North Carolina's Ruthie Houston, the inspiration for a classic children's book, dead at 99

Ruthie Houston, the woman who inspired the beloved children's book, "The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree," died Wednesday at 99.

Born in Avery County in 1914, Houston was the mother of Gloria Houston, author of 11 books, including her most famous, "The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree," a best-selling picture book set in the North Carolina mountains during World War I.

Since its publication more than 25 years ago, Houston's Appalachian tale has sold millions of copies and become a holiday classic.

Its main character is a little girl named Ruthie who's supposed to play the heavenly angel in her church's annual Christmas Eve play.

Though that book brought Ruthie the most notoriety, she was beloved in Avery and Mitchell Counties long before that. A natural storyteller, she for years entertained schoolchildren who visited her Sunny Brook Store in Avery County to hear the stories of mountain life that inspired her daughter's books.

In December, I wrote a story about Ruthie and her birthday wish. For her 100th birthday, which would have been on March 9, she wanted people to donate money to help reduce the national debt. She even made a video, which you can watch on YouTube.

Ruthie was concerned the debt could threaten the many government and social programs that helped alleviate poverty and suffering in her lifetime. When I interviewed Ruthie in December, she recounted stories of family members who died for lack of medicine or government safety regulations.

"I just don't want those things to happen again to my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren," she said. "We have come so far with having necessities. But I don't want them to have to go backward instead of forward."

Ruthie's son, Jerry Houston, lives in Charlotte. She died Wednesday at the home of her daughter, Gloria, in Asheville. Gloria posted this on Facebook:

On Wednesday evening, as fluffy snowflakes fell outside the window of Ruthie’s room a glowing sunset broke through the clouds lighting her face. In that glow, about 6:30 p m, I held her hand as she stopped breathing and was gone. This was the visual image with which she left me. Her death was peaceful, and our conversation was vital until a few moments before.

She was disappointed that she would not celebrate that 100th birthday and that she would not be voting for a woman for President, but she said that she was “so tired.” Her heart was exhausted from the effort of the past few weeks, but, on Tuesday she had visited with Jerry for much of the day as she worked on her latest napkin making project, at the request of a friend. Then she walked to her bathroom and to the table to join us for pizza--with garlic.

Ruthie was only disabled for one day. Until her final moments, she was mentally active, only last week calling for a friend’s birthday (on her own cell phone) to sing the rhymed couplets she had composed specific to that friend. Her leaving was much as she had wanted it to be. We are blessed to have had her among us for almost 100 years.

Visitation will be 5-8 p.m. Friday at Webb Funeral Home in Spruce Pine. Burial will be private. Ruthie's family and friends will celebrate her life in a memorial service at Pine Grove United Methodist Church, north of Spruce Pine, at 2 p.m. on Saturday. The family asks that attendees refrain from wearing fragances or hair spray and refrain from smoking beforehand. ,

Queens University novelist to read from 'Dept. of Speculation'

Jenny Offill's latest novel, "Dept. of Speculation," out Jan. 28, is  getting rave reviews.

Library Journal says it's an "enlightened choice for a reading group."A starred Publishers Weekly review calls it "clever, subtle, and rife with strokes of beauty."

The novel is narrated by a wife analyzing her life amid motherhood and a faltering marriage.

 Offill, who teaches in Queens University of Charlotte's Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA program, will give a reading  at 8:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 10 in Queens' Ketner Auditorium. She'll be joined by poet Morri Creech, author of "The Sleep of Reason."

My favorites books: 2013 edition

Looking for a book to start the new year? Here are some of my 2013 favorites. You’ll notice they include an over-representation of New York-centered works. This was not planned. Maybe the Big Apple is just a good place to set a story.

A book that makes you feel weird about your smart phone: “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart. 

In this dark, comic novel set in near-future New York, America is run by mega-conglomerates with names like LandO’LakesGMFordCredit. Also, everyone carries smart phone-like devices called “apparats” that can rate a person’s hotness and credit-worthiness. Published in 2010, it’s fiction that’s predicting the future pretty accurately. 

Another book that makes you feel weird about your smart phone: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Issacson.

Issacson captures Jobs’ quirks and complexity – bizarre eating habits, aversion to deodorant, selfishness – while illuminating his genius for making products that have transformed the way we live. 

