Wordless Wednesday: October 31

Halloween Reading

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Heroines

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week we're talking about heroines - specifically kick-ass heroines. My favorites include:

Elizabeth Bennet 

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

Margaret Hale 

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Alexandra Bergson

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Isabel Archer

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Undine Spragg

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

Jo March

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Swan Lake

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield

Emily Maxwell

Wish You Were Here and Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan

Harriet M. Welsh

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Are any of these among your favorite heroines? Find more lists here.

The Sunday Salon: Today I Am..

Drinking hot coffee... black.

Wearing black yoga pants and a comfy green sweater.

Reading The Submission by Amy Waldman for my book club and, on audio, The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell (Sandy convinced me).

Listening to Puccini and Pasta. I may be Puccini's newest fan.

Cooking Cider-Brined Maple-Glazed Turkey, because I hate to experiment on Thanksgiving. Yesterday I prepared the brine and herbed butter, brined the bird overnight, and will roast it today. Look for a Weekend Cooking post next weekend if it turns out.

Preparing for Hurricane Sandy/Frankenstorm. Gutters cleaned yesterday. Today we'll secure outdoor furniture or put it away for the winter. Supplies laid in just in case.

Worrying about relatives facing bad weather - Daughter #1 and Twin A awaiting Sandy, and a Tsunami warning in Hawaii for my brother's vacation.

Looking forward to Random House Open House on Friday, meeting some book blogging friends, and a visit with my daughters.

Happy Sunday!

photo credit

Author Birthday: Sylvia Plath

The Bull of Bendylaw

by Sylvia Plath

The black bull bellowed before the sea.
The sea, till that day orderly,
Hove up against Bendylaw.
The queen in the mulberry arbor stared
Stiff as a queen on a playing card.
The king fingered his beard.

A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,
A bull-snouted sea that wouldn't stay put,
Bucked at the garden gate.

Along box-lined walks in the florid sun
Toward the rowdy bellow and back again
The lords and ladies ran.

The great bronze gate began to crack,
The sea broke in at every crack,
Pellmell, blueblack.

The bull surged up, the bull surged down,
Not to be stayed by a daisy chain
Nor by any learned man.

O the king's tidy acre is under the sea,
And the royal rose in the bull's belly,
And the bull on the king's highway.

"The Bull of Bendylaw" by Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems. © Harper Perennial, 1981.


From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of poet Sylvia Plath (books by this author), born in Boston (1932). She was an excellent student, and she went to Smith College with the help of a scholarship endowed by the writer Olive Higgins Prouty. One summer during college, she was chosen to be a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine. She was only 20 years old, and she had already been published in Seventeen, Mademoiselle, The Christian Science Monitor, and other newspapers. Her summer started off well. She went to lots of parties and discovered that she loved vodka. But she was having trouble writing poetry and short stories, and she worried that she was a failure as a writer. Then she got notice that she had not been accepted for an advanced creative writing course at Harvard, taught by the writer Frank O'Connor. She was so depressed that she attempted suicide. Her benefactress, Olive Prouty, paid for her stay in a mental hospital and psychiatric care.


Plath returned to Smith and graduated with highest honors in 1955. She won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University, and there she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. In 1960, she gave birth to a daughter and published The Colossus, the only book of her poems to be published during her lifetime. It got minor reviews in various British publications. In 1961, she was excited to find an American publisher; she wrote: "After all the fiddlings and discouragements from the little publishers, it is an immense joy to have what I consider THE publisher accept my book for America with such enthusiasm. They 'sincerely doubt a better first volume will be published this year.'" And on the date of its publication in 1962, Plath wrote to her mother: "My book officially comes out in America today. Do clip and send any reviews you see, however bad. Criticism encourages me as much as praise." But The Colossus was even less noticed in America than in England; there were only a handful of reviews, many of them just a paragraph long.

Plath decided to write a novel based on her experience during the summer when she worked at Mademoiselle. She referred to the novel as "a pot-boiler" to family and friends, but she had high hopes for it. She won a fellowship to work on the novel, and the fellowship was connected to the publishers Harper and Row; but once she finished it, the editors there rejected it — they thought it was overwritten and immature. The Bell Jar was published in England in January of 1961 under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. It got good reviews, but not great. A month later, Plath committed suicide.

