Traveling by Word

I have been posting my bookgroup's annual reading slate here since 2013, the year after I began this blog. Last year it was nearly the only thing that I posted. This year it will be the first of, at least, monthly posts. Or so is my intention.

In all those past posts, I think I have pointed out and praised every attribute of the Foreign Authors Bookgroup, this diverse group of women who are brought together by our love of reading and our interest in the wide world around us. We do not exclusively read foreign authors, but our focus is on foreign lands and cultures. Our November meeting is dedicated to nominating books, either fiction or non-fiction, current or classic, which we will then vote on for the year to come. We now have a limit of two nominations each, and I always aspire to read at least some of those which did not make the list.

I am now on the third book of the year, Magdalena, River of Dreams by Wade Davis, an exploration of the river that runs through Columbia, the land, its people and its history. It's an information-dense book that I doubt you would pick up on a whim, but I'm finding it quite interesting. At this age, I have finally come to accept that there are many places where I will never set foot, Columbia being one of them. Yet here I am, traveling both in time and space down this mighty foreign river, all the while comfortably tucked in bed, thanks to the written word.

Still reading

And still here. How can it be that an entire year has passed since my last blog post? Is time actually speeding up? It certainly seems so, since I can't believe that I am slowing down. At any rate, I have not abandoned this blog, which, according to Blogger stats, still attracts some readers, although I admit that I write it primarily for myself. The fact that it's “published” also motivates me to continue.

 As I have been doing since the first year of this blog, twelve years ago, I'm sharing the books that the members of my long-time Foreign Authors Bookgroup have chosen for the year. The group goes back much farther than that, and there have been some departures as well as newcomers. We have changed from evening to an afternoon meeting time as most of us are no longer constrained by a work schedule. But our criteria remains the same: fiction and non-fiction by foreign authors or about foreign lands and cultures. 

This year we have more non-fiction than usual. Our August book is one which I am reading for the second time. No prior interest in hieroglyphs is necessary to enjoy The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode The Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. It is a thoroughly entertaining book. As the author says “...the saga of the Rosetta Stone is as far as could be from a narrow tale of arcane scholarship in musty libraries.” There are “...stories of archaeological swashbucklers tumbling through ancient tombs; peeks at the first-ever attempts to set down words in writing; excursions into big subjects like the struggle against death and forgetting – and it would be a mistake to forgo those adventures in favor of sticking to hieroglyphs alone.” The wealth of content in the book is presented in such a lively style to make it a real page-turner. I'm looking forward to the bookgroup's discussion next Tuesday.

 

In Appreciation

While other activities I once participated in, such as the Skillman Players theater group, are now but memories, the Foreign Authors Bookgroup continues to be an ongoing, much-appreciated part of my life. And I think that most of the other members feel much the same, which I find both gratifying and surprising, because we are such a disparate group of women in many respects, brought together by our love of reading about world around us. I have enjoyed and learned, and more than that, I have gained new insights into my own character and viewpoints from our monthly discussions.

So when an assignment in a digital art course I am taking was to create an original work of photo artistry based on the theme of admiration for a dear friend, I modified it slightly as appreciation for all my friends in the bookgroup. As the assignment suggested, I did have it printed and have just sent a copy to each person in the group. 

We have already begun our 2023 reading slate with a short but moving Irish novel, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.  Next up is a French novel which I nominated, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier which won the Prix Goncourt in 2020.  So, come the first Tuesday in February, I will find out the reactions of the group both to my "appreciation" card and to the unusual novel that I selected.  

Here is our complete schedule for the year.  

We continue to read...

Through the never-ending pandemic, through alarming political turmoil, through our varied personal circumstances, we continue to read. Some of us have traveled, others, including myself, have remained at home. A few no longer even live in Dallas. Most are retired or only work part time, and we have very diverse interests and pastimes. Books are what brought us together.

