The long Independence Day weekend is giving me time to catch up on a few things. These pictures were taken back in late May/early June when I was in California and Minnesota.

Sonoma County, California
We spent Memorial Day with friends who have a really beautiful weekend house in Sonoma. We had a great time and the weather was perfect. The second to the last one is me enjoying Widow Barnaby after a swim.

 
I seem to have so many great ideas for blog posts running through my head these days, but the “new” house is really taking its toll on my free time. Between dealing with unpacking, cleaning, dying AC units, and just general moving mayhem, I haven’t had a whole lot of time or energy to put pen to paper as it were.

But I thought I would give you some idea of the nicer things that are a part of my new routine up here in the wilds of Chevy Chase, DC.

Birds
Even though we just moved about four miles north of our previous home near Dupont Circle the difference is amazing. Our new neighborhood is so peaceful with nothing much other than lots and lots of song birds to break the quiet. It has been a marvel to watch and listen to the birds in our leafy, breezy back yard. My particular favorite is the Gray Catbird who seems to greet us every time we walk out back. He is a pretty little fellow with a beautiful song repertoire. (I didn’t take this lovely picture, it is from a website for Bayberry Beach in New York.)

Buskers
I have written here before about buskers and how magical they can be (and how maniacal they can be). One evening this week at my new Metro stop as I road the long, long escalator out of the station, I heard this wonderful music emanating from above. At the top of the escalator was a woman playing an acoustic guitar and singing. She was like Tracy Chapman, but her voice was stronger than Chapman’s and seemed much more versatile. Would she sound good on a record? I am not sure, possibly, but in that setting she was wonderful and sang with such passion, it was a real performance. Thankfully I had about ten minutes to stand and listen. Five dollars didn’t seem like much to give for what she gave me. Hopefully I will see her again.

Books
The same evening I heard the great busker, a woman near me on the bus was reading Anita Brookner’s Lewis Percy. Now I have toyed with the idea of posting what I see people reading on my commute like Karen does at Bookish NYC, but she does it so well, I have refrained from being a sad copycat. But it isn’t every day one sees someone reading my beloved Anita Brookner. In fact, I am not sure I have ever seen anyone reading Anita Brookner. I took advantage of the opportunity to chat with her about Brookner. I took this to be a good omen for my new life. If even one person in my new neighborhood is reading AB, it makes up for the thousands on the Metro reading those Steig Larsson books that I have been avoiding because of their ubiquity. I guess it is the contrarian in me.

The Blog?
So, until we get a little more settled, the posts will be fewer than I would like. But at least in all the chaos there are lots of little things to be happy about.

I have had a sheet of this wrapping paper on the wall of my work cube for some months now and something occurred to me recently.

The titles and authors on the spines of these early Penguins run vertically up the spine rather than down the spine. I have a whole library of books, and with the exception of one Russian/English copy of Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis that I found in Prague, none of them have the titles going up rather than down.

Were all the early Penguins like this? When did they change? Who can enlighten me?

Even though I am sitting around waiting for various contractors to do their various jobs around the house, it is hard to not enjoy the day. Beautiful weather, lovely breezes, birds singing their little hearts out. And a quiet minute or two to attend to my blogging life.

A few weeks ago I was in Minnesota for my nephew’s high school graduation. While there my sister and I managed to pop into Half Price Books in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. I probably wouldn’t have made my way to this particular bookstore since my normal gravitational pull when I am in the Twin Cities is toward Minneapolis. But my friend Steve happens to work there so I thought I would check it out. And I did manage to find a few things that made browsing quite fun. And although my suitcase was already dangerously heavy I couldn’t pass up to opportunity to take a few things home with me.

Before you scroll down to read my brilliant insights into Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, I just thought I would let you all into my 3D world for a moment. I am a little overwhelmed at the moment trying to settle into a new house. Not only is there all the unpacking, but there are also more than a few contractors running around sorting out things like floors, hot water, and electrical panels. This would be stress enough along with work and a million other things that need seeing to at the moment. But it appears that we have well and truly entered into the life of homeowners with our unpredictable pile of bricks that we can now officially call a Money Pit. When your electrician calls you at work to tell you that your air conditioning system has gone belly up just as we enter into the stinking hot, humid slog of a DC summer, you can really only laugh. Long, loud, hysterical laughs that are in direct proportion to the amount of money it will take to fix the situation.

But alas, you don’t all come here looking for sob stories–unless someone wrote them into a fabulous novel–so I will truncate my “poor me” diatribe. The bottom line is that once we get past this bit we will have a wonderful place to call home. One with lots of birds and butterflies (seriously) and a whole room I like to call my library. Plus I have some great pictures of northern California and all kinds of other fun posts in store. It is just going to take me longer to post about them.

(No that isn ‘t our new house, and no, we don’t live in Newhouse. It just seemed apt.)

  
Lots of you liked the Mitchell and Webb Insulting Librarian video that I posted a while back.  I think this one is evening funnier. Bad Vicar indeed.

  
Back on May 30th, Simon at Stuck In A Book tagged me to choose a picture that sums up my taste in reading. With moving and travelling and everything else going on right now it has taken me much longer than I would have thought to complete this assignment.

The biggest challenge is that the picture was NOT to include images of books or a character from an adaptation. That made it hard. I was all set to find some picture of a cosy library or a beautiful still from the Merchant-Ivory adaptations of  A Room With a View, Howard’s End, or Maurice. But that would have been cheating.

