Follies Past – A Review
Title: Follies Past
Author: Melanie Kerr
Publisher: Petticoat Press
Genre: Historical fiction/ Classic spin-off
Length: 272 pages
“Follies Past” should be the name of the file folder for every other Jane Austen spin off, because this book blows them all out of the water.
This is by far the best Austen spin off I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Most Pride & Prejudice sequels or prequels read like fan fiction, but Kerr has managed to construct a novel that reads like one of Austen’s own making. It could very well have been a long lost manuscript of Jane’s, documenting the characters of Pride & Prejudice before they encounter the Bennets.
I was so happy reading this, I’ve always longed to get a bit more of Georgiana’s story. Kerr does an excellent job of taking the small tidbits of information we know about characters and giving them a full and lush back story without straying from our vision of them.
I think Caroline Bingley was truly brought to life as well. I both hate her more and less – how is that possible? Through Darcy’s eyes: “He ought to have known that a lady who is too sparkling and clever is also cunning and insolent and not to be trusted.”
Much is learned from Darcy’s perspective without the act of spelling everything out, something other books have done in diary form turning Darcy into an effeminate sap. Instead, from Kerr, Darcy expresses himself naturally and in his own fashion: “Gibbon’s History is worth an entire library of your sentimental drivel. The depth and breadth of his scholarship paints a picture of the Empire that may never be surpassed. How can you compare such an achievement to your works of vapid sentiment.”
Kerr has stayed true to the characters, true to the time, and yet wielded a rich and elaborate story. It’s beautiful and brilliant, and I cannot imagine an Austen fan who would not love it.
My one criticism is this: I ADORE the front cover of this book – but my first and continuous reaction is that it is not a cover that belongs on *this* book. It’s a fun and awesome piece of art, I’d even hang it on my wall I like it so much, but it doesn’t truly portray what is within the pages.
Below, Miss Golightly is caught on film inspecting Kerr’s book. She had the same reaction I did to the cover, “Oh I love that cover! Wait, her writing sounds like it could be Jane Austen! That’s incredible. I’m a little confused by the cover now.”
Five stars for the story. Five stars for the cover art. But only three stars for matching the cover art to the story.
The Colorado Kid / Haven
Title: The Colorado Kid
First Edition Release Date: October, 2005
Author: Stephen King
Synopsis taken from stephenking.com:
Vince Teague and Dave Bowie are the sole operators of The Weekly Islander, a small Maine newspaper. Stephanie McCann has been working for them as an intern. When Stephanie asks if they’ve ever come across a real unexplained mystery in the fifty years they’d been publishing the paper, they tell her the story of The Colorado Kid.
I have to be honest, I picked up this book because I have developed an unhealthy obsession for the tv show Haven.
Which, despite being drastically different stories, I like both King’s original story and the tv show spin off, a lot.
There are a lot of complaints on the internet about the show having nothing to do with the book. I wonder what King
thinks, actually, because even though there were some definite creative licensees taken, I think the writers of the show have tried to honor the original creator.
In the book, Vince and Dave are not brothers – in the show they are. I’m not sure why that particular route was taken for the show, I don’t think it would have made a big difference to keep their original relationship. I do, however, like their characters’ dynamic in the show. And I adore the actors who play them.
The book focuses on the intern, Stephanie, who is asking Vince and Dave questions regarding the biggest mystery in Hammock Beach. In Haven, Audrey Parker (FBI) has come to town to investigate a different murder. Absurdly different, until you dive deeper into the show where you find that Audrey’s entire reason for being in Haven (or Hammock Beach, as it is called in the novel) has everything to do with the 1980’s mystery of The Colorado Kid.
If you have the patience to really get into the show, you’ll find that the show and the book have this main common thread:
In 1980 an unidentified body is found on a beach in Maine, wearing gray slacks, and a white shirt. No one seems to know who he is, or how he got to be there, but he is dubbed The Colorado Kid.
King’s book allows this mystery to mostly go unsolved, as Dave Sturm wrote in 2009:
“[…] King has written a meditation on stories by telling one that heads to a letdown, because the central mystery — SPOILER: How did the body of a Coloradan end up dead on a Maine beach just hours after he disappeared from Colorado???: END SPOILER — is left a mystery at the end.
King has violated a central tenet inherent in Hard Case Crime. The story has no plausible resolution.”
by Dave Sturm
Rambles.NET
8 August 2009
The point of the book is the beauty of things that are mysterious, how one answer unveils another question – at least that’s what I got out of it. The book also leaves itself wide open to becoming a set of mysteries that must be solve to explain the existence and death of this strange man on a beach, which the tv show honors.
