Fairy Tale Fridays - Giambattista Basile

When I had the idea to start Fairy Tale Fridays, I largely envisioned myself re-reading beloved fairy tales, reading the new takes on them and discovering the original versions. Perhaps a little research here and there into the origins of the tales. But the more I've read, the more I've wanted to learn about how the stories morphed over time, who passed them down and who's telling them now and I'm always looking for new sources of information. Today I found The Journal of Mythical Arts thanks to Veens at Giving Reading A Chance. I doubly excited to find this site because it covers not just fairy tales but myths as well.

As soon as I started poking around the site, I came across the name Giambattista Basile. You may remember that I only recently discovered Basile (shocking, now that I know how much he contributed to fairy tales) and I decided I wanted to learn more about this man who seems to be one of the first people to record fairy tales which had, until that time, been primarily oral.

Born in 1575, Basile was both a poet and a military man who held posts in Neapolitan courts. As different as those two roles are, he's best known for two wildly divergent works. One was a series of nine satires of popular culture in Naples, the other a fairy tale collection, the title of which translates to The Tale of Tales or Entertainment for Little Ones. Basile took the tales that he had heard and made them into original tales which are heavily metaphorical and written in the local dialect. The stories were never published until after Basile's death and then fell into relative obscurity until the Brother's Grimm praised the work. For a guy that's been dead nearly 400 years, Basile is remarkably modern--he's got his own Facebook page! So now, in addition to my previous pledge to learn more about religion in fairy tales, I also want to read Basile's original work (well, the English translation, anyway!).

Sunday Salon - June 26

A little of this and a little of that for you this week, all book-related for a change! From NPR, a couple of links for you. First up, some literary getaways for this summer, including Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee. What literary getaway would you recommend for summer reading?

Also from NPR, Nancy Pearl's 10 Terrific Summer Reads. Delighted to find on Ms. Pearl's list The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert. So now, don't just take my word for it, listen to the wonderful librarian and get yourself a copy!

(Joe Shlobotnik/Flckr)

On Point Radio, with Tom Ashbrook (heard on NPR--you think maybe I listen too much?!), recently compiled a list of listener's best summer read picks. The list includes everything from classics to just released titles; fiction to non-fiction to memoir. Some book "experts" also gave their suggestions for the summer. Are any of these on your agenda in the coming months? I've got a couple that I'm hoping to get to, including The Gap Year by Sarah Bird and Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan.

From Barnes & Noble, their Bookseller's Guide to Good Reading. Included are some hot reads (Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Before I Go To Sleep and the last installment of the Stephanie Plum series), cool books (The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, The Astral, and I Wore The Ocean In The Shape of A Girl) and modern classics (The Poisonwood Bible, Cloud Atlas and Housekeeping). I always think I know most of what's out there, and then one of these lists comes along and proves me wrong.


I'm very excited to have discovered, in the newspaper today (thank heavens newspapers haven't completely disappeared yet!) that Omaha's Joslyn Castle will be hosting "Romance at the Castle: The Brontes" in July. There will be movies, readings, and a one-woman play. I won't be able to get to nearly all of it but I'm hoping to round up a couple of other Bronte fans to get to a few of the offerings.

I'm looking forward to the coming weekend--not so much for the Fourth of July celebrations but for a three-day weekend with, I hope, plenty of time to sit on the patio and read. For those of you in the U.S., do you have big plans for the coming weekend?

What are you reading this week?

What's Keeping Me From Reading Lately - Omaha

It's not that I'm not enjoying Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (I really am!). It's just that there are so many other things going on around here lately to pull my interest away from reading. Tonight it was some baseball followed by big fireworks show. I've gotten tired of the driveway displays but I sure do love those big booming shows!

The flooding Missouri River continues to fascinate and horrify me. That road you see on the left? That's Interstate 29, the north-south corridor from Kansas City to Canada. You can just make out Omaha to the south.

I'm not much of a baseball fan as a general rule, but I do like to watch some college baseball and I love to watch the College World Series. It was especially interesting to watch as a massive bow echo line of thunderstorms moved over the city on Monday night.

If Virginia had won last night against defending CWS champions, South Carolina, it would have been a toss up what to do tonight. It will be a beautiful night to spend outdoors and, had VA won, it would have meant a rematch to determine who gets to play Florida in the championship series.  Since they lost, the decision is made for us.

This year marks the 25th year for Shakespeare on the Green and it looks like tonight we'll be heading down to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream. They always do a terrific job but a big part of the fun is having a picnic dinner in the park with a few hundred other fans of the bard while enjoying juggling and wandering troubadours. I'm eager to see Hamlet as well so we may be back down to the Green next weekend.

Perhaps I can work in some reading while I'm stretched out on a blanket waiting for it to get dark enough for the show to start. What are your plans for the weekend?

