I knew of Margery Sharp as a children’s author who wrote the series of books about The Rescuers and Miss Bianca (although Wikipedia says that The Rescuers was originally meant for an adult audience?). However that may be, Ms. Sharp also wrote twenty-five other novels for adults as well as numerous short stories. Cluny Brown is one of Ms. Sharp’s adult novels, published in 1944, and not to be taken over by children. (It has a few mild expletives, and the characters are all grown up people, not mice.)

The novel takes place just before WWII in the late thirties. One of the characters says repeatedly that Europe is headed for war, but no one takes him too seriously. Instead of war or impending war, the atmosphere in the book is one of halcyon days in which there is time and mental space enough to pursue rather leisurely growing up and romance in the English countryside.

Cluny Brown is a London girl, an orphan, who is a puzzlement to her guardian plumber uncle and to all of her friends and neighbors in a working class neighborhood in London. She’s tall and plain, but on second or third glance rather striking in some undefinable way, and she has ideas “above her station”. These strange ideas of Cluny’s, such as her taking herself out to the Ritz for tea one afternoon, cause her uncle to worry, and eventually he decides to send Cluny “into service” as a maid.

Cluny ends up in Devon at Friars Carmel, the country home of Sir Henry and Lady Carmel. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Downton Abbey, although not so large or exalted, Cluny wreaks havoc by just being Cluny. She doesn’t do anything too shocking by today’s standards, but in the eyes of the English country villagers and lords and ladies and maids and butlers, Cluny is definitely an anomaly, an odd bird. She asks if she can keep a dog. (The answer is no. Maids don’t keep pets.) She talks to her employers as if she and they are all people, on common ground so to speak, not disrespectfully but as an equal.

Anyway, the book is basically a romance, and Cluny eventually does the thing that is the most shocking of all: she chooses her own husband and runs away with him. I thought this story was a nice little glimpse into British mores and changing times of the 1930’s, and it was fun to think that Cluny and her free ways were only the harbingers of a great deal of change and freedom (and license) very soon to come with the war.

A serial version of Cluny Brown appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, and made into a Hollywood film by Ernst Lubitsch in 1946, with Academy Award winner Jennifer Jones in the title role. Recommended for fans of Downton Abbey and Miss Reade novels and pre-WWII light English romances.

W.H. Auden supposedly said about responses to books, “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.“

Well, I hate to disagree with Mr. Auden, and I do think that those are all valid responses, but there are many others. What about the book that’s well-written in parts, but the parts don’t fuse into a whole? What about the response that this book is entertaining, not trash, but also not great or memorable literature? What about “this book is good, but it has some serious flaws, so I’m ambivalent?” I could think of many, many more nuanced responses to a piece of literature, and my evaluation of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage falls somewhere between the cracks of Mr. Auden’s five verdicts.

Yes, the book is well written. Jones has a feel for the emotional tone and complexity of family and marriage relationships, and she writes about those differing emotional reactions and decisions with insight and understanding. However, the depiction of black men in particular plays into stereotypes that have been damaging in the past and that are sill perpetuated today: namely the idea that black men are oversexed, sexually promiscuous, and dangerous. The husband in our American marriage is promiscuous before marriage and unfaithful after the wedding. But he nevertheless expects the wife to be faithful and committed to him while he is wrongfully imprisoned for five years on a rape charge. This husband would never, never commit rape, but he doesn’t mind sleeping around. And he expects his marriage to withstand that kind of betrayal.

Do men really think like this? Maybe some do. But why would the author portray her “American marriage” as inconstant and unsteady from the beginning if the purpose of the novel is to examine that marriage’s strength when placed under the pressure of injustice and false imprisonment? If I wanted to write about a bad marriage where the guy is unfaithful from the get-go, then all the prison stuff would be superfluous. Or vice-versa.

I wanted to like and to learn from this novel, but in the end I found it disappointing. It just didn’t live up to the hype. However, I did like the ending. One of the main characters was somewhat redeemed in my eyes at the very end of the book.

Final verdict: Try it if you like to be up on the latest (or near-latest) culturally relevant American novels, but don’t expect too much. And skip over the sex scenes if you don’t like that kind of descriptive passage. Or just skip it.