So, in Haven, every answer Audrey Parker uncovers in the show leads to another series of questions. The show has one magical quality – it’s entire existence is someone’s creative answer to King’s unsolved mystery. By the fourth season, you may start to catch my drift. I am still patiently waiting for season five to get uploaded to Netflix.
In short, I adore the show and I loved the book. I read the first 137 pages of the book during my one hour lunch break. I read the rest of the book as soon as I completed my work. One thing that I missed doing, however, was read King’s afterward. I was in a hurry to get home, but couldn’t go without finishing the story – but putting all my thoughts in review here I wish I had taken the extra moments to read what he had to say about his own work.
Patricia & Max
I’ve had Patricia Von Pleasantsquirrel
Anyway, we read it tonight, and I wanted to be sure I shared this with the world.
Patricia Von Pleasantsquirrel is a snotty little girl that thinks she’s supposed to be queen of everything. Her mother won’t let her stay up past midnight, her dad won’t let her eat cake before dinner, her baby brother has the audacity to act like a baby instead of be her servant, and her dog has the bigger audacity to be a dog instead of being a great white stallion. She is one who suffers from the great illness of entitlement, when she hasn’t done a darn thing to earn any titles.
In front of my moatless cottage before it broke in half.
“Patricia was certain that a one-level, three-bedroom, moatless cottage was no place for royalty.”
Part of me wants to say, “No kidding, sister.” The other part of me says, “Hey! I love this one-level, three-bedroom, moatless cottage that’s literally falling apart at the seams…” Oh, we’re not actually talking about MY house…
So then, in protest to a life that is not exactly what she’s dreamed, Patricia puts on her frilliest dress, takes out all her books, and settles on one…
If you haven’t felt the familiar tingle of a child who has “made mischief of one kind and another,” we can spell it out for you – as Proimos does. Patricia decides to read Where the Wild Things Are
This is the point in the book when I gently close it and actually pick up the Caldecott winning children’s book by Maurice Sendak. This is where we jump into Max’s adventure… we roar with beast… we gnash our terrible teeth… and come back home to settle into Patricia’s story.
Where Patricia thinks:
“If a silly boy with no social graces could be made king with no effort at all, then imagine how easy it would be for me to find my princessdom.”
I won’t give away her whole story. I won’t riddle this review with spoilers. But I will say, my favorite parts include two jelly beans named Edith Wharton and Louisa May Alcott as well as a hippo named Elvis.
The only thing that could make this reading experience more complete would be if I finally bought a copy of The Giving Tree
Literary Journal Monday – Gatsby Love
All About Additional Literary Journal Adventures at Good Books in the Woods…
I got to peek at some incoming journals today, they were hanging out on the owner’s desk…
The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924[1] to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers. The magazine went out of print in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy. – from Wikipedia
So that’s cool, but the real juice is this, here in the June 1924 edition…
For those who don’t know, “Absolution” is important to fans of The Great Gatsby. Why? Well, you see, the writing of The Great Gatsby has a rich history. It may have been published by Scribner in 1925, but Fitzgerald had several previous versions of the literary classic.
In 1923, he had written 18k words for the book that was destined to become The Great Gatsby but scrapped most of what he had written and began again. These scraps can be found peppered throughout literature under different headings and titles – titles like “Absolution.”
“I’m glad you liked Absolution. As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan,” Fitzgerald wrote his editor. The novel in question was none other than The Great Gatsby.
The above letter is a page from Dear Scott/ Dear Max: The Fitzgerald – Perkins Correspondence.
So many neat things can be found inside the pages of literary journals and I’m enjoying discovering the treasures.
Somewhat unrelated, but definitely something for the Fitzgerald collector that I found while researching this post, are some wonderful embellished journals. The creators have taken the first handwritten page of The Great Gatsby and imprinted it on the cover of leatherbound journals. So beautiful: http://blog.paperblanks.com/2012/09/f-scott-fitzgerald/
Housman for Kids
A Weekly Low Down on Kids Books
Title: A Shropshire Lad
Author: A. E. Housman
Illustrator: Charles Mozley
Genre: Poetry
In February I stumbled across A.E. Housman. Between the state of my soul, the weather, and Housman’s poetry, I found a little hub of safety. In the words of my best friend, “Where has he been all our lives?”
Apparently everywhere.
