Mid-Century Modern: Book of the Month Club
The pandemic has most of us looking for something to occupy the extra time on our hands. If you're like me you've already watched Netflix all the way through, or at least the stuff you can stomach. So, I've decided to start working on the many boxes of memorabilia and other possessions left behind by family that has survived the dumpster, yard sale and family member looking for a token of remembrance of those now gone.
One of the categories I have trouble letting go of and likely never will are the books. The exception was my Grandmothers paperbacks that were just too numerous to store. I gave them to an autistic woman that happened along at the annual park yard sale. I guess there won't be one this year. Anyway, her face lit up when she spotted the boxes of Grace Livingston Hill paperbacks and other assorted books of the same genre. She told me how she loved to read and had hundreds of books and that that was all she really ever did. Her caretaker smiled shaking her head in agreement. I told her that they were my Grandmothers and that I thought she would want her to have them because she would love them as much as Grandma had. She asked how much and I told her they would be a gift from Grandma. She teared up and thanked me. Grandma would have approved.
There are also a few of my Mom's books left that she collected by way of the Book of the Month Club, back in the 60s. I have listed them below with abstracts from the internet. The stories all seemed to have aged pretty well and are worth a read these fifty-five plus years later. I think my Mom may have read Valley of the Dolls, but these seem to reveal her more serious taste in literature.
The one book that is missing and I can see it on her headboard bookshelf in my mind's eye is her copy of a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. How do some make it and some not? I mourn the loss.
Here are a few:
Amazon abstract:
"Stuck inside? Join the original queen of the page-turner Mary Stewart, as she leads you on a thrilling journey through a dangerous and deadly Provence . . .
"Stuck inside? Join the original queen of the page-turner Mary Stewart, as she leads you on a thrilling journey through a dangerous and deadly Provence . . .
'Mary Stewart is magic' New York Times
'One of the great British storytellers of the 20th century' Independent
Lucy Waring, a young, out-of-work actress from London, leaps at the chance to visit her sister for a summer on the island paradise of Corfu, and what's more, a famous but reclusive actor is staying in a villa nearby. But Lucy's hopes for rest and romance are shattered when a body washes up on the beach and she finds herself swept up in a chilling chain of events.
I shuddered, and drank my coffee, leaning back in my chair to gaze out across pine tops furry with gold towards the sparkling sea, and surrendering myself to the dreamlike feeling that marks the start of a holiday . . .
'A comfortable chair and a Mary Stewart: total heaven. I'd rather read her than most other authors.' Harriet Evans
'She built the bridge between classic literature and modern popular fiction. She did it first and she did it best.' Herald"
Amazon abstract:
"Those Harper Women is an intimate portrait of the treacherous web weaved by immense and inherited wealth. Three generations of Harper women grapple with the family patriarch and the travails of self-discovery."
"Those Harper Women is an intimate portrait of the treacherous web weaved by immense and inherited wealth. Three generations of Harper women grapple with the family patriarch and the travails of self-discovery."
Amazon abstract:
"Copyright 1965. SYNOPSIS: "Set in New York City. A behind-the-scenes novel of corruption, race riot, police scandal, a corrupt cop, multi-million-dollar urban-renewal program, and the hidden pipeline of power reaching clear to the White House. The action involves the District Attorney's office with its warfare, the shocking murder of a police informer, and a man whose sermon is hate, ending in the metropolitan city room where the intensity of the big city plays out."'
Amazon abstract:
"Fruit of the Poppy is fiction and should be read as such. Yet, there are elements in the story of the traffic in narcotics between the United States and Mexico which lift it above the level of a writer's invention. Little, if anything, has been written about the dedicated men, the agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in the US and their counterparts in Mexico, who engage in a quiet war in an effort to shut off the supply of drugs flowing into this country. They are outnumbered by the syndicates and the individuals who constantly seek and devise new and ingenious methods of smuggling narcotics over the border. Agents in both countries go undercover for years. They create entirely new identities for themselves and walk-in danger along unfamiliar paths. They submerge themselves in a murky half-world in which there is no place for home or family. So complete is their cover that, after a while, it is possible to almost forget who they really are. This is the story of a "silent service" on both sides of the border interwoven with the elements of a novel."
Amazon abstract:
"Naked Came I is a bestselling 1963 historical novel by David Weiss based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin. Naked Came I portrays Rodin as a born artist who was driven to be an artist because his desire and temperament would allow him to be nothing else. It portrays him as friends with other contemporary Parisian artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and other artists of the Second French Empire who either exhibited or were in some way associated with the Salon des Refusés and were generally outside the Paris art establishment of the era, and who had been refused admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. The title is derived, according to the frontispiece, from Cervantes' Don Quixote. (Cervantes, in turn, had taken it from the Book of Job, 1:21.) Due to the success of Weiss' previous novels, the book was, almost simultaneously with its American publication, also published in the United Kingdom and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy. In popular culture, Naked Came I was the title of the sensationalized memoir of Opus the Penguin in the Berke Breathed comic strip, Bloom County."
"Fruit of the Poppy is fiction and should be read as such. Yet, there are elements in the story of the traffic in narcotics between the United States and Mexico which lift it above the level of a writer's invention. Little, if anything, has been written about the dedicated men, the agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in the US and their counterparts in Mexico, who engage in a quiet war in an effort to shut off the supply of drugs flowing into this country. They are outnumbered by the syndicates and the individuals who constantly seek and devise new and ingenious methods of smuggling narcotics over the border. Agents in both countries go undercover for years. They create entirely new identities for themselves and walk-in danger along unfamiliar paths. They submerge themselves in a murky half-world in which there is no place for home or family. So complete is their cover that, after a while, it is possible to almost forget who they really are. This is the story of a "silent service" on both sides of the border interwoven with the elements of a novel."
Amazon abstract:
"Naked Came I is a bestselling 1963 historical novel by David Weiss based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin. Naked Came I portrays Rodin as a born artist who was driven to be an artist because his desire and temperament would allow him to be nothing else. It portrays him as friends with other contemporary Parisian artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and other artists of the Second French Empire who either exhibited or were in some way associated with the Salon des Refusés and were generally outside the Paris art establishment of the era, and who had been refused admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. The title is derived, according to the frontispiece, from Cervantes' Don Quixote. (Cervantes, in turn, had taken it from the Book of Job, 1:21.) Due to the success of Weiss' previous novels, the book was, almost simultaneously with its American publication, also published in the United Kingdom and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy. In popular culture, Naked Came I was the title of the sensationalized memoir of Opus the Penguin in the Berke Breathed comic strip, Bloom County."
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