This Week's Miscellany (05/19/23)

Clickbait, Dame Maggie Smith, Kids' books about making books, Maycember

Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

Hello from the whirlwind of Maycember!

Are you also in the season of graduation banquets, end-of-the-year-programs, water days, pizza parties, awards ceremonies, school trips, and everything else thrown at large families to ruin our lives as the academic year wraps up? KIDDING. (Kind of. The scheduling panic attacks are real.)

We started out this year with a preschooler, two elementary students, and a middle schooler—we end with a rising kindergartener, elementary student, middle schooler, and high schooler! What a year!

One lovely thing about being back in Tallahassee is that for a city of its size, it has oodles of cultural events. We went to the free Shakespeare in the Park (Antony and Cleopatra) and Swan Lake (very not free—but as a former ballerina I want to support our local company!) all in one weekend. We’re feeling Very Cultured.

Mini Book Reviews

A newsletter feature I pitched recently is kids’ book recommendations and a lot of you good people seemed interested. So I thought I’d start with two wonderful books about books!

Brother Hugo and the Bear by Katy Beebe (illustrated by S.D. Schindler)

This delightful picture book is about a monk who loses his abbey library’s book of St. Augustine’s writings because it’s eaten by a bear. He has to journey to another nearby monastery (the Grande Chartreuse) to borrow their manuscript to copy as his penance—but the bear has developed quite a hankering for the sweet words of St. Augustine and is hot on his trail! It’s great for a quick bedtime read-aloud and the illustrations, based on medieval illuminated manuscripts are quirky and glorious.

Marguerite Makes a Book by Bruce Robertson (illustrated by Kathrn Hewitt)

This lovely book follows the creation of an illuminated prayer book in medieval France. Marguerite’s bookmaker father is ill and may lose out on the commission of a lucrative project for a wealthy patroness. Can young Marguerite use everything she’s learned about crafting books and decorating them from her father to complete the project before Lady Isabelle comes to collect her book of hours? Every page is lovely and intricately illustrated and readers will learn about the complicated artistry of medieval bookmaking and painting.

Have you read either of these gems?

Quote

“Most of my friends who are writers knew by the time they were ten that they would spend their lives writing. When I was ten, I couldn’t decide whether I was going to be a missionary or a movie star. But…I have always thought of myself as a reader. Indeed, I often say that one reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think you are working.”

-Katherine Paterson

Have I ever related more to a quote?!!

Links

This is a great piece about the demise of clickbait.

Judgement Day Has Arrived for the Journalism Business by

Ted Gioia

In retrospect, the problem with this gimmicky strategy is obvious. If you trick people into clicking on garbage, your metrics are impressive for a few months. But eventually people can smell the garbage without even clicking on it.

While clickbait can soar for a time, human beings start to recognize and avoid it. There is no shortcut that will go undetected longterm. The only worthwhile way forward is consistently good writing. People have wised up to cheap writing fueled by advertisers and are interested in supporting publications and writers that they trust. That’s probably why you’re here! (Shameless plug for an upgrade to a paid subscription):

The writings of Brian Doyle remind us of the unique holiness of children and childhood by Lindsay Shlegel for America Mag

Doyle’s humble tears testify to his appreciation of the family he raised with his wife, Mary—especially because for a time that family seemed out of reach. He describes his first prayers as a father as the tears he cried when he and his wife were “told by a doctor, bluntly and directly and inarguably, that we would not be graced by children.” Doyle writes in his essay “Yes” of that in-between time: “For there were many nights before my children came to me on magic wooden boats from seas unknown that I wished desperately for them, that I cried because they had not yet come.”

And forthcoming film, The Miracle Club, had me at “Dame Maggie Smith”

In The Miracle Club, there’s just one tantalizing dream for the women of Ballygar, a village in outer Dublin, to taste freedom and escape the gauntlet of domestic life: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes, that place of miracles that is a magnet for millions of visitors every year. With a little benevolent interference from their local priest, close friends Lily, Eileen and Dolly, who are funny, messy, flawed, and vocal, get their ticket to go on the humorous, blissful, and exhilarating journey of a lifetime.

I’m in!

And in case you missed it, my new book is coming out in just three weeks and is available for pre-order:

Pre-order from my publisher, Pauline Books and Media or from Amazon.

The Year of Jane

We wrapped up Emma and are reading Mansfield Park! Here’s why I think it’s such an excellent novel.

And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I want to offer a huge thank you to M.E. for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.

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Thanks for reading!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity