Dewey's Read-a-Thon is this Saturday!

In the book blogging world, possibly no event is bigger than Dewey's Read-a-Thon (link to the FAQ page on the official blog).  It's a twice-a-year 24-hour reading orgy, with prizes, mini-challenges, and cheerleaders (people who are assigned to visit your blog and cheer you on) and everything.  I have observed the goings-on each time they hold it, but have never jumped in and participated, mainly because I find it hard to do anything for 24 hours.  Plus, in the past, the date was never a convenient one for me.

This year, however?  It's this Saturday, October 18, and I'm jumping in with both feet.  One of the nice things about this read-a-thon is that it has no hard and fast rules about how one participates.  Of course, the ultimate goal and expectation is that people will stay up for 24 hours and read as much as they can in that timeframe.  But really, it's all about personal goals.  So participants have carte blanche to modify the rules to suit their own ends.  Some prizes are available only to people who partake of the full meal deal, of course, but there seems to be something in the read-a-thon for everyone.

So the other day, about 24 hours before signups closed, I signed up.  (Anyone can participate at any time, but to be guaranteed to get on the list for being visited by cheerleaders, prizes, etc., there was a signup deadline.  At last count, over 700 bloggers have signed up for the read-a-thon.)  But I am approaching the read-a-thon on a personal best level, at least this time around:

1. I won't be staying up the full 24 hours.  I'm not sure I could have done that when I was young and foolish, so I'm pretty sure I can't do it now that I'm old and foolish.  Plus, I have a church job that requires me to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed pretty early on Sunday mornings, so I need my beauty rest for that.  The read-a-thon starts on Saturday at 7 AM in my time zone, so I am envisioning that I will probably read most of the day, stay up reading as late as I can on Saturday night, and then get up early Sunday morning and finish off the read-a-thon before it ends at 7 AM.
2. I'm not even sure I can put my life on hold enough to do nothing but read all day and all night on Saturday, so I am going to commit to reading as much as I can, but when I need to do something else, I am going to do it.  Baby steps!
3. The conventional wisdom from bloggers who have done the read-a-thon for years is that the best approach is to choose short, captivating books that will keep you pressing ahead, and not heavy, boring, complex tomes that will bog you down.  Accordingly, I have chosen two books that should fit the bill:

All Hallows' Eve by Vivian Vande Velde

OK, I do realize this is pretty low-hanging fruit.  It's a book of YA short stories.  So it shouldn't make me even break a sweat.  However, it's the right time of year for this kind of reading, and I need something that will be an easy start.  I should be able to finish this book no matter what else I do during the read-a-thon, and that's kind of the whole idea.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I bought this book a few weeks ago on the strength of all the fantastic reviews it was getting, but I wasn't quite sure when I was going to read it.  Plus, I have never read any Gaiman before, so I wasn't sure if I would like it or not (despite the rave reviews).  BUT.... it's a small book (around 180 pages).  And it's supposed to be a really, really good story.  So I am adding this to the read-a-thon list also.  I might actually be able to finish it as well.

And that is that.  Two books.  No sense in shooting myself in the foot before I begin.  And if I read these two books in the space of 24 hours, that will be a first for me in my reader's life, so that will be something of an achievement all by itself.  And if I do by some miracle get through these two books and have gobs of spare time left, I bet I can find another book to read in the ever-growing TBR pile.

Is anyone else joining me in the read-a-thon?  If so, what are your plans and what are you reading?  If not, has anyone read these two books before (especially the Gaiman), and what did you think?

A Bookish Trip to Natchez

A week or so ago, I made a trip to Natchez, Mississippi (about three hours from where I live) to attend the wedding of one of my work colleagues.  It was a very festive occasion, as most weddings (hopefully) are -- a big church wedding at an Episcopal church, and during the ceremony I had my first experience with communion that involved a common cup of wine.  The microbiologist in me just about had a conniption fit and was prepared to sit this one out, but I reasoned my way through it:

1. It was real wine, after all, and alcohol is no slouch at disinfecting things;
2. The officiant wiped the rim of the chalice after every person drank from it;
3. It was a silver chalice.  Silver is also highly antimicrobial.

So -- I had some wine.  It was pretty nasty.

