During the past week I learned lots of tidbits about Dracula, the world’s most famous blood-sucker (yes, Virginia, there were vampires before Twilight and True Blood), as well as attending a program of dramatic readings of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. I was inspired to get reacquainted with these tales that never go out of style, and urge you to do the same.

If you haven’t read Poe (or Stoker) in a while, crack open those copies you saved from high school English class and get in the spirit of the season.  The bicentennial of Poe’s birth is being celebrated this year, so cut yourself a slice of cake to go with that goblet of amontillado.  On-line texts can also be found, along with literary criticism, historical data, and (for those folks befuddled by obscure symbolism and 19th century phraseology), the SparkNotes.

Here’s a list to get you started on blood-curdling literary treats while you wait for the spirits of the dead to cross the veil on Samhain night.

Vampire poems

Ghost stories

Real (their word, not mine) ghost stories 

Full text of Dracula courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg titles by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s short stories via SparkNotes 

Dracula channeled by SparkNotes

Below are books of fantasy and literature about doubles, imposters, and changelings. All of them are available through the libraries of the CLEVNET Consortium — many are owned by the Cleveland Hts-University Hts. Public Library System. You can click on the title if you’d like to order the book through the CLEVNET webcatalog.

Ceely, Jonatha

Mina

Conrad, Joseph

The Secret Sharer

Donohue, Keith

The Stolen Child

Erdrich, Louise

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Horsley, Kate

The Changeling of Finnistuath

Kamensky, Jane and Jill Lepore

Blindspot: By A Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise

Melville, Herman

Confidence Man

Stevenson, Robert Louis

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Stewart, Mary

The Ivy Tree

Tey, Josephine

Brat Farrar

Wilde, Oscar

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Winspear, Jacqueline

Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Woolf, Virginia

Orlando

I wanted to run away to sea when I was a young girl. It was the wrong century, and I was the wrong gender, and the great sailing ships no longer plied the ocean, but I was captivated by the tales of Horatio Hornblower. Supplemented by Two Years before the Mast, A High Wind in Jamaica, and a good portion of Moby Dick, I was sure that being a sailor seeking adventure was the life for me.  Reading Robert V. S. Redick’s debut fantasy, The Red Wolf Conspiracy (already a publishing success in Great Britain), has reawakened that desire.

Pazel Pathkendle, tarboy, orphan, and bonded servant, must deal with a mad captain named Rose, a duplicitous bosun, vicious shipmates, deep loneliness, and mind-fits brought on by a spell cast by his own mother.  We follow the strange changes of his fortune as he is taken on and dismissed from various vessels, kidnapped and sold into slavery by the Flikkermen, and pursued by a jealous murth-girl.  But all is not grim drudgery and terrifying assaults for Pazel.  His facility with languages and quick thinking gets him out of numerous scrapes, and in navigating through many perils he finds both friends and allies.

But how can we be sure who is on Pazel’s side? Loyalties and motives are obscured and seem to shift with each gust of wind. One of Redick’s strengths is the cast of characters he assembles, spanning various species, ages, nationalities, and talents (and their corresponding  faults). My favorites were Ramachni, (a sorcerer who appears to the young Thasha Isiq in the form of a kind-hearted black mink), Hercol (who’s a dancer and a swordsman – my kind of guy) and Pazel himself.  Can the 6-inch tall ixchel continue to hide from those who despise them? How did Felthrup the Rat become a Woken Animal? Who is the Shaggat Ness and what plots does Dr. Chadfallow have up his sleeve?  Why is the mad captain writing letters to his long-dead parents? Can the Great Ship escape a watery grave and continue to sail the seas of Alifros?

Come aboard the IMS Chathrand to explore these questions and look to the horizon for a sighting of Redick’s blog, (Letters from Alifros) and the next volume in the series, The Rats and the Ruling Seas. The Red Wolf Conspiracy is a rollicking tale of magic, intrigue, and the briny deep, and I enjoyed it more than any new fantasy of the last 6 months. I put Robert Redick’s storytelling ability on a par with that of Patrick Rothfuss (which is prodigious).  As I neared the end of the The Red Wolf Conspiracy, I ran across a sentence that seemed like a tag line for every new plot twist in the book: “[t]he next three seconds were astounding”. If you want to feel the salt air in your face and have a whopping good time, pack your kit and run away to sea with me.

Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In library-land they throw around words & phrases like roman a clef, nom de plume, pseudonym, ghost-writer, and pen name – but none of those really fit this situation.  This is not a straight-forward title-change, nor an identity crisis.  I’m really harking back to my original name for this blog. Without going into the whys and wherefores of how I ended up as The Mistress of Ancient Revelry, and why I’m now returning to my verbal roots, let’s pay a visit to my constant friend, the Oxford English Dictionary…

luminous
  1) Full of light; emitting or casting light; shining, bright
  2)  transf. and fig.; said esp. of writers, expressions, literary treatment, etc.

page
  1) A boy or youth employed as the personal attendant and messenger of a person of high rank…[or a] servant in a royal or noble household…having a particular ceremonial function
  2) The material written or printed on one side of a leaf of a book, etc.
  3) A regular page or column in a newspaper or magazine set aside for a particular topic.�
  4) Computing. An electronic document containing text and/or images and viewed on-screen
  5) intr. To leaf through a book, newspaper, etc.; to read or look through the contents of a book, newspaper, etc.

So however we put those two words together, it seems like I can still have a ceremonial function, though as The Luminous Page instead of The Mistress of Ancient Revelry. If you read “page” as the object, not the person, then it conjures up images both of illuminated manuscripts and of computer monitors that use liquid crystals displays that bend light.

Over the months that I’ve written blog posts, I’ve tried to articulate (at least to myself) exactly how my diverse readings tastes somehow form a coherent thread.  One aspect of that was the recurring thought about returning to the name I had originally chosen for my blog title. As we go on from here, and I continue to refine that answer, I’ll still be a voice you can rely on, the messenger that shines a beam onto authors, websites, and events that you may be unfamiliar with, or wish to revisit. Please visit as often as you like to leaf through the contents of my blog and, I hope, linger for a while. 

So now that we’re all the the same page (you, me, and the original name), have a little fun with ten famous novels and their first titles. If you have quirky interests, read about the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. And for those of Nordic extraction (or even quirkier interests) download the essay on translating titles from English to Swedish.

Meanwhile, The Luminous Page (formerly known as The Mistress of Ancient Revelry) will continue weaving the spell of books, art, and magic.

Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Despite growing up with a grandfather named Dominic DiOrio and a full complement of Italian relatives, I never inherited the opera gene.  And despite growing up with Superman and The Flash, I never inherited the graphic novel gene, either. However, I do confess to having huge respect for American Splendor  and great affection for its author, and so I may be sitting in Oberlin this weekend watching Harvey Pekar’s newest venture – an opera.

Harvey is a regular at the library where I work, and as I’ve searched for reference books for him and printed out current reviews of his work, he and I have become friends. We chat about his up-coming projects, the state of the world, local events, his personal life.  I’ve helped him photocopy his new graphic novel episodes (complete with stick figures) before they get sent to the publisher, and I relish the memory of the day he asked, “Is it ok if I put you in one of my stories?”.  Yes, it was way more than very, very ok, and I appeared in the August ‘08 issue, which I then proudly showed off to anyone who would stand still long enough.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about Mr. Pekar and his musical extravaganza on a blog geared (mostly) towards fantasy – well, this blog is also about art in its many forms and dedicated to welcoming the strange (and the stranger).  And Harvey is as strange as they come (and I’m using that as a compliment).  How much stranger can you get than someone who started writing comic books about himself, comics not about a hero – or even an anti-hero – but just an everyday kind of guy doing an everyday kind of job? Someone who since then has appeared multiple times on television and radio, won numerous literary awards, had a movie made about his life, (winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, among other accolades) and now has written an opera?

From my personal contact with Harvey, I can also let you in on a secret. The man who is most commonly called a curmudgeon by his interviewers, who got a call from Oprah’s staff saying they heard he could “complain about anything”, was banned from the David Letterman show, and has titled his opera Leave Me Alone, is really a pussycat.  But don’t let him know I told you.

