Midsummer Madness: Books to Celebrate Fairy Magic

Die Elfenkönigin Titania streichelt den eselsköpfigen Zettel by Johann Heinrich Füssli ca. 1780 - 1790 

Midsummer’s Eve (June 24^th) will soon be upon us.  It’s a shame Americans don’t celebrate it like the Europeans do, especially those wild Scandinavians, Finns, and Estonians.  I guess when you’re pounded by icy cold most of the year, you like to really throw it down in the summer.  Midsummer is a time for bonfires, drinking, singing, dancing, giant swings, picking flowers by the moonlight, and finding treasures beneath a will-o-the-wisp.  I imagine there’s also a little romance involved and a fair amount of lewd behavior.  For instance, those crazy Latvians like to run around naked at three a.m. to mark the festival.  Now that’s as good a reason as any to visit the Baltic countries.  Whoo-hoo! Where’s the sarīkojums?! (That’s Latvian for par-tay.)

Sadly, Book Phantom can’t make it to Latvia and will have to make her own little Midsummer Celebration; there will probably be a bonfire and some drinking, and with enough of said drinking, there may be something that approximates singing and dancing.  I’ll probably have to draw the line at streaking through my little town, because I’m middle-aged and that’d just be gross.  Plus, I doubt the local Baptists would turn a blind eye toward naked shenanigans done in the name of heathen debauchery.  So, I’ll just have to settle for some reading revelry (and I anticipate a bit of it will be lewd!).  For June, I’ve selected books that will imbue me with the magical feeling of this happy season – all of my picks pertain to fairies and fairy enchantment.

• New Release:  The Great Night by Chris Adrian is a modernized take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It takes place in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where three mortals who have experienced tragic losses find themselves lost on their way to a party.  Fairy magic is afoot when Titania releases a dark and murderous Puck from his bonds in hopes her absent Oberon will return to save the day.

Books to Celebrate Bathroom Reading Month

My reading room

“That’s exactly why I’ve designed the Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” Miss Hilly say.  “As a disease-preventative measure.”

I’m surprised by how tight my throat get.  It’s a shame I learned to keep down a long time ago.

Miss Skeeter look real confused.  “The Home…the what?”

“A bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help.  I’ve even notified the surgeon general of Mississippi to see if he’ll endorse the idea.  I pass.”

Miss Skeeter, she frowning at Miss Hilly.  She set her cards down faceup and say real matter-a-fact, “Maybe we ought to just build you a bathroom outside, Hilly.”

                        From The Help by Kathryn Stockett

“After his breakfast he walked the path to the outhouse.  He felt remarkably peaceful sitting there, shut away from the world.  He’d always thought of the privy as a holy place, a refuge from all but the most basic human concerns.  As a novitiate he scandalized his superiors by claiming it wasn’t the church but the shithouse that was God’s true home in the world, the pungent effluvium as meditative an odor as incense, sunlight through the crescent moon carved in the door providing the dusky ambience of a monastery cell.”

                        From Galore by Michael Crummey

“…at once the tap glowed with a brilliant white light and began to spin.  Next second, the sink began to move; the sink in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into.”

                                    From Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

In literature, the bathroom has served as a means of racial oppression, a place for spiritual contemplation, or an entryway to secret dangers.  It's also a great place to read.  June is Bathroom Reading Month, and to celebrate, I’ve compiled a list of "bathroom-y" books for all reading types.  Keep ’em on top of the toilet for those captive moments throughout the day.

An Autodidact's Summer Writing Course

When I went on vacation at the end of April, I took a vacation from writing.  Although I have been back from vacation for over a month, I still haven’t resumed work on my work-in-progress.  I suppose I should call it my work-in-limbo.  It's funny that it has gone from a WIP, which makes me think of a whip cracking me into action, to a WIL, whereby I am trying to passively will my story to completion. 

The worst part of all this wasted time is that my children will be out of school for summer in less than two weeks.  Summertime is a ten-and-a-half week stretch of non-writing for me.  You can imagine how impossible it is to work with two children under the age of ten bubbling with excitement over their freedom from school drudgery, pulling and tugging me every day, ALL day long.  I have come to accept summer as a forced hiatus, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do something that will further my writing progress.  In order to make the best use of my arrested creativity, I have decided to do a summer creative writing course. 

I know what you’re thinking, but, no, I won’t actually be going to a creative writing class with other adults, where we can happily workshop our latest bits of inspiration.  Summertime is a time for me to enjoy my kids, and I won’t be taking them to day camp or shipping them to grandma’s.  There will never be an Iowa Creative Writing Workshop for me, nor a Gotham Writers’ Workshop, nor even the closer-to-my-geographical-range Wildacres Writers' Workshop.  I accept this with no regrets.  As a middle-aged mom, I have come to terms with the fact that I have to be, well, “creative” about my creative writing aspirations.  Therefore, my creative writing workshop will be of my own making.  This summer, I will be an autodidact.

