I‘ve been feeling  quite dorky lately, if I may use that as a serious term and not a childish insult (If I mayn’t then I guess I’ll have to be content with whatever connotations are connected with that word. I don’t think there really is a good synonym for it). First of all I have to tell you that I have managed to stain almost every single shirt I own. Not dusty patches of flour that can just be washed off either, but marks of all sizes and colors, with unknown origins, completely resistant to water and detergent. If anyone knows the best way of getting stains out of clothes I would much appreciate their advise. It has been said before, but one really can endure almost anything as long as they are well dressed.

                        Of course, being well dressed means next to nothing when you find yourself sprawled on the sidewalk with your bike around your ankles. I love my bike, it is beautiful. It is blue. It lets me fly, filling my soul with bubbles of laughter. But sometimes I think it is trying to kill me. Perhaps that’s what it was thinking when it toppled over yesterday, causing my juice bottle to fall out and spill all over the white cement. At the moment I was almost convinced that it was going to get its wish, I was pretty embarrassed. The worst part about where I live is that there are so many nice people. So the moment I fell there were a half a dozen “are you all rights?”At such times, one must pick themselves up and gently right their horrid vehicle, and all while smiling and nodding and shaking their head ruefully and saying “only my pride” and such nonsense. I now have a really pretty patch of pink skin that gradually becomes red before fanning out in a blueish purple mist.

         But enough about me. I promised to give my opinion of Moll Flanders, now that it’s been properly discussed, but I’m afraid my judgement stays the same. She was not reformed enough in my opinion to serve as a proper warning, which is what she was supposed to be. I’ve moved on to Pamela, which I liked exceedingly well until page 251, when the girl lost practically all worth in my eyes. There are still two hundred pages to go in her defense, but I hardly think they will be able to absolve her of this one huge blot of stupidity.

             It’s interesting to be reading these first novels, written in 1722 and 1740 respectively, while also reading Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813. The whole feel of them is completely different, as was, no doubt, their intended audience. It’s fun to be able to toss one’s head knowingly and chalk it all up to society’s changing perspective of the novel. Did you know, they were originally coarse in both quality and content and therefore regarded as scandalous? How far we’ve come from that, and yet how many ways it still holds true. At any rate, these 18th century books are doing strange things to my English, as you can probably tell. But even that is fun, in it’s own right.

The first one I read was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie which was very cleverly written mystery, with a delightfully morbid sense of humor, if you like that sort of thing. In fact, I was a little afraid at first because the opening sentence describes the tweleve year old protagonist’s wall paper by comparing it to dried blood. And the girl herself, Flavia, of all things, is rather scary. Her passion is poisons, and her craft is chemistry. Therefore there are lots of chemical mentionings throughout the novel, (references to herbs, referring to minerals in latin, and that sort of thing). Her family is also a little offsetting. There’s no happy family here, but one complex tangle of solitude and grudges. It made me feel rather sad, though I suppose it made for a more interesting read. All in all the book was perfect for summer, with everything from murder to bicycle rides. I’ll be interested to see if the promised sequels to this book can live up to it.

The second book has a title so long that I’m going to have to look it up, I just call it the Potato Peel Pie book, but that won’t do here. It’s full name is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which will make sense to the reader about ten or fifteen letters in. Yes, that’s right, this is a book of letters. Ever sense I read Daddy Long Legs (by Jane Webster) and Letters From Camp (by Kate Kilse), I have been in love with letter novels*. Is there a term for them? There must be somewhere. Anyway, this book take places right after the end of WWII, but the reader gets the chance to hear many different accounts of what happened during WWII. While most of the recollections are from people who were on the island of Guernsey when it was occupied by the Germans, some of them are from survivors of labor camps. Some of the stories will leave you feeling ever so small. This made an edifying read, if I may use that word in this context. By the last third of the book, though, most of the “history” aspect disappears. If you’ve managed to get that far you won’t mind the lighter turn it takes, you will be so interested in what happens to the characters you won’t be able to put it down anyway.

But there were somethings that I didn’t like about it. The main character struck me as a person I wouldn’t get along with, I can’t really explain why, unless it’s that I’m narrowed minded and stodgy, while she is opened minded and uninhibited. More concretely, there was no end notes that said “yes these things really happened” or “while these exact things didn’t happen, very similar events did occur. ” I really like that in historical fiction, it makes me feel better about using novels as a basis for facts. In the end though, all my words mean very little. The only way to know if a book is really any good is to go out and read it for yourself.

*Also, one of my favorite books as a teen was Ella Enchanted, which had a section of letters between the main characters. Kate Kilse, though, will always be the measure I use to evaluate all such books.