Item: 1 copy of How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn

This is a library book that I finished today, and may I say that the smell of the book itself was part of the pleasure of reading it.  It smelled like libraries of days past, and days past is kind of what the book is about.  The flap pocket where every library book used to have its own card is still there, with 3 dates stamped on it:

August 9, 1988
November 8, 1988
November 13, 1989

But what's between then and now is unknown, because this is when a magic computerized wand for keeping track of books came into use, and so now the entire lending history is kept someplace else, inaccessible to me.

Anyway, it was a book I enjoyed reading.  It's somewhat of a minor classic, published in 1940, and there was also a movie version of it in 1941.  The narrator of the story is Huw Morgan, the youngest son in a Welsh mining family, and there's less a plot driving things forward than just the passage of time.  As the book starts out, Huw is an adult leaving the house where he's lived all his life, and then it goes back and starts again when he was a child -- so the reader knows all along how it ends, but not why.

In a way, this is the story of the coming of modern times.  As the story goes on, the lovely pristine valley of the title is being covered by slag heaps.  As time goes by, members of the tight-knit family household disperse to London, to the US, to New Zealand and South Africa.  It starts out with an economy where men working in the mines earn enough to support their families, have jam on their toast, and teach their children Shakespeare, and then slowly there emerges an economy of strikes and unemployment and labor unrest.  Over the course of the book, the surroundings go from the living community of a village to, well, what we have now.

The community is the thing that was continually amazing me in the book:  how the arrival of a letter was a huge event, plus the postman usually stayed for dinner, how the accomplishment of one village person was cause for celebration with music, voices, instruments, everyone bringing pots of food, and the excitement running through the streets at full pitch.

You'd think this background was something thrown in there to make it all seem cozy and sentimental, but there's plenty of violence and grief and sorrow to balance it out.  By the end, the village is a place where women don't go out of the house alone, and I realized then that this type of fear was something that had never entered the story before.  Like most of the other things that have disappeared, I suppose, the old days never seemed remarkable until afterwards.