Oh, and Harvey? In honor of all your work, the next time I see you the jelly donuts are on me.

It’s a new year, so let’s start with “Marley was dead: to begin with” and “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” If you share my reading tastes, you know where those sentences first saw the light of day. What follows are some of the best and the worst opening lines (my call) from stories I read over the holidays.

What hope is there for a book that starts “Maureen Pascal, ensconced in the six-hundred-count luxury of the Manhattan hotel room provided by her publisher, thrashed about in the oversize bed”? I was tempted to send that line in to the Bulwer-Lytton contest, but my co-worker Becky had another idea.  She suggested that Maureen might want to shop on the QVC channel for one-thousand-count sheets and thus reduce her tendency to thrash.  I’m withholding the title to save you the pain of reading a book which includes phrases like:
¢ “sinister slits where their eyes should be”
¢ “expos[ing] her delicate neck to the blade that would separate it from her body”
¢ “an ominous wooden chopping block” (you probably saw that one coming)

I was looking forward to Aurelia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet.  Fantasy, art, color – what’s not for me to like?  Well, the first sentence, for one. “Aurelia lay still as death, like a discarded doll, in a burgundy tangle of rushes and spineweed, on the bank of a bend in the River Throanscall, when she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name.” Or, apparently, how to edit a sentence. However, this one has gotten a lot of good press and a devoted following, so it might do something for you that it didn’t do for me.

Kringle, by Tony Abbott, also opens with a run-on sentence, but one with a deliciously shivery feel to it: “Deep in the land of ghosts and frosts, back in the days of long ago, in the time before and a little to the left of the time we know now, when goblins roamed the land and rough tribes of men battled for this or that frozen inch of frozen earth, we might, if we turned out heads just so, peek through the eaves of a low-roofed hut, farther north than you or I would care to go, and see inside it a small boy crouched before a cold hearth”. This mythic retelling of the Winter Gift Giver’s life before he grew up and hit the North Pole didn’t live up to it’s opening, but I think that younger children will appreciate this as bed-time reading next December.

Neil Gaiman’s newest is The Graveyard Book. The first line goes beyond a delicious shiver – “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife” – but the story isn’t as gruesome as you might guess from that sentence. Well, yes, the book opens with a murder, and Nobody Owens is being raised in a cemetery, and there are ghouls (and a slithery being called The Sleer). But for all that, it’s not hideously gruesome, and it’s geared toward mid-grade kids. At least mid-grade kids with a taste for hanging out with dead people.

And, speaking of dead people, I’ll end with another opening, this one from Hogfather, one of my favorite books by my favorite author, Terry Pratchett. Death himself lends a hand when the Discworld’s Winter Gift Giver goes missing, and Pratchett manages (as always) to combine humor, philosophy, and science in one short sentence – “Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”

Snow-laden pine trees and roaring fires in the hearth may seem stereotypical, but I tend to think of them as archetypal.  Those images open a door in our psyches, and give us access to our primeval memories. The best fantasy novels do the same thing.  Here’s a list of books with winter/Christmas/solstice themes. Purchase some for gifts, make a new holiday tradition by reading to your family, or revisit a childhood favorite.  And after you gather up that last scrap of wrapping paper on the 25th, there are still 11 more days of this traditional holiday to linger with a good story. 

Kringle – Tony Abbott
Yes, that Kringle – you may know him as Father Christmas or Sinter Klaas. This is the imaginative tale of his childhood in post-Roman Britain, replete with goblins, elves, and marauding Norsemen.  Abbott interweaves snippets of old tales and traditions, and (of course) includes the flying reindeer.

The Dark is Rising – Susan Cooper
Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, celebrates his birthday on Dec. 21st by discovering he is last of the Old Ones.  This classic tale of the eternal struggle of Light and Dark depicts Will’s search for ancient symbols amid a gathering winter storm. Author Cooper’s poem, The Shortest Day  is a welcome addition to any Solstice celebration.

