Do I Look Ten Years Old?

Lately I've been revisiting a favorite author from my childhood - Enid Blyton.  This British author wrote hundreds and hundreds of books mostly in the 1930s-60s featuring plucky kids having adventures and solving mysteries and eating twenty sandwiches at a time with "lashings of ginger beer."

They're not well written.  The children are fairly interchangeable, the descriptions are bland, the dialogue is simplistic, and the plots are, as one might imagine with hundreds of titles, a little bit repetitive.  One of her biggest series, with 21 titles, featured "the Famous Five" -- two brothers and sister, their cousin Georgina who insists on being called George because she'd much rather be a boy, and her faithful dog Timmy who often saves the day.  The first thing the Famous Five do is ditch their parents and go off camping or hiking or biking or caravanning or staying on an island all by themselves and so forth, where they inevitably run across mysterious people engaged in suspicious acts who turn out to be smugglers or kidnappers or treasure hunters up to no good and after some mildly hair-raising escapades which often involve exploring tunnels or caves or dungeons, everything comes out right in the end.

It's totally lightweight, mindless entertainment which is good for bedtime put-yourself-to-sleep reading.  As a friend recently pointed out, sometimes you just need brainless reading to counteract the intensity of the world.  Enid Blyton works quite well for that.

She also wrote a shorter series, very similar, with titles like The Castle of Adventure, The Sea of Adventure, The Island of Adventure and so on.  When I ran out of the Famous Five books, I went down to my local independent bookstore and found a copy of The Valley of Adventure on the shelves.  You can clearly tell it's a children's book from the cover art, and when I took it to the register, the clerk looked at it closely and said, "So, are you enjoying these?"

I replied that they were pretty mindless and very old-fashioned but yes, I kind of liked reading them late at night -- and it wasn't until I got back to my car that it occurred to me to wonder why the clerk assumed that I was buying it for myself and not for a child.  Is it because children's books are popular with adults these days, or is it just something childlike in my general appearance?  Probably both. 

In any case, in The Valley of Adventure, four kids and a talkative parrot get on board the wrong plane and wind up in a mysterious valley where suspicious men are up to no good.  I'm sure they will save the day. 

Art Time

Here's my latest watercolor effort -- this is a juvenile Common Yellowthroat, spotted a week or so ago at my favorite birding place, the Montlake Fill (AKA the Union Bay Natural Area) in Seattle.

B Good

I've posted about this before on my other journal, but hey, repetition is good when you can't think of anything to write about, right?

So I repeat myself here:  most of the things I love begin with the letter "B".  Thus the subject line.  B is indeed good. 

Baseball
Beaches
Birds
Bittersweet Chocolate
Black-and-tan wiener dogs (okay, bit of a stretch...)
Boats
Books
Brownish-red wiener dogs (likewise)

"Art" is a harder sell but since I paint, one could always go with "Brushwork".  That's a looooooong stretch.  Still.  Works for me!

Baseball has been tough this year.  On Sunday, I'll be at

to watch the hapless Mariners take on the Red Sox.  All I can say is, it's a good thing that I also like the Red Sox.

Thankfully, the rest of the B's are pretty reliable for making me happy. 

Why Not A Whydah?

Last week someone spied a Pin-tailed Whydah at my local birdwatching patch, the Montlake Fill.  Since this bird is native to Africa and isn't inclined to take up random 9,000 mile migrations, it's assumed to be an escaped cage bird.  I figured it would be long gone by the weekend but someone else not only spotted it but got a photo on Sunday. 

I was out there both Saturday and Sunday wandering round and round thinking positive thoughts like, "Why not a Whydah?"  Couldn't I see it, too?  I even went back on Monday after work, and again Tuesday morning before work.  Alas, my intuitive connection to nature and birds which often produces amazing sights failed to connect to any little black-and-white birds with bright orange bills and 8-inch-long tail feathers.  Sigh.  Oh, well.  It wouldn't have really "counted" on my Life List anyway -- at least, it seems to be considered ill-mannered to include any non-wild birds who make wild dashes for freedom many miles from their true home.

Oh, and last night I dreamt that I saw the Whydah, but that doesn't really count, either.

So, no Whydah for me...but I did enjoy getting outside as often as possible in lovely, sunny, 70s weather.  As compensation, I got to see a large black-and-white bird on Sunday, a gorgeous Osprey making sweeps over the lake.  That was swell.

And on Monday I saw this large brown-and-white bird just hanging about:

I wondered if perhaps the Whydah had been turned into an eagle's light snack, as it would likely not be savvy to the ways of our predators.  These things happen.

But I do hope it found a happier fate!

Books Read: July 2011

Fiction

The Alpine Fury (Mary Daheim)

The Alpine Gamble (Mary Daheim)

The Alpine Hero (Mary Daheim)

Books Can Be Deceiving (Jenn McKinlay)

Five Get Into a Fix (Enid Blyton)

Five Go Down to the Sea (Enid Blyton)

Five Go to Billycock Hill (Enid Blyton)

Five Go to Mystery Moor (Enid Blyton)

Five Have a Wonderful Time (Enid Blyton)

Five Have Plenty of Fun (Enid Blyton)

Five on a Hike Together (Enid Blyton)

Five on a Secret Trail (Enid Blyton)

Jane’s Adventures In and Out of the Book (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy)

The Real Macaw (Donna Andrews)

Nonfiction

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Richard Holmes)

Bird Egg Feather Nest (Maryjo Koch)

Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (Bill Bryson)

The Painted Garden (Mary Woodin)

True Nature: An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude (Barbara Bash)

Wonders of the Past, vol. 1 (J.A. Hammerton)

Fiction:  still making my way through the classic British children’s series by Enid Blyton featuring “the Famous Five” (four kids and a dog) which are silly but make for good late-night right-before-falling-asleep reading.

The rest of the fiction is all mysteries all the time except for “Jane’s Adventures…”, a middle-grade book about a girl who visits wild and wacky places by literally jumping through the pictures in a book – one might think “Jasper Fforde” except that it was written in 1969.

Nonfiction:  I highly recommend “The Age of Wonder” for a terrific look at scientific development as told through extremely entertaining biographies of such fascinating people as Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, William and Caroline Herschel et al. 

Bill Bryson, of course, is always informative while being engaging, and “Made In America”, while certainly not as amusing as his travel journals, is still a fun book.

“Wonders of the Past” – part of a four-volume set first published in 1923 (my copy is from 1933) which covers ancient ruins from around the world in short essays by various experts, accompanied by loads of cool old photographs.  These books originally came out one year after Howard Carter found King Tut’s tomb, so there is quite a bit of Egyptian archaeology, but the work is wide-ranging – Petra, Greece, Rome and its colonies, Mayans, Angkor Wat, Buddhist shrines, Persian and Assyrian and Babylonian ruins – it’s all good stuff.

The rest of the nonfiction is comprised of art/nature journals.

Currently reading: 

“The Lost Woods” by naturalist Edwin Way Teale

“The Alpine Icon” by Mary Daheim

“Yet Another Five Have the Same Adventure Over Again Book” by Enid Blyton

“Wonders of the Past”, volume 2