So, year after year, we continue to read, sharing each month a passage to another time and place. This year began in late 19^th century Venice and will end in mid 20^th century rural Ireland, with sojourns across the globe along the way.

Fabulous fabric

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World was mired on my endless to-read list until the author Virginia Postrel gave a presentation via Zoom to the Dallas Area Fiber Artists. Such a enthusiastic and entertaining presentation that I immediately ordered the book and proceeded to read it. And then to rave about and recommend it to everyone I could think of.

You needn't be a sewer or someone who works with textiles in any way to appreciate and enjoy this book. You need only be a curious reader for the fascinating lore and surprising historical connections to keep you turning the pages. And to keep you turning to your nearest and dearest, asking “did you know that...?” Such as, did you know that the word “textile” comes from the same Indo-European root — teks — as “technology?” Because, as Postrel explains, “textiles are such an old technology that we rarely think about them.”

In seven chapters on Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators, Postrel takes us through time and around the globe, showing us how the need for and the desire for and the making of textiles affected diverse societies and contributed to our modern world. Textiles played key roles in Italian banking in the Renaissance, in the Industrial Revolution, in the development of modern chemistry, in computer programming. And within all these broad categories are many individual narratives of people, some famous, some unknown, who bring life and scale to each chapter.

I am in awe of the extensive research Postrel did and even more in awe of how she turned a work of non-fiction into great storytelling. As I said, she is also a compelling speaker, so I suggest you go to her YouTube channel and let her tell you about the book herself.

Zooming along

 Like so much else in our Covid-inflicted world, our bookgroup has gone online. After ten virtual meetings, we are getting the hang of it. (Like remembering to mute and unmute!) And while we are missing gathering around the long wooden table at La Madeleine, the advantage has been that those of us who have moved to other cities and other states can continue to participate. We can claim to be coast-to-coast now, with members in Maine and Seattle, Washington. In November my sister-in-law from Arizona and a member's daughter in Washington DC were guests as well.

So here is our very varied slate for 2021. January's book, Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon, is a “spy thriller” set after WWII in divided Berlin as the Soviet occupation is tightening its grip. The story keeps you turning pages, but you learn a lot about both the politics and the actual life in the city at that time.

The next book, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, couldn't be more different. I had listened to it as an audiobook last year, but there is so much in this book that it was definitely worth a re-read. I'm looking forward to our discussion in February. As always, I invite you to join us. 

 

Booked up

Not only a new year but a new decade of reading for the Foreign Authors Bookgroup, going on its 26^th year. Our January book, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, a Man Booker Prize nominee, has been read, much appreciated, and thoroughly discussed.

The next book, The Hired Man, is a slim volume set in a Croatian village where dark wartime secrets are brought into the light by a family of outsiders. The author, Aminatta Forna, is indeed foreign, although not Croatian, having been born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain, with periods of her childhood spent in other countries as well. The novel (and the author) has received numerous accolades . After reading about and sampling the book, I decided to nominate it.

Everyone in the bookgroup enjoys Nomination Night so much that we devote an entire meeting to it. It's an opportunity to introduce books that each of us thinks would be interesting, informative, discussable. We hear about books, both widely heralded and obscure, with personal recommendations from readers whom we know. For 2020 there were twenty-five books nominated, so paring that down to eleven was difficult, as always. Some books seem to induce almost everyone to vote for them, while others which I hoped would be chosen, lose out. They go on my personal to-read list.

We have a two-book per person nomination limit, and this year, in order to try to contain all the enthusiasm for the books within a reasonable hour-plus, we also set a time limit for presenting each book. I'm afraid I did rather poorly in presenting my first book, Himself by Jess Kidd. Since it didn't get chosen, let me recommend it here. The setting is a village in County Mayo, Ireland, in the 1970s, where a young man, raised an orphan, comes to uncover the truth about the teen-aged mother he never knew. A charmer, he sets hearts aquivering, but also causes a stir in other respects as he pursues his quest, aided and thwarted by a cast of diverse and eccentric characters, including ghosts of the dead. It's a beguiling novel, interwoven with the supernatural, brimming with folklore and humor, lyrical and poetic. A wonderful read! 