Even in kid’s books, of all places.
The book I found is a $10 hardback from Good Books in the Woods. It’s a hardback. It was printed in 1968, and the style of binding, as well as the illustrations, reflect that. To me, it’s the perfect edition to have floating around the house for your kiddo to discover and flip through as early readers. Same classic poetry with a much different kid friendly feel.
Literary Journal Monday – The Black Cat
It may have been a whole week since my last post, but the discovery I made today has made the whole week of dry reading worth it. In fact, what I discovered today at Good Books in the Woods made this entire series of Literary Journal Mondays worth it.
Today I found The Black Cat.
Tucked away, just two hardbound volumes (collections of the actual magazine), hidden in the Literary Journal room.
It was a beautiful, thrilling moment, opening the jacket to a random page and finding this:
“The Black Cat” is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1843 – it was a horror piece about a murderer similar to The Tell-Tale Heart. It’s no wonder that in 1895, a literary journal called The Black Cat was born, dedicating itself to short stories of an “unusual nature.” Of course, I don’t know for sure that the founders of The Black Cat were referencing Poe, but I can’t help but jump to that conclusion. It’s something I would do.
The original m
agazine covers varied from month to month, like most magazine covers do, but they all have a spunky contemporary Gothic look that I imagine was hard for people to pass up. The publication ran until 1922 and featured some surprising contributors. Rupert Hughes, Susan Glaspell, Ellis Parker Butler, Alice Hegan Rice, Holman Day, Rex Stout, O. Henry, Charles Edward Barns, and Octavus Roy Cohen all made appearances in the journal. For Jack London collectors it has become a bit of marvelous legend, as London attributed his “A Thousand Deaths” story being printed there to saving his life. They paid him when no one else would, and when he really needed the cash. London is quoted having said, “literally and literarily I was saved.”
It is so coveted by collectors that the original edition featuring London sells at auction for more than the above hardbound books go for in antiquities stores.
Were I a millionaire, I would not hesitate to buy them all up. Standing in the store today I remembered Nicholas Basbaines’ A Gentle Madness as I salivated over the two collectibles on the shelf. This is true beauty, I thought, this in my hand.
I read Jack London’s contribution, it is only a few pages, then continued to snap photos as I carefully turned the pages, my eyes thirsty for old fonts and typesetting.
A Little Bit of Fad Reading
Title: Divergent
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books (An Imprint of HarperCollins)
Length: 487 pages
So I finally took that leap onto the [fad] train.
When I worked full time in the bookstore, chatting with customers, recommending books in person, I would have read this as soon as it was a thing for the sole purpose of finding something on the shelves that was similar when we were out of stock. It was published in 2011, the year I left. That last year was also one spent handling more inventory and displays as the store’s SIM than handling people and their whims and desires in the book world. So though I was vaguely familiar with the title I totally missed the need to devour this title in a day and come back with a list of titles to hold over disappointed customers until we could get this one in their hands.
Somewhere along the road in my stay-at-home-mom life I discovered Hunger Games, and fell in love. Though part of a huge fad, Hunger Games was no Twilight Saga or Vampire Diaries series. Hunger Games was epic and beautiful and insanely well written.
So when I saw the preview for the movie Divergent, I thought, ‘What the heck? Let’s see if it will surprise me too.’
Color me surprised – again! I really liked this one. I read it in one day – nearly one sitting. It tends to be easy to do that with contemporary young adult novels, no matter how long they are.
I found Hunger Games more moving, but I was able to relate more to the main character of Divergent. I’m nervous to see how they portray her in the movie, the book version is a person I feel very in tune with. Katniss Everdeen is someone I admire and look up to as a literary character, but with whom I share very few similarities. Tris’s story feels as though Roth dropped my mind into her version of dystopia. Tris feels how I feel and tends to react in ways I am known to react. (So far anyway.) Many of her fears were my fears at 16, actually, I can’t think of one that is different.
For that, it was incredibly enjoyable and easy to get into, and despite this being completely entertaining fluff fiction, I consider the hours spent reading it time well spent.
I’m interested to see how the rest of the books go (it’s a series), as well as the movie adaptation in theaters this month. Although I’m a little nervous that it might be too easy to amp up the cheese factor for the big screen – but I guess I’ll have to take a flying leap onto that fad train as well or I’ll never find out.
Literary Journal Monday…
…became “figure out how to make my car run by book club tonight” Monday. Sort of.
