Over Memorial Day weekend I was back in the Twin Cities for a whirlwind trip of seeing old friends, doing a bit of ancestry research, some great classical music, and three or four trips to Dairy Queen. My uncle and aunt live a stone’s throw from a Half Price Books. I didn’t think I was going to pop in this time but then a friend of mine who works there let me know HPB was having a 20% off sale that weekend. How could I say no to that? So, on my way to meeting some friends for lunch I had just enough time to pop in and pick up a few things.

With only 30 minutes to browse (which turned into 34) I only got through about the letter L. By that point I started to really just skim and then had to have a really adult moment and walk away from the rest of the alphabet. Probably a good thing given that I already had 14 books in my basket.

The Plato Papers – Peter Ackroyd
I think this one is the biggest gamble of the bunch. In addition to thinking that Ackroyd is not my cup of tea (don’t know why) this one takes place in the year 3700. I am quite intrigued. 

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
I’ve seen the 1990s film, but never read the book. How could I pass up this retro-vintage edition?

A Kind of Anger – Eric Ambler
I’ve read a library copy and I just finished the audiobook so why do I need a copy? I’m not sure, but it is a cool old copy that was fairly inexpensive.

The Brimming Cup – Dorothy Canfield
After reading and loving the Persephone-published novel The Home-Maker I have picked up some old copies of Canfield novels hoping I would like them half as much. I tried reading The Deepening Stream but found it tedious and did not finish it. It kind of put me off Canfield but the fact that Virago reissued this title makes me think it would be a good one for giving her another chance.

The Sea House – Esther Freud
It had the word village on the jacket flap and a cosy looking cover. Total roll of the dice.

Innocent Summer – Frances Frost
Vermont in the summer, pretty cover, lovely illustrations. This could fall into the buying it just because it’s pretty camp. Fingers crossed.

The Matchmaker – Stella Gibbons
Everyone loves Cold Comfort Farm. I don’t. I haven’t been able to finish the book and I don’t like the film. Despite the farm inspired cover of this lovely Vintage edition, I’m hoping it doesn’t include an untidy farm that needs tidying so that it is so damn untidy. (Can you see why CCF didn’t work for me?)

& Sons – David Gilbert
I remember when this one was all over the blogosphere, but I didn’t remember anything about it to the point where I picked it up, decided to get it, discussed it in a Tweet, and yet still didn’t make the connection that this was that book until I just sat down to write this blog post.

The Comedians – Graham Greene
The Lawless Roads – Graham Greene
Travels with My Aunt – Graham Greene
I’ve already read TWMA but given my recent interest in Greene I decided I need to own a copy. The other two I haven’t read and don’t really know anything about either of them.

The Diary of a Nobody – George and Weedon Grosssmith
I try to stay away from the Folio Society editions–I don’t like the slip cases for one thing–but the illustration of the lamp on the book spine got me to take it off the shelf. It appears to be a London-y tale written in diary format. I’m just hoping it isn’t too madcap.

In Our Time – Ernest Hemingway
I’ve never even heard of this one. In general I like Hemingway. Might have also been influenced by this old Scribner Library edition.

Free Air – Sinclair Lewis
I’ve read a lot of Lewis, but I had never even heard of this one. It was published the year before his breakthrough hit and seminal work Main Street.

This may see a little premature, but I am already starting to think about what kind of reading material I am going to take on my August vacation. Usually this means I have two weeks of reading opportunities that I need to try and fill. If we are headed somewhere via car, often up to Maine, it means that I take about 10 books for 14 days and buy 20 more along the way. But this year we are headed to Idaho to go on a whitewater rafting trip. Not only is this kind of trip probably not very conducive to reading, but we have severe luggage limitations. For six days on the river we are limited to a fairly small “wet bag” and most of that needs to be filled with things like thermal clothing and rain gear.

But they do suggest having a book to read. So what should it be? It needs to be long enough to last. It needs to be lightweight. It needs to be a copy I don’t mind ruining. My first thought was to take something long that I know I want to read but have a hard time committing to when I have dozens of other books at hand. But I could find myself getting easily distracted and then not doing any reading. Would that be a bad thing? With a group of 16 people in remote wilderness with no phones or anything else electronic, surrounded by amazing views and scenery. Constantly looking over my shoulder for bears and mountain lions. Maybe I shouldn’t have my head in a book.

My second thought was Trollope or Wilkie Collins. I kind of wish I hadn’t already read The Three Musketeers. That seems like a perfect book for this sort of thing. What do you all think? What should I take? What would you take?

I should add that the rest of trip will offer plenty of reading time. Flight to Denver. One night at an airport hotel. One night in Stanley, Idaho. Six nights on the river. Four nights in Portland, Oregon and then a flight from Portland back to DC. That is going to require reading material as well. Maybe if it is a big chunkster, it could last the whole trip. And god knows that books will be purchased at Powell’s in Portland.

I love a dilemma like this. But not one like the one below…

This isn’t the outfitter we are going with, but this video gets me really excited and makes me think I might not need a book after all.