Many people learned about Plath only after her death, reading her poems in obituaries and news stories. In the next couple of years, her poems appeared regularly in magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. In 1965, a collection of poems called Ariel was published posthumously, and received major reviews in all the big papers and magazines. In Britain, Ariel sold 15,000 copies in its first 10 months, and Plath's popularity continued to rise. The Bell Jar was finally published in the United States and stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for six months.

Sylvia Plath wrote: "Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty (audio)

The Chaperone
by Laura Moriarty
Narrated by Elizabeth McGovern
Penguin Audiobooks, 2012
13 hours and 14 minutes
source: review copy

Publisher's Summary:

The Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both.

Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a 15-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.

For Cora, New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the question at the center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the 20th century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

My thoughts: 

One summer can change a life. For Cora Carlisle, it was the summer of 1922 when she chaperoned a young Louise Brooks in New York City.

The Chaperone is a remarkable novel not only for its sense of time and place (New York City and Kansas in the early 20th century), but for its portrayal of Cora's personal growth and development as she searches for her roots, comes to terms with a loveless marriage, and begins to forge a new outlook on life. Her initial narrowness and naivete eventually give way to broader understanding, acceptance, and eventual happiness.

A beautiful novel - highly recommended.

A note on the audio production:

There's no good lead-in, so here it is:  I didn't love Elizabeth McGovern's narration of The Chaperone.

In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, her voice actually put me off in the beginning. The vast majority of listeners rave about this production, but McGovern's 'normal' accent seemed (to me) precious and affected at times, while her Kansas voice was simply grating. Do people really sound like that in Kansas? I don't know. However, by the end of the second CD, I'd grown accustomed to her narration (it's a far cry from Downton Abbey, folks) and settled in to enjoy the story.

 In the end, it was an average production of a superior novel.

Read or listen?
It's a toss-up. Either way, don't miss this book.

My rating:

Top Ten Books to Get into the Halloween Spirit

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week is all about books that remind us of Halloween, so let's get right to it. My ten favorite Halloween books, in no particular order:

The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Richard Dalby

Even the cover is scary.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

The best ghost story... ever.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

And don't forget about The Lottery and Other Stories.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Just plain creepy. 

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again."

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Austen's gothic novel, and Jane at her funniest.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Nothing says Halloween like a good murder mystery.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Not quite up to The Time Traveler's Wife, but wonderfully weird.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Because it's Edith Wharton...

The Witch Next Door by Norman Bridwell

A throwback from second grade...

What are your favorite Halloween books?
More Top Ten Tuesday lists are here.

The Sunday Salon: Blissfully Boring

Good morning and Happy Sunday. As I sit here sipping my coffee, reflecting upon the past week, I am struck by how quiet the house is with just three of us here. It hasn't been like this in five months. In addition, it's been a week where I haven't driven more than 30 minutes in any direction.  Will this continue? Probably not, but it has been a blissfully normal (some might even call it boring) week.

What have I done? Laundry, odds and ends around the house, fall clean-up outdoors, had my teeth cleaned, started stocking the freezer, walked the dog, watched baseball and high school football, and tried 5 new recipes for Trish's Pin It and Do It challenge. Like I said, blissfully boring. We'll see what the week ahead has in store.

Surprisingly, there was not much reading other than a few chapters of The Submission by Amy Waldman. This novel about building a 9/11 memorial is my book club's next selection. I can already tell that we're going to have a great discussion, but it looks like I might not make it to the meeting because...

Random House Open House in New York City is Friday November 2. Now that I have a place to stay in the city, I might just attend. Anyone else planning to go?

On audio, it's become clear that I can do nothing else while listening to Colin Firth read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. I am riveted to his voice, of course, but the book is so depressing - not at all conducive to exercise, housework, etc. It's a short book but, at this rate, could take a month to finish.

In the car, I am listening to This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz read by the author... a book that is slowly growing on me, despite having more f-bombs than anything I've ever read!

Today we're seeing Syracuse Opera's production of Tosca, then celebrating my twin sisters' 39th birthdays, again! Hope it's a great day for you, too.