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The story that helped shaped our “modern” view of Christmas is first and foremost a Victorian fantasy. Spectral visitors and dream journeys are woven through this well-loved redemption story.  Try out the film version starring George C. Scott (A Christmas Carol) and the musical with Albert Finney (Scrooge).

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Without ever mentioning the word “Christmas”, the chapter entitled Dulce Domum evokes the pleasures of deep friendship, convivial company, turning meager supplies into an abundant meal, and the strong call of home.  This chapter is also available as a stand alone picture book (A Wind in the Willows Christmas), illustrated by Michael Hague.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Lewis’ image of a fawn carrying parcels and an umbrella in a wintry landscape gave birth to this first Chronicle of Narnia, and lives on in countless readers’ minds. The four Pevensies find themselves in the land where it is “always winter, but never Christmas” and learn that “Aslan is on the move”.

Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld – Terry Pratchett
Hogswatch is a combination of Winter Solstice, Christmas, and the Scottish New Year (Hogmany), celebrations all interwoven with the very oldest magic.  Things go seriously awry when the Hogfather mysteriously disappears and another anthropomorphic personification (the one with the hooded robe, scythe, and hourglass) enlists his own human granddaughter to insure that the sun will come up the next morning.

Wintersmith – Terry Pratchett
Part of the witches’ cycle of Discworld novels, this Pratchett book is aimed at younger readers but can be thoroughly enjoyed by all who love his trademark humor and insight into human nature. Tiffany Aching, courted by Spirit of Winter himself, must use her nascent witching skills to restore the cyclical turns to the Dance of the Seasons, thereby saving her village and the lambs under her care.

A Traveller in Time – Alison Uttley
Based on night dreams the author had as a young girl, this tale is hard to find, but well worth the search.  Penelope Taberner moves seamlessly between the 16th and 20th centuries and relives the sorrows of the captive Mary Stuart. The last two chapters are lovingly-told descriptions of the preparations and revelry of an Elizabethan manor house during the Christmas season.

Yes, yes, we all know that the economy is tanking, the barbarians are at the gates, and our hopes are low – and getting lower. So, here’s your chance to raise the economic outlook, someone’s intelligence quotient, and your spirits at the same time – buy books for the holidays.

To get you started, watch videos clips of your favorite authors, find 17 reasons why books make great gifts, and search through a slew of helpful book lists on Random House’s Books=Gifts website.

Don’t have a lot to spend? Check out the used and remaindered books dealers. You don’t participate in gift-giving? Then buy yourself a book. Prefer to give to charity at this time of the year?  Buy and donate a book. Hate to patronize big box stores?  Visit your local independent bookseller - and buy a book.  Don’t want to bother with waiting in line at the post office?  Order and ship on-line – but buy a book. Not sure of someone’s reading taste?  Here you’ve got some options – 1) ask the person in question what titles that they are longing to read (I’ll bet that they tell you) or 2) go to a Readers’ Advisor for suggestions. In either case, buy a book.

Don’t know where to find a Readers’ Advisor?  Yes, you do – you’re reading this blog. During the holiday season my fellow RATS and I do not put on little elf hats (because seeing RATS in elf hats is gruesome rather than festive), but we are here to help. If you’re home from Hogwarts for the holidays, send us an owl – otherwise, e-mail, call, or show up in person. We can assist you with that most important of holiday decisions – which books to buy. 

Have I deflected all your objections, overridden all your reservations? Now go buy a book.

I like Halloween. I like any holiday where the veil between the worlds thins (but, then, all ancient holidays celebrate that in one form or another). In the Celtic calendar it was the eve of Samhain (pronounced Saw-in) and marked the New Year, and for that one night all things were possible and spirits of lost loved ones could once again revisit the living. 

To prepare for Halloween, I didn’t dress the kids (or the dog) as princesses, pumpkins, and superheroes (that’s because I don’t have kids – or a dog), or soak myself in the ersatz blood and gore of commercialized haunted houses (and that’s because I have very low tolerance for “ick”). But a third reason is that both of these approaches make cartoons of a seasonal transition that celebrates the underworld passage to a new life.  So instead I lit some candles and looked into the scrying pool to find some Samhain-appropriate stories. 

