The Life I Read...

When one is a reader much time is spent in collecting, maintaining, and getting rid of books. These activities reduce the time available for actual reading but books as a tactile experience have been a source of joy to me since... well, since before I learned to read.

A number of books from my collection were borrowed and used as decoration at a baby shower for my good friend Tricia. I took the opportunity to rearrange my collections. All of my children's literature [except for the rabbit books and a few oversized books] has joined my Victorian author collection evelynwhitakerlibrary.org in the antique amoire in the living room. I've also been adding archival covers to book jackets and decorative covers which somewhat diminishes that lovely tactile experience.

We bought the Eastlake piece while DMP was in the Army stationed in Maryland. There were really super antique auctions and shops but unfortunately not a lot of money. I planned to use it in our dining room as a china cabinet but it has spent 32 years in our living room holding our special (or sometimes merely decorative) books. At the same time I bought a similarly styled dresser intending it also for the dining room to hold my collection of table linens and function as a cocktail or beverage buffet. It lives in the guest bedroom/office. I still have dining room dreams but DMP says that I might as well let go of the vision we saw in a lovely shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I will never have a dining room to hold that beautiful table for 18 (the dealer said there were 2 additional leaves) with its three sterling silver candelabra.

A girl can dream...

Oh well, if I spent that much time entertaining, there would be much less time for reading.

Having mined the water on our family farm, we are hoping to reap the wind.

I've read and am continuing to read much about wind energy and wind farm contracts. Windustry.org is one good place to start. As a family, we've decided to participate in a community wind farm and all of us are excited about the possibility of having an income source even after the water is gone. My brother, along with his son, has been very helpful and is doing a super job of not only acquiring information and making contacts but of being point man for our family. After much study and even more talk, we all agreed that it was a "win-wind."

Wright, N.T.: Surprised by Hope. Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Harper-Collins, 2008. This is the book selected for Sunday Bible study in the Open Door class which I'm reading in a digital edition on Kindle. My recommendation: read it, read it, read it. Kindle location 1174 "There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.... History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only." 1209 "Sometimes human beings--individuals or communities--are confronted with something that they must reject outright or that, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview." 1235 "The most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment, left-brain rationality alone." 1333 "All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love..." 1564 "Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming the goodness of the other..." 1803 "What creation needs is neither abandonment nor evolution but rather redemption and renewal; and this is both promised and guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This is what the whole world is waiting for." 1831 "In our own day the problem is... flat literalism, on the one hand, facing modernist skepticism, on the other, with each feeding off the other." 1856 "Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture." 1896 "...if the ascension is true, then the whole project of human self-aggrandizement represented by eighteenth-century European and American thought is brought to heel." 1901 "At this point the Holy Spirit and the sacraments become enormously important since they are precisely the means by which Jesus is present." 2248 "...God's world, the world we call Heaven.... is different for ours (earth) but intersects with it in countless ways, not the least in the inner lives of Christian believers." 2397 "The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitute a radical challenge to the entire thought structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear."

Being informed and transformed by reading N.T. Wright, I am very happy with the Christmas card which DMP and I will send this year. As usual I "preview" the readings for Advent and select Bible verses. DMP and I select a card and choose a verse. I love that our card this year will celebrate Jesus' coming to earth not only as the Babe of Bethlehem but as the Redeemer who will bring resurrection and a new heaven and a new earth. From the 96th Psalm: "Let the heavens be glad, Let the earth rejoice... Then shall the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for He is coming."

I continue to nibble at my Annie Dillard reader. Living like Weasels (1974) is as nearly perfect as reading gets. The short essay describes her encounter with a weasel and offers a meditation about choice and necessity. It concludes:

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then, even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you aloft... lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

SEASONS (a group of women meeting monthly to read and discuss theology):

Rice, Anne: Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005. A competent retelling of the story richly embroidered with the senses (you can taste the bread, feel the water of the mikvah, smell the smoke of the sacrifice) and the creation of a very believable family dynamic. I don't care much for this type of fiction and wouldn't have read it if not for SEASONS but I did enjoy and do recommend it. I plan to donate Out of Egypt to the church library.