While in Natchez, I decided to make a trip to a small independent bookstore while I was there, because books!  This was my second trip to the city, but the first time I was there, I didn't look up a bookstore.  That was a mistake, because Natchez has a real gem of a bookstore, called Turning Pages.  (Love the name!)

When you walk in the store, you are immediately greeted by shelves and shelves of books.  It's the most inviting sight ever.

You're looking at more or less the width of the bookstore in this shot.  It's cozy!

Also near the door was this display of Greg Iles' most recent book, Natchez Burning.  In case you don't know, Greg Iles is Natchez' resident famous author.  In fact, while chit-chatting with the cashier during my checkout, I found out that Mr. Iles was getting married that day also, somewhere in Natchez in a private ceremony.  Talk about synchronicity!

These were signed copies of the book, actually.  One made it home with me.

While the bookstore is not large, it's sufficiently welcoming and stocked so that one can spend quite some time there (and I did).  And I came home with this:

1. The signed Greg Iles novel. I've never read any of his books, but I figured since I was in Natchez, I was morally obligated to buy this book. (ha)
2. The Secret History by Donna Tartt -- I bought this because I read The Goldfinch this summer and loved it (which reminds me, I still need to write a review of it). 
3. Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall.   No particular reason; it just looked like my kind of book.

On top of the stack is something I had not run across previously.  There you see three paperbacks which are samplers of upcoming books, put out by Penguin Books ("What the World is Reading") and their imprints Berkley Prime Crime, New American Library, and Obsidian Mysteries (the Mystery and Thriller Sampler).  These are essentially ARC samplers, and of course they were free.  And, of course, I took them home with me, because I don't have nearly enough books and I always need ideas for more.

If you're in the vicinity of Natchez (it's a wonderful place to spend a weekend, that's for sure), make sure you stop in at Turning Pages and say hello.  You will be glad you did!

By the way, here's a photo of a display at the Natchez Visitors' Center outlining the writers who hailed from Natchez.  Richard Wright is on there -- he's arguably the most famous writer who was born or lived in Natchez.  (He was actually born on a plantation near Natchez but spent the majority of his life somewhere else, most notably Chicago, New York, and Paris.)  Mr. Iles is on this exhibit as well, and although he was not born in Natchez, he was raised there and has since made it his home.

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by H.G. Wells and E.F. Benson

It's the sixth week of my R.I.P. "Peril of the Short Story" version of Deal Me In Lite, and this week I start reading two stories each week in order to get to the magical number of 13 by the end of October.  And this turned out to be a very interesting event.  There's already a lot of serendipity built into the Deal Me In method of reading, but when you pick and read two stories together, you can achieve even greater levels of serendipity, as I found out this week.

So for this week I chose the Ace and two of spades from my "Tragic Royalty" deck of cards:

The Ace corresponded to "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, and the two corresponded to "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery" by E.F. Benson.  Both of these stories are available on the Internet, but I got them from an anthology I have owned for quite some time, Ghosts, edited by Marvin Kaye:

Yes, that is Edward Gorey artwork on the cover.  I found an image that shows the entire dust jacket because it's really wonderful and highly appropriate for this book.

Both of these stories involve a person who spends time in a haunted room -- but one spends time there on purpose (because they don't really believe it is haunted) and the other KNOWS the room is haunted and gets trapped there by accident.

In "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells, the narrator proposes to spend the night in a haunted room, the so-called "red room" of Lorraine Castle, in which braver souls than he have spent the night, and died there.  The servants, who are elderly and who have lived through the history of the house, do their best to dissuade the narrator from this foolhardy act, but he is determined to do it.  As he makes himself comfortable (if that word may be used here) in the room for the night, he tries to dispel the overwhelming gloominess and darkness of the room with candles that he lights and sets up in various nooks and crannies of the room.  Then the candles start going out, in various combinations.  Is it a draft?  Or something more sinister?  Eventually the candles all go out at once, and the fire goes out as well, and the narrator is thrown into a terrified panic.  He runs around frantically in the dark, trying to find the door of the room, and knocks himself out on a piece of furniture.  Not to spoil the story for you (because it's really not much of a story, although very well-written and interesting), the next morning the narrator comes to the conclusion that what really haunts the room is Fear itself.

