The driving force of the novel is the threat of termination of their tribal status by the US government.  In the acknowledgements, Erdrich tells us that this section is based on letters from her grandfather as he helped the tribe stop termination which would rob them of their treaty rights and devastate their culture. 

In addition to this main plot are the coming-of-age stories of two young indigenous women and the man who loves them both.  There is the acerbic portrait of two young Mormon missionaries trying to convert the heathen.  The naïve white boxing coach wonders if he could make the sacrifice to become Indian if the woman he likes would have him.

The characters are well drawn, believable and sympathetic – even the ghost of the teenager who years after his death can’t leave his tribe. Native American beliefs and practices are effortlessly integrated into this five-star story with excellent plots, setting and characters. 

He can enjoy his comfortable retirement from teaching, sit at his breakfast table with plenty of toast, tea, and the newspaper.  Or – he can insert himself into one of the stories, maybe the one about refugees from Libya who are in limbo because of German bureaucracy. Or – he can join the group opposing any help at all for the unwanted refugees, seeing them as freeloaders not victims.

Richard is unhappy with himself because he has walked past the encampment of refugees whose signs said simply “We become visible” without noticing them at all.  He visits, begins to talk, helps where he can, becomes their friend.

At the end, to celebrate Richard’s birthday, there is a German style barbecue with potato salad and halal sausages.  Richard’s old German friends and his new African friends attend.  After dinner, they tell stories, some of happiness and some of sadness, which are shared and understood across nationalities.

This wonderful novel details the plight of refugees who have fled their home countries because of war time atrocities.  They have seen family members killed or have totally lost touch.  Lonely and homesick, they are living in Germany where they are unwanted and where the laws make it impossible for them to settle or to work.  While the setting of this particular book is Berlin after unification, it is also a universal situation that we recognize.

Her latest, Give unto Others, explores the obligation to do a favor for an old acquaintance and to choose between the rules and what is right.  Brunetti hadn’t particularly liked this person but was fond of her mother who was kind to his family.

Leon’s novels work because of her minute observations of how people behave – mannerisms, facial expression, tone of voice.  Here, we have the shameless deviousness of the Italian police as they affect all sorts of behavior to encourage people to talk to them.  Brunetti and his supporting staff do not disappoint in this easy-to-read appealing mystery.

The second section deals with changing attitudes about the place and function of a farm.  Previously, it was an attractive setting for a family home, plus a source of identity, pride, and fulfillment for the farmer in a job well done.  In the 1970’s, the purpose of the farm changed to making money and expanding; it was a business that was supposed to acquire bigger machinery, produce more crops, and make more profit.  Earl Butz is quoted.

In the last section, farmers awaken to the downsides of this perpetual growth. They notice the disappearance of common insects, birds, mammals and wildflowers, and realize this reflects an insidious loss of soil fertility and overuse of pesticides.  Fertility is not being replenished by artificial fertilizer or the practice of monocropping.  Industrial farming is not just an environmental problem, but a business one as well.  Continuing to spend down capital, in this case fertile soil, is not a sustainable business practice.

Rebanks details what he is doing on his inherited farm to rebuild his soil and forge a way of farming to integrate the soil’s needs with a productive cattle and sheep farm.  I have met the term “rewilding” in a previous book (Wild Silence by Raynor Winn).  Rebanks also uses “regenerative agriculture” and tells us this budding science is the only good thing to come from American agriculture. 

This thoughtful narrative shares many insights on the intersection of the wild and the planted, the necessity of animals on a healthy farm, the value of a farm to the community (not just food production.)  But it concerns me very much that this Oxford educated, knowledgeable, dedicated, more than energetic man cannot make a living from his farm.  His farmer friends (and of course this successful author) have other jobs to make ends meet. The need for sustainable agricultural practices and the economic plight of the small farmer aren’t news items, but Rebanks does an excellent job of focusing our attention on their importance.

Starting with this particular fire, Orlean moves to how fires burn in general, how arson is determined, the difficulties of getting an arson conviction. But the fire is just the starting point for this book about all things library. She details the history of the LA library building, its colorful staff, its place in the community, how people rallied to restore it after the fire, and the restoration of smoke and water damaged books.

