The Vintage Reader

MY DADDY
by Ogden Nash

I have a funny daddy
Who goes in and out with me,
And everything that baby does
My daddy's sure to see,
And everything that baby says
My daddy's sure to tell.
You must have read my daddy's verse.
I hope he fries in hell.

From Many Long Years Ago, copyright 1933, by Ogden Nash. Reprinted in (what else?) An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor, Bennett Cerf., ed., copyright 1954.

Anybody know a good blogroll tool, other than blogrolling.com? I'm looking for something that lets me arrange the links in categories, has a bookmarklet, and works with Blogger. If you know of such a thing, please please please drop me a note in the comments. Editing my template every time I find one of my old links (or a new link!) that I want to add to the sidebar is a PAIN!

Yesterday afternoon I had a rare moment in the life of a homemaker: the house was clean(ish), the errands were run, the pantry was stocked, laundry was going, and Vintage Baby was asleep, as was Mr. Vintage Reader. On top of that, the May issue of EQMM had just come in the mail, so I sat down to read. But of course, I couldn't make it through more than a few stories without coming across something I wanted to look up online.

Ed Gorman's column "Blog Bytes" featured The Rap Sheet, a blog that used to be a newsletter. Since I've been largely away from the blogosphere for the last year and a half, I missed the beginning of this terrific blog, so I have a lot to catch up with. But halfway down the page as of today, there was a really nice post about cover art, specifically mentioning one of my favorite examples, Fools Die on Friday, by A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner). It's one of the Dell Mapbacks, which longtime readers (both of you) know are my collecting passion, and might remember how happy I was to luck into a very good edition with the original cover--the racier one--a few years ago (the permalink to that post isn't working, since the site has been moved from Blogger to WordPress and back since then, and I haven't gotten around to fixing all the little things that went screwy during that process).

That post led me to another neat post at Vorpal Blade Online about collecting Dell Mapbacks. This post has lots of gorgeous cover scans, including the maps on the back covers.

And speaking of cover scans... the post at The Rap Sheet also led me to Bookscans, a HUGE collection of paperback cover art of the 40s and 50s. This project is so inspiring that I've decided that next time I have a free afternoon I will spend it scanning covers to send it the Bookscans guy. Yes, Bookscans is just that cool. Of course, that's assuming that I get another free afternoon sometime before I forget this fine aspiration and instead spend my free afternoon surfing web sites about homophonous phrases or some such thing.

Via Lifehacker: LibraryThing's UnSuggester lets you enter a book you DIDN'T like, and it will suggest some books that you might like, based on that. For example, I recently tried to read The Cove, by Catherine Coulter, on a recommendation by a relative. I didn't even make it through the first chapter before the introduction of a wise older woman who calls the heroine "Child" every time she speaks to her, which is pretty much a deal killer for me. Catherine Coulter has been around for a long time and I've never read anything of hers (mostly because she used to just write Big Thick Romances, and the most recently published Big Thick Romance I've read is Love's Tender Fury), but a friend who shares my enjoyment of Herman Wouk had also recommended this series (I think she compared it to The X-Files) so I gave it a try. But it just wasn't to my taste, so into the UnSuggester it went, and came out with these results.

Whadya know? I did like Mrs. Dalloway, the first UnSuggestion. I haven't read numbers 2 or 3, but I loved White Noise, the 4th suggestion. I don't really understand how Getting Things Done (#14) got on the list, but okay, I like it too. And White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (#17), is one of my favorite books of the last 10 years. There's a LOT of Neil Gaiman on the list, and I do always like Neil Gaiman.

By and large, though, I'm not sure this is all that useful for me. For one thing, I rarely finish books I don't like, unless I don't like them because of something like a horrible but well-written character (I remember one by Clyde Edgerton--Raney, I think--that had a main character I totally hated, but I couldn't quit reading). For another thing, I'm much more likely to want to read more of something I like than less of something I don't. But it's interesting, anyway.

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that the UnSuggester is the companion to the LibraryThing Suggester, which makes recommendations based on books you did like.

The entries for Laura Rebecca's Retro Recipe challenge are up! This time the theme was, appropriately, Food of Love. The posset is my favorite, I think, but that might be because it took MORE THAN AN HOUR to get Vintage Baby to sleep tonight.

You notice that I didn't enter the War Cake. 'Cause, y'know, love, not war. Yeah, that's it. It's not because the War Cake was a godawful raisin-studded lump of concrete that I wouldn't wish on my 5th-grade gym teacher, let alone someone I actually love.

