First, the basics: wallet, lip gloss and lipstick, reading glasses, key fob with a little Minnetonka moccasin.
Now, the walking pharmacy: Two kinds of Aleve, two kinds of Claritin, Tums I forgot I had, Kleenex, dental floss picks, hand lotion, and a loose lipstick that is probably twenty years old, but I can’t bring myself to throw away. The Claritin is generally for my kids, not me.
Finally … air fresheners from the oil change place, Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment, tabs for when I simply must flag a passage in a book, business cards in case I need to give one out, and, oh, look! A pair of earrings that needs to go back to my jewelry box.
No, I don’t carry a brush. I have curly hair. One does not brush curly hair; the results are unfortunate.
I occasionally carry a comb in case one of my sons needs it, but they are getting older and starting to comb their own hair before they leave the house.
Other things that might, from time to time, get thrown on top of these: a hand-knitted hat or bonnet, a hair band, clip, or pin that I have taken off, a book that I want to have with me. And of course, the phone.
(Is the above really the latest Sunshine Blogger Award logo? Looks kinda messy.)
So, Bookstooge sort-of-nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Thank you, Bookstooge! I am so flattered. I think his exact words were, “If you’re reading this, consider yourself nominated, because it means you have a pulse.”
Rules For The Sunshine Blogger Award:
Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.
Answer your nominators’ questions.
Nominate up to 11 bloggers.
Ask your nominees 11 questions.
Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.
Questions from Bookstooge:
Why Would Anyone Consider Cereal to be Soup?
It’s because they are trying to categorize things according to algorithmic rules/decision trees instead of the way the human mind normally works, which is by constructing a schema for the thing in question and then eyeballing it.
With schemas, if the thing mostly resembles the schema, it is considered an instance of that thing, even if it misses checking some important boxes. And if it checks all the boxes but manifestly does NOT resemble the schema at all, then it’s not an instance of that thing.
Cereal is in the latter category. It’s an ungodly modern creation of Mr. Kellogg, who believed that eating meat was morally wrong as well as unhealthy, and sought to banish it from the breakfast table. And I say this as someone who very much likes breakfast cereal, particularly as an evening snack, even though I know it has wreaked havoc with my metabolism (see question #10).
2. Why Do You Blog?
I blog to get you interested in my books. Go buy ’em. BUT, warning, don’t buy the Kindle version of The Strange Land until the end of next week, when it will cost 99 cents because of a special promo.
3. How Do You Justify Your Existence? (I got that one from the Tales of the Black Widowers, good isn’t it?)
“So God created man. In the image of God created He him, male and female created He them. And He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the cattle and the creatures that move along the ground.'”
Edit: By quoting this passage, I am NOT asserting that the only justification for our life is to reproduce … i.e., that your life somehow has no meaning if you are not a parent. I happen to have been given three children, but that’s God’s gift to me, not mine to Him. No, the point of quoting this passage is this: I justify my existence because God made me. He made us. He wanted there to be people. He wanted us to exist as male and female. And, per the latter part of the passage, He wanted there to be a lot of us. If you exist and you are a human, He is happy about that.
4. How Do You Choose Who to Follow?
Unfortunately, I’m a lot like Trump in this way. If you say nice things to me, I like you and then I follow you.
An alternative route is that you posted something that really interested me. This usually means book reviews, discussion about writing, theology, ancient history, and sometimes art.
5. If John McClane and John Wick were tied on a railroad track and you could only set one of them free, which would you choose and why?
O.K., I had to duckduckgo him, but John McClane is the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. I would save John McClane instead of John Wick for the following reasons:
John Wick could definitely save himself.
I only saw the first Die Hard, but in it, John McClane is a family man, whereas John Wick doesn’t even have a dog anymore.
Once when we were in Indonesia, somebody swore that my husband looked exactly like Bruce Willis and now I can’t unsee it. That makes me think Bruce Willis is even more handsome.
6. In a game of Parcheesi, who would win, Spongebob Squarepants or the Doom Slayer?
I expect Spongebob to win in the same way that Bugs Bunny would.
7. Do you feel guilty about all of my oxygen that you are breathing?
Yes. My gosh, don’t remind me!
8. What is your favorite movie?
It’s a tie between The Princess Bride and a little hidden gem called Undercover Blues.
