Ann Leary, author of The Good House
Author of The Good House
We have returned from our delightful vacation and I’m still nestled up with my Kindle. Some more things in its favor: It doesn’t tell you what page you are on. I suppose this is because the screen reveals less than a printed page. Instead, at the bottom of the screen, it tells you how much of the book you have read. I have read 22% of the Cheever biography. I know that it’s almost 800 pages long, so I suppose I’ve read ….oh, you do the math.
Yesterday I received an email from a young mother who wanted to know the names of some of my favorite books. I am often asked this, so have decided to compile an abbreviated list.
This past summer, when we were in Nantucket, I blogged about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and even posted a very erotic passage from this masterpiece. If I see a copy of Moby Dick lying around, anywhere, I am compelled to pick it up and look up some of my favorite passages. I can almost feel where they are with my hands when I start leafing through the book, I’ve read the chapters so many times. Another book that I compulsively reread is Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. I read it during the first chilly night of fall, pretty much every fall. I guess I’m drawn to books about New England
Recently, a few readers have mentioned that they’re not that into poetry, so I’ve been trying to change that by posting poems that it’s hard not to love. Today I thought I’d feature one of my favorite poets A.E. Housman.
I looked up Mr. Housman’s bio on Wiki and learned that he had a rather sad life. First, he was born and grew up in an English town called Fockbury. That’s just got to fock you up. His mother died when he was twelve. But the saddest part is that he fell deeply in love with a male classmate at Oxford – a heterosexual male, and this one-sided love caused him many years of anguish. If you’ve ever had an unrequited crush, read this … and weep:
Yesterday I visited the Manhattan home of Lisa Sharkey and Paul Gleisher and their three children, and I interviewed them for an upcoming episode of IN HOUSE. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Lisa and Paul live in a green, eco-friendly townhouse on the Upper West Side and they have written a beautiful book about “eco-fabulous” homes. This is their roof garden:
We stayed in the city last night and this was the view from our window this morning:
Pretty huh? Well, it was pretty then, but now it’s slushing out. That’s right, slush is falling from the sky. Denis and the kids are attempting to drive to the country, but it’s snowing where they are and they’ve been driving for hours and are not even close to home. I stayed in the city an extra night because tomorrow I’m interviewing Lisa Sharkey and her husband Paul Gleicher who have co-authored a beautiful book called Dreaming Green: Eco-Fabulous Homes Designed to Inspire.
I haven’t posted in a few days because I can’t find the USB cord that attaches my camera to the computer, rendering me virtually mute, as I’ve become seriously dependent on photographs for this blog. Now I’m forced to use my words, as I did at the beginning of the blog, when I didn’t know how to load photos. But, I’ve been working and reworking my pathetic collection of words all day and can’t summon enough wit for an interesting post, so instead, I’ll print a short passage from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
If you indulge yourself in nothing else this holiday season, I implore you to march yourself over to itunes and download the audiobook recording of Dylan Thomas reading this treasure himself. Get the Dylan Thomas version, not a version read by a famous actor!
I’m sure many of you listen to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac program on NPR, but you might not know that you can also subscribe, online, for free and receive daily emails with poems and information about writers. Today was a very nice poem, check it out!
I had a conversation with Garrison Keillor once. If Denis was here, he would debate this, because he was with me and insists that it wasn’t Garrison Keillor, but a bum, that I was conversing with.
If you’re in or near the Sharon, CT area, this afternoon at 2:00, tune into 91.9FM, WHDD, to listen to my IN HOUSE interview with Playwright A.R. Gurney. If you don’t live in the area, you may still hear it as it’s broadcast, by going to robinhoodradio.com, and clicking on the “Listen Live” link. If you miss it, I’ll have it downloaded here on my site, sometime later today.
I just received an email from Phil Holland, who went to Bennington with me, though somehow I didn’t know him. Phil is a good friend of Moses Pendleton. He saw my previous post and sent me the photo above, The photo was taken from the roof of the house. Those are large Adirondack chairs in the center of the circle so that will give you an idea of the scale of the garden. The sunflowers are in the foreground. From this perspective it looks like something from Chariots of the Gods.
Didn’t have time to blog yesterday because it was too beautiful out and I am engrossed in a great book – Edna Ferber’s So Big.
Edna Ferber wrote Giant, which I read as a kid ( I saw the movie on television, read the book and was launched into my decades-long fantasy of marrying a cattleman), as well as several other great novels and plays. She actually wrote the novel, Show Boat, which was later turned into the musical. She was one of the most popular American writers of the earlier part of the last century and was part of the whole Algonquin Round Table gang. So Big earned her the Pulitzer Prize.