  

Now I'm on to The Hired Man, which I haven't read, as I usually like to nominate books that are new to me. It's taking a chance, but usually there's enough information on a book to be able to tell if it's worthwhile, with opportunities online to sample the writing. The little that I read in The Hired Man was so intriguing that I had to force myself not to go ahead and read it then and there. But I like the book to be fresh in my mind when we come together to discuss it, so I'm just beginning it now.

As always, you are welcome to join us if you are in the Dallas area; just email me for details on where. Or send your comments and participate online with us.

 

Worth reading

If you love beautiful garments, you will swoon over the confections in The House of Worth, 1858-1954: The Birth of Haute Couture. Certainly you might have swooned while corseted into one of the boned bodices and metal-hooped cage crinolines which supported the yards and yards of fabric and trim that comprised one of these dresses. But how sumptuous, how splendid, how breath-taking the result! Each garment shown in this richly-illustrated tome will have you marveling at its design and details. 

 

In addition to all this visual delight, the book presents the story of the Englishman Charles Frederick Worth who came to Paris as a young man in 1846 and by 1858 had established what would eventually become the famous House of Worth. It's also a fascinating look into the fashion life of royal and aristocratic ladies as well as those from the artistic and demi-mondaine worlds, beginning at the time of the extravagant Second Empire in France, when the Empress Eugénie became Worth's loyal client.

From the voluminously-skirted gowns of this era to the bustle-backed styles of the later 1800s, Worth's creativity and his love of opulence and ornamentation is magnificently demonstrated. His son, Jean-Philippe, entered the business as a designer, and I do admire some of these later turn-of-the century designs, executed after Charles Frederick had died in 1895.

 Looking at all these frilled, embroidered, bejeweled, lace-adorned silks and velvets, I could not help but muse on the woman that they presented and the woman that wore them, for they surely would shape both outward and inward concepts of the wearer. Such perfection, such utter femininity. But also, such artificiality, such discomfort!

One passage from the book especially stays in my mind. “The empress [Eugénie] was fond of an active lifestyle and liked to dress very simply when she was not engaged in public duties, often in a black skirt caught up over a red underskirt, worn with a loose-fitting shirt... It was wearing a similar outfit that she scaled the Mer de Glace glacier near Mont Blanc.” Can you imagine doing that in skirts!? It made me think of the famous quip about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, that she did everything he did, but backwards and in heels.

 So it is easy to see how women embraced the flapper fashions of the Twenties. About one dress from 1924-27 the description concludes: “Dresses of this kind have no internal structure and rely entirely on the body to support them.” How wonderful that must have felt after all the tortuous shaping the body had previously been subjected to. But I have to admit that for ahh-inspiring beauty, these shapeless dresses, however artistically adorned, can't compete with those incredible clothes from decades before. Even the more lavish New Look styles with which the history of the House of Worth closes in 1954 pale in comparison. 

Yes, I am grateful I live in the age of knits and spandex and denim, and linen that is allowed to wrinkle. But The House of Worth will make you yearn, if only for a moment, to be swathed in a luscious silk, a froth of delicate lace at your bosom, embroidered blossoms entwining with pearls down the front, some ruching perhaps, and tassels and ribbons, the skirt spilling out gracefully about you. Just page through this wonderful book and let your imagination waltz away.

The many benefits of reading

Recently I received a Penguin Random House email that touted the many benefits of reading. They included improving memory by activating the parts of your brain that create new synapses for memory; making you smarter by enhancing vocabulary, improving articulation, and increasing creativity; making you more empathetic by improving understanding of others' beliefs and views; as well as relieving stress and lowering blood pressure.

