one day violaine was reading her favorite author (edgar allan poe, of course) in her usual hangout deep in the woods when a handsome transient appeared on the path and asked her if she know where to find adventure and maybe some coffee and a piece of pie.  “my friend and i,” he said, gesturing to hedgie the hedgehog was was standing next to him still glowing from the excitement of leaving his native milkland, “have just, er, hopped off a train a mile or so from here.  we were in danger of being discovered as stowaways and thought it’d be better to avoid trouble.”

still stunned by their appearance in her secret reading spot, violaine only managed to say, “if you’re looking for something fun or whatever, i heard there’s a circus five miles or so from here.  just follow that path through the forest and you will find your way.”

and so tom and hedgie follow the path and find a small village where they encounter alice who is on her way to bring some “beautiful soup” to her mad lover (some know him as the mad hatter, but he’s not really all that mad).  she tells tom that he is indeed going in the right direction.  “keep following this road and about 2.5 miles west of here you will find your way.”

and precisely 2.5 miles west of alice’s front doorstep, tom and hedgie find huxter’s amazing traveling carnival.  they meet hazel and olive (conjoined twins, stars of the show, and both “dazzling dancers”) and boris the bear, who works as the musical accompaniment to hazel and olive’s act.  boris has recently found himself in need of a banjo player.

luckily for boris, tom has brought his banjo along; so perhaps the vagabond and his hedgehog sidekick have found a home at last…

the end (for now).

***some details and all dolls from the imagination of emily winfield martin and her book the black apple’s paper doll primer.  story from the minds of kaycie hall and zita white.  scenes conglomerated by zita white.

by Zita

Before the great recession, around 2005, I was recently divorced and working on figuring out my retirement plans. I was meeting with my bank pals, Stan and John. During the process I was asked “How far out do you want to plan?” My answer was “Until I’m a hundred years old. I’m going to try to live to a hundred.” Stan, who is around forty, replied that an older guy in his sixties had suggested Chris Crowley’s Younger Next Year.

Being 55 and struggling with severe lifestyle adjustment, I absorbed Younger Next Year. This book provides a fine and practical study about conscious aging, as well as tips for creating a fun and self-aware lifestyle. Taking charge of your body leads you to take charge of your life. You choose your state of health.

Author Chris Crowley pulls no punches; you have to connect to yourself and commit to doing what you need to do to take care of your health. Chris’s point is that we have to learn to take care of ourselves, and exercise is the only way to engage your brain and physical body. If you do it you will get younger. Through work and routine, we can resist old age.

Chris states that we need to exercise six days a week (with aerobic exercise at least four days) for the rest of our lives. There are no negotiations on this until you die. Make being healthy your new job. Have a schedule and exercise until you sweat. This creates circulation, which more than any other single thing is the key to health. After fifty, exercise is not an option; you have to exercise or you just get old. By exercising and paying attention to what you eat and drink (alcohol is my guilty pleasure) you slow up the slippery slope to an unhealthy death.

Separate chapters by Chris and Henry (his doctor) help us understand the meanings of these truths. Becoming aware of our health is the first stage of having more physical happiness. Our awareness that we are working to control our health fate is important. We are taking charge and doing our part to decrease the needs of entitlement health demands, which our country can’t seem to afford or be realistic about.

Trust me, this is a good book. Reflecting back to Stan’s suggestion–I thank him, too. Reading Chris’s book made me a happier and healthier sixty-year-old guy. Forty years to go until my one hundred! I look forward to Chris’s update, which I hope he will write as he turns 80.

Crowley and Lodge have also written Younger Next Year for Women.

See Chris Crowley’s newest book Thinner This Year: A Diet and Exercise Program for Living Strong, Fit, and Sexy written with nutritionist Dr. Jan Sacheck.

