Author: Diane

Ex-Libris by Ross King is a double journey throughout Renaissance Europe alternating the travels of the current bookseller with those of a book smuggler, forty years earlier. An erudite version of The DaVinci Code, Ex-Libris is filled with mysterious organizations, secret codes, and menacing spies.

What there is to not like is the interminable name dropping – of European royalty, Thirty Years War events, religious factions, arcane authors and esoteric books.  Ross King is a PhD, scholar, lecturer, and respected nonfiction author. In this work of fiction, he has trouble leaving out even one piece of information. Historical fiction fans will find this a treasure.

Despite the surfeit of facts, the flavor of the times seeps through. There is the setting:  the stench of the filthy Thames; snow blowing into an already freezing carriage; turnips and fish for breakfast. There is the value and importance of books and libraries:  kings buy and sell them; the church, ever fearful, suppresses or destroys them; smugglers steal them. Each political group demands unquestioning loyalty to its beliefs. Bernie Sanders and AOC would have had a very hard time.

As expected in a novel about books and words, descriptions are vivid and compelling. For example, sailors at sea receive an unpleasant surprise: “But slowly a storm front appeared on the eastern horizon, implacable and bruise-black, and began edging its way across the sky like the shadow of an approaching giant. The deck-beams creaked noisily and water poured through the scuttles.  Then the first of the spume broke over the bows…”

Unusual words gave my dictionary a workout.   I thought claudications might be a 17^th century word, but no, it’s technical, and probably one our age group should know – leg cramps. My favorite was a “clowder” of cats (more than two). 

I loved that one of the most valuable books described turned out to be an original by Galileo with his own precise calculations explaining that longitude at sea could be found by a using a chart of the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons. The things we learn from reading!

Bruno Bettelheim, the respected child psychologist, wrote this nonfiction work in the 1970’s about the universal hidden meanings and symbols designed to help children progress through the necessary stages of development. Honed through centuries, fairy tales “translate internal processes into visual images.”

This is a dense book and discussions of the detailed psychological meanings of individual fairy tales became too much. I was out of my depth, but I got the general idea. Many express anger at the “wicked” (step) mother who is no longer willing to do everything for her child; Red Riding Hood has mixed feelings about the wolf in her bed; Jack needs to slay the ogre (bullying, drunkenness) that lives in his (bean) stalk and use his masculinity to provide and protect.  My, my.  Who knew? These stories speak to the child’s unconscious, offering relief and encouragement, nudging the child on the path to independence with the goal of “living happily ever after.”

 Although fairy tales define this phrase in traditional ways: children leave home; the girl marries; the boy provides; we can extrapolate and understand it in terms suitable to the 21^st century. The necessity of striking out on one’s own, finding someone to love and be with, learning an acceptable way to provide for oneself, all ring true as timeless roads to happiness.

They also sound like prescriptions for the very young adult, which is as far as fairy tales take us. But Bettelheim describes the search for meaning as a whole life’s work, and I like to think that literature carries on the fairy tale’s task, with opportunities for more to come. As we live longer, pathways for seniors finding meaning in very different life situations are waiting to be explored and thoughtfully crafted into new stories.

One of the plays was about a jealous, power-hungry stepmother who plots against her new daughter. Could she have been the stepdaughter with a tiny foot that would fit easily into a certain glass slipper? Cinderella is a very old story, first written down in China during the ninth century A.D. and well known in the East before that.

Heywood shows the lack of agency of the two girls who are given by their father to older warriors to cement political alliances. After marriage things don’t change; they are expected to be demure and obedient, produce heirs, and accept their husbands’ lovers. But stifled feelings will out and step by logical step we see idealistic girls become disenchanted women, one of whom leaves her husband for another and is partially responsible for a ten-year war. The other murders her military general husband the day he comes home victorious. Heywood’s sympathetic treatment of the women in this historical fiction offers reasonable possibilities for such actions. And – we get a great brush up on Greek mythology.

A newly elected president appoints a woman he hates to be his secretary of state.  Their term has barely begun when there are bus bombings in England, France, and Germany.  Is the United States next?  And could there be something worse planned?  An insignificant foreign services officer may be the one to crack the secret code.