Worth all 1,300 pages: “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” by Robert Caro.

I knew zilch about Moses until I read this 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner. Now I know that he shaped 20th-century New York, for better and worse, without ever holding elected office. Caro’s tenacious reporting and research left me awed. You won’t find a finer study of power and its uses. 

Tensest scene ever involving soda bread: “Someone” by Alice McDermott. 

Well-chosen details elevate this story of an ordinary Brooklyn girl named Marie. In the author’s skilled hands, small scenes of daily life – young Marie balking when her mom assigns her to make the family’s soda bread – pulse with drama and import.

Revisiting the 1970s: “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann. 

This 2009 National Book Award winner for fiction weaves disparate characters – a Catholic priest, mother-daughter prostitutes, a Park Avenue housewife – into a rich, sprawling portrait of New York in the early 1970s. 

Makes you thankful for airport security: “The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking” by Brendan Koerner.

In a five-year period starting in 1968, hijackers began seizing U.S. commercial jets at a rate of nearly once a week. Koerner tells the riveting tale of the longest-distance hijacking in American history, set in an era when airlines would rather have a plane hijacked than inconvenience passengers with pesky metal detectors. 

Is it time to kill the apostrophe?

Connie Eble is the consummate grammar nerd, the sort of person who punctuates her text messages and uses semi-colons correctly, even though she considers them pretentious. As an English professor at UNC Chapel Hill, she has spent more than four decades fixing grammar mistakes in student papers.

So Eble’s feelings about apostrophes may come as a surprise. She thinks its time we got rid of them.

See what I did there? If you are among the dwindling number of Americans who use apostrophes correctly, you probably twitched reading that last paragraph. You knew the its was missing the apostrophe that signaled a contraction of it and is. Still, you knew what I meant.

And that’s why Eble, who’s a linguist, argues that apostrophes are useless. “Do you ever have to stop someone and say, Did you mean possessive when you said its?” she asks. No, you never do. The context makes it clear.

When Eble first explained her stance to me, I admit to grammar-geek shock. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If we officially dropped apostrophes, English teachers would save untold hours. Phrases such as daily special’s would die a quiet death.

Fueled by texting, the anti-apostrophe movement seems to be gaining momentum, especially in Britain, where some retailers, including the bookseller Waterstones, have dropped their apostrophes. The people in charge of killtheapostrophe.com are British, though it should be said that England is also home to the Apostrophe Protection Society. Apostrophe opinions run strong across the pond.

The Apostrophe Protection Society’s chairman argues that apostrophes are sometimes essential for clarity. True, the sentence Residents refuse to be placed in bins would be less ambiguous with an apostrophe after the s in residents. We’d have to adjust to reading hell and Ill as he’ll and I’ll. Plural possessives could be tricky.

But punctuation is supposed to convey information, and Eble argues that apostrophes convey precious little. A misused apostrophe, however, tells us the writer was either careless or unable to master grammar rules. It gives us grammar sticklers a reason to look down on others.

Will we see the demise of the apostrophe in our lifetime? I wouldn’t bet on it, but who knows? Language changes. Hyphen use, for instance, is definitely on the decline. Fig-leaf is now usually fig leaf, while pigeon-hole has become pigeonhole. The New York Times recently dropped the hyphen in email.

Once, long ago, apostrophes, like the appendix, served a purpose. I won’t go into their complicated evolution. But more grammarians do seem to be making the point playwright George Bernard Shaw made a century ago. “There is not the faintest reason,” he wrote in 1902, “for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.”

Coming to Park Road Books: Jan Brett, a big chicken bus

In the world of children's books, Jan Brett ("The Mitten." "The Hat," "The Wild Christmas Reindeer") is known for illustrating sumptuous wintry scenes so detailed they make you want to put on a sweater. 

She'll be at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, to publicize her latest picture book, "Cinders: A Chicken Cinderella." Yes, it's a  retelling of the Cinderella story, but it's set in snowy 18th-century Russia and, true to its title, features chickens.

Brett, who raises similarly fancy birds at her home in Massachusetts, will arrive in Charlotte in a custom bus decorated with images of Cinders and other fowl from her new book.

