Book Trailer of the Week: Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music

I share today a book trailer for the new biography  highlighting the life and career of one of my musical heroes, Ralph Peer.  Peer is not all that well known today, but to those of us who love and collect what is probably best described as "roots music," Peer is the man who made it all possible.  I am already a fan of Barry Mazor's writing, so I expect this to be an excellent history of the period.

This short trailer does a good job of explaining just how important Mr. Peer is to the history of music in this country.  (And that raw, soulful Carter Family song is the perfect soundtrack for this one.)  Even if you are not a fan of the music itself, Peer's story is a fascinating one.  Take a look.

The Girl Next Door

Interestingly, as Ruth Rendell has grown older (she is now 84), her novels tend to feature an older cast of characters.  Her latest, The Girl Next Door, for example, focuses on a group of childhood friends, all of them now in their seventies, who are brought back together by the investigation of a crime that happened in their old neighborhood in 1944. 

After, as children, they discovered a carefully constructed earthen tunnel in an open field near their homes, there was no keeping them out of it.  Finally, they had a place to call their own where they could create a little world far away from the prying eyes of parents and neighborhood do-gooders.  But now, some six decades later, a gruesome discovery is made near their secret tunnel.  A little tin box containing the remains of two human hands (one male, one female) has been found – and police want to know what the old friends might remember about those long ago days.

It is not like any of the old group has gone out of their way to keep up with the others.  Whole lives have been lived with varying degrees of success and failure; some are happily married now, with adult children; others have been married more than once and have no children; some stayed in the old neighborhood, and others have not been back for years.  Life has moved on and, now if they think of their old friends at all, most still picture them as the children they were in 1944.  But that is about to change.

The wild card in the deck has always been Daphne.  Two or three years older than most of the other children in their group, she is the one all the boys were in love with and all the girls wanted to be.  Even now, as the group prepares to meet together with a police detective, most of the men are eagerly anticipating a reunion with Daphne – and most of the women will find themselves resenting her when she arrives.  Let the fireworks begin.

Ruth Rendell

The Girl Next Door is a mystery about a crime that even the police don’t seem to care much about.  After all, the victims, even if identified, have been dead since before the end of World War II, and their murderer, if still alive, is likely to be almost 100 years old.  But don’t let that fool you because Rendell has a lot more than that up her sleeve.  Not the least is her reminder that the emotions of childhood relationships, feuds, and passions are every bit as strong in the minds of the elderly as they were when fresh.  And as it turns out, according to Rendell, they are also every bit as strong in the flesh.  Several childhood friends, because of a pair of severed hands, will live out their remaining years much differently than they had anticipated just a few weeks earlier.

Pure Ruth Rendell, this one is a beauty.

All About Those Books...Start Readin'

These Mount Desert (Maine) high school students have produced a fun takeoff on the hit song "All About That Bass" with a positive message about making learning fun they call "All About Those Books."

Funding for the project was provided by nonprofit, Big Fun Education, a group promoting the theatre arts in schools.

Barnes & Noble on a Cold Houston Saturday Morning

It's long been a habit of mine to wander the aisles of one of the two Barnes & Noble stores near me for an hour or two on Saturday mornings.  So, with two discount coupons in hand, that's where I headed on this damp, cold (hey, it's 45 degrees and this is Houston, after all) morning.  As it turns out, I wasn't really in a book-buying mood, after all.

Maybe it was the sobbing woman who was guarding the front door that did it.  She started saying "sir, sir, sir" while I was way too far from her to understand the situation.  And, of course, I had to stop...or push past her, so what were the options, really?  Still crying, she started babbling about her two...later in the conversation to become three...kids at home with not enough to eat this morning.  Could I give her two dollars and some change?  Now, I'm suspicious of people who beg on the streets, have been suspicious of them for years, in fact.  But I figured it would be cheap and quicker just to give her the two bucks and wish her luck, so I did.  That's when she started to berate me for skipping the "change" part of her request...and never did she say thanks, or "God bless you" or the other usual things that I usually hear in these situations.  So that was kind of a negative "ding" before I even got inside the B&N.