This is an excellent stand-alone story but knowing something about the authors and current political figures, plus figuring out which author contributed what, adds layers to the fun.  There is the wonderful cameo interview with the incompetent former President “Dunn” (we wish) whose aggressive manner and coarse jokes are so rude.

The audacious secretary of state, who we catch wearing a pantsuit, deals with Russian brutality and Middle East maneuvering as she tries to rebuild relations and reassert America’s authority abroad.  At home, there is confusion and mistrust among her peers.  And wow!  What the intelligence services can find out – and quickly – about any of us.

Although Louise Penny picks up her usual pace considerably in this tale full of feints and misdirection, her use of repetition leapt out at me: “He’d left the US just a day ahead of when he’d planned to.  When he had to.  Just over a day ahead of when the world changed forever.”    She tempers her moralizing, but cannot resist a fable or two.  At the end she produces a delightful Three Pines surprise.

In the acknowledgement section of the book, the two authors tell how they met, became friends, and decided to work together.  This friendship between women shines through the story in the warm relationships between the secretary of state, her best friend, and her daughter.

Like Louise Penny’s Gamache, Donna Leon’s Brunetti, Peter Mayle’s Sam Levitt, or Michael Stanley’s Kubo, all of whom wine and dine in mouthwatering detail in some of the most beautiful places in the world, there is Martin Walker’s Bruno, chief of police. 

Living in a scenic village in the Dordogne, Bruno effortlessly whips up dinner from his garden and local delicacies.   In Chateau Rock, he rides every morning with a charming woman and takes his male basset hound for its first encounter with a lady basset.  Against this idyllic backdrop, there is murder. 

When a farmer is found dead, his children learn he has given his estate to a shady sounding retirement home, and they have been disinherited.   His odd behavior is mixed with Russian money laundering, espionage, and an aging rock n roll singer to make an intricate plot for Bruno to unravel.  This is the next to the latest Bruno mystery, #15.  The most recent, The Coldest Case, was published in 2021.

Kidder provides a tutorial in the history of these two countries, the invasion and control by colonial powers, and the relationship between the Tutsis and Hutus.  He uses flashbacks, a device usually found in fiction, to show Deo’s early life and the atrocities he suffered when barely out of his teens.

The book raises many philosophical questions. What is it about Deo that attracts the most extraordinary help from strangers?  Or – what is it about these people that they are willing to give that kind of help, take a stranger into their small home and support him for an indefinite amount of time?  How does Deo explain to himself why people did the terrible things he witnessed?  What are the manifestations of PTSD and how do they affect a lifetime?  

Years after his escape, Deo has attended the Harvard School of Public Health and Dartmouth Medical school and returned to Burundi to build a hospital.  The interested reader can go beyond the book to the website Village Health Works to see the progress of this remarkable person.

The rhythm of the physical work, the independent people who live along the water, and the leisure to contemplate helps them to reevaluate and find new life directions.  The calm slow pace of the book echoes the leisurely movement of the boat along the canals and through the locks. 

Anne Youngston is also the author of Meet Me at the Museum, a novel about an older man and woman who find each other through a shared interest in the Tollund Man, subject of a poem by Seamus Heaney.  These two charming stories star people in midlife willing to take chances for more fulfilling lives.

At our last book meeting, our group, when talking about Strength, wondered how much the world loses because immigrants, or people in general, are too poor, uneducated, or prohibited by culture from developing their talents.  I was reminded of that when I saw that Noah Stewart, the tenor who sang Mario, Tosca’s lover, is black.  How recently has it been ok for a black man to portray a white woman’s lover?  What a loss it would have been not to have heard this terrific singer who was the best of the three leads.

It is a story of duality.   We see the grandeur and beauty of the setting, the mountains, wild animals, the river ice cracking, snow falling.    But the hardships of homesteading the harsh Alaskan wilderness only bring the couple further loneliness, injury, and despair. 

Then, in the midst of this frozen landscape comes a wish improbably granted.  A little girl appears in the woods looking very much like the child they had made from snow the night before.  She wears its scarf and mittens.   Is she the snow child come to life?   Ivey’s answer is ambiguous.  The girl slowly joins the couple’s life, bringing them the gifts of love and warmth.  Neighbors visiting across the ice become friends, then family; a young man, a surrogate son; and the magic child herself enables them to be the parents they so wanted to be. 