But this one made me laugh. Improves Sleep: Incorporating a reading routine into your bedtime ritual tells your body it's time to wind down and get some sleep. Because who hasn't snuggled into bed for a good read and only to blearily wake up some time later with the book flopped askew on a body part. And woe If it happens to be a weighty tome!

  

We do have one weighty tome in this year's bookgroup selections: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It was my nomination and a novel that I read rapturously back in my younger days, in the 1961 translation by David Magarshack (which I still have in battered paperback form). There are several newer translations, and I intend to read one of those this time. After our encounter with Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert in 2017, it seemed appropriate that we should share and discuss the story of one of the other most famous fictional 19^th century women. 

 

I doubt that Anna will be all that sleep-inducing, but I have been finding my eyelids drooping over next month's book: Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, a very unconventional novel, to say the least. Yet it is this sort of book that I might not ordinarily read that makes our bookgroup so worthwhile. I'm looking forward to learning more about this novel, this author, this culture, and discussing it with a group of articulate and open-minded women. If you are in the Dallas area and like reading interesting and often challenging books, please come join us.

"Sociable" reading

In a recent New York Times review of The Social Life of Books by Abigail Williams, the reviewer likened the 18^th century practice of books being read aloud to a group to the phenomenon of best sellers which millions read more or less simultaneously, a contemporary example of sociable reading. It seems to me that an even better comparison would be with the reading and sharing of books by a book group or club

According to The Reading Group, a UK-based website, book clubs have shed their fusty image and become trendy as well as ubiquitous, meeting everywhere from libraries and living rooms to online. In addition to helping readers sort through the huge mass of books being published today, a primary reason for their popularity is that participants ...“are finding being a member of a book club to be fun and rewarding, transforming the personal and private experience of reading a book into a shared one of discussion and appreciation.”

Or as another New York Times article on book clubs elaborates: “Reading is a solitary act, an experience of interiority. To read a book is to burst the confines of one’s consciousness and enter another world. What happens when you read a book in the company of others? You enter its world together but see it in your own way; and it’s through sharing those differences of perception that the book group acquires its emotional power.” Yes, indeed.

Further delving online unearthed an interesting 2015 white paper report on book clubs from BookBrowse.com. A lot of the statistics are no surprise; my long-time book group could be the poster child. A majority of members are women, and they tend to be older, empty nesters, often retired, seeking intellectual stimulation and personal connections. Higher education plays a role but income a bit less so. They also are more likely to use their public library. (Ah, we know it's probably us when all the copies of a relatively obscure book are checked-out or on hold.)

That report also defines the ideal book. “Overwhelmingly, book club participants want to read books that expand their horizons—windows that allow them to see into the lives of others or mirrors that let them reflect on aspects of their own lives. Above all else, books need to have plenty to discuss.”

We hope that we have chosen books for 2018 that fit that criteria. So without further ado, here are our selections. I invite you to join us in person if you happen to be in the Dallas area. Or read along with us and send any comments from wherever you may be. 

 

Reading assignments

So many books out there to read! I used to keep my to-read list on index cards, a fat little stack which I still have. Now I can keep lists right on the Dallas Public Library site as well as on Goodreads, where it's so satisfying to be able to transfer a book over to the “Read Shelf.” But, to face facts, I will never get all those books on my various lists read, however great my longevity. However, bookgroup selections generally make it promptly to that Read Shelf each month because I don't want to miss out on participating fully in our lively discussions. The first of our 2017 selections was delightful and the second a page-turner for me.  I look forward to reading the rest. As always, you are welcome to join us, virtually online, or here in Dallas; just email for location.

The world, in English

No matter if English is our only language, we are able to know what the French Emma Bovary and the Russian Anna Karenina thought and said thanks to translators. And although we can easily name the authors who brought those two famous characters to literary life, most of us would be hard-pressed to identify any translators. After all, aren't they mere conduits, turning the authors' foreign words into English ones?

