Castaway Playaway

A while ago, I was in the library looking to feed my audio addiction. My eyes lit on this attractive cover of Robinson Crusoe, and I grabbed it, since I’d never read it.

It felt strangely light; judging from the shape, it should have contained a bunch of tapes.

I opened it up, after some struggle, and saw that it contained a little calculator-shaped gadget, and a battery in a separate foam slot.

I was annoyed. I felt old and cranky. I thought, “What in the world am I supposed to do with this? It probably goes with some machine I don’t have. Now I have to look around for something else acceptable to listen to?”

Then I made myself calm down and look at it. It was called a Playaway, and it was, of course, a digital version of the recording. It had a place to plug in your own headphones or earbuds (how hygienic), and instructions on how to turn it on and navigate through it. So I decided to check it out.

You may already know about this, but if you don’t, I recommend the format. You don’t have to change tapes or CDs. The navigation is pretty simple. And when I paused it to get out of the car, when I got back and turned it back on, it started right up where I had stopped it.

The only trouble I had was when the battery ran out in the middle, and I didn’t recognize the signs until it had flaked out a few times.

The only major design flaw (and I can deal with it) is with the volume—you can’t decrease it directly. You have to keep pressing the button that increases it until it gets to the loudest (pretty loud) and then jumps down to the softest and starts the climb again.

As for the book itself, I’m happy to have read it, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as The Swiss Family Robinson.

Book Club, January 2008

I keep forgetting to post the book club meetings here. Well, the next one is tomorrow night (Friday, January 11). We’ll be discussing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a book that makes me feel as if I were in school again—in a good way.

In case you’ve forgotten how it works (if you’re like me), we alternate every month between classics* and current books. We decide two months ahead of time which book we’ll read, to make it easier for the librarian to get copies for us. We decide at each meeting what the date will be for the next meeting (always on a Friday night, except for the Christmas party, which is on a Saturday night in December) and where we’ll meet. In December, the meeting and book discussion are replaced by the Christmas party, and in the summer we slow down, meeting only once in July/August.

For information on book club and where it is this time, please call the library at 482-8806.

The book we’ll discuss next time (which we decided last time—confusing, isn’t it?) is Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez (1985).

*We’ve expanded the category of “classics” to include biography and nonfiction, when we feel like it.

Children's Books I Like to Read

Knowledge doesn't always make you happy.

I read Swiss Family Robinson several times when I was a kid. The version was from the '50s, I think, illustrated by Lynd Ward (not the version pictured). The most striking thing about his pictures is that all the people's faces are skewed; I read much later that toward the end of his career he developed a condition that affected his eyesight, which in turn affected his drawings.

Anyway, it was one of my favorite books--a very satisfying adventure of a family, shipwrecked on a tropical island, not only surviving, but, over 10 years, building quite a civilized compound and finally deciding to stay there, instead of being "rescued."

I was offended that Disney's movie version had cavalierly removed an entire son, and introduced a ship full of pirates.

Then my kids grew old enough to listen to the book, and, without access to the copy that I had loved, I took another one out of the library. As we went along, I started noticing some differences in this version. On closer inspection, I realized that it was a translation, and assumed that it was just a different translator's interpretation. Then I did a little more research, and discovered that there have been many versions of this book through the years, and that different editors and translators have added and removed entire chunks of the narrative. Disney's offense was nothing. Most likely, the book I read originally had little to do with Johann Wyss's first manuscript.

Here's what Wikipedia has on the subject:

The Swiss Family Robinson (Der Schweizerische Robinson) is a novel, first published in 1812, about a Swiss family who is shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia.

Written by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss, and edited by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss, this novel was intended to teach his four sons about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance. Publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel modernized and changed the story expanding and continuing it with additional chapters not authored by Wyss, republishing it under the title of The New Swiss Family Robinson.[1]...

Although movie and TV adaptations have often given them the surname Robinson, which is not a Swiss name, the "Robinson" of the title refers to Robinson Crusoe.

This was almost as shocking as learning that Laura Ingalls Wilder might not have written the Little House series. After I get over the shock, though, I'll go back and read it again, just for spite.