Ivey explores the independent wildness in all of us juxtaposed with the need for love and companionship.  This is a sophisticated telling of an old-fashioned kind of fairy tale, the kind before Disney.  Things didn’t always work out “happily ever after,” but showed life the way it really was with both joys and sorrows.

One of the themes of Ivey’s novel underlines this maxim. Enjoy what you have when you have it because things don’t last forever.

But then – “something happens” to the princess daughter at the prom.  The family is blasted apart, leaving members to grieve and rebuild in their own very individual ways.   Although this particular story seems dated, (the setting is the 70’s; the cultural feeling is the 50’s), the pain and sorrow of trauma are depressingly timeless.  Recovery is a long road.

Oates wrote at a time when novelists thought many lists and precise details made the story more realistic.  For those of us who disagree, the novel is balanced by Oates’s insight into betrayal, cruelty, weakness, revenge, and like the book above, that old cliché, “This too shall pass.” Bad things don’t last forever either.

“Nothing is, my dear.  Only what our opinions make of it.”

My reading friends and I are not the only ones thinking about Joyce Carol Oates lately.  Popping up in my newsfeed today is “Who’s Afraid of Joyce Carol Oates?” by Miles Klee who writes about digital cultural in Mel Magazine.  Klee describes himself as “Mel’s resident tank-top dirt bag, shitposter, and meme expert.”  Not my usual kind of reading material. 

But hurray for 83-year-old Oates to be singled out by the hip younger generation.  Klee describes her Twitter account as one where “A relatively normal day online can tilt into chaos whenever Oates has an idea that travels unfiltered from her mind palace to her feed…She’s an artist, and it’s a pleasure to witness her bold, non-predictable craft.”

One of her more arresting posts: “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naïve?”  Well, that stands apart from the crowd.

The bears in the woods take full advantage, visiting farms for sheep and cat dinner with honey for dessert.  When one uncharacteristically attacks a human, the residents, besotted with guns, take their beloved weapons out for exercise.

The joke-like title prepares the reader for a quirky and humorous book, but this nonfiction work also provides a serious exploration of the unexpected consequences of libertarian thinking.  City inhabitants may be successful in limiting laws about trash removal, fire and police departments, but they can’t do anything about the rules of nature and leave themselves vulnerable to problems solved long ago by civilization.  Vivid, sympathetic portraits bring the residents and their town to life.

Published in 2020, this discussion of personal freedom is very timely.  We might not have bears, but we do have a virus invasion which, like the bears in the book, attacks the vulnerable who pay the price for the “personal choices” of others.

My husband and I have been hiking and bird watching in the woods many times in our lives, but never, until now, have we encountered a live bear. 

While I was reading this book, we were birdwatching in the Washington Cascades, along a trail marked “Wildlife Viewing” when we paused to look at an odd, out of place nest.   Osprey?  It was barely five feet above us – much too low.  Then I saw its three-inch claws.  We were out of there in a hurry and this photo is not ours, but courtesy of Google.  As we met other walkers we warned them, but one group took it as an invitation.  We saw them later, all excited, as they said yes, it most certainly was a bear.  It had uncurled itself and ambled down the tree into the chokecherries.  Was it a cub?  Oh no, she said.  It was bigger than me!

Political change is underway.  The control by the West, England and the United States, is waning.  The powers of China and Japan are rising.  Smaller Pacific islands are rediscovering indigenous strengths.  Australia is suffering growing pains as it sorts out its white/native identity.

While largely political, the book also deals with changes in natural history.  Coral reefs have been depressingly despoiled, but there is excitement about the discovery of new life forms in the deep and a stronger understanding of the global influence of Pacific weather.

The most compelling and shocking chapter was the first, The Great Thermonuclear Sea, about the US testing of atomic weapons on Bikini Island in the Marshalls.  Reading that chapter, I found it hard to know which was worse – the appalling environmental destruction or the uncaring horrific attitude towards the islanders displaced or put in harm’s way.

On the opposite end, the epilogue, The Call of the Running Tide, was a favorite of my book group.  We were all taken with the story of Polynesian exploration – sailors who knew where they were out on the ocean with no navigational instruments, not even a compass, because of their knowledge of the winds, tides, stars, birds and (lying on the floor of the canoe) sound of the ocean.  This lovely chapter tied together the others and ended the book on a hopeful note.

