The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Last night I picked up the book my daughter has been urging me to read for several weeks, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Burrows. At what I hope will turn out to be one of the most difficult points in life (there are worse things than approaching the one year mark of the early and unexpected death of your spouse, but I pray I’ll never experience them), I lay in a strange bed at a friend’s, literally unable to endure night in my own home. Consumed by emotions I’m completely at loss to identify or explain, I finally opened the pages of the book, and began to read.

I could tell as I read that Mary Ann Shaffer was a lover of books. (Annie Barrows is her niece and a childrens author. She stepped in at her aunt’s invitation to complete revisions when Mrs. Shaffer became to ill to finish them herself.) Mary Ann had worked as a bookseller, librarian and editor. A marvelous story teller, she also wrote prolifically, but never managed to produce something that satisfied her. Her standards, it seems, were high. The Guernsey Literary… Society, set in a post WWII Channel Island, began in 1967 (according to her obituary) or 1980 (her publisher), as a biography of the wife of polar explorer Robert Scott. Disappointed by a research dead end in Cambridge, she took a side trip to Guernsey. Socked in at the airport by dense fog, she did what any sensible person would do, and looked for something to read. Here a bit more mystery arises. Was there, as her obituary relates, a library at the airfield, or was it simply a bookstore, as her publisher claims? I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I really hope it was a library. In the literary society’s Guernsey a branch library would have been installed to benefit all who passed through. Mrs. Maugery would have insisted. Whatever the source of Jersey Under the Jack Boot, it and other books on the Nazi Invasion of the Channel Islands fascinated her. That interest eventually allowed her to fulfill her lifelong ambition to “Write a book that someone would like enough to publish.” When her book club convinced her to do just that she started to write seriously. She was about 70 at the time.

To some reviewers Dawsey Adams and rest of the accidental literary society seem far-fetched, too quirky to be true. I didn’t find them strange, maybe because I grew up in a rather remote, rural area myself. Ingenuity, mutual reliance and eccentricity are almost required in a small isolated society. Shared hardships seem to makes those qualities stronger. My grandmother’s family made soup out of straw during the great famine that eventually drove them from the Ukraine to NE Colorado. In similar circumstances Potato Peel Pie sounds pretty clever to me. Had she known of it, Great Grandma Bauder might have asked for the recipe.

The deprivations people suffer in the book were very real in England and Europe during WWII. The tiny island in the English Channel actually was occupied, and their children were evacuated before the invasion, some never to be reunited with their families. One book reviewer mockingly asked if no one on Guernsey at that time ever read a trashy novel. I don’t imagine they did. Books would have been burned for fuel soon after the wood supply ran out. Guernsey’s bookseller, we are told, boarded up his shop because people are buying up his treasures to use as fuel. Only a book valued highly by its owner might have been saved, and only by someone as strong minded as Amelia Maugery, the supplier of the society's books. Before she wrote her novel, Mrs. Shaffer spent years researching the Nazi occupation of the Channels and corresponding with many of its survivors. Whether created by the author’s imagination or drawn from documented facts, Guernsey and it’s people are real to me. Maybe because of what they lived through the literary society member’s letters don’t just portray facts, but truths as well. “’When my son, Ian, died at El Alamein…’” Amelia Maugery writes, “‘visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn’t. It’s death that goes on.’”

It’s true that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is endearing, charming, smart and joyful, as critics have said. If that’s all it were it would be enough. We could use more well written books like that to lift our spirits and make us smile, couldn’t we? It was more than that for me last night, though. It didn’t just lift my spirits, it comforted me, gave me some confidence and a bit of hope. My daughter said the she felt that, too, when she read it. I don’t want to sound mystical, or somehow imply that The Guernsey Literary… Society is a profound work. It isn’t and I’m glad. But when a book can tell its story honestly, with real characters and situations that feel true, it gives us more than a great read. It gives a piece of life. Why that means so much to me at this moment, I honestly don’t know. But it does.

Read, and sleep, well, Friend

Zombie Haiku

While I'm waiting to figure out what's going on with my computer, I thought I'd make sure you've heard about the poetry contest taking place at The Bookshelf Muse. I'm not much of a poet and I know next to nothing about zombies, but I'm sure there are a few of you out there who do, and you know who you are. There's a link on my sidebar to take you directly to the blog, if you like. At the very least check out what's been submitted so far. There were a couple I found quite... tasty. I was afraid to ask what the prize for the best poem is, you'll just have to ask yourself.

Oh, and by the way, don't forget today is National Book Lovers Day.

Read Well, Friend

Gratitude to Old Teachers

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then- holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness."

