Carry On, Mr. Bowditch

by Jean Lee Latham
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1983 (originally published 1955).

Growing up in Salem in the young United States, Nathaniel Bowditch is fantastic at figures but indentured at a young age. Instead of fulfilling his dream to go to Harvard, he must "sail by ash breeze" and teach himself everything he wants to learn.

I first read this Newbery award-winning book for school, and I loved it enough to read it multiple times afterwards. I haven't read it since childhood, however, so it was interesting to reread with an adult's eyes. I loved Nat and his notebooks as he learned new things, and I can relate to his desire to have the answers be right. On this reread, I found that as an adult I understood the conversations between characters - especially what's left unsaid - much more fully, and I'm not just talking about the vague references to salty language! I also had not picked up on how the author takes pains to use short sentences and, if not explaining something outright in the narrative, has characters explain some things about sailing or navigation so that children readers would be able to follow along. This last fact is the main reason I wouldn't bother to reread this book again (except, perhaps, as a read-aloud to young children), but I will be looking for another biography to read on Nathaniel Bowditch.

Caleb's Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks
New York : Viking, 2011.

Bethia Mayfield is the daughter of the preacher on Martha's Vineyard, a man who sees it as his life's work to preach the gospel to the Indians. On one of Bethia's rambles in the wilderness of this land, she encounters a young Wampanoag, whom she renames Caleb, a young man whose friendship she treasures, but would never be sanctioned in the 1660s.

I have read other novels by Geraldine Brooks, but never have I been so enthralled with them as I was with Caleb's Crossing. Bethia, our narrator, is a young woman with a keen mind and thirst for knowledge but also devout and not unbelievably modern in her thinking. Caleb was based on a real person, one of the first Wampanoag men to matriculate at Harvard. As in the best historical fiction, time and place - in both Martha's Vineyard and Cambridge - are evocative and realistic with historical details naturally adding to the narrative, showing Brooks' research with a light touch. I now want to follow up with some of the sources mentioned in the afterword to learn more about the time period. In addition to this, Brooks delicately touches on the themes of religion and prejudice without sounding preachy or anachronistic. Truly superb historical fiction.

The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

by Elinor Lipman
New York : Random House, 2003.

Dr. Alice Thrift doesn't excel at interpersonal communication. Actually, that's putting it lightly. She's an intern who wants to become a surgeon, works long hours, and takes everything seriously. When Ray Russo, a former near-patient for a nose job, starts calling her and asking her out, she's rather flattered and can't quite see how this could go wrong, despite the advice of everyone around her.

I was in the mood for something light and knew an Elinor Lipman book would fit the bill. Despite, or perhaps because of, her serious nature, Alice was a really fun heroine. I'm not so great at reading people either, but even I was a step ahead of Alice and sometimes laughing at her naivete. She tells you on the very first page that her relationship with Ray doesn't work out, so reading this felt kind of like watching a car wreck - you just can't look away.

Seth Pomroy, His Book

by Seth Pomeroy
Northampton, Mass. : published by the Forbes Library, for the Friends of Forbes Library, 2002.

Seth Pomeroy - or Pomroy, how he signed his name - lived in Northampton, Massachusetts, and fought in the French and Indian War. The majority of this, his journal, concerns campaigns fought in 1745 and 1755, primarily in New York.

The written journal has been reproduced on the pages, alongside a line-by-line transcription by Joseph Donohue. I tried to read what I could of Seth's script, but it was not always able to make it out unless I read and compared it to the transcription. It was a slow start for me, but I took it along with me on vacation and managed to get some reading time where I could really get into the flow of the writing and get used to the rhythm and look of the old-fashioned text and style.

Though not particularly poetic or polished writing, this is nonetheless a glimpse into the life of a regular colonist living in the 1700s, made all the more fascinating for me, personally, because the author was a distant cousin of mine.

Trancendental Wild Oats

by Louisa May Alcott
Boston, Mass. : The Harvard Common Press, 1975.

When Louisa May Alcott was ten years old, her father and other transcendental visionaries experimented with living off the land in a community called Fruitlands. They would not use any animal products in diet, farming, or clothing. They would work at what jobs pleased them and spend their leisure time in activities such as reading or discussing philosophical questions.

In Transcendental Wild Oats, Louisa May Alcott fictionalizes her family's experience attempting just that. This very short story is subtitled "A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance." I do not know enough about Fruitlands to determine how realistic some of the situations are, but her descriptions sometimes made me laugh as Louisa shows how the principles may have been well and good, but in practice their experiment went awry. This volume also includes an excerpt from Louisa's childhood diary and two letters that Fruitlands founders Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane wrote.