This leads us to the synchronicity with the second story I read this week, "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery," by E.F. Benson.  Let me just take a moment and make another plug, as I have before, for E.F. Benson as one of the more underrated modern British novelists (modern as in the early 20th century).  I have waxed eloquent about the pleasures of his Lucia novels elsewhere on this blog, and in my opinion this gem of a story is another example of his expert way with a tale.  I have never read much of his other work besides the Lucia novels, but apparently Benson is also well-regarded for his ghost stories, of which I believe he wrote several.  If they are anything like this one, I will have to hunt down the others and read them too.

In Benson's story, the Peveril family lives in a house that they know is haunted; in fact, they co-exist happily with several different family ghosts, and take a kind of pride and pleasure in interacting with their long-dead ancestors in this way.  This part of the story is actually pretty humorous, in Benson's typical understated, droll style.  However, there is one pair of ghosts that the family fears: the ghosts of twin babies that were brutally murdered by the ruthless Dick Peveril, so he could inherit the estate instead of them.  This murder, which involved throwing the babies into a fire, happened in the long gallery, and ever since then, the ghosts of the babies have haunted that room.  They appear only once or twice a year, and only in the dead of night, but the family is terrified of seeing them, because everyone who has ever seen their ghosts has died a horrible, gruesome death.  So every member of the family simply makes sure to stay out of the long gallery after dark, and they make sure their houseguests know this rule as well.

So this sets the stage for a New Year's Eve party where the family is hosting several guests, including Madge Dalrymple, who unfortunately twists her knee skating on the lake.  Madge decides to rest her leg by sitting in front of the fire in the long gallery.  She's warned not to forget about being in there after sunset, but of course you know what happens next.  Madge falls asleep over her book and wakes up right at dusk.  When she realizes what time it is, she becomes terrified, and of course the twin baby ghosts show up soon after.  What happens next, though, is an interesting twist on the traditional ghost story, and this ghost story actually turns out to have a happy ending.  It's not a sappy, tacked-on happy ending though -- it fits the tone and plot of the story perfectly.

I enjoyed both of these stories and would highly recommend both of them.  Look them up and let me know what you think!

"Amazing Grace" by William Hoffman

Deal Me In Lite, Week 15: "Amazing Grace" by William Hoffman

This week we have the four of diamonds, and another story from the anthology Growing Up in the South.  It's an interesting tale told from the point of view of a young boy in West Virginia (not exactly what I regard as the South, speaking as a native Tennessean and a transplanted Mississippian, but I realize it is below the Mason-Dixon line, so we don't need to quibble).

     

Nana is the matriarch of the family and the narrator's grandmother.  One day she stops doing all of her customary activities such as baking bread and filling the kitchen with good smells, and goes out to the yard to simply sit under the Indian cigar-tree (a catalpa tree, in case you are curious what that is, like I was).  This is so uncharacteristic of her behavior that the family immediately knows something is wrong.  It turns out that she is upset that her son Henry, a successful businessman who moved away to Pittsburgh, had never been baptized in the river, a family tradition.

The family calls for Henry, and he comes back to the homestead along with his wife Dale Blue and his son Dawson.  Nana wants them all to be baptized in the river, and she enlists the help of the minster, Preacher Arbogast.  Henry is finally talked into it, but Dale Blue, who is clearly a city girl, needs quite a bit more convincing.  She initially agrees, but backs out when they get to the river and it appears that this is the social event of the season, complete with photographers.  It takes some conniving on Henry's part to soften her up, and how he finally manages to do it is pretty entertaining.

This story is very evocative of the speech and pace of the South.  The plot is not that compelling but the story is worth reading just for the language.  For example, here's a scene just after Henry comes to visit and he has brought his mother a grandfather's clock as a present:

Nana eyed the clock.  She had an oval face, and her hair was thin, wispy cotton.  She adjusted her glasses to peer at the clock.  Then she turned away.

"But don't you like it?" Dale Blue asked.  "Henry went to lots of trouble to bring it."

"All that clock tells me is my days are running out, and nobody's been to the river," Nana said.