Read David Bellos' fascinating book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? and you will have a new appreciation for translators and their craft. Subtitled Translation and the Meaning of Everything, it covers an incredible range of topics, from the development of dictionaries to the dragomen interpreters of the Ottoman empire through to the demands of movie subtitling and the intricacies of simultaneous translating. While it's full to the brim with interesting information, it's not at all academic or tedious to read. (The biggest problem is that you will probably be bombarding your nearest and dearest with surprising tidbits you've just read.)

I've lauded it to my fellow book group readers because, obviously, a Foreign Authors Bookgroup has a special interest in translation. Although, as I have mentioned in previous posts, we do not read foreign authors exclusively, but rather, fiction and non-fiction about foreign lands and cultures. This year, three of our selections are translated from another language, which is actually very substantial percentage-wise. A blog on international literature is named Three Percent because, as is stated in the About section “only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation.” Check out all the great resources they offer to acquaint you with those works.

Here's our literary travel itinerary for the year. Come join us, online or in person if you happen to live in the Dallas area. 

 

Ready to read

Last year's eleven books have been read and discussed, and now a new slate awaits.

I appreciate being part of a group of readers who are willing to read out of their comfort zone. Occasionally there are some grumblings about the number of "depressing" books we've chosen over the years.  So why do we choose to read them, these stories about desperate lives, dangerous places?  Interestingly, if you do a Google search for "depressing books" you'll find a host of responses, some arguing for their various benefits, others swearing off of them altogether.  One blogger said she was glad she read "tough" books when she was younger, because they improved her in various ways, but now all she wants is to be entertained.

Well, don't we all like to be entertained?  I like mysteries, which usually involve a violent death, not really a pleasant subject when you think about it, yet definitely entertaining if well written.  But what I want out of my precious reading hours more than entertainment is enrichment. I want to fill my mind with knowledge and understanding of other lands, other cultures, other times.  I want to see them, experience them through narrators and characters different from myself, or sometimes much like myself.  And often that world within the book is one where I would not want to be in actuality, but that may be exactly the point.  Why is this world the way it is, and what do I learn from that? 

I came across a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article in the Telegraph in which the author suggested that dark and depressing novels ought to make people glad about their relatively benign lives.  " Try 400 volts of pure Thomas Hardy and count your blessings that you're not Jude The Obscure."  I think that all of us in my bookgroup would agree with that.  After reading about a slum community in contemporary India in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a memoir of life in war-torn Vietnam in The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham or the settling of Australia's New South Wales in Kate Grenville's The Secret River, we certainly have a greater appreciation of our own good fortune, as women living here in this time and place.  We also believe that these books are important for opening our eyes to and increasing our empathy for the infinite variety of other lives. 

Do I feel like all the books that we've read have been "worthwhile?"  I must say that there have been some I'd only force my worst enemy to read (except  he or she might like them!), but, once again, the great thing about a book group is that we can discuss things in the books that disturbed us, that we disagreed with, that we disliked.  And someone else's point of view might just give us a different and illuminating perspective on a "difficult" book.

 Of course, who would really like reading if reading were only about books that were "good for you"?  I also found in The Telegraph a list of 100 novels everyone should read, of which I've read about half.  Some, such as My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk and Austerlitz by WG Sebald, were bookgroup selections, but many others – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki – I read because I wanted to know what was in those renowned books, and I read them enthralled from first page to last.

Some books do take getting into, adjusting to their unusual rhythm, altering your expectations.  And sometimes a book just plain disappoints. Even when that happens I tend to slog through to the end.  (Maybe there's a correlation between that and eating everything on your plate, something I happily did without being forced to.)   As always, I'm looking forward to reading all of these books, even the ones I didn't vote for.  Discovering a good book that I would never have considered on my own is also one of the pluses of being in a book group.  I invite you to come join us on our reading journeys, in person if you happen to live in the Dallas area, or wherever you are in the world online. 

 Here's a look at our selections for the past three years. 