Long ago, I considered writing a book on the 1st Century, including the childhood of Jesus, the hidden life of Christ. Rachel Crying for Her Children was my working title. The project was put away and forgotten--I often find I satisfy my creative impulses by researching and planning without actually having to write a book. Probably an indication that I'm better suited to be a librarian than a writer. I much enjoyed revisiting this material and was pleased to see in Rice's Author's Note and in the bibliographic materials on her website many of the sources I had researched. I will also take a look at a couple of titles which Rice recommended: the translations of Richmond Lattimore and at John A. T. Robinson: The Priority of John.

So many books, so little time...

Dillard Annie, Rice Anne, wind, Wright N. T.

When I start a novel, any novel but especially a good one, I want to read it all the way through from start to finish with as few interruptions as possible, which is of course not at all possible most of the time. Vacations are an exception. Earlier this month while on vacation, I indulged in a fiction binge:

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley's Secret, Kindle downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Braddon (1857-1915) first published her "sensation" novel about bigamy in 1862 and it was a sensation of the popular sort, going through nine editions in the first year. I was surprised at how much fun it was to read this book--a murder mystery with a bit of romance and family dysfunction. The character of Robert Audley (the nephew/sleuth) and some of the book's tone remind me a bit of the much later comic novels of P. G. Wodehouse. A quote re. Lady Audley's relationship with her adult step-daughter: "There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare. There must be a battle, a brave boisterous battle, with pennants waving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands." Another favorite: "Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is very commonly made by easy-going, well-to-do-observers, who have no occasion to look below the surface. He mistook laziness for incapacity. The thought because his nephew was idle, he must necessarily be stupid. He concluded that if Robert did not distinguish himself, it was because he could not.

"He forgot the mute inglorious Miltons, who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher; he forgot the Cromwells, who see the noble vessels of the state floundering upon a sea of confusion ... and who yet are powerless to get at the helm... Surely it is a mistake to judge of what a man can do by that which he has done.... The game of life is something like the game of ecarte, and it may be that the very best cards are sometimes left in the pack."

Yonge, Charlotte M.: The Heir of Redclyffe, Kindle downloaded from Project Gutenberg, first published in 1853 and the best selling of Yonge's novels, "the most popular novel of the age." Yonge (1823-1901) used profits from her books for charity. Her father told her upon the success of The Heir of Redclyffe "that a lady published for three reasons only: love of praise, love of money, or the wish to do good." She is sometimes called the novelist of the Oxford Movement and was a life-long Anglican Sunday Schools teacher. I read this book long ago, probably in imitation of Jo March in Alcott's Little Women. I enjoyed reading it again. Yonge is a bit "preachy" even for my taste (despite my complete sympathy with her religious views and, as readers of this blog have undoubtedly noted, my predilection for all things theological) but dear Charlotte does go on and on and on and... Perhaps that's one more thing I have in common with her.

I've started Wright, N.T.: Surprised by Hope. Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Harper-Collins, 2008. This is the book selected for Sunday Bible study in the Open Door class which I'm reading in a digital edition on Kindle and I'm hopelessly behind the class in my reading. I'm greatly enjoying the DVD discussion by N.T. Wright and the discussion questions. A few years ago I read this author's The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God--Getting Beyond the Bible Wars (2006) and would put it on my short lists of books that made a significant difference in my world view because it finally made clear to me the questions asked by post-modernist thinkers. p. iv "Almost all Christian churches say something in the formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible and quietly setting aside other parts." p. xi "How can what is mostly a narrative text be "authoritative"? [How can we] "speak of the Bible being in some sense "authoritative" when the Bible itself declares that all authority belongs to the one true God, and that this is now embodied in Jesus himself." p. 14 "My present point is that these older ways of thinking about the world have left their mark on the study of the Bible, on the way it has been taught... and that these ways of thinking have themselves become discredited in the mainstream culture." p. 16 "integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones." My copy of this book is very heavily highlighted and I recommend it with enthusiasm. I'm hoping that I will be able to enjoy reading N.T. Wright as much on the Kindle with bookmark/highlight tabs as I did in print with my yellow highlighter in hand.

