(Debby)
The Known and What I Thought I Knew

Part of the point of a public library is the freedom to pick random books that one doesn’t know anything about. Sometimes this works out great (case in point would be Hyperion). Sometimes…not.

The Table of Everything – Trudy White.

At Goshen College, students can push books (well, more like booklets) through Pinchpenny Press. It’s a great outlet for creative energies and aspirations. I got to edit a Pinchpenny Press book that was a collection of poetry and essays on environment & place. It was great fun, except for laying everything out in that fancy publishing computer program. Three or four years later, I had the odd experience of finding a copy of that book at a Mennonite Relief Sale in Oregon. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Trudy White, here, took the equivalent of a Pinchpenny Press collection of short stories/reflections/drawings and managed to get a printing press in Australia to publish it. And then it suffered the fate of so many books – it was donated to Book Aid International, and shipped to the Kenyan Library system. I’m not sure how she would feel about that, either. Sadly, it tends not to be a sign of high esteem for a book.

Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson

That’s right – KIDNAPPED! Man, how’s THAT for a blast from the past? Actually, it turned out that I didn’t really know anything about Kidnapped at all – my vague memory of it is actually of Treasure Island, I suspect. There aren’t really any pirates in Kidnapped; there is a shipwreck, but it is short and basically self-inflicted out of ignorance. What there is, is a whole lot of Scottish politics that I am trying very hard to understand but which is just a little bit out of reach. Like, Whigs and Jacobians and MacGregors who go by the name of Drummond because of some feud – actually, there seem to be a lot of inter-clan feuds – and Highlands versus Lowlands and whatnot.

All around, this book is AWESOME!!! Seriously, I cannot think of anything I would want to add or take away from this book. Maybe part of what I like so much is that I have to follow the political bits (which are a huge chunk of the plot – who is a Whig and who is a …um, not a Whig? Something about Kings? and France. Definitely something involving France) as though it is a mystery that I am finding clues for and trying to put it all together. But anyways, I really and truly enjoyed this book, and I am currently reading the sequel, Catriona, and so far it is, if anything, even more wrapped up in Scottish politics, and it is continuing to be awesome.