I never really thought about The Picture of Dorian Gray being censored, but when I went looking for a copy to read for our book discussion, I came across this version and decided to pick it up to find out exactly what had been taken out.  It’s an exhaustive treatment, with a lengthy introduction, textual commentary, annotations and appendices.  I was  taken back to my English Literature graduate school days where I read this kind of thing on a regular basis.  I had no idea that the manuscript had been ’edited’ so many times over the years.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published  in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine which came out simultaneously in England and America.  The spelling was Amercanized, as is usually the case with British manuscripts even today, and the references to sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual were edited and/or removed to make the work more acceptable.  Even so, it created a firestorm of controversy.

Oscar Wilde revised and expanded the manuscript for the 1891 book version under the influence of the hostile reviews of the press and the fear of possible obscenity charges.  The later version contains twenty chapters instead of the thirteen in the original with the addition of more characters and more explanatory incidents leading to, perhaps, a better understanding of the fate of Dorian.

Unfortunately, Wilde did not escape retribution for taking the risk of publishing his work.  Parts of the novel were used as evidence against him in the court trials which sent him to jail with hard labor, into exile for three years after that, and ultimately to ruin and disgrace which resulted in his premature death at the age of forty-six.

The general and textual introductions and the annotations explain it all.  They tell why, how, and what was used to prove his ‘guilt,’ give an overview of the attitudes and miasma of oppression of the time, and place the work in the context of Wilde’s life and career.  While this version could be read without referring to the notes, it is a much richer experience when you take the time to read them as you work your way through the book.  I recommend this version to anyone who is curious about why this book was such a big and damning deal for the Victorians and Wilde.

Catchy title, isn’t it?  I saw this book on a sale rack at the library and was intrigued by the title and even more drawn in by the cover.  After I read the jacket summary, I was hooked.  Billed as a “nonfiction mystery,”  it explores the enigmatic life and relationships of Dawn Langley Simmons, a British author who was at the center of one of the most unusual  lifestyle scandals of the century.

Born in England in the 1930s, Ms. Simmons (I’m sure she would disapprove of this title) began life as a boy named Gordon Langley Hall.  He was the son of working class parents, servants of Vita Sackville-West, and raised primarily by his maternal grandmother.  After a stint teaching on an Indian reservation in Canada during World War II and then teaching theater in London upon his return, he started his writing career contributing articles to a small local newspaper.  He wanted to travel and continue his writing career and moved to New York in 1952 where he found work as a file clerk and moved into an apartment.  He managed to parley these simple beginnings into a career as an author of the biographies of famous society women and into a relationship and living space with heiress Isabel Whitney from whom he inherited a house in Charleston, South Carolina and a substantial amount of money when she passed on.

Mr. Hall moved to Charleston and proceeded to refurbish the house and fill it with antiques and tried to join in Society by throwing dinner parties and opening his house to tours (while selling some of the antiques on the side).  Then things got strange.  Gordon, claiming to have been born intersexed, went to Boston in the sixties to have a sex change operation to ‘correct’ the mistake nature had made, changed her name to Dawn, married a much younger African American man named John-Paul Simmons and shortly thereafter became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter who she named Natasha.  Her life went downhill from there.  Her husband went through her money, the family lost their Charleston home and ended up moving north.  John-Paul was unfaithful and abusive and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and from that time on has been institutionalized off and on.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction—or is it?  That is what the author, Edward Ball, determined to find out.  Was Gordon Hall born intersex or was he gay?  Did his operation correct a mistake of nature?  Was he really capable of having a child ‘naturally’?  How much of his/her background was based in fact and how much the product of a fevered imagination?  Mr. Hall’s investigation takes him from the collection of Dawn’s papers at Duke University to his/her home and gravesite in England with stops along the way to speak with experts on transgender surgery and the intersexed.  He interviews her friends, her living relatives and, maybe most significantly, her daughter and estranged husband.  All of this in an attempt to arrive at the truth behind all of the rumors, stories and lies told by and about this fascinating character.  Herein lies an intriguing tale told very well.  It will keep you guessing until the end and maybe beyond.

(Photo by Jerry Prank, Dartford UK, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

I just came across a post reporting that the author of the Cat Who… books died on June 4th at the age of 97.  I did a search to find out more about the circumstances of her death (and life) and located a couple of articles, one from the New York Times and one from the Detroit Free Press, which give some insight into her career.  She had a more interesting background than I had ever imagined.