The ever-widening trend of paranormal fiction offers up many books that are basically glossy chick-lit with a few fangs and muttered spells thrown in for effect. But I’ve come across two new novels that explore the dividing lines between reality, fantasy, and madness, and lay bare the ugliness that is revealed when a religion based on love devolves into hatred, fear, and bigotry. 

I first found The Lace Reader some months ago, and was captivated by it premise – reading a person’s future by peering through patterns of hand-made Ipswich lace. Towner Witney, reluctantly returning to her hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, struggles against the influence her icy and abrasive mother, becomes flooded with memories of her sister Lyndley’s death, and is courted by a local cop with demons of his own.  None of these are welcomed developments, and Towner, afraid of another descent into mental illness, walks a path as delicate as the threads that form the lace.

Author Brunonia Barry takes her main story, sub-plots, and varied character perspectives and weaves them into a novel that is taut and mystifying. She transformed me into a lace reader myself, catching glimpses and hints of  Towner’s fractured past and possible futures, but unsure of how it all fit together until the focus suddenly shifted and I saw the image whole and entire.  Part of the intrigue for me was the setting of Salem, which has transmogrified its heinous history by welcoming modern witches in a spirit of tolerance and affirmation. Barry deftly handles sub-themes of physical abuse, alcoholism, and religious fanaticism without being coy, strident, or preachy.  I liked this one enough to read it again and the second round was just as satisfying as the first.

The story of how The Lace Reader came to life has its own share of magic, being reissued by William Morrow after first being self-published. A sequel is in the works, a film is being considered, and Barry has a knock-out website. 

Travel with Towner as she descends into the underworld and re-emerges into the land of the living.  When you’re done, check back to enter your own comments and see my entry on The Heretic’s Daughter along with a few other literary treats.  On this blog we can celebrate Halloween for more than just a day.

The Joy of Text is a festival of arts and letters, put together by HeightsArts and ABC (Art Books Cleveland). From Friday, October 24 through Sunday, October 26 you can celebrate the spoken and written word, trace the history of writing from papyrus to pixels, cheer (or boo) the contestants in the Haiku Death Match, and view handmade artists’ books called abecedaria (which are – as you might guess from the name – alphabet books).

Want to get involved in the growing book arts movement? Find inspiration and instruction in this book list, and come to the Joy of Text festival to meet the members of Art Books Cleveland.

Technique and Instruction

The Art and Craft of Handmade Books by Shereen LaPlantz

Bookbinding Basics by Paola Rosati

The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books by Gabrielle Fox

Expressive Handmade Books by Alisa Golden

Handcrafted Journals, Albums, Scrapbooks and More by Marie Browning

Making and Keeping Creative Journals by Suzanne J.E. Tourtillott

Paper

The Art of Handmade Paper and Collage: Transforming the Ordinary into the Extraordinary by Cheryl Stevenson

Marbled Designs: A Complete Guide to Fifty-five Elegant Patterns by Patty Schleicher & Mimi Schleicher

Papermaking Techniques Book: Over 50 Techniques for Making and Embellishing Handmade Paper by John Plowman

300 Papermaking Recipes by Mary Reimer & Heidi Reimer-Epp

Calligraphy

The Art and Craft of Hand Lettering: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration by Annie Cicale

Brush Lettering Step by Step by Jim Gray and Bobbie Gray

The Calligrapher’s Bible: 100 Complete Alphabets and How to Draw Them by David Harris

Learn Calligraphy: The Complete Book of Lettering and Design by Margaret Shepherd

Inspiration

The Book as Art: Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts by Krystyna Wasserman

500 Handmade Books: Inspiring Interpretations of a Timeless Form by Lark Books (publisher)

Awaiting Your Addition:

(Y)our Artists’ Journal: A Collaborative Book (Drawings, writings, quotations, cut-outs, etc. contributed by the patrons of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library – Item ID # 0000245252986

All books on this list (and many others on these topics) can be found at/requested through the
Cleveland Heights – University Heights Public Library 216-932-3600 x 1

List compiled by Carole Wallencheck — member of
the Readers’ Advisory Team of the CH-UH Library