Moving outward from LA, she discusses more general topics such as the targeting of libraries during warfare. There are the specifics of the magnitude of the shipping department for the interlibrary loan system.  There are intriguing small details such as the statistic that library users are 80% male; librarians are 80% female.   

Throughout the book is the evolving vision of what kind of information system a library should be.  A keeper of books?  Of course.  A partner with technology?  Of course, again, say librarians who call themselves “Wikipedians in residence.”  How many services such as job search assistance, seed storage, or marriage licenses are appropriate?  What about the homeless who are attracted to its warm safe space?

Throughout this meticulous, sometimes too abundant, amount of information shines Orlean’s respect for the impact of reading and books. She quotes an older librarian who tells her he is planning to move to Sri Lanka when he retires.  Has he ever been there?  No, “But I’ve seen the pictures and I’ve read the books.”

In Number 7, No Way to Die, fly fishing in Coos Bay Oregon is the setting instead of grape growing in the Willamette Valley.  Easley’s intrepid sleuth, Cal Claxton, saves a young surfer mistakenly convicted of murder.  Each of Easley’s books deals with a social issue, and in this one it is women’s rights, a subject dear to the heart of his daughter.

His most recent mystery, No Witness, tackles the issue of undocumented workers who commonly work in the vineyards growing the grapes and bringing in the harvest.  A young Latina is murdered outside her home.  Is it mistaken identity or has an innocent young woman discovered something nefarious in wine country?

In Work Song, Morrie returns, moves to Butte and gets a job as a librarian.  Once again, Doig’s love of books is apparent as he describes a spectacular out of place library full of gorgeous leather-bound editions.  The contrast between books and reading and rough farmers and miners is one of Doig’s favorite topics.  Morrie is soon embroiled in the conflict between the miners’ union and the powers of Anaconda Copper Mining.

Copper mining itself is the largest entity in the book; its descriptions dwarf the other characters and details of plot which seem paltry by comparison. In this case, Doig doesn’t have the skills of superb teacher Morrie, and left me bored with excessive details. However, my buddy readers who are more history oriented thought all that information was just fine.

Petrie has a story he wants to tell and through the fog of failing memory slowly dredges up details of an episode whose emotional resonance is still felt.  Lonely and abandoned by his parents he had tried to befriend a new student with “blood red hair” who was more of a misfit than he.  They shared an interest in chess, but it was their mutual connection to Egypt that drew Petrie to Ben-Zion Elefantin.  (I learned that Egyptians can indeed have red hair.  Ramses II was a redhead.)

The memoir of Petrie, once a successful lawyer, is appalling in its casual racism, antisemitism, and resistance to anything different. He belittles the Austrian cook who offers kindness to an old man until he learned she had earned a master’s degree in Europe, but even then…

But what is the compulsion to write this memoir?  What does Petrie want to bring from the past, from his subconscious, into the present?  At the end of this cerebral book, he says that he knows, and Elefantin knew, “the significant thing” about life.  Does he share it with the reader?  He does not.  Ozick ends her story with the words “We two kings,” and leaves it to the reader to ponder what truth or illusion the two chess mates knew.  An exploration of the truth of memory is appropriate for Ozick who turned 93 shortly after this novella was completed.

All three of the teenagers have additional problems.  One girl has been flattened by her mother’s suicide; the other has been molested by a stepfather and ignored by a mother who “didn’t notice;” the boy, once a promising football star, has been severely injured. The community of church is prominent in this black neighborhood, but is not enough to offset the damage of secrecy, lies, and betrayal.  An anti-abortion point of view emerges but is subtly done.

The Mothers is one of those books that hooks a reader at the beginning but isn’t so interesting as the story goes on.  I felt that Bennett kept expanding the story to include everything she wanted to say instead of developing a tight plot with nothing extraneous.

Detective Cal Claxton has a home in the hills of Oregon wine country and a law office in Portland where he does some pro bono work for just causes.  A young woman consults him about her mother, killed in a hit and run, who has left a strange will about her property development company. Before the book is finished, Claxton has made the acquaintance of the Russian mafia and pieced together a complex money laundering scheme. 