After navigating the depths of Pacific, I was ready for some easy reading.  Two gems came my way. 

Each chapter starts with a quote from one of A. J.’s favorite short stories, thus giving his customers, and us, plenty of possibilities for future reading.

Penny’s ability to evoke a sense of place is superb. I can smell the hot chocolate in the bistro and hear the crunch of ice underfoot as I’m walking away.  There is always an element of moralizing in Penny’s books and this one is on the edge of too much.  Nevertheless, I was happy to sit by the winter fire in frigid Quebec for a few afternoons this summer.

I look forward to seeing what these two do with this popular series.

I would like to say that it was my interest in birds that made me look at this headline, but no, it was really its feisty non-pc attitude.    Andrew Paul, in the AV Club, describes scientific research done in Australia that shows birds are already physically adapting to climate change by enlarging the sizes of their beaks, ears, and legs to help themselves cool in the face of a warming world.

Ethan Hawke is terrific as the fanatical John Brown, playing him with nuance and sympathy.   Yes, Brown is a zealot, but sincere in his faith, large on courage, loving to his family and fellow man.

The well-chosen music, perfectly matched to each scene, gives the movie a dimension the book can’t match.  Its outstanding score is a compilation of negro spirituals, folk tunes, and jazz performed by musical greats ranging from Mahalia Jackson to a hymn by Elvis Presley.

But like the book, the movie raises some uncomfortable issues.  What are we to do with a religious fanatic, one of the sparks of the Civil War, who appears to be right when he said only war would effect the broad social change of freeing the slaves?  I never think of violence and fanaticism in positive terms, but in this case…

I should have been more suspicious, because the subject of this book is persuading blacks to use sales, the hard selling, cold calling kind, to get the success that has been traditionally denied them.  In his view, skill in selling leads to a high paying job in the tech industry.  This novel is fiction with quirky characters and an engaging plot used to drive home a point of view.  Along the way, the tech industry in particular is chided for the lack of minorities in the sales force.  Askaripour encourages blacks to follow this path to success while he says plenty to the whites who would keep them back.

I kept waiting for him to suggest to his readers that they consider WHAT they will skillfully sell, that this bit of moral consideration would be part of the book’s ending.  But no, it wasn’t, and he never did.

But – like the main character, Little Onion, I fell under the spell and became fond of the fiery, fanatical John Brown and wished the story wouldn’t end the way I knew it must. More than an unusual homage, this thoughtful book has a lot to offer.  

The none too flattering depictions of John Brown and Frederick Douglass are timely as we examine our old heroes and find them wanting.  Must heroes be flawless super beings, or is doing just one history changing thing enough to qualify?

Slavery was the flash point subject throughout lawless Kansas in the 1850’s when strangers were accosted wanting to know their stance.  Answering the wrong way could be deadly.   This reminded me too much of our current vax, anti-vax division; although at this point, it is only one choice that is potentially fatal.

The language is funny, “but with me traveling incog-Negro…and the Captain…famous as bad whiskey;” The observations are pointed, “Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway.  Nobody knows who you are inside.  You just judged on what you are on the outside…You just a Negro to the world.”

It is a fine description of Brown and his legacy.    Did McBride pick a bird feared to be extinct because he thought there weren’t enough John Browns left in the world?  

For example – birds’ stomachs and livers atrophy when they are ready to migrate and plump up again at the feeding grounds.  (I wish I knew how to do some of that atrophy part.)  Whimbrels fly into hurricanes and use the winds to propel them on their way.  A new program being developed will use acoustics to identify what kind of birds are in that mass picked up on radar.  Learning exactly where birds stop along the way is helping conservationists target their land purchases or work with peoples who want the birds in their pots.

I am comforted to read about the dedicated biologists in countries all over the world who are working to help birds survive.  It is no longer a given.

But – on the package was a blurb about their “Earth Friendly Packaging.”  Really?  I did not believe them but followed the link to their website – and I think I’m convinced.  There was excellent information about the environmental costs of molded paper egg cartons vs. their cartons made from recycled plastic.  Plus – they will send a postage free label so their customers can return the containers which will be recycled once again.  Reading – such a great tool for evaluating assumptions.