A Blast from the Way Past

I had a great time reading this book. Look at that cover—isn’t it appealing?

A blast from just the past would have been for me to re-read the ’60s editions (and even the older ones of my mother’s) of the Nancy Drews I used to love. But Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her starts way back with Edward Stratemeyer, who started the publishing company that created not only the Nancy Drew series, but also the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys, among other series.

Melanie Rehak weaves several stories together: Stratemeyer’s life, the lives of his daughters, the life of Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote many of the Nancy Drew books as Carolyn Keene (as well as books in other series), the evolution of the publishing industry, and the story of Nancy Drew, who was modernized (kicking and screaming), politically corrected, and dumbed down through the years.

It made me want to go back and read The Secret of the Old Clock again. When I do, I’ll let you know whether it was entertaining or depressing.

Next Book Club Meeting

Book Club will meet next on Friday, July 20th, at 7 pm. We will be reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, to mark his recent passing.

Here are the publisher notes on the book:

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch-22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it unique poignancy — and humor.

My Man Godfrey again

Well, I finished it. (See the "My Man Godfrey" post below.) For a while it was a little deeper (a very little) and more complex than the movie. Then the end is pretty silly, just as silly as, say, the end of "North by Northwest" where Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint into the upper berth on the train. But it's interesting to read in the context of the movie, and entertaining along the way. So if anyone wants to borrow it...

A Dog's Life

Here's another book I recommend every chance I get: The 101 Dalmatians. I didn't read it as a kid. I didn't realize until sometime in the '90s that it even existed. I was watching the Disney movie with my kids for the 25th time, scouring the credits for familiar names, and I saw the sentence: "Based on the novel by Dodie Smith." Who knew it hadn't sprung full-blown from the Disney machine?

Written in 1956, it is, of course, better than any of the movie versions. The dogs are smarter and have more personality, and Cruella deVil has a husband and a cat and a house. And Mr. Dearly ("Roger" in the movie) wasn't a songwriter, but an accountant, which is much more sensible.

It is a novel for children, but I've enjoyed it every time I've read it. It's one of those books that I wish would go on forever.

I looked for other books by Dodie Smith, and all I was able to come up with was I Capture the Castle, which I promptly bought and then couldn't finish. They made a movie of it recently, which wasn't much better...

Now, looking for a picture to go with this post, I've found other books by her, so I guess I'll have to try them, including a sequel to Dalmatians called The Starlight Barking.


P.S. We've broken 40 visits to the blog! And we have our first comment, on the Madame Bovary post!

Wacko Women in 19th Century Literature

When I learned that book club was discussing Madame Bovary this time, my heart sank. I had already read it--when? high school? college? back when dinosaurs roamed the earth?--and who needed to revisit that old chestnut?

But then two things happened. I picked up the book from the library and discovered that I remembered absolutely nothing from the first chapter. It was all news to me. Then the CD version became available, the one with my all-time favorite narrator, Davina Porter, and I just soaked up the story whenever I got in the car.

I still think Emma Bovary was a twit (which was the only thing I remembered from the first time I read it), but this time everything else hit me--all the different pressures on her, the subtlety with which Flaubert painted her personality and her struggles, and the entertaining cast of supporting characters.

By the end, I was horrified at the devastation that her misdeeds had wrought (though not without help from some other players in the cast), and kept having to remind myself that it was only a book, and that I didn't have to be depressed about the desperation of her life.

Horror Story; or, They Sucked the Life Out of This One

The book on CD that I mentioned in the first post was Bram Stoker's Dracula, narrated by Alexander Spencer and Susan Adams. I was looking forward to it, since I'd never read it before.

Alexander Spencer's narration starts out all right--a little affected, but listenable. But by the middle of the second CD, when protagonist Jonathan Harker fully realizes his danger, Spencer gets hysterical and unbelievable.

Then, toward the end of the second CD, the narration switches to Harker's fiancee back in London, played by Susan Adams, who, as I mentioned below, has a high-pitched, breathy voice with a suspect British accent.

I will obviously have to read this in hard copy. The writing is great--it just can't stand up against the voices.