"Lounging idly in the deserted little waiting-room was the usual shabby, bored, lonely ticket-seller, prodigiously indifferent to the grave beauty of the scene before him and to the throng of ancient memories jostling him where he stood."

Having recently suffered a bout of isolated transient alexia, I worry about a relapse when I encounter a sentence like that. It makes me wonder: Do I still have the ability to read?

That's the first sentence of a novel — writers put a lot of effort into crafting sentence #1, you know! — and that one is calling out to readers who are not me. Somehow every noun needs at least one adjective — or 3 or 6.

The book is "The Brimming Cup" by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It was the #2 bestseller of 1921. (#1 was "Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis.) Here's a great picture of Canfield Fisher:

Wikipedia: "Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early 20th century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States. Her writing helped increase understanding of the Montessori method of child-rearing in the U.S.; she presided over the country's first adult education program; and her service as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951 helped shape literary tastes in the U.S."

Why am I reading "The Brimming Cup" even though I found the first sentence hilariously off-putting? I have a very specific reason, and it's got nothing to do with any reason you might have to read it. My mother has an unusual name. I've never met or even heard of anyone else with that name, even though it sounds fairly ordinary: Marise. I'd always known that the name came from a book her mother had read, but I'd never known anything else about the book.

Now, I know the book is "The Brimming Cup." I was talking to Grok about the rarity of the name and prompted:

I want to read the book to understand my grandmother, Geraldine Beatty: 

I blogged about that photograph back in 2006, here. At the time I said: 

I'm pretty sure this was taken in the 1920s.... The woman in the middle seems to be wearing a flapper costume, what with that headband, but wouldn't a young person have dressed like this then? The women who are not my grandmother are wearing awfully similar coats, and the men have nearly identical hats, yet my grandmother is coatless....

This picture mystifies me and makes me feel sad. It's not just the poignancy of the distant past, but that I never knew my grandmother when she was anything like this young and confident person. The Geraldine I knew suffered and complained. I never got the whole story out of my mother, but I think she completely changed when her fifth (and last) child was born with a hopeless birth defect and died within one year. So for me this picture represents the most unreachable part of the past....

But that part is reachable. I can read "The Brimming Cup"!