Two New (to me) Authors

Mary Roberts Rinehart is a name I've seen in other mystery books. Wanting to expand my repertoire, I checked Fantastic Fiction and learned that The Man in Lower Ten was her first mystery novel published in 1906.

Checking through C/W MARS, that title was only available as one of a set of 3, so I requested it.

I'm afraid my first impression was disappointment. The book, while newer than 1906, was still old and had been rebound in a less-than-appealing plain red cover. Because it had been rebound, the inner margins were minimal, making the book hard to keep open and I had to work to read the ends of the lines on the left-hand page and the beginnings of the lines on the right. And the print was small. I considered returning the book and forgetting about this excursion.

It is a testament to Mary Roberts Rinehart that I finished all three stories.

Her writing style reminds me of Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle. The stories are somewhat convoluted and not always easy to follow. But I found myself enjoying them.

Typical of her times, she tends to make sweeping generalizations such as this sentence from The Case of Jennie Brice written in 1913. "There was something big about her, something which is often found in large women, a lack of spite." While that's a nice thing to say about someone (in this case Jennie Brice), I'm not sure that all "large women" can be described that way. Another comment about another character was that if he left his light on at night he must be a murderer.

My preference, however, is to read contemporary mysteries and I recently read my first book by Louise Penny Kingdom of the Blind. It had just arrived at my local public library and was listed in the
Wednesday morning email Wowbrary.

This series takes place in the Canadian province of Quebec and features Chief Inspector Gamache. Like Donna Leon and Faye Kellerman, there is a lot of character development and description of family life. It makes the characters more real and gives me a real appreciation of a different culture.

Since this series started in 2005, I'm adding Louis Penny to my list of authors to read from the beginning.

Where My Money Goes

It's not that I have a lot of extra money. After paying the mortgage (yes, at my age my house is still mortgaged), utilities, the cable bill, property taxes, buying food and clothes, gas for the car (not to mention maintenance of the car), and other necessities, I'm left with what's called "discretionary" income.

It's not a lot, but I have choices. I can buy more clothes (which I sometime do). I can buy more shoes (which I did just last week). Or I can donate to a worthy cause. And there are lots of worthy causes.

Rather than give $5 or $10 to every solicitation I receive in the mail, I've chosen to focus my efforts on to the areas that are most important to me.

1. Education. Not everyone is academically inclined, but while I was still in junior high school, I decided I really wanted to go to college. I'm not sure why. No one in my family had gone to college. I didn't even know anyone who had gone to college. In my family's social circle it was something "other people did". But I wanted to do it.

For me it was a good choice (though sometimes difficult as I was not a great student). It presented opportunities I would never had otherwise. Before I graduated, I realized that having a B.A. in History was no guarantee of a great and exciting career, but I had also discovered that I wanted to go to Library School and become a Librarian and I needed that B.A. to do that.

Being a Librarian has been a a great (and, yes, sometimes exciting) career for me. It's important to me that as many people as possible have a chance to go to college if that's what they want. I regularly donate as much as I can to UMass/Amherst and Simmons College School of Library Science.

2. Libraries. Since libraries contribute substantially to education, and since being a Librarian has meant so much to me, I also contribute regularly, and as much as I can, to the W.E.B. DuBois Library at UMass/Amherst and my local public library.

Of course there are other worthy causes that sometimes strike my fancy and when that happens I contribute to them. But the bulk of my "extra" money goes to Education and Libraries where I feel it will do the most good.

The End of an Era

I'm bummed! I found out about this situation a few months ago, but I've been in denial and too depressed to blog about it.

The Dewey Decimal Classification schedules will no longer be printed on paper. The last books were published in 2011. Since new editions have been published every 6-10 years, I fully expected a new edition soon. It won't happen. The Dewey Decimal Classification will be available online only via WebDewey.

I know this makes a lot of sense. It costs a lot of money to publish a physical book. The unabridged, 4-volume set cost nearly $500. The abridged, one-volume version was over $100. And before they hit the market, they were out-of-date.

Since the schedules are updated regularly, it makes sense to access the information digitally, but for some reason, I've always preferred to hold those books in my hand.

In contrast, when the Library of Congress subject headings were made available online, I rejoiced and wondered why anyone would bother to buy those "big red books". Even better, once they were online, the Name Authority File was included. And all FOR FREE!
 
WebDewey requires a subscription fee. And I do not find it very easy to use. Perhaps it's because I'm used to the books and I need to practice more with WebDewey. Regardless, I still have my DDCs and will keep them for a LONG, LONG time.

Minions

Several years ago on the AUTOCAT email list, someone posted the comment: Catalogers don't have OCD. They have CDO. That's like OCD, but it's in alphabetical order.

As a cataloger, I thought that was pretty funny - and pretty accurate.

Fortunately for me, there are several library staff members of MassCat libraries that also have CDO. They regularly send emails asking me to upgrade bib records, or merge bib records, or correct bib records in other ways.

I'm so appreciative of these people - my minions - for their help.

Cleaning up the MassCat catalog is a massive job, one that will never be completed. But it is a little bit cleaner and more accurate because others also care about it.

Thank you, minions.

Where Have I Been the Last Six Months?

Taking a break from posting on this blog. I just haven't been motivated, though I am today.

Reading a lot. Mostly mysteries, of course, but many other books, too.

Cleaning up the MassCat catalog. I merged duplicates of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel yesterday.

Leading the Senior Exercise class in Hatfield. There are 20-25 people who participate every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, though only 6 showed up yesterday, the day after Christmas. Maybe there was too much holiday cheer going on.