The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall.

I thought this biography of the author of Roget’s Thesaurus was full of interesting information interspersed between the author’s attempts to psychoanalyze Roget and all of his family members. He states lots of assumptions about Roget’s life as facts but then gives little or no evidence that those things are true. I liked the book because I learned a lot about Peter Mark Roget, but I often didn’t know what to trust.

For instance, the author states that Roget was self-centered and oblivious to the feelings and needs of others. Then he gives examples of how attentive and loving Roget was with his wife, Mary. I didn’t know what to think. Kendall states that Roget had an illicit sexual relationship with his daughter’s governess for many years after his wife’s death and that his family tried to hide this relationship, but he never says how he knows this to be so nor does he tell us why Roget, a religious man, would not have married the woman who was said to be his mistress. Maybe it’s all so, but I have questions.

I did like learning about how Roget influenced the development of the slide rule and how he loved the invention of his friend, the kaleidoscope. And I was amazed by the description of Roget’s discoveries in the science of optics, discoveries which led directly to the development of motion pictures about a century later. I enjoyed the story of how Roget as a young man escaped from Switzerland and the French authorities there when the Napoleonic Wars were heating up in 1803. I was sad to read about all the instances of mental distress and illness in Roget’s family and about his beloved uncle’s suicide. Altogether, I’m glad I read the book.

But I returned to Jen Bryant’s The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus after reading this adult biography, and I had a new appreciation for Bryant’s skill in distilling the essence of Roget’s life and accomplishments into a picture book. If you want a very brief introduction to Roget’s life, I suggest Bryant’s book. If you then want to know more, you can check out this biography or one of the others I found when I searched.

Peter Mark Roget: The Man Who Became a Book by Nick Rennison.

Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man by D.L. Emblen.

I did enjoy this quote from Kendall’s book that encapsulates Roget’s response to Darwin’s then-new theories about the origins of life and the purposes of natural history:

“In his ensuing discussion of plants and animals of every strip that comprised the remainder of the first volume (Bridgewater Treatise), Roget proceeded from the assumption that God has designed all their features in an ingenious way. Roget conceived of God as an artist; and his job as a natural historian was to discover and reveal the order in the work of art known as the universe.”

God the artist, indeed. Roget and I would agree on that assumption.

January 1: Ring Out Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from In Memoriam. On Close Reads, The Daily Poem.

January 2: When the Year Grows Old by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Listen on the Daily Poem podcast.

January 3: For Tolkien’s Birthday, A Walking Song by JRR Tolkien.

January 4: January by Folgore da San Geminiano, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This poem is a sonnet, originally written in Italian.

January 5: Great Is Thy Faithfulness by Thomas Chisholm.

January 6: Epiphany. Prayer to the Three Kings by Evelyn Waugh. We do need to pray for those who are “the learned, the oblique and the delicate”. It’s so hard for the rich man, rich in his own wisdom or money, to enter the kingdom of heaven.

January 7: Twelfth Night by Phyllis McGinley.

January 8: When Icicles Hang by the Wall by William Shakespeare, from Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act V, Scene 2.

January 9: At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners by John Donne.

January 10: Monday by Billy Collins. I actually found this poem on the Facebook page for the Literary Life podcast, a podcast that I enjoy very much, hosted by Angelina Standford and Cindy Rollins. If you’re on Facebook or if you listen to podcasts, I recommend The Literary Life, the page and the podcast.

January 13: The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens. I found this poem in the book I’m reading currently, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

January 14: A Garden by the Sea by William Morris.

January 15: California Winter by Karl Shapiro. I like the way this poem looks at California in the winter and compares/contrasts/places it within the world and the history of the world.

January 16: The Musical Instrument by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

January 17: So We’ll Go No More A’Roving by Lord Byron.

January 18:

January 19:

January 20:

January 21: Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

January 22: There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale.

January 23: Snowflakes by William Wadsworth Longfellow

January 24: Month of January by Hilaire Belloc.

January 25:

January 26: Winter: My Secret by Christina Rossetti.

January 27:

January 28:

January 29: Meeting at Night by Robert Browning.

January 30

January 31:

I have a fair number of poems already chosen for my “Poem a Day” for the month of January, but I’m also open to suggestions for the rest of the days of the month. If you have a favorite or suggested poem for me to read, please leave a comment.

