In the story within the story, simple Aethon, in ancient times, sees a play about someone who escapes the world of men to join the world of birds who live in a city called Cloud Cuckoo Land where wine flows freely and honey cakes arrive on the backs of turtles.  Understanding this to be reality, he determines to find this utopia, and looks for a magician to turn him into a bird.  This charming tale, supposedly written by an Antonius Diogenes, is discovered, read, and loved throughout generations.  It is the delightful story that unites the disparate sections of our novel.

Five main characters live hundreds of years apart.  Two of them are young teens involved in the siege of Constantinople in the 1400’s.  Saracen (Muslim) Omeir with his special team of oxen has been conscripted to join the sultan’s attacking army.  Christian Anna, forced to work in a monastery embroidering linens for bishops, finds herself abandoned during the siege.  Seymour, in the present time, is a lonely idealistic boy whose best friend is an owl.  Orphaned Zeno grows up to fight in Korea where his love teaches him Greek.  Konstance, in the future, is headed for a new planet named Oph2 (off to) beyond the clouds. All these young people are touched by the power of Diogenes’ tale which is an homage to storytelling, reading, books, libraries, and librarians.

A few lines of his story pop up in the fifteenth century, a few more in the present, again in the future, and repeat. Not even the individual stories are in chronological order but shift back and forth.  Piecing their fragments together echoes what must be done with the ancient Diogenes folio which is found with pages mixed up and sections unreadable.

An additional joy of the book is spotting the allusions to real Greek literature, characters, and historical events, then teasing them out from the fictional ones. For example, the phrase Cloud Cuckoo Land comes from The Birds, a real Greek play, but it was written by Aristophanes, not Diogenes. I sorted out some of this with help from historically minded friends, but it is not necessary to the enjoyment of this compelling novel.

And finally, since the puzzle motif is so strong, I can’t help but think about Wordle, another word puzzle that is so popular (and addictive).  Maybe puzzles are in the air these days, or – (sorry for the pun) at least in the clouds.

Many thanks to all my sister readers who recommended this very excellent book with the strange title. 

Its structure reflects the lighthouse, the image of its title. Section one, bright and shining, pulses with optimism and life. It culminates in the exquisite dinner party where the Boeuf en Daube is perfectly done and Paul and Minta are newly engaged. For this brief moment, all are bathed in comfort, security and happiness.

But time passes and light disappears. The last section brings the darkness of grief, death, and war. When the children, grown now, finally achieve a trip to the lighthouse, it is not as they imagined it would be. As the book ends, it is Lily Briscoe the artist, less attractive, less socially adept, who emerges as the main character as she finds her way to balance and contentment.

Woolf’s stream of consciousness and deftly changing points of view put us inside the characters’ minds giving an immediacy and intimacy to their shifting reactions.  The rhythm of this echoes both the lighthouse and movement of the waves.  She paints a familiar picture of aristocratic life in turn of the century England, an opinionated scholarly man supported by a capable pleasant woman who is wife and mother with servants for the household duties. 

We never learn the Ramseys’ first names.  For him, I saw it as a sign of respect, and his power, for his guests to refer to him this way.  But her – she is “Mrs. Ramsey” even to friends who love her.  What does that say about her identity?

This wonderful book can be enjoyed on the level of its story, descriptions, and characters. For something a little deeper, there is symbol and metaphor. For something more serious yet, there are musings on the meaning of life by a brilliant author.  Or, maybe best of all, it can simply be experienced as a work of art created by an exceptionally talented artist.

Liselle is married to a white attorney who has just failed at his first bid for elective office. As the story opens, she, like Mrs. Dalloway, is planning a dinner party for that evening. Her former lover, Selena, troubled about homelessness, poverty, the ills of the world, has been hospitalized for mental health treatment twice and lives with her mother. The happiness the two had together has since eluded them, and now, they have a second chance.