And then I was thinking that Simon’s picture was apt for me as well. But to copy him would have been the ultimate cop out.

I still had the whole notion of tea and England on my brain, which indeed does sum up a lot of of what I like.

And my recent read of Widow Barnaby by Fanny Trollope reminded me how much I like domestic and housekeeping details in novels. (Although Widow Barnaby doesn’t really go into “downstairs” details.)

Or anything to do with academia or the Church of England…

And all of that reminded me of how much I love a good old fashioned pastoral landscape, whether it is in England…

or the U.S. (this lovely Grant Wood painting sums up much about my taste in U.S. fiction)…

or Italy…

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that any picture that could sum up my reading tastes would have to be old, cosy, and as much as I love the pastoral, it would have to be urban. And not being able to narrow it down, I did manage to limit myself to only three. And in my book, rain seems to equal cosy—maybe it is the thought of being inside reading. For some reason reading doesn’t remind me of sunny days and blue skies. No doubt this is a subject for my therapist. So these then, best sum up my reading interests:

London

New York

And to a lesser extent, Paris

  
I have been having a good time on the road but I haven’t had much time on the Internet since the 28th. I look forward to getting back to DC to catch up with all my blogger friends and to post a few things. I recently finished Widow Barnaby by Fanny Trollope and About Alice by Calvin Trillin. Reviews to come soon.

We had a great time in Northern California over Memorial Day weekend and this weekend I had a great time in Minnesota with relatives.

So, until I get back to blogging for real, I thought I would leave you with this lovely image of one of the many wetlands in my natal land of Minnesota.

I just got an email from a reader in Toronto who is going to Kansas City, Missouri next week and asked me if I knew of any good books that take place there.

I don’t know of any books set in Kansas City. However, I have a few ideas about some truly great books–masterpieces, in fact–that at least put you in the general geographic area. The good news is that these are all books that I LOVED.

I have only been to Kansas City once in my life for a brief business trip so I am by no means an expert. The odd thing about Kansas City, MO is that the state of Missouri, although considered part of the Midwest is also kind of the western most edge of the South. But the state of Missouri, and Kansas City itself of course, border on the state of Kansas which is really the start of the Great Plains which stretch north and west and make up the physical and perhaps mythically figurative heartland of America. (I’ve just looked at a few maps of the “the Great Plains” and while they are broad and span many states and provinces, the border is more narrowly drawn in reality than it is in my head. So what, my mental map is going to stand.)

A book that is set in the state of Missouri is Stoner by John Williams. Follows a dirt poor farm kid who goes off to college in Columbia, MO and ends up eventually becoming an English professor there. The contrast between his life on the farm and academia I think presents a theme not uncommon to kids in the rural Plains states.

A book set in the state of Kansas is the bone chilling, compelling, controversial, best selling, and wonderfully written In Cold Blood. Truman Capote’s masterpiece fictionalized volume of non-fiction about a family murdered in their home.

And finally, there are two books that take place in the neighboring Plains state of Nebraska that are true classics in every sense of the word and have a universality that tugged at my heartstrings having grown up in Minnesota which is kind of the northern edge of the Plains before they turn into the north woods. They are of course, My Antonia and O, Pioneers by Willa Cather.

No doubt my readers, maybe Molly from My Cozy Book Nook in particular who lives in the that part of the world, will have some suggestions?

I think this is probably fodder for more than one post, but here it is all lumped together…

While I make my way through the fabulous 500+ pages of Widow Barnaby by Fanny Trollope I thought I would blog about something that has been on my mind for a while.

In a way this is less of a post and more of an invitation for my British readers to weigh in on the Oxbridge stranglehold on British fiction and an opportunity for anyone to chime in on Academia in literature in general.

In American literature New York City looms large in the same way that London looms large in Britain. But I don’t think there are any equivalent U.S. educational institutions that are as all pervasive as Oxford and Cambridge are in British lit. I suppose Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League may have disproportionate representation in American lit, but again, not as omnipresent as the O&C megaliths. Not just as institutions that produced so many writers, but also as background in so many novels. And it is not just that they seem somewhat ubiquitous but that there is almost a complete lack of mention of other universities. Almost as if there weren’t any other Universities in Britain. It is very easily the case that I am just reading the wrong stuff. After all I don’t read a lot of modern fiction. Is this a story of a publishing industry that wouldn’t give the time of day to the so-called redbrick Unis?

And please, before you yell at me for being a dumb Yank, please know that I cast no aspersions on either Oxford or Cambridge, and I obviously love reading the fruits of their academic loins.

This discussion also begs the question about writers writing about becoming writers, and in many cases the academic milieu from whence they sprung. I love academic novels. The brilliant Stoner by John Williams (at a University in Missouri) is the first one to come to mind, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (at a University in Wisconsin) is the second. But then there is that whole world of academic novels where they focus on the writer becoming a writer. I also love those books as well, but tend to feel like the author is cheating a bit by writing some warmed over autobiography. And although I love those types of books, I think I reserve my highest praise for authors who come up with worlds way outside their own experiences (Margaret Atwood, Ann Patchett, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan, to name just a few).

So what think ye? Oxbridge, academic novels, writers writing about becoming writers…pick one or all and let me know what you think.

And while you’re at it, tell me your favorite academic novels or your favorite novels about writer’s becoming writers, or any good novel that uses some other British university as a setting. And if you have lots of opinions like me, give me all three.

Although I don’t really know of any specific academic novels about these particular intitutions, here are the three academic settings that shaped my life (some more than others):