Somerville Public Library Blog

As Thanksgiving approaches, one’s thoughts turn naturally to cranberries and mastodons.  No?  If not, maybe you should consider making The Legend of the Cranberry a part of your holiday tradition.  Ellin Greene’s beautiful retelling of a Delaware Indian legend offers an interesting origin story for the cranberry.  It goes all the way back to the time when the People understood the language of the animals, and the Great Spirit created the elephant-like Yah-qua-whee to be the People’s helpers and friends.  When the Yah-qua-whee go on the rampage, the People, the smaller animals, and the Great Spirit join together to stop them from destroying everything in their path.  A huge battle ensues during which the ground is churned up into a muddy bog and much blood is spilled.  Eventually the Yah-qua-whee are defeated.  The following spring, in commemoration of the battle, the Great Spirit causes the bog to be filled with pink blossoms that later ripen into bitter, blood-red berries.  From that day to this, the berries have been eaten at feasts “as a symbol of peace and the Great Spirit’s abiding love for the People.”

And that is where cranberries come from and why we eat them on Thanksgiving.  Enjoy!

One of my favorite sub-genres of fiction is one I call “Books about Books:” novels in which books, reading and writing are important elements of the plots or themes.  The grandfather of them all is, of course, Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 novel about a country gentlemen who goes mad after reading dozens of novels about knights-errant, and rides off into the Spanish countryside to battle nonexistent foes.  At the opposite end of the spectrum–chronologically, stylistically, and emotionally–is Stephen King’s Misery, about a writer who’s held prisoner by an insane fan (in the movie version Kathy Bates is terrifying).  A recent contribution to the genre is Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief , the tragicomic story of a novel-in-progress as well as an epistolary friendship that arises in the staff break room at a Staples. My two personal favorites are Possession and A Confederacy of Dunces. Possession is a literary detective story about two young academics, Roland Mitchell and Maude Bailey, who discover evidence of a secret romance between two famous  Victorian authors and follow a trail of clues that takes them across England, over to France, and to crossroads in their own professional and personal lives. A Confederacy of Dunces is the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, a 30-year-old slacker (long before the term was invented) in 1960s New Orleans whose mother orders him to get a job. So off Ignatius goes into downtown New Orleans–and into a series of mishaps and catastrophes, all the while invoking his favorite book, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, and writing down his delusional version of  his misadventures in his “Working Boy’s” journal.

If you share my passion for “Books About Books” try using our database NoveList (mentioned below) to find recommendations, check out this list at BookBrowse, or come to SPL and ask us to help you.

Have you ever felt bereft upon realizing that you’ve read every last book by one of your favorite authors?  Let NoveList come to your rescue!  NoveList is an online tool that lets you use a favorite author or title as a template to locate other books you might like.  You can click on the “Author Read-alike” link to find authors whose books are similar to the novels your favorite author writes.  You can also look up a favorite book by title and then click on the “Find Similar Books” link in the listing that appears.  NoveList also has a “Describe a Plot” feature that allows you to enter your own descriptive terms to search for books that might interest you.  Other features include:

Award Winners - Check out these lists of award-winning titles in various genres.

Book Discussion Guides - Guides include author information, plot summaries, questions and answers, and suggested titles for further reading.

Feature Articles - Brief discussions of selected books by genre or theme.

Recommended Reads - Not sure where to start?  NoveList’s suggested reading lists are compiled by experienced librarians and cover a wide variety of subjects in all genres.

What We’re Reading - Find out what some of your favorite authors and reviewers are reading, and why.

To get to NoveList:

• go to the Library catalog
• click on the Research & Information button (on the long blue bar near the top of the page)
• click on Databases
• scroll down and click on NoveList

Give it a try - you might just find new authors and books to love!

Maybe you don’t  personally know any veterans or actively deployed soldiers. But you do know that military service is hard, and often lonely and dangerous–and you want to do something to help. You have some options thanks to Soldiers’ Angels. The organization began in 2003 when the mother of a soldier deployed to Iraq told her many soldiers in his unit were getting nothing from home: no cookies, letters, books–nothing. She decided to do something about that. 6 years later Soldiers’ Angels consists of 280,000 volunteers, all working to help soldiers and veterans. On their website you will see links that show you step-by-step what you need to do to send care packages to wounded soldiers, write letters to personnel on active service, and assist veterans who need help traveling to medical appointments.