Reading round the world

Last year our bookgroup traveled to Russia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Haiti, England, Egypt and China. Quite a bit of that involved time traveling as well, to the eras of Henry VIII and Cleopatra, to colonial America and France during WWII.  We all look forward to our monthly peregrinations, to discovering little-known corners of the world and participating in the lively discussions that follow.

We began this year with a return to Afghanistan, and next month Burma is our destination.  Here's our literary itinerary for the year, if any of you would care to join us, virtually (we're hoping to have a bookgroup blog online soon) or in person here in Dallas.

   
You can find our 2013 books here and more information about the bookgroup plus our 2012 books here.

A new year of reading

Yesterday evening as the rain pattered outside, ten of us gathered round one of the long wooden tables at La Madeleine Cafe to discuss the first book of the year, City of Thieves, by David Benioff.  As I mentioned last year when I first introduced the bookgroup, we are a very diverse group of women brought together by a love of reading, and I find we share many values while the diversity ensures piquancy in our discussions.  I look forward every month to our talk of literature and life. 

For anyone who might like to join us (in person or virtually) here is our slate for 2013.  (Our name is slightly misleading; we read not only books by foreign authors, but also about foreign places or cultures. Thus, our next selection, Cleopatra, by American Stacy Schiff  takes us to ancient Egypt and Rome.)

    

Voyage to Venice

While I was sitting at my sewing table patiently hand-overcasting the seams on my dress, I was also treading the streets and traversing the canals of Venice with John Berendt as my guide. You may remember him as the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the fascinating look at the city of Savannah, Georgia and some of its most eccentric and scandalous denizens.  He has followed that up with The City of Falling Angels in which he explores Venice and encounters another cast of uncommon characters.  Such as Archimede Seguso, a master Venetian glassblower who, with one son, is involved in a sad professional feud with his other son.  Or Daniel Curtis, the scion of a prominent nineteenth century American expatriate, unwillingly giving up the Palazzo Barbero where Henry James and John Singer Sargent were guests.  And then there's the daughter of Ezra Pound and his long-time mistress Olga Rudge, apparently bilked of her valuable trove of Pound papers by the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and his wife.  Berendt introduces the reader (or listener, as was my case) to these and more, probing all sides of the particular stories he is telling and more or less letting us draw our own conclusions. Through it all runs the story of the 1996 fire that destroyed much of the great and beloved Fenice Opera House and its effect on many of the people in the book.  Lots of juicy gossip, some poignant history and vivid travelogue all rolled in one terrific tome that will whisk you away from the everyday.     

Earlier this year I listened to Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon by Andrea Di Robilant, her great-great-great-great grandson.  We first meet Lucia as a sixteen-year-old engaged to be married to Alvise Mocenigo from one of Venice's great families, and we follow her through a long life's vicissitudes, many of which are caused by the triumph of Bonaparte in Italy and his dissolution of the Venetian Republic.  There is also Avise's unfaithfulness, her own miscarriages, her love for an Irish officer in the Austrian military which results in the birth of a son.  We see her as in young bride at the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, at her husband's country estate of Alvisopoli, making her way in the court society of Hapsburg Vienna, residing in Paris where she socializes with the Empress Joséphine and witnesses the fall of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814, while also studying botany at the Jardin des Plantes. Finally, in old age, back in a Venice still ravaged by the effects of Napoleon's occupation, she becomes a living relic of the city's great past, sought out and visited on Grand Tours.  The story resounds with her own words from her numerous letters, and we who have come to admire, appreciate and empathize with this woman can be thankful that her descendant who found those letters is such an engaging writer.

 The photos are from my one and only actual voyage to Venice in 1989. 
     

Take a trip with Sarah Vowell

Go along on her Assassination Vacation.  But definitely don't if you're hyper-religious, ultraconservative, or in general easily offended by irreverence.  However, if you escape all of those categories, get ready for a lot of laughs, snorts, giggles and concordant head-nodding as you read about the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.  No, it's not the assassinations themselves that are funny; the humor is in Vowell's views on American culture then and now.  In addition to being amused, you'll learn some interesting things. 