Although the story takes place in one day, Solomon’s use of flashbacks and stream of consciousness enable her to easily switch back and forth between the thoughts of the two women over the intervening years. I was especially interested in what Liselle felt comfortable doing in society as half of a black lesbian couple compared to what she would do as half of an interracial heterosexual couple.

The language, aggressively younger generation, is somewhat off-putting.   This is a provocative read by a definitely not “old white guy” author – or white woman either. There may be overtones of Virginia Woolf, but Solomon has strongly made this story her own.

The conductor acknowledged that the composer was Russian but used the opportunity to condemn the oppression he had suffered as part of Russia’s anti-gay persecution.   We were then asked to stand in solidarity against oppression and aggression everywhere while the symphony did a rousing emotional rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem.  Nicely done.

The first section, reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying follows them as they put their father’s corpse in a trunk, steal a horse, and look for the right place to bury him. The dry hills they pass through have golden grass, but it is the only gold left.

A flashback tells the mother’s typical story. Led by hope and promises of gold and land, she and two hundred other Chinese sail to California. When they arrive, they are given poor-paying, dirty, unsafe work in the coal mines. Father, born here but who “looks like them,” is assumed to speak their language and is hired as a liaison, teacher.  Success and luck do not follow the couple and they, like so many of the non-winners in the story of the West, sink into poverty and despair. The image of the tiger, usually a Chinese symbol of good luck, appears throughout the book, but it has turned ominous, and it is bad luck that stalks them, or at best, the indifference of the wilderness.

The parents have passed on toughness and self-sufficiency to their children who survive, find different paths, and separate.  One, identifying as male, chooses adventure. The other sister, looking for the warmth of home, chooses civilization. Eventually, the call of family, of belonging to someone, and being with others like themselves becomes strong. Their reunion tests the strength of those “family first” lessons.

Zhang gives voice to the Chinese prospectors, miners, and their families, groups of people generally missing from the romanticized stories of the American West.

Homeless in their 50’s, they choose to walk several hundred miles along the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, camping for months until they find a small place to live.

Wild Silence continues the story, telling how they manage afterwards. Immersion in nature during the months of the hike has slowed the progression of Moth’s disease and he enrolls in a sustainable agriculture degree program. Still traumatized by the loss of her home and business, Ray Winn hides in the house but is eventually motivated to write the story of their trip.

This lovely non-depressing book has much to offer. Most striking are the descriptions of the natural world. There are the plants and animals of Cornwall plus its land and weather. There is a short but difficult hike in Iceland in the shoulder season.  Saturday it is summer, but Sunday, their last day, is winter.  There are the glories and majesties of Icelandic mountains, the hardships of the trek, their relationships with much younger campers.

While in Cornwall, they are offered a neglected house and worn-out farm to restore and rewild. The concept of rewilding, or naturally bringing the farm back to sustainability, is very satisfying, and I enjoyed seeing with them the first buds on the apple trees, the new green of wildflowers and grasses, and the return of endangered curlews.

Winn paints inspiring pictures of nature, but it is the example of the couple’s emotional resilience that is most impressive. Suffering some of the hardest blows life can inflict, they find the agency to make creative personal choices that eventually lead them to active new paths. Moth Winn, nine years after his diagnosis, still manages the physical labor of the farm. Ray Winn, who never wrote before, has penned two best sellers.

The title of the first book, The Salt Path, which is so often referred to in this one, is reminiscent of Atlantic Ocean salt spray but also the original salt route through Germany. That route’s purpose, bringing a life necessity to many, echoes Winn’s feeling about the role of nature.   

The title of The Wild Silence underlines humanity’s need for wild places and the author’s intense concern over their disappearance. “There was a silence in the air, no bird calls, or insects buzzing, not even the gentle rustle of the seed heads of grass moving in the wind.  Just a hot, still, wild silence.  The silence of an empty land where no wild thing lived.”  Such is the description of the acreage they will bring back to life.

