THANKS.

Did you catch it? Sunday's concert was a hoot.

Upwards of 120 people attended, listened and laughed as these talented young men from UConn sang and entertained.

After expenses, almost $1200 went to benefit the library.

The Friends of the Bakerville Library would like to thank Sharon Mitchell and the Bakerville Methodist Church for all their help, both with this event and with many other past ones. Thanks also to everyone who helped with the refreshments and the flowers, and to everyone who came to the concert, sold tickets, and made donations.

This Sunday--TODAY!

There's still time to get your tickets for Another Completely Different Afternoon with A Completely Different Note. In fact, you can get them at the door this Sunday, April 29th, at 3 pm at the Bakerville Methodist Church.

Tickets are $10 (12 and under free). All proceeds benefit the Bakerville Library.

Refreshments will be served after the concert.

If at all possible, don't miss this very entertaining a cappella group from UConn, including Bakerville's own Patrick Reardon, one of last year's Northwest Idol winners. They're captivating.

(Scroll down for more details and links.)

Children's Books I Like to Read

It's been a week since my last post, and I've made no progress on The Devil in the White City. So just to have a blog entry, and because it's one of my favorite subjects, here are some of the children's books I like best, and am willing to re-read either to myself or to anyone else. (When my kids were little, sometimes it was hard to find a balance between those books they wanted me to read over and over, and those books I wanted to read to them over and over.) (And sorry, I'm having trouble placing these pictures where I want them.)

The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson. This is one of those rare perfect books--perfect chunk of text on each page, perfect placement of juicy drawings, perfect balance of humor and pathos, of familiarity and strangeness. And a bonus--after you're done reading, look for all the vultures in the drawings.

The Three Bears, illustrated by Fyodor Rojankovsky. This is specifically the Little Golden Books version, with illustrations that I used to love when I was little, and still do. I never noticed back then that on each page, the bears and Goldilocks were wearing different clothes, and that the chairs and the bowls and the beds also changed from page to page, as if Rojankovsky hadn't taken his drugs that day. I just got lost in the intense colors and the over-the-top patterns.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series by Betty MacDonald, illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Hilary Knight. I didn't discover these until I read them to my kids, and I think I like them better for that reason. I just crack myself up as I read the names of the kids that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle cures, or the snidely diplomatic things she says to the worst offenders. These are funnier than her adult book The Egg and I, though that's worth a read, too.

I'll probably think of more later, but maybe you have some of your own? Feel free to comment below.

Just in case you're interested,

I am enjoying the hard copy version of The Devil in the White City. I haven't yet gone past the part that I listened to, but the text without any tone of voice is much more authoritative and interesting.

I did speak with someone else who is listening to the (abridged! but I'm not telling) version by the same narrator, and she doesn't mind it, which is why people really should be commenting, so this stuff isn't all just my opinions.

In the meantime, I am passing time in the car with The Two Towers, by Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is what I depend on when there's nothing else. (I used to depend on Jim Dale and Harry Potter, but I overdosed on that voice and can't listen to it at the moment.) Rob Inglis, who narrates Tolkien, is another great one. He is occasionally boring, but once I get into it, I forget about him and just listen to all the voices.

Spring Newsletter Available

You can find a pdf of the Bakerville Library's Spring 2007 newsletter here.

The Devil in the White City

This is an interim post. I'm on the first CD of the audio version of The Devil in the White City. The information is interesting, and details are plentiful. But the narrator (Scott Brick) seems to imply that everything is really important--especially numbers. Any time he says, for instance, "seven million," he pauses first and then says the number as if he were Ryan Seacrest announcing the bottom three. It gets wearing. I will probably switch to reading this one.

Next Book Club Meeting

The next book club meeting will be Friday, April 27th, when we will discuss The Devil in the White City, about a serial killer at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (nonfiction).

We Interrupt This Blog...

To remind you:

Coming Sunday,
April 29th, 2007
at 3 pm

A concert featuring CDN
(A Completely Different Note) at the Bakerville Methodist Church.

Remember what a good time you had last May, when they sang at the firehouse? Here's more information about this premier all-male a cappella group from UConn, which includes Bakerville's own Patrick Reardon, last year's Northwest Idol winner!

On Sunday, April 29th at 3 pm, we'll give these fellows more room and better acoustics at the Bakerville Methodist Church (just east of us on Rte. 202), and let them raise money for the library. Tickets will be $10 (under 12 free) and refreshments will be served after the concert. Mark your calendars now!

Hanging Out With Julia

As you can tell, nonfiction mostly isn't my thing, but I am a sucker for a good biography.

A few years ago, my brother got me hooked on Julia Child with a copy of her French omelette show and a good omelette pan. Now my favorite way to distract myself while folding laundry is to do it while watching Julia roast a chicken or make mayonnaise or whip up some egg whites for a Queen of Sheba cake.

So when he gave me her biography last year (Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch), I was excited. And the amazing thing is that, even though the writing is really not that good, the book is compelling anyway, because her life was so interesting, and because the author had full access to all her letters and papers. I'm sure you all know this already, there's been so much more in the media about her since she died, but she was a member of the OSS, which is how she met her husband.

I get the impression, watching her on tape, that she would have been fun to hang out with. (So I sit there and fold laundry and pretend I'm hanging out with her.) Reading the book, it seems that she restrained herself on TV, and actually had quite a raunchy sense of humor, which would have been even more fun.

And that Queen of Sheba cake is delicious.

A Sure Thing

What could be more sure than this: an Alexander McCall Smith novel, read by Davina Porter? I hyperventilated as I picked The Sunday Philosophy Club, blurbed as a mystery, off the library shelf.