Things, mood-wise, did take a big step in the right direction when I overheard a little girl of about five talking to her mother about a book she wanted to buy.  She was speaking in English and her mother responded - in Spanish - something to the effect that she should practice her Spanish sometimes when talking to her little brother or to the mother.  Keep in mind that this child has zero, absolutely zero, Spanish accent when she speaks English, so someone, somewhere, is encouraging her to speak English instead of Spanish.  Maybe it's the woman's husband, maybe it's her school...but I couldn't resist starting a conversation with the mother and encouraging her to make sure that her daughter learned both languages because of the huge advantage that will give her for the rest of her life.  We went on to have a nice, long conversation about learning new languages, the difficulties she had when she first started learning English, and how much easier it is to read a second or third language than it is to speak them (the woman speaks Spanish, English, and French).  

So that was the positive ding that should have gotten me back to my original mood...a nice wash, and a new beginning, a reset.  Didn't happen.  

So, after ninety minutes of browsing, I came home empty-handed.  Most of you, especially my wife, would say that's for the best if you saw the books already stacked up on, and around, my desk waiting to be read.  

But I'll probably try again tomorrow afternoon...TBR stacks, be damned.

Joyce Carol Oates: 141 Books and Counting

I "discovered" Joyce Carol Oates and her writing in the 1980s and now, some thirty years later, I am as fascinated by what she does as ever.  This woman, to put it mildly, is a book writing machine who has experimented with just about every form of writing there is: novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, sports writing, young adult fiction, children's books, book reviews, memoirs, etc. (and I'm probably leaving something out).  Name it, and she's probably done it.

Yesterday I added a JCO bibliography link, one that will require me to pay close attention to it if I am going to keep the bibliography current - and I counted 141 books to her credit.  Think about that for a moment: 141 books from 1963 through 2014.  There may be other authors of her stature who have matched the pace of almost three books per year for fifty years, but I don't recall one (if you do, please let me know).

In the process of looking for a video to attach to the Oates bibliography (as I've done with each bibliography linked at the top of the homepage), I found the one embedded here.  It so perfectly captures the woman, her personality, her environment, and her writing philosophy, that I want to share it in a separate post.

I have had the pleasure of two brief encounters with Ms. Oates over the years, once in the eighties at Rice University in Houston and then last month in Austin during the 2014 Texas Book Festival.  She is exactly the woman you see in this short video: soft spoken, polite, interested in questions no matter how silly they might seem to her, modest, and tiny.  Ms. Oates is 78 years old now - that should give her enough time for another 30 or 40 books.  I can't wait.

First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen

First Impressions, Charlie Lovett’s follow-up to his very successful debut novel The Bookman’s Tale, shares many similarities with its predecessor, the most obvious, of course, being its “bookish” theme.  Once again, Lovett’s main characters are book people who are happiest when they are surrounded by books, their own or those they can find anywhere else.  This type of book has developed into a recognizable sub-genre in recent years, one that has great appeal to the most avid of readers amongst us. 

For the most part, First Impressions delivers the goods.  Despite being a little predictable because of a plot that readers of this genre have already become all too familiar with, that of a lost manuscript that could change the way the world looks upon a major literary figure from the past (in this case, Jane Austen), the novel gets off to a strong start.  The set-up works beautifully, in fact, as we meet Sophie Collingwood, a young woman who has just taken a job in a London antiquarian book shop.  Sophie loves her new job, particularly working the shop’s “want list” for customers hoping she can find the books they have been unable to locate on their own.  And it turns out to be this same “want list” that will pull her into a mystery that could end up wrecking the reputation of her favorite author, Jane Austen.

Charlie Lovett

As the mystery deepens, Lovett alternates chapters from Sophie’s present day point-of-view with chapters set in 1796 and recounted through Jane Austen’s eyes.  Tension builds as the two story lines begin to converge, Sophie starts to unravel the mystery, and Jane Austen delights in a new relationship with a man four times her age. This man, Richard Mansfield, as it turns out, is the author of a book (A Little Book of Allegories) that has the potential to ruin Jane’s literary reputation more than 200 years after its publication.  

Unfortunately, all of that well-constructed tension is squandered by the book’s rather farcical climax, a climax during which the novel’s characters morph into caricatures right out of a pre-talkie cliffhanger from some 1920s movie theater.  The action grows so ridiculous at one point that the reader almost expects to find the heroine being tied to railroad tracks while her tormentor gloatingly twists his mustache as a speeding train comes barreling toward them.  This jarring change of tone lessens the impact of the other eighty percent of the book, and that is unfortunate because, until that point, First Impressions was good fun.