I continue reading Annie Dillard (previously blogged) and greatly enjoyed revisiting Total Eclipse and An Expedition to the Pole from Teaching a Stone to Talk. I found her short story The Living a bit odd and disturbing, as Dillard can be. I'm reading a collection of her works on my Kindle. Dillard is one of the finest nature writers I've encountered and I greatly enjoy her writing style and her powers of observation. She makes unexpectedly connections and helps me see how intricately all of life is interwoven. Interwoven--what a great name for the book I'll never write.

And as previously blogged I'm reading through everything by Carlyn G. Heilbrun who will undoubtedly merit a blog dedicated solely to her one day. I recently finished The Last Gift of Time. Life Beyond Sixty. This author gives voice to my thoughts and I know no other author (who did not live in the 19th Century) who mirrors by interior life and thoughts so well. p.2 "...aging might be gain rather than loss, and... the impersonation of youth was unlikely to provide the second span of womanhood with meaning and purpose." p.4 "Perhaps I am one of those who are born... blessed with the gift of eternal old age." p. 35 "As Sartre said, not to choose is to have already chosen. The major danger in one's sixties--so I came to feel--is to be trapped in one's body and one's habits, not to recognize those supposedly sedate years as the time to discover new choices and to act upon them." p. 120 "What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be." p. 137 "To find unmet friends, one must be a reader, and not an infrequent one.... Reading--like those more frivolous lifelong pursuits, singing in tune, or diving, or roller-blading--is either an early acquired passion or not: there is no in-between about it, no catching up in one's later years." and p. 182 "Life seemed simpler because I was young and simple." p. 150 quoting Samuel Johnson: "the enduring elegance of female friendship." ...perfectly describes the relationship of a woman reader with a woman writer whose work she has encompassed, reread, and delighted in." Thank you to my "unmet friends for that "enduring elegance: Jane Austen, Evelyn Whitaker, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Grace Livingstone Hill, Beatrix Potter, Christina Rossetti, Annie Dillard and, yes, Elaine Showalter and Carolyn G. Heilbrun.

I finished the second of the poetry books DMP gave me for Christmas last year. Gluck, Louise: Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. She is an excellent poet and I'll probably keep this book on the shelf and may reread it in a year or two but it was much to dependent on the Persephone myth to be quite my cup of tea. full text available at the floating library

I'll close this month's reading list with another quote from Carolyn G. Heilbrun (p. 182):

"True sadness which is not nostalgia can, I have found, be dispelled by reading: by that same literature which seemed, in my youth, to hold both excitement, wisdom, and all I could discover of truth; and by today's newly perceptive books. Lifelong readers continue to read, finding in books... the means to enjoy life or to endure it."

Alcott Louisa May, Braddon Mary Elizabeth, Evelyn Whitaker Library, Heilbrun Carolyn G., Reading, Wright N. T., Yonge

In a recent post, I said that I don't read mysteries but anyone looking over my reading list would see that I do. Previous posts have included books by

I read mysteries if they have been recommended by someone who knows what I like to read (usually DMP) and I'll read a second by an author who appeals to my sense of humor or offers me a view into history or who feeds me literary tidbits. Since DMP must go to Murder by the Book, now celebrating their 30th anniversary, at least twice a month, I come across such books rather frequently. I've indulged in a fiction binge of several mysteries:

