Today is very cold (7 above, -11 windchill) and very beautiful with Alberta Clipper snow swirls, especially against the barn red garage. Mine is a lively, urban backyard, seen through a big H window, though the squirrels, rabbits, and birds must be resting. The alley people who go to Joe’s Market on the corner are out in force; the garbage and recycling trucks have been by with an extra truck in tow for holiday leavings; and soon the shovelers will rid the walks of the powdery snow before the temperature plummets, as is the forecast. A neighbor clears the block’s public walks and alley with his frontloader Tonka toy because he is a good guy and because he owns a duplex at the other end of the long block. It’s January in Minneapolis, uncertain footing keeps me mostly housebound, and the next good book lurks.
Fig. #71. Remembering, remembering...
I just finished P. D. James’ latest paperback, The Private Patient. It was smooth but long, and I didn’t learn anything new about the series characters or the place, so it was just okay. The fun is choosing what to read next. It’s a non-fiction day, and Tom Gjelten’s Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause beckons, but Marilyn Stasio twice recommended (New York Times Book Review 10/15/09, 12/3/09) Emily Arsenault’s The Broken Teaglass as a debut mystery with lexicographers as detectives, all pluses. I love to think about building dictionaries and the word authority they convey, and I need a belated Christmas gift for the fussiest librarian/friend in the world who really knows reference books, also likes dictionaries and has surely read all mysteries, especially cozies, ever written. This could be a winner. Of course, I have to test it first, a one-handed challenge as it is only available in hardcover.
I hope I’ve not been spoiled by K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary, my all-time favorite dictionary-making book. Great-granddaughter Murray writes a compelling biography of this most unusual man and uses family artifacts and lore to add the telling detail I love. Think rooms of cubbyholes full of 3×5 p-slip or learning languages from Bibles in vernacular. I know Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman is a good read, but his emphasis is on one OED word-reader’s connection with James Murray, and okay I haven’t read it, but I don’t think it would add much to the dictionary-making processes that are the highpoint of Murray’s book. Sometimes having savored the best, the best is enough. My worry is that Arsenault’s mystery may fall short for the same reason.
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That was yesterday. Today, ever colder and 100 pages into Arsenault, I think The Broken Teaglass may be just offbeat enough to be giveable. But the issue of giving a book about something to someone who knows A LOT about that something remains a hazard. If there is a choosing rule somewhere in all of this, maybe it should be: don’t give someone who knows a lot about something a book about that something, especially a novel. But how, then, does unconventional thinking ever have a chance to jar the mainstream mind? I hate rules. They so rarely fit.