Perhaps this was not a good book to read as my introduction to Bronson Alcott and Fruitlands. My particular copy has an introduction by William Henry Harrison, who apparently worked in the Fruitlands museum in the 1970s. Harrison's introduction is broad and gives a brief biography of Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott, the founders of Fruitlands, but I didn't truly feel like I had a grasp on what their intentions for Fruitlands was. This makes reading a satire of the attempt a little bit difficult to "get." But the story piqued my interest in reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott that gives me more information on this experiment. Here is my short list of Alcott-related books I now want to read:

• Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs (Newbery-award winning children's bio)
• Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson
• Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
• The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (more a history of thought than about the Alcotts specifically)

Funny how reading one book can add to my TBR list...

Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg
New York : Nan A. Talese, c2010.

The last thing Avi expected to become was a prison librarian. This former Orthodox Jew without an MLS applied for the job because, well why not? It was full time and came with benefits, which was more than he could say for writing obits. But the job came with much more than the description in the ad could entail.

As a librarian in a public library, I usually skip over books that are about working at a library. It feels too much like bringing work home. This memoir intrigued me, however, reminding me of a class I look en route to my MLS on serving underserved populations. Our class even visited a prison library as a field trip. And, I figured, his job was different enough from mine not to feel like bringing work home.

Well, soon after starting this book I realized how much of an understatement that was. At first I was put off by his casual use of swear words and his attitude towards the religious life he left behind. After he got the job, however, I became fascinated with some of the details of his interactions with inmates, his struggles with "the right thing to do" in various situations, and what his job entailed. It's about as different as a job in the same field can possibly be; we both work with books and try to have materials on the shelves that interest our patrons, but that's about as far as the similarities go. The high stress of his job and the constant battle between serving the inmates and keeping the guards happy gets to him after awhile. The descriptions of prison life and the lifestyle and choice of the men and women who were in that prison are not pretty, and drained me just reading the book. By the time I got to the end, the book started to feel disjointed and hard to follow. I wasn't sure if I ran out of steam or the author did. Still, this is a profession that doesn't get a lot of notice, and I enjoyed this look into an aspect of librarianship that is often fraught with difficulty.

The Penderwicks

by Jeanne Birsdsall
New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2005.

Rosalind, Skye, Jane and Batty Penderwick are four sisters who go to a summer cottage on vacation with their father and the dog, Hound. At fourteen, Rosalind tries to keep order since their mother passed away, especially by taking care of Batty. But their summer may be turned topsy-turvy between Mrs. Tifton - who is very particular about her gardens - and her son, Jeffrey. At the very least, this will be an unforgettable summer.

Though set in the present day, The Penderwicks has an old-fashioned, timeless quality to it. The full title reads "The Penderwicks: the story of four sisters, two rabbits, and a very interesting boy." The words that kept coming to mind were cute, sweet, and funny. IPods and designer clothes aren't mentioned, and the themes are such that kids from all generations can relate to, like a child's relationship with a parent. This is a book I would be willing to purchase and keep around to share with my own (future) children.

Now I Want to Work for a Dictionary

The Broken Teaglass
by Emily Arsenault

Just out of college, Billy gets a job as a definer for the Samuelson dictionary in sleepy Claxton, Massachusetts. When looking through the citations files (commonly shortened to "cits") in answer to a letter, he and his co-worker Mona stumble upon a rather unusual citation. Taken from The Broken Teaglass, the cit is longer than normal and seems to be a story that takes place at Samuelson. What's going on?

This is a rather unusual mystery, not merely because of its setting but also because it doesn't have the building pace that mysteries generally have until you reach the denouement. Being dialogue-heavy, the book read fast even when the pace wasn't flying along. I was often a step ahead of Mona or Billy, and figured out the ending early.

My favorite parts, though, were the premise and the setting. I loved the details of lexicography and the eccentric nerds/geeks that populated the dictionary staff. It made me want to work on a dictionary! I want to find cits and put them together and, and, and. Yeah, this book definitely brought out my inner word geek. I was a little disappointed to read in the acknowledgments that the author had taken some liberties with the lexicographical process but didn't explain which parts. I wanted to know! For those like me that liked the dictionary and lexicographical information, I'd also recommend The Meaning of Everything and The Professor and the Madman, the books Simon Winchester wrote on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.