She was a very private person and wasn’t given to revealing much about her personal life.  Being a true ‘lady’ of the old school, she let everyone believe she was born in 1926 until an interview in 2005 when she revealed her true birth date—June 20, 1913.  She was born in the small town of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts.  Since the depression made a college education much too expensive, she became an advertising copywriter in Detroit for several stores and then moved to the Detroit Free Press where she spent the majority of her career as a lifestyle writer and editor.  She wrote the first three of her books while working there and then stopped for eighteen years because her publisher wanted her to inject more sex and violence into her novels and that was just not her style. 

Her first husband died in 1969.  She married her second husband, an actor, about the time she retired and they moved to Bad Axe, Michigan where she did volunteer work for the next several years.  Her second husband encouraged her to start writing again and she came out of retirement and published the bulk of her books after reaching the age of 70.  She was a true technophobe—she wrote many of her books in longhand and then gave them to the typist.  She never moved beyond a basic mechanical typewriter.  She was more interested in her characters than in solving mysteries and admitted it and with the success of her books she started a trend that changed the mystery market.

She modeled her fictional town, Pickax, after Bad Axe, Michigan where she lived until the mid-eighties.  If you’ve ever read any of her books, you can see that many of the stories and situations come from her experience on the newspaper.  She actually did have a siamese cat who died at a young age under mysterious circumstances.  It fell out of a ten story window and Ms. Braun was told by a neighbor that it had been pushed.  She based one of her short stories on that incident.  She did most of her writing from her retirement home in Tryon, North Carolina—a place she discovered while she was working on a story for the  Free Press.

Her final years sound difficult.  For the last several years of her life she and her husband didn’t have cats.  She was given a siamese kitten which kept getting underfoot and after Ms. Braun tripped several times, it went back to live in Atlanta with the fan who had given it.  Her older cat had to be put down.  Ms. Braun’s health suffered and she developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and became so weak that she could no longer write after 2007 when her last  book, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers, was published.

I was fairly critical of this last book in a previous post (see Farewell to ‘The Cat Who…”) and I still stand by my opinion, but I think I better understand what was going on.  I think that Ms. Braun knew that her time was limited and that she was trying to tie up loose ends, to get her characters and their lives settled.  Her husband, Earl Bettinger, said that her one regret was that she was unable to finish her last novel, The Cat Who Smelled Smoke.  I hope that her characters, along with their author, will be left in peace.  It would be a shame if anyone else tried to finish the book in her absence.  She was a terrific storyteller and a great talent as well as an interesting and intelligent woman.  May she rest in peace.

 (Photo by Friedrich Bohringer from Wikimedia Commons)

Each year as the winter holidays approach I enjoy ‘seasonal reading’—books set in winter and/or at holiday time.  I read quite a few mysteries, but I also indulge in general fiction and I have old favorites to which I return every year.  I also like to read at least one new (to me anyway) book in hopes that it will become one of my new old favorites.

I have lots of old standbys to keep me occupied.  Miss Read is, of course, near the top of my list with Christmas at Fairacre, Miss Read’s Christmas, and Winter in Thrush Green.  I never tire of visiting the folks in her villages with their humor, warmth, and humane earthiness.  I also love Agatha Christie’s mysteries and at this time of year I like to read Holiday for Murder, one of Hercule Poirot’s adventures as he tries to figure out whodunit to pater familias Simeon Lee on Christmas Eve as his family is gathered for the holiday.  When I’m in the mood for older favorites I also turn to Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh which is set in an old English manor where a variety of guests become the suspects in a holiday murder.

For those of you who like your fiction new (as in 2010 new), there are quite a few selections.  M.C. Beaton’s newest Agatha Raisin mystery, Busy  Body, is set at Christmas time.  For the horror/vampire lovers there is Heidi Betts’ Bite Before Christmas and for the fans of historical mysteries Kate Kingsbury has produced a new Pennyfoot Hotel mystery titled Mistletoe and Mayhem (the entire series is set in Edwardian England).   Speaking of historical fiction, Anne Perry has written another in her series of Victorian Christmas novels entitled Christmas Odyssey and there is a new book in the Pink Carnation series set in Regency England and written by Lauren Willig called Mischief of the Mistletoe.