There is the feeling Winn has in Iceland, “…there was an overwhelming awareness of the earth gathering itself, preparing.  Rising toward the moment when it would shake like a wet muddy dog and then go about its business.  Rid for good of the annoyance of humanity.” (Oh dear, more Sixth Extinction.)  But optimistic resilient people that the couple are, they go back to the farm to wait for the growth of spring. There was no problem reading Silence without having read Salt Path. The beautiful story is well told and stands alone. 

A would-be bank robber inadvertently takes hostage a small group of people viewing a prospective new apartment. While awaiting rescue they begin to confide in each other, and the problems of everyday life are shared. A widow is lonely as New Year’s Day approaches; a long-married couple doubt if their marriage will continue; a young couple, pregnant, worry about their ability to parent. And then there is the white rabbit who shows up. Through this runs the thread of long past suicide – one that happened and one that didn’t.

This sympathetic portrayal of the problems of living doesn’t shrink from reality, but, at least this time, they are resolved happily.  A quote from The Merchant of Venice, that a character gets almost right, sums up its optimistic tone, “How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

And a quote that especially appealed to me,“Even if he knew the world was going to hell tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.”

I look at the world now and am grateful that I live in a time when I don’t have to witness the chaos of its destruction. I’ve come to believe that we are very probably living at the start of an extinction which will see much of the natural world disappear. If this sounds overly dramatic, Kolbert thought so too.  She knew she had to start slowly to build her case.

Just a few hundred years ago, scientists didn’t believe there was such a thing as extinction. There were many theories about those large fossils – what they were and where the animals had gone. Eventually, people came to realize that some of those bones represented animals that were not coming back. Much later, geologists began to realize that extinction didn’t have to happen gradually; there were times in the geological record, five (!) known so far, when 90% of life on earth suddenly disappeared.

Kolbert presents a meticulous body of work to support the hypothesis that a sixth extinction has begun. Scientists have named our age the Anthropocene, or the time of human beings who have had a profound effect on all other life and literally changed the makeup of the planet.  Snowball rolling downhill is the image that came to mind as she discussed the effects of global warming and ocean acidification, the speed at which these things are happening, and the large loss of plant and animal life that has already occurred. We are used to the idea that our world has changed course once in the past; after all, there are no more dinosaurs. But the fact that it has done it five times, that it will continue to do so in the future, and we are witnessing the beginning of the sixth – that is disturbing indeed.

When I read these scientific books, I am always so impressed with the vast amount of detailed, unpleasant, repetitive drudgery involved in teasing out a particle or two of new information. Kolbert presents vivid stories of dedicated scientists and hardworking grad students spending their days doing just this.

But what of the business leaders and politicians who are in the position to make a difference, to be the “someone to do something?” Their days are also filled, many times too much so, but not with worry about snails living near vents in an ocean, dying because of too much acidification.  How do we switch our collective focus from the immediate and particular to the looming and only somewhat distant future?

My reading group did not have an answer; rather, there was the dreary realization that stopping massive climate change will take massive cooperative effort which is not in evidence these days. Kolbert tells us however that we do have that ability. Humans first came to dominate all other animals because our genes, more than those of any animal, promote cooperation.  Primitive humans with few weapons figured out how to kill large game.  They worked together as a group to kill mastodons and the group ate well.  But looking at it from another point of view is not so optimistic. The mastodons, which comprised all those dinners, are now extinct. 

The most unsettling thing missing is the setting. All throughout this short novel, I looked for clues. Eventually the narrator is called signora; there is a piazza; the town closes in August. This lack made me realize how we always put the people we know in their “place.” This is a friend from work; this other is a neighbor; this is someone from my book group. But Lahiri tells us “…when all is said and done, the setting doesn’t matter…”  Doesn’t it?  It’s an interesting question. 

What the book has in abundance are descriptions of the minutiae that make up the majority of most lives, such as the routine physical things that become habitual or casual relationships with people regularly seen but not known. Lahiri’s use of stream of consciousness gives a running commentary on the narrator’s reactions and emotions, the pleasure of unexpected kindness, the irritation with an unpleasant co-worker. This emphasis on the immediate reminded me of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now and the mindfulness movement he helped to popularize. Perhaps Lahiri is saying your whereabouts doesn’t matter; life happens wherever; pay attention.

