Category Archives: books

Two More to Go

books, reading
A Woman Reading, after Pieter Janssens Elinga,1846–47 François Bonvin French
A Woman Reading, after Pieter Janssens Elinga, 1846–47
François Bonvin French (The Met Collection, CC0)

My goal each year is to read at least 75 books. I track my progress in a group at LibraryThing. This year, I am on track to finish the goal by the end of August. I’m at 73 and am reading the two books that will put me at the goal: The Incredible Crime by Lois Austin-Leigh and Puddin’ by Julie Murphy. You can see my whole list here.

The first book, written by a great-great-niece of Jane Austen, is a British crime mystery written in the 1930s during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Besides the mystery, these books are a glimpse into life between the two World Wars as Britain moved away from its class system. One of the wealthier characters who lives on an estate in the country is described as “fedual.” There is smuggling and possible wrong doing at Cambridge and I am hooked.

Puddin’ couldn’t be more different. It is a sequel to Dumplin’, which I read earlier this year and loved. The focus has moved to two of the other characters from the first novel although the whole group is still connected. Body image continues to be an important theme.

Clearly, I enjoy reading a wide variety of books. It is a reminder that our kids are the same. Maybe reluctant readers just haven’t found their niche. It is imperative that we give them as wide a choice as possible if our goal is to help them learn to love reading as a personal, powerful activities. I read everything I was assigned in school, but I always had my own book tucked in my bag ready for a free moment. Maybe some kids need to start with the book in the bag rather than the titles on the syllabus.

Protecting Sacred Lands

books, thinking out loud

Peter Matthiessen‘s book Indian Country has been on my shelf for awhile. I have read his fiction and nonfiction, including In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, his account of the American Indian Movement take over of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre in the late 1800s, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

This book, published in 1984, chronicles contemporary systematic take over of Indian lands across the United States as private companies looked to profitable mining and recreation uses. Matthiessen describes his travels to these often remote locations where Native Americans have maintained their traditional lives and language (many did not speak English) declining the creep of so-called civilization that seemed only to destroy. They inhabit the land in ways that owners do not, connected to an inner geography of sacred spaces passed down from the beginning of time.

Matthiessen is not acting as an impartial journalist. He clearly supports what are described as “traditionals,” groups who are often at odds with the elected tribal councils set up under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Traditionals believe these official councils are really just the puppets of  government and private companies, giving them the go ahead to open Indian lands under their control for their own financial gain, with little thought to the impact on the lives of those who will be displaced. He was attacked in this editorial in The Washington Post for refusing to recognize the legitimate voices of the councils.

I started some follow up research on the various stories and discovered an excellent resource related to the encroachment on sacred lands from The Sacred Land Film Project: https://sacredland.org/. Their map of threatened lands is a good starting point for exploration.

In the noisiness of our world, these stories can get buried, maybe a blurb on the news after reviewing the recent tweets and insults. Right now, protesters are trying to save a sacred mountain in Hawaii.

Social Media Tip for Readers

books, reading, Twitter

I think one of the coolest uses of social media comes from The New York Public Library. Each Friday from 10 – 11 AM, they use the NYPL_Recommends Twitter account to suggest titles for future reading based on your favorite titles.

I just finished the most recent title in Deana Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell mystery series. If you haven’t read these mysteries, I can highly recommend the series. A bit of breathless Victorian kitsch with tongue firmly in cheek. I am caught up with the series, and I need some more feisty Victorian heroines so I asked the New York Public Library.

They recommended Caro Peacock and Tasha Alexander:

If you would prefer to connect with them more directly, their website features staff picks in a long list of genres.

For the Love of Books

books, reading,

I have also been a reader, you know, that kid on the bus curled up with a book. I once missed my bus stop because I was tucked behind the seat reading so intently I missed the stop, and the bus driver didn’t see me. In the days before cell phones, I remember it being pretty traumatic. Someone called someone who called my mom to let her know I would be very late as the driver had to do the whole rest of the route.

The last two books I’ve read have both been a celebration of books and reading and I felt like I spent a week with people who understood that little girl behind the bus seat.

In Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim has collected heartbreaking, joyful essays by women of color about the books they loved, particularly the ones that seemed to draw from their lives, honoring those stories and inspiring these women to tell their own.

Books for Living is Will Schwalbe’s second books about books. (I have not read The End of Your Life Book Club…yet.) These are the books that have made a difference to his life, his beliefs, the way he lives. I had already started moving away from constant connectivity before reading this book and was rediscovering my love of reading, curled up with a book for an hour, being away to lose myself in a different world:

Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can’t interrupt them; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. (p. 14)

Schwalbe suggests we should each construct a list of the books that have been important to us. It may change but those changes will be of interest, too.

I’ve been thinking about that list but am not ready to share it yet. I would love to hear what might be on your own list. Meanwhile, I have another book to read.

 

Collecting Powerful Prose

books, writing

The Last Witchfinder defies description a little bit:  maybe historical fantasy? Author James Morrow follows the horrific history of witch finding in the early to mid 1700s from England to America through the character of Jennet Stearne. The daughter and sister of witchfinders and niece of an accused witch, she spends her life trying to come up with a grand argument that would legally undermine the witch laws, using Newton for her guide.

Along the way, she is abducted by Algonquin Indians, shipwrecked with Ben Franklin, and accused of witchcraft herself. And, in an oddly fascinating twist, the narrator is Newton’s Principia Mathematica, the text that Jennet used for her argument, and in the interludes, the book describes its battle against the Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunting handbook. Here’s where fantasy really takes over.

What I really loved, however, was the rich, evocative  writing, often ironic, and sometimes just fun.

A couple timely samples:

“She [Jennet} wanted only to sit in the shadowed library, let the darkness seep into her bones, and ponder her suspicion that the world contained things of which neither monks nor mathematicians could give a sensible account.” (p. 62)

“I am well aware that the average member of your species will not abandon a pleasurable opinion simply because the evidence argues against it. Self-doubt is a suit of clothes that few of you ever acquire and fewer still wear comfortably.” (p. 113)

And, from the narrator, an anachronistic insight into the contemporary world that is, I think, bleaker than it seems but uncomfortably close to the truth. I would like to think we would take a selfie with the wildflowers (tongue in cheek intended):

“True, thanks to all those exquisite quantum equations, you humans now have television (though in my opinion the whole thing went downhill after The Avengers), mobile phones (allowing you to walk through a field of stunningly gorgeous wild flowers without actually being there), and personal computers (hour after hour you stare at the screen, a life of cybernetic desperation.”

I heard Thoreau echoing in that last bit: “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” he wrote in the opening of Walden. Perhaps cybernetic desperation is not so quiet: living our lives within view of everyone, seemingly all the time.