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Appearance of Religion in Fairy Tales

In keeping with my idea that June Fairy Tale Fridays would be devoted to marriage, I came across a tale, in my Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales, titled "The Heavenly Wedding." It starts:

"A poor peasant boy one day heard the priest say in church that whosoever desired to enter into the kingdom of Heaven must always go straight onward." My first thought was that this didn't sound very much like a story that was going to end in a "happily-ever-after" wedding and my second thought was that this was the first time that I had ever read a fairy tale that referred, in any overt way, to religion.

In the tale, the boy begins walking, straight onward until he comes to a church. Having followed the priest's instructions, the boy believes that he must have come to Heaven and refuses to ever leave the church afterward. The priest agrees to let the boy stay. While there, the boy witnesses people praying to "Our Lady with the blessed child Jesus." Seeing how thin she is, the child begins leaving food for the statue. Those who come to the church begin to notice that the statue is indeed getting larger.

After some time, the boy becomes ill for many days and is unable to feed the Virgin. When he returns, he apologizes to her and she tells him that she has seen his good will and that the next Sunday he will go with her to the wedding. The next Sunday arrived and when the host came the boy fell down and died and was at the eternal wedding. Which, if you are a religious person, does end our story with a "happily-ever-after" wedding.

Curious about this appearance of religion in a fairy tale, I did a little research. In one article I found the idea that all fairy tales are based on the originally religious beliefs of people. It was the supposition of the author that this is the only way that fairy tales survived the arrival of Christianity in Europe because the people were banned from telling their old stories by their new religious leaders. Most of what came up when I typed in "religion and fairy tales" had more to do with the idea that all religion is, itself, a fairy tale for grownups. Buried some where in all of those search results is, I'm sure, more information on this topic. I'll be spending some time in the coming week looking further into the appearance of religion in fairy tales and looking for other tales where it makes an obvious appearance, as it did in "The Heavenly Wedding." This has definitely piqued my interest!

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

Joy For Beginners by Erica Bauermeister
288 pages
Published June 2011 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours
*all quotes are from an uncorrected proof

Having survived breast cancer, Kate has no interest in risking death by going on the white water rafting trip her daughter is proposing. But at a celebratory dinner with six of her friends, Kate agrees to go on the trip, if each of the women agrees to a challenge of their own, a challenge that Kate will choose.

Caroline's son has just left for college when her husband leaves her for a younger woman leaving her wondering who she is if she is not a wife and a mother. Free-spirit Daria, is the youngest of the group, a potter who prides herself on being unpredictable.Wife and mother, Sara loves those roles but has recently started to wonder what happened to pre-marriage Sara.

"And she found herself wondering at what point in her life she had ceased to be Gulliver and had become the strings holding him to the ground."

Hadley, Sara's neighbor, is a young widow. In her grief, she purchased a house with a garden where the ivy has all but taken over everything else in the yard and cut off the house from the outside world. Kate challenges Hadley to clean up her garden, opening it back up to the world and uncovering all that is still there, buried beneath.

"When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order to simply move forward through their days. If that suspension faltered, if you truly understood, even if only for a moment, that human beings were made of bones and blood that broke and sprayed with the slightest provocation, and that provocation was everywhere--in street curbs and dangling tree limbs, bicycles and pencils--well you would fly for the first nest in a tree, run flat-out for the first burrow you saw."

Marion, the oldest of the group, is also the rock steady organizer. Where her sister, Daria, grew up pushing the limits, Marion was always the "good girl."

"There were moments in life, Marion thought, when you reached back, baton in hand, feeling the runner behind you. Felt the clasp of their fingers resonating through the wood, the release of your hand, which then flew forward, empty, into the space ahead of you."

Kate's best friend, Ava, whose mother died of cancer, is dealing with the guilt of not being with Kate during Kate's battle with cancer. How could she be? When her own mother was losing her own battle, Ava discovered that her hyper-sensitive sense of smell meant that she could tell when people were losing their battles.

And Kate? Kate who had looked death in the face and won? Kate is terrified of the raft trip, unable to grasp how she could possibly have allowed herself to be talked into willingly risking her life after working so hard to save it.

Joy For Beginners started slowly for me. I felt much the same way with this one as I did with The Four Ms. Bradwells: another story about a group of women; what can this one possibly offer that's new? First of all, Bauermeister has written the novel in a unique way that allows each character to take center stage as they tackle the challenge that Kate has assigned them. There is none of the "whole group together hashing out old grievances" that is so standard in novels about women. Instead, many of the characters don't even appear in the other character's chapters.

I suppose it should not have surprised me not to "click" with some of the ladies. If these were real people, it would stand to reason that there would be some that I wouldn't connect with. Still I began to be worried when I wasn't particularly drawn into Caroline's and then Daria's stories.In the same way, then it should not have taken me by surprise to have found myself so emotionally attached to other characters, some because I saw so much of myself in them. I found myself particularly drawn to Sara and Marion because I saw something of myself in them, but also to Hadley, who brought out the mother in me. Bauermeister really grabbed me with these two passages that seem to define so many women's lives:

"From the beginning, Sara had felt the pull toward procreation, toward Dan, as strong as the current of a river, deep and sensual, impossible to resist when she was ovulating. During the weeks when she was not fertile, she had felt like paper, thin and insubstantial, ready to blow away with the next wind."