Visiting Italy for 2 weeks in September. Italy is a pretty big place to see in two weeks. M wanted to visit some artist/woodworkers and also see some archaeological sites. After doing a lot of research, he settled on the Tuscany area. We landed in Florence and immediately went looking for a phone store so that we could get Italian sim cards for our cheapie cell phone and the iPad. The airport is tiny and when we rented the car (4 passenger Smart Car) were directed to the local mall.

We stayed in some lovely B&Bs. One was Villa Barbetti in Sienna. Another was Podere Fonternaccia in Colle di val d'Elsa. I highly recommend both. We met some wonderful people, ate good food (though the best food was in people's homes rather than restaurants), and soaked up the ambience of the old, walled cities. Driving is difficult. Italian drivers are aggressive. The walled cities were not made for cars. They have narrow, steep, cobblestone streets. Many people in Italy use mopeds or other 2 wheeled vehicles. Once we parked the car, we walked a lot.

The weather was hot and sunny the entire time. After we returned home, I was told the weather in western Mass was wet and chilly.

We have no more trips to Europe planned, but may go to Cuba in February. By February, I'll be more than ready for hot and sunny.

M is for Mess

Hooray! I've finally finished through the letter L in my alphabetic list of possible duplicate bibliographic records in the MassCat catalog.

Last week I began on the letter M. Believe it or not, Macbeth by William Shakespeare, was not that bad. Yes, there are lots of versions of the Scottish play and lots of copies of each, but I found no duplicate records. I must have cleaned that section out while working on something else.

The bad news, however, is that I did a search on the single word "Macmillan" and got nearly 5,000 hits. Since the software only sorts the first 1,000, titles, that means I'll have to use a different strategy to get to the title Macmillan encyclopedia of ... 

And as I perused those first 1,000 titles, I began to wonder what I've been doing these last five years. I found several duplicates beginning with the letters A and B. And lots of incomplete records (though some of them were new). And lots of other stuff that needed fixing.

I can see it's going to take a while to get through this section.

On a related notes, M and I spent the weekend in Lenox seeing Shakepeare plays, including Macbeth. I've seen lots of Shakespeare. There's a company here in Hampshire County that puts on two performances each summer - a comedy and a tragedy - and does a great job with both. M and I saw Twelfth Night on the 4th of July. We're planning to see Othello later this week. But this was my first performance of Macbeth.

Shakespeare & Co. always does an amazing job. The staging is often unique (like the comedy - I forget which one - set in 1950s New Jersey complete with women with big hair and boobs and men with lots of gold chains) and always very professional. It's such a pleasure to watch their productions and Macbeth was no exception.

There was one minor disappointment, though. I kept waiting for the witches; they were not there. :-(

Serious Reading

Interspersed among LOTS and LOTS of mysteries, I read other stuff, too. As an exercise instructor, I'm always interested in health and nutrition. I guess this might be called my "professional reading".

When I saw the title Food: What the Heck Should I Eat by Mark Hyman, I requested it. It is an eye-opening book in many ways. Dr. Hyman considers his program "Pegan". That's a cross between the

Paleo and Vegan diets. Very briefly (because his book includes a lot of detail), he says our bodies need the nutrients that can only be found in meat, fish and eggs (this is qualified in the next paragraph) and we should eat primarily fresh vegetables and some fresh fruit. He also says our bodies do not need grains, and that some people cannot eat them (e.g. celiac disease and gluten sensitivity).

The meat that is best for us comes from pastured beef. The way cattle are raised in this country, the massive operations, are cruel to the animals and result in meat that may be tender, but lacks much nutrition because of the way they are fed. Same for poultry, and therefore eggs.

He strongly recommends locally raised, organic foods whether meat, vegetables or fruit. He also says that our bodies cannot absorb much of the benefits of vegetables without fat and he's very much against low-fat diets. He makes a good case for high-carbohydrate diets being the cause of much of today's obesity. In his opinion, the culprits are sugar and starch.

What makes this book so compelling (and depressing at times) is his very broad view of our diets: not only the food itself, but how it's raised and the toll that raising has on our environment.

I know the name Barbara Ehrenreich from Ms Magazine. I also saw the play Nickel and Dimed - On (Not) Getting by in America which was based on her book of the same name. I always thought she was a sociologist. Turns out she has a Ph.D. in cellular immunology. The book I read was Natural causes: an epidemic of wellness, the certainty of dying, and killing ourselves to live longer. In it, she talks about the high cost of medical care and blames some of it on all of the testing that's done. She questions if annual physicals are really necessary for healthy people, feels that some testing (x-
rays, for example) create problems, and when a problem is found and a person goes through treatment, the treatment is often painful and the person dies anyway. What greater good is served by someone going through chemotherapy to lengthen their life by a few months?

There is a lot of anger in this book, some of which sounds justified. Ms Ehrenreich resents all of the medical intervention that happened while she was pregnant and delivering her children, most of which was unnecessary. Of course, it all cost money.

She has some chapters on human physiology, mostly at the cellular level, to describe how our bodies work. In many cases, those cells do what they want to do regardless of what we do. And therefore, despite our paying minute attention to diet and exercise, our longevity is somewhat predetermined by our genes and those cells doing what they want. We have a lot less control over our lives than we think.

There is a quality of life issue, though. Even if my age of death has to do with my DNA, I want to feel as strong and energetic as I can until then. So I watch what I eat (most of the time) and go to exercise class regularly.

And I'll keep reading books like this to try to learn as much as I can so that I can form my own educated opinion.