And yet – at the end of the book, the narrator (she has no name) goes away for a year’s sabbatical, crossing “a border” thus choosing to change the setting of her story.  Perhaps this character who has had no direction (plot) or close relationships (characters) finally generates enough agency to go out and look for her place in the world.  My co- readers and I all had different ideas about the point of this novel.

I certainly didn’t get the meaning on my first attempt, when I listened rather than read. This book requires the ability to slow down, reread, stop and think. It’s an interesting example of when listening to something read in an unchanging measured pace is totally inadequate.

One thread running through the book is that women are valued when they can make a contribution to the family’s welfare. For a long time that value was childbearing only. A woman past that age was superfluous and just an additional mouth to feed. She might find a place for herself if she was needed to care for grandchildren or do chores. As women lived longer and a middle class developed, women could expect many years after childbearing was over.  What to do with them? 

Giving women the right to fill that time as they wished was the purpose of many reformers. They felt that women need not stay unwanted and hidden at home but could, and should, find a cause – helping the poor, suffrage for women, abolition of slavery, the temperance movement (to keep the family intact.)  Eventually toes were dipped in water and women took jobs – and then had careers!  Collins tells about the women who led the way and the changing tolerance of society towards working, and now governing, women.

Of course, there are more causes than ever today, the environment comes to mind, but I wish she had said more about women feeling they finally have permission, and time, to do things just for their own enjoyment – painting, music, chess, golf, travel, a lot of reading.  The book emphasizes the leader, the celebrity, rather than the majority of us at home who might be interested in less pressure and quieter pleasures.

Helping senior women (and men) to lead more fulfilling lives are the many improvements in health care.  We are reminded of the easily fixable things today that caused misery and illness a hundred years ago.  We meet the advanced thinkers who connected health with lifestyle rather than God’s decree and recommended exercise and keeping the drinking water separate from the sewage.

A quote from Alva Vanderbilt illustrates the flavor of this funny educational book, “Brace up dear. Pray to God. She will help you.”

Our views of ripe age and 53 have certainly changed.

Salim, the main character, begins to tell his story when he is seven.  He describes the hut he lives in, his mother and uncle, his small village home in Zanzibar.  His tale unfolds in a leisurely manner as he gets older and he, and we, learn more about the complexities of his life.  Eventually, this likable and sensitive young man goes to live in London with his uncle and aunt and we experience, with him, his disillusionment with them, and his difficulties in adjusting to London.

On this level, not much else happens and it is a tribute to the author that Salim’s day to day life is so appealing.  When I picked up the book, I felt like I was opening an email from a friend I didn’t get to see very often.  Maybe nothing special had happened, but I was glad to hear anyway. 

Under this benign attractive story there is another plot developing.  As Salim matures, he begins to question some of the troubling parts of his childhood.  Why don’t his parents live together?  Why doesn’t his father like him?  The mystery, like an ominous movement under placid waters, surfaces occasionally until the last section when it emerges fully.

Many grand topics are touched on, colonialism, revolution, corruption, religion, immigration, but the heart of the story is found at home in the powerful effects of family secrets.  Gurnah took the title Gravel Heart from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play whose influence he acknowledges at the end of his novel:

“Unfit to live or die:  O gravel heart!  After him fellows; bring him to the block.” 

Unfortunately, in this modern book, there is not a Duke to swoop in to rescue the innocent and punish the guilty. 

Is this Nobel prize winner better than other books?  Well, I can’t say it is better, but it is certainly as good and a very satisfying read.

To achieve her desires, Dorothea decides to marry the elderly scholarly Casaubon.  This is the point in the novel when anyone who has read it before calls across the pages, “No, no, Dorothea, don’t marry him.”  But alas, she aways does.