Maron, Margaret: Rituals of the Season. New York: Warner, 2005. This is one of the later books in the series which began with The Bootlegger's Daughter and DMP thought I'd enjoy the chapter heading quotations from Florence Hartley's The Ladies Book of Etiquette, 1873, which may be read on-line at the Open Library. Two quotes: "Many believe that politeness is but a mask worn in the world to conceal bad passions and impulses, and to make a show of possessing virtues not really existing in the heart; thus, that politeness is merely hypocrisy and dissimulation. Do not believe this; be certain that those who profess such a doctrine are themselves practising the deceit they condemn so much... True politeness is the language of a good heart." "Among well-bred persons, every conversation is considered in a measure confidential...." DMP's timing was great since I'd just read a Hartley quote in the Ph.D. thesis of Sonya Sawyer Fritz. A bit of Maron's humor from p. 36: "So what is the difference between a spinster and a old maid?" "Well, as Doris would've said if Herman hadn't stopped her, a spinster ain't never been married. But an old maid ain't never been married ner nothing." DMP was correct; I did enjoy Maron's mystery and may have the chance to read her again (I'll certainly scan her chapter headings) since he acquired most of the out-of-print earlier books by asking me to find them for him. I used abebooks.com, one of my favorite sources, and was able to order from two vendors that I have used frequently: owl books and seashellbooks.com.

I'm planning to read and re-read the non-fiction books by one of my favorite authors, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, and thought that I'd start with three of the Kate Fansler mysteries which were first published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross:

In the Last Analysis. New York: Fawcett Books, 1964. "I didn't say I objected to Freud... I said I objected to what Joyce called freudful errors--all those nonsensical conclusions leaped to by people with no reticence and less mind." p. 1 "She had learned as a college teacher that if one simplified what one wished to say, one falsified it. It was possible only to say what one meant, as clearly as possible." p. 8 "...there's only one test for discovering what you really want: it consists in what you have." p. 159 "He probably thought I was writing a novel and he answered my question in the most long-winded and technical way possible. But then doctors are always indulging either in incoherence or oversimplification--if you want my opinion, I don't think they even understand each other." p. 209
Poetic Justice. New York: Fawcett Books, 1970. Filled with delicious W.H. Auden quotations and an excellent depiction of university life during my undergraduate years and some feminist issues. "unready to die... but already at the stage when one starts to dislike the young." p. 3 "I have nothing against young people--apart from the fact that they are arrogant, spoiled, discourteous, incapable of compromise, and unaware of the cost of everything they want to destroy.... I prefer those whom life has had time to season." p. 41 Kate to Reed: "You... are my greatest accomplishment. I have achieved the apotheosis of womanhood. To have earned a Ph.D., taught reasonably well, written books, traveled, been a friend and a lover--these are mere evasions of my appointed role in life: to lead a man to the altar. You are my sacrifice to the goddess of middle-class morality..." p. 107 "It may serve, in these frantic days of relevance, to remind you of the importance of the useless." p. 110 "When formality went from life, meaning went too. People always yowl about form without meaning, but what turns out to be impossible is meaning without form. Which is why I'm a teacher of literature and keep ranting on about structure." p. 133 "...'the only earthly joys are those we are free to choose--like solitude, your college, certain marriages.' 'And what about unearthly joys?' 'Ah, those, if we are fortunate, choose us. Like grace. Like talent.'" p. 135
The Theban Mysteries. New York: Avon Books, 1971. Antigone, dodging the draft, and an up-scale New York girls' school. "No one pretends anything any more, which I suppose is a good thing, although I can't help sometimes feeling that the constant expression of emotion in itself becomes the cause of the emotion which is expressed." p. 12 "What is troubling... is that he is rude, unwashed, inconsiderate, filled to the brim with slogans, and outrageously simplistic. Alas, he also right." p. 25 "Nothing ages more quickly than the absolutely up-to-date.... the latest in everything, age[s] like a woman who has had her face lifted: there is not even character to set off the ravages of time." p. 27 "There is nothing so uncomfortable as seeing both sides of the question." p. 89 "For myself, I've discovered that when I ask myself what I should do I always tumble into confusion. The only clear question is to ask oneself what one wants to do.... It sounds like [self-indulgence] certainly, but oddly enough, it isn't. The 'should' people are really indulging themselves by never finding out what they want. It has taken me many years to learn that discovering what one wants if the true beginning of a spiritual journey." p. 125

