The Lennox ladies

I can't remember where I heard about Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard -- I surf so many blogs and other sites with suggested reading titles -- but chances are good it was on a talk forum on LibraryThing, still the best bibliosocial networking site out there in my opinion. The book is a social history of upper class Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century -- and a bit of the nineteenth -- as viewed through the lives of four sisters. Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox were the great-granddaughters of King Charles II, via one of his mistresses. Their grandfather, product of that union, was made the Duke of Richmond so their family was part of the aristocracy.

It's a great read; it could easily have been ponderous with all the personal and social detail to be filled in but it's not. Tillyard does a fantastic job in making people who have been dead for centuries understandable and in providing context for their times. The reality of their lives as women -- even privileged, wealthy women whose lives were far easier than 99 percent of people at that time -- is an interesting and useful corrective to the romantic aura surrounding that era, thanks to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and a million imitators. I'm not dissing Austen et. al -- I'm a huge fan -- but somehow I feel a little more honest having a better idea of how life was really lived.

This family also happens to be a particularly good one for examining the time. Caroline Lennox, the eldest, married the politician Henry Fox and one of her sons was the even more prominent politican Charles James Fox. Emily Lennox married an Irish nobleman, later named a Duke, and with him had 19 children -- then produced another three with her second husband, who was definitely not nobility but was her children's tutor. Louisa Lennox was the most conventional; she also married an Irish nobleman and appeared to be happy in her marriage though they had no children. Sarah, the youngest sister in the book's focus, had the most dramatic life. The future George III fell in love with her but she wound up marrying another man -- very unhappily. She had affairs, which was not terribly unusual, but actually left her husband and wound up divorced, which was. Eventually she married a military officer and was the poorest of the sisters but happy with her lot. It was an interesting time for lots of reasons -- the king went mad, the French revolted, Napoleon was running amok and the industrial revolution was right on the horizon -- and the sisters were in the middle of a transition where love and fidelity within marriage were assuming greater importance -- heading for the Victorian era and all its conventions.

Now that I've read the book I'm eager to see the miniseries produced by the BBC in 1999 -- especially since Louisa is played by Anne-Marie Duff, better known to devotees of Shameless as our Fiona (she's married to James McEvoy, by the way). Anyway it's on the Netflix list. Once the Tour's over I may even get to it ...

Beastly tales

I just reviewed another work of nonfiction for my alma mater, The Miami Herald -- the book is Zoo Story by Thomas French and the review ran yesterday. I liked the book a lot -- it was obviously based on years of reporting, which is the sort of thing that the St. Petersburg Times has been able and willing to do -- and which may be pretty darn scarce on the ground in the future, even at papers owned by nonprofit foundations. The story follows the expansion and consequences of that expansion at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo, where the CEO pushed for an ambitious new Safari Africa exhibit featuring elephants imported from a game preserve in Swaziland. French makes characters out of some of the zoo's animals, which is dangerous -- my only problem with Mike Capuzzo's otherwise excellent Close to Shore was when he claimed to be inside the shark's head -- but French navigates the perilous territory very well, describing more of what happens to the animals than pretending to know what they're thinking.

The same book is reviewed today by Salon's Laura Miller, one of the best book reviewers in the business. Not that I'm intimidated or anything.

A report from Library Land

I recently attended the American Library Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. -- the mother of all library conferences. According to an ALA news release, there were 19,513 attendees -- and I believe it. The gathering was so huge that I knew my college housemate was there -- and never saw her once in three days (she is a university library dean and operates on a whole different level of librarianship). What did I learn? For one thing, from the moment I stepped into the Convention Center to pick up my registration packet, I realized this was my tribe. Everyone looked a little familiar, even though I didn't know any of them. This conference was one of the first times I've felt real regret for not going into this field earlier in my career -- even though I value everything I learned from journalism and other jobs.

It was an exceptionally well-organized conference, which I suppose comes from having these down after all these years. Everything was in the room specified, at the time specified. Events started on time and did not run over their allotted time. A lot of conferences could take a few lessons. For me, it was a nice mix of literary celebrity and practical info. My only complaint is that not much seemed geared toward little libraries like ours -- and I know there are a lot of us out there. No doubt that's because little library staffers don't have time to attend ALA conference organizing sessions, or make their name in the field as speakers. But it's worth keeping in mind because I bet a big part of ALA's constituency actually comes from little shops.

There were some big name writers there -- Toni Morrison as the keynote speaker at the opening general session, John Grisham, Junot Diaz, Dennis Lehane. It was interesting to see the difference between librarians as an audience from a purely literary gathering like the Key West Literary Seminar or the Miami Book Fair. Librarians seemed purely appreciative, not needy in the way that literary eventgoers can sometimes be, and I liked that. Naturally all the writers made sure to give props to libraries and librarians.

Some other mostly random observations and quotes:

What is it with the librarians and Second Life? I just don't get it -- and I don't want to and I won't. Maybe it's because I associate it with a particularly unappealing former work colleague but it just strikes me as creepy. Isn't Regular Life enough, or more than enough to keep up with? I suppose this is just how others feel about Facebook but that's cool. No one's forcing you to do any of those things. It just seems like I never hear any references to Second Life ... except from strangely enthusiastic librarians.

"You don't walk into Nordstrom's and say, 'please show me your inventory management system.'" Stephen Abram of Gale, talking about the way we present our online public access catalogs to patrons.

"We are living in a golden age of comics and book design." Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," "Her Fearful Symmetry" and the upcoming graphic novel "The Night Bookmobile."