Creating memorable characters is Eliot’s strong point: the failed scholar who regurgitates the past, the idealistic doctor who wants to save the world but is caught by a pretty face, the woman herself whose values are those of the small village finishing school.   The characters are rich and complex.  We may be appalled by Casaubon’s dismissal of Dorothea, but we are sympathetic to him when he recognizes his life’s work as useless.

This 800-page creation of rural England moves at a pace befitting a time of horses, carriages and leisurely social calls.  Eliot not only meticulously builds her characters but her setting as well. The reader is present at a village meeting where there is much maneuvering to elect the new hospital vicar. There are chapters where relatives gather around a dying man to discuss among themselves the demerits of other hopeful inheritors.

While this kind of detail creates a nuanced image of the people of Middlemarch, it can be off putting to a modern reader who is used to a streamlined plot. To lessen the temptation to skim, we read it over four months, 200 pages per month. We didn’t want to miss any of Eliot’s wit and subtle perceptive lines:

“… moodiness – a name which to her… covered his thoughtful preoccupation with subjects other than herself…”

“creditors – disagreeable people who only thought of themselves and did not mind how annoying they were to her.”

“…goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged…”

Or a just-right phrase such as “the winter worn husband” describing someone poorly matched with an energetic wife in her springtime.

Is this 150-year-old novel worth reading today? Absolutely. The subjects are universal – the illusions of young love; the realities of marriage; living beyond your means; the difficulty of sustaining youthful ideals; juggling for power and reputation; the pettiness of gossip.  These things have not changed and continue to make up the life we know in the 21^st century.

My first experience with Oliver was years ago when my yoga teacher would read us something of hers at the start of our relaxation. Today I found a different studio still quoting Oliver on its home page. It is the last line of “The Summer Day:” “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” Oliver’s poetry fits well into diverse spiritual practices. “Make of yourself a light” she has the Buddha say for his last instruction. 

This Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner is renowned for her lush nature poetry. Some is easy to enjoy. For example, “Hummingbirds:”

 “The female, and the two chicks…in their pale-green dresses…tiny fireworks…dainty charcoal feet…sea-green helmets…metallic tails…”

But many poets write about the beauties of the natural world. The exceptional part of Oliver’s work is the portrayal of the not-pretty parts of nature, the powerful, terrible, or ugly in a realistic, non-judgmental way. In “Beside the Waterfall,” a dog, Winston, is out for an early morning walk in the woods with his owner and finds a dead fawn. In a magnificent use of efficient spare language, Oliver paints an image I will long remember:

“Winston/looked over the/delicate, spotted body and then/deftly/tackled/the beautiful flower-like head,/breaking it and/breaking it off and/swallowing it.”

This is followed by a description of the rising red sun which

 “dropped its wild,/clawed light/over everything.” 

Yow!  What a powerful impact. Saying so much with so few words is the epitome of what poetic language should be.

Living Bird, winter 2022, reports that a study of these endangered birds has shown two separate cases of parthenogenesis, or virgin births. Two birds hatched from unfertilized eggs.

Mary Oliver is right. It’s a vast world out there and we, and what we know, are a very small part of it.

“A thin, black cloud appeared on the horizon…rapidly filled the sky until not one spot of blue remained.  Hundreds of thousands of snow geese, flapping, honking, and gliding, covered the world…Perhaps a half million white wings flared in unison, as pink-orange feet dangled down, and a blizzard of birds came in to land…the wet meadow filled until it was covered in downy snow.“

Kya, the main character lives there, by herself, in an isolated shack. We first meet her when she is six, on the day she is abandoned by her mother, left to live with her older siblings and drunken brutal father. One by one they all leave until she is left alone as a child of ten.

Kya turns to the marsh for support and sustenance. She digs oysters for food, talks to the social flock of gulls for company, learns to pilot the left-behind motorboat into its interior. Naturally drawn to the wildlife of the marsh, she immerses herself, learns the ways of its inhabitants, and is nurtured. “The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya’s shoulders…whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her…Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”

Few people help her but those who do, become true friends. There is the boy, then young man, who teaches her to read. There is the proprietor of the general store who sells her fuel, and his wife, people who are black and marginalized like she is.

