New Series, New Book!

 

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I'm delighted to be presenting a new YA series this month...the Linda Tassel Mysteries. Linda is a daughter of the Eastern Cherokee nation in Georgia. In Death at Little Mound she is discovering about the ancient people of her homeland through her work on an archeology dig. Into her life comes Tad Gist, a recent transplant from Buffalo New York. Just in time to help her solve a murder.

my first Nancy Drew mystery...The Secret in the Old Clock!

I enjoyed writing about Linda from Tad's point of view. I set the stories in the 1990s, when my children were teens.  What fun to revisit that time of their lives. When I was a teen, I loved reading Nancy Drew mysteries, but was frustrated that Nancy stayed a perpetual sixteen through all her adventures. I plan to follow Linda and Tad through their teen age years and deepening romance.

I hope you or a young reader you know will join them!

Monet's Cataracts - and mine

 

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Last summer I noticed a cloudiness in my left eye. I suspected it was due to cataracts, which run on both sides of my family. My husband had them a few years ago, with similar symptoms. When my eye doctor confirmed the problem in both eyes, she remarked that she likes referring severely near-sighted people for cataract surgery. In most cases, the treatment significantly improves their vision and they'll need thinner eyeglasses, and sometimes, none at all.

Cataracts are one thing that make me glad I don't live in the past. My relatives who had the surgery in the 1970s were hospitalized for a week, and afterward they had to wear Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses. My grandmother was an early recipient of lens implants in the 1980s. They worked well for her after her month of bed rest. Today, recovery is quick--minor restrictions like no swimming for a week.           

After cataract surgery, I'll be able to snorkel without prescription goggles. 

I used to think cataract surgery was a 20th century invention and people who lived earlier simply went blind. But it goes back to the fifth century BC. The treatment then involved striking the eye with a blunt object, dislodging the eye fluid and restoring limited vision. Centuries later the surgery evolved to inserting a needle into the eye and extracting the cataract. The basic method hasn't changed a lot since then, according to my cataract information sheet. Today's treatment involves inserting a fine probe into the eye, removing the cataract and then injecting a lens implant. 

The year after my husband's cataract surgery, we took a holiday in northern France. On the way to Paris, we stopped at Giverny, the former home of impressionist painter, Claude Monet. We were intrigued to learn that Monet had cataracts for almost twenty years before they were treated with surgery. We wondered if this explained the muted and blurred shades in many of his impressionistic paintings. 

Monet's failing vision led him to use larger brushstrokes. He saw some colours differently with cataracts. Fog increasingly shrouded his view of everything. Post-surgery he destroyed or redid some of the paintings he created when he saw his world through cataracts. 

Water Lilies by Claude Monet, painted in 1920, three years before his cataract surgery, hangs in The National Gallery, London  

Due to my high astigmatism, my eye surgeon recommended I upgrade to a lens that corrects this problem. I further upgraded to a multifocal lens that can handle distance, intermediate (computer) and reading vision.  The standard lens sets vision to only one level, making glasses necessary for most people. 

It's now two weeks after surgery on my second eye and my vision isn't perfect. My right eye is 20/20 for distance. The left is worse, but much better for reading. The left also sees halos and glare when I watch TV. The eye technician says these should diminish in time and I can expect my eyes to take 4-6 weeks to settle. I see well for most activities, which is a huge change after wearing glasses since I was ten years old. I'm still getting used to my naked face and find myself trying to remove or put on imaginary glasses. I wear sunglasses on windy days so grit doesn't blow into my eyes. But it feels great, if a little strange, to wake up every morning and see the world clearly. 

     Monet's garden, Giverny, France

Where's the Fun? by Karla Stover

 

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Every time I get a list of new books coming out, I look for something humorous. Today's fiction included something going on in a corrupt California town, federal agents being killed, a poem from

 Biden's 

inauguration, a dust storm and murder in a marsh. Non-fiction had portraits of immigrants, a woman who lost her mother to cancer, Matthew McConaughey's diaries, the state of the Republican party and caste systems. We live in the best, most generous country in the world and seem to love to wallow in misery. 

I just learned, today, that Patrick McManus died. McManus was a Pacific northwest native who wrote humor columns for hunting and fishing magazines, novels featuring a woodsman named Rancid Crabtree and one-man comedy plays. Ordinarily I wouldn't read a book about hunting and fishing but his are just so much fun. 

I really enjoyed the first three Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich but the author is up to number 26 and the same things happen in each book. However, I just read that in November 2019, when Twisted Twenty-Six came out, it opened at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list of combined print and eBooks. You can't argue with the success of her books but you don't have to read them, either.

I really liked Jay Len's autobiography, Leading With my Chin and Tim Conway's What's So Funny: My Hilarious Life but not a lot of others memoirs by comedians.

When the pandemic first hit and Washington State was shutdown, I started buying used books off the internet. And what I bought were published ages back, some of which were made into movies, and all of them non-fiction. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay published in 1942, spent five weeks in 1943 on the New York Times non-fiction best sellers list. It was made into a movie, a play, and was used as a codebook in World War II by German intelligence. Sometimes The Egg and I is referred to as fiction and at other times as non-fiction. It came out in 1945 and quickly hit the best sellers list. It's fallen into some into disrepute because the author didn't care for her native American neighbors and poked fun at them and some of her other neighbors. The Bishop family (Ma and Pa Kettle in the book) and a few others sued her but lost. The movie was only so-so. Cheaper by the Dozen was published in 1948 and in 1950 won the French International Humor Award. It was also made into a not-so-good movie. Hollywood seems to think it can do a better job than the authors did. Although, having said that, the movie ending of The Silence of the Lambs was much better than the book's ending.

Recently, I looked up funny books from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. I liked Cold Comfort Farm but not the Jeeves books by P.G. Wodehouse (1930s). I never read Pippi Longstocking (1940s) but I remember the Gilmore girls loved it. I think I saw the movie, Please Don 't Eat the Daisies but have no memory of the book (1950s). However, Barbara Pym's book Excellent Women (1950s) is described as "rich and amusing." So, maybe it's worth a try. 

For those who remember them, Jean Shepherd, Peg Bracken and Erma Bombeck were well received in the 1960s. However, if I had to recommend a more contemporary book that is a joy  to read, it would be The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific, no cannibals, no sex just a funny memoir. And, since few of us are flying these days, arm chair travel may be the next best thing. Maybe I'm a snob but I  just don't care about a "Grammy winner recounting difficulties in her formative years," or one person's "journey listening to her inner self,"  or a collection of "essays on anxiety, loneliness and productivity."

Please tell me if you read these books and why you enjoyed them.