I had a chance to hear her speak at one of Dallas' annual Arts & Letters Live events yesterday evening, and she certainly passed my authors test as someone with whom I would sit down to lunch.  I have to confess that I don't listen to NPR, so I was not familiar with This American Life to which she contributes.  I have now remedied that online, and I'm looking forward to reading her latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, about the Americanization of Hawaii.

Adele P. Margolis

Here I was thinking these two sewing books by Adele P. Margolis were my own personal discovery and little-known secret when they have been heralded on quite a few sewing blogs and reviewed on Pattern Review.  I'll have my own say about them in a moment, but first, and perhaps even more interesting, is the author herself who died at age 100 in 2009.  Be sure to read this moving tribute by Ellen Steinbaum, the niece of her lifelong best friend, but let me just mention some salient facts from her reminiscence.


Despite wishing to be an artist, Adele trained as a teacher and taught elementary school from 1930 to 1945.  She gave her future husband, Nathan, also a teacher, a set of paints, and he went on to become a recognized artist. His circa 1950 lithograph, Vogue Says, probably depicts Adele.  During the Depression, she began to sew her own clothes and in her 40s started to teach fashion sewing at an adult education school in Philadelphia.  From there her "sewing guru" career took off, with the sewing books beginning in 1959. The photograph of her below is scanned in from the dust jacket of one of my books.  In her 80s she began writing poetry and published a collection of poems as well as wrote her final (unpublished) sewing book on creating and altering patterns for the older figure.

Reading her books makes me wish I could have known her and taken classes from her.  From her breezy yet no-nonsense style, I imagine a warm and encouraging teacher, but one who wouldn't listen to excuses, who would insist on you going beyond your comfort zone, and doing it well.  Here's her voice on the subject of draping: "To do draping you must have the courage to cut.  If you're apprehensive about cutting, then draping is not for you.  Better stick to pattern making.  Of course, you're fearful you'll make a mistake. Cutting is so final!  Just remember it's only fabric.  If you ruin it, there are miles and miles more of the stuff.  It's the release from fear of making a mistake you need most of all."  

Design Your Own Dress Patterns consists of Part I – Principles of Pattern Construction covering shaping by dart control, refining a pattern, use of multiple darts, shaping by seams, and adding fullness with pleats, gathers, gores, etc.  Part II is all about styling: necklines, collars, closures, pockets, sleeves.  The final chapter touches on draping, pattern grading, and creating a garment from design to pattern to muslin to determining a layout on your fashion fabric. If you're simply interested in producing a garment or reproducing exactly what you see on the pattern envelope, this book will probably seem tedious.  However, if you want to look beneath the hood, so to speak, to understand the whys of what you're sewing and be able to make changes if you so desire, then you'll treasure this tome.  Going through each chapter, doing all the exercises (using the quarter-scale models she instructs you to use), you would surely be knowledgeable, proficient and confident by the end.  In fact, when I first acquired this book, that's what I intended to do, but, alas, that's still a far-off future project.  I have used it on several occasions to add a detail, such as a collar, or redesign a bodice front. Her directions are clear and easy to follow, the line drawings explicit and just looking at them will give you lots of inspiration.

I've used How to Make Clothes that Fit and Flatter less because when I'm trying to solve a fit problem I look for something specific, more like a modern recipe—move this a certain amount here, fold that in a certain way there, whereas this book is more like a pioneer recipe—add a spoonful of this, a handful of that.  Once again, I think this book would be most useful if you were to use it like a textbook and proceed through it as if taking a course.  The copyright in my book is 1969, and some of what she has to say certainly reflects another era: "There's absolutely no mystery about it any more!  Those old-time unmentionables are today's common knowledge—thanks to present-day advertising.  And small wonder—they're so photogenic!  So attractive and so comfortable are they also that there really is no excuse for anyone no longer very young or very slender for not wearing what she needs to show off her clothes to best advantage."  However, I find that part of the charm of this book, and most of the information she imparts is valid for any time or style.

