Sewing and a Book Review

Today, I have been busy with projects and flaxing around (apparently flaxing isn't a word...autocorrect suggests "flapping" or "flexing", neither of which I was doing...in my book, it means "flying around, getting lots of things done").  One of the things I did was start work on a fabulous late 40s/early 50s wrap dress.  I seem to have a bit of a thing with wrap dresses this summer.  I made a flowery short 60s dress that is for fairly nice occasions and this dress is completely different.  It's long and swishy and will be for really hot August days at home.  I actually took the time to stop and take pictures, so I've included a few.

That blue thing is the bias tape that I'm using as facing
in the place of a regular facing.  The pattern I'm
using was missing any facing pieces.

This actually has a little bit to do with a book I just read.  Well, "read" is a little too serious.  It was more like, "skimmed some parts and read some parts admired the pretty pictures".  The book, written in the 90s, is called Life, Loss, and What I Wore.  I picked it up simply because I had a few minutes and I didn't want to be engrossed in something really good and burn the rhubarb sauce all over the stove (I did that anyway).  This book is a very small memoir of a woman's life, as lived through her clothes.  So, the story starts out with a dress that her mother made and wore in the 30s and moves through her life.  Each page is a small anecdote and its facing page is an illustration of the dress.  Each chapter is a decade and ends in the 90s, with the author's granddaughter playing dress-up in one of her old dresses. And there were some gorgeous vintage dresses mentioned.  I especially loved the description and picture of the author's elegant 50s ball dress.   Reading this description, this sounds like a charming and interesting read.  And it was, to some extent.  However, I didn't love it.  The writing style sounded extremely dated (in a bad way), but it wasn't just that.  It was extremely self-involved and navel-gazey.  I found myself saying, "Oh please," more than once.  So, I don't recommend this unless you just happen to own the book and haven't read it or you really want to know about it and get it from the library.  It's not worth purchasing, in my humble opinion.

The book

But back to my dress.   I can't wait to see how it turns out.  I love this era of pattern and I think it's going to be a very nice, practical dress.  Here's the pattern, so you can see what the end product will look like.  I'm doing the shorter version because, honestly, can't you just imagine tripping over that long skirt every time you walked?

A Wilder Rose

Last week, I was talking to my grandmother and she was enthusiastically telling me about this wonderful book about Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  I listened, exclaimed that it sounded wonderful, then promptly forgot about it.  However, she was persistent, and so now I've read the book, too.  And what a wonderful read it was!

A Wilder Rose is the fictionalized account of Rose Wilder's often-fraught relationship with her mother, particularly when helping her mother write the Little House books.  From unpublished diaries and letters, historians and writers are beginning to see that Rose Wilder pretty much wrote the Little House books herself.  Rose was a very skilled editor, journalist, and writer and had a lot of experience in the publishing world.  Laura, on the other hand, and pretty much no skill, but she had a lot of good stories. Laura and Rose's relationship when writing the Little House books is the basis of this book.  According to this book (and who knows how much of this is fictionalized and how much is really based on fact), Rose spent her whole life feeling like Laura didn't quite approve of her.  This feeling only intensified when, at the age of 3, Rose was left alone while Laura was sick.  Wanting desperately to help, Rose put too much wood on the fire and burned the Wilder's little house down.  Rose writes of still remembering that sickening realization of what she had done.  This was just the start of many years of severe poverty and hard living. Rose agreed to basically write these books for her mother with no credit because she always felt indebted to her parents because of all the loss they had suffered.

Rose Wilder Lane

Once Rose grew up, she was determined to make something of herself and so attended high school in Louisiana with one of Almanzo's (her father) sisters.  After that, she attended college and began a high-powered writing career.  She had a brief marriage which collapsed shortly after the death of her only son.  When the Depression came, Rose returned to the Ozarks to live with her parents.   That was when she had her mother began working on the Little House books.  The journey from a very unpolished memoir that Laura wrote to the polished stories that we know of today is a fascinating one.

