Category Archives: reading

Saying Goodbye to Fictional Friends

books, reading,

Book Cover for Killer CharactersToday, I reached the end of a mystery series  by Ellery Adams called the Books by the Bay mysteries. Killer Characters is the eighth and final book in the series. I don’t think I have ever read all the books in a cozy mystery series so wasn’t sure how an author would finish it up.

The series focuses on a group of friends in a small coastal North Carolina town. Olivia Limoges, the main character, was born in Oyster Bay but after her mother dies and her father disappears, she spends many years living with a wealthy aunt and traveling the world. She has returned to the town as a business owner and a member of the Bayside Writers Book Group. The group includes the town’s police chief, and they work together to solve the mysteries, each bringing different strengths to the problem. Olivia’s smart and obedient standard poodle Captain Haviland often plays a role as well.

I really enjoyed the series. I often vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina so love the setting and have been to many of the locations. Adams uses the setting to form the basis of many of the stories with plots revolving around Native American, seafaring, and Appalachian communities.

Adams has created characters that grow and change with each book. She explores their relationships within the group and with others outside the group. In Oyster Bay, she has created a rich community with few of the sometimes flat characters that can populate mysteries. Even peripheral characters have a bit of a back story.

And while I will miss it, I think Ellery Adams made the right decision. We had grown with this group of writers in Oyster Bay, NC, as far as we all could go together. It was time to let them all go. And, as she had with the whole series, Adams didn’t provide the perfect happy ending you might expect.

This was the first book in the series that I read rather than listed to as I accidentally ordered the Kindle version. I read it in a day and cried at the end and then even re-read the first chapter of the first book that was included with the digital version. Adams had created a wonderfully rich character in Olivia Limoges, and I will miss her.

Local History: New Resources and Recommended Reading

history, Media, reading

The Digital Public Library of America is a portal to digitized collections across the United States. I served as a volunteer ambassador for several years. Last year, I used their search engine and collections to create a series of postcards.

b x w photo of police and protesters
Public Domain, courtesy of VCU

Today, DPLA announced the launch of the  Digital Virginias service hub, which offers more than 58,000 items for research and exploration. One of the collections highlighted in the press release is a group of 490 photographs from Virginia Commonwealth University that document the 1963 Civil Rights protests in Farmville, Virginia. The photos, like the one to the left of protesters and police, have been released into the public domain.

Police arrest protesters outside College Shoppe, Main St., Farmville, Va., July 27, 1963
Photo Courtesy of Freedom Now Project (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

VCU is sponsoring the Freedom Now Project, an interactive introduction to the Farmville protests. Photos in the Flickr set include extensive notes help with identifications and context. For instance, this photo identifies the protesters and police outside the College Shoppe and includes a link to a newspaper article about the arrests.

Farmville is located in Prince Edward County, which was at the heart of the closing of public schools in Virginia known as Massive Resistance. The photos in the collection were taken by the police with the thought of being used as part of court cases.  Now, in the fullness of time, they show the raw emotions–frustration and persistence–as the protesters interact with the police.

In her book, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, Kristen Green tells the story of Massive Resistance from the ground as she grew up in Prince Edward County in the 1980s and attended the private school–known as a segregation academy–that was begun during the public school closings in 1960. She weaves the history with her own story and confronts ugly truths: her grandparents led the fight to close the schools and deny the county’s African American (and poor white) residents five years of schooling rather than integrate the schools. It took nearly 25 years for the private school to admit black students and then only under an ultimatum from the court. She was an eighth grade student at the private school when it was integrated and completely unaware of the still rampant segregation in her community. Ultimately, Green confronts her own ignorance. The book is a compellingly personal look at this dark period of history in Virginia.

Green described the lengths that some African American parents went to get education for their children, often requiring long separations,  sending them across the border to North Carolina or to relatives or even strangers in other counties. Most families, however, didn’t have the resources necessary to pay for travel and board.

…the vast majority of children stayed home and their only formal education would come in the form of church training centers. There, for a few hours a day, volunteers taught the kids basic skills. Many children simply played or, if they were old enough, went to work in the fields with their parents and pick tobacco. Some would never return to school. (Green, The Atlantic, 8/1/2015)

Green recommends visiting the Moton Museum in Farmville to learn more. Farmville had been the site of protests beginning with a student strike since 1951 and the former Robert Russa Moton High School, now a National Historic Landmark and museum, isthe student birthplace of America’s Civil Rights Revolution. Three-fourths of the Brown vs Board of Education participants came from the Moton student strike.