She wouldn't look at the clock again.  The men carried it into the hall to set it up a second time, but she went to bed without glancing at it.  Uncle Henry and Dale Blue came to the kitchen where they sat around the table with my mother and daddy as well as Aunt Henrietta and Aunt Cornelia and their husbands Albert and Asa.

"She's sure low," Aunt Cornelia said while she poured iced tea from a glass pitcher, her arms brown from helping Uncle Asa in the hayfields.  "I've not seen her this far down since lightning hit the heifers."

"Spoiled is what she is," Dale Blue said.

Boy, eyes bugged at Dale Blue as if she was a snake on a rock.  She was in the family but not of it.  She colored, touched her frozen-custard hair, and shrugged.

"Honey, maybe you better let me do the talking here," Uncle Henry said.

"But she's pouting like a child," Dale Blue said.

"All the work she's done for this family she's got a right to pout until Moses makes sauerkraut out of little sour apples in December," Aunt Henrietta said.

And there's more where that came from -- this is a wonderful story that is in the same league as the best Southern writing.  It's well worth your time if you ever run across it.

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

Harvest Home, by Thomas Tryon, has been on my Kindle TBR list FOREVER.  So when I was fishing around for ideas about the books to put on my R.I.P. Peril the First list, I knew I had to read this book.

Ned Constantine, his wife Beth, and their teenaged daughter Kate have just moved from New York to the sleepy little New England hamlet of Cornwall Coombe.  It's a place so traditional in its outlook that the villagers look askance on the use of something as basic as a tractor for getting their farming done.  And make no mistake, farming and their (only) crop, corn, is something they take VERY seriously in Cornwall Coombe.  Their entire year revolves around the planting and harvesting of the corn, with their major festivals which including Planting, Days of Seasoning, Tithing Day, the Corn Play, and the last and most mysterious, Harvest Home.

Even though this novel has what might now be regarded as something of a hackneyed plot (it might have been much more original when the book first came out in 1973, I don't know), Tryon successfully avoids making the characters too stereotypical, I think.  One of the major characters of the book is the Widow Fortune, who seems to be a creepy old lady when she first appears in the story, riding around in her horse and buggy, and wearing a little white cap (think Amish style).  Then, due to several important and plot-turning events, the reader gradually comes to trust her as a stern but ultimately kind-hearted and beneficent matriarch who watches over the welfare of everyone in the village.  Then.... the tables turn again.  OK, she IS a creepy old lady who is capable of pretty much anything.  She doesn't see herself this way, of course, but she's basically evil.

Bette Davis as the Widow Fortune in the made-for-TV movie version of the book (see below)

Other creepy events and pieces of information find their way into the narrative, gradually adding to the unease the reader keeps trying to push away.  The Constantines' next door neighbors are the Dodds -- Maggie and Robert.  Robert is blind, and the sound of his "books on tape" (although back in the 1970's it was more like "books on vinyl") floating in from the house next door is an ever-present background to the Constantines' lives.  One day Ned helps Robert put in his eyedrops and discovers that Robert is blind because his eyeballs are completely gone.  Hmmmm.......

Then there's the mystery of Gracie Everdeen, a villager who is now dead but whose grave is the only one outside the confines of the cemetery, as if she were being shunned even in death.  And no one really wants to talk about what happened to her, except that whatever she did brought on the last poor harvest, what the villagers call the "Great Waste."  Hmmmmm.........

And how about Missy Penrose, a creepy little girl who serves as the village's oracle, not only doing relatively innocent things like choosing baby names for expectant mothers, but also choosing the young man who will be the "Lord of the Harvest" for the coming seven years?  Oh, and she chooses the Lord of the Harvest by dipping her hands in the blood and entrails of a freshly-slaughtered sheep before walking around a circle of the young men and placing her bloody hands on the face of the one she chooses.  (Now you just can't tell me that's normal, I don't care who ya are.)  Hmmmmm.......

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea.  This novel is CREEPY.  And an excellent read!

The progression of events in this novel, a kind of slippery slope to the inevitable, is one of the main things that makes it so effective.  The reader watches as Ned goes from being enchanted with his new home of Cornwall Coombe, to being irritated at the old-fashioned ways and attitudes of the villagers, to being suspicious of what is actually going on behind the scenes, to the final stage of understanding the lengths to which the villagers will go to preserve their way of life.  It's like watching pretty much every horror film ever made, where you are yelling at the characters NOT to look behind that door, NOT to go down into the dark cellar, NOT to go find out what made that weird noise outside -- and secretly hoping that they WILL.