9. If you were going to be “accidentally but on purpose” killed tomorrow, how would you spend today?
I would write long letters to each of my children. If I had extra time, I’d move on to my husband, then other close family and friends.
I might try to transfer the rights to my books so they don’t go out of print, but I don’t think that could be done in one day. If you snooze, you lose, and I guess I snost and I lost.
10. Are mirrors Friend, or Foe?
Friend, but only in the sense of “faithful are the wounds of.”
11. If you could change ONE THING about your blog, what would it be?
Every single visit to my blog would result in a book purchase and then a breathless review on Amazon GO BUY MY BOOKS PEOPLE!
Ahem. I Nominate:
I nominate seven friends (the number of perfection!) plus Bookstooge cause I want to hear his answers too. And I nominate you, Reader, if you want to do it! After all, you are breathing! Which might provide the answer to my first question!
I got this tag from Bookstooge, who found these lists at Emma’s site. The idea is to answer each question with the title of a book you read from the previous year. Emma and Bookstooge both filled in three sets of blanks using titles of books they read in 2024 alone. I, on the other hand, am filling in one of the three sets of questions, using books I read in roughly the last year. When I say roughly: If I am currently reading the book (now, in 2025 – In Cold Blood), I get to use it. If I read portions of it last year (The Seven Laws of Teaching), I get to use it. And so forth. Enjoy!
When I was younger I was Ellen Tebbits
People might be surprised to discover that I Hope This Finds You Well
To recap, I joined a readalong with Bookstooge of a book with a cover that looks like this:
and whose author looks like this:
… which gives you a better sense of what the book is like than the cover does, really.
Barbara Cartland turned out a book every two weeks for the last twenty years of her life. Keep that in mind.
So, I finished this book pretty quickly. I was expecting a formulaic romance, and that’s what I got. The book does not drag. I can’t say I was super invested in it emotionally, but that’s because I’m a cynical middle-aged woman. And when Richard thinks to himself,
Oh, God, he loved her so much.
page 109
… I believed him. Behold the magic of Barbara Cartland!
Now, this book remains a first draft, and there are some first draft-y things in it, such as a shawl starting out as “lace” in one chapter, and getting transformed into “green silk” in the next. My favorite of these “first draft” moments is this one:
But now — how can I bear to be his wife knowing that he is already be in love with someone else?
page 106
I mean, I can relate. The most comical and confusing typos always show up in my most emotional scenes … and I always get so carried away when re-reading the scenes, that I can never catch them myself.
So, all in all, this was a not-terrible romance novel that read sort of like an outline, because it basically was an outline. If the book had been re-written to be much longer, then I feel certain that many of the minor plot holes/historical vaguenesses would have been ironed out, plus the potential emotional heft might have been successfully deepened to actual emotional heft. But, every author has to say “done” at some point, and in Cartland’s case, that was after whipping up the first draft, because that was her business model. She let readers take care of the historical details and the emotions, handling them with suspended disbelief and imagination. And that’s fair.
There was only one thing I did not like: the angry almost-kiss. (“Almost” because the couple are interrupted by a maid, so they don’t actually kiss except once at the very end of the book.) Anyway … “angry” and “kissing,” they do not go well together, no precious, they do not. I do not want Tiana’s marriage to be the kind of relationship where Richard ever kisses her angrily. And in fact, in most of the book, that is quite out of line with his character. It just happens in one scene, where they both lost their tempers “horribly” (actually quite mildly), and then were nearly overcome with passion. I don’t know why this is a romance trope. I guess I’ve missed something during my four decades of living. But, tip for you guys, in the middle of a fight is not the greatest time to start kissing your beloved.
My faithful fellow blogger, Bookstooge, is doing a readalong of a book someone, possibly as a prank, recommended to him: Love Saves the Day by Barbara Cartland. I went so far as to order this book from Amazon in order to participate. I don’t usually read in the romance genre, but I have read a few, and I don’t despise the genre or its readers or anything like that.
I waited to post this until after Bookstooge’s first reaction post went up on Friday, but I am composing my reaction before I see his.
First, let’s talk about this cover, eh? The word “terrifying” comes to mind. The guy looks more like Dracula – or a 60-year-old uncle- than like a romantic hero. Note that he is grasping the heroine by the upper arms. She, for her part, appears to be very concerned and trying to get away. I don’t mind the fact that this is impressionistically rendered – I don’t even completely mind that her hair is not, as it is described in the book, curly — but the emotional tone of this cover does not match the promised content.