The Auden quotes in Poetic Justice are probably what inspired me to grab my well-worn Pocket Book of Modern Verse, edited by Oscar Williams, for bedside reading, all 628 pages. I have a few favorites but, by and large, I am out of sympathy with Moderns: "Terrence, this is stupid stuff..." A.E. Houseman. Found a smile and an apt description of the Parliament (Rice's NCAA Bulletin Board): "...owls raving--Solemnities not easy to withstand... The owls trilled with tongues of nightingale. These were all lies, though they matched the time..." Robert Graves. My final reading for this paperback with it's yellowed, brittle pages--some falling out--and it's broken spine. I kept it far longer than necessary for sentimental reasons: Larry McMurtry taught my section of English 100 at Rice and this little book is where I met and got to know: Auden, Thomas Hardy as a poet rather than a novelist, Houseman, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'm considering a replacement.

I'm finally returning Peterson, Eugene H.: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Discipleship in an Instant Society. 2nd edition. Downers Grover IL: Intervarsity Press, 2000, to my Psalms study shelf. This a very rich book offering commentary on the Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120-134. Many quotes from this book will one day be added to my Psalms notes but this one is worthy of mention here: "Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor."

SEASONS:

David Eagleman: Sum: Forty tales from the Afterlives. New York: Vintage Books, 2009. The author majored in British and American literature at Rice before earning a Ph.D. in neuroscience. A funny, thoughtful delight which is less about Afterlives than about our perceptions of life. A couple of quotations: "She was always leery of apostates, those who rejected the particulars of their religion in search of something that seemed more truthful. She disliked them because they seemed the most likely to float a correct guess." "...your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events.... you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality."

So many books; so little time.

Eagleman David, Hartley Florence, Heilbrun Carolyn G., Maron Margaret, mystery, Peterson Eugene, Poetry

I live in the heart of a sprawling city where "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And bears man's smudge and shares man's smell..." and yet sometimes I am surprised by great natural beauty. The wild turning of a bayou, a kingfisher perched on a wire, flights of birds or butterflies that swirl like schools of fish in the sea, swooping martins, flowers, flowers everywhere. "...nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep-down things..." These two ideas play tug-of-war in my thoughts. {The quotes are from my favorite poet Gerard Manley Hopkins whose words are as deeply etched in my heart and as voiced in my prayers as any scripture.}

Yesterday I went to the zoo with my sister-in-law, my neice and her young daughters. When one goes to the zoo one expects to see animals, animals in cages--no matter how lovely the habitat of the cage may be. My favorite animal was wild and uncaged--a young cotton-tail rabbit sitting behind a palm tree nibbling a tidbit from the plantings. A "dearest freshness deep-down thing" reminds me that this city is an overlay on an ancient landscape.

After I got back home I rested by catching up on blog reading. CFS in her blog Link to this blog wrote, "The other day I was driving home from work, on 290, going posted speeds with the rest of the Houston population, and do you want to know what I saw: a duck and her four baby ducks. That is right, there was a duck trying to cross 290 with her 4 babies!!! It was a disturbing picture for me. How on earth did that duck and her four babies get up on 290?" I identify with the duck and wonder how such a fast-moving, dangerous thing as U.S. Highway 290 came to be on the peaceful Katy prairie, ancient home to migrating water birds. "...all is seared with trade" and the prairie is being devoured by that sprawling city that is my home.

I think of my friend DTA and her pressing concern for the over-population of the earth. I remember petri dishes filled with nutrients and seeded with bacterial cultures. How very much pictures of the earth from space--the spreading lights, the destruction of forest, the growing deserts, the Texas-sized gyre of litter in the Pacific, urban sprawl creeping across the big blue marble, "all... bears man's smudge and shares man's smell"--resemble those petri dishes with the bacterial colonies eating thier substrate until all is gone and there is nothing left but death.

Another friend, VFS, blogs Link to this blog about the Polyphemus moth in Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. I don't need this reminder of a disturbing story that has long lived in my memory. I remember my mother asking me to take a look at the "worms" that were eating one of her prize plants and finding a butterfly chrysalis and watching the process of a butterfly unfurl and take its first flight, a "dearest freshness deep-down thing." I am in sore need of such comfort.