Henry Bly, Gratitude to Old Teachers
- In honor of all those returning back to school this month: students, teachers, administrators and every one who supports education.

Read well, Friend

The Trouble with Bookstores

It started innocently enough. Now that I’m home again I don’t have access to WiFi, and my kids assure me I have the slowest dial-up in the country. They might just be right, so yesterday I spent quite a while in a local WiFi restaurant with my computer. After an hour or so I decided the chair was just too uncomfortable and adjourned to Starbucks, with their lovely stuffed chairs that are better than the ones I have at home. On my way there, my eye was caught by shelves of books in the store next door. Ah, yes, Applegarth's Books, the new used bookstore. I’d never stopped in there, I owed it a visit. To my surprise it was big. It was clean. It was well-lit and well organized. I was in love. The problem, as you may know, with falling in love with a new bookstore is that then you fall in love with the books in them, probably a lot of the books. And that means you'll spend the money you were going to use on a venti iced Chai Latte with extra cinnamon. Also, you now have to find space on a shelf, or a table, or the floor, or someplace to put them. You also have to give up all the other things you wanted to do today, like vacuuming the coils behind your refrigerator. Is it worth it, you ask yourself? Do I even have to answer?

It was bookstore love at first sight. I managed to control myself, however. I showed great restraint. I put back books I really wanted, really needed. Eventually I narrowed it down to eight. I found my first volume right inside the door. A cloth bound hardback with green printing on a cream spine caught my eye immediately. My favorite colors. The Near Woods by Millard C. Davis needed a look. I passionate about books on natural history, especially if they’re about trees and woods. A few peeks inside convinced me it should be mine. Thank you, Murrey David Goldberg, for passing it on to me. It was a steal. Around the corner I found several shelves of books about writing. They yielded Novel Ideas, (Cute title, no?), in which ‘Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process‘. Two of my favorite things to read, essays and books about writing. Definitely a keeper. In the same section I found What’s in a Word?, one of those books about the source of common sayings and names. Opening it randomly I was taken aback to see bassinet in the military section. As a grandmother to be, I had to read on. It seems the term started in the Middle Ages when the French developed a bowl shaped helmet. As it resembled a basin they christened it bassinet. Somehow, passing down from French soldiers to Sir Walter Scott, folks decided the similarly shaped baskets their infants slept in should also be called bassinets. If you don’t find that fascinating, well I just don’t know what to do with you.

The most exciting find of the day was a beautifully preserved, probably never even taken off the shelf, copy of How To Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. A classic first published in 1940, I’ve wanted it for years, but for some reason I never actually bought it. Now I know why. This absolutely perfect copy, published in 1972, has been waiting for me. It’s pristine, feels absolutely right in my hands, and cost me 6 dollars. It doesn’t get any better than this. The next books I picked out are two old favorites -- The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas), and Howard Pile’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Pile's is the version I grew up with, a big green cloth-bound book with occasional color illustrations, all managing to make men in tights look pretty good. Actually, I didn’t pay too much attention to that part; I was much more interested in joining Robin and Friar Tuck and Allen a Dale. We would all live outside in Sherwood Forest, hunting and cooking, singing songs and telling stories. We’d wash our clothes in the river, and play tricks on rich, pompous travelers. What a grand life! I’d been camping in the Rockies, and I knew camping could be dirty and smelly, but this was Sherwood Forest. It would be perfect.

I bought Jude the Obscure because my daughter-in-law told me to. That's not quite like it sounds. I’d just spent 8 weeks there, and we both love reading, writing, and talking about them both. (We both love my son, too, but that’s neither here nor there.) I mentioned at some point that I’d never managed to finish anything by Thomas Hardy because his books seemed soooo depressing. She recommended Jude; she was even pretty sure I’d actually like it, so I’ll give it a whirl. Just for her. I made myself stop shopping then. I had enough books to keep me reading for a while, and I'd spent as much as I could afford to help the store survive. I was done. Then something magical happened to me on the way to the register. My eye was drawn away by a familiar black and orange binding. The boldly lettered title jumped out at me. The Power and the Glory. It had been so long, too long in fact, since I’d thought of the whiskey priest and his struggle with organized religion, God, and most of all, himself. That’s why I ended up walking out of the store with nine books and no regrets. I’ll find space on a shelf, probably by taking some not so worthy books to the store and trading them in. For more books of course. It could be worse. I could collect bassinets. Imagine how much space I'd need then.

Read Well, Friend


( Novel Ideas by Shoup and Denman, What's in a Word? by Garrison, and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.)