And then there is…

So, a pun, a play on words, and an anecdote walk into a bar…

No joke.

This vignette is the beginning of Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt.  Intrigued by the story, Haupt used it as a starting point to explore starlings, Mozart, 18^th century Vienna, music theory, physics, and even linguistics.  Whew!  Although the book is meticulously researched and full of information, it is not scholarly in tone, but an enjoyable, easy read.

The song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.

To educate herself, Haupt procured and kept a pet starling which flew free in her home.  She united this new firsthand knowledge with research to create stories of possibilities.   About Mozart’s mysterious piece, A Musical Joke, she has an idea.  The Magic Flute?  Another theory.  She riffs on the nature of time.  Does it pass differently for short lived animals who have a faster heart rate?  For the musically trained, there is a chapter comparing music’s structural technicalities with bird vocalizations.  But mostly, this is a charming upbeat story comparing her life with starling Carmen, to Mozart’s life with starling Star.

I especially liked Haupt’s openness to wondering about the unity of nature, and her thoughts on creativity:

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The world of the Native Americans of 16^th century Virginia was ruled by the manito aki, the spiritual underpinning of the world we think of as real. Pocahontas, its priestess, represents that world.  This fascinating book is a well-researched nonfiction study of a culture that knew its time was at an end.   It is also a story of birth as the Indian holy woman and her European wizard alchemist husband (John Rolfe) are brought together by the manito aki to bring forth the new world order that we live in.

This formidable book requires at least a little openness to alternate realities.  An interest in the history of Jamestown and the infighting of English religious factions is not enough to get a person through this tome as the emphasis is on an alternate way of seeing.  At the beginning of the book, my American 21^st century world view made some of this a little hard to swallow; at the end?  Well…I will think about it.

Allen’s sometimes droll tone and abundance of interesting facts make this scholarly book fun (albeit in small doses).  She instructs us in the similarity of the English view of witches, magic, and fairies to the Native view of the gods and shows us that the Indians changed the English as well as the other way round.  We learn that John Rolfe was shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda and this was the basis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  The story that Pocahontas saved John Smith’s life because she was in love with him was just the English version, reflective of the times.  (There are two Johns – Smith and Rolfe.)

As I read her book, I pictured her as a young very au-courant woman, so was very surprised when I learned that she died in 2008 at the age of 68.

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Poverty, drugs, violence, stunted dreams are all here.  The characters, though, are street smart and sympathetic; the plot includes a couple of minor mysteries and is engaging; coincidences abound; old folks fall in love. 

The language is superb.  Yes, there is the blue language of the streets throughout.  But mixed with that are the poignant passages.  Sportcoat, in his 70’s, remembers, sees, his dead wife:

She stood, clasping her hands near her chest, emboldened with the enthusiasm of love and youth, a way of being he’d long forgotten…The newness of love, the absolute freshness of youth…She was so pretty.  So young.

Hettie, his wife, speaks to him:

Back home you gived life to things nobody paid the slightest attention to: flowers and trees and bushes and plants. These was things that most men stepped out on. But you…had a touch for them things.

McBride is not above a lesson or two for his readers:

The world was becoming clear to me then. Seeing how we lived under the white folks, how they treated us, how they treated each other, their cruelty and their phoniness, the lies they told each other…

The threads of the story are tied up neatly providing a satisfying ending.  But after I thought about that happy ending, I realized that it was happy only for the people who got out of the projects – the cop who retired with his lady love; the minor mobster who left to make bagels; the talented baseball player who was the one in thousands good enough.  For the rest, who stayed, the dark clouds gathered and the rain fell as big time drugs moved in.

Although the Taoist symbol yin-yang, black and white, is not about right and wrong, it is the picture that kept coming to mind.  The black darkness is the devastation of war, the destruction of home, shattered family, greed and cruelty of individuals.  The balancing light is found in the human characteristics of tenacity and courage, love, friendship, kindness.  The intertwined structure of the novel, past with present, contributes to this image. 

There are few details about the war in Syria but many about the state of refugee camps in Turkey and Greece.  To endure these, the characters draw strength from the stories they tell themselves, illusions they create, and memories both real and embellished.    Without these, this book, like their journey, would have been too depressing to finish.