I love Annie Dillard who voices my tug-of-war and grows my spirit. It's time to read her books again and I'm pleased to find that I can now add her books to my Kindle: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek American Childhood The Writing Life For the Time Being Holy the Firm Teaching a Stone to Talk An Annie Dillard Reader The Maytrees The Living

My blogging friends both work with issues of childhood, although in very different fields. Their blogs resonate with each other, echo through my thoughts, disturb my rest. How many children did I see at the zoo today who are Dillard's Polyphemus moth? How many mothers and children are caught in a world that has changed and is moving much too fast? How many of us are caged in spaces too small to spread our wings and fly? We and all creation bear the curse of a by-gone Eden, "bleared, smeared with toil..."

I find it's easy to weep.

It's harder to hope.

I share the depression that often crippled the poet.

Yet, Hopkins concluded his poem:

"Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Link: to Hopkins poem on the Victorian Web.

Dillard Annie, environmental, Hopkins, memoir

When I was in the 4th Grade at South Plains School, J.B. Williams, became the principal and every two weeks (or maybe only once a month) he went by the public library in Floydada to check out a collection of books for his "country school" students. I think the librarian selected them for him. The books filled the large back seat of his car and the older boys carried then into the classrooms, sorted by grade levels. My classroom had books for girls (Nancy Drew and stories about nurses) and books for boys (Hardy Boys and sports stories) and dog and horse books. I usually managed to read all the girls' books, all the dog and horse books, and several of the boys' books before Mr. Williams brought the next bunch of books.

The Nancy Drew books were the most coveted; all the girls wanted to read Nancy Drew. I sometimes spent recesses and lunch hours telling the slower readers the stories so that they would give their books to me, which probably undercut the purpose of Mr. Williams hauling all those books around. I read the first 37 books of the series, mostly in the editions illustrated by Bill Gillies: Link to see Nancy Drew dust jackets The Nancy Drew mysteries are "formula" ficition. Carolyn Keene was a name owned by the publisher and the books were actually written by several people. The first books (perhaps the first 23 in the series) were written by Margaret Wirt Benson for $125 each. Benson wrote other books, many of which I read. Link: Mildred Wirt Benson

After I finished whichever Nancy Drew books were in the stack, I read all the dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune, the first author's name I learned because someone else wrote dog stories that I didn't like at all. I remember looking carefully at two of the books and discovered that the author made a difference. I also remember showing the books to Mr. Williams and telling him which ones to bring next time. I was a bossy little girl. Some would say I never outgrew it.

I also loved the books by Mary O'Hara; My Friend Flicka is the most well known probably due to the TV series. I liked the one about the white stallion Thunderhead and in fact searched that book out for my collection. Green Grass of Wyoming and Wyoming Summer are other titles.

The nurse books were the Cherry Ames mysteries by Helen Wells and the Sue Barton series by Helen Dore Boylston. When I declared my intention to be a nurse, my parents said I should become a doctor instead because I liked to be in charge. See, I really was a bossy little girl.

As I grew I read and read... Mysteries were a big part of what I read: Victoria Holt (one of the pen names of Eleanor Hibbert) and Mary Stewart and the canon of classic mystery writers: Eric Ambler, John Buchan, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Helen MacInnes, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, and Erle Stanley Gardner who wrote the Perry Mason series that my Gran Cummings loved and DMP continually rereads.

I know a lot of people who read mysteries--who in fact still read the mysteries I read. My husband, and at least 2 of my sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law... One of sisters-in-law in fact writes mysteries. Link to Dee's website. Houston has a whole bookstore devoted to mysteries which I visit with DMP two or three times each and every month. {Sigh!}

I, however, don't read mysteries. Somewhere between ages of 25 and 30 years, I pretty much quit. I stopped reading mysteries and formula romances around the same time. It was not a conscious decision as much as my having tired of the formulaic genres. Around that time I wrote a romance novel which was never published and in retorspect I'm very glad it wasn't.

I read a lot of Victorian authors, I read some literary fiction, I read some theology but I don't read mysteries.

memoir, mystery, Nancy Drew, Reading, school, Wilbur Dee