This involved coercing my husband into taking the battery out – because I hate dealing with the stupid under-the-hood-cover they throw on new cars these days. I am one of those truly-85-in-every-aspect-not-just-books-and-my-FLIP-phone people. In that I was more than happy to work on my car myself… alternators, spark plugs, shocks, struts, the whole shebang… as long as it was from 1987 or older. This business I’ve driving now… well, it might be all nice and cushy and have air conditioning and defrosters that work; and maybe when it rains my feet don’t get wet because there’s an actual floor board, not just a carpet… but I HATE IT. I hate it because as soon as I pop the hood it looks like a Russian space station from a disaster movie set in the future to me, not a car.
So, yes, despite women’s lib and all that – I coerced my husband into unhooking the dead battery for me. I still took it to AutoZone, carried it in myself, and had it replaced (for FREE! It was under warranty, thank goodness). But I still came home, handed my husband the keys to his truck and told him the new battery was where he’d left the old one. Pretty sure he wasn’t too keen on hooking the new one up, but neither was I. I married a mechanic for a reason! I CAN work on my car, but I’d rather read a book.
Or, in this case a literary journal off my personal shelf.
McSweeney’s Autumn 1998
My copy is a 3rd printing from 2006, “Created in darkness by troubled Americans. Printed in Iceland.”
I always like their little subtitles and witticisms. Reminds me of Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail and the majestic moose biting their sister.
I’ve read McSweeney’s before, issues one through three in their entirety to be exact; the rest of the issues I’ve just peeked through. I collect them and have a whole shelf of them all my own to be perused at my leisure and today I picked up issue one again. How can I not when it’s filled with goodies like this:
“Come close […] because I’m going to tell you a secret. Ready? Here it is: Each and every one of us, and I mean everyone, has a tiny little troll who lives in our heads and controls our thoughts.” – pg. 12
The letter section just kills me. It’s too wonderful.
Neal Pollock’s bits are always fun, too. Like this one from issue one:
“My life is not private any longer, but neither is it really public. Rather, it’s a kind of quasi-private-psuedo-public life that could only exist in the netherworld of the Internet. I have given myself up to the web, and like a beast in a cage that eats meat all the time, the web insatiably demands more.” – The Burden of Internet Celebrity, pg. 22 of “Gegenshein”
And the Paris letter in issue two (“Pollyanna’s Bootless Errand”) that I just can’t bring myself to try to sum up; you simply must go read it yourself.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad day spent, despite the hiccups. I got to re-read an old essay involving Man-Bats on the Moon by Paul Collins (featured in issue two as well), whom I love, and that is never time badly spent. And yes, I said Man-Bats. On. The. Moon. If I haven’t imparted some sort of desire in you to go discover the glory that is Paul Collins’ knack for discovery weird history, then I have seriously failed as a book blogger over the last few years.
The kiddo and I also ate through nearly an entire crock pot of corn chowder, half a block of Swiss cheese, and a container of cayenne pepper. (Also there was a vat of coffee and a jug of V8 Fusion involved, so you KNOW it was a day well spent.)
Oh, and then, I went to book club. Because we got my car running just fine and in plenty of time. I spent a little under two hours discussing Herodotus with book clubbers. And now, moments after midnight (moments in Tuesday!), my brain kind of hurts a little.
Herodotus and Me
On Wednesday one of my book clubbers emailed me about my reading status. How far along was I in preparation for our discussion for Monday (now tomorrow).
We will be discussing The Histories by Herdotus.
When he emailed me I was only on Book 3 (out of 9), roughly 200 pages into the historian’s account (out of 953).
I sat down, promising myself I wouldn’t go to bed until I had complete Book 4…
I had to stop myself after completing Book 6.
It is not going to be difficult to finish this book by Monday. Now, Sunday afternoon, I’m to Book 9 and I didn’t read anything at all yesterday. You would expect Herodotus to be dry and boring, another clubber said it was like reading the bible. My best friend read the reblog of the North Africa post and said, “I WISH that sounded interesting to me.”
The fact that it doesn’t astounds me.
Ancient History fascinates me I’m riveted. Hooked. I want to know everything. So much that when I stopped to take a bath I took The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Wednesday and Thursday alone, I read through most of King Darius I’s reign. I learned a long forgotten word from some government or history class long passed – oligarchy – and contemplated the reality of governments.
I also did a bit of research on Parnassus and enjoyed pulling my Oxford English Dictionary down to inspect with my handy-dandy turtle magnifying class, and I felt quite studious. These are the things that bring me joy.