But there is a dark current that reaches her. In the small town at the edge of the marsh, a man has been murdered. Slowly, we learn of a connection between him, young, handsome, popular, and Kya, the strange, shunned, maturing marsh girl. Her accusation of his murder is the focal point of the story.

In her book, Owens makes worthwhile points: the importance of the marsh, the difference kindness can make, the tendency of most to offer indifference or ostracism to someone who is unusual. But these ideas play only supporting roles. 

This is a novel that must be read to the last page. What is the main theme? Why does Kya handle the situation the way she does and is she right to do so?  Because of the ending, the reader is left pondering what the book has to say for a long time after the reading is finished.

Delia Owens wrote this, her first novel, which has been on the best seller charts for three years, when she was 70. She had returned to the US after living in isolated areas of Africa for twenty years with her husband. They were both heavily involved in conservation issues and are connected with a story that says an elephant poacher was mysteriously and justifiably killed, his body dumped in a remote lake. An interested reader can find seeds of Crawdads in Owens’s life story.

This is what makes reading, especially with others, so much fun. The same book is different for each person. We bring our individual knowledge and research, likes and prejudices, and combine them with the printed words to make our own personal novel.

This novella starts beautifully with descriptions of a successful Iowa farm in all of its blooming fertility. A young husband and wife are waiting at the railroad station for her sister to arrive from Scotland to live with them. The wife has a bit of a puritanical streak; the husband does not.  The sister who comes is young, lively, and fun.  After a very short time, the predictable happens and sister is pregnant. 

How the three of them deal with this, in a time when religion and reputation are paramount, makes up the rest of the story.  They continue to live together and just don’t speak of it. The results of buried emotions are so depressing I could hardly believe that no one, once, ever, was forced into screaming and shouting and exploding the silence away.

Although Roberts does talk about rock art, it is in the context of its location.  He is drawn to the art, granaries and artifacts found on the faces of sheer almost unscalable cliffs.  “Genius climbers” he calls the old ones who lived in the Four Corners of the Southwest.  Why did they choose inaccessible locations and how did they get to them carrying tools and maize when he and his friends could barely reach them using modern equipment?

Roberts is interested in the Ancestral Puebloans, formerly called the Anasazi, who apparently disappeared in the 1100’s and left these tantalizing clues behind. Where did they go – and why? His book travels from information directed towards someone very knowledgeable about the early Southwest inhabitants, to personal stories about climbing trips with friends and their children.

One chapter explores the intellectual theory of the Chaco Meridian.  An archeologist realizes that three famous ruins, Chaco, Aztec, and Paquimé are on a line of longitude and posits that this was done on purpose.  Others point out that Europeans couldn’t measure longitude until the 1700’s when the chronometer was invented, and these SW ruins are hundreds of years older, with no chronometers in sight. 

On the other end of the spectrum is a chapter about climbing with friends to revisit a beautiful 1500-year-old basket preserved in a desolate canyon. He discusses whether the “outdoor museum” concept is a good one and whether artifacts should be left in situ rather than removed to languish in drawers in museums.

Roberts explores the many conflicts among academics who theorize about these pueblo dwellers. Also the conflicts between them and the ranchers who first raised cattle in the area and had their own ideas. Also the conflicts between all those theories and the oral histories of today’s natives living in the area. The reader is left with an understanding of how difficult it is to know anything definitive about ancient people who did not have a written language. Unfortunately, the petroglyphs are not it and are as obscure as everything else.

David Roberts died last summer. In his obituary the NYT described him as “an accomplished mountain climber with a literary gift to match…who turned adventure writing into art.”

It is like removing a lid from boiling water. The daughter falls in love; the son takes steps, albeit clumsy, to proclaim an identity.