One of the legends that particularly resonated with me was the quest for the City of Brass: 

After years, when the City of Brass is finally reached, it is a shiny paradise of beautiful mosques gleaming with brass and jewels, but there is nothing alive in it.  There is a table with etched words that say “At this table have eaten a thousand kings blind in their left eye, a thousand kings blind in their right eye, and a thousand kings blind in both eyes.  Every king who ever ruled this place was so blind that they left the place full of riches and devoid of life.” 

Nations may come and go but greed is apparently ubiquitous and lives forever. 

She tells us the new word “arborglyph,” that is, a communication carved into the tree.  We know about lovers’ hearts, but this was a serious method of communication among people before paper and books.  At this same time, I was reading Pocahontas by Paula Gunn Allen where she also uses the word to illustrate communication methods of native American tribes, thus proving the point that when you learn a new word it will inevitably pop up somewhere else.

There’s this meme going around now that says, “Dinosaurs didn’t … and look what happened to them.”  One I especially like is, “Dinosaurs didn’t eat chocolate and look what happened to them.”  But even better is, “Dinosaurs didn’t read and look what happened to them.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates uses it often in Between the World and Me to castigate those who will do anything to shore up the belief they are “better than” simply because they are white.   I have read other books by angry black men and dislike the tone despite agreeing it is justified.   I much prefer the approach of Isabel Wilkerson in Caste – she lays out her argument in precise, powerful straightforward terms.  But, there are times when rage is appropriate and measured discourse just doesn’t do it.  Coates’s point is that we have reached that time.

He is outraged over the lack of control that blacks have over their own bodies.  Of course this was true during slavery, but he contends that it is still true today.   He cites the harassment and many killings of black men by the police with the tacit approval of society who prefer what they perceive as safety to justice. 

I tried to imagine what it would be like to have that fear any time I got in a car.  Suppose the traffic police started to target white old ladies and give them tickets for minor or made-up issues.  I would be incensed at such harassment.   And then I tried to imagine what would happen if the police started pulling these white old ladies out of cars, frisking them, and regularly shooting them for resistance.  I failed in picturing this.  It is too preposterous to think about grandma being treated in this way and the country would be in a furor.  Yet – this is exactly what happens to a portion of our society, black men.

Coates does an excellent job of portraying the black man’s fear of being killed.  When he ventures into side subjects such as school failure or the limited horizons of black children, he is less successful.  I wish he would have acknowledged that there are other groups who are poorly served by public schools, whose children have stunted dreams, or who do not have control over their own bodies.

The soaring cadences of the last couple of pages remind me of a black preacher rising to the hopeful end of his sermon, but Coates’s tone is ambivalent.  Maybe there is hope, but “Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.”

Like Tea Girl, Sea Women starts with an exploration of the historical cultural practices and beliefs of a unique group of people, in this case, the haenyeo, or deep sea divers, of Jeju, South Korea.  Only the women dive, leaving the men at home to care for small children.  See has a good time with this inversion of our norm.

The harsh condition of the divers’ lives is leavened by See’s favorite topic, relationships between women:  mothers and daughters, and girls who vow to be best friends forever.  When World War II and its aftermath comes to their island, their hardships increase and relationships are tested.

Although full of interesting information, both about the divers and seeds of the Korean War, this book is too dark to say I really liked it.  The difficulties of the characters in Tea Girl are balanced by the pleasant topic of tea; here, their difficulties are intensified by the cruelty of war.

In The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner, the opposite is true. The first chapter could have been describing my life these days.  Joe Allston, the main character, observes the fat towhees in the yard, goes for a walk, looks through old photos, thinks about volunteering somewhere.

How does an author tell a satisfying story about old age?  He must deal with the general ennui, waning abilities, chronic illness, friends dying, yet bring his characters to contentment at the end.  Stegner uses the device of a postcard from an old friend.  When Joe and his wife Ruth receive it, they relive the time, twenty years ago, when they rented rooms from her in Denmark.  Interspersed with this emotional remembered story is the routine discontented present.

Some of the ruminations about old age go on too long and the story drags.  Then, when the reader is lulled into accepting this pace, there comes a wallop.  Somewhat like life.  I like that the story begins with birds, and ends with this lovely image: “It is something…to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while drinking and boasting…go on below; a fellow bird who you can look after and find bugs and seeds for…” 

Stegner was 67 when he wrote this; it was his next to last book.