The book was adapted into a TV miniseries movie, "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home," in 1978.  The cast included Bette Davis as the Widow Fortune.  It's available in parts on YouTube, and I did watch a little bit of it after reading the novel.  It's supposed to be relatively faithful to the plot of the book (an increasing rarity these days) but the book has to be much more entertaining.  Plus, 1970's TV miniseries -- need I say more?

In short, if you are looking for a scary-ish, spooky, creepy autumnal read, you could do far worse than this book.  I highly recommend it!

"Lusus Naturae" by Margaret Atwood

Deal Me In Lite, R.I.P. Edition, Week 5: “Lusus Naturae” by Margaret Atwood (Story 5 of 13)

I have a confession to make: I would read Margaret Atwood's grocery list.  Any kind of words she wants to put down in any order would be OK by me.  I think she is one of the most interesting and inventive writers today.  So when I saw her story "Lusus Naturae" in my McSweeney's anthology, I knew it had to go on the R.I.P. Peril of the Short Story list.  And this week, the 5 of spades dealt it up for me.

    

"Lusus naturae" is Latin for "a freak of nature," and that's what the narrator of this story admits to being.  She is a nameless young girl whose family does not know what to do with her, except they know they cannot keep hiding her any longer.  We never get any real picture of what she looks like, but she refers to her yellow eyes, pink teeth, hairy face and body, and red fingernails -- so the "lusus naturae" terminology is apt.

The family decides that she should "die," so they fake her death and burial.  Oddly, this gives her more freedom than she has ever known before, as long as she stays out of sight.  Completely self-aware and intelligent, she uses her new-found freedom to educate herself by reading and trying to learn about the world.  But she has a penchant for roaming around at night, and it is this which finally becomes her undoing.  Stumbling upon lovers meeting furtively at dusk, she mistakes them for creatures who are in the preliminary stages of becoming like her, and she is oddly, irresistibly, and tragically drawn to them.  The story ends rather predictably but Atwood's decision to write the story from the point of view of the monster gives the ending a great deal of nobility and redemption that it would not have otherwise had.

I enjoyed this very short story.  It was well-written and suitably creepy for my R.I.P. short story enterprise.  Atwood has a new short story collection that's just come out, and you'd better believe it's on my wishlist!

"February 1999: Ylla" by Ray Bradbury

Deal Me In Lite, Week 14: "February 1999: Ylla" by Ray Bradbury

Another visit to the Ray Bradbury anthology this week, courtesy of the Ace of Spades, and I must say this story was much more satisfying than the one last week.

"February 1999: Ylla" is an interesting little story that focuses on a Martian couple, Mr. and Mrs. K, otherwise known as Yll (the husband) and Ylla (the wife).  They live a calm, and I suppose typical, existence on the Red Planet.  However, they are not happy.  They become unhappier when Ylla starts having strange dreams about men arriving in a strange silver object.  In her dreams, they state that they come from the third planet.  This is, of course, is impossible according to Yll -- he reminds Ylla that their scientists have determined there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth to support life ("Earth" is what the men in Ylla's dream call their planet).

Still, Ylla keeps dreaming about the arrival of the spacemen, and her dreams become much more vivid.  She even dreams about falling in love with one of the spacemen, which of course doesn't sit too well with Yll.  He begins a series of ploys to keep Ylla's mind off the spacemen, but nothing seems to work.  Soon, there comes a day when Ylla is convinced, through her dreams, that the spacemen are arriving that day, and she can't wait to meet them.  The events of that day are surprising and tragic -- I won't spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that Ylla never gets to meet her spaceman.

One of the things that I liked about this story is the way in which Bradbury almost effortlessly paints a picture of a Martian couple and Martian existence that is immediately believable and realistic in the mind's eye of the reader.  It's quite a feat.

This story was originally included in the short story collection/pseudo-novel The Martian Chronicles, which I have never read.  However, after having read and enjoyed this story, I am thinking the stories in this collection might be suitable fodder for a future Deal Me In sequence.