Love of coffee, gourmet food, craft beer, jogging, Native American activism, artist colonies, all add to the Northwest flavor.  But wait – Italian white instead of local pinot noir??  Easley redeems himself with Blood for Wine, where he rescues a pinot grower/vintner who has been framed for murder.  These mysteries, with their intricate plots, strong characters, and appealing settings, are a delight to read.

Easley has just won the Spotted Owl Award, bestowed annually for the best mystery book of the year by a writer in the Pacific Northwest.

The youngsters have recently lost their mother; their father, busy with two farms, the Big Ditch irrigation project, and the school board, is overwhelmed by housekeeping duties. A saucy ad in the paper catches his attention: “Can’t Cook but Doesn’t Bite.  Housekeeping position sought by widow.  Sound morals, exceptional disposition…”  Energetic, cheerful Rose, who whistles while she works, is soon settled into the household.

Her brother Morrie, dapper, highly educated, totally ignorant of rural farm life, accompanies her. Why he is in such an incompatible place is a mystery. Again, fate intervenes, and Morrie finds himself the teacher in a one room schoolhouse which is the hub of the far-flung community. Doig vividly depicts the difference a gifted teacher can make, the value of education, and the importance of the school in an isolated, rural locale.  Morrie Morgan, like Halley’s Comet, which appears in 1910 and stars in the story, appears suddenly, shines brightly, then travels on. He can be found again in two later Doig novels.

At the end, this well plotted book with an unexpected twist has a nice exploration of honesty as the best policy.  Are there times when silence, omission, is better? It is thirteen-year-old Paul’s answer that affects so many other characters and makes this a very satisfying novel.

After working in the merchant’s store for several years, he is ordered to participate in one of the last trade caravans into the East African interior, where trouble awaits. The cosmopolitan caravan is comprised of men from India, Arabia, and Africa, all of whom continually joke and trade barbs about their respective religions, superstitious beliefs, and knowledge of the world.  They were the internet of 1900.

The villages they visit are controlled by sultans determined to protect their small dominions. They demand tribute and treat the traders and each other with trickery and brutality. But these “savages” of the interior are no different from the more “civilized” ones the young Yusuf has met in the towns where those with money dominate others, children are kidnapped in daylight, and the poor eat bone broth for dinner.

Travelling with the caravan, Yusuf is awed by the beauties of the natural world, waterfalls, lakes, and mountains, and a possible meaning for “paradise” emerges. But in this lovely world people are tormented by swarms of insects whose bites cause illness and death.  Wild dogs and hyenas prowl; crocodiles attack and kill.

He returns to the safety of the merchant’s house with its beautiful walled garden but soon learns that it is a garden built on misery and despair and a less obvious danger lurks there. Gurnah prods readers to evaluate their idealized views about nature as paradise.

As he matures, Yusuf draws close to other slaves in the merchant’s household and is stunned to learn that some have worked off their fathers’ debts, could leave if they wish, but choose to remain. What exactly it means for a person to be free is the second major theme of this deceptively simple story. Is the freedom to have independent thoughts despite one’s lot in life enough – or must one have the ability to initiate change?

This is a novel steeped in Eastern culture not Western. Allusions to the Yusuf/Joseph story (both sold into bondage) are from the Koran, not the Bible. A big city is Bombay, not London. But good literature is universal. Some of the nuances may be missed, but the main ideas are understood.  The philosophical inquiry into the meaning of paradise and how to search for it make a provocative read.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s later book, Gravel Heart, was the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The father, an immigrant, former professor of Russian literature, small time crook, lives in an enclave of other Russian Jews in a falling down condo rife with more than the usual Homeowners Association animosity.  At issue is a million-dollar budget, kickbacks, and a new white Lexus given to each board member. Bill’s investigative instincts kick in.

One of the things to like about this book is the main character who is at a transition point in his life and emerges successful. On the way, Bill shares his knowledge of Russian literature and love of good architecture and furniture design. One of the things not to like so much is the strong Russian Jewish “shtick” that underlies the story. Vodka and tragic poetry are ubiquitous. 

I was a little worried when I saw that the epigraph to the first chapter was a quote from Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.  But when I read that the Russians pronounced the name Donal’d Tramp, I felt better.

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.