Thriller lovers will enjoy Margaret Maron’s newest work, Christmas Mourning.  Those who are fans of romance should enjoy Patti Callahan Henry’s Perfect Love Song:  a Holiday Story and fans of gentle, traditional reads will most likely enjoy Thomas Kinkade’s On Christmas Eve.

While you’re waiting your turn to read one of these new titles, you might consider picking up Maeve Binchy’sThis Year It Will Be Different:  and Other Stories.  Those interested in quirky, funny, sort of appalling fiction might want to take a look at Christopher Moore’sThe Stupidest Angel:  a Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror.   Mystery lovers might want to give one of my all time favorite authors, Jane Haddam, a try.  She has written two Christmas mysteries in her Gregor Demarkian series:   Not a Creature Was Stirring and Stillness in Bethlehem.

Speaking of mysteries, died-in-the wool, can’t get enough mystery fans should check out the holiday section of a great web site called Stop You’re Killing Me.  Mysteries are listed by author and by holiday.  In addition, on other parts of this great site you will find books listed by character, by series, by setting, by time period and by almost any way you can think of.  I use this often–especially when I’m addicted to an author and want to read everything he or she has written about a particular character.

As for me, in addition to a couple of my standby favorites, I’ll be enjoying Holiday Grind (a coffee house mystery) by Cleo Coyle,  and Mistletoe and Murder (a Daisy Dalrymple mystery) by Carola Dunn. 

 If you find yourself intrigued by any of the above titles or website, just click on the highlighted words to check it out further.  Happy, safe, and warm reading!

(Photo by Elina Mark as part of the Estonian Science Photo Competition courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

So—you’ve grown your own produce or been given some by friends or relatives and you’ve cooked all you can eat—now what?  Why freezing or canning, of course.  That way you can save some of the summer goodness for your fall and winter meals.  You might even be able to stretch your supply of home grown produce until the spring.

I remember helping my mother and father can and freeze–cleaning green beens, shucking corn, anything that didn’t require a knife.  However, for some food preservation is a lost art.  That’s why we hosted a food preservation workshop given by the Ohio State University Extension Service  on Saturday, July 24th.  Marisa Warrix, who lives in South Euclid , was the presenter and the program was very well attended.  In case you missed it, she will be coming back to the area to do a couple of workshops at the Whole Foods Market in University Heights on Cedar.  On Tuesday, August 10th she will present a workshop on ‘Canning Garden Produce’ from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm.  She will present  a workshop on ‘Freezing Garden Produce’ on Tuesday, September 14th from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm followed by another hourlong workshop two weeks later on Tuesday, September 28th–also from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm.  You may make reservations by calling Whole Foods at 216-932-3916.

If you can’t make any of the workshops, or want to get a head start and can’t wait, you may go to the Ohio State University Extension web page and scroll half way down the page to the ‘Food Preservation’ section.  There you will find power point presentations and the documents that Ms. Warrix uses in her workshops.  There are also links to helpful fact sheets.  I would also suggest taking a look at their blog, ‘Eat, Save, and Be  Healthy,’  They have a lot of dietary, child care, nutritional, and other good-to-know things having to do with improving one’s quality of life.

Of course, we have books here at the library that will help you with preserving food.  Some of the newer ones are:

Homemade Living:  Canning & Preserving with Ashley English

Canning and Preserving Your Own Harvest:  an Encyclopedia of Country Living Guide

Grocery Gardening:  Planting, Preparing, and Preserving Fresh Food

Joy of Pickling:  250 Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market

In addition to saving money and insuring the wholesomeness of your food, canning and freezing can be a bonding family experience.  You could start a whole new tradition!

(Photo of Comella Community Garden in Cleveland by Jeff Schuler, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

One of the newest movements in cooking/eating is obtaining food locally–purchasing foodstuffs grown as close to where you live as possible.  The Library started participating last year with our herb garden at Lee and, when harvest time came, made the produce available on a table in the lobby and encouraged our customers to take what they needed and bring in what they had too much of for others.  It was a big hit.  Folks came to get fresh parsley or tarragon and dropped off extra tomatoes and squash. 