Lately I’ve found myself drawn to contemporary novels of the gothic nature, so my plan for this blog is to share some of those with you.  In my opinion there’s just something wonderful about curling up in bed at night, reading by a single lamplight (or a candle if you really want to go that extra mile for ambiance), and getting goosebumps from a suspenseful story.

Here are a few that, to my delight, have been dangerously close to giving me eerie dreams:

1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.”

And so I did. I haven’t read this book since I was in eighth grade (I can tell because of the scribbles and underlined words in my old copy), and re-reading it at 22 years old I found that I still loved it.  It follows the story of the second Mrs. de Winter, a young woman who, after a very short courtship, marries the charming Maxim de Winter of the grand Cornish estate Manderly.  Sounds too good to be true, and so it is.  Mrs. de Winter finds that Manderly is haunted by her predecessor Rebecca, Maxim’s beautiful first wife.  Creepiest of all is Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, who keeps the house running exactly as Rebecca had when she was alive.  Danvers even keeps Rebecca’s rooms aired and her favorite pajamas laid out for her each night.  Things are not, however, always as they seem, and this book certainly keeps you in suspense about what’s really going on at Manderly.

Fun fact: The 1940 film adaptation of this novel was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  I certainly recommend that you watch it after reading the book.

2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

I’ve mentioned this book on the Lemuria blog before (see that mention here), but I couldn’t leave it off this list. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a twisted, creepy little tale about Merricat and Constance, two sisters living alone in their family’s dilapidated mansion. I don’t want to give away much but let’s just say that the rest of the family died from arsenic poisoning and the people of the nearby village hate Merricat and Constance. Things get strange, and it’s hard to say who is more frightening…Merricat and Constance or the village people.

3. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I’ve wanted to read this book for quite some time, and I’m happy that it finally found its way to my bookshelf and then my bedside table. The story was much darker, and well, scarier, than I’d expected. I actually thought it might give me a few nightmares (but I think stayed up too late reading to have or remember any dreams).  Margaret Lea, our narrator, is a lover of the classics, so it’s quite a surprise to her when she gets a letter from contemporary writing sensation Vida Winter.  The letter is a summons to the author’s home, an invitation to write Miss Winter’s biography. It should be noted that Vida Winter is famous for not only her many novels and short stories, but also for her habit of lying to all journalists who venture to ask her about her personal life. The story she tells Margaret about her childhood at a place called Angelfield is chilling and the reader almost hopes that she’s spinning yet another lie.

The Thirteenth Tale is full of  literary references and tie-ins to Victorian gothic classics like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Turn of the Screw. Setterfield does a great job of making these classic tales foreshadow and reflect on bits of Vida Winter’s story.

So there you have it, the books that have been haunting my bedside table as of late.  If anyone has anything spooky to recommend, I’d be happy to hear about it.  -Kaycie

A few months ago our Penguin rep handed me a book that I ended up devouring over the next weekend: 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson. I have been waiting and waiting on the pub date, which is almost here! Attention literary readers, especially those who loved The Invisible Bridge and The Glass Room, for you all are in for another real treat!

Set in Poland during WWII and then after the war in an English shipping village, 22 Britannia Road cries out for recognition of the devastating and long lasting effects upon a war torn country and its inhabitants, especially those women and children who were left behind as their young husbands patriotically fled to be war heroes.

Rather than suffering another deplorable personal episode with a German soldier, beautiful Silvana grabs her young son and flees to the Polish countryside where they learn to live as peasants and find their food and shelter in the forests. As the narrator develops the twists and turns of the years in which they live in the wild, the reader wonders if they will actually get out alive. Of course, they do,or the story would have ended, but Silvana and her, almost feral, young son have been altered permanently, especially emotionally and psychologically.

Jump forward to the end of the war when Silvana and seven year old Aurek arrive in England, met at the train station by her husband, Janusz, who did remarkably survive the war, and has been living at 22 Britannia Road for some time hoping to get his wife and son back from Poland.