The Pint of No Return details the festivities of Octoberfest complete with descriptions of the beautiful Northwest in the fall.  A film crew making a documentary, talented female brewer (main character), budding romance, plus much information about making and drinking beer provide a needed respite from all the serious books out there.  Her three other series, The Bakeshop Mysteries, set in Ashland, Oregon, Pacific Northwest Mystery Series and Rose City Mystery Series all sound appealing to this Oregon reader.

 Virginia Woolf lived in a time when all upper-class people had live-in servants.  How else would they haul water up flights of stairs, light fires, empty chamber pots, and produce, on a wood or coal stove, three formal meals a day plus tea.  The huge difference in housekeeping between one hundred years ago and now is clearly brought home.

The relationships between Woolf and her servants interest the author as much as their duties and living situations. The information is presented mainly from the upper-class point of view.  Woolf left diaries and voluminous written material.  Her servants did not.  The author tries to equalize the situation by a thorough examination of government and institutional records, but there is little personal material available.

Light’s book would appeal to the reader who wants to learn more about Virginia Woolf’s life and writing.  I was caught by Woolf’s conflicting emotions about the servants.  Here was a self-proclaimed feminist, a liberal thinker of her day, who tormented herself over the question of the poor, but was unable to see those who lived in her home under her nose as worthy of concern.  The way she writes about her servants is appalling.  If it was so hard for someone like her to overcome the straitjacket of convention, is it any wonder we continue to have trouble?

This book would also appeal to the reader interested in women’s history of the early 1900’s in London.  Light tells about the high number of abandoned children left in the poor houses who were trained with one goal in mind – to be servants.  And third are Woolf’s exhaustive ruminations on social structure and her conflicting desire for an independent life with leaving her underwear for someone else to wash.

Reading this made me think about what it would be like to have outsiders in the house day and night.  What would they think of me if I read or napped in the afternoon?  Would their observing presence make me uncomfortable?  It would, and I understand better why Woolf and her class created enough barriers,  both mental and physical, between themselves and the servant class, so that they would not care.  Their opinions just didn’t matter.

And a last thought – currently, we are very concerned in our culture with the residual effects of slavery which ended 150 years ago.  Shouldn’t we also recognize that the long-lasting effects of a class system that produced mind numbing poverty, ignorance and grueling working conditions less than 100 years ago might be responsible for some of the problems among whites today? 

She wants to balance the masculine Thoreau, Muir, Audubon names that control our view of nature writing by inspiring us to read some of the women authors who have made so many contributions without equal fame.

Aalto whets our appetite with summaries, excerpts and commentaries about twenty-five diverse writers ranging from Dorothy Wordsworth who journaled in the early 1800’s, more well-known authors like Mary Oliver and Rachel Carson, to current native American and black voices, like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Carolyn Finney.  In addition, there are many honorable mentions.  What a wealth to choose from!

This is an excellent selection from the many Western women of the last two hundred years who are receiving recognition for nature writing of all kinds: Vita Sackville-West, the developer of the famous English garden Sissinghurst;  Saci Lloyd, a teacher who writes “cli-fi” (climate change fiction); Camille Dungy, a poet who writes about the very scientific concept of trophic cascade (what happens when a top predator is reintroduced into an area).   Living in an environmentally oblivious neighborhood as I do, I am comforted to know that the expanse of nature writers is so broad (and these are just the women).

Those of you who know my less-than-avid interest in history will be all the more impressed with Aalto to learn that she has enticed me to choose one of the “honorable mentions” that reeks of history to put on my “list,” Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat by Paula Gunn Allen.  Sounds fun!

And there is a new word – mudlarking – which is one of the author’s hobbies.  It means scavenging in river mud for objects of value, commonly on the tidal River Thames.  The term can be expanded to include finding an unexpected treasure such as when searching through old research files; I think of garage sales.

So it is in Run.  Patchett introduces us to a prominent white politician, happily married, one child. The couple adopts two black infants.  The wife dies.  When the boys are grown there is an automobile accident that gets the story rolling.  A black woman who saves one of the boys turns out to be the mother who gave him up for adoption.