Dennis Lehane said the first nine screenplay adaptations of his novel "Shutter Island" tried to change the story to have a happy ending -- and they all sucked.

The panel called "Isn't It Romantic?" -- which featured six very nice and funny writers of romance novels -- was held in a room that was way too small for the crowd, in stark contrast to other sessions that had much bigger rooms and were half full or less. I think that speaks to the dissing of genre in general and romance in particular (I didn't check out the couple of scifi sessions I saw on the agenda so I don't know if those had similar room assignment/crowd issues). Too bad -- because we know they're popular with readers and obviously with a good section of librarians, too. Speaking of stereotyping, I think I was at the exact median of age, body size and apparel choices in that room -- making me feel both at home and strange, like when I see Swedes whom I've never met and am not related to, but who sort of feel familiar.

And this isn't ALA or library-related at all but if you go to Washington and have limited museum viewing time, I cannot recommend enough visiting the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. They share the old U.S. Patent Office building and they are both fantastic museums that are also a reasonable size to take in. The Portrait Gallery side, in particular, offers a nice precis of American history at the same time as seeing some cool paintings. And I got to see a genuine painting of Elizabeth I there! (Yes, she's not American but she played a role in early English settlements.) The real thing! The guy who painted that was looking at her! That gets my Tudor geek on, big time.

Of course, if you're interested at all in libraries you will probably visit the Library of Congress -- I'm embarrassed to say this was my first visit there but it was so worth it. What a gorgeous building, and monument, to the mission of libraries and their centrality to our country. And it's a working library, too. The tour was great, with all the cool architectural and artistic details explained and they had a great exhibit called Exploring the Early Americas. Highlighted in this exhibit is a map from the early 1500s by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, for which the Library recently paid $10 million. Why, you might wonder, would our national library pay $10 million for some German map? It turns out this was the map in which Waldseemüller named that big continent to the west after one of the early explorers: Amerigo Vespucci. OK. Now I get it.

Don't worry I'm not writing about ebooks

I'm sick to death of reading about ebooks and digital publishing because it all seems to come from the poles -- either we're looking at the Glorious Future or the Terrible End of literature. Plus there's so much being written and published, both online and in print, by self-obsessed media types, that you couldn't possibly follow it all. Plus as a wise person once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. So why kill myself trying to figure it out when really smart people who are paid to do so obviously can't? I chose this image because I recently completed two online book club reads -- in both cases, ahead of the official schedule. The first was Neil Gaiman's American Gods for the inaugural One Book One Twitter. The second was Justin Cronin's Passage for the inaugural Salon Book Club.

I liked both books a lot -- each gets four stars -- but in terms of communal reading experience I have to give the edge to Salon -- even though they're only midway through and even though I have spent a lot less time with the online component than I did with the Twitter side and I don't plan to contribute to the Salon discussion, as I did to the Twitter talk. It might be because I'm more comfortable with someone in charge -- and I fully understand that the brilliance of Twitter is that no one is in charge -- but if I have a chance of sitting in on a book discussion guided by the brilliant Laura Miller, I'm taking it. The Twitter conversation was necessarily stutterstep and repetitive and without nuance. Salon's is far more limited in terms of the number of people taking part -- but the contributions seem more thoughtful and considered. In other words, more like reading a book.

This is not an anti-Twitter jeremiad. I was mildly Twitterphobic and am now glad to have gotten over that. It's fun to use it as a kind of personalized wire service; I follow mostly book-related feeds but also a few news feeds and a couple celebrity feeds (Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, OK?). I also follow a couple cycling feeds (Lance Armstrong and Johann Bruyneel).

As for the books -- American Gods was good but I really need to re-read it because limiting myself to the 1B1T reading schedule was just too frustrating and too scattered. There's a lot going on in that  novel, with a lot of characters and side stories thrown in, and too much time between reading sessions meant I forgot too much. The Passage is one of this summer's hot books -- it's, inevitably, about vampires but this ain't no Twilight/True Blood dreamy vampire. These are bad vampires, initially created by a government experiment run amok and they manage, in short order, to destroy America as we know it. It's been compared quite a bit to The Stand by Stephen King, which I haven't read. I don't even read in that genre. But I found it an engrossing, well written tale that credibly created a world and included characters whose fates mattered to me. Isn't that what a good summer book is supposed to do?

When Ernie met Martha

[gallery columns="2"] Who knew Tony Soprano had a Hemingway thing? Well, who doesn't? It turns out James Gandolfini has long wanted to bring the story of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn's relationship to the screen -- and will finally do so, with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the leading roles.

This is of interest to us around here because Key West is where the pair met -- Hemingway was living here with his second wife, Pauline, and Gellhorn was an ambitious young journalist hanging out with her family. The place they met was Hemingway's favorite hangout Sloppy Joe's -- then on Greene Street in the building now known as Captain Tony's. The pair married but the union was the shortest of Hemingway's marriages -- possibly because Gellhorn was the most independent and professionally successful of his wives.

So far the reaction I've heard around here is: Clive Owen as Hemingway? Really? And Clive Owen? If he comes to town, I'm planning to occupy your guest room! Either way we'll keep you posted. But be aware, the guestroom is booked.

I think it might be cool to look at this time in Hemingway's life because it's the period we don't often hear about him -- between the young man in Paris of the 1920s and the iconic Papa of the famous Karsch portrait. Maybe it will encourage more Young Hemingways to enter the annual lookalike contest at Sloppy Joe's.

Another question: Will Kidman pull out her fake nose from The Hours?