Building upon a long ago memory of  a special love before the war, the small family tries to reattach the emotional bonds, often failing miserably. When a third party enters the mix, sparks fly, but the “fire” comes when the truth about the young son emerges. The deep kept secret has all along been known by the reader, but watching how it plays out with the husband makes this novel all the more enticing and charismatic.

A debut novel, 22 Britannia Road will make waves, I predict. Authored by a young English woman born in Burnham-on-Sea,  the fast moving novel captures the emotions and personalities of each character beautifully. Amanda Hodgkinson, who currently lives with her husband and daughters in a farmhouse in southern France, will be receiving awards, I’m sure, for this splendid novel. She received her MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.

22 Britannia Road goes on sale Thursday, April 18th.  -Nan

My plan for this post was to cover as many of the new baseball books as possible, as I’ve done the last few Aprils. But this year, as I was reading and preparing, I realized that one book stood out and deserved to be discussed in greater detail. So the revised plan is cover that book here, and then in a week or two, I’ll write a seperate post covering the other new baseball books.

The Extra 2% by Jonah Keri

An over-zealous blurb or comparison is a dangerous thing. I’d read a lot of advance praise about Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%, but when it arrived with not one but two Moneyball mentions on the back cover, I was worried. Michael Lewis’s book was so influential and so eclipsed the boundaries of the baseball book and business book genres that any comparison seems risky at best. On the other hand, it’s probably inevitable that any new baseball/business books will garner Moneyball comparisons, so at this point it’s probably best to just ignore them and evaluate the book on its own merits (if you’re interested, you can read my blog on Moneyball here).

The Extra 2% stands up just fine on its own, so its a bit of shame that, on the surface, it follows the Moneyball formula so closely – it is, after all, the story of how a small-market baseball franchise has challenged the status quo and competed with big market teams by applying unconventional strategies and creative solutions. The similarities really end there, however. Moneyball really centered around Billy Beane and his approach to player evaluation, and the rise of statistical analysis instead of traditional scouting. The Extra 2% is much broader – Keri covers the history of the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays, the new ownership, the general manager, the players – really, every aspect of the organization. He looks at both the on-field turnaround as well as the business decisions by the new owners to build a fan base in Tampa/St. Petersburg. All these little decisions, the cumulative advantage built on doing just a bit more in every part of the business and the game – that’s the extra 2%.

More importantly, though, Keri is careful to distinguish between the current success of the Rays and the possibility of future continued success – when unconventional strategies work, they remain unconventional for only so long, and pretty soon the rest of the league (or most of it, anyway) has caught up. The Rays will have to be one step ahead of the Red Sox and Yankees off the field just to keep pace with them on the field. The MLB revenue-sharing policies help small-market teams to some degree, but unfortunately they also disincentivize growth and competitive effort on the part of small-market teams. How (and if) the Rays will continue to compete with the big market teams remains to be seen.

I also appreciated the balanced examination of the decisions made by the previous management compared to the current management of the (Devil) Rays. Not every decision made by the previous group was terrible – some of the players acquired and developed during that period made major contributions to the AL East-title winning Rays teams. Nor has the new ownership batted 1.000 on their strategies. But the difference isn’t simply in degrees of success – it’s the difference between a management group that vacillated between conflicting goals, and a management group that is committed to a plan, committed to follow the steps to rebuilding the franchise (and taking their lumps in the meantime).

If there’s a flaw in The Extra 2%, it’s that it lacks a central character that ties the story together. With the possible exception of manager Joe Maddon, none of the figures in the book are particularly intriguing or charismatic – they seem like guys you might want managing your retirement fund, but not someone you’d invite to your barbecue. It’s hard to blame the writer for this, however – people are who they are, and the story of the Rays’ success really is the story of a team, not a single charismatic figure.

In the end, The Extra 2% rightly deserves its own place in the library of baseball books, and it is my favorite new baseball book this year. I’ll cover some of the other new baseball books in a week or two — there are some excellent runner-ups this year.