The book is told by Rose to a young aspiring journalist who is living with her.  This made for some kind of confusing foreshadowing that I think the author could have worked a little harder to make clear.  However, that is my only complaint.  I was surprised at how different these well-known characters appeared to be.  Laura became a very different, but 3-dimensional, character.  This book portrays her as a very domineering, grasping, not-very-nice person.  But in spite of these less-than-perfect character traits, we come to identify with and pity both Laura and Rose through this story.

I recommend this book to anybody who has read the Little House books, which is a pretty large percentage of the population!  The story is well-told and gives the reader another perspective into these well-known stories.  I think that I am going to read a non-fiction book that has just come out about Laura and Rose's relationship.  I'll let you know what I think of it and how it compares to this book.

As usual, I have the amazon links for this book and the A Ghost in the Little House, the non-fiction book I'm going to read.


    

Storm Pictures

As I sat on the porch this afternoon, there was a gentle breeze whipping around and a blue, blue sky.   It was the perfect kind of day to be outside, but suddenly, I smelled that damp, breezy smell that signifies rain.  I snatched up the camera and took pictures of the storm closing in over the barn roof.  I thought I would share them here today, since this blog is both my book reviewing and my life-recording blog.

The rain and the wind came oddly fast, so the majority of the pictures ended up kind of blurred, but I was very pleased that I managed to get a few really nice ones.

The weather just can't decide what to do today.  As I write this, I'm sitting on the porch enjoying the sunshine and breezes again!

I'll be back tomorrow with a full length book review.  Until then, I hope you enjoyed these pictures!  I had a lot of fun taking them.

A Rainy Day

Today I'm enjoying the rain gently pattering on the roof as I work on inside projects.  I've spent every waking moment outside the last few days, so it's a nice break to be inside.  Here's what I'm doing/have done today (and a pretty picture I found for your perusal):

I love pictures of people reading.  This picture is by Deborah Bays.
It's called Summer Solitude.

• Listening to the Kingston Trio as I type this.
• This morning included a trip to a local store where I got pretty soap and earrings.
• Working in my cozy sewing room.  Sewing is the perfect pastime on a day like this.  I'm working on a flowery 60s wrap dress.
• Contemplating blog posts and what my writing goals are.
• Doings some furniture shifting
• Reading (of course).  I'm enjoying A People's History of the United States (the chapter about the beginnings of slavery) and Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell

What do you like to do on rainy days?

My Latest Reading Project

I have a new reading project.   I sat down with some lovely sharp pencils and notepaper and made lists. I love making lists and planning, so this was a lot of fun.  For the next several months every evening, I'm going to be reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States (written along with Anthony Arnove).  So far, I've read the first chapter in both books.  Each chapter in each book corresponds.  The Voices book is several writings from several viewpoints in different points in American history in each chapter.  The People's History is Zinn's take on the time period with plenty of primary sources cited.  For instance, the first chapter of the Voices book has an excerpt from Columbus's diary, an excerpt from the diary of a man who was on the ship with Columbus and came to realize the evils of what they were doing, and an essay written by a Native American man in the 1980s re-imagining Columbus's arrival.  Then, Zinn offers his thoughts about the arrival of Columbus, all written in a captivating and lyrical prose.

I think this is an important book for everybody to read.  American history (particularly school textbook history) has become badly distorted in a variety of ways.   Firstly, for many years, the viewpoint of the white, European-origin male has reigned supreme and the school system seems to not have quite gotten the message yet that this is only relevant to one segment of the population.  Second, the wars, exchanges of money, and foreign policies have been the "important" parts of history for a long time.  What counts is not what the Virginia slave women were making for their meals, but what law Jefferson was passing.  Howard Zinn has set out to completely change the way we view history and I think he's done a wonderful job of it.

One thing I am enjoying about this book is the calm recognition that, yes, this history that Zinn is writing is biased.  So often, history is presented as pure gospel, like the Pythagorean Theorem, that can never be wrong.  Even though the facts themselves may be true, every historian picks and chooses when writing something and it's refreshing to have that acknowledged.  The other thing I love about this book is how truly interesting it is.  That history is boring is something that many 5th graders repeat.  And really, if you're talking about textbooks, they're right.  This book succeeds in sounding serious and intelligent, while still being fascinating.