What's the most famous book set in North Carolina?

The headline on my Facebook newsfeed sucked me in, as was its goal.

“This map,” it said, “shows the most famous book set in every state.”

Why a website called Business Insider compiles such lists I don’t know, but I clicked immediately, curious to see the most famous book set in North Carolina. Would it be Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel?” Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain?” Or maybe “A Long and Happy Life,” the debut novel that vaulted Reynolds Price to national fame?

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The most famous book set in North Carolina, according to Business Insider, is Nicholas Sparks’ “A Walk to Remember.”
 
Until it appeared on Business Insider’s list, I had not heard of this 1999 bestseller, which became a movie starring Mandy Moore. Its main character is a teenager in Beaufort who dies of cancer. Sparks, who lives in New Bern, has set many of his novels in North Carolina.

Though I puzzle at this choice, I still like the list because its selections – especially the random-seeming ones – make great conversation starters. (“The Wizard of Oz” for Kansas? Come on. The book’s setting is mostly Oz. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” is a totally better choice.)

Also, the list gives a sense of the depth – or lack of depth – of each state’s literary traditions. Surely it was a struggle to come up with a book for a few states. South Dakota, for instance, got Tom Brokaw’s memoir, “A Long Way From Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties.”
 
North Carolina, on the other hand, has multiple contenders. When I called Ed Southern, director of the N.C. Writers’ Network, his first thought was “Look Homeward, Angel,” published in 1929 and set in Asheville. It’s a classic, probably the greatest book set in North Carolina. It’s also not read much these days. The “most famous” stipulation makes the choice trickier.

So we kept brainstorming. Southern said he could make a strong case for Charles Frazier’s 1997 Civil War-era novel, “Cold Mountain.” It won the National Book Award and the movie version starred Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger. I recalled that Robert Morgan’s “Gap Creek” became plenty famous as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. We agreed that “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” Allan Gurganus’s 1989 bestselling novel, should be in the running.

If you’ve got another suggestion, let me know with a comment here. Also, what do you say about South Carolina? Business Insider chose Sue Monk Kidd’s “The Secret Life of Bees.” I’d go with a Pat Conroy book, probably “The Lords of Discipline.”

Nonfiction November: Carolinas authors write about smart dogs and murder

This month’s roundup of new books by Carolinas authors features nonfiction, including two works sure to appeal to dog lovers.

Veteran journalist Mark Pinsky writes an intriguing story of unsolved murder in “Met Her on the Mountain” (John F. Blair; $24.95). The book recounts a 40-year quest to find out who killed a young antipoverty worker in Madison County.
In 1970, a VISTA worker named Nancy Dean Morgan was found dead deep in the Appalachian mountains. She had been left naked, hogtied and strangled in the backseat of her car. An inept local investigation went nowhere, and when new information reopened the case in the 1980s, prosecutors failed to convict their prime suspect.

Pinsky, a former Los Angeles Times writer, became fascinated with Morgan’s case and began collecting information. With this account, which combines true crime and N.C. political history, “Many readers will be convinced,” Publishers Weekly writes in a starred review, “that his dogged investigation has at last uncovered the truth.”

Pinsky, who now lives in Florida, graduated from Duke University, where he worked on the school newspaper and first heard about Morgan’s murder.

On a lighter note, “Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $26), tells the story of one smart dog. In 2004, John Pilley, a retired Wofford College psychology professor, decided to see how many words he could teach his family’s new border collie puppy.

Ultimately, the dog, Chaser, accumulated and learned the names of more than 1,000 toys and became a media star. The book, written by Pilley with Hilary Hinzmann, describes the professor’s training techniques, which can be used with any dog.

“This marvelous blend of good science and heartwarming dog story will inspire all of us to reexamine our canine friends,” Booklist says in a starred review. Pilley lives in Spartanburg with his wife, Sally, and Chaser. He and the dog are now working on complex sentences.

For more on canine intellect, check out “What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs” (Simon and Schuster; $26.99), by Cat Warren, an N.C. State University English professor.

Warren became intrigued by working dogs through her unusual hobby: Her German shepherd, Solo, is a cadaver dog, trained to search for bodies. She explores how dogs find drugs, detect bombs and can even locate unmarked graves of Civil War soldiers.