Also take some time out today to listen to Boots on the Ground, a radio documentary that examines the Iraq War through the stories of the men and women fighting there. You’ll get a new appreciation of their courage and sacrifice.

Do you ever worry that certain of your favorite books and authors are disappearing - that young readers of today simply do not want them anymore?  I do, and though I risk sounding like a cranky old librarian by saying so, I’m more concerned than ever when I read about school libraries dumping their entire book collections.  If film adaptations are anything to go by then Shakespeare and Jane Austen seem to be as popular as ever, and I’m glad of that.  But the works of some other classic authors are not faring as well. Wuthering Heights was one of my favorite books as a teenager.  Do teens still read it?  Do young people still read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?  That really spoke to my friends and me when we were in high school - I typed out a big chunk of it and carried it in my wallet for years.  And Dickens - I guess kids are still being forced to read David Copperfield and Great Expectations in school, but the idea that a teenager of today would open The Pickwick Papers in search of light entertainment seems kind of ridiculous.  But why? Okay, it’s not relevant to their lives, but it’s not exactly relevant to mine either and I still loved it as a teen. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology is another example.  I literally wore my paperback copy to pieces when I was a kid though it held no apparent relevance for my daily life.

I completely understand that today’s teenagers want books that are significant to them.  I just wonder why they don’t seem to also enjoy literature that has been loved by many generations before them.  I wonder if these classics are going to be neglected into oblivion.  And is it a bad thing if that happens?  Somehow I think that it is bad, but maybe it’s just that I take it personally - for some reason that I can’t articulate with any clarity, I want these books to be wanted and loved.

What do you think?

In Britain, today is Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates the discovery and prevention of an attempt by Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) (pictured left) and other co-conspirators to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605, when King James I was scheduled to address both the Lords and Commons (the conspirators had filled the cellars of the House of Lords with firewood and gunpowder some days before).

Fawkes and his associates belonged to a group of Catholic extremists who wanted to overthrow the government, abolish the Church of England and the Church of Scotland (both Protestant) and re-establish Roman Catholicism as the official religion of Britain.

The plot was discovered when one of the conspirators sent a letter to a friend who was a member of the House of Lords asking him not to attend Parliament on that day. He handed the letter over to one of the king’s ministers, and an investigation began.

To grasp the significance of what would have happened had they succeed, imagine that religious extremists succeeded in blowing up both the Senate and the House of Representatives and killed the president. It would have been the 9-11 of seventeenth-century England–but much worse.

In Britain the anniversary of the foiled plot is observed with bonfires and fireworks.  Some days before, children make straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and stand on the sidewalk, asking passers-by for “a penny for the Guy” (the better your straw man, the more money you get).

The night before is known as “Mischief Night” when children play pranks on the neighbors.*

Guy Fawkes Day  was also observed in the thirteen colonies before independence, where it was known as “Pope’s Day.” It was usually celebrated by drinking a lot and burning an effigy of the Pope.

The title of this post is a quote from a traditional English rhyme that begins,”Please to remember/The fifth of November/Gunpowder, treason and plot…”

If you want to learn more about this episode in English history, check out  Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser. And the ever-brilliant Gary Wills wrote a stunning (and surprising) exploration of the Gunpowder Plot’s influence on the work of Shakespeare in Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

*Thanks to my friend (and Yorkshire native) Simon for refreshing my memory on a few key points.

November 2, 1947: Howard Hughes’ plywood airplane, the “Spruce Goose,” flies for the first and only time. It only flew one mile, but it was still an improvement over contemporary flights: it left on time and didn’t overshoot its destination.

November 6, 1862:  Direct telegraph line established between New York and San Francisco.  San Franciscans are surprised to learn that being told “how they do it in New York” is somehow even more annoying when it’s in Morse Code.

November 14, 1832: The first street car begins running in New York. New Yorkers soon complain it’s often delayed and bypasses their stops. As for those who can afford hiring a horse-drawn cab as an alternative, good luck finding one that will take you out of Manhattan.

November 18, 1883:  Canadian and U.S. railroads adopt five standard continental time zones–which really only serves to make train passengers angry, since now they know how late their trains are.

November 23, 1876: Harvard, Princeton and Columbia form the Intercollegiate Football Association–presumably as a way of letting people know they actually have football teams.