I am, as of this posting, almost all the way through Chapter 4 because I mistakenly remembered that Bookstooge was going to be writing about chapters 1 – 6 in his first post. My impression so far: the plot is a very capable romance plot. The heroine is young, brave, idealistic; the hero is a little older, world-weary, etc.; there’s a rival romantic hero in the picture who is young, blond, and charming; financial circumstances are forcing the couple into co-operation they wouldn’t otherwise undertake. There’s even a bitter, scheming housekeeper a la Rebecca. I can’t see any big holes in the plot.
My first impression of the wordsmithing is that this is a first draft.
There are a ton of comma splices. There is head-hopping. (Though that may be intentional; sometimes it’s hard to tell head-hopping from an omniscient narrator. I omnish, myself.) The tone of the dialog is slightly inconsistent. It’s as if Cartland wants this to be an Edwardian-era novel, like Austen, or even earlier, but it’s set in 1903, and sometimes it comes off as if the characters are pretending to be from an earlier era. I can’t tell whether clothes, technology, and so forth, contain any anachronisms. The clothes are fairly generically described, but there are “omnibuses.” (Edit: I just looked it up, and oops! Edwardian is 1901 – 1910. So, spot on. So, the language sounds like it’s going for … Victorian? But obviously I’m not very savvy about this, so perhaps her language is also period accurate.)
Anyway, after noticing that this read like a first draft, I then went back to the introduction (which, like a good fiction reader, I had skipped), and, lo and behold …. it is a first draft.
Dame Barbara Cartland[‘s] most amazing literary feat was to double her output from 10 books a year to over 20 books a year when she was 77 to meet the huge demand.
She went on writing continuously at this rate for 20 years and wrote her very last book at the age of 97, thus completing an incredible 400 books between the ages of 77 and 97.
Her publishers finally could not keep up with this phenomenal output, so at her death in 2000 she left behind an amazing 160 unpublished manuscripts, something that no other author has ever achieved.
Barbara’s son, Ian McCorquodale, together with his daughter Iona, felt that it was their sacred duty to publish all these titles for Barbara’s millions of admirers all over the world who so love her wonderful romances.
So in 2004 they started publishing the 160 brand new Barbara Cartlands as the The Barbara Cartland Pink Collection, as Barbara’s favourite colour was always pink — and yet more pink!
The Barbara Cartland Pink collection is published monthly exclusively by Barbaracartland.com and the books are numbered in sequence from 1 to 160.
–the introduction
Barbara Cartland was cranking out about one novel every two weeks for twenty years. I’m not even mad, I’m impressed. And I am now a little bit jealous of her. Imagine having such high demand for your books that you can just dash off all your ideas and the publisher will publish them as fast as they can.
Also, I’m tickled. That selection above gets funnier every time I read it. I mean, it sounds made-up, like something from a Bertie Wooster novel. Even the names of Barbara’s son and granddaughter sound like characters from her books. And the fact that they are calling it the pink collection because that was her favorite color … the fact that she loved pink so much … the fact that her author photo looks like this:
Now that I think about, the section above might be my favorite part of the book. The romance between Tiana and Richard is going to have to get awfully good in order to compete with Cartland herself.
I got this tag from Snapdragon Alcove. I hope it’s OK that I’m posting it after Halloween (life is busy!). Because of the relatively narrow range of my horror consumption, I’m freely mixing movies and books.
Pick your favorite example of a …
Zombie apocalypse
The Book of Eli (a movie)
Not exactly zombies, but as I recall, there is an older couple that seems normal, but then you find out they have some sort of neurological disease from having eaten human flesh to survive. Creepy.
Also, I love the characters Denzel Washington usually plays, and this is no exception. I like my apocalyptic movies to be somewhat uplifting, and this fits the bill.
Vampire
The Unwilling, by C. David Belt (a book). Cheating a little, ‘cause I recently reviewed it here. This one made me cry, because there is a child vampire who wants to be “a real boy.”
Haunted house
I guess I don’t read many haunted house books, because Monster House is the only one I can think of. It is just as sad as ghost stories usually are.