After being away from our home for a year, it is nice to be back and watch things pop up in the garden. Granted, much of the yard, especially the back, is in shambles after the construction and won’t look good again until next year. But, the stuff that is still around looks rather pretty. John will have to fill me on the variety of iris because I think it is a beaut but don’t remember what he told me.

Those that know me know that I love to set myself up for failure when it comes to bookish goals/challenges. Perhaps failure isn’t the right word. I did, after all finish Simon Thomas’s beastly Century of Books. And I have a decent success rate with the infamous TBR dare on James‘ blog. Maybe what I mean to say is that I set myself up to be miserable–but no, even that is too strong.

I guess, like it is for many of you, it’s really a love/hate thing with me and challenges. I love to join them or think them up, but I don’t always love doing them. But then today I bounced over to Lonesome Reader and saw Eric’s post about the shortlist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction and I started to get that feeling. He has reviewed five of the six books and possibly read the sixth already. I’ve read none of them. But I think I am going to…oh dear…trying to fight it off…can’t. hold. back. I’m going to read them all. (Cut to image of Kermit the Frog flailing his arms and saying yaaaay.)

I know that part of what has me bamboozled is that I am just in one of those moods where I want to read everything. But there are other reasons as well:

1. This a good opportunity to see what passes for good, prize-worthy fiction these days. Given my predilection for old books, this is a good thing.
2. Simon Savidge has sung the praise of The Bees repeatedly in print and on The Readers.
   The Ali Smith cover is just too cool.
3. I feel like everyone has read Sarah Waters and I haven’t. Given this one is set in 1920s London I think I could like it. Hopefully not too many flappers.
4. Ironically, at a recent book blogger get together Frances of Nonsuch Book couldn’t tempt any of the seven or so bloggers in attendance to take a free hardcover edition of the Anne Tyler. She ended up leaving it on a free table in front of Capitol Hill Books. Now I will have to buy it. The last time I read Tyler was 1989–The Accidental Tourist. Even though I liked it I haven’t tried anything else.
5. The others I know nothing about.

I will not be finishing them prior to the winner being announced, whenever that is. I just know I won’t.

Lucy asked me if she could help announce the winners of my book give away. Look at that face, how could I say no?

The randomly chosen winners are…

Crampton Hodnet 1 – Karen K

Crampton Hodent 2 – Laura C

Civil to Strangers – Jennifer

Famous Last Words – Cal

The Magnificent Spinster – Kathy

Gerald and Elizabeth – [edited 5/6/15] Ellen B

I will leave a reply on the winners’ comments just in case there are duplicate names. If you are a winner please email your mailing address to hogglestock [at] outlook [dot] com

[For those of you wondering what happened to My Porch scroll down past this post.]

Well maybe you haven’t been wondering, but I sure was. I don’t recall when I first saw the meal service pop up on Facebook or somewhere like that but I was intrigued by it from the start. I love any kind of kit that comes in a box and I like food so how could I not be interested? Although I had no intention of ordering the service, I did check out their website and saw a blog post somewhere about someone trying it out. I was totally impressed by the quality of the graphics, copy, and photography. And according to that blog (the name of which I will never remember) the food was good too. Still, didn’t seem like something I would get for myself no matter how cool it looked. Well, I also liked the fact that the service required actual cooking, that these were not prepared foods.

Still, not for me. Because I looked at Blue Apron’s site, I started to get pop-ups for similar services like Plated and Healthy Somethingorother. But neither of them were compelling enough visually to get me to even click on the links. And then these really cheesy ads started to pop up on cable for another service called Hello Fresh. For some reason I poo-pooed all these other services and was loyal to Blue Apron. I’m a sucker for good packing and marketing and the others just didn’t look as cool. Not to mention the fact that, rightly or wrongly, I considered Blue Apron to be the original and all the others to be copies. And I hate copy cats.

All this loyalty and I hadn’t even tried it.  But then I saw some reference to the fact that each meal was 500-700 calories per person. Bingo. That finally did it. I have been cutting down on calorie intake but am terrible at portion size and control when I cook from scratch. Too much calculating. But here was what promised to be tasty meals, perfectly portioned, and fun to cook. And it turned out to be true. The two-person plan gives you three meals a week. It was indeed lots of fun to cook, the recipes were things I would never attempt on a weeknight, the meals were really damn good, and overall totally satisfying. We liked it so much that I have now ordered a second box for the week, but this time vegetarian recipes. This means six original, often unusual, foreign-inspired meals a week. And the total cost is less than I would spend at Whole Foods in a week not to mention all the rotten produce I throw out when my weekday resolve to cook doesn’t match up with my weekend grocery buying.

Today I got our first vegetarian box with the ingredients for three meals. I am just waiting for John to come home to see which one I should make tonight. And then on Thursday our meat box will show up with three more meals.  Much more I could say, but I will let the pictures do the talking.

I decided recently that I was really tired of the look of my old blogspot blog. I’ve been working on a new blog for work and helping develop a new website and became so dazzled by the possibilities that I began to find My Porch very, very dowdy. For years I’ve been annoyed with the clumsy way Blogger handles text and after seeing what WordPress had to offer and how clean all the text looks, I just couldn’t bear another month with blogspot.

