Bookshelf Traveling - September 19

Time for another round of Bookshelf Traveling in Insane Times which was created by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness and is currently hosted by Katrina at Pining for the West.   The idea is to share one of your neglected bookshelves or perhaps a new pile of books. 

This is a very random shelf with six suspense novels by Helen MacInnes, eight novels of varying genre by Catherine Gaskin, seven historical novels by Valerie Anand and, finally, two by W.E.B. Griffin, hidden behind the Fred Lynn bobblehead.  Old W.E.B. (and his son, now writing the books) has other shelves and deserves his own post another time.

My mother introduced me to Helen MacInnes' books, handing me her hardcover of Above Suspicion (1941) long ago.  MacInnes was inspired by Nazi activities she and her husband observed on their honeymoon in Bavaria.  The book was made into a movie starring Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray.   MacInnes was born in Scotland and met her husband at the University of Glasgow.  Gilbert Highet became a classics professor and taught at Oxford before moving to New York in 1938 to become a professor at Columbia.   He wrote a number of books and is best known for The Classical Tradition (1949) and Poets in a Landscape (1957).  While he was becoming an academic star, Helen became one of the first women to write espionage thrillers and women took a prominent role in the stories, often drawn into a dangerous situation merely by being in the wrong place (the new covers are less damsel-in-distress as you can see below).  In all, she wrote 21 books, most of which were bestsellers and four were made into movies.  I enjoyed all except one where the heroine gets killed on the last page (what was Helen thinking?) but if you can only read one it should be While Still We Live, which remains my favorite WWII book.  It's the kind of book that when you come across an extra copy you grab it and think about who in your life most deserves such a treat.

Listen to Helen here!  It’s an interesting talk she did as The Venetian Affair was published, and you can hear that she retained a little of her Scottish accent even after years in the US. I am guessing it was a speech at Columbia because at the beginning she mentions Mrs. Van Doren, a writer who was married to a famous Columbia English professor, Mark Van Doren, and their son Charles was the infamous winner of the rigged game show.  My grandmother was also a Columbia faculty wife and I wonder if she was invited to this talk.  She was a literary snob but I think would have been willing to hang with her incredibly cool peers.

Maybe I shelved Catherine Gaskin next to MacInnes because she wrote at least one book that was a Cold War thriller, The File on Devlin (do not confuse her with Catherine Gavin who wrote historical fiction; I own two which are good but not great).  But most of Gaskin's books are historical fiction and, while I like them all, my favorite is The Lynmara Legacy, now available as an eBook, a sort-of family saga about a woman determined to avenge insults to her mother.   I once lent my hardcover copy to a coworker who, although I didn’t know it, was plotting to get me fired.  Years later, although I was still very bitter, mutual friends dragged me to her birthday party to bring about a reconciliation.   When I saw my book on her shelf with a post-it on the cover in my handwriting that said, “Return to Constance!”  I indignantly put it in my purse and went home.  I don’t know why it isn’t on the shelf with the others because you surely don’t think I would have been foolish enough to lend it again!   

Valerie Anand is also a gifted writer of historical fiction.  Crown of Roses (1989) is a standalone about Richard III that I will certainly hold onto.  She also wrote two historical series, The Bridges Over Time and a Norman series (this about serfs whose lives are so miserable I could never bring myself to reread them).  To a Native Shore (1984), about a young woman who marries an Indian, and has a hard time adjusting after she moves to India with him, appears to be inspired by her own experience. She is in her 80s now, writing historical Elizabethan mysteries under the name Fiona Buckley.  I am very discriminating about historical mysteries so have not tried these yet.

What do you do when you have hardcovers and paperbacks of an author?  Do you shelve them alphabetically or in series order or by pub date?  I tend to organize by format but am not always consistent - sometimes it depends on the bookcase!

Off the Blog: Like most people I know, I am very saddened by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday.  She taught at Rutgers Law School before I attended but I admired her long before I become a lawyer.   I visited the Supreme Court several times while I was in law school to hear oral argument and once in 2008 for an elegant dinner with the Supreme Court Historical Society.  I met several of the Justices but Justice Ginsburg did not attend the dinner, which was disappointing. Then she was honored at Radcliffe Day in 2015, which I attended with my parents.  She was frail but indomitable, and she had the large tent full of people completely silent, straining for every word and providing several standing ovations.