Read again after a very, very long time

I used to read A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852), at least once a year. The illustrations were from faded black-and-white plates, and the edition was from the nineteenth century (I think from Ticknor & Fields). I've since seen the version illustrated by Rackham, and I really don't like those pictures. I always liked the Wonder Book just a little better than Tanglewood Tales. Dover doesn't seem to publish Tanglewood Tales, or I'd buy it. I think it will have to come as two-in-one from the same outfit (Kessinger) that has reprinted the story of the yellow butterflies. At any rate, I didn't much care for the framing device then and I don't much care for it now, as I learned when I recently read the Dover version. My favorites then are still my favorites: the slaying of the gorgon and the story of Baucis and Philemon. In the story of Midas, I especially enjoyed reading about the breakfast menu: "hot cakes, some nice little brook trout, roasted potatoes, fresh boiled eggs, and coffee, for King Midas himself, and a bowl of bread and milk for his daughter Marygold."

Sands and tides

Here's more from the scan-o-rama series. There's nothing here as interesting as the photographs of locomotives being loaded aboard ship in connection with The Great War or the images of post cards from the Pershing punitive expedition. These are from a plastic Polaroid camera that took small images. They fell out of a book infrequently taken down from the shelves. The location is Cosey Beach in Momauguin. The subject is Mack when he was a puppy, along about the time he destroyed every shoe in the house. In two pictures both his hind legs and his front legs are stretched out in the sand. The hair that usually fell over his eyes is being blown back away from them. The building visible next door in one image is where the members of the Sons of Garibaldi used to play cards on the porch and had a boccie court out back. In one picture Mack is at the foot of our front steps. When the tides were high, the water would creep up the steps, but it never came in the door.

August 1981 books read

Louise Bogan: Journey Around My Room (ed. Ruth Zimmer)
Paula Fox: Desperate Characters
Doris Grumbach: Chamber Music
Gene Fowler: Good Night Sweet Prince
Henry James: The Awkward Age
Ellen Glasgow: The Woman Within
George Eliot: Felix Holt, the Radical
Alison Lurie: Only Children
K. M. Peyton: Flambards
K. M. Peyton: The Edge of the Cloud
K. M. Peyton: Flambards in Summer
Friedrich Schiller: Don Carlos
Anthony Trollope: Kept in the Dark

James, Eliot, Schiller, and Trollope were not read for the first time and are still part of the household library. The rest were from the Austin Public Library; I wonder how many of them are still among the holdings and how many have been deaccessioned.

August 1980 books read

Evelyn D. Ward: Children of Bladensfield
T. S. Mathews: Name and Address
T. S. Mathews: Jacks or Better
Charlotte M. Yonge: The Daisy Chain
Henry Nash Smith: Democracy and the Popular Resistence to Classic American Writers
Joseph Wechsberg: Dream Cities of Europe
Charlotte Bronte: The Professor

August 1979 books read

Stephen Spender: The '30's and After
James Hanley: Another World
E. Nesbit: The Story of the Treasure Seekers
E. Nesbit: The Wouldbegoods
Gordon Milne: The Sense of Society: A History of the American Novel of Manners
Janet Glover: The Story of Scotland
J. McMurtry: Victorian Life and Victorian Fiction
Penelope Mortimer: Saturday Lunch with th4e Brownings
Pamela Hansford Johnson: The Good Listener
Irving Howe: Celebrations and Attacks
Paul Scott: Staying On
John H. Spyker: Little Lives
Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March
John Nichols: The Magic Journey
Anne Humphreys: Travels into the Poor Man's Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew
Jennie Calder: Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction
Paul Theroux: The Old Patagonian Express

It's time to read some E. Nesbit again. Those, I think, were found at Terra Toys, when it was still downtown, before it moved into the Futura Press building on South Congress. I went to reread some Pamela Hansford Johnson not all that long ago and found there was not a bit of it left at the Austin Public Library. I didn't check on Penelope Mortimer, but I wouldn't be surprised to see her work gone as well. There are probably books about Thornton Wilder and his work but not much Wilder beyond Our Town.

August 1978 books read

Arlene Croce: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book
ed. Nicholson & Trautmann: The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. I, 1888-1912
Mark Girouard: Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement 1860-1900
Muriel Beadle: The Cat
Walter Kerr: The Silent Clowns
ed. Nicholson & Trautmann: The Letters of Virginia Woolf vol. II, 1912-1922
Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Hardy volumes have photographic covers and were picked up in Charlottetown. There must have been some television series at the time. They were rereads. I think we were seeing a lot of Fred and Ginger and Buster and Harold Lloyd.

August 1977 books read

C. P. Snow: Anthony Trollope
Norman Douglas: Looking Back
Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire
P. G. Wodehouse: The Code of the Woosters
G. K. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown
Margaret Drabble: The Realms of Gold
Katherine Mansfield: The Gardon Party
Margaret Drabble: The Waterfall
Margaret Drabble: The Garrick Year
G. K. Chesterton: The Incredulity of Father Brown

The Drabble paperbacks were acquired at a bookstore in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. In a dream the other night, we were aboard the Abby and on our way across the waters.

August 1976 books read

Mysteries weren't recorded in this list.

Lewis Namier: England in the Age of the American Revolution
John Galt: Annals of the Parish, or the Chronicle of Dalmailing during the Ministry of the Rev. Micah Bulwhidder
Paul Thompson: The Edwardians
Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows
Muriel Spark: The Public Image
Nancy Mitford: Love in a Cold Climate
George Moore: A Mummer's Wife

The Mitfords were in the pretty little Penguin paperback versions, and the rest were from the library. I've since acquired a paperback of the Rebecca West.

August 1975 books read

W.E.B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk
James Weldon Johnson: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
ed. Robert Manson Myers: The Children of Pride
George Meredith: The Egoist
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

August 1974 books read

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Anthony Trollope: Ralph the Heir

These were both re-reads. I don't dare guess how many mysteries were read that month.

August 1973 books read

This list does not include mysteries.

Honore de Balzac: The Lilly of the Valley
W. L. Miller: The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society
Robert Rhodes James: Ambitions and Realities

The Miller book is about politics in New Haven during that certain time. The third book is about British politics during the second half of the 'Sixties. I know why I read the Miller, but I don't remember anything much about the third book.