I’ve been reading the blog Weekly Geeks for a while now. The concept behind it is a thought-provoking, weekly literature blogging meme.

Last week’s post asked readers to share “a podcast [or three] you love, preferably book related, but not necessarily so. Give us the link, of course, and share with us details about that podcast and why you enjoy it so much.”

I have enjoyed podcasts, which are similar to online radio shows available for download, for many years and have listened to a variety of them. Some are done by single people. Others have a group format. Some are actual radio broadcasts, while others record from their living rooms. Their foci range from knitting, food, and books to baseball, old time radio programming, and music.

For those who are interested, here are several of the podcasts I download (and listen to) regularly:

1. The Writer’s Almanac
   You might be familiar with this 5-minute segment if you listen to NPR during the day. Hosted by Garrison Keillor, it offers listeners a few literary “this day in history” highlights and concludes with a poem, often from modern poets. This is a great podcast if you have just a few minutes a day to spare or if you want more poetry in your life.
2. CraftLit
   Hosted by crafter extraordinaire Heather Ordover, CraftLit provides public domain classics read aloud (often as a part of Librivox). Heather, an English professor and former high school English teacher, starts each episode with a bit of crafty talk before moving on to the analysis of the previous week’s reading and a preview of the current episode’s material. We’ve read a variety of works this way so far, ranging from A Tale of Two Cities to Frankenstein to our most recent novel, The Scarlet Letter. Whether I’ve read them before or if they’re new-to-me, I almost always enjoy and learn from listening to these weekly podcasts.
3. Stash and Burn
   This podcast, hosted by San Francisco residents Jenny and Nicole, purportedly exists to help knitters work their way through their overflowing stashes, but instead is really just bimonthly love song to friendship and yarn. I like to listen to certain podcasts at certain times: CraftLit while I’m knitting and The Writer’s Almanac while I’m getting ready for work or on my way to the metro. Stash and Burn is my dishwashing podcast. Nicole and Jenny make excellent company while I’m doing tedious late-night chores, and I greatly appreciate their laughter and camaraderie.

I also enjoy and recommend several other podcasts, including Cast On, Quirky Nomads, Sticks and String, and The News from Lake Wobegon, a segment from Garrison Keillor’s popular A Prairie Home Companion.

What podcasts, if any, do you enjoy listening to?

One of the best things about living in D.C. is the proximity of great bookstores, especially Politics & Prose.

A couple weeks ago, Barbara Kingsolver came to town. Knowing how popular she is, the store arranged for her to do her reading at a local church.

She started off behind the pulpit, but after a little while moved to center stage.

I have enjoyed her work since sophomore year when I took a class on contemporary women’s writing. We read The Bean Trees and I fell in love. More recent books have merely reinforced the sentiment. I especially enjoyed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was one of the best books I read last year.

Her new novel, The Lacuna, focuses on the first half of the 20th century. It sounds great, and I’m eager to start reading it.

After reading for half an hour or so, Barbara took questions from the audience, including interesting ones about whether she felt sad leaving her characters behind when she was done working on a book.

She also signed books.

I managed not to fall down in front of her when it was my turn. But I did stumble all over myself in a fangirlish effort to thank her for her writing. She was gracious, in just that way I knew she would be.

Oh, and she did say she liked my shirt.

I will own that shirt forever.

Do you ever get into jags with your hobbies? Periods where you just spend hours and hours doing the same thing?

I’ve been on a reading kick recently and have been finishing books left and right. I get home from work and head to the bedroom to curl up with my latest novel. It’s not a bad thing (although Rudi might disagree), but it’s just odd.

Sometimes, I feel that way about knitting, too. I can feel a knitting jag off in the wings, waiting its turn. Right now, it’s just manifesting itself in a strong desire to wind yarn for upcoming projects, but I know that one day soon it’s going to elbow its way to the front and demand I pick up the needles and start casting things on.

How about you? Do you have obsessive relationships with your hobbies, too?

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (©, Walt Disney Productions)

From the fly leaf: “From Screen to Book

“Two modern classics for children are The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton. Recently Walt Disney Productions purchased these two books and set about making them into a single motion picture.

“Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi wrote the screenplay for Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman composed the music and wrote the lyrics. (These are the same four men who wrote the screenplay and songs for Mary Poppins.) The screen story is built around that fabulous apprentice witch Eglantine Price (played in the film by Angela Lansbury), but all the adventures are new. This book is based entirely on the screenplay.”

My take: When I last visited Karen, she took me to a local used bookstore that was going out of business and selling off their wares for $5 a bag. Clearly when you have that kind of incentive, you pick up some odd choices. (I once, for instance, picked up during Middletown’s buck a bag sale a book based on The Partridge Family.) This wasn’t particularly odd, but I didn’t peruse it as carefully as I might have otherwise and merely added it to the pile.

So I didn’t notice the above caveat, which now means I will have to seek out Norton’s source material and to see how certain details were Disnified. I have some things that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for, but it could be that Norton (who also wrote The Borrowers series) included them in the original novels.

