Every once in a while there is a perfect book for children. The Story of Ping is perfect, and Ferdinand the Bull. And Peter Rabbit. And Where the Wild Things Are. The way I came to judge a perfect book when I was a young mom with young children was how little I had to change or embellish the words on the page.

We’re talking very young children here. And there seemed to be a lot of books that my kids liked the idea (pictures) of, but in which the text was over their heads, or just silly. It’s very tiring to rewrite the words to a book over and over, and I vividly remember one evening choosing Peter Rabbit, and then marveling at what a total pleasure it was to read out loud. There was not one single word that I wanted or needed to change.

And of course, a perfect book needs to be perfect for the children, and not just for me, so it also has to be a book that gets read and reread a hundred times. Word for word.

All right, there can be sound-effects. When I read Where the Wild Things Are there were always sound effects. But that’s it. No changing anything else.

It was perfect.


I’ve found another one. It’s called Waiting for Mama by Lee Tae-Jun, and it was published in 1938 in a Korean newspaper. This edition by NorthSouth (978-0-7358-2143-9) was illustrated with graceful lines and suspenseful color treatments by Kim Dong-Seong.

The story is simple: a little boy goes down to a streetcar stop to wait for his mother. There are probably less than fifty words in the entire tale, but there’s a beginning, a middle -- there’s tension and characterization -- and there’s an end. It’s a classic in Korea, and although the dress and street scenes are foreign to most Americans, the theme is universal. The little boy and his experience is universal. And encouraging.

Don’t miss the very interesting paragraphs at the end of the book about the Korean language either.

I guess it’s better than chips, or ciggies, though I won’t say I don’t have battles with those as well. For me, mysteries are the Valium of reading material. (Reading material used to be a euphemism for pot back in my old days; “¿Oyes, no tienes materia de lectura?”) I like to read mysteries in bed. If I can get away with it, I’ll spend an entire rotten-weather Saturday moving from couch to chair to nap to mystery until it’s over and in the clear. Yes, mysteries clear my head of the day since they have nothing to do with my job, my family, my economics, etc.

And I love Soho. The galleys come in all the time, sometimes in yellow wrappers and sometimes with a half-finished, glossy cover. There are cozies and foreigners and toughs and exotics. Here are two that I’ve recently read:

Assasins at Ospreys by R.T. Raichev
It’s not the plotting that’s riveting in this book, it’s the language and the characterization. Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne set off one wintery day to rescue a damsel in distress. Darcy’d met the lady at an author meet-and-greet the last summer; Darcy is a mystery writer, Payne is, well, handsome, smart, and handy.

Goldilocks, as Darcy’d nicknamed her, had been in a wheelchair when they first met. Not any more. She’s lithe and light as champagne. She’s also a terrible flirt even though she’s a newlywed. Sound like a cliché? So do most of Raichev’s characters at first impression. Beware. It’s not that the author’s playing games with identity, it’s that he/she (?) develops his/her characters over the course of the story. And first impressions are not always accurate. Imagine!

Then, there’s the language. Pure delight. Everything from the titles of the chapters: “Malice Aforethought,” “The Enigmatic Mr Lushington,” “Ceaseless Turmoil,” “Unholy Dying,” but the sentences, word choice, dialogue, and conversation topics are delish and delovely. Assasins at Ospreys deserves a whole Saturday uninterrupted.


The Headhunters by Peter Lovesey
I know I’ve read something else by this author, but it was years ago and I’d have to see the cover to pick it out. Anyway, that’s irrelevant because nothing about this book fits easily into any category. Sure, there’s a murder – or rather, a body – in the second chapter, and another one about halfway through, but most of the time, I felt more like I was reading a novel than genre fiction.

For one thing, the detective is not the hero of the story even though it appears she is part of a series. Not only is she not a hero, she is shrill and prefers easy answers. For another thing, the characters behave like real people, speak like real people, and are often inscrutable – out of shame, shyness, or deviousness -- like real people. Finally, I had no idea who the perp was until nearly the end, and that only by process of elimination. That doesn’t happen too often without authorial tricks. Lovesey’s trick was all craft.

Is it Spring Break yet? As I’m writing this, the sun is shining and out the window, two swans glide along the Boardman River. They’re not the only ones gliding and diving: besides the ubiquitous mallards, there are mergansers, buffleheads, scoters, and ring-necks. What a nice day, you’re thinking … sounds like Spring Break. Nope. It’s March and the bay is frozen. The river’s the only open body of water around here and that’s why the crowd.

But I’m thinking about Spring Break; I’m thinking about sitting on the beach, legs stretched to the sun. My son is standing in the surf, fishing, and I’m reaching for a book… which one?



How about Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time (Chelsea Green, 978-1-933392-43-1, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset). This collection of thirty-six interviews is just long enough, just short enough, just provocative enough to warrant lots of in-between surf gazing.

“People think that the brain appeared suddenly,” says Rodolfo Llinás from the NYU School of Medicine. “This is not true. It took 650 million years to become what it is.”

Hmmm. 650 million years ago there was only one land mass and it was called Pangaea.

How about an interview with Daniel Dennett, director for the Center of cognitive Studies at Tufts. He talks about consciousness, soul, will, language, and ESP. And Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor (emeritus) and one of the greatest science writers of all time. He talks about extinctions by meteorites and the consequent diversification. The last major extinction happened 65 million years ago, and it takes about ten million years for the earth to recover. Between ten and twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was sa rich in species as it’s ever been. “Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.”

Topics range from the why vodka sometimes refuses to unfreeze, the definition of beauty, and the lack of a biological limit on the human lifespan. What could be more wonderful?

Well, magic, I guess.

In Mind, Life and Universe Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at U-C Sand Diego points out that right-handed people tend to hear high-pitched sounds on the right and low pitched sounds on the left. This is regardless of where those sounds are actually coming from. She calls it an acoustic illusion.

Almost magic, but not quite. There is an explanation.

Did anyone ever stop to ask why Orpheus’s lyre charmed stones and snakes, heaven and earth? If they did, was the answer simply because it’s music?


The Biblical account of the birth of magic, according to Astrology, Art, and Alchemy in Art by Matilde Battistini (translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, J. Paul Getty Museum, 978-0-89236-907-2) begins with the rebellion of the angels and their outcast from heaven.

These children of heaven, having fallen in love with mortal women, decided to reveal to their brides the secret for dominating the Earth. Thus were the magic arts born, the knowledge of the stars and therapeutic properties of minerals and plants that women received and passed on for millennia.

All right. That sounds like fun.

The rest of the book is just as enticingly written, and is fabulously illustrated with the works of everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Giotto to Riminaldi to Blake. The handy size – 5 ¼ x 7 ¾ -- will pack easily in a bag, and all ages and orthodoxies will find something to wonder about when the rain falls on your holiday parade.