Save the Whales Bookmarks and Whale Book Speed Reviews

It's time once again for Book Phantom to return her library books, which means another bookmarking caper!  This month, I bought my bookmarks from Save the Whales, and proceeds go to protect these intelligent and graceful giants.  I won't publish the bookmark fronts on my blog due to copyright, but here's the link so you can order some yourselves (the bookmarks are at the bottom of the link page).  There are eight different whale designs to choose from, and at only fifty cents each, you can order them all for less than a cup of Starbucks or a bargain paperback.  Below are the messages I left on the backs of the bookmarks for unsuspecting book borrowers.


Gray Whale Bookmark for Grayson.  It's a memoir, so the quote about time and memory seems proper.



Sperm Whale bookmark for Moby Dick.  I'm placing this in Chapter 32: Cetology, where Melville debates whether a whale is a fish or a mammal.




North Atlantic Right Whale bookmark for Galore.  This mark is just right for a story set in the North Atlantic island of Newfoundland.  The story begins with the removal of a man from a beached whale. 

Although I don't promote my blog by placing bookmarks into children's books I borrow, I'm putting my Save the Whales sticker (a lagnaippe that came with my bookmark purchase) into Nightbirds on Nantucket.  Just a little surprise for one of the younger readers out there.

Ten Things I Liked About Moby Dick

I’m not reviewing Moby Dick on this post.  Now that I have completed it, I have mixed feelings about it.  It’s basically a treatise on whales and the whaling industry from a 19^th century perspective stuffed between a slice of comedy (the first 100 pages) and a slice of tragedy (the last 100 pages).  I could never tell whether I was reading through Ishmael’s eyes or through Melville’s.  The author wasn’t kidding when he had Ishmael say, “…a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”  Much of Moby Dick read like a dissertation.  That’s all I’m saying from a critical perspective.  Others more qualified than I can pick apart the literary nuances of the novel with greater skill and insight. 

I’d much prefer to list a few kooky things I loved about Moby Dick:

Mrs. Hussey's Try Pots Inn Chowder Recipe

The first hundred pages or so of Moby Dick are surprisingly fun and humorous.  Melville devotes an entire chapter (albeit a short, three-page chapter) to chowder.  Ishmael and his pagan friend Queequeg spend the evening at the Try Pots Inn on Nantucket before shipping out on the Pequod.  The inn is famous for its chowder.  This chapter gave me such a craving for chowder, that I just had to make some.  Here's a passage from Moby Dick that's sure to get your mouth watering, too:

Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make a supper for us both on one clam?"

However, a warm and savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us.  But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.  Oh! sweet friend, hearken to me.  It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.  Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we dispatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.  Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat.  In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.  (Chapter 15, Moby Dick)

Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken: A Sympathy Message for Kennedy-Era American Children

Who can resist this jacket design by Edward Gorey?

For the kiddie portion of my Tales of the Whales booklist, I read Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken.  The story begins when ten-year old Dido Twite, an English girl, awakens from a ten-month coma aboard an American whaling ship.  When Dido recovers, Captain Casket asks her to befriend his skittish daughter, Dutiful Penitence, who refuses to leave her cabin because she is afraid of the sea.  Dido teaches the serious Quaker girl to have fun and play games.  Eventually, Dutiful, or Pen, as Dido calls her, musters her courage and leaves the cabin.

            Captain Casket is on a mission to find a pink whale he rescued from a beach in his boyhood.  He is so obsessed with finding “Rosie” the whale that he leaves Pen and Dido at his Nantucket home with Aunt Tribulation.  Aunt Trib is like the stepmother in Cinderella – she forces the girls to do chores all day and to wait on her like servants.  Dido teaches Pen to stand up against Trib, and the girl develops some backbone.

            Nightbirds is an “off-shoot” of Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, but the story won’t confuse readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier books.  Readers will like Dido because she is brave and heroic and a tad full of herself.  It’s great fun to see her give Aunt Tribulation what-for.  Aunt Tribulation (who isn’t who you think she is) is deliciously bad.  Nate the cabin boy is Dido's friend and ally.  He owns a talking bird named Mr. Jenkins who offers plenty of laughs with his silly, aristocratic squawking.  When Dido asks the bird where he’s been, he merely answers, “Your Grace’s wig needs a little more powder!”

            From what I know about Aiken’s Wolves series, the books revolve around an alternate history, where King James II was never deposed.  In her world, King James III rules, but he's constantly harassed by The Hanoverians.  This conspiring is critical to Nightbirds on Nantucket.  Dido, Nate, and Pen thwart an assassination attempt on King James III in the story’s climax.