Melody's Blog

In an earlier blog post, I distinguished between my "official" editing and the editing I do out of love for my family and I've been incredibly busy (for me) with official editing. The third Paul Bechtold Library open access monograph was just published and you can read it—for free as an open access book or purchase a print on demand copy on Amazon for $14.99. The title is  Reconciling Cultures and Generations: Reflections on Today's Church by Korean American Catholics , edited by Simon Kim and Francis Daeshin Kim, copyedited (maybe really a bit more than copyedited!) by me. I'm incredibly proud of how terrific this book has turned out to be, especially with such a lovely cover created by Francis Daeshin Kim with photos from Kevin Considine who I know a bit! I've started on the next bit of editing, a collection of 14 or so essays on Contextual Theology by faculty from the theology school at Santa Clara University. They are basically riffing off a book...

I just finished one the best books I’ve read so far this year, Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World, my 1975 entry in A Century of Books . Over the years my children read quite a bit of Roald Dahl and I read some along with them but I had never read this one. What a larky story! Danny and his father live in a vardo, and his dad decides to go back to poaching which was a generally accepted way of life among the people, as a sport, not so much to put food on the table (although it surely evolved from that). I haven’t discussed children’s books yet on this blog, so let me just say my daughter and I have a mutual collection of about 2000 juvenile and young adult books. My description of this collection would be that they are mostly or what I would consider classic and not much contemporary fiction. My daughter is 28 now and while she still does read some children’s works, certainly not at the rate she did as a voracious reader in elementary school. She was, like me as a you...

The second Persephone book I read this year is The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler. It felt like going from one extreme to the other. (I’m trying to get three reviews done this week for the Persephone Readathon .) The other two are ones I had planned to read for A Century of Books . I already reviewed The Hopkins Manuscript , which was really too bleak to enjoy (I don’t think enjoyment is ALWAYS the point of reading, however), and now I have to say I didn’t particularly love The Young Pretenders either. These are the only two Persephone books out of about thirty (no, I disliked Heat Lightning by Helen Hull —do not have any recollection of why that was) that I cannot give my highest recommendation. Anyway, this certainly wouldn’t be one of my favorite Persephone books, though I didn’t dislike it. But it’s really hard when it’s up against so many other great books on their list. The Young Pretenders is a book about two children who are left in England while their parent...

Update on Persephone Readathon! I've kept up somewhat with Jessie's Daily Challenges . I posted my photos of my Persephone books, most still having their own Persephone endpage illustration bookmark. I posted a few shoutouts--writers who Persephone readers might enjoy: Angela Thirkell, Richmal Crompton, and Margery Sharp. I wrote a six word summary of the Persephone book I am currently reading (well, I'm not since I exhausted my current stash), but I posted about The Hopkins Manuscript , which I also reviewed on this blog, "interminably bleak, not dull, cataclysm narrative." And on Jessie's blog I posted a favorite quote from a Persephone book. This one is from The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. I think I may need to find some more Holtby to read for A Century of Books , though she did not write very many; she died tragically young. Here is the lovely quote from The Crowded Street :   Fiercely she fought this sense of inexorable doom for the salvation...

Today I'm joining Jessie's 11-day Persephone Readathon ! I heard of this by way of  Claire at The Captive Reader . I'm a day behind, but I might mention that I do not even remember how I heard of Persephone; it has been too long. I already have three Persephone books lined up to review for A Century of Books so it made sense. Unfortunately, I have no more Persephones on my nightstand waiting to be read. So today is celebrating by sharing photos of one's own Persephone Library. My photos are not beautiful like Claire's, but they suffice. The first one show them with the lovely bookmarks that are of the same design as the endpages. I thought I had all of mine, but a few a missing. That's a bummer! This second photo is just them lined up mostly in order by the ones I've had the longest to the most recently acquired.I have a ton more marked in my Persephone catalog that go on my wishlist!

This is the first of two horse books I have already read this year. I am not particularly a fan of horse books, nor was I as a girl. I think I read more about girls who were into pony books than actual pony books! However, I like a good story and some horse books provide a rollicking story. I had read the first of this series, Old Sam, Dakota Trotter, several years ago and liked the characters. Stories of young people living in other time periods and cultures have a way of transporting me to a different life. Bethlehem Books , the publisher, is a publishing company that started many years ago with reprints of classic children’s and YA books that had gone out of print, most of them historical fiction. This was before the days of ebooks and my daughter and I share many print copies of their earlier books. Now they are making most of their books available as ebooks for $4.95, a price I can get behind! I go to their website periodically to see if they have anything new and t...