I know it's late in the day for this, but honestly, I've been awake since about 3:30, thanks to my stupid insomnia, so the brain isn't exactly firing on all cylinders. Today we have a foot or so of new snow, and it feels like a snow day. Which to me means curling up with a couple of peanut butter and honey sandwiches on cinnamon bread and reading the literature of my youth: "problem novels" by women who wrote under their initials, like S.E. Hinton and M.E. Kerr. Specifically, I'm really in the mood today to read That Was Then, This Is Now, by S.E. Hinton. Some of the characters overlap from The Outsiders, but the kids in TWTTIN are a little younger; however, they go to the same Tulsa school as the kids in The Outsiders, and I think Ponyboy is mentioned at least a couple of times. It was published in 1971, the same year as Larry Clark's Tulsa, the photo-exposé of teenage drug use in the Heartland, and that's the world this book portrays too. There are drug-addled hippies who pull Bryon's brother M&M into their social circle, call him "Baby Freak," and get him all hopped up on the dope. I would love to talk more about the book, but I'd have to read it again first, and this is supposed to be a Valentine's Day list.

So!

I'm going to recommend some excellent vintage romance reads instead. So with no further ado, I bring you:

THE VINTAGE READER'S FAVORITE ROMANCES

1. Love Story, by Erich Segal. How can you resist a book that starts with "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me."?
   
   This book is truly a tearjerker, and it's also really, really short (although there are still scenes that aren't in the movie). It brings Harvard (and New England) in the late 60s to life, and read now, it chronicles the end of the era of old money and big business and strict class distinctions. Jenny, the motherless daughter of a working-class man and Oliver, the privileged son of a wealthy New England family, meet, marry over his parents' objections, and have a really great couple of years together. I like Erich Segal anyway, but this one, a third the size of most of his other novels, is his masterpiece.


2. Love's Tender Fury, by Jennifer Wilde. Here's a revelation for you: Jennifer Wilde was a MAN! And actually, s/he wrote a book or two I like better than LTF, but this is the one that made his reputation in the mid-70s and personally, I'm pretty sure was the basis for the coining of the phrase "bodice-ripper" to describe this kind of epic historical romance. Marietta Danvers, a poor but proud English orphan, is raped by the lord of the manor where she works (as a lady's maid, I think) and then shipped off to "the colonies" to be sold at auction. She goes through a lot of adventures (and a lot of men) on her way to becoming a fully self-realized Woman of the Seventies, well before her time. I love Jennifer Wilde's characters because they are ACTUALLY feisty, as opposed to most of the modern historical heroines whose feistiness is more closely akin to spoiled teenage rebellion.


3. The Incredible Year, by Faith Baldwin. Actually, this one probably isn't available in most thrift stores, but it's pretty easy to get a nice copy on eBay for not much money. The only edition I've ever seen is the Dell Mapback, which has a really ugly cover. Still, it was the first Faith Baldwin I ever read, and also my first Mapback. Julie, an innocent young woman from the North Woods (Canada, I think--her housekeeper speaks in a "patois" most of the time), is sent to New York after her father's death to stay with a couple he met on a cruise shortly before he died (no, really!). They introduce her to Society and the social merry-go-round a girl of her Breeding should know something about (according to dear old Dad), and she learns to be brittle and superficial, only to lose her one true love when the transformation is complete. You can probably guess the ending, but it will keep you reading all the way to the end anyway.



4. Yonder, by Margaret Bell Houston. Olive, the daughter of a minister and his wife, goes to live in the Florida Keys with distant relatives after her parents' sudden death (are you spotting a trend here?). There she meets a number of interesting characters, accidentally uncovers a family tragedy, and finds out just why it is that she can never have the man of her dreams... who turns out to be not so much the man of her dreams anyway. Written in 1955, it's set in the '20s, and has a nice timeless feel to it. There's not really as much romance as suspense in this one, but I consider it a romance anyway.

More later, hopefully including pictures. Right now it's time for Vintage Baby to go to sleep.

UPDATE: Miraculously, in less than five minutes I was able to lay my hands on three of the four books listed above! Unfortunately, when I went to take a picture of them, I found that the camera isn't working. I can't use the scanner, because it's not hooked up to the computer with the image software on it, and the network isn't working either, so I can't transfer the files. So no pics. Oh well.

I'm on an email list that has several frequent posters from the UK, and this morning one of them used a word I really like: cross. As in "I'm feeling quite cross today." It used to be part of my vocabulary because I read a lot of English books from the 60s by authors like Elizabeth Caddell and Margery Sharp, but it drifted away. That's a shame, because sometimes it's exactly the right word to describe how I feel: quite cross. Not quite angry, not exactly irritated, not even miffed--just cross.

I'm not particularly cross right now, but next time I am I hope I will remember it.