I myself took the opportunity to use some of our herbs for our Southern Garden Tea.  I used collard greens to decorate the sandwich platters, the dill on the smoked salmon sandwiches, the tarragon and parsley on the cream cheese sandwiches.  Much more handy, and cheaper, than getting them from the grocery store.

This year, with the help of a grant and a lot of dedicated volunteers, we expanded our efforts to include all of the branches.  We are offering cooking demonstrations at all of the branches which will feature Robin Blair, a personal chef, who will show how to prepare meals using home grown produce.  We have also purchased gardening books to help those who wish to grow their own food and cookbooks with recipes for those who have started to harvest from their gardens.

If you are interested in growing your own produce, you might try one of these:

Grocery Gardening:  Planting, Preparing, and Preserving Fresh Food.

Vegetable Gardener’s Bible.

Garden Wisdom & Know-How:  Everything You Need to Know to Plant, Grow, and Harvest.

If you have limited space:

From Container to Kitchen:  Growing Fruits & Vegetables in Pots.

One Magic Square:  the Easy, Organic Way to Grow Your Own Food on a 3-Foot Square.

Small Plot, High Yield Gardeining:  Gro Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well from Your Front (or Back or Side) Yard Organic Produce Garden.

For cooking the ‘fruits’ of your labors:

Edible:  a Celebration of Local Foods.

Farm to Fork:  Cooking Local, Cooking Fresh.

Eating Local:  the Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers.

Fast, Fresh, & Green:  More than 90 Decicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers.

Cooking from the Garden:  Best Recipes from Kitchen Gardener.

These and many other books we have on the shelves will help you grow and cook your own produce.  Click on any of the above titles to reserve a copy for yourself.  You can take advantage of our herb/produce table when you come in to pick up your books.  Happy eating!

So, I was perusing reviews the other day and came across a review of  The Deadly Dinner Party & Other Medical Detective Stories  by Jonathan Edlow.  I could not believe that I had missed this book.   I am a sucker for programs like House,  Dr. G., Medical Examiner,  Mystery Diagnosis—you get the picture.  Things like these just fascinate me so I hurried over to the shelf and was happy to find the book there.  I settled in with the book (over lunch, I might add) and I was not disappointed.

Although the book jacket advert bills it as E.R. and House meet Sherlock Holmes, I found that to be somewhat of an overstatement.  In fact, if it did fit that bill it might be a bit cheesy.  It is actually a low key but very engaging volume of fifteen  medical detective stories written by a practicing physician and Harvard professor. 

In the first story, from which the book takes its title, a stomach bug turns a suburban dinner party into a disaster that almost kills its host.  In another a young business executive is diagnosed with what appears to be lung cancer, but the nodules on his lungs wax and wane (along with his symptoms) and no one can figure out what is causing his illness.  Still another gives the account of several patients in the same area of Massachusetts who present with different symptoms and are of varying ages but all have dangerously elevated calcium and vitamin D levels.  The trick is to find what they all have in common.

Dr. Edlow goes through these cases, explaining complex medical concepts in a manner that the intelligent lay reader can readily understand.  He gives insight into how doctors go about solving difficult medical cases–the detective part of the job–and along the way relates some of the history of various treatments and medical history in general.  If you like your medical stories based in reality and can suspend a hypochondriac’s tendency to ‘catch’ illnesses as you read about them, give this one a try.

I have a long standing interest in history and women’s history, so when I had the opportunity to go to the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage for a Backstage Pass Tour of their newest exihibit Women & Spirit:  Catholic Sisters in America I jumped at the chance.  The Museum is partnering with the Library and several other organizations to present programing in conjunction with the exhibit and one of my friends, Dr. Judith Cetina who is the manager and archivist of the Cuyahoga County Archives, will be speaking at the Lee Road branch on Monday, June 14th at 7:30 pm.  Her topic is Works of Mercy:  Women Religious, Benevolence, and Healthcare in Cleveland (click to register).  I’m really looking forward to hearing her speak and I thought it would be interesting to see the exhibit beforehand.