Davina Porter, as you know, is my all-time favorite narrator, complete with various British accents and a generally good grasp of what's going on in a story and who should sound like what.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, a funny set of mysteries that takes place in Botswana. It's the first series in a long time that makes me long for the next one to come out. And the audio versions are narrated by my other all-time favorite, Lisette Lecat, another master of accents and innuendo.

Imagine my confusion as this unfunny book ambled along, paying little attention to the mystery. It features Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and amateur sleuth in Edinburgh, and the community she moves among. Isabel is given to long philosophical considerations which require patience on the part of the reader (and, apparently, on the part of the other characters in the book), and which sometimes, though not always, end up having a bearing on the plot.

I stuck with it, however, on the basis of my previous experience with the author and the narrator, and decided at the end that it was a good story—the mystery revived itself, and some humor flashed through, including mentions of crushed-strawberry trousers that have made appearances in other books. I liked it enough that I'm listening to the next one: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. It helps that I know what to expect, and I do enjoy the development of the same cast of characters.

Perhaps some of the charm of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is that it takes place in a country completely different from mine, so much more can be considered funny, or at least surprising; possibly someone from Botswana would consider it tedious and completely expected. [No; I've just finished The Kalahari Typing School for Men, and it is genuinely funny.] I'm looking forward to the next one, in any case; The Good Husband of Zebra Drive is due out in mid-April.

I'm just gullible.

Warning: Spoiler details ahead. Don't read if you care about being surprised.

I've read a few of Lawrence Block's books about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar who also runs a book shop, and they're pretty entertaining. Block's writing doesn't captivate me the way, say, Leslie Glass's does, and his books don't read as literature the way someone like Elizabeth George's do, but his situations merit a second look, and he has a sense of humor. So when I saw the book on CD about his hit man, Keller, I looked forward to a good time.

The author narrates it, and I like his deadpan style. I was both intrigued and repelled by the idea of hit man as protagonist. Block has Keller do his antisocial (to say the least) job within a code of honor, and much of the time he's thinking not about how to kill people, but about his stamp collection or about baseball or about retirement. He has an interesting relationship with his agent, Dot, who seems like a regular person except for the fact that she arranges people's murders.

About three quarters of the way through the book, against his better judgment, Keller gets to know one of his targets and befriends him. Keller develops serious doubts about whether to kill him, and develops a complicated scheme to help the target fake his own death. Then, after the suicide note has been written and all the other preparations made, Keller kills him after all, and it turns out to have been a big con. Keller is uncomfortable with this, and says that he could never be a con man on a regular basis, because it involves betrayal.

But I realized by the end of the book, when Keller has not changed at all, but continues to be an amoral killing machine, that in fact the whole book has been a big con.

I know what you're doing, Lawrence Block, and I don't like it.

Goodbye, Bill Stafford

We pause to mark the passing of a good friend of the library. William Stafford, shown above talking to second graders about his early school days in the Bakerville two-room school house (now the library), died on Sunday, February 25, 2007. His family and friends and all of Bakerville will miss him. His obituary, from the Register Citizen, follows.

William Stafford
Oct. 19, 1926 - Feb. 25, 2007

NEW HARTFORD - William Stafford, 80, of New Hartford, passed away Sunday afternoon, Feb. 25, 2007.

Bill was born on Oct. 29, 1926, to the late William and Katherine (Marsh) Stafford.

He attended the Bakerville two-room schoolhouse, now the Bakerville Library, and graduated from Torrington High School. After serving in the United States Army in Germany in World War II, he worked for Agway as a service technician for many years. Bill was an active member of the First United Methodist Church, and was also a speaker at the Bakerville Library. Bill was predeceased by his daughter, Heidi, and survived by his wife, Barbara Beyer Stafford, of 58 years, and three children, daughter and son-in-law, Kathy and John Steeves; and two sons and daughters-in-law, Gary and Maria Stafford and Mark and Debora Stafford. He also has four grandchildren and four (almost five) great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at the First United Methodist Church, 21 Fern Drive, Torrington, on Saturday, March 3, at 2 p.m.

Donations may be made to the First United Methodist Church Book of Remembrance or the Bakerville Library, 6 Maple Hollow Road, New Hartford, CT 06057.

(Below: Bill Stafford (l) and Bud Sedgwick, also a former student at the old Bakerville School.)

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!

My Man Godfrey

What I'm reading now I didn't get from the Bakerville Library, but if anyone wants to borrow it, just e-mail me (the link is over in the column on the right). I was browsing Powells.com, a west-coast bookstore that has become an alternative to Amazon, and I noticed a service that they offer--type in the book (new or used) that you're looking for, and they'll notify you when it becomes available. I had been looking, off and on for a couple of years, for a copy of My Man Godfrey, by Eric Hatch (who used to live in Litchfield), which is what the old Carole Lombard/William Powell movie was based on.* It has been out of print for a while, and I had given up hoping to find it, so I just signed up for the Powells service and forgot all about it.

Obviously one thing led to another, and last week this used copy (for $3 plus shipping) arrived in the mail. I'm quite enjoying it. The basic plot is pretty similar to the movie's. The Carole Lombard character is much less elegant, and funnier, and I like Hatch's prose. I haven't finished it yet, so I don't know whether the book is any deeper than the movie (which is not); I'll let you know.

*Actually it was based on Eric Hatch's novel 1101 Park Avenue, so maybe this version of the book was released with this title after the movie came out? Here's a decent synopsis of the movie.