Anakalian Whims 
Literary Journal Monday – Mapping My Mind
March 10, 2014 at 10:14 pm (In So Many Words, Reviews, The Whim) (ADD, ancient history, books, dystopia, dystopian society, fiction, Gone, good books in the woods, Hunger, Lang Leav, literary journals, London Review, love, Michael Grant, poetry, reading life, reviews, romance, series, social commentary, Tonight You're Mine, You Instead, young adult)
I am not ADD, but my mind is often many places at once. It goes and goes… it races… it is unstoppable.
I was craving a little bit of dystopian society literature after reading Herodotus. My brain spinning in a circular momentum about democracies, oligarchies, and dictatorships. Darius and then Xerxes tyrading around ancient lands building the Persian Empire. A thousand utopian and dystopian variations of all societies throughout history – a million possible outcomes for our modern world – twisting about in my mind. Conveniently, it was at this moment that a trailer for the movie Divergent came on and I thought, “It’s about time I read Veronica Roth.”
Cue discussion of autism I’ve been having on and off with people since reading Not Even Wrong written by Paul Collins. Collins is an amazing author and obscure historian. Still suffering from story hangovers from Divergent and the movie Tonight You’re Mine (all about instantaneous human connections) – I found myself thinking about my niece’s Gone series.
Set in a town in California, all the kids fifteen and under have been left in a supernatural bubble – all adults over puberty have vanished, leaving kids and babies to fend for themselves and create a new government. Not unlike Lord of the Flies, different factions have formed. One is under the leadership of Sam Temple, another under his half brother Caine (the biblical implications of Caine and Abel not to be lost on readers, of course). Sam and his new girlfriend, Astrid, are two of the oldest left behind. They have formed a parental union for the younger kids, caring for all the helpless, including Astrid’s autistic brother.
Like bumper pool – or pinball, if you missed out on the bumper pool phenomena – the synapses in my brain spark and twitch and leap bringing me back to Paul Collins/Not Even Wrong/ McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Then, I find myself thinking, “Goodness, it’s Literary Journal Monday.
London Magazine February/March 1981 Vol. 20 Nos. 11 &12
The Private Letters of Tennessee Williams and a piece on Gore Vidal catch my eye. I flip through the first few ads, the table of contents, then stop dead on a heading: FINAL REMINDER.
My thoughts have veered so far off track that I forget what I was reading altogether. I flip through the journal in my hand trying to grasp the reason I had sat down to look at this in the first place.
It’s March. St. Patty’s Day is coming up. Irish authors keep popping in and out of my mind. Ireland… Scotland… Tonight You’re Mine… music… poetry… Derek Mahon, an Irish poet’s name blinks at me from the page of the literary journal in my hand. Literary Journal Monday, of course. I read the poem “The Elephants” first. I love elephants. Then my eyes skip over to “April in Moscow” and I read “Spring burst into our houses…” It does, doesn’t it? Just bursts right in and none too soon. At the end of the poems there is an ad for the Poetry Society Bookshop at 21 Earls Court Square in London. I wonder if it is still there.
If they do still exist, I bet they have a copy of Lang Leav’s Love & Misadventure. I’m dying for a copy. Leav has been speaking to my soul lately. Misadventures stuck in the cogs of the mind of a woman turned 30.
A line from Grant’s book swings into full view of my mind’s eye:
There rarely is when a hug is really needed. It’s that moment Leav writes about…
The lack of selfishness between the characters at this point is refreshing in fiction and real life.
In a 2014 American Society of infantile adults who never learned to fend for themselves and work hard without constant praise, we are fascinated by literature and movies where children and teens are forced to grow up overnight and be adults.
It’s sad when the idea of fifteen-year-olds co-leading a community and making wise, unselfish decisions for themselves and each other sounds absurd and fictional. My associative mind leaps back to all the ancient history I’ve been studying, back to the likes of King Tut – pharaoh at age nine – dead by nineteen, married somewhere in between.
We believe in responsible marriages like the Romans, but we chase telepathic connections like the Greeks. What a very convoluted and contradictory way to live – the reality of a dystopian society is that every society is a dystopia – even a society of one. Our minds are everywhere and nowhere. Of course we are in conflict.
I suppose you Literary Journal Monday followers got a little more than you wanted. I bit off more than I could chew today. I attempted to map my own mind and identify all the associations and patterns, leaving myself somewhat exhausted from chasing whimsies.
At least I got to spend a few stolen moments in this room…
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