The story gently explores the relationships among all these people – the neglected first son, the white father pressuring the adopted boys to succeed; the black mother who wanted a good life for her boys – and now, her daughter thrust into the center.  One unguarded, careless moment that changes everything is a common theme, but Patchett does a good job with it.

Comparing the treatment of race in this barely fifteen-year-old story to how it is treated in novels written currently is thought provoking. There are comments about black children being ignored and not seen, about black uninsured hospital patients receiving more casual care, but oh how mild these comments are compared to what we read today.  Is it the age of the book or the white author?

Are there other female Native American detectives in fiction?  Bernie, the Navajo wife and daughter, fills the empty spot.  The grandeur of the Southwest, valuable tribal pots, Navajo customs are all here in this compelling mystery.

Do any of you follow Books with Sue Fitzmaurice on Facebook?  She always has the best quotes!  Notice that this one comes from Powell’s Compendium of Readerly Terms.  The Compendium is a real thing put together by Powell’s Books in Portland.

Here’s another:

It is easy to find these very fun definitions online.

The storyline follows the main character Li Yan as she emerges from her village’s restrictive superstitions into the modern world.  Mentored by her teacher, she leaves the village for a coveted position at a new tea school where she will become the tea equivalent of a sommelier. 

This novel twines three threads.  Number one is Li Yan’s story which explores several things:  an enduring mother/daughter relationship, changing friendship between two young women, the courage of one who finds her way into the new while keeping what is worthwhile from the old.  Second, is the story of the tea.  I had never heard of pu’er tea, or tea cakes, or vintage teas.  Mild green tea bags have been my choice.  But there is a whole world out there and See steeps us in it.  The information is accurate, and the places are real.   The third line threading through the others is the adoption of Chinese infants by wealthy Americans.  We meet Haley who grows up both Chinese and American, both grateful and angry at her position.  See expertly weaves the three parts to give an integrated compelling story with a satisfying ending.

Tea Girl reminded me of Song of the Lark by Willa Cather in the sense that we see the importance of mentoring.  In both novels, someone in the town spots a bright child and cares enough to “interfere” and give assistance.

It must have been true for Ernest Hemingway because he wrote A Moveable Feast about his life in Paris forty years after he lived there.  It is an idealized memory of Paris in the 20’s when he was young, healthy, optimistic and still in love.

After the Hemingway television series, we wanted to read something of his, but I didn’t want the war stories or violence of the bull fights.  A Moveable Feast is not one story, but a series of vignettes, recollections of restaurants, wines, people he knew and places they went.  It’s a nice homage to Paris and a lifestyle of a hundred years ago.  I still think of Hemingway as a somewhat current writer, so it is a shock to think about that hundred-year part.

A law clerk to one of the justices discovers she has been given his power of attorney when her boss falls into a coma.  There is a case; he is the swing vote; one side (with the impeachable president) will do whatever it needs to win.  The judge, having anticipated what may happen, left her a set of instructions encrypted in chess moves.  The case revolves around genetic manipulation and along the way we see evidence of the exciting medical possibilities but also receive warnings about misuse and terrorism.  Having just lived through a pandemic year, I was receptive to the concerns of this timely book.

Although this is the first mystery published under her real name, Abrams has written eight romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery.  I’ve read a couple and found them lighter and more relaxing than this one – but fine stories also.

“The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang is a twelve-page gem that comments on the near extinction of the rain forest parrots around the observatory.  These are birds who address each other by name and, studies have shown, don’t just “parrot” words, but understand what they are saying.  The feathered narrator, judging from the experience of its kind, thinks that extra-terrestrials might be wise to avoid humans.

The text of this very short story can be found free online at Electric Literature.  It can also be purchased for your Kindle for 99 cents.

“The Great Silence” was recommended in a NYT opinion piece by Ezra Klein called “Even if You Think Discussing Aliens is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out,” dated May 13, 2021.  Apparently, UFO’s, like the psychedelics I wrote about last time, are now being taken seriously.  The Pentagon, CIA, and other government agencies all have information on the subject that has been consolidated into a just released report.  In true political fashion, the report doesn’t assert a definite opinion, but if the CIA thinks it might be true – does that make us more or less likely to think so too?