This satisfying story has a traditional plot line with a beginning, tension, climax, and resolution. It’s so different from a New Yorker story that just starts, goes on for a while, and stops. Much happens, but it is the internal action as the two come to terms with withered, repressed sexuality, that is most compelling.

Two main symbols contribute to the depth of the novel. The house the three had lived in together is neglected, filled with remnants of the past moldering away. The adjacent woodland where the brother spends his time is filled with wildlife but overgrown and out of control.

Passing On reminded me of Afterlife by Julia Alvarez, where a new widow’s behavior is influenced by what she thinks her husband would have done. In this case however, the control is only for a while.

On keeping up with technology, Petrow chastised those of us who continue to use two spaces after a period. So old school and reminiscent of typewriters. With the advent of computers and their different way of spacing individual letters, one space is now correct. Really? Also about technology, there is a discussion of the pitfalls of various dating apps for seniors. 

I disagree with him though when he says, “I Won’t Be Ordering the Early Bird Special” and complains about old people wanting to eat at 4:30. Hmmm. I have enjoyed many “happy hour suppers” with friends – crackers, cheese, fruit, wine – no one has to cook. Time for cards afterwards. What’s not to like? 

The disadvantage of the book is that there is too much personal information about illness – his, his parents’, his sister’s, his dog’s(!) True, this is a book about aging, but before long I wanted to refer him to his own chapter on the organ recital, which has nothing to do with music.

A young woman, barely 30, loses her position as a librarian. At a job finding seminar she is asked to name her dream job. Open a bookstore, of course. The characters are delightful; the setting is gorgeous. Nina finds herself in the Scottish countryside among idyllic farms and a friendly small town.

Listening to the book being read by Lucy Price Lewis in her lilting Scottish burr added a lovely dimension. Reading it by the fire with your feet up would also be appropriate.

Nina, the bookseller, has a wonderful quote about reading. At the movies, you just watch the action. When playing computer games, you try to control the action. When reading, you are not outside, but inside; you have moved into the action and are a part of it.

So many things in Venice are made from stone, especially marble: statues of course, churches, cemeteries, sea walls, rocky coastal remnants that stand guard. The stone has travelled from a variety of places, and we get a bit of that history; they provide the foundation for a riff on things Venetian.

There is the creative figurative language: “…the clouds Bless us with sky,” a phrase so alive instead of the tired “clouds parted.” And there is intuitive observation, “…limestone becomes marble. Organisms once alive made stone…”  And there is a sense of the numinous, or spiritual, “I have a thought…that if I could somehow reach the same vibrational level as the (stones) I could experience the world as they do—outside of human time, …a longer, slower story…”  And there is the speech of nature, “The wind would stir the leaves, the sound Recognized by the birds as the voices of the gods.”

The musically inclined reader might hear echoes of a third art besides the literary and visual. Whispers, vibrations, blowing, singing suffuse the book. While probably unintended, there are overtones of other music as well. Maybe because I’m married to a rock ‘n roll devotee, I brought to the book a whole other idea of travelling, singing, vibrating, long lasting “Stones.” I laughed and dismissed this until I came to the last page on which the author has written, “Enter this heart of stone,” and there in a song title were those Rolling Stones again. This is a good example of why books and poetry say such different things to different people.

I looked up the heart of stone legend and see that it has at least two sources.  There is Ezekiel who says, “I will take the stony hearts out of your body, and I will give you one of flesh.” There is also a German fairy tale written down by Wilhelm Hauff in the 1800’s called “The Cold Heart,” about someone who trades his heart for riches and then discovers that he can no longer feel. There is a movie. 

I’m not sure what Lawless means by saying “enter” this heart of stone on the last page. Are we leaving his quiet pocket of mystery for a harsh stone hearted world? Or has he put a different twist on the image? Maybe he wants us to be aware of stones as alive and humming, a timeless foundation that we can access if we try.

How the Stones Came to Venice is published by Litorall press and available by mail order from them. If you live close by, I would be glad to share. My copy was my Christmas gift in our book exchange.

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…