Staff Picks from the Green Table: Carla
Bookseller Carla Bayha on early touchstones in a life of reading
Each month, a different Literati Bookstore staff member curates a table of favorite reads and recommendations. For April, Carla Bayha chose titles that “represent some of the random but fondly remembered paths to books that I first took when I was younger.” Check out her table note, and all of her picks, below!
Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum/illustrated, by John R. Neill
My Mother had half a dozen “Oz” books from her girlhood. “Ozma” — the third Oz book- is my favorite. (My sister, however, swears by “The Shaggy Man”.) I was fascinated by Princess Langwidere, who had a cabinet of interchangeable heads from which to pick depending upon her mood. Princess Ozma herself wore a striking Art nouveau headdress, like a siren of the “silent” screen. Dorothy Gale and Princess Ozma are captured by the evil (g)Nome King, who turns his enemies into colorful table ornaments. A sassy talking hen comes to their rescue. “Oz” books were regularly banned from schools, so I probably wouldn’t have been able to check them out if there was a school library.
An Enemy of the People, by Henrik Ibsen
Our progressive church used to bring in traveling theater troupes that performed in the sanctuary. I saw this Ibsen play when I was young enough to be impressed, and old enough to sort of understand it. It remains for me the play that got me interested in reading plays and seeing them performed. Its theme pitting public health against a family’s private gain and political corruption, seems particularly relevant today. (Warning: there is a small whiff of eugenics somewhere in it — bad science never goes away.)
Romance Author Georgette Heyer
I loved visiting my Aunt and Uncle in Arlington, VA. My Aunt, who read the “Washington Post” cover to cover every morning, who marched for civil rights and against the Viet Nam war, and later became a social sciences librarian, loved author Georgette Heyer. Her kids tried to embarrass her for having a bookcase filled with these Regency romances. In fact Heyer was the founder of the subgenre. Heyer was my first teenage binge read.I spent a couple days in bed in August reading half a dozen of these. First, it was really hot in the D.C. area in August. Second, never apologize for your reading choices.
Signs and Symbols in Christian Art by, George Ferguson
We moved to Ann Arbor at the start of my 11th grade. I had just finished a three week European study trip with my previous high school, and was still in my Renaissance art phase. (I am not religious, but I have always loved art museums, maybe partly because D.C. museums had air-conditioning.) One of my few memories from a dismal school year, was being dropped off by my Dad early every morning on his way to work, and heading to the guidance counselor area to lie down and read, because they had a really comfortable couch outside their (usually closed) offices. My history teacher walked by one morning and saw me reading this. I still remember his snicker. I still use the book. I still prefer to read lying down on a couch.
Virginia Woolf: A Biography, by Quentin Bell
Bell’s was for me a revelatory book, and one of the first “adult” biographies that I read. Ann Arbor’s Borders Book Shop and Centicore Bookstore were the beneficiaries, as my Mother and I bought and shared and both read Woolf’s novels and essays, Lytton Strachey’s books, volumes of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography (still a favorite), and more.
The Belton Estate, by Anthony Trollope
Virginia Woolf called “The Belton Estate” her favorite Anthony Trollope novel, and it also became mine. As much as I love several of Trollope’s “Palliser Novels”, this is the standalone novel of his to which I return. Clara Amedroz, like many great 19th century heroines, choses the wrong man, and when that doesn’t work out, she thinks the game is over. Readers suspect otherwise.
Detective Novelist Rex Stout
I read most of Stout’s detective novels (my second mystery binge after Doyle) in a very short summer forty some years ago, in between my jobs of selling popcorn at the Michigan Theater, and folding towels and sheets in the hotel laundry of the former Campus Inn. Portly Sherlockian Nero Wolfe lived in a brownstone with a rooftop green house of orchids, and a personal chef who consulted with Wolfe everyday on his menu choices. Wolfe’s wise-cracking Watson Archie Goodwin kept it real. At that time I lived in an almost windowless Ann Arbor basement apartment opposite the loudest dorm.
French Cooking in Ten Minutes, by Edouard de Pomiane
The author advises that when you come home to cook, the first thing you should do is boil a pot of water, because you can always use it for something! This book has always made me smile. The antithesis of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of..”, I love the size, I love the limited list of ingredients, I love that it first came out in 1930 and that de Pomiane is really Polish. It’s one of the first cookbooks that I bought for myself.
The Medical Detectives, by Berton Roueche
When we visited my Grandmother in Ames, there was a competition between my sister and me to get to stay in my Uncle’s childhood bedroom. It had a whole wall of built in bookcases. My youngest Uncle, my Mother, and her father, all had a great love of mysteries — both real and fictional. This book, a gift from my Uncle, gave me a lifelong skepticism of all medical pronouncements, whether establishment or alternative. And I always suspect mass hysteria first whenever I hear about schoolchildren all getting sick at the same time. This book was said to be one of the inspirations for the TV show “House”.
The Plague and I, by Betty MacDonald
I read MacDonald’s “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle” books to my son and failed to make the connection that this was the same MacDonald who penned “The Egg and I”, a beloved comic memoir about life as a chicken farmer. (I have never seen the Ma and Pa Kettle movies which were loosely based on “Egg” and sound awful.) I stumbled on “The Plague and I” in a used bookstore. MacDonald manages to make her stay at a sanitorium for tuberculous patients, both moving and funny.