You can find her out-of-print books readily online, but Dover Publications has also reissued the first book as Make Your Own Dress Patterns with the original line drawings by her husband.

Fashion, Style, Clothes

I often wonder, why do I like clothes so much?  For myself, I see the appeal as having two main aspects: how clothes enhance (hopefully) one's appearance, and then the beauty of the garments themselves (although probably a plain t-shirt and jeans don't rate very highly in the later category). Because I sew, there is also the creative pleasure that begins with an irresistible fabric and culminates in a style of my own choosing, contrived by my own hands.

So, as someone in whose life clothes occupy a prominent place, I was eager to read The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant which I discovered via an older post in Biblioblog.  (Make sure you read her – ahem – thoughtful review.)  And it is a thought-provoking book which I recommend, whether you consider your own interest in clothes highly developed or extremely minimal.  In fact, I would especially recommend it for the fashion-averse, who might come away with a better perception of how and why clothes matter, why clothes are lusted for and loved by so many of us.

Not that I always agreed with everything in the book.  Certainly, this Englishwoman and daughter of immigrant parents is going to have a different experience of dress than I have had and therefore some very different ideas.  But it seems to me that at least part of the point of this book is to create a dialog in the reader's mind about clothes, about fashion, about style.  Along the way she imparts some fashion history and uses the personal story of a Holocaust survivor to illustrate her thesis about the importance of personal adornment.  Occasionally I did find the book somewhat repetitive and felt that it showed its genesis in an eponymous blog (which was active from 2007 to 2010 and is interesting in its own right).  Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile reading.

In Praise of Bookgroups

Reading, that most solitary of pastimes, takes on a welcome social dimension when you participate in a bookgroup. You can rave (or rant) about that book you've just finished, analyze the characters, appraise the writer's style, and everyone is interested, because they've read the book, too!  Plus, sometimes those other opinions of a book you weren't crazy about or couldn't get into will persuade you to have another go at it or regard it with a new understanding.  Best of all, it seems to me, is that a bookgroup gets you to read books you probably would never have opened otherwise, often opening your eyes as well. 

 

 My Foreign Authors Bookgroup was started back in 1994 at the very first Borders Bookstore in Dallas, by JuLe, an employee there. Mr. C and I joined it (yes! there were men in it back then) in 1996.  And what a lot of interesting books we have read as a result.  Over the course of years the group has evolved, and the venue has changed several times. Now we are about a dozen women, in many respects fairly dissimilar except in our desire to read and discuss books with substance and meaning. We read eleven books a year, either by a foreign author or about a foreign place or culture; in September we nominate and vote on books for the coming year.  Generally, our discussions are free-form, with whoever nominated that book being the putative leader.  If you're in the Dallas area and would like to join us, please email me for details.  We are always glad to have new members.



This month's book was the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It is a big (but not sprawling) novel focusing on the years 1527 to 1535 as Henry VIII of England seeks to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn, with the surprising protagonist being Thomas Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, who rises to be Henry's right hand man by aiding him in this quest. And for anyone who thinks of Thomas Cromwell as the villain of A Man for All Seasons or one of the other many accounts and popular representations of the Henry-and-Anne drama, this is a different man altogether, a very remarkable one. I was in awe of how brilliantly Mantel presented the complex intertwined religious and political issues as well as convincingly portrayed the era to a modern reader without long and tedious paragraphs of exposition.  It is, indeed, a lyrical novel although not self-consciously so. You can open to almost any page and find a passage worth savoring.  It's an excellent bookgroup selection because there are so many aspects that will stimulate discussion. However, if you aren't in a bookgroup, don't let that stop you from choosing to read this five-star novel. But, I guarantee that by the time you finish it, you'll be dying to talk about it to someone else.