books, plus some dozen from the library). It was that I found the books’ contents unappetizing. I put aside Daniel Deronda because Eliot’s sarcasm and Gwendolyn’s selfishness got on my nerves. I thought maybe a nice thick fantasy would cheer me up, so I bought Sherwood Smith’s Inda. It made me tired. I was rapidly losing hope. I picked up Treasure Island, still on the library pile. Oh, thank goodness.

Pirates, of course, along with many other essential ingredients: eighteenth century, a young innocent, mystery, high-seas sailing. A story to sink my teeth into.

Voila! Life is tasty again.

Library bounty

Yesterday was my bi-weekly visit to the local public library—the one that officially belongs to our village (though physically located in another), the one I can use for interlibrary loan. What did I bring home?

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

I had forgotten I wanted to read this after watching the PBS Masterpiece Theater version a couple months ago. How I love those Victorians. You can’t get a sentence like this anymore: “She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda’s mind was occupied in gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a ruined wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy cost of gilt mouldings, dark-toned colour and chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy—forming a suitable condenser for human breath belonging, in great part, to the highest fashion, and not easily procurable to be breathed in elsewhere in the like proportion, at least by persons of little fashion.”

Robert Louis Stevenson: Four Complete Novels, including Treasure Island

If I get a chance, I’d like to peek into The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well.

For Princess Two I picked up the latest in Mo Willem’s Pigeon saga, Pigeon Wants a Puppy, which was enjoyed family-wide. Princess Two and I also read together the picture book Turtle’s Penguin Day, by Valeri Gorbachev. Twice in a row (she’s in a penguin phase). Fortunately, the book had short and sweet text, and giggle-inducing art; so I didn’t mind.

In the interest of honesty, I now have to admit that I returned unread Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. I got to skimming through it, and it just didn’t appeal to me that day (or the next). It has been some years since I decided I don’t have to finish every book I pick up. Life is too short, and there are too many other books out there.

Eleventh day of Christmas books

This gift came from my youngest sister. It is not actually a book, but got me thinking about them…

The Dread Pirate Game by Front Porch Classics. Anyone who knows me can guess the first “Dread Pirate” that came to my mind—the Dread Pirate Roberts from William Goldman’s brilliant book and book-into-movie, The Princess Bride.

From there I got to reminiscing about some of my other favorite books featuring pirates:

Tanith Lee’s young adult fantasy novels Piratica and Piratica II

Ian Toll’s history about the early U. S. Navy, Six Frigates, which includes some fascinating material on the Americans’ struggle with the Barbary pirates at the turn of the 19th century

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, in which pirates pop up in various exotic waterways

I also realized the biggest omission in my trove of pirate literature is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which has been on my to-read list for far too long (though I recently watched the Muppets movie version).

Thanks, sis, for the fun pirate times, and Merry Christmas!