That said, this was a cute enough story about three orphans evacuated to the countryside from London during World War II. Carrie, Charlie, and Paul are foisted upon a local single woman living alone in a large house when she comes into town to collect her mail.

Unable to refuse what she is informed is her patriotic duty, Eglantine Price takes the children home and feeds them all sorts of healthy and natural foods that would probably make a modern vegetarian proud. (I assume cabbage buds are Brussels sprouts. She also feeds them rose hips, glyssop seed, elm bark, whortle yeast, stewed nettles, squill tea, and mangel-wurzel jam (a type of beet which the children assure this modern American reader is generally considered cattle food).

Unexcited to discover they’ve been placed with someone so ill-fitting as a surrogate parent, the children plan to escape back to London. That is until they witness Eglantine crash landing her broom in the back yard. Realizing she might not want this episode broadcast to the neighbors, Charlie decides they are going to stick around to blackmail her instead.

Hoping to get cash, the children instead end up with a magic bedknob that will take them anywhere they like. Accompanied by Eglantine, their journey takes them to London to find her witchcraft correspondence course teacher. When he turns out to be a second-rate con man, where will she turn to find the elusive spell that will finally enable her to contribute substantively to the war effort? Will the children stay in London or will the lure of magical travel lure them back to the countryside? And will Eglantine turn Hitler into a white rabbit or something worse?

The story isn’t particularly well written and, as I noted above, there were some aspects that felt a little too Disney-like to ignore. But it was a quick read, provided you with a definite feel for a specific time in history, and fueled my curiosity to seek out the original Norton novels. I can think of a worse way to spend an evening.

Pages: 212

My dentist lives and works on the other side of town in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. After my appointments, I like to stop in the shops I don’t visit terribly often. Sometimes it’s Eastern Market, but other times, like this week, it’s Riverby Books.

Riverby might be the nicest bookstore in town these days. I mean, sure, Capitol Hill Books is a book lover’s dream with its piles of books everywhere, including the tiny bathroom, and Second Story and Idle Times are both perfectly lovely shops. But when you walk into Riverby, you feel like people are glad you’ve come in and are excited you want to buy these books, some of which they’ve loved, too.

First, they lure you to their gate with the colorful balloons.

Then they invite you to walk into the yard with their tables of $1 charity books.

And, then, once you’re inside, snap! You’re theirs. You are going to give them your money because they have books you want, books you need. Even if you’ve never heard of the titles, you’ll find yourself with an armful of books after just a few minutes waving around a pile of money, pleading with someone to take it so you can stop finding more.

Ahem….

Not that that happened to me this week. No, not at all…

Karen and Grey Kitten have suggested that I ought to just start writing up my book reviews. I figure if I start with the most recent and work my way backwards, I at least have a shot at offering insights into what I’ve just read, rather than not remembering details of any of this year’s books…

Sabriel, by Garth Nix

From the jacket: “Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him. She soon finds companions in Mogget, a cat whose aloof manner barely conceals its malevolent spirit, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage long imprisoned by magic, now free in body but still trapped by painful memories. As the three travel deep into the Old Kingdom, threats mount on all sides. And every step brings them closer to a battle that will pit them against the true forces of life and death — and bring Sabriel face-to-face with her own destiny.”

My take: Dark fantasy is generally not a realm of fiction I choose to pursue. But I was in need of something to read at work one lunch hour, and Sabriel was sitting on the discard cart at the office. It looked promising, but I wasn’t wowed by the prologue. Later, though, I saw it mentioned as a young adult fantasy novel with a particularly strong female character and decided to give it another shot. I’m glad I did.

Sabriel is the teenage daughter of the Abhorsen, the necromancer in charge of protecting the Old Kingdom from the Dead (who sometimes refuse to stay dead). Sent to school in Ancelstierre (a land much like an early 20th-century England) on the other side of the border from the Old Kingdom), she doesn’t see much of her father. When he does visit her, though, he shares with her his knowledge of Charter Magic, the strong force which keeps the dead at bay, and of walking in Death. As she ages, her father increases his visits but appears to her mostly in a less corporeal way.

Until one night, when he fails to appear when expected. Instead, a golem materializes in the school, bearing her father’s sword and the bells of Death to her. Realizing that the Abhorsen would never part willingly with those items, she sets out to the Old Kingdom to rescue her father from whatever has trapped him somewhere between Life and Death.

Pursued by the Dead, their zombie-like minions, and their slaves, she arrives at the family homestead only to find that the supernatural servants there, including Mogget, a cat who isn’t really a cat, believe her father dead and greet her as the new Abhorsen. Mogget reminds her that her sworn familial duty is to protect the kingdom and to vanquish the Dead, not to mount rescue missions. With these two obligations vying for her loyalty and with the Dead dismantling the kingdom, Sabriel must figure out how to save the world — and her father — before it’s too late.

Carl is once again hosting his annual Halloween-themed read-along, the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge IV. Sabriel qualifies under the dark fantasy category and puts me halfway toward my Peril the Second quest.

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