Psychological thriller
Fractured and Shutter Island (both movies). I was very angry with both of these movies, but Fractured probably made me angrier.
Creepy doll
The Collision series, by Rich Colburn. So far, it has only two volumes: The Resolve of Immortal Flesh and The Formulacrum. But The Formulacrum ended on a literal cliffhanger, so that means Colburn owes us another one.
Neither of these books is exclusively about creepy dolls, but one very memorable creepy doll is featured … and that’s just about the only book I have ever read with a creepy doll.
Monster
Beowulf, duh.
And, in case you are not up to speed on this, Grendel is a t-rex. But there are plenty of other monsters in this how-to-defeat-monsters book, including the sea monsters Beowulf encounters while swimming in the North Sea, and Grendel’s mother, who appears to be some sort of octopus.
Comedy-horror
The Tremors franchise. It is the best. Extreme gross-outs, but also extreme humor. Survivalist Ed really steals the show.
Teen Horror
Stranger Things. I will die on this hill.
The series starts out where the kids are about twelve and it more resembles E.T. or The Goonies, but the events cover several years and we see the kids discovering the opposite sex, feeling left out as they grow up at different rates, dealing with problems with their parents and problems involving finding a career and their place in the world. Their lives have all the teen challenges, plus the ghosts and demonic creatures and stuff to deal with. And yes, there are a few make-out scenes that it would be nice if we could skip. I will also say that the series seems to be equally sensitive to the experiences of teen boys and girls.
Some people think the episodes are too long and detailed, but that’s the point. They work in a lot of human drama in addition to the scary stuff, and I am here for it.
Demonic possession
Perelandra and That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis both feature possession that gets more terrifying the longer you think about it.
In Perelandra, the possessed man gets to come out and speak instead of the demon once in a while, and this gives a more evocative glimpse into his mind than we might prefer.
In That Hideous Strength, the people that are serving the demons get dehumanized to an even greater extent, and we see the beginning of this dehumanization process happen to one of the main characters. There is also a memorable scene where one of the villains, who up until now has been the most formidable because of his intelligence, wants to put a stop to something, but “he could not think of any words.” This moment of aphasia shows us how close his mind is to total disintegration.
Science fiction
Science fiction reliably pulls towards horror, for obvious reasons. Human nature doesn’t mix well with dimensional portals … or genetic engineering … or time travel.
That second image is from a movie called Paradox. It turns out there are quite a few of those, but this one involves time travel being exploited by a bitter coworker to go postal, and even though the team has an awful lot of information, they can’t figure out what is happening quickly enough.
Yes, I’m a serial reader. If nothing else, I am definitely that.
But this tag is about book series. A book tag is something that comes with a bunch of questions or prompts that the blogger answers. Normally, the blogger is also supposed to “tag” a bunch of other people, like one of those chain e-mails from back in the day, but I don’t usually do that part. I personally got this tag from Fran Laniado. It was most likely created by Dutch blogger, @Zwartraafje in this post.
From which series did you read the spinoff series?
First, I read a number of books in the Emberverse series. The premise of this series is that one day, inexplicably, in the middle of the 90s, a bunch of technology stops working: engines, electricity, and gunpowder. This event, which people begin to call “The Change,” throws the world back into preindustrial technology. Naturally, the first book (Dies the Fire, above) is post-apocalyptic with lots of starvation, hand to hand fighting, and horrendous die-offs in the cities especially. As the series develops, people rebuild a medieval-style world. (Because it turns out that in the absence of gunpowder, you need a warrior class and a peasant class to support them.) Eventually, the young hero goes on a quest to find the source of all the weirdness, which seems to be centered around Nantucket. It turns out that right when The Change happened, modern Nantucket was replaced by an ancient version, from well before Europe colonized the New World.
All of that is background to set up the spinoff series. This is called, not surprisingly, the Nantucket series. In the first book, Island in the Sea of Time, the modern island of Nantucket and a ship near it are suddenly transported back into the Bronze Age. The islanders have to learn how to survive without any mainland. Eventually, they make their way to England and meet the original builders (or at least users) of Stonehenge. I’ve read Island. I own the second book in the series, which opens with King Agamemnon realizing how much he loves artillery. I just needed a break from this spinoff series, but I’ll come back to it some day.
