Misc Books: Helene Hanff, Lauren Tarshis, Stuart Turton

[rachelmanija]

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff



A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.


I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis



The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.


The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton



A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

Was "Underfoot" the one about "Oklahoma?" The first title was "Away we go." They changed the name to Oklahoma but after they'd printed the programs (?) Someone said it had to have an exclamation point, so they wrote them in by hand.

"84 Charing Cross Road" was included in the Readers Digest Condensed Book series, IIRC, which would have exposed it to a ton of readers who might not have heard of it otherwise.

[sixbeforelunch]

Yup! I pulled down my copy and found the passage surprisingly easily so here's the text for anyone who might be curious (OCR from a photo so forgive any errors)

Nobody, it seemed, liked the title Away We Go. The composer had wanted to change it to Yessirree, but Joe was thankful to report he'd been talked out of it. The title finally agreed upon - thanks largely to Armina Marshall, Lawrence's wife, who came from out that way - was Oklahoma.

It sounds fine to you; you're used to it. But do me a favor and imagine you're working in a theatre and somebody tells you your new musical is to be called "New Jersey." Or "Maine." To us,
"Oklahoma" remained the name of a state, even after we'd mimeographed 10,000 new releases and despite the fact that "Okla-homa" appeared three times on each one.

We had folded several hundred of them when the call came from Boston. Joe picked up the phone and we heard him say, "Yes, Terry," and "All right, dear," and then he hung up. And then he looked at us, in the dazed way people who worked at the Guild frequently looked at each other.

"They want," he said in a faraway voice, "an exclamation point after 'Oklahoma."

Which is how it happened that, far into the night, Lois and I, bundled in our winter coats, sat in the outer office putting 30,000 exclamation points on 10,000 press releases, while Joe, in the inner office, bundled in his overcoat, phoned all over town hunting down and waking up various printing firms and sign painters. We were bundled in our coats because the heat had been turned oft by an economy-minded management now happily engaged in spending several thousand dollars to alter houseboards, playbills, ads, three-sheet posters and souvenir booklets, to put an exclamation point after "Oklahoma."

[osprey_archer]

Thank you for putting the excerpt here! The joys of show business.

[rachelmanija]

I love that.

[sovay]

We were bundled in our coats because the heat had been turned oft by an economy-minded management now happily engaged in spending several thousand dollars to alter houseboards, playbills, ads, three-sheet posters and souvenir booklets, to put an exclamation point after "Oklahoma."

That's amazing.