My mother loved historical fiction. In the days when Erma Bombeck was the queen of domestic humor, and would be feminists felt caught between Betty Friedan (too serious) and Erica Jong (too randy) historical novels were a thinking woman’s guilty pleasure. More serious than Barbara Cartland’s frothy stories, less licentious than the bodice and pants-bursting tales of the “Sweet Savage” series and miles beyond the Harlequin romances, historical novels combined enough research and literary craft to create entertaining stories that someone wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading. About half of the stories were based on historic figures; the other stories were based around historic places and events. The heroines weren’t always beautiful (at least they didn’t think they were) and while most of the stories still focused on a woman’s quest to achieve a happy home, husband and family, the traditional ending wasn’t guaranteed. Mama had a ton of these books and I ran through them all while I was a kid. At the time I thought they were terribly boring; I was in love with “the classics”. The world must have have agreed with my teenaged self , because I don’t see many historical novels these…
My friends and I like to debate the future of books and reading. (For us, this has more appeal than politics or football.) There are the pro-e-readers in the group who are looking to carry half of their libraries in their smart phones and there are the anti e-readers who are happiest with the traditional paper pages in their hand. I enjoy the debates but until recently I believed the only difference between traditional and electronic books was the carrying case. After all, they were both just printed words on a flat surface, right? Nope. When it comes to ebooks, words may be just the beginning. My favorite ereader has a nifty gadget: an incorporated dictionary that lets me highlight any word in the text I don’t know so the definition will pop up without me having to close the page. There’s an encyclopedia link there too. Very helpful. Now I’ve learned that someone has developed ebooks for little kids that have animated pictures mixed in with the text and links in the text (like my dictionary) that helps youngsters understand new words. Kids with the interactive and animated illustration books gained more in story understanding and vocabulary…
February is a hard month to love. Say all you want about the plucky groundhog, and rhapsodize on the romance of Cupid; remember the Chinese New Year, American Presidents and throw in a good word for Leap Year but the truth doesn’t change: February in the Northern Hemisphere is a difficult month to love. The Holiday Season disappeared ages ago and the pastel head of Spring is nowhere near to being seen on the horizon. We may be looking at wind or rain next month but right now the weatherman’s two favorite words are “freezing” and “snow” and the outside world almost seems drained of color. In February, it’s hard to avoid getting depressed. To keep the wraiths of February Depression at bay, may I suggest picking up a few books? In their own ways, each of the following stories helps me through these days of relentless cold. I hope they can help you too. If the rest of the world had to describe Jamaica in three words or less, their list would be: Poverty, Music, and Hot. Politics, Drugs and Religion make the next list but they seem to have grown out of a civilization where life…
It’s funny how often SF writers predicted the future. Verne imagined exploring space and the ocean floor, Bradbury predicted earbuds and my favorite, Robert Heinlein foresaw the Cold War, the Internet and helped invent water-beds. Still the development Heinlein predicted that I enjoy the most was in his novel Time Enough for Love. In that book, Heinlein not only foresaw the development of the e-reader, he predicted the difference between the traditional “paper” book fans and the screen readers. However, I doubt if he realized how silly that battle would get. According to that source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, e-readers actually started in the 1930’s, long before the computer age (or I) was born and Project Gutenberg started digitizing texts 40 years later. Of course, the hardware wasn’t really available to the public then to make the data easily accessible but once personal computers and access to the internet became a common household item, the times began a changing. People began reading books on screens. Then eight years ago, Amazon upended everything by coming out with the Kindle, first as a standalone e-reading pad and later as a software app that allowed the user to keep and use an entire…
It’s no secret that I’m addicted to reading. I started staring at printed pages before I learned to walk and I was pulling the meaning from them before I could tie my shoes so reading was never hard. Want to hear a secret? Reading the Classics, those old, required plays and poems was hard for me, at first. My eyes, trained for the fast-paced, economic sentences of the twentieth century, stopped dead at Elizabethan verse and Middle English. Now, professors tend to look down on would-be English Majors who can’t discuss Shakespeare and Chaucer, so I had to resolve the issue. You could say I got a lot of help. I’d prefer to think of it as cheating. The Canterbury Tales Take enough English classes and eventually you’ll bump up against Chaucer’s famous tales. The premise is simple. A bunch of religious travelers meet at a pub and amuse each other through the evening by telling stories. The problem is, they’re speaking in Middle English, which has, at best, a nodding acquaintance with our type of palaver. As an example, I’ll give you the start of my favorite, The Miller’s Tale: Whilom ther was dwellynge at oxenford A riche gnof,…