 

 

 

 

 

The Inevitable Let Down Or Taking A Day

community, reading, social networking, thinking out loud

Our MyrtleI just needed a day, I think, to do not much after months of doing, doing, doing. I had planned to travel today for a last bit of holiday vacation  but slept badly last night and woke late feeling low, not prepared for a long car drive even with a decent book to listen to. I messaged my old friend who was lovely and supportive; thank goodness for old friends, indeed. We’ll meet up tomorrow at an annual get together of other old friends, mostly women I worked with at my first teaching gig in the late 80s, and then spend a few days recuperating from it all with sales shopping and binge watching and at least one movie theater movie, probably Mary, Queen of Scots. I look forward to this annual trek and know it will be restorative, but I just needed a day to make the transition.

One thing I did do was set up my feed reader as part of my general goal of being better connected. I emptied it completely and decided to just start with the people Jen Orr mentioned in her blog post. I recognized all the names as thoughtful people who were doing good work around creativity and equity. It is a good start, I think, and I am trying to keep things sustainable. I plan to have this group as a core of regular reading because I know they will connect me with a wider community and then I can add others to the core list. I hope it is a better strategy than filling the feed with every person I might possibly read and then being overwhelmed by the number of posts.

My organizational efforts  were immediately rewarded with this beautiful prose poem by Sherri Spelic reflecting on the holiday and the coming year, what we bring with us, what we leave behind, what we look forward to.

A Few Random Notes for the New Year

adult learning, blogging, books, reading, technology

It is warm enough here on the farm to have the doors open. I sat on the rocking chair on the porch and started reading my first book for the year: Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding. The first chapter pulled me in: an informal history that manages to celebrate not just birds but explorers and wilderness. I am, admittedly, a bird nerd so this may not be general interest, but it goes along with my desire to learn more about some of my hobbies.

I  chose this book as part of a challenge on LibraryThing, a reading community that I have belonged to since 2005. I have met a few of the folks in real life but most are virtual friends who share my love of reading and books. I want to spend more time here in 2019: again, an opportunity to focus on more deeply on reading, one of my lifelong hobbies.

I was surprised and honored to be mentioned by Jennifer Orr who included one of my recent posts in her year end review. I did a bit more blogging at the end of 2018 and knowing at least one person read and thought about my post might be enough to keep me going into the new year. Plus, Jennifer’s reviews provide a great start to my reading list for 2019. I plan to be much more intentional with my online time in the coming year. Less mindless scrolling and more meaningful interaction.

I am most excited about sponsoring a 4H special interest group related to coding in my local community. I live in one of the poorest counties in Virginia, underserved in many ways. But there are champions, and I have been able to connect with a few to sponsor the after school club in January. I spent my holiday break doing curriculum and lesson planning for our work together.

I think my biggest challenge is finding a work/life balance, especially when there is a huge overlap between those two things.

But I also love to play music and want to become more proficient on the guitar and ukelele, maybe even connect with a face to face group of musicians.

And I want to make time to create in all kinds of ways: crocheting, paper cutting, electronics. One of my best moments from 2018 was participating in the local library’s Trunk or Treat event on Halloween and getting folks to interact with the screaming pumpkins and the joke telling hat, both powered by Makey Makey.

One Hundred Books: One Summer: American,1927

books, reading

I have read 100 books this year. I just updated my Library Thing list and realized I had reached the milestone. You should be able to view my list here.

I’m not ready to reflect on the full list yet, but one book that seemed to speak to the present day was Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927. Here is the review I wrote on my thread at Library Thing:

One Summer by Bill Bryson was a detailed and fascinating dive into the summer of 1927. Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight in May sets the stage for what really was an extraordinary summer in the life of America. Bryson weaves the threads of history together from the Great Mississippi flood to the rededication of Mt. Rushmore to execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. He connects to our own time in his descriptions of nationalism and the eugenics movement with Iowa, at one point, outlawing conversations in any language than English even on the telephone. Iowa’s governor commented that there was no use for any other language for prayer as God only listens to English (p. 165).

There are light hearted anecdotes as well and Bryson’s description of the rise of radio reminded me of many other technology adoptions. In the early days, anyone could start a radio station. It was an immediate connection to the world that people had not experienced before in a wide way. Bryson believes Lindbergh Day in 1927 was the day that really made radio as everyone wanted to be part of the celebration as the hero was honored with a ticker tape parade.

I just glanced at someone else’s review and realized all I have missed that Bryson manages to both include and connect to the threads. Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, in an effort to stage a murder, left an anarchist newspaper behind as evidence that foreign agents had murdered Ruth’s husband and stolen some jewelry. It was that kind of anti-immigrant sentiment that made it easy to accuse and execute Sacco and Vanzetti. Bryson really teases out that thread to come to a conclusion about this trial. I won’t spoil it for you.

There was Babe Ruth, Showboat, Prohibition, Al Capone, talkies, just a huge slice of American history served in a jaunty style even as he uncovers some of the ugliness that lurked pretty close to the surface.

This is a timely book, a reminder about history repeating itself.