My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. Recommended at Reading Ladies Book Club.

The Kennedy Debutante by Kerri Maher and Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth by Paula Byrne. Both recommended at The Paperbag Princess.

The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis. Recommended at BooksPlease.

Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War by Romesh Ratnesar. Recommended at An Adventure in Reading.

Separated By The Border: A Birth Mother, A Foster Mother, And A Migrant Child’s 3,000-Mile Journey by Gena Thomas. I heard about this book on NPR.

Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson. Andrew Peterson’s new book about art, worship, and creativity.

The Less People Know About Us by Axton Betz-Hamilton. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

Ladysitting by Lorene Cary. Recommended at Real Simple: Best Books of 2019.

God in the Rainforest by Kathryn T. Long. Recommended at Patheos, Anxious Bench.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.

I finished reading this book about Elizabeth Holmes and her ill-fated start-up company, Theranos, last night, and I also watched the documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. The entire story of an entrepreneur turned liar and crook got me to thinking about lies.

We constantly tell ourselves stories. Some of these stories we repeat to other people. We don’t usually tell others the stories that put us in a bad light (confession)—even though the Bible tells us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Maybe that’s because we often aren’t honest with ourselves to begin with, not about the sin and failure and mess in our lives. No, we like to tell ourselves good stories.

I tell myself in regard to lies that a little exaggeration, a little rearranging of events and actions, won’t hurt anyone, and it will smooth the way, make things more understandable, less messy. After all, one can be too scrupulous. And everyone else does it, too. This is exactly what I think Elizabeth Holmes told herself at first. All of the businessmen (most of them are men) in Silicon Valley exaggerate and fudge numbers and build up their expectations of success in order to appeal to investors. Holmes told herself she was just playing the game by the same rules as everyone else.

But then, slowly over time, the little lies and exaggerations become big lies and exaggerations. And if I’m not careful, if we’re not careful, we begin to believe our own lies. Elizabeth Holmes believed that she was creating a new technology that would revolutionize health care; she told herself and then others that this technology would work, that it had to work, that if only she could get enough investment funds to gain enough time to make her ideas into reality, she could change the world. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurs do: sell an idea that hasn’t yet come to fruition. And if she had to fudge, even lie and deceive, to keep the investors happy and keep the money rolling in, then it wasn’t really lying. It was casting a vision, creative storytelling.

Until it all came crashing down. Holmes’s technology of blood testing using just a finger prick drop of blood wasn’t near realization. It wasn’t even close to being a reality, if it could be done at all. But Elizabeth Holmes was so invested in her story that she ignored the problems and the caution lights and just kept right on forging ahead. If she had to lie and deceive some people to keep on realizing her dream, well, then, that was the price she had to pay. And how dare anyone try to stand in her way? Elizabeth Holmes was the heroine of this story!

Oh, Lord, help me to be careful about the stories I tell myself and the stories I tell to others. I am often the heroine of my own story, and I am prone to believe a lie, to become caught up in my own story, to ignore the warnings and the issues and the messes that I am busily leaving in my wake. Lord, give us eyes to see, and grace to repent, and tongues to tell the truth. Kyrie eleison.

I would like to spend the month of January reading books from the years 1900-1909, either books published in 1900-1909 or books set in that decade.

Classic children’s books published in 1900-1910:

Already read: The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900); Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902); The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1902); The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter (1903); Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903); A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett(1905); The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908).

The Adventures of a Brownie by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1900). I do think this little book can go on my reading list for the month.

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902). Maybe this one, too.

Why the Chimes Rang and Other Stories by Raymond Macdonald Alden. I’ve read Why the Chimes Rang, and enjoyed it as a sweet Christmas story, but I haven’t read the “other stories.”

Fiction Bestsellers, 1900-1910:

I’ve read: Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant (1900), Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900), Janice Meredith by Paul L. Ford (1900), The Hound of the Baskervilles by A. Conan Doyle, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905); The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906).

I’d like to add to my reading: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) and The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903). The latter book has a movie coming out soon with Harrison Ford as the main character.

Some other books published in the first decade of the twentieth century that I’d like to read:

Diary from Dixie by Mary Chesnut.

Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlof (1902). Selma Lagerlof, first woman author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, wrote this story of a group of Swedish families who set up a Christian colony in Jerusalem. It would count for the Reshelving Alexandria reading challenge to read a book in translation.

Some books set in the years 1900-1910 that I would like to read:

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert Massie.

The Greatest Adventure: A Story of Jack London by Frederick A. Lane. I have this book in my library.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Idaho and Montana, 1903. A nineteen year old woman murders her abusive husband and then runs away from his brothers who are thirsty for revenge.

Abel’s Island by William Steig. (1907 setting?) I also have this one in my library.

Also I should add some famous and popular poets of the decade to my “poem a day” project: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Houseman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Anna Akhmatova.

If you want to read more posts about books and other news and arts from the years 1900-1909:

1900. 1901. 1902. 1903. 1904. 1905. 1906. 1907. 1908. 1909.

That should be enough for January, especially since I also have some reading plans that are not related to the 1900-1909 decade. Happy reading, everyone, wherever and whenever you are doing it.

I plan to read a poem a day this year, aloud. I always told my students that poetry was meant to be read out loud. And in reference to the poem by Tennyson that I chose for the first day of 2020, I told someone yesterday morning that the actual date may be arbitrary, but human beings need a reset date, a time to start over and think and examine our lives and begin again. It’s that time of year, a time to start anew, to throw out the things that are not working or that are slowly dying.

I put some covers of books I suggest for celebrating the new year down the side of this post. Enjoy.

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.”

?Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I have a goal of reading one books that I haven’t already read by Dickens each year until I’ve read all of his novels. I’ve already read Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and now, Bleak House. Any suggestions for a Dickens novel for 2020?

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. I actually read several of the books in Turner’s Queen’s Thief series this year and enjoyed them all. The first time I read The Thief, I wasn’t that impressed, but this time I really dived into the series headfirst and found it fascinating in its treatment of personality, relationship, and political intrigue.

Great Northern? A Scottish Adventure of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. I highly recommend the Swallows and Amazons series. I also read We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea this year and it was just as good as the others in the series. I just have one or two more Swallows and Amazons books to read, and then I’ll have to throw a party or something Finishing the series seems to require a party or something.

Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins. Great YA fiction, published in 2019.

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich. I just finished this family saga/woman’s life story novel a week or so before Christmas, and I loved it it. I want to read more books by this author.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. This was a re-read along with the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, and I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time I read it.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. This was also a re-read for me, this time in conjunction with my in-person book club that just started this fall. Such a good, but heart-rending story.

The Iron Lily by Barbara Willard. I enjoyed reading all of the Mantlemass Chronicles by Willard this year, but this one may have been my favorite.

The Friendship War by Andrew Clements. Deceptively simple story about a button-collecting fad that reveals a lot about character and friendship in a group of elementary age children. Mr. Clements died late this year, after having published a number of solidly entertaining middle grade fiction titles over the course of his career. His most well-known book is probably Frindle, about a class of fifth graders who make up a new word and campaign to have it accepted into the language.

A Dawn in the Trees: The Thomas Jefferson Years, 1776-1789 by Leonard Wibberley. This book, too, was a part of a series of mildly fictionalized biographical novels about our illustrious third president. I like Jefferson better in fiction than in fact. I did enjoy these books about the story of Jefferson’s life.

What are the best fiction books you’ve read this year? What fiction are you looking forward to reading in 2020?

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton.

The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream by Bryan Mealer.

Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court by Mollie Hemingway.

The Doctor Who Saved Babies: Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis by Josephine Rich.

Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened By the Moon by Leonard S. Marcus.

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior.

The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick Banting by I.E. Levine.

How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books by Joan Bodger.

Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Wilner.

Book Girl: A Journey Through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life by Sarah Clarkson. I did several posts here on Semicolon in response to this book, including Reading Mentors, Book Empathy, Books of Faith, Books That Shaped Me, Reading in Fellowship, Reading Slump, Gifts of Reading, and How to Choose Books.

Sun King: Louis XIV of France by Alfred Apsler.

Young Man in a Hurry: The Story of Cyrus W. Field by Jean Lee Latham.