With which series did the first book not sell you over from the start?
Sacred Clowns is one book in the “series,” but not the one I had the bad experience with.
Stretching the meaning of “first book” a bit, I’m going to go with Tony Hillerman’s Navajo police procedural series, starring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.
Unfortunately, these books are not labeled as a series, though the contents do have a chronological order. So when I say “first book,” it’s the first one I happened to pick up. I just got unlucky. Unlike most of the Chee/Leaphorn books, most of the action in the one I picked up does not take place in Dinetah (the Navajo homeland in the Four Corners area), but rather in Washington, DC. Also, in that particular book one of the major point-of-view characters was a stone-cold killer with a back story that was just so sad I wasn’t sure I could handle any more by that author. Luckily, later I caved and picked up another of Hillerman’s books.
Which series hooked you from the start?
Well, I mean all of them. If I read any distance into a series, it’s usually because it hooked me. But I am going to have to go with The Belgariad. It opens with the hero, Garion, growing up in a big farm kitchen on a hardworking, prosperous, devout farmstead similar to the one in Farmer Boy, but bigger and more medival. Garion’s Aunt Pol, who we later learn is a sorceress, is first introduced as an amazing cook whose dishes can make farmhands from other farms weep. I’m a sucker for this kind of simple, wholesome stuff.
Which series do you have completed on your shelves?
I have The Chronicles of Narnia, because somebody once gave me a nice, thick doorstop where all the books are together in one volume. Also, I just last week acquired a nice hardbound copy of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. It was on the sales shelf at the library! I am very excited about this, because it’s a brilliant trilogy and I feel that finding it in hardback is like finding treasure.
Which series have you read completely?
*deep breath*
The Chronicles of Narnia, all the Brother Cadfael books (I think), The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, all The Three Investigators books (I think), all of Susan Howatch’s Church of England series except the last one, The Little House books, everything ever written by Agatha Christie (not really a series), the Belgariad & Mallorean (but not the spinoffs), the A Wrinkle in Time trilogy.
Which series do you not own completely but would like to?
Well, this is a tough one. In theory, I would like to own a complete set of every series I like. In practice, until recently I moved house every few years (sometimes much more often), and I have a limited budget. Both of these factors make it difficult to build up a dream library. Also, I have plenty of bookish friends and relatives, so if I want to re-read something, often I can borrow it. I guess if I had to name a series that I would like to own all of, it would all of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo cop books and also all of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael mysteries. I’d also like to own all the Tintin albums and all the Asterix albums, because those are great for kids, table reading, and art inspiration. But that’s one where it’s possible to borrow.
Which series to do you not want to own completely but still read?
Andrew Klavan’s Homelander series. I convinced my librarian to order them and then I read them all.
Which series are you not continuing?
There are plenty of contenders here. Life is short.
The latest series that I started, enjoyed several of, and then broke off was Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series. The later books aren’t bad, it was just that once I’d learned Odd’s tricks, it got so that I could take or leave further books.
Which series you haven’t started yet are you curious about?
Which series did others love and you did not?
The Legacy of Orisha series. I read the first book: Children of Blood and Bone.
Here’s a sample of an incident that drove me crazy: the romantic hero, who is also sort of the villain, is the son of a king who has oppressed magicians with harsh purges. He is just starting to discover that he himself has a magical power: he can directly sense others’ thoughts and feelings. He has a terrifying moment when he picks up on a memory of the heroine. It was the lynching of her mother. He is shocked and horrified by what he sees and feels. And then he concludes, “I will never understand her pain.” Even though he literally just did! He literally just lived through it! But that line is a clue that the author is not going to give him a redemption arc or let him out of the role of oppressor. Nor is the author going to let him and his sister off the hook for “not seeing sooner” that their father was an awful tyrant, even though they are about 18 years old and just came of age themselves. So, if you like merciless class war, you’ll love this series.
Sorry, that might not be the most cheerful note to end on, but that’s the way the tag crumbles. Have a great day, everyone!
Today I will be doing the Finally Fall Book Tag, which I got from Riddhi. A tag is a series of prompts that the blogger responds to, usually by naming one or more books. At the end, we are supposed to “tag” other bloggers, but we all know that I don’t do that because it just gets too complicated, what with not wanting to leave anyone out, not wanting to hand anyone a task they hate, etc., etc. It’s sort of like planning a wedding that way.