I thought I would give you two quotes that I especially love from Zinn's books.  The first one is from A People's History, the second is from Voices.

"My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia.  It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality.  But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us.  One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a max of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.  We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks.  This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences.  It is therefore more deadly."

"To omit or minimize [the] voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations.  I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women- once they organize and protest and create movements- have a voice no government can suppress."

I strongly recommend that you read these books.  They are actually surprisingly cheap for how big they are and they are books that are worth buying and adding to your home library.  However, they are at my public library, so you could definitely check them out of the library first, read a bit, and then decide what you think.

 

Giveaway

Quick!  Quick!  The Midnight Garden, a blog that focuses mostly on young adult and middle grade fiction, is hosting a giveaway of L.M. Montgomery books published by Sourcebooks Fire.  As many of you know, I adore L.M. Montgomery, so you'd better bet that I went over there are entered at once.  If any of you are interested, head on over there.

Here's the link.  Enjoy!

There are two sets of books being given away: a set of the six Anne books and a set of six non-Anne books.  The books in the non-Anne set are Jane of Lantern Hill, A Tangled Web, The Blue Castle, Pat of Silver Bush, Mistress Pat, and Magic for Marigold.  Of these, I have only read The Blue Castle, so I'm pretty excited about this.

I'm blogging about this at the last moment, so you only have 15 more hours to enter this giveaway.  Good luck!

The Dead in their Vaulted Arches

You know those books where you finish them and have no desire to go back into regular life or read another book?  The book is still so present in your mind that all you want to do is sit and go over the book again and feel sorry that it wasn't longer.  Well, that was how the last Flavia de Luce book was for me.  I've read some great books recently, but none of them have stuck with me like this.  I read it in about two sittings in one day and it was wonderful.

I'd heard some bloggers mention that this book isn't like the earlier books and this made me a little worried that I wouldn't like it as well.  I definitely agree with them, this book is a little different from the earlier books.  The other books followed the pattern of a pretty classic mystery that Flavia solves by traveling around her little village finding clues and talking to people.  Along the way, of course, there is some family friction and little side adventures, but the point is solving the mystery.  Well, this final book doesn't follow this pattern at all.

As the story begins, the de Luce family is standing on the railway station waiting for their long-lost dead mother who wrecked in the alps (I think...but I can't absolutely remember where it was) when Flavia was a baby.  As they stand waiting, a tall man comes over to Flavia and murmurs, "You like pheasant sandwiches, too?"  Minutes later, somebody shoves him onto the railway and he is run over by the train.  As the family members begin to flock to Buckshaw, Flavia learns more and more about her mother and she begins to suspect that there is more to her mother's death than meets the eye.  Is it perhaps connected to the man who died on the railway tracks?

Alan Bradley wrote about Flavia's mother's death and the reactions of the family so beautifully; I found the funeral scene so heartbreaking that it gave me chills.  I tend not to like extremely emotional scenes in books, but this was so believable and understandable that I thought it was very appropriate. The ending surprised and pleased me and the loose ends were so nicely tied up that I was left feeling quite satisfied with Flavia's lot.

I don't just recommend this series.  You must read this series.  I'm even considering buying these and re-reading all of them, they were so good.  However, if you don't want to buy them, please, please, please check them all out of the library and read them.  I promise, you will be glad that you did.

And that's the end of the Flavia de Luce series.  I've heard murmurings about there being more books, but who knows.  On Good Reads, the seventh book is listed with a 2015 release date, so we'll see...
Oh, but please, Alan Bradley, I want more!

Here are the links to all the blog posts I wrote about Flavia de Luce:

http://bookandaquilt.blogspot.com/2014/03/flavia-de-luce.html

http://bookandaquilt.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-red-herring-without-mustard.html

http://bookandaquilt.blogspot.com/2014/04/i-am-half-sick-of-shadows.html

http://bookandaquilt.blogspot.com/2014/04/speaking-from-among-bones.html

And here's the handy-dandy amazon link, so you can order this straight away, if you so choose.