It is wonderful.  It is a combination of a timeline of United States  history and a look at the various areas in which sisters and nuns have had an influence, and they are many.  If you go, and I encourage you to do so, you will find out the difference between a sister and a nun, how they arrived in the United States, how they chose their work, the derivation of their habits.  There are artifacts from several orders in the form of letters, journal entries, tools, and habits.  There is a short movie in the exhibit where several nuns and sisters discuss why they became religious, why they do what they do.  The paths they have taken are myriad, but tend to center around education, healthcare (you will find out about the order that was instrumental in founding the Mayo Clinic) and orphan/childcare (ever read about the orphan trains?).  In addition, there is a section devoted to the orders in Northeast Ohio and that is what Dr. Cetina will be lecturing about. 

If you want to read something ahead of time, there are several titles that you could pick up at the library that are featured at the Museum:

    Sisters:  Catholic Nuns and the Making of America by John Fialka

Stalking the Divine:  Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares by Kristin Ohlson (local author)

Pioneer Healers:  the History of Women Religious in American Health Care.  (Dr. Cetina wrote a chapter for this book).

Click on any of the above titles to request the book or on any of the highlighted phrases to visit the web site and get to the Maltz Museum if you can for both the exhibit and some interesting programs they have coming up connected to the exhibit.

It’s National Soup Month and what better time for soup than in the cold, snowy days of January.  While I was preparing for a program on soup and soup making, I came across two great books that are worth taking a look at and, in my case,  purchasing for my private cookbook collection.

The first is called The Dairy Hollow House Soup  & Bread:  a Country Inn Cookbook.  Written by Crescent Dragonwagon (yes, really–more about her later), this is a great primer on stocks and soup basics and has a wonderful chapter on ‘The Soup’—an always tasty vegetable based soup that is easy and fast to make and has the potential for infinite variations.  It also happens to be essentially low in calories and fat, so it can be used as the basis for a diet meal, if you so choose.  It’s basically a ‘one from column a, one from column b’ type of recipe, making it flexible and variable (and easy–don’t forget, easy).  The simplest version uses purchased stock and frozen vegetables, is ready in under an hour and tastes delicious.  I love it. 

What you pick up from this book  is that soup is as much a state of mind as anything else and if you regard it in this fashion, it becomes much easier to be creative in your cooking.  This is largely due to the attitude of the author, Ms. Dragonwagon, who is fascinating in herself.  She has written a number of cookbooks and children’s books, run the Dairy Hollow House Inn, and is currently living in Vermont and conducting ‘Fearless Writing’ workshops.  Read more about her and find out how she got her name by clicking on this link to her website.

The second book that fascinated me is entitled An Exaltation of Soups:  the Soul-Satisfying Story of Soup, as Told in More than 100 Recipes.  In addition to recipes, which are organized by rites of passage (to celebrate marriage), purpose (to chase a hangover), and holiday (Eastertide), there is also a section covering  the origins and history of soup, proverbs and reflections on soup, and basic stocks and foundations.  Sprinkled throughout are poems and short stories with soup as their theme.  The recipes are great and the rest of the content will keep the interest of even the most attention impaired intellectual gadfly.

Reserve your copy by clicking on the book title and enjoy—with a cup of warm soup.

I love Michael Symon and I love cookbooks, so this one was a natural for me.  As soon as I heard it was coming out, I put an order in for the library, put my request in for the book and waited.  I was really excited when it arrived and it turned out to be everything I love in a cookbook and more.

I’m the sort of person who likes to read cookbooks.  I like to read through the recipes, look at the pictures and try to imagine the settings in which the food was originally served.  I like cookbooks that are evocative of a time, a place, the person who compiled/wrote them.  Michael Symon’s Live to Cook:  Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen has all of this.  The recipes are great, but even better are the sections where he explains his technique and philosophy of cooking and those where he talks about his background and family–all of the things that contributed to his development as a person and a chef.

I’ve always thought that Symon sounded like a really great guy–someone who would be fun to know and that comes across in his book.  He is down-to-earth, honest, and very aware of the debt he owes to his Greek and Mediterranean heritage and to his family and friends.  He tells the story of how he learned his craft, the mistakes he made and what they taught him.  When he tells you what techniques you need to master, he tells you why and in language that you can understand.  It is all very simple,  grounded in himself and his beliefs.  The recipes are good too–so far my favorite is the ‘Ohio Creamed Corn with Bacon’—yum. 

Give the book a try–I think you’ll like it.  Click on the cover to reserve your copy and be careful—you just may end up buying it.