In fall, the air is crisp and clear: Name a book with a vivid setting.
The Lord of the Rings.
OK, look, TLOTR could actually be the perfect answer for every one of these prompts, am I right? So I’ll just name it for each of them, and then one other one that is my backup answer.
Beyond Middle Earth, I suggest you check out the setting in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish cycle. It’s on a planet that, because of its orbit, experiences seasons that last for lengths of time that we on Earth would call years. The people who live there have eyes with no whites to them. After intermarrying with immigrants from Earth, they develop a skin tone that is navy blue in the upper classes and “dusty” blue in the lower classes. It’s fascinating, brutal, and beautifully written.
Nature is beautiful… but also dying: Name a book that is beautifully written, but also deals with a heavy topic like loss or grief.
The Lord of the Rings. They kill off Gandalf.
The 6th Lamentation by William Brodrick
Also, this book. The Holocaust, survivor’s guilt, lost children, neurological disease. Are those topics heavy enough? See my full review of ithere.
Fall is back to school season: Share a non-fiction book that taught you something new.
The Lord of the Rings will teach you terms like weregild (“person-money” – money paid in compensation for someone’s death).
The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
Everybody please go read this and as many other Thomas Sowell books as you can get your hands on.
In order to keep warm, it’s good to spend some time with the people we love: Name a fictional family/household/friend-group that you’d like to be part of.
Failing that, I would be honored to live and work with Mma Potokwane, the forceful woman who runs the orphanage in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.
The colourful leaves are piling up on the ground: Show us a pile of fall coloured spines!
I didn’t intend it, but every book in this pile except for The Family Mark Twain is indie published.
And Neanderthal Woman is homemade.
Also … the golden-leaved mallorn trees of Lothlorien.
Fall is the perfect time for some storytelling by the fireside: Share a book wherein someone is telling a story.
One of the best things about Lord of the Rings is the way you keep getting hints of yet more ancient places, people, and stories.
And for my backup answer, we have Ursula Le Guin again. In her Earthsea trilogy, there is a very creepy story told about a stone that if you so much as touch it, steals your soul. In her book Left Hand of Darkness, the main story is interspersed with short myths to help us get a feel for the culture of the planet the story is set on, where glaciers cover about half the landmass and people are sexless for most of each month.
The nights are getting darker: Share a dark, creepy read.
The Balrog, and Shelob, and the Ring and the effect it has upon people, are all pretty doggone creepy.
Also, The Dark is Rising and the whole series that follows it deals with pre-Roman paganism still alive in Britain.
The days are getting colder: Name a short, heartwarming read that could warm up somebody’s cold and rainy day.
The Hobbit. Annndddd …
Allie Brosch’s new book Solutions and Other Problems.
It’s not heartwarming in the sense that it presents the universe as a rational or hopeful place, BUT it did make me laugh so hard it brought tears to my eyes. It’s not short in the sense that it’s a big, thick hardcover, BUT that’s only because it is packed with her funny (and actually very artistic) drawings. It’s a fast read.
Fall returns every year: Name an old favourite that you’d like to return to soon.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
Also, this book, The Everlasting Man, by the ebullient GKC. I recently ordered my own copy so that I could mine it for future quotes on the blog, and I quickly discovered that GKC was the original source of all my suspicions about ancient people having been just like us, but smarter.
Fall is the perfect time for cozy reading nights: Share your favourite cozy reading “accessories”!
Up till now I’ve tried to make posts that don’t mention you know what, because I figure that readers come to Out of Babel for fun and weirdness, not for more mentions of you know what. But, I saw this super fun tag over in the book nook of The Orangutan Librarian. I hope by trying it I’m not letting you down. As you can see, I’ve spun it a little, imagining how the characters would handle coronavirus in their own worlds.
Rules
Take 5 or more of your favorite book characters and imagine what they would be doing if they were quarantined with us in the real world.
You can have them be in their own squad if you want, or working on their own.
The Pevensie kids, of course, would not even be here …
For some reason I imagine Edmund and Lucy quarantining with their cousin Eustace and his parents rather than being with their parents (who got stuck in Greece) or with Peter and Susan (who got stuck at their respective universities). Eustace, though less of a know-it-all since his first trip to Narnia, is still extremely well-informed about epidemiology, government policy, and all the latest economic and medical updates. His mother, Alberta, insists that everyone wear masks and gloves even inside the house.