"She had never felt the simple urgency of time more than in the past few years, as her ovaries creaked into silence and she had gone for months and then a year without the gush of blood or the deep purple sadness that came with it. She had understood that something was ceasing within her and, more important, would never start again. The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly irreversibly clear."

Perhaps it just took me until Sara's story to really understand where Bauermeister was going with the book, what she was trying to say. Once I did, I couldn't put the book down as I was drawn deeper into these women's lives. Bauermeister's writing is sublime and her messages universal: don't be afraid to lean on others, take a chance, discover your joy and embrace it. Highly recommended for book clubs.

Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For more reviews of this book, check out the full list of reviews on the tour. For more information on Ms. Bauermeister, check out her website or follow her on Facebook.

The Omaha Bookworms Discuss The Cookbook Collector

The Omaha Bookworms met last night to discuss Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector. Sadly, the picture is not of last night (although I had every intention of taking a picture and just forgot). That picture is from last summer when Mari ( of Bookworm With A View) was still with us in body as well as in spirit. The plan last night was to be on the patio but the weather just didn't cooperate. At least it was better than the night before when there were 23 tornadoes in Nebraska and the sirens went off here, sending the crowd at the College World Series game scrambling for cover. But I digress...

We were a small group last night--just five of us. Three had finished the book, one was about half way done and one hadn't read it. Ellen, who had recommended it was probably disappointed that the rest of us weren't nearly as enthused. I was happy to learn that neither of the other two who finished the book had foreseen what happened on page 329, which we couldn't discuss because we didn't want to ruin for the person still reading.

We talked a lot about the time period this was set in -- Ellen's of an age where she knew a lot of people who were young enough to really get caught up in the dot.com hype. We talked a little bit about what you would do if you found yourself as suddenly wealthy as many of the characters in this book did. One member has a friend that leaves in a big house they got cheap because the owner had lost all of their money in the dot.com bust.

Even though not all of us loved this one, we would all agree that this makes a good read for book clubs.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
394 pages
July 2010 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: bought this one at the Half-Price Book Store to read with the Omaha Bookworms this month

Two sisters, 28-year-old Emily and 23-year-old Jess, who could not be more different. Emily is the stereotypical over achiever, the daughter every parent dreams of, the sister who makes living in her shadow difficult. Jess is the free spirit, the idealist, the thinker whose study of philosophy is a disappointment to her scientist father.

"Everyone expected Emily to take care and take charge. It had always been this way. ... Emily knew she was not an angel, but the more she doubted it, the better she behaved."

As Emily, and the computer company she helped start, move confidently toward a bright future, Jess struggles to nail down exactly what her future will hold. Emily tells Jess "you have a way of losing yourself in other people." The same might be said of causes; Emily frequently finds herself with different men involved in different activist causes.

Emily's boyfriend, Jonathon, is equally driven. He has also co-founded a computer company, scheduled to go public only weeks after Emily's company does. But where Emily is pragmatic, Jonathon is content to let other people take care of the details, while he shoots for the stars.

The constant man in Jess's life is not one of her boyfriends. Instead it is George, who made millions with Microsoft but now is the owner of an antiquarian book store and Jess's boss. George is a collector and one of the "last romantics."  But George has never married, unable to commit to long-term relationships, even when it comes to the things he collects.

"Endlessly he had searched for his love, and when he couldn't find her, he looked for signs, traces of her beauty in books and maps. He surrounded himself with talismans and reliquaries, but he never stopped desiring the one he couldn't find."

A huge cast of supporting characters orbit each of the primary characters, including two Bialystok rabbis, Emily and Jess's father and his new family, co-workers, tree activist Leon, and Sandra McClintock who one day begins bringing cookbooks in to George's store.

Along with that huge cast, Goodman gives the reader an almost equal number of plot lines as we learn about the lives of all of the characters. As a book club selection, all of these characters and plot lines make for a book with a lot to talk about. Perhaps because I was reading this one as both a person just reading it because I'd heard wonderful things about it and as a person thinking about discussion points, I came away from this one feeling of two minds about the book.

As a book club reader, I took a lot of notes to keep all of the characters and discussion points straight in my mind. A somewhat unusual book structure, sudden wealth, secrets, loyalty, trust, activism, family, collecting but not doing  -- all things I'm looking forward to discussing with the Omaha Bookworms tonight. But as a person just reading the book for pleasure, I began to feel like the book was work to read; too many characters to keep track of, not enough time to explore any one thought or character. Still, on page 329, Goodman hit me with something that I should have seen coming but somehow missed altogether; it was then that I realized how deeply into the story I had been drawn, how interested I was in learning how Emily and Jess dealt with what had happened.

The reviewer for The New York Times called this one a "feast of love" and The Barnes and Noble Review calls The Cookbook Collector a "delicious read." Fifty fewer pages, a dozen fewer characters, and I think I might have felt that same way.