My intention was to just transfer everything from My Porch over but I ran into two challenges. I was trying to figure out how to take my ‘Google juice’ with me. After almost 9 years of blogging I really didn’t want to give up my digital footprint. After much research and even trying to hire someone to migrate my blog to save my Google juice, I just decided I didn’t give a rip. I am going to do a few things to get redirects in place but if they don’t work I guess I will have to start over.

My second challenge was that the title My Porch no longer really worked. I still like the notion of sitting on a porch chatting about books and music and travel and food, but when I put up various banner images on the new blog and none of them were of porches I could barely handle the cognitive dissonance. And then when John brought it up I decided it was a bridge too far. So then I decided to do what I had previously thought unthinkable. I decided to change the name of my blog. Forget the fact that I have been Thomas at My Porch since 2006. Forget that my email address was onmyporch. Forget that my Twitter handle was also My Porch related. It jut seemed like time for a new world order.

So how in the hell did I ever come up with Hogglestock? Since I decided to pay $18 for a domain so that I don’t have a dot wordpress url, I really wanted something that was a single word. After much trying and a little research I discovered that pretty much every word in the English language has been registered as a domain name since about 2006. That would explain why adumbrate.com wasn’t available. Then I thought of choosing a name based on a fictional character. I thought of becoming Mr. Samgrass after the character in Brideshead Revisited. But as much as I love Brideshead I’m not a universal Waugh fan so that seemed a little too specific. Although I must say that the officious partypooper Mr. Samgrass does have more than a few things in common with me.

So then I thought about trying Trollope. Certainly my favorite Victorian novelist and full of made up names and place names. And then I narrowed it down to three possibilities. Bundlesham, Utterden, and Hogglestock. All are fictional place names in Trollope’s novels and each had its pluses and minuses. I swore Amanda at Fig and Thistle to secrecy and asked for her opinion and John also chimed in before I settled on Hogglestock. For those of you who don’t recognize the name right off the bat, Hogglestock was the name of the parish belonging to the Revd Josiah Crawley in the Barsetshire series. It may be a hideous, depressingly poor place, but the name was too good to pass up and I am definitely a fan of the Barsetshire books.

So here we are. My Porch is a thing of the past (although most of my 1,200 posts and your 9,047 comments are available here) and Hogglestock is a fresh new day. Same content, different look. I hope you continue to like me my blog.

It may take a minute or two to get some of my lists posted on Hogglestock, but fear not they will return.

 
In early March Frances of Nonsuch Book and I went to Baltimore to visit a book “store” where all the books are free. She wrote about it here, so I won’t say too much more. What I am going to show you today is how that excursion threw my already full library into turmoil.

In very short order I began finding books that I knew would be coming home with me.

In the first 60 seconds of looking I came across two great finds.

The result was a big old pile of books. 23 of them and all were free. But this meant I was going to have to find room in my already full library.

The chaos that ensued was I started to organize. Lucy occasionally gave advice and instruction.

I love that Nonsuch Book (no relation to Frances) publishes great forgotten literature. But they make them too squat and wide. They don’t feel real good in the hand and they take up too much shelf space.

Then came the issue of how to organize memoirs, bios, and letters. I didn’t have the guts to intershelve them with fiction by the subject as some on Twitter suggested. I ended up Creating a bio/memoir/letters section. That way I could accommodate the few non-literary subjects in my collection (e.g., Mahler and Rorem).

I’ve got a lot of Mitford. And this picture is even missing one volume.

Because of my recently discovered love of Eric Ambler (note the first picture at top) a friend suggested I might enjoy Helen MacInnes. I haven’t read her yet, but I wasn’t about to pass up all of these on the chance that I will like her.

So far, I have read The Masters in an old Penguin edition and the edition of The Affair shown here. After I found out that Snow’s work falls in a couple different series, I made a conscious decision not to learn more about them. Otherwise I would feel the need to start at the beginning and read them in order.

I’ve read the first of the Ottley books which is included in this Virago omnibus. Plus I couldn’t pass up the cover. The Magnificent Spinster is one of my all time favorites and I already own this edition so I will be having a give away in the near future. Music in the Hills is totally rare her in the US and impossible to find unless you want to pay big bucks. I paid moderately big buck for the same version of Gerald and Elizabeth so this one will part of a give away as well. And the Ambler I have already talked about.

Thinglass / Shutterstock.com

For those of you unlikely to read or enjoy the review of The Misalliance that I just posted (scroll down) I thought I would throw in this bonus post.

You may recall that I decided to keep track of all the London place names that come up in Anita Brookner’s fiction. Her novels are full of London. Not in an overly conspicuous way, but it leaves you no doubt that Brookner is a creature of the city.

Having now finished re-reading six of Brookner’s 24 novels (and working on number seven at the moment), my Gazetteer of Brookner’s London is starting to take shape. I can’t wait to see the list when I’ve finished re-reading all 24. Part of me wants to do this with every book I read that takes place in London but that would be just short of madness.

At some point I will invest the time and/or money into having a map made. But for now it is a list. I know there are London geeks out there who will enjoy looking at it even if you haven’t read Brookner.