Gandalf the Grey would have caught the coronavirus early (because he travels a lot), come down with complications (because it hits old people the hardest), died, and been resurrected.
Sam Gamgee, humble, hardworking, and patient, would be the perfect person to quarantine with. He’s also a very resourceful cook.
Faramir and Eowyn would be climbing the walls, holed up in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith.
Tom Bombadil and the River Daughter are immune to human ills and they also take a long view of the death of much of the rest of the world.
Gimli would rather risk death than give up smoking.
Tony Hillerman Quarantine
Sadly, in real life, the coronavirus has hit the Navajo nation really hard. Tony Hillerman’s Navajo cop characters, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, would be reacting very differently. Leaphorn, who is older and more of a homebody, would be happily hanging out with his wife Emma at his home in Window Rock. Chee, who is young and restless, would be running around the reservation trying to help everyone he could. He would go to be with an older relative who is dying of the virus, making sure that the person is moved outside as per tradition and that they have someone with them. Though young and healthy, he would unexpectedly develop a bad case himself and would be found recovering in the hospital at the very end of the book, being visited by his girlfriend Janet or Bernie, depending upon where we are in the series.
Emberverse Quarantine
Junie and Mike of the Emberverse have already been through a society-destroying event that resulted in most people dying. Junie heads up a neo-pagan community near Corvallis, Oregon, and Mike runs a more specialized, military one just northwest of Salem. Since the Change destroyed all modern technology, the inhabitants of the Emberverse would probably barely notice the coronavirus. Fewer people develop the diseases of civilization (heart disease, diabetes) in their medieval-style world, living conditions are less crowded, and there are no nursing homes or hospitals. Probably all they would notice was a particularly bad seasonal flu endangering the few remaining old people. They’d be grateful that this sickness, unlike many, was not threatening little children. Junie would be using her herbology and caretaking skills to help as many of her subjects as possible. Because Junie and Mike both grew up in the modern world, before “the Change” happened, they are aware of germ theory and this would help them enforce hygiene on their people.
Miss Marple has lived through two world wars. She would gamely go along with whatever deprivations and regulations the quarantine brought. She’s been through worse. If anyone complained, she would smile sweetly while silently judging you and simply say, “So many things are difficult.”
Hercule Poirot is already a bit of a germophobe. He would take enthusiastically to masks and hand sanitizer, but would become peevish when unable to procure the foods that he’s used to. Whenever Hastings began to panic about the many unknowns, Hercule Poirot would calm his fears through the use of the Little Grey Cells.
Airheaded bachelor Bertie could not stand not going to his club. He would beg Jeeves to come up with a way that Bertie could skirt the rules to get out and about. Jeeves would do so, knowing that within hours, Bertie would be back home with a horrible hangover that he would need to sleep off and then drink one of Jeeves’s miraculous restoratives. Jeeves knows that the coronavirus mostly endangers older people, so even if Bertie should become a carrier, there is little danger that he would infect anyone because even in normal circumstances he cannot be induced to visit his Aunt Agatha.
And … I can’t resist … Quarantine with my own characters!
Nirri is, essentially, already in quarantine all the time. He broke his spine in a fall from the Tower of Babel, becoming paraplegic, and is now being reluctantly cared for by people with whom he does not share a language. He is the nightmare person to be quarantined with: arrogant, demanding, unable to communicate or be reasoned with. Though 130 years old, he is healthy as a horse and there is no way he is dying from this. On the bright side, he is an accomplished musician. Give him a lute and he will entertain you all evening, even if you don’t understand the words to his songs.
Zillah is a born caretaker and the tribe’s resident medical expert. It was she who insisted they rescue Nirri. Though young and even middle-aged people don’t usually show symptoms of the virus, in a tribe their size there might be one or two who do. Zillah would spend herself caring for them, and then get sick herself (she is the tribe’s second oldest person, after Nirri). She would survive, cared for by her daughter Ninna, and the weeks when she was sick would be the loneliest of Nirri’s life.
You Sure You Wanna Do This?
If you do, I tag …
Jyvurentropy, who has been posting so much that I can’t keep up with her
Out of Babel Books 